Ode to a gas station

In the past few years, I have done a large amount of driving. Between getting to and from the great state of Minnesota, trekking across the country for a Hamptons-inspired spring break, and discovering the joys of hopscotching from relative's house to friend's house to scenic interstate-side consonant-heavy restaurant, I've seen a lot of road, and, as such, I've bought a lot of gas. My favorite part of this is having a chance to peruse the aisles of random gas stations, admiring the respective humorous postcards, stocking up on the really yummy Snack Well's cookies, taste-testing new coffee drinks, and poking questionable round meats that tend to ooze variously colored liquids. For me, gas stations are almost as good as grocery stores; sometimes they even manage to surpass them, winning me over with either their local charm, or their impressive selection of energy bars and apples.

This morning my roommate Salva kindly offered to drop me off at the place I was being picked up to be taken to school. Given that it was 7:15a.m., that I wasn't exactly sure how to get there, and that it was cold and dark, I very quickly agreed. It just so happens that he is one of perhaps three Spaniards to have avoided being born with his internal clock infuriatingly set to "Spanish Time," meaning that I was plopped down in a fairly empty parking lot by the side of the highway in the cold, dark morning a good 20 minutes before my ride even had a chance of being there. Seeing a gas station nearby, and realizing that I'd yet to actually go inside one since arriving in Spain, I headed toward it.

It's amazing how, after almost two months in this country, and well over a year spent cumulatively in other countries, homesickness can still manage to take me completely by surprise. Reaching the doorway of the gas station, I was suddenly overcome by a desire for a tall cup of gas station coffee. The cup, of course, would be styrofoam, probably the color brown; the coffee would be watery and weak, but I'd add milk and whatever else was lying around by the machine. Carefully I'd stir it with an impossibly tiny stir stick and then snap on the plastic lid, probably splattering mysef a bit in the process. And then I'd walk back to my car, hands pressed around the sides of the cup for warmth, and I'd nurse my terrible gas station coffee for the better part of an hour.

This, of course, was not to be. Despite my greatest desires, there was no rumbling coffee maker waiting to see me off to Periana with a tall cup of sludge. There weren't even energy bars, not to mention anything resembling fruit. If I had wanted, I could have bought a carton of Don Simon boxed wine for under a Euro, but somehow that didn't seem appetizing. I lingered in the relative warmth of the gas station, half hoping that if I stood there long enough a Starbucks might appear. It did not. I miss gas stations.

A brush with comic book fame

Last week I was on TV. They didn't just pan across a crowded room I happened to be standing in, and they didn't just show a snippet of a comment I made in passing. On Thursday afternoon I found myself at a local TV station sitting in front of several glaring lights, with a wine glass filled with water, some scratch paper and a pen sitting in front of me, translating for a non-Spanish-speaking American comic book artist who was being interviewed as a invitee at a local comic book convention.

Patrick Gleason doesn't speak Spanish, so when the English-speaking convention representative was delayed getting into Málaga, a friend of my roommate called to ask if I could come to lunch as Patrick's translator. I like free food--I think it tastes better than its paid-for counterpart--and I like my roommate's friend, Lucas, so said I'd go. Lunch was yummy and fun; there was seafood stew, which I hadn't had since being in Chile, and tuna steaks and dessert, as well as non-alcoholic flavored shots which seemed utterly ridiculous to me. At some point, Lucas left the restaurant to go pick someone up at the airport, and I agreed to accompany the group to the TV station where Patrick was set to do an interview. Upon arrival, it became clear that things had not quite been thought through all the way, and the mysterious interview was actually an hour-long program dedicated to interviewing Patrick and two other convention-invitees. No one spoke English except, of course, for me.

In addition to Patrick, the moderator, and myself, there were two Spanish comic book artists: Jesús Redondo, famous for his Capitan Trueno, and Paco Roca, a graphic novelist who just won Spain's most prestigious national award for the genre. Patrick is himself a well-respected young artist who's currently working for DC Comics doing a Marine Corps version of The Green Lantern.

