it's a small world after all

I’m currently sitting in my señora’s kitchen plugged into the ghetto Internet router, cradling a roll of toilet paper for my runny nose (yep, sick in my first week and unable/too lazy to find Kleenex) and contemplating a siesta before we go out to celebrate our first week in Spain tonight at Pacha, another club. Yep, I'm in Spain for the next three months, studying, living with an older single woman, and attempting to improve my Spanish to near fluency. I made it through my first week of classes relatively unscathed, except for contracting this mystery illness, although I can tell that what appears to be only a small amount of homework is going to take much longer than expected since it’s all in Spanish. None of my classes are particularly challenging content-wise, but focusing on understanding and speaking Spanish for an hour and a half can get very tiring. Plus, it’s hard to relax when I get home because our señora obviously wants to hear about our day and chat with us about travel plans, food, the girls who stayed with her last year (fellow sorority members), etc—in Spanish. I’m generally okay with it, but my roommate has a hard time when she’s tired and hungry. I think I’m glad we live together so that whenever we get mentally exhausted, we can just lapse into English.

Overall, this week has been a blur, and I feel like I’m living in a bubble of sunshine and fiestas while life continues as usual, or worse than usual, at home. With the economic crisis dominating the headlines, growing tension between Pakistan and US forces in Afghanistan, and the continuing (never-ending…) election season and all the drama surrounding it, I’ve been trying to stay aware and in touch with what’s going on outside Madrid. That’s why it was refreshing when my professor for “Spain and the European Union” started off our first class Tuesday by discussing what’s happening on Wall Street and reminding us that all eyes around the world are focused on our upcoming election (as well as making some Sarah Palin jokes, of course). As he put it, who becomes the next president of the United States matters just as much to Europeans as it does to us, except that they can’t vote. He also took time to compare our electoral process to the elections in European countries. Theirs tend to last only a few months, while ours has turned into an 18-month marathon of mud slinging and pandering. As he put it, whenever a country is going in the wrong direction, European voters automatically vote for a party elsewhere on the political spectrum, though whether that is good or bad is certainly up for subjective judgment. He also asked us why Americans have an aversion to voting for “elitist,” educated politicians, telling us that he’d love to have a beer with his neighbor but would never trust him to run the country. Clearly none of us could answer that question since we are all “elitist” according to the currently popular definition.

Later that night, as we were relaxing at a bar, a group of French guys insisted on asking us all whether we were voting for Obama and giving enthusiastic high-fives to those who answered in the affirmative. While those guys were kind of annoying, and most of us are tired of thinking about politics and are relieved to be outside of the United States during the final two months before the election, encounters like that make me realize that European and American interests are inextricably linked, whether we like it or not. I was initially excited to study abroad here mostly just to practice my Spanish, and I was actually a little disappointed that I hadn’t put myself on track to visit the Middle East, my main region of interest. But now I’m hoping that studying abroad here will help me learn more about the ways in which European powers rely on the United States, and in what ways we, too, depend on Europe to maintain our own strength. I’m interested to learning more about the power of diplomacy that holds the European Union together and perhaps even getting a sense of whether the average person’s attitude toward war and aggression are different than the prevailing views in America. Plus, it’s always interesting to hear an outsider’s perspective, and based on what my professor told us, I have a feeling that I’ll be hearing plenty of those as soon as the election results are in.