Dondeques

The generosity of Galician people

The other day I got out of school early, and on the 50 minute ride down the mountain, I asked the special education teacher what she was going to eat for lunch that day, just to make conversation. (We are close enough for that question not to be totally stupid). Her response was:

“I’m going out for lunch with a friend. Do you want to come?”

I was so flabbergasted that I stammered something (true) about having leftovers from last night for lunch because I didn’t want to be an annoying foreigner on their friend get-together. Because in my world, if I go out to lunch with a friend and she brings some stranger I’m like “uh, what the fuck, I wanted to talk to you, who is this?”

Spanish people are more generous than the people I’m used to/the person I am, although sometimes the generosity comes with weird psychological conditions. For example: one English teacher has invited me over his house for lunch one day, but we haven’t set a date for it, he just told me to let him know at some point when I wanted to come over. I know for a fact that he is totally serious and wants me to come over, but I cannot call someone and invite myself over their house for them to feed me. So I haven’t asked him at all, and he probably thinks it’s because I don’t want to go, but I do! This is an issue that can be pretty easily resolved through communication.

Another English teacher was showing me pictures of her furry-ass Persian cat yesterday and said something like “you have never seen my cat because you have never been to my house”. And I was like what the hell! You have never invited me to your house!But apparently she was nevertheless offended that I had never been there.

And the family that I tutor for has already invited me over to have lunch, after having worked there only a few weeks. They are being much more methodical about setting dates, though, which I appreciate.

I think it might be because Galician people tend to be kind of timid, not wanting to invite you over in case you say no. This is a problem because I am the same way. I don’t want to invite myself somewhere and have someone say no. I’ve been told that Galician people in general have a kind of inferiority complex. Everyone in Spain looks down on them for being hillbillies, and people in South America use the term “Galician person”, or “Gallego” as a slur for anyone from Spain. (I was told that this is because many Galician people immigrated to South America, made a bunch of money, then went back home to Galicia, pissing the South Americans off).

Obviously those statements about Galician people and the way others react to them are generalizations, but I’ve spent a whole lot of time around Galicians lately, and the generalization holds for many of them.

Entroido/Carnaval

I’m way behind on events, here. About two weeks ago (at the same time as Mardi Gras) we had Carnaval (Entroido in Gallego) here in Lugo and Fonsagrada. It was a big freaking deal at school.

I was told it was absolutely mandatory to wear a costume to school, so I scrounged around the clothes I have here and found enough for this costume:

The rest of the teachers were pirates. Classes ended at noon, and everyone went off to prepare their costumes. All the teachers were in the staff room getting dressed and goofing off, and all of a sudden the vice-principal said “wait, who is out in the hall with the kids?” About four teachers ran out. Spain.

They love me.

This is one of the history teachers, by far the best pirate:

And I’m not allowed at all to post pictures of students, but I don’t think this nightmarish image counts as a photo of students:

They made those Simpson heads in art class. The Simpsons is very popular show here, and I just recently found out that America’s Funniest Home Videos is on tv here too. They dub the voices. I need to find it and watch it.

At school, the kids had a costume contest where they each did little skits or dances in their costumes and were judged. The 12-year-olds dressed up as a “really badly behaved class” and did a skit as such. They had to dig really deeply into their wells of creativity to summon the ability to act like a class that threw stuff, screamed all the time, and jumped out of their seats to hit each other. (Did you not the dripping sarcasm? Ok, good.)

The winners were the oldest kids who dressed up as cookies. The Simpsons masks were really well-done, but totally uncharismatic and I think everyone was mildly horrified by them, so they didn´t win.

It was all cute fun at school, but then when we went out dancing that night, there were some extremely horrible and stupid costumes. I would say one of the most popular costumes was a Native American (braids, leather-looking little dress) and one that followed close behind was ¨Black Person¨. I didn’t get any pictures of the Black People out dancing, but here is a picture from the parade of an example of someone in their Black Person costume:

There you go. The worst Black Person costumes I saw were a bunch of girls with that Afro wig, blackface, black long sleeve shirts, and long colorful sleeve-less dresses. I’m pretty sure they had something under their dresses to make their butts look big too. So that was a downside of Carnaval, completely politically-incorrect Spanish people.

