Sunday, December 9, 2007

"Smile With Your Eyes"



Here's a story of one of the more interesting and unusual experience I've had since I've been in Barcelona. One of my students, who I've mentioned before, is a photographer. He said that he would like to practice taking pictures (yes, outdoors, fully dressed) and asked me if I would take pictures with him. I agreed, although after taking some quick preliminary pictures after one lesson, he proudly showed me during the next how he photoshopped away the smile lines near my eyes. I'm 22! But I thought: professional pictures in pretty places and an excuse to buy a new dress. ¿Por que no? So, about a week and a half ago, we went to Park Guell to take pictures. There I found myself trekking around Gaudi's Park in heels, getting curious stares from the normal people who wear coats and boots to go to a park in November.

I didn't know what to expect, but turned out to be a really fun day (even though the bubble man wasn't there this time). There was a field trip there that afternoon, so there were a bunch of Spanish kiddies running around. A few of them came up to me, with their friends giggling in the background to ask, "Es un modelo?" to which I replied "Solo por hoy" (only for today). I'm sure at least half of the pictures have some kid in the background peering out from behind a pillar or tree.

Trying to communicate with Fredi, whose English isn't quite there yet, was a challenge. I'm sure we were quite a sight: me switching from picture-taking mode to teacher mode, posing for pictures and correcting his grammar in between shots, and us talking in a combination of the two languages while setting up for a photo shoot in this public park. The funniest thing, though, was when we made our way down to the main entrance, where this guy, the dragon fountain, lives:



There were already a lot of people there taking pictures, mostly foreign tourists, so we waited our turn and planned the method of attack. What I didn't expect what that, when I ran up there to pose for a few pictures for Fredi, the other people gathered around would seize the photo opportunity as well. I was trying so hard not to laugh or run away as I smiled for a few dozen strangers' pictures, hoping they wouldn't be disappointed when they realized I was just a girl with a dress.

Like any good model-for-an-afternoon, I immediately went to get something to eat afterwards, because all that standing and giving my best happy/pouty/enticing looks just made me hungry. This is all sort-of relevant to today, since we just went to take pictures again, this time in Villa Olimpica where the 1992 summer Olympics were held. It was, without a doubt, the windiest day since I've been here in Spain, and I got similar ("somebody give that girl a jacket!") looks, especially when we wandered down to the sea and I had my bare feet in the freezing Mediterranean water.

So the moral of the story is, if you're a private student trying to learn a new language, the best way to get free practice time is to flatter your teacher by asking if you could take pictures of him/her. Here are a few of the ones Fredi's sent me already. They're all from the same area of the park because I guess that's where he started working on them. God only knows what he's airbrushing this time.





















Saturday, December 8, 2007

Success!

This afternoon I went Christmas shopping, along with the rest of the world. That means, my avid readers, that there's a chance I bought you something shiny today. Only time will tell.

Anyway, it was pretty productive day. I bought some Christmas presents, got dinner, and then signed up for a movie card at a movie store down the street that has Spanish movies with English subtitles, Spanish movies with Spanish subtitles, English movies with Spanish subtitles, English movies with French subtitles... you get the point. I'm only writing about it because 1) I'm excited to have access to hundreds of Spanish movies, because I think I can learn a lot that way and 2) You would not believe what I had to go through to get this membership. First, they needed proof that I wasn't going to start running a transcontinental stolen movie ring, which meant that I had to present a photocopy of my passport, an official document with my address on it, and evidence that I work here in the city. Even when I gave the guy a copy of an envelope sent to my address from the US, he still was asking for an electric or phone bill before his manager came up and told him it was OK. Next, he brought me down to the basement, had me fill out paperwork, and gave me a very important secret number which I was instructed to not lose under any circumstances. Finally, I had to go back upstairs to pay, where I was told all movies are due back the next day unless you call and ask to keep them longer. But, I made it out alive, and now am the proud owner of Season One of The L Word in Spanish. At least until tomorrow before 9:30 pm.

That's all for now. I'm going to watch some of my DVD until my friend gets off work, then we're going to a fiesta. That means party. I'll be home in 13 days!

A few pictures from this evening:



Evidence that I'm not as quick with the camera as I'd like to be. I saw 4 or 5 people running down my street, each with a huge group of balloons like this. Next time I'll be ready.




One of the Rambla street performers, the lovechild a talking tree from Lord of the Rings and a Victoria's Secret model wearing those giant wings on her back.

Friday, December 7, 2007

Feliz Navidad


The Christmas lights are up all around the city, and they're so pretty I don't want them to be taken down at least until February. I hope they're at least still up when Stevie and Scott come back with me after my trip home. Like I mentioned before, Barcelona (and all of Catalunya) has two official languages: Castilian (Spanish) and Catalán. So, we have lights all over the city wishing everyone Felices Fiestas and Bones Festes (both mean Happy Holidays). Hope everyone is having a fantastic holiday season. I'll be back in the US starting the 21st!



