Tarjeta Verde

My face here.

My problems are solved!

During several conversations about my legal status in Spain (which I rarely bring up myself), I have been offered the following advise: Why don't you just find someone to marry in exchange for residency?

Brilliant! Now all I need to do is find:

1) A man (or woman, since gay marriage is legal here) eager to be used for his or her EU membership, preferably open-minded, interesting, a good conversationalist, attractive, talented, creative, kind, funny, liberal, adventurous, and modest.

2) A desire to treat marriage as a means to an ends.

If anyone knows someone who fits into the former category, and/or has advice on how to adopt the mentality of the latter, please contact me or feel free to forward my number to interested parties. In the meantime, I'll be doing just fine here, starting the process of "empadramiento," which will register me as someone living in Barcelona and start the clock ticking on when I could receive residency. No bouquet toss or passed hors d'oeuvres necessary.

Return of the Mac

After my computer decided to spontaneously fail on me one night and I had to send it to Steve Jobs for a little repair, I finally have it back in my hands with a brand new hard drive makeover. Though on one hand, Facebook is responsible for lowering GPAs of students everywhere (and in my opinion decreasing the quality of interpersonal relationships... who needs to ask someone how they're doing when they can just log on and see their every update?), it really saved me this time because I had all my favorite photos uploaded and thus had a "back-up" when my hard drive crashed and I lost everything. So, warning to everyone out there... backup your stuff. Not only to prevent losing your information, but to avoid having to hear everyone tell you after the fact "Oh, well you should have made a backup!!". This I realize now. Thanks.

So... as usual, I have taken a break from writing for a few months, and now it's time to play catch-up. A ver...

The last post I wrote was about going to America for Obamapalooza 2009. I drove down to DC Monday morning and started working in the afternoon at Al Gore's Green Party at the Portrait Gallery. The big man in charge told us that Halle Berry, the Clintons, Angelina Jolie, and "about 50 other A-listers" would be there, but in the end they must have had problems on the metro because none of the people he named showed up. It would have been better if he hadn't raised expectations, because in the end it was a really cool event to work... we basically served food to really happy rich people while Melissa Etheridge, John Legend, and Will.I.Am played on stage and everyone from random people like Paul Reisser to more relevant ones like Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore himself spoke in between sets. During the entire event, in addition to serving everyone tap water, the supervisors were watching over our shoulders to make sure we separated all the recyclables for Big Al, who was filming the event to show that it was environmentally-friendly.
The best moment for me was when me and my partner-in-crime of the night went upstairs to the VIP room to collect champagne glasses (a.k.a. stalk Al Gore) and ran into a woman desperate to get downstairs to the main room to see John Legend. There was a long line, and I guess being VIP only gets you so far. The other caterer whose name I can't remember now (we'll call him McCainiac because he made it known that he voted for McCain. Better luck next time!) and I escorted her and her husband downstairs, and when the security tried to stop them, we said "No, don't worry... they're with us." While the guards contemplated what that could possibly even mean, the couple slipped into the crowd and the grown woman was giggling like a little girl and thanking us. I had to help her... she's got good taste in music!

The next day I worked at the same location, but at a less exciting event - the Ford Motor Company party. The Director of Grand Cuisine, who rents us ProBar caterers from the unstoppable Robert Gold, informed us that we did a great job sorting all the plastic, paper, and glass last night, but that in the end there was a mistake with the bags and it all got thrown out anyway. Fail! He handed us our paper, and the menu was like this...

Thomas Jefferson Individual Truffle Macaroni and Cheese
John Adams Miniature Cream Puffs
Lydon Johnson Quesadilla Rolls
George Herbert Walker Bush Crab Stuffed Mushrooms (I think this was a not-so-subtle attempt to tell the Bushes to stuff it)

My personal favorite was when I had to ask people if they wanted a Richard Nixon Teriyaki Skewer. And yes, I saved the menu so I could share it with the world. I mean, is this how we're honoring our fore fathers these days, by putting their name in front of cheese and macaroni? For the next event I propose Barack Obama Pigs in a Blanket with Joe Biden Dipping Sauce.

