El perpetuo trabalenguas - The Perpetual Tonguetwister

            I’m not going to lie to you. At times, living in a country where another language is dominant makes you feel like your brain is pretty useless.

Now, I have studied Spanish for several years now. I have a degree in it from the University of Oregon – a pretty nice khaki piece of paper that says I have an advanced knowledge of the language, and I think it might even say I graduated “with honors”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. But sometimes, going into a bar and ordering a café con leche makes me feel like I have the IQ of a two year old who has been repeatedly hit in the head with a tire iron. This is especially true if I try to add any kind of flair to the sentence and really “make it my own”. I’m not sure how much I try to make English “my own” language; I normally say “Dude,” and then an semi-intelligible string of nouns, superfluous adjectives and even less necessary adverbs comes out, and what results is something most American English speakers can understand, but perhaps many others, especially older members of my own family, might have trouble understanding.

Dude, like, what type of tip is this dude on, right now, man?

Suffice it to say, then, when I try to make Castillian Spanish “my own”, an even less comprehensible concoction comes out of my lopsided mouth, and many native speakers here in Vieja Castilla are left bleating out a resounding “¿Qué?” in the face of this pale-skinned foreigner, the not-so-affectionate term for which is actually “guiri” (geer-ee). It’s sort of like the Iberian Spanish version of “gringo”, of which I’m sure everyone is familiar.

But there’s the interesting thing going on: here, what we call “Spanish” is not even really the native language in a majority of the Iberian peninsula. Of course, you’ve got Portugal where they speak Portuguese. Bien, that’s all fine, but even in Spain itself, “Spanish” is actually a misnomer that offends many people. Here, what we normally call “Spanish” is normally referred to as castellano, which means “Castillian”. This is the language that a vast majority of people in the country speak, and it’s the same language that all those big-ass countries in Latin America speak – Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Panama, Honduras, Cuba, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and of course Puerto Rico (which ain’t a country, dude).

However, here in Spain, there are actually three – count ‘em – three other languages that are considered co-official with Castilian Spanish. In reality, there are many other minority languages in Spain, but only three have sufficient quantities of speakers to merit the consideration of "co-officiality" in their respective provinces. 

Here's a little breakdown:

The three main languages are (with their colors corresponding to the map):

 Galician – gallego in Castilian Spanish and galego in the language itself, this is a language very closely related to Portuguese, and it’s spoken in the northwestern corner of the country, appropriately right above Portugal.

 Basque – vasco or euskara in Castilian Spanish and euskera to the Basques, this is the language spoken by a minority in the Basque Country, and it’s one of the most insane-looking languages on Earth. It has absolutely no linguistic relatives in the entire world, and it’s what some people call an “indigenous language” of Europe. 

 Catalan – catalán to the castellanos and catalá to themselves, they speak this language in Catalonia, on the northeast coast of Spain where Barcelona is. Of all the minority languages, this one has the most native speakers (around 7 million).

 

Many of Spain’s minority languages are learned in schools, and especially with Basque and Galician, they are considered official languages more as a formality and method of asserting the peoples’ autonomy than as a matter of linguistic necessity. Many, many people in Galicia and the Basque Country do not even speak their respective “native” languages – only Castilian Spanish. However, in Catalonia, while many people are either bilingual Spanish/Catalan speakers or monolingual castellanos, many people, as I will soon recount to you, are so proud of their catalá that they would rather speak English to tourists than castellano, and this is due in no small part to the long periods of linguistic imperialism that the Spanish empire (both Francoist and otherwise) has embarked upon throughout its history.

And speaking of the fight for independence in different regions of Spain, I will segue into telling you a little bit about my time in Catalunya and Euskadi, or for the castellanos among us, el País Vasco.

