Yesterday night, I ended up spending some time with my housemates — Sun, Ravil, Valentina. Turns out that Ravil and Valentina are married. I don't speak Spanish very well (read: let's just say that I speak Spanish like a drunken scarecrow), and none of them speak English very well, so our conversations consist of a lot of broken Russian, Spanish, and English. With Google Translate open on our phones at all time. I even broke out into Japanese a couple of times, as I was so frustrated at my inability to express myself. (Strange. Despite the fact that Japanese has absolutely nothing in common with Spanish, I'm going through this godawful English -> Japanese -> Spanish translation process whenever I try to speak Spanish. I've got to be the one person on the planet who improves her Japanese when she tries to learn Spanish. Brain, you are my worst enemy.)
Anyway, Sun had cooked; I was feeling a bit ill so I didn't eat much (unfortunately they took my 'not wanting much' as a sign that I'm a vegetarian, which I didn't realize until this morning when Ravil asked me whether I could drink leche - milk - and eat huevos - eggs.) We've planned to switch off cooking between us, which means I get Russian food tonight! ...it also means that I need to cook Indian food tomorrow, which I'm already planning on begging off. There is no chance in hell that I'm finding the spices that I need here. I found this recipe that I'm going to try instead.
We talked about American TV shows (Ravil & Valentina are big Game of Thrones fans - I hate to be the one to say it, but typical Russians!!. In my defense, Ravil spent the night making bad jokes about being in the KGB, because apparently all Americans believe that Russians are spies? Where did they get their knowledge of Americans from, the 1960s??? That said, Hollywood is still pretty great - and by great I mean the opposite of great - at typecasting everyone with an accent, so. Sun is a BBC Sherlock fan. They ended the night with a round of tea, but I begged off because I wanted to sleep.
Well. I didn't. It's the oddest feeling, one that I am unfortunately rather intimately acquainted with: being dead tired and yet still being completely and utterly unable to sleep. I must've done something especially awful to the Sandman at some point. Maybe I kicked him in the teeth when he was attempting to do his thing. Can you blame me? Big sparkly dude sneaks into your room, sprinkles "magic dust" over you ... sounds like an episode of Breaking Bad.
Sleep forsaken, I spent a portion of the night texting people (hi, J), and reading godawful fanfiction. Mainly because my kindle was locked up in my suitcase and, well, being too tired to sleep means that I was also too tired to traipse across the room to fetch it.
Et voila. After an excruciating eight hours, the sun finally came up. And I mean that: the sun doesn't rise until around 745AM here. The street lamps are still burning until well into the morning. I could see the sunrise from my window; tomorrow I'll get off my ass and take a picture of it.
Wrenched myself out of bed, washed up, threw on some clothes; then Sun & I went to the metro station (five minutes away) to get to AIP, which is the language institute where I will be spending much of my time for the next four weeks. Immediate reaction: oh my god everyone is speaking in tongues. Dudes from the Tower of Babel, this is all your goddamn fault. For once, I wish God had done some pre-emptive smiting instead of making us all unable to communicate. That's a lie, I don't wish that. I love different languages. I'm just a bit grumpy and overwhelmed, ignore me.
Everyone was very nice! I smiled and overused sí and muy bueno and vale (literally "okay," Valencians say this every other word)! I didn't understand 99% of what was going on! Then, thankfully, they broke us up according to skill level: I ended up in a group of four, with one Austrian student from Vienna, recently finished his master's in food technology in Munich, was taking Spanish in order to increase his business opportunities, and two Chinese students who spoke not a word of Spanish, English, or anything else (I tried Japanese on them, too - no go. Strange. Most of the Chinese people I've met back home know at least a shred of Japanese; maybe I've been speaking to all the wrong people.) I didn't even catch their names. Felix knows English, which is wonderful for me. No one else does. We had one teacher (god, I'm forgetting her name - Christina, I believe?) from 8:30-~11:45; we did some comprehension & grammar with her. Our second teacher (Sylvia - they assign each class two teachers so we're exposed to normal and slight differences in pronunciation/accentuation) stayed with us until about 1:30 for conversation practice. None of the teachers know English, so they gesture a lot and use other words in Spanish when we don't know what they're saying — which doesn't always help. I learned a great deal! Not as much as I'd have liked, but it's only the first day, I need to stop being hypercritical of my progress.
Every day after class, there's a few hours of study time, and also usually a group outing planned for the evening. Of course you need to pay, so I figured I'd go to 1-2 of the group outings a week. I skipped this week's, which was a trip to taste the very Valencian drink horchata. Note to self: try some. The rest of the events for the week didn't sound particularly interesting, expect for Friday! The aquarium! I adore aquariums, I adore aquariums, I adore aquariums. It's the latent childhood dream of wanting to become a marine biologist come to a different sort of fruition. And AIP subsidizes the cost of the ticket to 15 euros (I need to figure out what the alt code is for the euro symbol) from 28, so that's a must-go.
