Some comments on the economic crisis and global warming

At the risk of offending one or two people, I’m gonna go ahead and declare that I am a big fan of both climate change, whether human-caused or not, and the euro crisis.

This past summer, the thought of moving from 500-Days-of-Summer-per-year LA to Spain’s Seattle equivalent was almost anxiety provoking enough to make me consider other employment options. Until I realized I had deferred for a year the only other option I had counted on (TFA), and so the only alternative employment option would likely consist of living at home and returning to the days of collecting weekly allowance in return for scraping cat droppings from the bottom of the litter box. If the cat litter Dad opts to buy actually lived up to its odor-masking promise, as professed on the box, this option wouldn’t have been half so bad. But considering my super sharp olfactory glands (don’t blame me, I’m a woman), there was just no way this was going to work. And of course, there exist no other household chores. Only option remained: move to Spain. ed.

SOooo hear I find myself, in Spain’s rainiest region, loving the fact that I haven’t had to replace the umbrella I left in the airport 2 months ago because Santander is experiencing its driest streak in like, 40 years. Kinda wish I did have an excuse to use the polka dotted Target rain boots I brought with me though, not because they’re fashionable, but because they replaced valuable space in my luggage from the US that could have been dedicated to other items (see: My Address, in case you want to send me Trader Joe’s extra crunchy salted peanut butter...actually don't shipping costs are absurd!). Some residents of Santander strangely gripe about the warm and sunny weather (maybe I would too, if I had invested in a heavy fur coat like 95% of the city’s elderly female population). I can relate to complaints by not-old-ladies that lots of sun=not so much snow for skiing in the nearby resort, but considering recent travel mishaps (see: Amanda and Allison spend a month’s paycheck on missed flights and Chunnel tickets booked for the wrong date), new budgeting does not include the cost of renting ski equipment, so I am happy to content myself with limiting outdoor activities equipment to my running shoes and the ample Cantabrian beaches ☺ It’s January and I’m already renewing my sports bra tan. In short, if you are an SUV driver or mass consumer of red meat, please continue in your habits because it is directly (and positively) impacting my level of happiness here in the not-so-rainy north of Spain.

As for the Euro Crisis, rising levels of unemployment in Europe are responsible for the (rising) quantity of native Spanish friends I have in Spain. No, contrary to what you may be tempted to think, my friendliness and charm have not contributed to this phenomenon. Rather, the fact that 49.6% of Spanish youth under age 25 are currently without work has resulted in a burgeoning class of Spaniards, naturally partiers and life-enjoyers by blood, being able to dedicate even more time to frequenting places of pleasure (and sleeping off the effects the next day). This, paired with my average 3-day workweek (thank you, Spain, for declaring at least one day every week a national holiday), has created abundant opportunity for midday Ultimate Frisbee practices and midweek camping trips, and made me utterly terrified for the “return to reality” that awaits me on the other side of the pond come June. (Although an afternoon spent re-bonding with my TI-89 (graphing calculator) has made me super excited about teaching math in helping to address the issue of educational inequality in the US upon return!) Soooo if you are a chief economic advisor or like, not buying enough Baklava to keep Greece afloat, continue in these habits as well, because they ultimately make me feel popular.

photo creds: Amanda Lipp

photo creds: lil lipp again

Reality: The economic crisis sucks. I am thankful, more than ever (as I expressed on my "Give Thanks Feather" in our "Pin the Feather on the Turkey" Thanksgiving Day activity), for being able to depend on the comfort of a monthly paycheck. Some of our friends are not so lucky:

In France, some wonder if selling tourist trinkets counts as employment.

Some also get tickets for "parking" where they shouldn't.


Hasta la proxima,
allison

France: The avocados are ripe and the lawyers are dead

Last week seemed to be a constant stream of those “studying Spanish literature did not set me up for the Spanish real-world” realizations, after A.) struggling to understand the Internet technician’s over-the-phone instructions on how to fix our faulty router and having to decide whether it would just be easier to incur the 50 euro fee of being transferred to an English-speaking technician and B.) failing to explain myself (I was late for class and whoever was in the women’s room was taking FOREVER) appropriately to an elderly man in the men's room, who had entered unannounced while I was finishing my business, and who began simultaneously peeing and scolding me for having blurred the bathroom gender line (In my defense, the men’s bathroom was empty when I first entered, and in many a sociology class we have discussed the concept of gender as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy.)

