Dondeques

Tips on how to conduct yourself with foreigners

I haven’t written in a while, so here is a doozy for you.

Here are some tips about how to act towards foreigners. This is mostly a conglomeration of my experiences that may be common among foreigners. But keep in mind:the majority of the foreigners you deal with will not be me. And people have all kinds of preferences. These are just guidelines that most sensitive people might already know, but many people don’t realize they need to do (or stop doing).

And whenever I refer to “foreigners” as “they”, I am sorry. Obviously we are not a cohesive group of people with one type of experience (intersectionality) and I’m mostly speaking from my point of view (intersectionality) which is a white girl from the US (if you don’t know what intersectionality means, look it up.)

So here we go:

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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.

So then what did he actually say?

Today, a kid came into the teachers’ room asking for a ping-pong paddle. (There is a ping-pong table in the hallway that these children worship as a god) One of the teachers gave him a paddle, asking what I understood to be:

“what happened to the other one, did you eat it?”

I laughed, and judging by the looks that the teachers and the student gave me, that is not what he said.

Luckily for me, the teachers all kind of think I´m stupid, which at times can be annoying, but other times can be freeing. If I open my mouth and say something grammatically incorrect, or ask a stupid question, it´s generally excused by the fact that I´m a foreigner. Kind of the way you excuse a very young child for acting weird and chuckle at their linguistic mistakes. Oftentimes, I just start speaking without overthinking it, because I know it’s going to come out horribly, so why worry?

The teachers actually do a very hilarious thing when I talk, which is after I finish, they turn to one another and ask “did you understand that?” and usually none of them did, so they turn back to me and say “what?”. I don’t take offense, because they don’t mean it in an offensive way; I think it’s just a knee-jerk reaction to check to see if anyone else made sense of what I just said. And it’s so damn funny and so predictable that I can’t get mad.

And it’s not my problem, it’s theirs. The teachers I talk to all the time understand me very easily in Spanish. The ones who don’t understand me are the ones who normally don’t speak to me, or who are in too much of a hurry to actually listen to me and just ask “what” instead of thinking about it.

A lot of the reason they can’t understand me is because of my accent. I have a pretty heavy American accent when I speak Spanish which I can’t seem to lose. My biggest problem is my “r”s. In American English, we have really heavy r sounds (think about the r in the word American), and in Spanish they are very light, but I can’t lose my American r, so I sound ridiculous. Another problem is when a word ends in a vowel, I hit that vowel really hard. For instance “tengo” turns into “tengouw” when I say it.And I probably have other issues that I don’t even know about.

My friends here make fun of my accent a lot.

Sorry for the outrageously long posts. I don’t really talk to anyone all day.

Even though I am only a few years older than most of these kids…

I realized yesterday when a 14-year-old student accidentally spit on his desk while he was talking and dealt with it by lowering his face and blowing on the spit, that these are just children. I spend a lot of time subconsciously feeling inferior to them because they understand what the heck everyone is saying and I never do, but we are all the same. I am a stranger in a strange land and so are they—they have to figure out what is happening in this adult world, and I have to figure out what is going on in this foreign country.

Shakespeare for ESL students…

We had a British theater group come to the school the other day to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You can imagine how well that was going to go over with a bunch of Gallego-speaking children.

Well you are wrong. We were too. We spent several classes trying to explain to kids what the hell happens in that play, but it turns out we didn’t need to. The performance started with these two people coming onstage and explaining the skeletal basics of the play.

Then they asked for six volunteers. The English teacher next to me turned to me in horror and said “there are only two people in the group”. I debated if I should raise my hand to go up so that I could whisper secret directions to the kids, but in the end I didn’t, and that was fine.

No one raised their hands, partly because they didn’t understand and partially because these kids are generally shy with newcomers. So the two actors came into the audience and chose six students. They ended up choosing six kids who were wonderful for the roles. Only one girl looked slightly uncomfortable—the others had a blast.

The kids played the roles of the lovers, Puck, and Bottom, while the actors were Titania and Oberon. The actors gave the students cue cards with their lines (which were in simple English). They only performed the subplot of the lovers and Titania and Bottom so as to keep the play short.

The students in the audience LOVED watching their classmates be forced to do goofy things. Even the ones who didn’t understand any of the words loved the play.

Watching the play was like seeing my life inverted. I am in a world of people saying incomprehensible words, and things are happening around me and I’m not sure what I should be doing. And I don’t have cue cards, so I just make shit up. I said that to Julian, the very awkward English teacher, and he told me that he feels the same way. And I felt very sorry for him, because I can go home and escape that feeling. He is already home.

The only problem for me was that after the lovely, delicious slice of watermelon that was listening to English spoken by real, live people, I had to return to reality. I speak English all the time in class, but it’s not the same as having other people speak it to me. It’s like trying to give yourself a back massage. It’s just not as satisfying. For the rest of the day, I floated around on my English cloud and had an extra-super-hard time focusing on Spanish or Gallego.

