...and I just mean about the country, not in the language.
Wow. I just had to consciously fight myself not to write "observaciones". We must be making progress.
I toyed for months with the idea of switching the blog to all-Spanish for the semester and just linking to babelfish. But I hate babelfish.
Yeah! I'm here in Madrid, Spain.
The flights went, all things considered, pretty smoothly. I caught the flu my brother had and got sick twice over the Atlantic. But all three flights were on schedule. That's never happened to me before.
Not feeling well gave me a great excuse to take my time getting used to Spanish food.
The Metro here is immaculate. There's barely even any gum on the floor. Especially compared to the one in Rome... wow. But it's also incredibly complicated, with a dozen lines criss-crossing all over the city.
It seems like all the floors in this city are slippery.
The language barrier is a little lower than I had first thought in the airports. Except for one thing - There's no way to practice using "vosotros" in San Diego.
We had a meeting yesterday evening with ISA about general stuff.
The students in ISA are all pretty nice. There's about 2o of us so far (the compultense students arrive later) but there's only about 3 of us who actively try to speak Spanish while in a group.
We had our examen de nivel this morning. It was nerve-wracking, especially the oral part, but I have hope that I did well.
My host family is really nice. And they force us to speak Spanish at home, which is good.
There was a lady on the bus this morning with a shirt that said "a heart 100% healthful". If you forget, here's the difference. Ha! It's funny because it's cannibalism!
Culture shock so far has been at a deal-with-it-able level. It's too soon to comment on home-sickness. The time difference is 9 hours ahead of Pacific time. Skype me!
I'll be blogging more soon, with some photos.
-Rebekah
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2 comments:
"But I hate babelfish."
Rightfully so, as computers have very little grasp of language.
"If you forget, here's the difference."
We had almost a whole lesson in metaphysics on this "misuse" as an analogous manner of speaking. Granted, that lesson was to clarify the difference between the analogous use and the precise use, but it did raise the point that we have analogous, poetic shall we say, statements where grammarians and the like would "correct" us. As an antigrammarian I would object to such restriction of our poeticity; but you're commenting on the reverse misuse, which in contrast, well, I guess could very well analogously mean what you implied about cannibalism, so for all I know you may be agreeing with me. 8^) (Although if "healthful" is made more general than "good for your health when eaten" to "good for one's health, a sign of good health, etc." [we went over several different imprecise analogous meanings of healthy in metaphysics], it could just be saying that the heart may not itself be healthy but it's helping you be healthy or is acting healthy... hmmm.)
Oh, and the verification word just now is "amacho". Does that mean anything? Mixing up Spanish and Latin it looks like it means unmanly, but in Spanish a would be to, so I'm not sure what to make of it (if anything at all... it just _looks_ like it ought to be a word because it looks like two words put together).
I hope that you used the air sick bag and didn't barf out of the window.
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