5. To Madrid, September 1996
Out of Penn my third year, I flew to Spain. I think I shared a row on the plane with a Spanish jai lai player. We talked all night. I arrived at Madrid's Barajas Airport exhausted but elated. I was on my own in a new country; I was 19.
I expected to see other students heading to our program's appointed meeting spot, a University of Madrid dormitory I would come to call “the bunker,” and readily identified one donning a University of Michigan sweatshirt. I approached her, introduced myself, and with Kristie from Battle Creek, Michigan, grabbed a cab off to the center of Madrid.
We chatted with the cab driver while en route. I was wary we'd be ripped off as I had been warned by guidebooks. But, I think we fared quite well. I was pretty shy with my Spanish but Kristie did her best and talked to the driver about her father, who worked at the General Mills cereal plant. Our discussion revolved around Cheerios.
After about a half an hour, we arrived at the bunker. We took the skinny elevators up to our rooms, cramming our overstuffed suitcases inside and heaving them out. I remember once settling into our assigned rooms, taking a deep breath and wondering, “Okay, now what?” With that and a tinge of uncertainty or that feeling of once finally daring something and getting to a dreamed of place wondering, what have I wrought for myself? What I have gotten myself into now? I wandered out into the halls and met some of the students who would be my peers for the next academic year.
I met a bunch, initially, from the University of Michigan, a school I knew little about, having spent my entire childhood and adolescence on the east coast. After a bit of meandering, we gathered enough of a posse and sufficient steam to head out into the Madrid afternoon. Most in our group were sleeping off the long flight but a handful of other students and myself were too charged to slumber.
We rambled through the streets of our quiet Madrid neighborhood. I was struck by the too-young military men shouldering machine guns on the street corners. We stopped at a café, beneath a red and white “Beba Coca-Cola” (Drink Coca Cola) umbrella and did just that. Not satisfied, some of us continued on while the majority of our little group returned to the bunker.
After a bit, we found a bar to our liking and as many underage U.S. kids will do when free in Europe the first time, we had some beers, some local, pretty blasé kind. Was it Cruzcampo, perhaps? Although I had studied Spanish continuously since seventh grade, I wasn't too confident about my ability to speak it. Maybe I'm not even now, ten years since.
But, luckily, a lot of the students in our program were Hispanic and had spoken Spanish with their parents since childhood or even before. Many of them rattled off Spanish without any consideration. I was impressed and dare I say, envious. I admit to leaning a bit too heavily on them and their fluency throughout my year in Spain. It's so much easier to have someone else order something for you, someone who's not 5'8” (Spanish women are quite petite) and with hair the colors of leaves in New England in late October. I have to admit, it was hard getting used to being the girl of very obvious German/Swedish/Irish heritage in the deep south of Spain (although, in terms of garnering attention from young men in clubs, sticking out did, at times, have its perks, too; wink wink, nod nod).
The Andalucian women were svelte and petite, their hair glistened and was perfectly controlled. They dressed to the nines just to go out drinking on a Saturday night. I had a lot to learn and much to adjust so to be less obtrusive. First, keep in mine, dear reader, I was a 19-year-old hippie-inspired Anthropology major. I was bursting with wanderlust and a hunger for people and ideas. I loved what many consider the putrid smell of patchouli, stereotypes and all. I enjoyed postmodernism and read Dada poetry. I worked at the Anthropology Museum at Penn, woman'ing a little computer machine that spit out “customized” cartouches for visitors. “Come on down: Your name in hieroglyphics in under two minutes." 1
Suffice to say, when I arrived in Spain that fall, fashion/appearance-wise, I was somewhat a mess. Rebelling and internalizing. Exploring chemicals and things I shouldn't. I arrived in Spain in September 1996 , dressed in sky-blue, bell-bottomed cords, a wife beater beneath a truly vintage (read garish) butterfly-collared long-sleeved shirt, bedecked in purples and burgundies. I had become, during my three years in college, a SalVal groupie, swapping the tailored preppiness of my mother-monitored childhood for indiscriminant bargain shopping at thrift stores about town.
I quickly traded my too-big pants in for slim skirts in dark, solid colors. I wore beret-like, almost mushroom-shaped hats and clumped around in heavy brown leather platform boots. Spain feminized me in that way. It's hard to concretely know a place's effect on oneself but Spain's lingering effect on me, my desires, dreams, and plans was enormous albeit unquantifiable.
Recalling these early days in Spain I think of how random our lives are. One seemingly minor or even inconsequential decision can take you very far in a heretofore undreamed-of direction. For example, when I was in seventh grade in sweet olde Pennsylvania, I needed to decide which foreign language I would study. My mom and dad had both studied German as kids partly due to having grown up in Pennsylvania Dutch country and partly, also, because of our family's heritage, which is probably pretty heavily German.
In fact, my father's father, my Pop-Pop, spoke Pennsylvania Dutch, a language linguists would probably call a creole, a coming together of two languages that, over time (a generation or two), takes on the formal and predictable grammatical structures and patterns of “inherited” languages. I think that during World War II my grandfather was able to use his “Dutch” when he came in contact with the German enemy.
Pennsylvania Dutch, if you don't already know or if my writing is dense enough not to have provided you the hint, is not Dutch, not the language spoken in the Netherlands/Holland but a creolization of English and German. I think the original English settlers to Pennsylvania, upon begrudgingly encountering the newly arrived German immigrants to the area, when asking them who they were and what language they spoke, mistook “Deutsch” for “Dutch” and the name's stuck to this day.
Chapter 5 Endnotes
1. On self-identified“middle-aged Renaissance man” Jim Loy’s website (www.jimloy.com/hiero/yourname.htm),“Your Name in Egyptian Hieroglyphics,” you can do just that. My name would be an owl (or is that a falcon) + a feather (?) + pants? a hearth? What does G's symbol look like to you?