But there were some super-great costumes, too! These are from the newspaper article about the parade:

Yay!

And there was some sort of evil carnaval bear or something in one of the nearby villages:

I don’t get it, but there he is. Killing…people…

Also, side note, carnaval is even more popular in the villages of Ourense, which is south of Lugo, and at some celebrations, people take burlap sacks, fill them with ants, sprinkle vinegar on them to get them enraged, and then hit people with the bags. Ants fall out the holes and into people’s clothes and bite them.

I am not making this up. I had people repeat this fact to me about five times because I didn’t believe it. I can’t even be upset about the animal cruelty there, I’m just so flabbergasted as to why anyone would even think to do this as a celebration activity.

Spanish Unemployment

I often complain about how few hours I work here, but when I look at the big picture of employment in Spain, I should be happy to be doing anything in Spain. The general unemployment rate is 24% and “roughly one in four Spanish workers is unemployed, [which is] twice the rate in the rest of the European Union” (http://www.cepr.org/pubs/Bulletin/meets/496.htm). 

It’s even worse for young people: 43.5% of Spanish youth (ages 16-25) are unemployed (http://www.unitedexplanations.org/2011/05/24/youth-outraged-unemployment-rate-in-spain/).

I had a conversation with my Spanish friend Darío, who is 24, about what he will do next year when he finishes his degree in traffic engineering, something he didn’t even want to do but chose because it has the most job opportunities. He said he planned to move back home, but didn’t know what he would do, because there are literally no jobs available.

That conversation was when it really hit me about how desperate the situation is here. I know that when I go back to the US, there are jobs available to me, especially if I go back to school to become a Spanish teacher.

They even have an excess of teachers here. Our school has three English teachers who each teach a total of 6 hours of English a week. Some give extra classes in music or French for a couple more hours. The rest of their schedule (which needs to be 25 hours) is filled with “guardias”, where they monitor the halls or the library or substitute for absent teachers.I was talking to one of them on Wednesday about it, and she told me that she gets really bored at school and sometimes feels useless there. So I guess I am not the only one.

So that is the situation here. Pretty much anyone should be happy to be doing anything in Spain.

To lighten the mood, here are some pictures from the Mr. Bean funhouse at the carnival in Lugo this past fall:

Who hasn’t cried in a school bathroom?

I locked myself in the bathroom at school on Tuesday and cried. This is a tradition as old as the profession of teaching and as old as secret places where no one can see you. Here is the reason I did it:

After lunch, I introduced myself to the French teacher who is substituting for the regular teacher for a few weeks. She said noticed that it must be very hard for me to understand people here. I let out an inward sigh of relief as I do every time someone shows sympathy for my situation. It´s not like I need a medal every day for doing what I do, just the occasional acknowledgment of how difficult it can be means a lot to me.

She was born and grew up in France. She came to Galicia a long time ago, so her Spanish is perfect and she speaks Gallego as well.

As we walked into the teachers’ room, she asked me if I came to school every day of the week.

“She doesn’t come on Thursday and Friday,” answered a math teacher from across the room, in Gallego.

I wondered why the hell this woman had answered the question for me, but continued my conversation with the French teacher by asking her how she liked the students. The math teacher came over and started talking about the topic, in Gallego, with the French teacher, who responded to her in Gallego. I hung on to the conversation for a moment before I lost it completely, felt tears in my eyes, went to the bathroom, and cried.

I felt robbed of a precious moment of fitting in and understanding what was going on. And I just kept thinking, “why did the math teacher do that?” Because, I mean, why did she do that?! Why did she impose a new language on the conversation and steer it away from a direction I understood? Does my comprehension of what is going on not matter?

I also felt betrayed by the French teacher. I thought I had found empathy amid the sea of nonsense words. Nobody has ever said what she said to me: “this must be difficult for you”. They make jokes about how hard Gallego must be for me to understand, and reassure me that “it´s a lot like Spanish”. Well, no, it isn´t. I don´t understand, it isn´t like Spanish, and it´s not funny anymore.

