Life & Language Lessons

Dos Besos:
More on kissing… as it turns out, there are many times one can be double kissed without expecting it. The other day I made cookies for my bible study group and now I know that if I’m ever in the mood for a lot of double kisses all I have to do is make cookies.
I have a Venezuelan friend here. As we were saying goodbye the other day, I asked, “In Venezula, only one kiss is given, right?” She confirmed that this was indeed the case and quickly responded with, “How many kisses do you give in your country?” I told her that we shake hands instead of kissing, and tried to explain the concept of a “personal space bubble”, but I’m not sure that it made much sense. They’re not real big on personal space bubbles in Spain, and I don’t imagine they exist in Venezuela either. I like the lack of bubbles.

Guapa!:
Another embarrassing story. The other day as I was leaving church someone called out, “guapa!” and I turned around attentively thinking someone needed to talk me. Hahaha. I am often called “guapa” instead of my name, but that’s normal here for most young women.

Polvo vs. pavo:
These words really aren’t that similar – which makes my confusing them all the more embarrassing. Let’s make a long story short and just say that my pastor and his wife respectfully thought that Americans eat “dust” on Thanksgiving as opposed to “turkey”. They believed this for about twenty minutes until my error was realized and we cleared up the issue. We laughed for about 5 minutes straight. They had thought it was strange, but if it was our tradition, they didn’t want to laugh at it!

Perdón, donde esta…?
It’s happened twice now. Lost Spaniards have asked me for directions while I’m out taking a walk. One of the times I was actually able to give the person directions (that may be a small miracle; not only because I’m actually a foreigner myself, but also because of my dismal sense of direction). It made my day both times it happened. My excitement sprung from the hope that
my foreignness may not be quite as obvious as I always assume.

A change of plans...
I may have told some of you that when I arrived in Spain, the program director surprised me by letting me know that I’d mainly be teaching International Commerce, not English! You’ve got to love the Spanish way of doing things (please sense the use of strong sarcasm). So anyway, I started teaching International Commerce a few weeks ago, and it’s going surprisingly well. I was initially afraid of the fact that I’m not exactly qualified to teach International Commerce to adults, but it turns out that the biggest challenge is (YAWN), excuse me, as I was saying, the biggest challenge is keeping the students (YAWN), excuse me again, um, what was I saying? Oh yes, AWAKE. The material is rather dry – to say the least. Thankfully, I’ve been doing activities with them that actually get them involved and force them to learn the material. I sense that they appreciate my efforts to make something so dry a little bit more fun.

Tiffany and I have been busily planning our adventures throughout Spain together. Tiff has been researching all sorts of things, and I’ve created a spreadsheet detailing our itinerary and a budget breakdown. I guess that kind of makes us look like non-spontaneous dorks, but I love it. As they say here, “me hace ilusión” – I’m really looking forward to it!