La lucha lamentable

I know I've already written a lot on here about fascism and its lingering shadow in Spain, and I don't want to give the impression that everyone walking around Valladolid is throwing up Nazi salutes and perusing well-worn copies of Mein Kampf (which, unlike in English, is actually translated in Spain as Mi lucha, which makes it sound more legitimate). However, like I mentioned earlier I have seen far more open support of ultra right-wing ideology here in just under five months than I have in my entire life in the United States. It comes in the form of graffiti, wheat-pasted posters and stickers in public places, skinheads openly flaunting their beliefs on their sleeves, literally in the form of Nazi and quasi-Falangist armbands. The numbers "88", for "Heil Hitler" are graffiti'd in ubiquitous locations around town. It is truly revolting.
However, I saw something yesterday that disturbed me. On my way home from work, I walked past some kids horsing around on a park bench. They looked to be about 15 or 16 years old at most. There were two girls and one boy, and the girls were dressed like normal, coquettish Spanish teenagers, with the practically-compulsory black leggings and khaki colored skirts, with their hair done nicely. In short, they looked good, they looked respectable, they looked cute, like normal teenage girls. But the boy who was with them had his head shaved and was wearing a black leather jacket, and looked decidedly tougher than the girls, like he was from a different corner of society. But here they were, joking around and laughing, as any classmates do who have just been released from the stifling Bastille of high school for the day. The boy was looking at the girls in a way that suggested that he was trying to impress them, as any 16 year old boy would in front of two attractive female friends, and the girls in turn looked impressed by these buzz-cut renegade, tall and Doc Marten'ed, making those typical, manly Spanish gesticulations with his hands, as if he was telling them a story which he could barely believe himself.
As I got closer to the group, I saw that all over the boy's leather jacket were patches. At first I couldn't read them, but I thought they would inevitably bear the names of various punk and metal bands, which would be absolutely normal for kids anywhere, and especially in Spain (they like to bang their heads here, so to speak). But as I got within distance to read the patches, I saw that instead of Rancid and Iron Maiden logos, there were nothing but "88"s, swastikas, pictures of Hitler, and white power symbols. I was stunned, dumbfounded. I stopped walking, standing only a few feet away from them on the sidewalk, and I watched them interact, playing around and laughing like normal teenagers, oblivious to me standing there, mouth agape.
The worst part about it was not so much that the young boy was wearing the jacket. Like I said, it wouldn't have been the first time I'd seen something like that. But what really shocked me, what really made me feel sick, was that there were people all around us who did not act as if there was anything wrong. This was on one of the main streets in Valladolid and there were dozens of people around. And these two girls, ostensibly normal and mainstream as could be (if there is such a thing based on appearances) that apparently saw no problem with the views of intolerance that their friend was, quite literally, wearing on his sleeve.

And I stood there and stared.

Ir al puto grano

            Let’s just ir al grano here. (That’s Iberispeak for “get to the point”. For a more colorful option, you could also say ir al puto grano. I think you can figure it out.)

            I don’t have a good excuse for not updating my blog more often. I could tell you that I’m going to try to do it more often from here on out, but trying is something district courts do, not employees of the Spanish Ministerio de Eduación. I wish, like many defense attorneys in the aforementioned district courts, I could provide you with some piece of exculpatory evidence that would absolve me of my tardiness and vagrancy, but I have none. This glove does indeed fit, and it fits like…a glove. So there will be no sensational acquittals for your dear reporter.

            Like many others (I hope) I sometimes suffer not from writer’s block, but its exact converse. Writer’s overwhelmment. (That is now a word.) I have too many things to write about. My life is too fucking interesting to even handle. Or rather, my brain has too many narrative threads at all times to permit any one of them the privilege of being physically committed to Word processing. They are all too important. It’s like “Sophie’s Choice”, but with less child sacrifice.

            What, then, do I choose to write about? There are too many Sophies to choose from. People tell me I should just “tell my friends and family about my experiences, because no one else will read your stupid blog, asshole”. And then I reply, “That’s not true. Even they don’t read it, and I’m not an asshole – I’m more of an arrogant bastard.”   

            Do I talk about standing at the foot of El Cid’s tomb inside the totally-majestic-and-sweet-cathedral of the ancient city of Burgos? Or do I write about getting my picture tweeted by one of Spain’s most illustrious and lauded hip-hop MCs, as an estadounidense holding a ticket to his Valladolid show? Or do I write about throwing my first Spanish snowball (bola de nieve)?