Anyway, having recently resolved to give up on learning more Spanish and instead stick to hanging out solely with my group of American expats and broken English-speaking 7th graders, my confidence in my Spanish speaking abilities has now been renewed! Nothing like a weekend in a country where you know not a lick of the language—beyond the universally known and overly recited lyric from a certain, sexually explicit Moulin Rouge song—to remind you that learning a second language is an arduous process indeed. This weekend in France, I found myself back at square one. After four days of wandering the streets and subways of Paris (no run-ins with Owen Wilson or Hemingway), and trying to establish lines of basic communication with Kim’s ex-boyfriend’s non-English speaking best friend, I am grateful to be back in Spain ordering tortilla and water from the tap once again with zero difficulty. Not to say that attempting to learn French for a weekend wasn’t entertaining:

My roomie Nicole has become recently quite intent on learning French, and as a first act of commitment toward achieving this goal, purchased a French dictionary a couple weeks before leaving for France. Apparently more nostalgic for the rush of midterm cramming than we thought, we buried our heads in said dictionary for the whopping 1.5 hour flight to Paris, laboring over the (what would turn out to be very wrong) pronunciation of phrases such as, “Where is the subway stop?” and “No, I do not have a cigarette.” We very quickly learned that our preliminary efforts were somewhat in vain, as a great number of people in Paris, in addition to hordes of American and British exchange students, speak English. Or, they understand charismatic hand gesturing and displays of charades better than they do our (overly dramatic) attempts at a French accent. Also, in many cases the French accent was flat out wrong. Apparently Nicole’s attempted pronunciation of “the avocados are ripe” was actually more along the lines of “the lawyers are dead.” Who knew?

So we decided on perpetuating the stereotype that Americans speak nothing but English. That is, for our 2 days in Paris, until we traveled southeast to the town of Besancon to meet up with Kim and her French ex-boyfriend (Ali) and a crew of his non English-speaking friends. More on that in a minute. I will now both boast and complain about Paris.

If Valentine’s Day is a slap in the face to singles of the world, Paris is a blow to the gut. While I allowed myself to think that the bridge across from the Louvre, the one where couples cornily attach (often heart-shaped) padlocks engraved with their names to the chain links in the fence, and then toss the keys into the waters of the Seine below, as a symbol of commitment of their everlasting fidelity, was tres adorable; I won’t say that I didn’t secretly will the toddler I saw trying to guess the combinations of various padlocks, into unlocking one of them. Paris could use a dose of heartbreak to balance out the rampant and very public displays of affection that are probably not hindered by its conveniently cuddly-cold weather.

Side-note: I have also resolved that my next move will be to a cold climate. Scarves and pea coats have on guys what we will call the “tuxedo effect,” in that it is impossible for a dude not to look handsome in said getup. Paris is like an interminable wedding. On the subway, in the streets, in cafes: dressed-for-the-cold guys are just begging to be photographed and placed into the pages of a wedding album. Books and reading glasses are not props. Unfortunately, neither are the cigarettes.

But really, Paris was awesome. I can see why people fall in love with the city. Felt like Buenos Aires but…less polluted and lesser chance of stepping in dog poop. Nicole and I did all the required, surface-level, touristy stuff in our 40-hour stint in Paris (day-long museum visits to be saved for subsequent, longer returns). Won’t bore you with the list, you probably know it well. Although I must say, our 2.5 hour night-visit to the Eiffel Tower had the potential to be very romantic, though in reality it mainly consisted of me apologizing to Nicole that I wasn’t her boyfriend (who she has resolved to make adorn a scarf and pea coat when she gets home).