Wednesday, December 5, 2007

People pay me to speak English.

Although it can get tiring traveling around the city from one class to the next, my students never fail to find ways to entertain me. It's very cliche, I know, but sometimes I feel like I learn just as much from them as they do from me.

For example, on Monday and Wednesday evenings, I take a bus to the edge of the map to teach a small group of businessmen. This is the same group where one student accidentally "outed" another in the middle of class. Awkward. Anyway, we recently had a new addition to the group, a young guy from Madrid who speaks amazingly. So, the new guy, who we'll call Antonio (because that's his name), asked me about popularity in the US. He had been to New York and seen plenty of movies where the main goal was to be as popular as possible by playing football or at least dating someone who does. I told them about a typical American high school hierarchy, and as I was explaining it, I was thinking how much I couldn't believe it's actually true. How is it that, for decades in the US, your acceptance among your peers has been based on how many goals you score or where you buy your clothes? At Concord, most of the football players and cheerleaders were well-known, everyone sat with their own "group" at lunch, we had the stereotypical mean girls who spread rumors about each other and everyone else, and we paraded the elected Homecoming King and Queen around on floats like they were true royalty. At Brandywine, they even had an end-of-the year superlative to decide who was the "Most Desirable". Come on, really? There are a lot of stereotypes about Americans that are off (we're all Bush-loving, Big Mac eating reality TV show contestants), but this one is actually pretty true, at least in my experience.

The point is, I never realized that the quest for popularity wasn't a universal, international phenomenon. My student told me that, in his high school, people would rather hang out with their own friends and stay relatively anonymous than to try to draw attention to themselves by being the star of a team, por ejemplo. Everyone knows who they know, there aren't cliques, and all this energy isn't wasted on trying to be or be respected by the chosen few. It made me wonder how people would be different in the US if they didn't have to spend 4 years (or more) trying to conform or facing the consequences of rebelling.

On a lighter note, it's been girls' week this week in my favorite class since the one guy is in India on vacation. We shared travel pictures, from Rosa's mind-opening trip to Africa to Magda's adventure in New Zealand, and it was great to get them to open up and speak in English without having to concentrate so hard. During the next lesson, I was teaching them about false cognates (words that look and sound the same in 2 languages but have different meanings), and they kept laughing to each other. After a few minutes, they shared with me that the word "cognate" sounds like the slang word for a certain part of a female's anatomy, so these 50something women were there giggling like little schoolgirls. Good times.

It's time for me to take a nap, teach one more class, then start my 4-day weekend. I'm very grateful for the multitude of Spanish holidays. I leave you with several pictures of BCN graffiti, one of my new fascinations. It's interesting that a lot of it is written in English...





















Sunday, December 2, 2007

Big Changes


I changed the name of my journal (not "blog"... never "blog"). The old title, "El mundo es un pañuelo," literally means, "The world is a scarf/tissue," but it's actually the Spanish version of "It's a small world". While I was at a party a few weeks ago, I saw this phrase written on the wall, and I thought it was even more fitting. It means something like, "A trip begins within ourselves". And that's your Spanish lesson for today.

foto: for no particular reason, me and my friend Eric last weekend at a Bar called La Oveja Negra (The Black Sheep)

Saturday, December 1, 2007

London, parte dos

(The formatting of this got really messed up when I published it, so come back later after I fix it, and it will make more sense!)

Here's the rest of my London post since it's a doozy...

After we left the Tate, we crossed Millennium Bridge and walked along the river, stopping at a few places:



St. Paul's Cathedral












































London Bridge is... not all that impressive:



We walked until we got to Tower Bridge and the Tower of London.



Tower Bridge:




Tower of London (view from the bridge):



Picadilly Square:



They had Christmas lights everywhere























For dinner Saturday night, we ate at a sushi
restaurant where you could order from the
menu or grab anything that looked good as
it passed by. Then, we watched Love, Actually
in KC's room, and she pointed out all the places
that we'd seen in London so far.






On Sunday, we hit most of the major sightseeing attractions before my flight in the evening:


In front of Big Ben:






































Parliment, which contrary to popular belief, was not actually blown up for the movie V for Vendetta:



The Eye of London:



St. James's Park, which we walked through to get to...



Westminster Abbey (where there was an ongoing anti-war protest) ...



...and Buckingham Palace









We walked back through the park, where we found this massive pelican!



























































The last thing we did was go to a punk-ish street fair. I was pretty poor at this point so I didn't get anything, but it was still fun to look around.





On the way back, we passed KC's favorite place in the city, Trafalger Square...