I expected to see other students heading to our program's appointed meeting spot, a University of Madrid dormitory I would come to call “the bunker,” and readily identified one donning a University of Michigan sweatshirt. I approached her, introduced myself, and with Kristie from Battle Creek, Michigan, grabbed a cab off to the center of Madrid.
We chatted with the cab driver while en route. I was wary we'd be ripped off as I had been warned by guidebooks. But, I think we fared quite well. I was pretty shy with my Spanish but Kristie did her best and talked to the driver about her father, who worked at the General Mills cereal plant. Our discussion revolved around Cheerios.
After about a half an hour, we arrived at the bunker. We took the skinny elevators up to our rooms, cramming our overstuffed suitcases inside and heaving them out. I remember once settling into our assigned rooms, taking a deep breath and wondering, “Okay, now what?” With that and a tinge of uncertainty or that feeling of once finally daring something and getting to a dreamed of place wondering, what have I wrought for myself? What I have gotten myself into now? I wandered out into the halls and met some of the students who would be my peers for the next academic year.
I met a bunch, initially, from the University of Michigan, a school I knew little about, having spent my entire childhood and adolescence on the east coast. After a bit of meandering, we gathered enough of a posse and sufficient steam to head out into the Madrid afternoon. Most in our group were sleeping off the long flight but a handful of other students and myself were too charged to slumber.
We rambled through the streets of our quiet Madrid neighborhood. I was struck by the too-young military men shouldering machine guns on the street corners. We stopped at a café, beneath a red and white “Beba Coca-Cola” (Drink Coca Cola) umbrella and did just that. Not satisfied, some of us continued on while the majority of our little group returned to the bunker.
After a bit, we found a bar to our liking and as many underage U.S. kids will do when free in Europe the first time, we had some beers, some local, pretty blasé kind. Was it Cruzcampo, perhaps? Although I had studied Spanish continuously since seventh grade, I wasn't too confident about my ability to speak it. Maybe I'm not even now, ten years since.
But, luckily, a lot of the students in our program were Hispanic and had spoken Spanish with their parents since childhood or even before. Many of them rattled off Spanish without any consideration. I was impressed and dare I say, envious. I admit to leaning a bit too heavily on them and their fluency throughout my year in Spain. It's so much easier to have someone else order something for you, someone who's not 5'8” (Spanish women are quite petite) and with hair the colors of leaves in New England in late October. I have to admit, it was hard getting used to being the girl of very obvious German/Swedish/Irish heritage in the deep south of Spain (although, in terms of garnering attention from young men in clubs, sticking out did, at times, have its perks, too; wink wink, nod nod).
The Andalucian women were svelte and petite, their hair glistened and was perfectly controlled. They dressed to the nines just to go out drinking on a Saturday night. I had a lot to learn and much to adjust so to be less obtrusive. First, keep in mine, dear reader, I was a 19-year-old hippie-inspired Anthropology major. I was bursting with wanderlust and a hunger for people and ideas. I loved what many consider the putrid smell of patchouli, stereotypes and all. I enjoyed postmodernism and read Dada poetry. I worked at the Anthropology Museum at Penn, woman'ing a little computer machine that spit out “customized” cartouches for visitors. “Come on down: Your name in hieroglyphics in under two minutes." 1
Suffice to say, when I arrived in Spain that fall, fashion/appearance-wise, I was somewhat a mess. Rebelling and internalizing. Exploring chemicals and things I shouldn't. I arrived in Spain in September 1996 , dressed in sky-blue, bell-bottomed cords, a wife beater beneath a truly vintage (read garish) butterfly-collared long-sleeved shirt, bedecked in purples and burgundies. I had become, during my three years in college, a SalVal groupie, swapping the tailored preppiness of my mother-monitored childhood for indiscriminant bargain shopping at thrift stores about town.
I quickly traded my too-big pants in for slim skirts in dark, solid colors. I wore beret-like, almost mushroom-shaped hats and clumped around in heavy brown leather platform boots. Spain feminized me in that way. It's hard to concretely know a place's effect on oneself but Spain's lingering effect on me, my desires, dreams, and plans was enormous albeit unquantifiable.
Recalling these early days in Spain I think of how random our lives are. One seemingly minor or even inconsequential decision can take you very far in a heretofore undreamed-of direction. For example, when I was in seventh grade in sweet olde Pennsylvania, I needed to decide which foreign language I would study. My mom and dad had both studied German as kids partly due to having grown up in Pennsylvania Dutch country and partly, also, because of our family's heritage, which is probably pretty heavily German.
In fact, my father's father, my Pop-Pop, spoke Pennsylvania Dutch, a language linguists would probably call a creole, a coming together of two languages that, over time (a generation or two), takes on the formal and predictable grammatical structures and patterns of “inherited” languages. I think that during World War II my grandfather was able to use his “Dutch” when he came in contact with the German enemy.
Pennsylvania Dutch, if you don't already know or if my writing is dense enough not to have provided you the hint, is not Dutch, not the language spoken in the Netherlands/Holland but a creolization of English and German. I think the original English settlers to Pennsylvania, upon begrudgingly encountering the newly arrived German immigrants to the area, when asking them who they were and what language they spoke, mistook “Deutsch” for “Dutch” and the name's stuck to this day.
Chapter 5 Endnotes
1. On self-identified“middle-aged Renaissance man” Jim Loy’s website (www.jimloy.com/hiero/yourname.htm),“Your Name in Egyptian Hieroglyphics,” you can do just that. My name would be an owl (or is that a falcon) + a feather (?) + pants? a hearth? What does G's symbol look like to you?
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