While visiting all the necessary landmarks ranked high on our list, we are not ashamed to say that eating as much French food as possible during our stay ranked higher. We’ve been skimping on meals in Santander, but Paris would be the place to splurge. It took a single meal of escargot and fondue, followed by crème brulee and chocolate mousse, to realize that our budgets would be better fit for purchasing croissants and crepes from street vendors for the rest of our stay. And so it was. And now I will be eating broccoli and oatmeal for a week straight to counterbalance the effects of that.

On to Besancon.

If you start at Paris, and travel southeast on a bullet train at a speed of 320 km/h for 2 hours and 37 minutes, where do you end up? Just west of the Swiss border, in a town called Besancon.

Besancon is beautiful, fall-colored, and old as rocks. It sits on the Doubs River, which apparently Julius Caesar recognized as being of strategic importance back in his day, before years had even 3 digits. Besancon is known also for a huge citadel, which has been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has a zoo at the top whose inhabitants even seem cast under the romantic spells of distant Parisian winds—the lions reenacted for us perfectly the reunion between Simba and Nala after years apart. We crooned.

I think what I will remember about Besancon, though, is a smelly, overpriced club where Nicole and I attempted to put a pre-game’s learning worth of French conversation into use.

We felt confident before leaving for the club. We had been in the company of several native French speakers for the past few hours, who had helped us perfect some phrases that might be of use. I could number them on one hand:

1. I am from the United States.
2. How old are you?
3. Filet mignon.
4. I am a little bit drunk.
5. Black and yellow black and yellow black and yellow black and yellow.

Well-armed with the above phrases, in addition to some refreshed elementary school ballet vocabulary, we felt certain we would reign in only the most eligible, scarf-clad French bachelors that evening. We even went to the lengths of writing down the address of where we were staying, “17 Rue Grande,” on our wrists, in case flirtation at the bar necessitated our separation…not having yet mastered the “directions home” unit in French, we would just have to show our wrist to a cab driver in order to arrive safely home.

Turns out that…the only people we showed our wrists to were high school boys. Pointing animatedly to the “17” part of the address, strategically covering up the rest, was our unfortunately lame response to the question, “How old are you?” You see, in attempts to escape the awful smell and terrible music of the section of the club that was, what we will say, age-appropriate, Nicole and I had accidentally wandered into the middle of a high school prom. Telling (gesticulating to) people that we were 17 was a desperate disguise for, for the first time in our lives, feeling like cougars.

We spent the next day touring the Citadel and the streets of Besancon, before then venturing on to a 3-hour and 80-euros stint in Geneva, before flying home to Spain. So odd that a 1.5 hour flight drops you in a land where culture and customs are a world apart. What a welcome rush it was to hear Spanish spoken over the intercom in the Bilbao airport! Even the transit to Spain was a welcome relief…I was all ears and smiles during the presentation on emergency evacuations. I now feel fluent in Spanish, by comparison with my knowledge of French. Bring it on, fast-talking internet repairmen and angry male bathroom frequenters!

Guess I'm a teacher now...

It appears that life in the “club and bar district” of Santander has caught up with me. I find myself in bed with a raucous cough on a national holiday, when I should be out and about celebrating a day of no work, but instead have a box of Kleenex by my side, wondering if my nasal projections will ever return to their normal (colorless) color. But somehow I find this state worthy of celebration—a day of rest is long overdue, a feeling shared by the tall, dust-collecting pile of neglected movies, books (well, a Kindle), and introductory guitar music by my bed.

It’s pretty simple: I get sick when I am sleep deprived. Four months ago, “when I was in college,” my lifestyle worked well with this equation—if attending a 9am class would mean sacrificing three hours of quality sleep, alarm clock settings could be (too) easily adjusted. But now that reality is in check. I am no longer a selfish, sweatpants-clad, attend-class-at-my-will student who can afford to only feign paying attention, really just wondering how long I can fool my professor into thinking that my staring out the window at the sun frequenters not imprisoned in the dark lecture hall was really my method of pondering a difficult academic question.