Said hasta manaña to AIP, wandered around a bit, got lost (Valencia is one of those cities where you have to work to find the street signs. This does not make me happy.). For some reason, the metro line that should've taken me all the way back to my apartment stopped early, so I walked the remaining 25 or so minutes. I think I might make it a point to walk home from AIP when I don't have much else planned for the night; it's a nice walk, and I like absorbing the city life.
Came home, repacked everything into my purse, and then headed out to the grocery store. This ... is where things got interesting. I picked up my groceries: fruit, vegetables, the ingredients for the dish I'm making tomorrow, and to satisfy my own curiosity: fresh dulce de leche, and a tiny tin of flan de huevo. There was a lot of meat & fish in the store! And by a lot, I mean the meat section was about 5-6 times the size of Ralph's. One little nook was covered in hanging pig legs. Pig legs. Next time, I'll take a picture: you have to pay to use a shopping cart (they're literally chained up at the front of the store), so my hands were full toting around my basket. I head to the check-out, somewhat nervous about my Spanish Achilles's heel, and, sure enough, the lady at the till starts talking a mile-a-minute and gesturing at the vegetables. Question marks were pouring out of my head. No comprendo, I said. Por favor, puede hablar más lento, disculpe, disculpe, but she just kept on gesticulating and speaking in more Spanish. Luckily, the man behind me spoke English - after a few minutes of question-marking on my side and hers, he told me that I needed to weigh the vegetables at the machine and print out a sticker that indicated the weight. Oh! So I leave my basket at the till, dash to the vegetable section (get lost, because you think the layout of H mart is bad, this is about twenty times worse), dash back, and finish the sale. I pay, I receive my change, and then my giant pile of groceries, including a 6L bottle of water, is left in a pile at the end of the till as she goes to ring the next person up. I realize, after a second, that they don't provide bags. There's no way I can make the ten minute walk back to my apartment holding all the groceries separately. What now?
(The local chain supermarket.)
So I indicate a bag with my hands, and the lady at the till says viente centavos! Oh. Remember, Dorothy? Not in Kansas anymore. So I fork over forty cents for a couple of bags, and make my sluggish way home -- feeling rather embarrassed & downtrodden by the whole encounter. I needed to get a few things from the adjoining drugstore, but I figured I'd take a walk first to clear my head. I settled on a route: a 3-km walk that would take me past Cines Babel, the one theater in Valencia that plays films in their original language. (A necessity for me, given that Thor 2 is coming out on Nov 8th.) It's a fairly long walk. I pass a few interesting bakeries on the way.
This classy piece of graffiti is repeated many times through the city:
One of the guys nearby cracked up when he saw me taking a picture of it. The cinema turned out to be this tiny hole-in-the-wall place. I've done a lot of wandering in the two days I've been here, and this is the first cinema (el cine) I've seen. I suppose Spaniards aren't much into watching films. At least not here in Valencia.
I took a number of pictures on the way back:
(Ad for a Les Mis Spanish play that starts in November. Tempted to go!)
(The metro stop five minutes from my apartment)
(My apartment)
(Carrer de la Peanya, the street my apartment is on)
(These giant recycling bins are found every so often WHAM BAM right in the street. Can you imagine LA drivers dealing with these?)
(I forgot to take a picture of all the delicious-looking displays, but of course this awful-looking one is a stone's throw from my house. The croissant is the size of my head!)
(Jacaranda trees!)
I headed back to Mercadona to pick up what I needed from the drugstore and then scuttled back to my apartment. I'm sitting here now looking up nearby restaurants on Yelp, and getting a bit frustrated: it doesn't look like Spaniards like Yelp much! I'll just have to ask my teachers tomorrow. I've decided, in the interest of saving money, I'll cook most of the time, but once a week I'll eat at a nice restaurant, and once I'll indulge in a cafe/bakery run, just because. Still have to scope out the bookstores around here, but that doesn't seem to be much of a thing, either. Huh, Valencia!
Now, onward to studying, responding to emails, and maybe a few tags. Need to get on top of my grad school essays, too. Feeling more than a bit overwhelmed.
Tomorrow, I've a meal to cook and afterwards I might visit one of the places-to-see!! in Valencia. This has been an entry full of whining and more whining, but let me reiterate: Spain is amazing, I'm glad I'm here; I'm just slowly finding my land-legs.
(Also, can one of you do me a favor and set up a Flickr account for me? They require cellphone activation and, well. No can do. Gracias.)
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