Being in DC for the inauguration was incredible. People were basically giving each other high fives on the street, and vendors were everywhere selling Obama t-shirts, air fresheners, and belt buckles. On Monday night I had a sleepover with Mimi, with whom I drank mimosas on the sofa while watching Obama get sworn in.

Tuesday I had an adventure with Karen when the cab driver took us to the wrong address, insisted he was right, and then kicked us out of the cab in the middle of nowhere. Wednesday morning I got to meet up with Stevie and Suchin, who braved the cold to spend the day in the middle of the action, and were so kind as to meet me near Urban Outfitters. And being home in general was great - there are no words for how nice it is to visit with my family after being away for months - and I left with my batteries recharged.

A lot has happened in Barcelona since then... visits from Mimi and Renee, travels around Spain, apartment changes, new classes, new season. But I'll save that for another post, and I'll do my best to make sure I have it up before July. Thank you for reading!

Un beso,

Laura

English Only

"It sure is hard to leave here but it's really not my home"

After spending two incredible weeks in Sicily, I've decided it's time for more vacation. So, like Columbus before me, I'll be journeying from Spain to America for a little visit. I'll be there from 16th until the 25th, with at least 2 days in DC to serve my country by serving dinner at various inauguration parties. Don't tell Secret Service that I'm illegal immigrant k thanks.

Here's a preliminary to-do list:

Eat pancakes with syrup, a buffalo chicken sandwich, and drink a Blue Moon.
Admire the expansive cereal aisle at the grocery store.
Take advantage of the exchange rate by stocking up on cosmetics, shampoo, etc.
Overuse the microwave, dishwasher, and clothes dryer.
Listen to the radio to catch up on music that's new to me but old news to everyone else.
Take note of how the air changes the moment Bush passes the baton to Obama.

Any other ideas? What have I been missing?

See you soon!

Success!

With only some minor miscalculations in the number of plates, forks, and, ahem, chairs... we pulled it off! Turkey, mashsed potatoes, gravy, special spinach, pumpkin soup (only half store-bought and a quarter splattered on the wall), bread, 8? bottles of wine, and two different kinds of dessert for twelve. Besides, I won't be able to get away with serving ice cream in coffee mugs when I'm a real adult, so why not enjoy it now?

picture, clockwise: KC, Roger, Jaume, Núria, Eric, Xavi, Oriol, Patrick, Sori, Antonio, Guillermo. And you can probably recognize me.

Draw me a tree

During one particularly interesting class this week, in which I was concerned that my student's sleep deprivation was causing some strange behavior (read: kangaroo impression), he delivered one of my new favorite quotes:

"One time, someone asked me to draw a tree, so I spend three hours carefully drawing the trunk, the leaves, all the branches... and then they told me it was for a psychology test."

Keep that in mind next time you have three hours to kill and someone gives you vague, illustration-related instructions.


( In case you're curious, this is a test used especially with children to determine their attitudes and perceptions, but it can be used with adults too. Basically, you're asked to draw a tree (or in other cases a face or a house), and what you draw says a lot about what you're thinking and feeling at the time. Everything, from the season of the tree to whether it has holes, roots, flowers, animals, or a swing, says something about you. Here's a link to something similar if you want to play along a home:

http://drawing.feedbucket.com/start.php )

I will make you so much happy

One of the easier things about learning Spanish is the pronunciation in general. There are some things that are very different from English, like the silent h, the harsh "j" sound, and of course rolling the rrrrrrs. A simple word like "rojo," (red), is difficult to pronounce correctly because you have to roll the first r and make the j sound in your throat. But 99% of the time Spanish words are pronounced like they're spelled phonetically. After you learn the rules, there are no surprises. Every syllable is pronounced, and the accents are handy to tell you if there are any changes in which syllable gets stressed. English, on the other hand, is a pain in the culo.

