Palabra del día: Chic@s
For months, I kept seeing the words "chicos" or "chicas" (boy or girl) spelled with the "@" instead of the "o" or the "a" and I couldn't figure out why. Then all of a sudden I figured it out: it's a gender neutral way of writing the word. In Spanish, if you are referring to a group of both boys and girls, you would usually use the masculine form of "chicos" no matter how many girls there are in the room. This clearly isn't an equal system, so somebody decided to invent the word "chic@s" to even things out. The only problem is that this word only works in writing since there is no way to pronounce "@".
Comida del día: lentejas
One of my favorite meals that my host mom cooked last semester was the Spanish version of lentils, which is a delicious soup that also involves potatoes, spinach, carrots, and other veggies. I have yet to ask her for the recipe, but I decided to try to cook them for myself anyway. My housemate Alberto gave me a cookbook called My Mother's Kitchen, but the recipe contained very few details and told me to put a whole onion, whole pepper, whole tomato, and whole head of garlic into a pot, add lentils, cover it with water, and wait. I decided to cut up the veggies instead, which I think was a good call. In the end they turned out edible, if a bit tasteless. I'm going to make a point to ask my host mom for her recipe as soon as possible and to avoid Alberto's cookbook in the future. I know I said I would try to share recipes this semester, but I'm going to hold off on this one for now!
Foto del día: 2 photos! It's finally feeling like spring in Granada, which means sunny warm afternoons and chilly nights, with differences by up to 40 degrees in the same day! I've been enjoying the daytime weather though by doing some hiking inside and outside of Granada. On one excursion, we took the bus uphill for an hour to arrive at the Sierra Nevada mountain range (in case you were wondering, the one in the US is named after the one in Spain, not the other way around). Once there, we did some hiking, sledding and frolicking in the snow. It hardly ever snows in Granada, but thankfully snow is always within an easy day trip. I much prefer it to what happened in the US this winter: you can enjoy the snow whenever you have a free day without having to shovel at all!
The very next weekend, I decided to enjoy the sunny Granada weather instead of the snow, so I hiked up to a viewpoint I hadn't been to before. It's been a while since I've shared one of Granada's beautiful views, but I never get tired of them!
In my last post I wrote about how fun it has been to live in an apartment with friends, and that continues to be the case. I also want to discuss some other aspects of the apartment that are very different from apartments in the US and caused me some serious confusion at first:
1. To light the stove you have to turn on the gas and manually spark a lighter next to the burner, and then hopefully there are flames. If you are like me and have never had a reason to use a lighter before, usually there aren't any flames, the kitchen ends up smelling like gas, and I end up with some very amused housemates. I struggled with the stove for longer than I'd like to admit, but thankfully after 6 weeks I've finally gotten the hang of it!
2. To get hot water for a shower, you have to flip a switch in the kitchen to turn it on. The water is heated by a gas tank which runs out about once a month, hopefully not while I'm in the shower!
3. There is no clothes dryer (this is very normal in Europe). To dry clothes, we do it the primitive way on clotheslines and a drying rack on the porch. On a sunny day, clothes dry in a couple of hours through the sustainable energy of the sun, and no one ever has problems with shrinking!
5. There is no heat. This was rough for the cold month of February, but now things are starting to warm up. Although Granada doesn't tend to get colder than 40 degrees, that's still a cold temperature to be without heat! We do have radiators/ space heaters that we can turn on, but electricity is extremely expensive in Spain so we try to minimize using them. Instead, we wear layers and walk around the house looking ridiculous in fuzzy purple bathrobes. Since it is so much warmer here during the day, there are also blind/ shutter type things on the outside of windows that you can put down as soon as the sun goes down to trap in all of the heat.
4. There is a dishwasher, which I like to brag about to my sister since she always complains about not having one. It's half the size of any other dishwasher I've seen, but it definitely does trick.
In addition to enjoying the sunny weather and spending time with friends, I've also been going to classes and doing an internship. This may be hard to believe since a third of the semester has gone by and I haven't mentioned one word about any of that, but I will try to make up for that now. My course load this semester includes two classes at IES: Contemporary Spanish Theater and Women in Mediterranean Literature. For the theater class, we get to go to nine theater shows in Granada throughout the semester, and I've already been to three. The most interesting one was in a style called "micro-theater," in which we went to three mini shows that were 10-20 minutes each. In between the shows, audience members hang out at the tapas bar across the street that's associated with the theater, and since the shows run every 20 minutes it's a very relaxed way to spend an evening. The most interesting part of the shows is that they take place in tiny rooms with about 12 audience members and two to four actors, and at times the actors made very deliberate eye contact or acknowledged the presence of the audience so that the play almost felt like real life. Apparently micro-theater is a new trend in cities like Madrid and Chicago, and this theater in Granada is a first attempt to see if it can gain a following in a smaller, economic-crisis plagued city. I for one enjoyed it and would definitely go back.
My other class at IES, Women in Mediterranean Literature, is actually taught in English. It's been nice to be able to do the reading a bit more quickly and to remember how to write in English twice a week, plus we have some great class discussions. I'm also doing one class in the education school at the University of Granada about elementary school music education. It's a big improvement over my class at UGR last semester in which I spent four hours per week copying powerpoint slides and worrying about the final exam. So far in this class, we've played a lot of fun rhythm games, and the professor is very welcoming and flexible which is also a nice change from last semester. Since the class is more focused on group work than lectures I've been able to meet some of the other students, including a girl who is studying abroad from the Czech Republic and just so happens to live in the same building as me.
I'm also doing an internship this semester as a teaching assistant in English and music classes at an elementary school. So far, I've mostly been assisting the teachers and observing, but I'm planning to start teaching more for the second half of the semester. The music classes have been a lot of fun, especially since I've been able to directly apply many of the activities and ideas that I've learned about in my music education class. The English classes are a bit more difficult because I am required to speak in English the whole time and the youngest kids can barely understand anything that I say. I know that the only way to learn a new language is to be exposed to it as much as possible, but my job would be a lot easier if I could explain activities in Spanish. However, this goes both ways: I've found that young kids are also for some reason really difficult for me to understand when they speak Spanish, probably because of a lack of annunciation. Despite the lapses in communication, everyone usually ends up on the same page eventually (or at least within the same chapter). Last week I taught "The Hokey Pokey" to a first grade class that was learning body parts. They absolutely loved it, and hopefully in addition to learning a silly dance that American kids do, somebody will remember what "left hand" means
I have a Jewish cookbook called "From My Mother's Kitchen" which Grandma gave to me when I was a little older than you are now - it has good, classic Jewish recipes, calling for chopped veggies when there are veggies in the recipe! If you don't remember it, I'll show it to you when you come home.
ReplyDeleteI am so glad that your UGR class is going so much better this semester.
I like the story about chic@s. I try to avoid writing "guys" when I'm talking to a group, but its hard to find good alternatives. I wish there was something like this in English.
ReplyDeleteYour teaching sounds really fun!
I wonder if Spanish people go out at night and stay out longer because they have no heat at home.
ReplyDeleteNo shrinking with sun drying, just more fading.
You do have a nice mix of courses this semester, sound interesting and fun.
I would love to have seen the hokey pokey class.