Being Foreign

I just want to write about this because my experience as a stranger in a strange land will soon come to an end and I want to remember it better. A friend sent me this article earlier this week.

Economist Story about Being Foreign

It articulates the experience I've been going through for the past 18 months way better than I ever could. If you don't feel like reading all it, I picked out a few choice sections below.

"“Everyone has the right to live in some society in which they needn’t constantly worry about what they look like to others, and so be psychically distorted, conditioned to some degree of mauvaise foi”, Berlin said in 1992.... "

This is a great explanation of what living in a foreign culture feels like. Your mind can never rest because you're constantly self-evaluating. Your facial expressions, gestures, your everything means something different than at home, so you have to be mindful of that. And I still live in a Western country! It's not even like I went to live in Botswana or Syria or Laos. Spain is pretty similar to the US, but the subtle differences become more apparent the longer I live here.

"Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could flee easy categorisation by your education, your work, your class, your family, your accent, your politics. You could reinvent yourself, if only in your own mind. You were not caught up in the mundanities of the place you inhabited, any more than you wanted to be. You did not vote for the government, its problems were not your problems. You were irresponsible. Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief."

Yes. This is the thing I will miss most of all when I get re-Americanized in two months. Being "the foreigner" pretty much removes you from judgement. People don't meet me, see the way I look, hear my accent, and automatically put together an idea of what I must be. At least not the same way they do in the US. To be honest, I feel like this is the most myself I've ever been because I'm not busy trying to either comply with or defy the expectations of others. I hope to continue to feel that way when I'm home, but something tells me that who I am is more conditioned by my environment than I'd like to admit.

"Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”.

An American child psychologist, Alison Gopnik, when reaching for an analogy to illuminate the world as experienced by a baby, compared it to Paris as experienced for the first time by an adult American: a pageant of novelty, colour, excitement. Reverse the analogy and you see that living in a foreign country can evoke many of the emotions of childhood: novelty, surprise, anxiety, relief, powerlessness, frustration, irresponsibility.

It may be this sense of a return to childhood, consciously or not, that gives the pleasure of foreignness its edge of embarrassment. Narcissism may also play a part. While abroad, one imagines being missed by friends and enemies at home. "

Exactly. Just exactly. Nothing to add.

"Foreigners do complain more than they should, and locals do not like it...Pay your taxes, speak some English and be nice about the country where you live. Exaggeratedly nice. Avoid even trivial criticisms. You do not go into somebody’s house and start rearranging their furniture...Perhaps foreigners are, by their nature, hard to satisfy. A foreigner is, after all, someone who didn’t like his own country enough to stay there. Even so, the complaining foreigner poses something of a logical contradiction. He complains about the country in which he finds himself, yet he is there by choice. Why doesn’t he go home?...His enjoyment of life is intensified, not undermined, by the absence of a homeland. And the homeland is a place to which he could return at any time."

Yes, I complain a LOT about Spain. More than I should, but there are negative aspects to life here. I guess it's just that when you leave your home country, you expect the grass to be greener in every way in your country of choice and it's irritating to realize that it's just the same damn grass after all.

"The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”...The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them."

A weird, yet bright, light.

I have been having some issues with my students, as we all know.

However, I have a student who I like so much. He has a desire to learn English just for fun. He speaks pretty well due in equal parts to the amount of Chapelle's Show he watches and the amount of gangster rap he listens to. He has asked me so far what the words ¨hustler¨ and ¨crackie¨ mean. This is a fantastic student, you guys.

Oh, also, HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!! Sad to be missing another Thanksgiving at home, but we're having a huge American Thanksgiving dinner here tonight, and I'm making a corn thing. I'll be drowning my sorrows in cheap, amazing Spanish wine and turkey that came from god-knows-where. So excited. XD

Two things:

1) I saw a red VW beetle on the street the other day. I was staring at it because dark red is an unexpectedly tame color for a beetle and because I have a lot of time on my hands. I noticed that someone had keyed the car. Scrawled into the door of this beetle was the word 'PUTA.' It was shocking. I can't imagine what a VW owner would do that would enrage someone so much that she or he would scratch PUTA into their car door. I think I'm deeply affected by VW's marketing or something because I figure if this person owns a beetle, they're probably not all bad.

2) I have an intercambio every week with one of my students, Luis. Last night Luis called me "coño." I think that means we're friends? Oh, Spain.

I have to go eat a tostada with tomate. SO GOOD.

This Andalusian accent is a mess. It hasn't been that hard to understand (unless they're speaking really quickly) with most people, but I think that's mostly because I've been living with Spanish people, which helps my comprehension a lot.

Last weekend, Jacqueline, Natasha, and I went to Marbella. It's a beautiful little seaside town on the southern coast of Spain. It's also extremely touristy. Everything is expensive! To save money, we bought food from the grocery store and asked the hostel staff to heat it up for us. Yes, we had to eat our microwaved lasagna and packaged tortilla in the company of the hostel's 3 or 4 smelly resident dogs (who were allowed in the kitchen, puke), but it was worth it to have a weekend away. The first day, there was so much niebla (fog)!

Then we went out for the night of Halloween. It was fun! Our taxista on the way back had brought his guitar, so he played us the only English song he knew: Hotel California. That song will forever be associated with that night for me.

Jacqueline really wanted to go to Malaga, so we hit that for a day, and it was wonderful! Marbella was nice, but it completely lacked culture. There were so many British people and so much English! All the Spanish people we met in stores or restaurants were SO HAPPY that we spoke Spanish. Malaga was a nice change of pace. It seemed like Spanish people actually lived there. We couldn't see half the things we wanted to, though, because it was a festivo (day off). Poo.

Bye.

Spanish students are the laziest sons of...

What's WITH Spanish students? They're really breaking their necks trying NOT to learn anything in class. You know that feeling that you get in your head when your brain is working, and you feel a bit frustrated and uncomfortable? That's called THINKING. Do enough of that, and perhaps it will lead to some LEARNING.

GOD.

Beautiful Córdoba

Thoughts

1) So I think I found out where the ho stroll in Cordoba is today. I always walk down this street called Calle Rey Heredia to get to the part of town with all the shops, and I noticed there are always, without fail, girls sitting on the stoops of several buildings along the way. They're never talking to each other or doing anything. They just seem to be bored out of their minds, waiting for something...or someone? And, they are always vaguely provocative in their dress. Today as I was walking, I saw a girl sitting on a stoop wearing 5-inch (I guess) red strappy heels and a pair of coochie cutters and all of a sudden, it hit me. My route to the center of town takes me directly down the ho stroll. I don't know how I didn't put two and two together before. I need to get a map and find a new way to get to the center.

2) So Los Del Rio (that's right, the world-famous Spanish twosome who blessed the world with Macarena) are Andalucian. They're not from Cordoba, though; they're from Sevilla. Anyway, their name means "those from the river," right? And the "river" they're referring to is the Guadalquivir, which I can totally almost see from the window of my room. That tenuous connection to a thing that is famous for being terrible made me feel special for more than 10 seconds, which is embarassing. What I'm saying is everyone, please call me Macarena from now on.

3) Have the people here ever heard of pooper scoopers?!? I've seen more dog turds in the past three weeks than I had in all the years of my life prior to moving here. Walking to work, I have to maintain perfect vigilance lest I squish one and end up smelling faintly of poo for the rest of the day.

4) I think I'm obsessed with Fanta. Honestly, maybe four, five times a day I think, "Wow, I could really go for a tall, frosty Fanta right now."

5) This:

Masturbation from Nick Thune