...and Good Enough College. The best part is that it's named for a guy, Mr. Good Enough. I wonder if he knows Mr. Right! Ha!



Afterwards, KC accompanied me to the train station where I left for the airport. No problems on the way home, except that I got stuck on the plane next to some chatty, brainless guy who said things to me like, "Don't you think you're a little too young to be a teacher?" I "fell asleep" pretty quickly as soon as the plane took off, and arrived back in Barcelona a few hours later. All in all, a great weekend, and I can't wait to go back when it's warmer!

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

London, parte uno

For Thanksgiving weekend, I jumped on a plane directly after my last class on Thursday and met KC in London a few hours later. Apparently going to elementary school, middle school, high school, and college together wasn't enough; now we're both living in Europe at the same time. She's doing a graduate program in London, plus she lived there for a semester during study abroad. Not only was it great to see her and catch up, she made an excellent tour guide. It was a little strange to be in a city where everyone spoke English, and I kept saying "gracias" when someone would hold the door or "disculpe" when I had to squeeze by in the metro. I went a little crazy with the pictures, so here's some of the better ones...

The first day, we took a trip to see a couture exhibit, which displayed French and English fashions from the "Golden era" of the fifties. No pictures allowed, unfortunately. Next, we stopped by the Natural History museum.

Here's the outside of the building, with one of the many ice rinks we saw that weekend.








































































Here's one of the statues with very politically correct information on the Earth's origins, so as not to offend the Creationists (i.e. Is the Earth thousands of years old or millions... who knows?!) And they had this elevator that we took up into the middle of the Earth to go check out the earthquake simulation room.



























Plus...dinosaurs!









Next, we headed over to Harrod's. KC described it as a place where you can buy everything from a dishwasher to a puppy, and it's so true. It was very extravagant and over-the-top, especially during Christmas season, and they thought of every detail, down to the Harrods brand doughnuts at Krispy Kreme.






Friday night out for KC's friend Ellie's birthday... look what we accomplished:









































Kc, me, and the birthday girl:



On Saturday, we woke up (somewhat) early, and spend most of the day at the Tate Modern Art Gallery.

Some random pictures along the way... the skyline, and the crazy Brits driving on the wrong side of the road:

































Kc and me under the giant spider that guards the entrance to the Tate:




























































This was one of my favorite, if not my favorite, parts of the trip. There were so many amazing paintings and exhibits. Some of the exhibits still stand out in my mind more than others. First, the African room, with huge colorful, politically-charged murals by artists like Chéri Chérin and Chéri Samba:







Also, there was a really interesting video, taken by a Brazilian artist, of ants carrying confetti left behind after Carnival, with a soundtrack of of mambo beat made by recording the sound of fallen matchsticks.

Another cool video to check out if you can find it is "Drumroll" by Steve McQueen. Here's a description:
"... a triptych of video images shot simultaneously by cameras mounted on the top, bottom and side of an oil barrel as the artist rolled it along the streets of New York City. The film was shot in real time as British artist Steve McQueen made his way through midtown Manhattan. The momentum of the oil drum rattling against the city streets creates a cacophonous clatter which blends with the ambient noises of traffic. The soundtrack also records McQueen’s voice, warning and apologising to pedestrians as he passes by. The spinning images create a vertiginous and abstracted impression of his surroundings, suggesting the rapid pace and chaos of the metropolis.
McQueen’s unusual method of filming means that Drumroll is an example of a work of art that documents the process of its own creation."

The trip also confirmed that I (KC, too) really despise Math Rothko and his followers:



"Red on Maroon". Right.

The current featured exhibit, Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo was impressive as well. Basically, she made a giant crack in the floor that runs from one side of the main hall to the other. The symbolism is really interesting. Shibboleth means, "a word used as a test for detecting people from another district or country by their pronunciation," and was taken from a Biblical story about lower class people being killed for being unable to pronounce the word (used as a password) while they were fleeing across the river Jordan. The idea was that a crack in the floor represents the idea of separation, particularly of race or class, and therefore confronts the idea of racism. The significance of the name is interesting to me as well since people in Catalunya have a distinctive way of speaking (pronouncing "c" and "z" as "th") compared to people in South America and the rest of Spain.

Anyway, here's pictures of the crack, which the artist won't tell anyone how she made. Plus, pictures of something else I'm interested in.. not taking myself too seriously:

The beginning:



Getting bigger:



Oh no!



































































My reflection:



Close up of the chain link fencing inside the crack, which is the most common means of separating people (by the way, I could never be an advocate of the "let's build a fence across the Mexican border" since I'm currently working under the table and trying to learn the language as an immigrant).


The giant spider in front of the Tate Modern Arts Gallery:


This is going to be a "to be continued" post, since it's taken me forever and I'm heading out to go see the Body Exhibit. Que tengas un buen fin de semana!