Because each syllable is pronounced in Spanish words, it's difficult for Spanish people to turn off the instinct to pronounce every syllable when speaking English. For this reason, one of the main difficulties that they have when learning English is with words ending in "ed". "Asked" becomes "as-ked", "watched" is "watch-ed," etc. The ones that have t or d before the "ed" are easy: invited, decided, and so on. But the rest are a constant source of annoyance. Another problem is the tendency to say "the people is," because "people" in Spanish is most commonly "la gente," which is singular. And still another is to says "fathers" instead of parents, "brothers" instead of "siblings," and "childrens" instead of "children". All of these come from directly translating from one language to another. The interesting thing is that each person, or each group of people, who learns English as a second language makes mistakes that are unique depending on what their native language is. I've never sat in on a Chinese ESL class, for example, but I imagine that their version of English is different than that of my students, especially at a basic level. I have even seem some examples of this when people are thinking in Catalan before speaking English. One common error is to say "dinner" when they really mean "lunch", because "lunch" in Catalan is "dina"....










...or else.



And this brings me to my second point, which I think I've mentioned before. When I took the TEFL course in Sevilla, once of the things they emphasized is that with this course, you're certified to teach anywhere in the world. And even better, their spectacular lesson plans would allow you to teach even in a country where you didn't speak the language. This might be true if you have the luxury of restricting yourself to teaching only advanced students who never ask you "how do you say ____ in English?". But in the real world, if you want to teach basic classes, if you want to avoid wasting time looking things up in the dictionary, if you want to understand (and help your students understand) why they make the mistakes they do, and if you want to help them form associations with words in their native language, at least some grasp of their native language is a huge benefit. And if nothing else, you can at least commiserate and stop them from beating themselves up so much when you tell them funny stories of your own mistakes. (I recently went into a Zara and asked where was the department for things for the home, pointing at a sign. After being told that there wasn't one at that store, I looked again and saw that it said Homme, as in "man" in Catalan. Oops). But even my extremely basic knowledge of Catalan comes in handy when I can explain that "fork" sounds like "forquilla" and "cousin" is similar to "cosí". I guess my point is that I've learned a lot of things during my time teaching, and one of them is to not listening to the marketing techniques of a company that's trying to get you to pay for their course.



But as difficult as English spelling and pronunciation can be, it's also a source of humor for those who don't take themselves so seriously. I wish I had a videocamera in my class the day I taught the group the words "tweezers," and they all repeated it for a minute straight. It sounded like a group of little birds at feeding time. Have you ever thought about how similar "message" and "massage" sound? And how embarrassing it would be if you're a receptionist and say "Your wife wanted me to give you this massage" by accident? The other day, I wrote the phrase "traffic jam" up on the board, and one woman, Rosa, said "oh, traffic ham" and everyone starting laughing and making jokes about traffic hams. I told them to just be sure to remember the real pronunciation, or they're going to insist to someone that their English teacher told them it was "jamón de trafico". And it makes me laugh everytime to hear people think out loud, or explain to another student, the spelling of an English word by pronouncing it like a Spanish word. I've heard "mistake" pronounced "mees-ta-kay" so many times, I've had to stop myself from using it as a real word when I'm speaking Spanish. Lettuce is "lay-too-say," naturally. And on Thursday, when I was teaching little Javier the frequency adverbs (always, often, never...) he was copying down the word "sometimes" and said slowly under his breath "so-meh-tee-mays". We both couldn't stop laughing.

If you're still reading, thank you. And if I have a point somewhere in all this, I guess it's that you have to go easy on yourself when you're learning a language, and go even easier on other people. It's difficult for ways that you never expect until you're in the middle of it. Even the simple act of ordering an ice cream cone in Spanish can turn into an R-rated mistake if you're not careful (as Eric, who works at an ice cream place) loves to tell me about.



I'm off to prepare for KC's arrival tonight! She's flying in from Ireland and staying until Friday. We're planning a Thanksgiving feast, so if anyone has any suggestions about recipes or ways to not screw up the turkey, they'd be much appreciated. If not, I can always trust Martha Stewart's recipe on how to fry a turkey on a jail cell radiator.

Besos y abrazos!