Guess who is LOVING LIFE?
It's me. Thanks for asking.
So everybody here (everybody being: anyone who isn't with our group) gets super excited to talk to us when they find out we're students. Well, they probably get an average amount of excited, but the conversation is normally:
-oh you're students? where are you from?
-the united states, we all go to the same university but are from different states.
-you speak very well, with a mexican accent. for how long are you here?
hold the phone!!!
Actually I'm not actually frustrated or surprised by this haha. As someone who speaks spanish only from a textbook and by example from teachers who are from Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and other countries... it makes sense. But literally EVERYONE has said this! We were talking with this cute mom and her three kids because they stopped to talk to us (random) while we were waiting together outside, and I said to them, "wait, I'm confused... I love talking with you but why did you stop to talk to us?" and she said something along the lines of we sounded american or that she heard someone with us speaking english but thought it was fake (yeah I don't know), she laughed and said we speak with a very mexican accent. My host family says this too. If history says anything, I will come home con un acento castellaño since my midwest accent was beaten out of me freshman year. Thanks y'all. Oh shoot but the reason why I mention this is because I also told them "yeah everyone that I've talked to says we have or at least I have a mexican accent... but why? I don't get it. Or how can you tell we're American?" and it was really funny to me because the first thing the mom said was "from your face. And the way you dress. Definitely." And all her daughters agreed. So much for not looking like foreigners haha. But the girls said I had beautiful eyes! That we all do- almost all of us have light eyes (blue, green, grey, etc) so if I'm going to be American at least I have attractive foreign qualities haha. Like my accent. #jokes
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I LOVE YELLOW BUILDINGS.
Just kidding, but I definitely got made fun of for saying “dang…
check out this awesome yellow building, though. It’s so happy.” so I guess I’m not kidding at all actually, because I definitely
still think they’re beautiful. I feel like in Europe, the buildings are
beautiful because they’re ancient and pristine. But what I love about the
buildings here is that 1. They’re not pristine (for the most part) but they 2.
have a lot of character (are old and crumbly) and 3. are all warm colors.
Anyone who has seen my room knows I have this unnatural tendency to be
distracted by warm colors schemes; I basically somehow only buy red and live
with things that are red/orange/yellow… I love it.
I'm trying to be less wordy, but again... brevity is not my style. But a bit on our school:
so we go to school in a part to the university of Alcalá called Alcalingua. At first, I didn't really understand back when we were talking about it at BYU exactly what it meant; I knew they weren't going to throw us in with a bunch of spanish college students, but I also couldn't rationalize giving a huge lecture room to 12 americans. Although to be clear: we are definitely in the same classroom all day and it is about the size of my living room at my old apartment haha. So lecture hall? Definitely not. Alcalinga, to be blunt, is like Alacalá's equivalent to the ELC at BYU or that one classroom in high school where your teachers would go help the kids who are still learning english who have moved from India or Mexico or something like that. That's what we had back home, anyway. It's like that, but obviously much more advanced and I know that simplification of it makes us seem like a bunch of half-brained Americans. To give more credit to us: our teachers are Rebeca, Sonia, y Faustino. I'm taking classes SPAN 321 (Grammar and Composition), SPAN 345 (Iberian Civilization), SPAN 326 (Phonetics and Pronunciation), SPAN 339 (Intro to Spanish Literature), a religion class (Los Mormones en España) and a class called "Madrid Walks" (paseos por Madrid). So I definitely am not just walking the streets trying to decide which ice cream place I want to go to.
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| outside of our classroom, trying to not look like a super nerd on the first day of real school taking pictures everywhere |
I have a lot more to say but I think I'll just try to not be overwhelming with everything. Also, it is surprisingly hard for me to write this, every other sentence I have to go back and stop writing bits here and there in spanish. Also goodbye ability to spell things in english- I am way struggling with the different ways of typing between "-tion", "-sion", "-zion". Is "-zion" even used in english? Ay...
con amor,
JD
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