The Barrio Bunch

What a day! This is what I love about Spain: I never am bored. Eating at 9:00, 15:00, and 22:00 leaves the best part of the days open. The “relaxed” lifestyle definitely allows more time to do more things (counter-intuitive, I know). Right now, with little homework and the excitement to discover Oviedo, it is perfect. Maybe I will give a different report a couple of weeks from now…

Let me walk you through my Spanish Sunday:

8:30 Wake up
9:00 Breakfast
9:30 Read Shakespeare and a chapter from Story of Spain, memorize some vocabulary
11:30 Meet some amigas at the Cathedral to go to El Fontan, Oviedo’s flea market
13:00 Email people back home
15:00-17:00 Lunch with Mila’s entire familia
17:00-18:00 Hanging out with the familia, Spanish language immersion :)
18:00 Off to worship at the Evangelical Iglesia
20:30 Hanging out at San Mateo with young Spaniards from the church
22:00 Home to dinner
22:30 Spanish/English study session with Estefania
24:00 Blogging and off to bed

So, a lot of time was spent with my familia today, which was nice because that hasn’t happened a lot so far. When I got back from the flea market this morning, there was food ALL over the kitchen (I mean, it is a tiny kitchen, so food ends up in strange places sometimes…). Since I never really see Mila cook, I was thinking that this possibly was her preparing the week’s food. But then a couple minutes later, Mila is pacing the hallway, first with a mop and then with a broom (I know, I thought it was kind of backwards too). At this point, I realized we were having company. Things like family get-togethers are not easily communicated to me, so as means of survival, my inference skills have become whip-sharp these days. Sure enough, 30 minutes later, the whole Barrio gang is there. I met Mila’s son Javier for the first time. He is married to Sondra and they have two children—Pablo and Aitana. Juanchi, Mila’s other son, and his girlfriend Marijo were also there in addition to Estefania and me. So we all sat down by the tiny kitchen table and ate a huge pan of paella, multiple conversations happening between the six native Spaniards. Now, this is what I was imagining when I was thinking of the host family situation.

I tried to listen, rather than tune out, because immersion like this is the best teacher. Still, there is so much to take in at once as I try to figure out more about my host family from social context. I find my head spinning at the end of the day.

It is quite amusing to talk to the two brothers, Javier and Juanchi. Juanchi is fairly fluent in English, but is always telling me to speak in Spanish (though in my defense, he and Marijo are always the ones who start talking in English once they see me…). Javier on the other hand wants me to always speak in English. He was trying to get Pablo to speak to me and during dinner when some little thing came up that he knew the English word for, he would throw it in. He really doesn’t know that much English though, and kept mixing up “hello” and “goodbye.” He also told me he was 66. At one point, Javier asked me to speak in English for a minute just to hear it. I starting talking about myself and when I paused, Javier and Estefania said, “rapido!” Really? They think I talk fast!?! How is that for irony?

I have been bonding quite a bit with Estefania. She is gone a lot at night during the week, so today was really my time to talk with her. She really knows about as much English as I know Spanish, so I think we can really be a big help to each other. It’s so funny—we will be talking (either in Spanish or English) and then both pull out our dictionaries at the same time to find the word that we don’t know. She really is a sweetheart and it turns out to be quite humorous to both be sitting there together trying to piece together this language so foreign to us.

Well, it is getting quite late here, so I better wrap this up.

¡Hasta la proxima!