Fallas

Today was the second Tuesday I went to the artist-lady's workshop. From school it's a 20-minute bike ride down Aragon into the Rio. It's four or so by this time, the city slowly coming back to life from its collective siesta, the Rio beginning to fill up with people running, walking their dogs, holding hands, roller skating, strolling, playing futbol.

Victor, Marisa's son, is sleeping when I get there. He's parked in his stroller in front of some dubbed Bones reruns playing on the TV. The arboles we paper-mached last time are gone; in their place are more of the little child-people in various animal costumes. Each one comes up to my knee or so, and though Marisa grabs the cat one by the ears and the pumpkin one by the stem, I cradle each one like it's made of glass. Yes, we're readying them for their festival funeral pyre, but to die a premature death in the hand of a clumsy American seems like it would be the worst kind of injustice. We seal them up with a paste that looks like watery glue and their new under-skin glistens. Paint me! they say. Paint me in absurdly bright colors, and we do.

Marisa wears a man's green jumpsuit over her regular clothes as she works. Today she also has a scarf that looks like the tails of a hundred miniature grey foxes spilling out over the collar; they wag slightly as she leans over the table, turning and adjusting the newspapered arms of the figurine she's building. Watching her work is...deceptive. She's at once so industrious and so distracted that it's easy to forget she's a really, really talented artist. One moment she's so absorbed in the papery creases along the figure's sides she can't be bothered to answer questions with more than a "sí," and the next she's off talking on the phone, chasing Victor around the studio for the next half hour trying to get him to stop playing with the dinosaur and eat his merienda. She comes off as so pragmatic it's hard to imagine these pink moons and fox-children coming from a place in her brain. But they do.

The studio, from the outside, might be the textbook definition of nondescript. The entrance is a dirty glass door, the street seemingly without a name (though I am a poor looker and may just have not seen the sign). The only way I know I'm in the right place is if I pass the graffiti of the woman in the red and white polka-dot dress. Yet a number of people pop in and out of the studio while I'm there, some family, some friends, some who appear to be total strangers but all, I am fairly sure, people from the barrio. An older man brings Victor some croissants in a bag, one lady makes herself at home on a stool and chats with Marisa, while still another woman comes to talk (I think) numbers with Paco, Marisa's husband. I submerge myself in the steady flow of Spanish and afternoon light and paint a cat-kid grey.

My fingers are still covered in paint, and I don't bother to wash it all off when I get home. I cannot wait for next week.

no hablo ingles

So attaining fluency is a lot more difficult than I thought.

But in all seriousness I feel a fair amount of guilt when speaking English. It feels like giving up. It feels like I and whoever I'm speaking English with are failing, that we're cheating ourselves. And we are. I even feel a little guilty writing in English right now, but if I don't write something in a language that I understand I'm going to go crazy.

Another student in the program said she felt her Spanish improved dramatically in the first couple weeks and then suddenly plateaued. And I feel the same way. School's not bad -- I usually catch all of what the teachers say, even if my responses are baby-like. But sometimes Mayte talks, or there's a conversation on TV, or we watch a movie in class or I'm just walking somewhere and I hear Spanish and I think...agh. This is hard. How people learn to speak English is beyond me. At least Spanish only has five vowels and a fairly straightforward grammatical structure compared to English, which is both a blessing and a constant reminder that learning Spanish should not be so hard, that I should be picking up way more than I actually am. Spanish speakers all over the world can pick up English; English speakers all over the world can pick up Spanish. Why is my brain soooooo slowwwww

Smaller groups is the key to speaking Spanish outside of school, I think. When a group of us went to Sevilla this past weekend (more on that soon) (possibly today), we spoke only Spanish for one whole day. And it went really well. After an hour of struggling to get into it, those r's just started rolling naturally and we were actually talking, and not "como se dice"-ing every English word that popped into our heads. I even had this weird thing happen this past week after hearing almost all Spanish all day when I tried to go to sleep that night, where a gobbledygook string of Spanish words kept running through my mind along with an unrelated current of English thoughts. THAT was encouraging, if a little strange. 

I'm glad I'm realizing how tough this is going to be now, as opposed to later (which seems like it would be impossible -- how can you ignore the fact that you don't understand people for 5 months, but I'm good at denying/ignoring things). But that doesn't take away from the fact that sometimes I want to chuck Don Quijote across the room, preferably into Gandalf's litter box. 

I love English for how complex and vast and quirky it is. And I want to love Spanish, too, because in many ways it's so much more direct. It is a decisive language. But right now I just feel boxed out. Gah. Hopefully this changes soon.

Barcelona, bullet-point style

This is how I will remember Barcelona: not in one cohesive picture or any one consistent theme -- there wasn't enough time for that -- but as a series of brightly colored threads, a brilliant fringe to rub between mental fingers, a burst of small and discrete points of light. And also as somewhat lonely. Maybe it's because of the size, because it is MUCH bigger than Valencia, but it felt emptier, less homey. Valencia feels more like a community to me, more toned-down in many outward respects and more...more quietly exuberant in others.

-La Sagrada Famila. It's so much different than any other religious building I've ever seen. Definitely grand, but not in the distant way a  lot of other cathedrals seem to be (a lot of others...I've only seen two or three in person, but pictures count right?). From the first you get the sense that you're watching a very intimate conversation between Gaudi and something divine. God, nature, the creative force in the world, SOMETHING powerful was pushing him to build up, and in a way that looks very much outside of the constraints of any other building, religious or otherwise, I've seen. The Wikipedia page makes me want to read a biography of Gaudi's life, or at least another Wikipedia page.

-Walking through the market and seeing the biggest apricots/tripe/walnuts/selection of fake Ray Bans (Reyes Barres) I'd ever seen.

-Understanding some of the people I traveled with more, and some a little less. Having conversations I did not expect to be having so early on in knowing someone, and opening up a little bit more and having it be okay.

-Realizing that I'm not a club person and never will be.

-Realizing that leaving the club to go to the rope playground on the beach at 3AM is much more my speed. 

-Getting a really, really good apple from a little fruit store, even though it looked shitty and the apple was small and brownish. And also a baguette (turning into a pan-fanatic) for a whopping total of one euro. This somewhat softened the blow of the five euro beer from the restaurant on Las Ramblas the night before. Novice traveler lesson number one: do not buy alcohol on the tourist street.

-Standing at the tallest point in the Parque Guell, which involved climbing up a twisting, crowded, railing-less stairway (fear of heights ftw) and seeing the whole city, all sprawled out and lego-like, and the Sagrada Familia looking like some kind of ornate bauble set down in the middle of a sea of blocks. Listening to a man play American country music on a guitar while looking out on the little post-it squares of color. Feeling extraordinarily peaceful.

-Traveling with people I like. Thinking about how this is only the first of many trips. Getting on the bus, leaving the city and thinking about how I might never come back to Barcelona, and not feeling sad but rather just wondering at the fact that  I will only be alive for so long and might not choose to come back there again, and at the realization that you can see a place and have it be both the first and last time in your life.