Tuesday the 13th

Here, in Galicia, at least, Tuesday the 13th is the day of bad luck. When someone told me that yesterday morning, I was like whatever, my day will be fine.

It was fine, but it did start with a stroke of bad luck. As I entered the cafe where the teachers have coffee every morning, I glanced at a group of people in our usual spot, but my eyes didn’t focus on any of them until one separated from the group and came towards me.

It was Javier, the nearly-forty-year-old man with grey hair who I nearly lived with at the beginning of this year, back when I planned to live in Fonsagrada. In fact, I had gone as far as to move in to his apartment, being pretty certain that he was an awkward gay man. The morning I moved in, he told me about an ex-girlfriend of his who he had gone to England with. My blood froze in my bones. And then those bones froze in my skin. And then my skin exploded, making a huge mess.

After that, I moved down the mountain to Lugo. He basically begged me not to go and told me how nice Fonsagrada is and how ugly Lugo is. I assured him that we could get coffee sometime so that he could practice his English. I never called him, so we never did.

So that is who was coming towards me. As he talked to me, asking how I was and how I was doing and how things are going (each of those questions), I was keenly aware of the teachers watching me and wondering what the hell I was doing talking to this older man and how the hell I knew him. I made myself as boring and stupid as I could, so as to finish the conversation quickly and to subtly reassure him that he hadn’t missed anything by not living with me. Then after he returned to his group of people, I awkwardly and purposefully did not look that way again. 

Here’s to me hopefully never seeing him again. Happy Tuesday the 13th!

This is the view I had when I lived briefly in his apartment. Pretty, but not worth it.

I guess I should show you where I am…

Are you ready for beautiful photos? You should be. They were taken by our friend Xose Casas (pronounced like Jose but with an “sh” sound replacing the J). At least I got them from his facebook, maybe he got them from somewhere else. He lives in Sarria, which is nearby Fonsagrada, and the scenery is basically the same.

We’ll start with the plain beautiful photos and move up to the stunning ones.

A cutie-pie little town:

Don’t think this next one is the same town…

This is an horreo, where they store corn and other crops to dry and so that the rats can’t get at them. I think they’re mostly a thing of the past, but some people still use theirs.

These are similar views to those I see on my 50-minute ride to school everyday. I try to always remember what a lucky duck I am for it, but sometimes I forget.

I’m convinced that Galicia is a fairytale place.

Another reason I want to go home:

Because of this stupid language with buttloads of verb conjugations and stupid gendered nouns. The verb conjugations—ok, whatever. They are difficult, but I understand the need to know exactly who did what and when (and the need to knowifthey’ll do it, for some reason. Shoutout to you, subjunctive tense! Also, fuck you, subjunctive tense.)

But gendered nouns? Why? I ask you why, every other language in the world except English. Why did you do this to yourselves and all English speakers and every noun in the world? A table is not a girl. It is a table. It is an it.

And if you’re trying to say that table is pretty, or dirty, or funny, you’ve got to match that fucking adjective with the furcking gender of the fucking noun. It makes you get everything in the damn simple sentence you’re trying to say wrong because you mess up one gendered article because objects having gender doesn’t make sense as a concept to you because your ancestors didn’t live in some hallucinagenic fantasy world where all of the objects spoke to you and told you whether they were male or female and asked you to name them as such.

And my friends here try and tell me that English has gendered nouns. They tell me to think about cartoons, like Beauty and the Beast, where the objects came to life and had genders. And I say nope, that was AN ENCHANTED CASTLE, notthe real world.

But I suppose I am lucky. Spanish only has two genders, male and female. German and Norwegian have three: male, female, and neutral. Looking on the bright side, here.

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.

Things learned about the English language

Here’s something I found out just last weekend: English is mostly made up of short, one-syllable words. A Spanish friend was telling me about how he used to have a hard time comprehending spoken English in class because the words were so short that they all blended together. My mind was blown by the truth of the unnoticed fact that was in front of my face for 23 years.

So next time you say a sentence in English, note how many single-syllable words it contains. Probably more than half. Maybe all of them. Wow.

Also, the phrase “do you usually use” sounds absurd. I was saying it slowly for a class when the boys at the back of the room (who do not understand English, they just hear sounds—and I could help them understand English if they would just come to class more than once every two months) started imitating me, saying “yoo yoo yoo”. We all laughed about it. I think the kids cut me a lot of slack because I’m cute and sweet to them. That’s not really the kind of teacher I want to be in the long-run, but it will do for now.

But it’s a strange situation I’m in; there is at least one student who is 20 years old, and the rest are not so far behind. Some of my students are so cool and fun that I would hang out with them if I could. And I’m closer in age to the students than I am to the teachers, and I have worse skin than most of them. The narrow age-gap plus this being my first year of any sort of teaching endeavor makes me cut myself some serious slack with the fact that I’m a total pushover.

Also, Spanish affinity for geography (well, the entire rest of the world’s affinity for geography) is making me get my act in gear and start studying some geography. Because I do not know anything.

Irrelevant graffiti for visual interest!