            The question is, then, in what am I going to verbally self-indulge next? I could tell you that details are coming soon, but details are something crooked auto-body shops do, not English teachers in Spain.

            

Tiempo de niebla, tiempo de esperanza

            This is my fourth month in Valladolid and I’m beginning to come around to understanding its ways. If you’ve been one of the people whom have asked me how things have been going, I’ve probably given you a response that was only partially true. Truth be told, up until recently I have struggled with this city of Vieja Castilla. To catapult from being immersed in the friendly, outgoing nature of Oregonians, to the windswept reserve of vallesoletanos has been shocking. The cultural differences are more befuddling than any language barrier, the latter of which is no small obstacle.

            For weeks, I have felt lost, wandering these tiled streets. I’m sure many expatriates feel this same way during the first part of their sojourn. Many faces were scornful and uninviting, to my eyes at least, and the prototypical concrete-block apartment buildings that I now realize are so classically Spain became terrible eyesores, mocking my sense of pleasurable aesthetics. It was as if no one cared how I felt, even the architects. There were so many things that I couldn’t believe, so many things that I couldn’t stand. I was incredulous. And then I became scornful myself. I became distrustful.

            Throughout my “dark gray period”, one thing remained a luz at the end of the tunnel, and that was my students and my school. I have nothing but the utmost respect and love for everyone at IES Las Salinas in Laguna de Duero, and everyone there has been so great to me – the silly American. Despite the fact that many of my classes seem more circus-like than pedagogical, I have learned so many things from mis niños and I wouldn’t trade the time I’ve had with them for the world.

            Recently, though, the “dark gray cloud” has begun to lift. Things have not seemed so sin esperanza, people have not seemed so scornful, and I have found myself more confident and capable of taking on challenges. I realized that, to some extent, there’s no point in fighting the way things are, and especially the way people act. Sometimes, we have to make adjustments to our own minds and attitudes in order to adapt to the environment we find ourselves in. Then, and only then, can we change the world around us. Fighting it does no good.

            Valladolid is known throughout Spain for its fog – la niebla. Many vallesoletanos complain about this meteorological phenomenon, especially because it often comes hand in hand with temperatures bajo cero. However, after having spent the last five-odd years of my life in the Pacific Northwest, the chill of the fog hauls in a welcome wave of nostalgia for me.

            It was the other day, was on my daily walk home from work that I realized just how thick and all-encompassing the fog was. Instead of walking the mile or so straight to my house, I decided to take a right turn on a street that jutted off to the right, into a neighborhood I had never explored before. On both sides were low-slung rows of buildings, some of which had those classic, ochre Spanish-tile roofs (à la the quasi-Iberian architecture of Southern California housing developments, but the real thing). There were the typical grizzled men wearing flatcaps smoking short cigarettes clustered around the entrance to every bar. The smoke from their cigarettes mixed with their frozen breath and the fog as it wisped upwards. A school had just let out and there were kids everywhere, laughing, shrieking vivid obscenities, and wringing their hands to ward off the shock from the cold air.

            After a kilometer or so (don’t worry Americans – I’m just rounding up a little bit from half a mile), I came to a wall blocking the street off from the train tracks that bisect the city. As in any city in the whole universe, train tracks are the Shangri-la of ne’er-do-wells, graffiti-taggers, and general mischief-seekers everywhere, so I thought it would be a great place to take some pictures of the Real Spain.

The Real Spain is not the mosque at Córdoba, it’s not La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and it’s not la Costa del Sol in Andalucía. The Real Spain, to me, is miles of lonesome train tracks disappearing into the distance; it’s a pre-1978-democracy warehouse that has been abandoned to the elements, both human and temporal. The Real Spain is an incongruous, Lego-assortment of buildings that looked like they were Tetris’d out of the sky, but in that very sense are perfect just how they are. The Real Spain is kids running out of school, screaming vivid obscenities, and the Real Spain is coquettish but serious-looking women looking at you but trying hard to avoid like they’re looking at you at all costs, out of habitually avoiding piquing the avarice and encouraging advances from their shameless, macho counterparts.