I am instead, and so suddenly, a great purveyor of knowledge, who needs to be alert at all times in the classroom setting, and whose absence at school for even one day would go noted with distress by the throngs of bushy-haired, bright-eyed Spanish students who eagerly await my arrival each day, on their best behavior, minds primed to receive and pencils prepped to annotate the wisdom that spews from my all-knowing mouth.

Except that the students in fact do not display, ever, what would be generally accepted as even good behavior, and that little to no actual knowledge actually spews from my mouth. I refer specifically to one class of students, who are our equivalent of high school freshmen, and who find farts in class and flirting with their neighbors understandably more entertaining than listening to “An Introduction to the United Nations” in a language not their own. This doesn’t anger me at all, I totally get it—not that many years separate us—but it does strike a nerve with the teacher whose class this actually is, to whom I’m technically an assistant English teacher. What has, up to this point, typically ensued the out-of-place snicker or chortle in class has been a quickly escalating yelling match between students and teacher of a caliber I have never witnessed in an academic setting. What often results is that one or two kids will get kicked out of class, the others will try to suppress their laughter, but then one or two will catch my eye, and I will realize a moment too late that I have forgotten to match the expression of sternness and discipline of their Real Teacher, and have instead let a smile or poorly suppressed snicker escape what should have been my tightly drawn lips, which will cause them to chortle more loudly, and the Real Teacher to in turn to anger more, not realizing I am now an instigator as well, with the result being that the bell sounds before we complete even 1/5 of the material I had intended to cover, and the Real Teacher assigns them for homework essay topics like “The Meaning of Respect,” and I wonder whether my presence in class that day was truly that necessary.

Discipline issues in this particular class aside, I am digging this whole teaching thing. It feels natural. I feel like I have more control and influence over the other grade levels, and have developed especially an affinity for the “segundos” (8th graders) with whom I have the most class periods. They are technically in the bilingual program at their school, but I quickly learned that “bilingual” is a very relative term, meaning that I often feel like a very bright headlight shining into the eyes of several dozen petrified deer. In just two weeks though, they seem to have become more comfortable talking out loud in English—I quickly learned that games with candy rewards are the way to get them speaking—and it’s rewarding to think that maaaaaybe I am instilling in each of them a little bit of confidence in their abilities. The seniors/12th grade equivalents are equally awesome—I have 10 of them on my own, once a week, for conversation practice. They initially seemed limited in vocab, but now that I have learned that the boys (there are 7 of them) in this group are indeed capable of asking more than “Do you have a boyfriend?” in English, we have moved on to some cool conversation topics. Last week we debated smoking legislation in Spain. (I was shocked to discover that many of them were upset with Spain’s decision, this past spring, to outlaw smoking in pubs and clubs!)

Teaching is taxing, though. Lesson planning requires an output of creative energy and critical thought unlike that which I had imagined. Teachers have homework too! (Even if they do it at the last minute—more on “teachers lounge” culture later). My new theory is that teachers give students homework purely as retribution for having to prepare lessons. It is funny, though, being on the other side of things. Like, I somehow don’t feel like I should have a cubby for my materials in the teacher’s lounge, or a key to the faculty bathroom (the one with toilet paper and soap). I am supposedly on the same authority level as those who confiscate cell phones used covertly in the hallways. I go to the café across the street with other teachers for coffee breaks, where the Argentine owner Sebastian already knows my order by heart. And I attend weekly staff meetings, where Spanish flies around the room so rapidly that I understand hardly anything, and realize that I have a lot more learning to do, and find myself staring out the window, feeling like a student again, and wondering if I’m convincingly fooling my teachers into thinking that I’m just pondering the answers to their questions I don’t fully understand.

In other news....shout out to Kacey Burr! Happy Birthday, amor!!! (pic from San Sebastian)

Una foto vale mil palabras

(found a new running path)

(an amazing sunday spent sailing with headmaster of my school and his wife)

(sculpted friends)

(creepin on luhvahs)

(some of my amazing new friends!)

(pirate ship was randomly docked in the bay one day)

(at last, some color on those white walls. no nails allowed in walls...innovation required)

"open later"—story of the spain and the siesta

(fine, I'll take my lunch breaks here if you insist)

(banana slug kissing club!)

