What a blessing that life here in Barcelona is so rich! I had barely arrived Saturday morning when I received my first invitation, a comforting sign that I was missed. Surely I was the newly-recertified American: Saturday night was an American pizza party, and I came bearing PopTarts, rice crispy treats, and peanut butter. The first filled a request from Natalie, Texan-born Rotary scholar studying international relations in Barcelona. The second landed in the hands of my flatmate Anna, who spent a year in Wisconsin during high school. And the peanut butter? Part of the Hamilton stockpile. These are the things we miss (and fit into a suitcase). I also spent time passing by my favorite places here, all languishing in the glorious Barcelona sunshine. My apartment is a short walk from Montjuic, the great seaside landmass that separates the city from its industrial port. To get there takes a ten-minute walk out my door, across the busy Parallel Avenue, and through a neighborhood called Poble Sec. The high, colorful, laundry-strewn apartment buildings are spotted street-level with bars, mini-marts, hair salons, and some odd shops. I love to walk down shaded Blai street, then right onto the street where parakeets chirp away, and sometimes past the intriguing vine-covered house. Then it’s a long staircase up through the parks that dot the hillsides of Montjuic. Then finally, the Lookout, a high rise garden that lays the city out before you. Most times I stop there, where you can catch your breath a little, above the city and watching the boats glide in and out of the pleasure port.
Walks like these will become my guilty pleasure, I suspect, as the semester’s work continues to pile on. Last week we all scrambled to turn in thesis research proposals, general areas that are meant only to pair us with a supervisor but seem also to carry the weight of a life’s work. The three areas I outlined were bilingual education, bilingualism, and content integrated language instruction. The first would pull me into a Catalan case study, as I’m especially interested in how the region integrates immigrants, children of course but especially adult language learners. The second area would involve a fun study of which languages people use and when and why, and how they all affect each other. Finally, the third area is a proven-effective teaching approach that has students learning, say, science through Spanish instead of a course on Spanish. In another week, my program professors will assign me an advisor and determine the course of my professional career. Or will it only be a 6-month thesis?
The general academic program is also intensifying, as visiting professors often appear on the scene for a week of four-hour lectures in their area of specialty. This week I’m enrolled in a hit-and-run on pragmatics, or the teaching, learning, and usage of language forms to express apologies, requests, refusals, invitations, etc. How we frame these phrases depends on the status of the speakers (think employer-employee, for example), distance between them (best friends or strangers), magnitude of the request or misstep (forgetting the forks versus the wedding), and to a great extent, cultural norms. Here in Spanish, it’s not rude to use commands and say, “Give me a coffee,” or “Pass me the salt,” no please, could you, or thank you ma’am. It’s perfectly acceptable, not bad manners, and not insulting. In fact, Americans or Brits are often ridiculed for being extensively, overly, annoyingly polite. I try to strike a balance.
Two more points, the first one short. Hooray, again and over again, for socialist health care. The Spanish government staffs and runs health centers, which provide general care and can be supplemented by private insurances. My residency card entitles me to my very own general practitioner, most necessary treatments, and a discount on already-cheaper prescriptions. In ten minutes of paperwork last week, I had my temporary health card and even got to meet my doctor! She looked into my ear, told me I had wax and to get over it, but these drops might help. I beamed.
And lastly, Rotary also vied for my attention last week, and I was more than grateful to consent. With the other Scholars, I lunched with Club Barcelona Pedralbes, whose members meet on the nineteenth floor of a very nice hotel on Diagonal Avenue. On Saturday I braved an early-morning rendezvous with Rotaract young adults to train out to the Autonoma University hotel for a day-long Rotaract District Conference. It was a day full of presentations, breakout sessions, and fun and games (we are all young!) that helped me make contact with the seven Rotaract clubs in the district. This week I will be presenting to one that meets at the Autonoma (after four hours of lecture, and after a PhD meeting at the university…). Life is miraculously full and joyfully filling!
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