I didn't even know where I was supposed to look--at Patrick, at the moderator, or at the camera (or at the other camera). At one point I hit my water glass with my pen and it made a loud "ding." At another point I mistranslated "slapped in the face" as something having to do with blinking. It turns out my Spanish isn't quite at the level where I can seamlessly relate explanations of comic book characters and the daily travails of deadlines and graphic novel markets from Spanish to English and back again. The next day, two of my students stopped me to tell me they'd seen me on TV the night before; it was hard to tell if their giggling was due to star-struck awe or the fact that they were laughing at me. A friend I met up with the next night told me that he too had seen the show; he didn't say much else. Despite my stumbling, everyone was very nice to me, and I got to wear one of those mic packs that bizarrely fascinating to me.

The show aired later that night, but I didn't see it because I'd been invited out to dinner with the convention gang, this time as a the special friend of the organizers since the English-speaking rep had finally decided to show up. I was picked up around 10:30pm (Spanish time is killing me--I've forgone meals in favor of just eating 'round the clock), and, after meeting up with the rest of the group, we drove to the tiny mountain town of Borge where we'd been specially invited by the town's mayor. We inched our way up the windy pitch-black road to the tiny lights of a town even smaller than Periana. Once safely parked in the town's single parking area, we walked the rest of the way to an 18th-century restaurant that was once the safehouse of a famous Robin Hood-esque Spanish bandit. It was quaint and endearing and most definitely closed. We stood in the cold and waited. Lucas called the convention organizers who assured us that the same thing had happened last year, and that the mayor had come down from house to personally open the restaurant for the group. This seemed odd to me since it would mean that there was nobody in the kitchen, no food being prepared, and no dinner for us for quite awhile (a painful thought at 11:15pm). We waited some more. Patrick, his wife Emily, and I talked about the image of the mayor majestically appearing from out of the darkness, with trumpets and velvet banners, to thrust open the doors of the restaurant...and then turn on the stove and start to cook? Lucas got a call a little while later after some others had joined us in the cold; apparently Paco, the convention director, was standing on the mayor's doorstep knocking, but no one was answering. Lucas looked a little irritated. I cringed thinking about what Patrick and Emily must be thinking. Finally, we decided to head back to the car, drive back to Vélez, and eat there. We ended up in Torre del Mar where we feasted on tapas and wine while sitting around enormous barrels.

I saw the comic book group once more on Saturday when I went to Málaga where they were having a book signing. Now somewhat a part of this very weird circle, I got to stand around and chat with Patrick and the others as they signed autographs and drew pictures for fans. I even got a couple drawings of my own that have now earned spots on my increasingly-decorated bedroom wall.

Spanish Quesadillas For Obama

It's 12:47am in Vélez-Málaga, and the polls are about to close on the East Coast of the United States. I didn't sleep much last night, and I have to be out of my apartment to catch my ride tomorrow in less than seven hours. I'm keeping myself awake with the cold leftovers of the soup I made for dinner, rice cakes, and the promise of victory wine and/or Bailey's we bought last weekend. I've been watching BBC religiously for the past several weeks, and I've now seen today's news loop at least five times. Having not kept up with recent non-BBC television, I just got myself caught up on the latest SNL sketches with Senator McCain. All day, I've been refreshing my Facebook page in awe of the number of people who have "donated their statuses to get out the vote." My roommates went to bed a little while ago, and all the Americans I know seem to have gone terribly apathetic on me. Never have I felt such an intense desire to be in the United States, nor have I ever felt like I was missing out on something momentous to such the degree that I do now.

I wore my Qdoba "Quesadillas For Obama" t-shirt all day at school today. It turns out that Spain doesn't really understand the idea of a secret ballot, and I've been taking advantage of my own disregard for secrecy at this point. The principal, in particular, seemed to get quite a kick out of my shirt. In class, I inculcated my students with YouTube videos featuring Mexican mariachis and American actors and artists chanting and singing in praise of Obama. Everyone here agrees that Obama's got it in the bag; nobody understands why I should feel any sort of anxiety.

Even from my far-off vantage point, it really feels like we're on the verge of history. I wish I could have been in Colorado for at least one of the several occasions that Obama spoke, and that I could be there now to soak up the civic excitement and hope. As it is, I'll have to settle for what I fully intend will be some euphoric skype calls not too long from now.