(santillana del mar daytrip)

(view from another sailboat)



y MADRID.....(antes de llegar a Santander...)

The Landlady Situation (Why hosting couch surfers might cause us to lose our security deposits)

I was getting bored with the whole “adjust to a new country/accent/lifestyle” thing, so I’m glad that I now have an additional challenge here in Spain: avoiding my landlady. Size-wise, Santander falls somewhere in the space between “college town” and “city,” in that there exists a public transportation system inherent of larger urban zones, but not one that functions between the hours of “let’s start drinking” and “woops, now too drunk to walk home”—at which point stumbling in heels on cobblestone becomes the preferred mode of transportation. I partake in no such behavior. (I wear flats.)

(this is 2 blocks from our apartment. Note: cobblestones)

And, as tends to be the case in communities of such size, people tend to know one another and bump into each other on the streets with frequency. Such, unfortunately, happens to be the case with my landlady—the lovely-yet-lunatic, loquacious Victoria—and my roommates.

This would not be a noteworthy situation if the situation were not as follows:


As I mentioned before, the city/college town of Santander is overpopulated by retired and senior citizens. As in, the scent of the salty sea has to seriously struggle to not be masked by the scent of old people cologne.

(Old people. Photo creds: Kim)


I have nothing against old people—I love a lot of old people and hope to live to be very old myself. However, retired, old people tend to have lots of spare time, and tend to like to spend a great quantity of this spare time engaging in conversation younger people who don’t have quite as much spare time. Victoria, our landlady, is no exception to this rule. The combination of “likes to talk” and “lives down the street” in a city where “people are bound to bump into each other on the streets” makes for a very fun (read: sarcasm) situation. We are talking 45 minutes of conversation, minimum, with the empty-nester if you ask her where a bus stop is. And that’s upon running into her causally on the street. The longer conversations (last night’s reached 3 hours, 45 minutes) occur when she shows up without warning at our apartment door. And this tends to be when either A) we are sleeping in after a long night out, B) we have not recently deep-cleaned the apartment, or C) a half-naked Italian opens the door.

I must digress to explain about our apartment situation in order for the gravity of “not having deep-cleaned our apartment” to be fully understood. And then the gravity of the “half-naked Italian” will follow as understood as well. It suffices to say that my roommates (Riki, Kim, and Nicole—see below picture) and I were offered an unbeatable deal on our freshly remodeled, crystal chandelier decorated apartment, which we understand to be the rarely leased lovechild of Victoria and her (less chattersome) husband, Luis.

Victoria offered us the apartment largely because we are seemingly charming, responsible girls who would keep the place spick and span. I’m talking, we could not sign the 15-page lease until we were given an extensive tour of the apartment and what precautionary measures to be taken to keep the place looking like new (and by “like new” I really mean, “like old” because the place is muy abuela as far as interior decorating goes). Of course, we signed the lease (and reluctantly handed over 1000 EURO in cash apiece as a security deposit (see below picture), agreeing to everything Victoria said, while really knowing that we would not actually hire the Romanian housekeeper twice a week per her suggestion, and that a process of intense de-abuela-fication would commence immediately upon moving in, wherein we would opt to make our apartment feel more “our age.” (This would involve removing a hideous floral print plastic tablecloth from the dining room table, investing over 30 euros in scented candles, and hiding several handcrafted wall decorations and over-the-top crucifixes in the recesses of a cabinet that we have since dubbed “the abyss.”)

(Riki and Kim get prepared to hand over our entire first month's paycheck)


The thing is, we weren’t prepared for Victoria to also adopt us as her surrogate daughters, a status which apparently grants her permission to show up uninvited at our door and overstay her welcome, giving us hours upon hours of Spanish lessons (we must correct our accents so we speak proper Spain-Spanish), in addition to endless commentary on the state of the economy (bad) and the state of our apartment (worse). It is a very confusing relationship for us. You see, Victoria is a very nice lady, and seems to love chatting with us “precious ninas,” but she is the type of refined woman whose mere presence makes you suddenly self-conscious of your hangnails and un-ironed shirt. She is the type of mother whose knowledge you value but whose criticism you fear, which translates into “she is the type of landlady who would very likely not return our 1,000 EUROapiece security deposit if you screwed anything up in your crystal chandelier-adorned apartment.”