I´ve spent the majority of my time at this school feeling guilty for what an awkward inconvenience I am, trying not to get in anybody´s way, trying to demand nothing. I don’t want to bust in and be like “here I am, now change everything about what you´re comfortable doing”. But sometimes, such as this one, the teachers are really rude and hurtful, whether they mean to be or not. I am here, I am a person, and my presence matters. They don’t have to cater to me all the time, but a little respect is in order, in the form of speaking a language I understand when I am around. I am a human being, and I deserve respect, no matter what country I am from and no matter what language I speak.

Our visit to a deserted village

After lunch at Isaura’s house, we walked to a nearby deserted village. I was so excited to go, and I’m glad I’ve finally gotten to poke around one of the many deserted villages in Galicia. I would have liked to try going inside the houses, but Isaura and Vera were there, so I figured it was best not to.

The village was a few houses on either side of the road. Isaura said that the last people who lived there, two brothers, had moved to Madrid and A Coruña a few years ago. This is the house they used to live in:

Here is their across-the-street neighbors’ house:

And their down-the-road neighbor:

And their shed:

It was very cool to see the abandoned village, but there are several obvious reasons that they’re getting deserted:

1. A village in Galicia can be so small that you can walk from one end to the other in a minute, and the next village is another two-minute walk away, but it’s considered a completely different village with a completely different name. So it’s not like a town in the U.S. being abandoned, because probably upwards of 30 of these tiny villages could fit into an average U.S. town.

2. Each of these villages will only have 12 or so people living in it anyway. For instance, this village has only one house with one family living in it:

therefore, with so few people living in a village, it’s easy to have it end up deserted if one family moves.

3. Also, there’s the issue of urban migration, as well as Spain’s declining birth rate (Spain is number 179 on the list). There simply aren’t as many people as before, so of course some houses will be abandoned.

After our walk to the deserted village, we went to Vera’s neighbor’s house

where we met this little guy

and then were taken inside, fed home-made doughnuts, and met this little lady, who was pretty horrified by us.

Then we went to Vera’s cousins’ house, where they have 80 milking cows, and got to see what an industrial milking room looks like. It wasn’t gross, really, but I didn’t want any milk for a while after this.

There are four milking stations, and each cow has been milked twice a day for most of their lives, but they still don’t really seem to know what they’re doing.

They also had a real Spanish bull! Let’s just say that the reason the picture  is blurry is for artistic effect, not due to my shortcomings as a photographer.

The Landlady’s house in Paradela

So we spent last weekend in super-rural Spain in a village with a population of about 40 people. On our way there, we were stopped several times by cows crossing the road.

This is Paradela:

It has one bar:

A hairdresser’s:

And a grocery store that is completely unlabeled. We went there with Vera and you walk into someone’s front door and inside is this:

Vera talked with the owners of the shop for a little while, and when we left, she told us that everyone there wanted us to come live in the town, because they didn’t have many young people living there. Many of the houses are uninhabited, and one house is for rent for 150 euros a month, or $210 a month.

This is Vera’s family’s house with an attached barn at the far end:

And in the barn…are lots of cows!

Most of them looked bored, but some were flirtatious.

Also, the roof of the barn was awesome:

Then we let the cows outside; they were only in the barn because the morning was to cold for them:

Then we ate lunch. It included fish with bones which I am still not perfectly competent at eating. They kept the television near the table on the entire time, even though we were all chatting. I think that is just something many Spanish people do—last year when I was in Andalucia, people did the same thing.

We talked a lot about politics, and I realized that everyone there except me was from countries that had had dictators in the last century. Mussolini ruled from 1922 to 1945 in Italy, and Franco ruled from 1936 to 1975 in Spain. So there are lots of people living in both of those countries who remember what it was like living under a dictatorship. Although both Spain and Italy are currently having huge problems, everyone at the table agreed that at least now they’re allowed to talk about the problems in the country, whereas under the dictatorships there were problems just as big, but no one was allowed to talk about them.

Nobody here in Spain ever really wants to talk about Franco. I took a Spanish politics class last year and his name wasn’t even mentioned once. I tried asking one of the history teachers at school about it a while ago, and she was reluctant to talk about it. All I learned from that conversation is that babies born during that time had to be given biblical names and that I shouldn’t bring the topic up again. (She didn’t tell me that, I decided it.)