The Real Spain is a controlled-chaos circus that’s impossible to figure out, and the only way to give you an idea is to list some examples of its characteristics. The Real Spain, whom I have come to not only accept, but love and embrace, is a place of live ghosts and just plain life, and you have to be with it for a while to figure out how to not figure it out.

And like Camus, I’m really starting to embrace the absurd.

Oh, and you know what the name of the street was?

Camino de Esperanza.

(Get out your Spanish dictionaries)

"No Golfing" - A Reverse Viaje

Going back in time six hours is a bitch. I don’t mean like H.G. Wells, “going back in time”, but like changing time zones. Your body doesn’t like it, your head doesn’t like it, and it makes everything seem wavy and strange when you try to focus your eyes.

            Today I woke up at 5:30 AM Eastern Standard Time, which would be 11:30 AM in Valladolid, Spain. To make the best of this unceremonious jolting of the brain-time continuum, I decided to get into my Subaru Forester and head to the gym. Unfortunately, the gym is not all that close to my house, and if you’re familiar with standard, American suburban-wasteland “planning”, you’ll know that when something is three miles from your house, you don’t always have a direct route. You have to make some choices.

I don’t know about where you live, but where I live, we already have traffic at 5:45 AM. And I made some shitty choices. I went to the longest lights; I got stuck behind people driving their $100,000 Lexuses at the speed of low-battery golf carts; and at one point, I was trailing a school bus that seemed to be picking up every wayward child in the vicinity. Leave no room for doubt: this all made me very angry. But it was a warm, terra cotta feeling of soothing anger; a nostalgia for traffic jams past.

Anyways, after about three hours in traffic – give or take two hours and forty five minutes – I got to Spring Hill Rec Center, currently high in the running for the Most Generic Suburban Place Name of All Time award, highlighting an adroit use of the classic combination: Soothing Adjective + Unoffensive Geographic Feature. As the candle would have sung in “Beauty and the Beast”: a tale as old as time.

As I turned my sturdy, liberal bumper sticker-bedecked Forester into Spring Hill’s parking lot, the newly awakening sun’s rays illuminated a wooden sign on the side of the access road. When I read this placard’s warning, I realized that where I had arrived, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., was just as strange of a locale – just as much part of my world-hopping adventure – as any cathedral’d villa in Spain or any ancient mosque’d hamlet in Morocco. This sign, perhaps ignored by many of the locals as if it were something as commonplace as a speedbump or as routine as a traffic light, blew my mind. It baffled and astounded me; I couldn’t believe what it said:

NO GOLFING

            We’re all accustomed to seeing signs telling us not to park somewhere, not to idle for too long in one area, or even demanding that we not give money to pandhandlers.

But telling us not to play golf?

Have legions of flat-capped, caddied renegades straggled so far off the course that they have started impeding traffic? I want you to understand that this sign was nowhere near any type of golf course. There was nary a green nor sand trap for at least five miles in any direction, so what does this mean? Have people starting teeing off wherever the fuck they want? And moreover, has this become a problem warranting an official county sign?

This was not in a field where one might practice his or her drive. This was not near any kind of surface or area conducive to the playing of golf. It was next to a narrow access road leading towards a rec center. Granted, the game of golf is indeed a pastime that can be construed as “recreation”, but would this suggestion be enough to set off an orgy of chipping and wedging so as to require a warning to halt these activities?

The suburbs are a strange place. Despite the often banal and superficial façade, there are things going on behind these manicured lawns and on these power-washed driveways. It is a place of intrigue, wile, and deception. Just as much as Montmarte, Madrid, or Marrakech.

I have thought about this all day and, honestly, the only conclusion I can draw from the “No Golfing” affair is this:

We are all insane.

París I - Banlieues

            First of all, to call the bucolic Beauvais Airport “Paris – Beauvais” is tantamount to saying “San Francisco - Modesto” or “New York – Trenton”. If you missed those narrowly-scoped geographic references, those are two cool, world-class cities incongruously linked to two much shittier cities because they have cheap airports about an hour and a half away. Of course, I’ve never been to either Modesto or Trenton, but I’ve read their Wikipedia pages. Things aren’t looking good.

