Week the Third

It´s here, that time you´ve all been waiting for with bated breath--

KATHERINE´S BLOG UPDATE!

(Shush, I´m not really that egocentric. :-) )

I´ll begin with a response to the lovely comments that people left (because you know how I love comments). I am indeed learning vosotros (with some difficulty, but pretty much everyone else in the program is in the same boat because teachers hate vosotros) The accent here is pretty strong, too, and the first few days were a bit difficult, but it´s much better now. D´s in the middle of a word are really quiet, and the soft c´s and z´s (but not s´s) are pronounced like the "th" in "thorn." My mother corrects me whenever I don´t use the accent, so I´ve picked it up pretty quickly and I´m the only one in the program who uses it regularly (because Taylor is still resisting.)

Also, it is papas fritas in everywhere but Spain, and I still try to say papas fritas, but papa isn´t a word here. Also, there are all sorts of funky Spanish words, like peach is durazno, but in Spain it´s "melocotón" (very fun to say.) Speaking of cool words, I learned... I think the first day in the program that the word for intoxicated is borrachado, and the word for a drunk person is borracho. This was because I was describing Gay Wellington to someone in conjunction with my interest in theatre. Finally, I´m accruing mothers at a phenomenal pace-- I now have my American mother, a Spanish one, Casey, and Emily! I feel very loved. :)

Okay, anyway, all the technical descriptions of Spanish are over, and I shall commence with experiences. AH, but one more thing: I forgot my camera cable again this week, and I think it´s a cosmic signal that the pictures are not meant to be... until my return to the United States. (Oh, and I tried photobucket-- no dice. I´m fairly sure it´s a problem stemming from a lack of compatibility of computer and camera, because I´m getting the same message from different computers and different websites. It works fine on my home computer, so...)

Okay, where to begin? We went to a city named Gijón on Friday, and it´s right on the coast, meaning that after viewing all the anchient architecture (reaching back to single-digit centuries), we got to go to the beach. Fortunately, it was one of those rare days in Asturias that it wasn´t raining (the weather here is very depressing), and I swam in the sea. (Oh, in addition to the ancient architecture we saw a sculpture whose name translates into something like "the beautiful horizon thing"... but the more common name is "La Báter de King Kong", or "King Kong´s Toilet," because when you stand in the center of it, it sounds like a toilet flushing.

That Sunday, I returned with my Taylor, my mother and her best friend, Rosa and we had a delightful time in the market of Gijon with inexpensive but very cool clothing, shoes, dresses, sunglasses, bags, towel sets-- you name it. Later we had a picnic and it was excellent.

Backing up to Saturday night, we (same group as Gijon) went to a huge celebration in another suburb of Oviedo, complete with rides like the Fun Frolic, kiosks of stuff, and a band... and lots of sidra. Sidra is an alcoholic drink charactic of Asturias, and I´m fairly sure it´s like hard apple cider. The interesting thing is that it comes in a bottle and to drink it, one has to pour the sidra from above one´s head into a cup held as low as possible. Hmm, I have a feeling that was most confusing-- google sidra and I´m sure you´ll find something if you´re interested. Anyway, it was funny to look above the heads of the crowd and see green bottles sticking out the top of the mass of people.

Monday night, Mamá, Taylor and I went to an event in Lugones (our suburb of Oviedo). In this particluar festival, a celebration of the day of San Juan, a huge bonfire is lit in the center of town and peole write down their wishes on a scrap of paper. They then crumple up the paper and toss it into the fire, in hopes that a few of the wishes will come true in the next year. I think there should be something like it in the United States. (Besides little bits of paper, students will often burn the textbooks of courses that gave them tons of trouble during the school year... Hehehehehehe...)

However, life here is not all fun and parties. Classes are truly difficult, and there´s a lot of homework to do-- I spend an average of about an hour and a half to two hours doing "deberes" each night, most of which is literature. You know how the little stories and things in Ven Conmigo/Nueva Vistas (the school´s Spanish textbooks) are short and easy? And have vocabulary sheets and little footnotes for the words not on the vocabulary sheets? Well, there are no footnotes nor vocabulary sheets in the poems and the short stories and the excerpts of books we´ve read, and they are not selected to be easy. Good for vocabulary, though, and the other day I bought a book from which we read an excerpt in class. It´s a mystery/thriller novel called La Tabla de Flandes, and I´m four pages in. Very interesting, if slow for me to read. I´m learning tons in the classes, though-- there´s no busywork involved in the homework.

In my after school activity, theatre, I am overacting like crazy and tripping on my Spanish lines and it´s fun. There are some weird parallels between this and doing a play in Shakespeare-- the language barrier is exactly the same, except instead of Old English, it´s Old Spanish (La Cueva de Salamanca by Cervantes, author of Don Quijote). It´s getting better all the time, though... the lines are soaking into my brain and there´s that same experience of not having to think about them, just having them flow out my mouth... and it´s really cool when it´s Spanish.

Spanish is getting better and faster and I´m pronouncing things better... I think my English is getting accordingly worse. Psh, English is for wimps! (ella dice, escribiendo en Inglés...)

Until next week, with more broken English than ever,
Katherine