Teaching, or lo que sea

I'm not quite sure what to think of my job. The majority of the students I've had classes with, which at this point is probably around 70 or 80 or so, know almost no English, despite having "studied" the language since they were six. Many don't know how to say "My name is," or "I like." It's not that I was expecting proficiency or anything--in my own high school, the language instruction was similarly lacking, and I made it through three years of French (even having skipped the second level) without being able to string together two sentences. But even then, I had some basic skills. For example, I knew how to tell an extremely descriptive story about a doll being thrown out a window, and I knew the sounds that all the animals made. I wonder what exactly goes on in these students' English classes. Up until now, I haven't had a chance to sit in on a class, and frankly I'm kind of hesitant to do it. I feel kind of like a brat criticizing the performance of people who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching, but there are some teachers at my school that honestly don't seem to do anything. What's worse, I've been witness to some pretty awful examples of teachers consciously deciding not to teach groups of students, and complaining about students (both individual students and entire classes) right in front of them. At the rate I'm going, it seems like the majority of English students will cycle through my classroom about once a month, probably much less. It's kind of difficult to see what my role should be in such a system. I'm tempted to ignore any last minute instructions from teachers about how I should spend my hour with their students (instructions that have amounted to things such as: "practice the pronunciation of the simple past tense"), and just make up my own lessons, culling ideas from my TA days, ESL websites, and random teaching books I've found at the school. But even then, if I'm only seeing a student once a month for an hour, I don't think my effectiveness level will be all that high. So at the moment I'm left fairly unsure of what I'm supposed to be doing. Luckily, the one hour per month these students spend in my classroom is not exceptionally important to their overall education. Still, it would be nice to know that I--and the rest of the English Department--wasn't wasting their time. And in addition, it'd be nice to spend the next seven months feeling useful and effective in what I came here to do.

This post, I'm realizing, has taken a definite turn for the negative, belying the fact that I've also had a lot of fun working at the Alta Axarquia, and that I've even had some very successful classes. For example, during Thursday and Friday of last week, I was in charge of coordinating Halloween activities for all of the students of English. Over the two days, a few hundred students made their way down to a classroom that had been decked-out in truly ridiculous Halloween decorations (including a 12-foot hanging witch that lit up), and cycled through handmade Halloween Bingo, team Trick-or-Treat-offs, and (a very enthusiastic, and very wet) bobbing for apples station. Luis, my director, insisted that we put dozens of tea tree candles all over the tables and then light them--I protested that this seemed somewhat dangerous, what with the hundreds of screaming kids running all over the place, but my concerns were shot down--which led to me very nearly lighting a decorative broomstick on fire. But very nearly lighting something on fire is quite different from actually lighting something on fire, and everybody seemed to have a lot of fun. There was an excess of cheap Spanish candy, an impressive amount of dressing up, and, and a good deal of fairly useless Halloween vocabulary being thrown around. The kids, for the most part, were--and have been--awesome. It's fun to have your name known by the majority of students in a school, and for them to call your name when they see you in the hall, or to stick their head out the window and call to you as you head home for the day. They seem pretty excited that I'm here, which makes everything so much better.

On a related note, I was inspired by Abi's post about the hilarious things that seem to come up in language classes--here are a few of my own:

- On a recent vocabulary test, one of my director's students wrote "coche" (car) next to the word "smart." I thought this was exceedingly clever and warranted at least a note from Luis, if not half a point.

- Emily, one of the the other lectoras in Periana (she's at the colegio, I'm at the instituto), told me that in one of her classrooms, a poster read: Do you have your rubber? The amount of proper English shoved down these kids' throats astounds me. Today, I was told that I couldn't write the word "neighbor;" it needs a "u." In an elementary-level book for a different class (that not a single student understands), the word "bonnet" shows up on the first page, in reference to a car. I still have no idea what that means.

- Apparently it's a running joke in Spain that Spaniards can't distinguish between the pronunciations of "shit" and "sheet," nor "bitch" and "beach." This is a common dinnertime conversation, though it has yet to come up in class.