            Actually, Beauvais is not a bad looking town. It’s got some pretty verdant green fields and some pretty quaint looking countryside. What’s the word I used before? Bucolic? Yes, that describes it perfectly. Truthfully, I’ve always thought that “bucolic” sounds like a disease pathology and not like something relating to the pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life. ORIGIN early 16th cent. (denoting a pastoral poem): via Latin from Greek boukolikos, from boukolos ‘herdsman,’ from bous ‘ox.’, but hey, I don’t get to make the rules. Some old, rich white men do.

            After the initial 45 scenic minutes of the shuttle from the afore-insulted Beauvais airport, things started to get grimy and much more smokestack-y. This outer ring of Parisian suburbs, called banlieues in the barbaric native tongue of the Frenchmen, were not what most would consider feats of aesthetic architectural achievement. Most of the buildings are lifeless-looking high rises that seem to have been mail-ordered by the dozens from some sinister art-deco building warehouse.

From what I have heard, many of these areas are not places you would live if you have the means to go elsewhere. They are the French equivalent of the large-scale government housing projects in major U.S. cities, complete with many of the same features of social depression and malaise.

The Parisian banlieues are not a pretty place from a distance, and I know that things are no better from close up. In fact, that word in and of itself in French, like the word “projects” in English, carries a connotation - deserved or not - of crime, gangs, poverty, and of a large minority population. However, like most European cities, their “projects” are on out the outskirts of the city and not inside it. Interestingly, translations of the word “suburb” or “suburban” in many European languages connote the exact opposite of the American English equivalent.

(If you want to see a damn good film that illustrates this phenomenon, check out the movie “Gomorrah” – a modern-day Italian crime epic set in the suburbs of Naples. Not a pretty looking place to live.)

However, seeing Paris’s less glamorous side first was a good introduction for me, an American that has all the wrong ideas about what “France” means. I was thinking berets and mimes and art museums and dinners by the Seine and fine wines and snobby waiters. And while Paris does have all of these things – though perhaps not in the imagined quantities – at the end of the day, it is a giant, world city. And as one of the most important cities in all the world, of course it has soot covered smokestacks and block housing and people on the streets and miles of graffiti-painted walls, claiming injustice and begging for a peaceful (or other) resolution. Of course the people here struggle, of course they are grimey, of course they are on the grind, and of course they fight for what they have, just like anyone else in the world.

Paris is not at all postcards and paintings, and I was naïve to think so.

In real life, it’s much, much more alive than that.

Magallanes

            Spain is a place of contrasts, for me at least. My life as an American teacher here is a strange concoction of wildly different situations. There are alternating waves of intensity, ranging from the very active and high energy, such as my work at the school, to vapid expanses of bleak llanura – flatness – where I feel understimulated and, frankly, a little bit bored. The periods of high activity are some of the more frenetic I have ever experienced: I have to think on my feet almost all day long, and mainly in another language. Likewise, the flat periods are often devoid of stimulation, with a paucity of motivation to change the current situation at hand. It is certainly a strange life. It’s a good one, even if at times it can be very difficult. Honestly, without the difficult times, there is no why I would know just how sweet the good times really are. That’s the way it always is, isn’t it?

            This kind of oceanic existence – being raised and lowered by a metaphysical tide – is nothing new for me. My life has always been up and down, just like everyone else’s I guess, but maybe a little bit more extreme. We all have light and dark periods, but most of us never reach celestial exuberance nor infernal depths. Truthfully, I would try and avoid describing my own world so melodramatically, but like I mentioned before, I recognize the radiance during the times of contentment because of its stark contrast to those times where everything has a more subdued, matte finish. Either way, I try to keep the sine wave – la onda – from peaking too high in the Himalayas, but at the same time stop it from scraping the bottom of the deep-sea trench, this oceanic life I have somehow found myself circumnavigating.

            I’m going to expand on this more in a second, but I’m going to put this up now as a preliminary to my foray into some more philosophical themes here. And don’t worry – it is all related to this viaje – this journey. Being here, in and of itself, is a foray into the philosophical, so it is only right that I go into it here on this blog. It’s something that directs a lot of my thoughts and thus my worldview.

            Hold on tight.