Another long, boring post for you—this one is about Gallego!

Its taking me a little while to get back into the swing of speaking Spanish again. If I stop taking myself so seriously for a second, it’s funny to listen to the tiny pause while the Spanish person I’m talking to tries to figure out what I just said. For instance, trying to say “you scared me” to somebody, I said “you said me a fear”, and there was the tiniest ‘what the fuck’ moment before the person I was talking to figured it out and continued speaking to me as if I’d said something a regular human being would say.

So another direction I’m going to take here is talking about cultural differences that interest me about Galicia and Spain (and maybe even some things about Italy learned from my roommates if you are very, VERY lucky).

One thing that fascinates and frustrates me to no end is the Galician language. It’s the dialect they speak here. It evolved during the Middle Ages, and was dying out by the 1800’s but experienced a resurgence during that century and is actually growing in usage today. It’s Spanish mixed with just enough Portuguese so that I do not understand it whatsoever. Here is an example of a sign about hiking trails written in Gallego:

The people here are, in theory, bilingual and speak both Gallego and Spanish. Among individuals, however, comfort in each language varies. Some people feel more comfortable speaking Gallego, while others prefer speaking Spanish. The students really only speak Gallego and don’t feel at all comfortable speaking Spanish, since they live in isolated villages. María, one of the English teachers, told me that when she took the students to Madrid, they were too ashamed of their Spanish to speak to anyone. They wouldn’t go into stores to buy anything because they were too afraid to speak. I can relate to that.

I was reassured before I came here that people would speak to me in Spanish and would understand me when I spoke Spanish. They understand me and do speak to me in Spanish, HOWEVER, when not speaking to me, everyone here speaks Gallego all the time. This means that I can’t understand conversations happening around me save for a word here and there, so I really have no way of joining in, unless I want this to happen:

Teacher (to other teachers): I had a terrible morning. My dog is sick and we had to take him to the vet and my son cried the whole time.

Me (having understood only “morning”): I EATED CEREAL THIS MORNING!

Teachers stare at me.

End scene.

On good days, I’m OK with Gallego and risk participating in conversations when I can. On bad days, I hate, hate, hate Gallego and feel like an isolated idiot. Even if it’s just two teachers and me, the two of them speak Gallego, even though they KNOW I don’t understand it. Things like that really frustrate me and make me feel extra isolated.

I was talking to María, one of the English teachers, yesterday about why people speak Gallego sometimes and Spanish other times. She told me that both languages are the official languages of Galicia and people are free to choose which they want to speak and when. The choice is deeply rooted in politics, however. Spanish is considered by some Galician people to be the language of the conservative right, and even fascism, stemming back to Franco’s dictatorship from the 1930’s to the 1970’s. Gallego was outlawed and criminalized during this time; therefore, Gallego is looked upon by some as a revolutionary language, the language of freedom, even of independence from Spain. Since teachers tend to be liberal-minded, the teachers at my school mostly speak Gallego.

So that conversation helped me put things into perspective; I would probably be speaking Gallego if I were in their position, because, basically, Gallego is awesome. I will try to learn to love it as much as they do, or at least respect it a bit more.

Well that was fun. For your effort, I give you some pictures of a Salamancan dog dressed up for Halloween.

Hello, what am I doing here?

And why are all my titles in caps? I don’t know. So the 5,000th person told me to start a blog, (actually, it was more like the 4th person, and some of them might have been kidding) so here I am, blundering around.

I don’t even really know what this blog is going to be about. I mean, I’m an American girl living in Spain (Lugo, Galicia, specifically) teaching English to high school students. I am completely unqualified for this position. So that will probably come up. Also, I am discovering feminism (read: getting super angry about things that I used to think were fine and normal) so so that will also be a theme. I also talk in my sleep pretty much every night and was given the brilliant idea to record what I say and write it down. That’s a bit of a dream, though, as it requires me getting a voice recorder. Signs point to “no”. Signs also point to “stupid, unintentional pun that I could change but won’t”.

But my overall goal is to bore you so much with my first posts that you never come back so I can post things that I’d be embarrassed if anyone knew about. So to start us off, here is a picture that is both boring and embarrassing. Compost-face!