We are now charged with the challenge of balancing a 20somethings lifestyle (and salary—see: TeachersCannotAffordHousekeepers.com) with the expectation that Victoria could show up at any given minute and find reason to not return our security deposits. So far, we are failing.

Last week, we hosted two “CouchSurfers” (travelers that you meet online and cook dinner for you in return for a free couch to sleep on—not as unsafe as it sounds). They were awesome—one was a 19-year-old surfer from Germany who has been traveling around Europe on bike for the past six months, and who may or not have royal blood (he uses a pseudo last name on Facebook for privacy); and the other was a guy from Italy who we are pretty sure has ties to the mafia (he carries around wads of 50-euro bills and was shocked to learn we find spending 100 euro on a single shirt a waste of money). Not sure why he can’t afford a hotel. But whatever, they cooked a delicious dinner for us (quite a (hilarious) accomplishment, as they had no common vocabulary) and then we went out on the town. And then they slept on our couches. And then Victoria showed up, four hours later, at 10am. We’re not sure why.

(our friend Heinrick (German Prince?) teaches us how to say "Last night I was drunk" in German. Note crystal chandelier in background.)


The (at that point, 100Euro-shirt-less) Italian opened the door (we four girls were sound asleep and somehow missed the incessant doorbell ringing), only to be chided by Victoria for having parked his bicycle and worn high heels on our hardwood floors (he was not responsible for either. Nor does he understand Spanish). We girls later got the brunt of that speech again later from Victoria. And after apologizing profusely, and assuring her that the couch surfers were not dangerous men, we now we play the political game—we want our security deposits back.

The political game involves withstanding the 3-hour Spanish lessons (she literally wrote out the entire Spanish alphabet the other day for Nicole and me, and had us pronounce each letter aloud), inviting Victoria and Luis over for dinner, and making it look like we are always in the process of cleaning our apartment.

The other day, Nicole and I were eating a late lunch when we suddenly heard the doorbell ring in such a manner that we knew it could only be Victoria. We panicked—the kitchen had not been mopped in two days! We obviously did not have time to clean, but decided we could at least make it look like that was our intention. So I ran to the patio to grab the mop and bucket, but failed to realize that it would take a good minute to fill the bucket with enough water to make our cleaning attempt look legitimate. The doorbell continued to ring. We had to answer at some point. I slopped some water on the kitchen floor and assumed the mopping position, which thankfully Victoria acknowledged, upon entering our apartment (accompanied by a cloud of the exact perfume we have been trying to rid our apartment of), with a satisfied nod of the head. But as she then sat down at the dining room table, we became suddenly acutely aware of everything else for which she could upbraid us. The un-table-clothed dining room table (which we were in the middle of eating on), the recently broken Persian blinds (that she stood up to lower—but then stopped—when we insisted that the presence of Peeping Tom construction workers right outside our living room window did not, in fact, creep us out), etc. This anxiety lasted for 3 hours. (This was the incident of the “let’s start from zero, with the Spanish alphabet” lesson.)

(fridge-worthy remnants of the 3-hour Spanish lesson)

Luckily, we got off the hook with that visit—a rarity indeed. If happily enduring 3-hour Spanish lessons is the price we have to pay for ensuring the return of our 1,000Euros apiece at the end of the year, I’ll happily (actually) abide. We’ve now come to expect the visits of Victoria at our apartment, and I think we have learned how to manipulate its appearance to our advantage. (Oh Victoria, having the German and Italian here was such an incredible experience of cultural exchange!) I just hope not to run into Victoria in the streets during those hours when public transportation ceases to function—don’t know what kind of motherly chastising I could handle at that point. Luckily, though, I have an acute sense of smell. If my nostrils detect a whiff of a certain old lady perfume, I will hasten (whether in high heels or flats) down the cobblestone road in the opposite direction.