Update 1: School

Rather than write a silly little anecdote to describe my time here, I think I'll just give some general updates in the significant parts of my life:

School:

Despite what you may think after looking through all my pictures, I do go to school here.  Middlebury has its own center in Madrid with a support staff that is there only for us.  It's a small but nice space, with a small library, computer lab, lounge, and three classrooms.  The staff is great, the director is this soft-spoken man whose primary job I'm pretty sure is to walk around and make sure that no one speaks English.  The associate director, on the other hand, is a wonderful woman named Patricia who is constantly asking us how life is and if we have any questions - I think it's her primary job to give us a remote clue as to how to live in Spain.  English is prohibited in the center, and all the classes are in Spanish with professors from Spain.

My primary classes are Spain and the European Union, Advanced Spanish Syntax, and Art History in the Museums of Madrid.  My Spanish professor talks SO fast, but I suppose that's appropriate for someone trying to improve our Spanish.  Her name is Beatriz (we call them all by their first name, which I love), and she's pretty aggressive - a common Madrid trait - and gives no sympathy to cultural differences, so a lot of the students don't like her, but I'm a fan, though that might also be because her subject is nit-picky grammar things which are right up my alley.  The things that she teaches are basically all of the tiny things that are so hard to explain and so subjective that our high school and intro college teachers just decided to skip over them (such as the personal 'a' if that means anything to you).  But after every class, I feel like I am so much closer to understanding the convoluted jumble that is constantly spouted at me from every direction here.  Don't get me wrong, I understand most things, but it's not because I understood every word and the structure of their sentences, it's because I found a noun and a conjugated verb and put two and two together.  When I listen to my roommates talk among each other, for instance, I just can't help but think that I'll never be able to do that, but syntax is helping...

In Art History, we spend every Monday looking at powerpoints of paintings with the lights off, and every Wednesday walking around one of Madrid's three famous museums, which as students we always enter for free.  Needless to say, I think Wednesdays are better.  Our professor's name is Julia, and the six members of our class have yet to figure out if she loves us or hates us, though we tend to lean toward hate more than love.  She is very calm and friendly, but comes across as extremely passive aggressive sometimes, and we're not sure if it's just because she wants us to learn stuff or if she's just fed up with us being pathetic and not knowing anything.  Either way, she's brilliant - last week, she drew a map of the entire Spanish royal lineage since the 18th century from memory, which includes quite a bit of incest, and basically only four names: Fernando, Carlos, Felipe and Isabel.  It's really fun to go to the museums because we've already studied the paintings and we have our own personal tour guide - the problem is going to be remembering everything that she tells us on our upcoming test.  Art history is a crazy subject - there are so many aspects to it that I have no idea what to think about.  A painting is a result of the evolution of art, the artist's personal history, the political and social history of the area where it was painted or where the artist has been, and so much more.  It's fascinating, but impossible to study - plus they don't put the museums in chronological order, so my understanding of time periods gets seriously jumbled each Wednesday.  (Side note: when she occasionally says something in English, her voice and accent are tremendously British.  Best word: Enlightement.)

Because I have an internship on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I opted to take the EU class at NYU, which has a similar program to Middlebury's with their own academic center, and we can cross-enroll.  The professor teaches the exact same class at Middlebury, but the NYU time just worked out better.  At NYU, there are only 5 girls in the class, and it's a wonderful class - the professor, Tomás, is a short pot-bellied, overly passionate man, not unlike some of my favorite professors and teachers of the past.  Every day when we get there, he asks us to move the desks in closer, so that the five of us are literally jammed up at the very front of the room, inches from his face.  It is easy to see that the world’s problems weigh him down, and he has made it his goal to get us to understand them and solve them – when he wants to emphasize something he says it in Spanish and then repeats it in English.  We spent the first three weeks trying to gain an understanding of what is happening with the EU right now.  It’s a great subject to study because everything is so new, but as he said, it’s awful to teach because a meeting that is happening this afternoon may change everything that he taught us this morning.  He came in one day and said, “Well my map is now outdated, because they just admitted Croatia into the EU.”  Now, however, we’ve gone back in time and we’re looking at World War II, which is an interesting place to start to study the EU, which didn’t exist until the late 50’s, but after studying it, I can see how the internal tensions and the Communist influence during the Cold War play a role in the EU today.

The view from a hill in a park during Jorge's walk.
Not all the best places in Madrid are in the center!

In addition to these three, I have a biweekly culture seminar, taught by one of the nicest and friendliest Spaniards I’ve met (Jorge).  In our Tuesday evening sessions, we learn about the things that will make us better at speaking Spanish that don’t involve words.  Understanding the culture is so important to speaking a language that if you do it right, your imperfect (or total lack of) use of the subjunctive goes unnoticed.  For this class, we have to write a blog in Spanish twice a week (the link to mine is on the sidebar if you feel so inclined).  Many of the recent themes have involved cultural clashes, so don’t be alarmed if they seem negative.  He has also mapped out walks for us to take outside of central Madrid, one of which we did last week, and it was really interesting to see the suburban, built-in-the-70’s, tourist-free Madrid. 

My schedule on Mondays and Fridays (the only days that I have class except the seminar) is:

7:45   Alarm

8:55   Run out of the apartment (or tiptoe rather, as everyone else is still snoozing)

9:05   Jump on the blue line with the thousands of other people going the same place I am for the day

9:30   EU class with Tomás at NYU

11:00 Depending on the day possibly stop by my favorite pizzeria/cafeteria (coffee shop), where the waiters at the bar already remember me (I tend to stand out).  If not, hop on the bus to Middlebury, where I hang out until grammar.

12:30 Spanish class at Middlebury.

2:00   Head home (walk if it’s nice) to eat and hang out until art, or just stay at Middlebury to do work.

5:30   Art history with Julia

7:00   Emerge from a classroom or museum with a head full of Spanish art.

1:30   Bedtime (that’s a story for another day)