Week 28

Exploring the City: This week marked our first visit to a Spanish hospital...because Cat had her baby!  Violet Alivia entered the world on February 5th, which means she was born on my half birthday.  We were primed and ready to take care of Ben and Cat's dog Andazi, and after attending to her with an afternoon walk we set out for the hospital.  This particular hospital was private, and I guess that means security is really relaxed.  We weren't sure what to do or where to go upon arriving - there wasn't a clear reception area, so we simply walked into the maternity ward and into their room.  Mom, Dad and baby are all doing well, though only one member of the family seems to be dictating the sleep schedule.  Even Andazi has purportedly been more restless than usual, as she seems to have taken on the roll of a protective older sibling.


                                 I'm the big sister!

Memorable Meal: While we've mostly been able to keep in touch with family through regularly scheduled calls on the weekend, it can be a bit more difficult to coordinate schedules with friends back in the states.  Last week we called our DC-based friends Rose, Eric, Julie and Dean at 1:30 AM for a dinner date.  We used to gather in person with these people, and Joni and I didn't see why a couple thousand miles and a six hour time difference should get in the way.  It was already a late night for us both, and so we didn't really have dinner.  Our meal consisted of lentil salad and jamón potato chips - admittedly not as good as the home made pizza and cookies our friends had prepared across the sea. The weirdest part of the whole experience is how normal it all seemed, which is a testament to the strength of these friendships despite extremes in distance and time.


En la clase: This year was the first time either of us had been out of the country during the Superbowl.  It's not like either of us are huge football fans, but the lack of ceremony surrounding the game was something we hadn't encountered.  Since the most memorable part of the game for most of America consists of the ad-watching experience, we took this opportunity to give classes on commercials (with additional talk of the game's cultural impact in the country).  To my surprise, even in the increasingly flattening world, very few students had any knowledge whatsoever about the game.  A few knew that it was an American football match, but almost no one had a clue about the prevalence/importance of the advertisements.  Soccer is by far the dominant sport in Spain, and I realized that this sport really doesn't lend itself to breaks in the action.  There are adds at half time, but that's about it.  The concept of a "television timeout" was baffling to most students, and even after a lot of discussion I think everyone felt rather justified in their ignorance.

I started the first one-on-one intercambio this week with my former student Maite.  This is similar to the idea of the language exchange we sometimes attend, but in a less distracting setting.  I spoke in Spanish for about 20 minutes, and then we switched to speaking in English.  It was a much needed dose of conversation with someone who wouldn't switch to English at the first sign that Spanish was not indeed my mother tongue.  I look forward to improving my confidence in conversation as these meetings continue.

Lost in Translation: The focus of our Superbowl lessons were the "Crash the Superbowl" contest that Doritos ran for 10 years, wherein the company asked for user-submitted commercials to appear in the Superbowl ad slot.  Doritos are widely available in Spain, and so Joni and I were both surprised to find that our students didn't know about the brand.  With further probing and after writing the name on the board, we discovered that it was simply the pronunciation that was off.  Joni and I both have a natural "tapped t" - meaning that in many words the letter t sounds much more like a 'duh' than 'tuh.'  So we talked about 'doridohs' only to be met with blank stares, and after writing the word out the students exuded revelatory exclamations of 'oh, doritoes'!

Most products we find ourselves desiring can easily be found in Spain, but every now and again something stumps us.  Such is the case with packs of colored construction paper.  There are several paper supply stores that sell single sheets, but we thought it would be more efficient to buy one pack to last the rest of the year.  Joni placed an order on Amazon, and a few days later a package arrived. Unfortunately, the paper we received was the size of index cards!  After checking the order it was evident that this was indeed the size we had ordered, but we can't understand why anyone would spend so much money on such small paper.  Joni was very disappointed, though it did remind us of an episode of This American Life(the first story of the show linked here) where a woman ordered what she thought was a gorgeous dining room table, but turned out to be a doll-house sized table from Ebay.

Final Notes: Once again laughing in the face of time zones, we attempted to watch the Super bowl live.  It started at 12:30 AM Madrid time, and I was able to find a fairly reliable stream that included commercials.  Here is a picture of our spread, complete with apples, dip, chips & salsa, limón soda and Andazi:



We watched until the live stream gave out about half way through the third quarter, at which point we were very tired and felt certain the game was in the bag.  Congratulations to the Atlanta Falcons on a decisive pounding of the Patriots!