Spain: the last pen

Our last day in Barcelona—the day of our return flight to Gatwick, London, actually—I purchased the most expensive pen of my life.

Originally, Angela and I had intended to awaken at a reasonable hour and use the morning hours to pack our belongings, check out of the hostel, and exchange her stockings at El Cortes Ingles. (She was determined to wear her skirt, since one of her pairs of jeans was wet and the other dirty. However, in order not to freeze, she needed stockings. Me, I would have gone dirty. By her standards, I’m sure I was. For our plane ride home, I was re-wearing a T-shirt for the third time, the pair of jeans that wasn’t wet, and the same sweatshirt I had worn every day of the trip.) Then, we intended to return to a tapas bar that we had hunted down earlier in our trip. We had gone in search of this bar one night and found it so packed, the customers were overflowing out the front door, food and drink in hand. We weren’t sure we’d ever get close enough to the counter to order, never mind a seat, so our plan was to return on the last day of our trip and arrive at the bar by twelve noon (when the place opened) so we’d be assured a table for lunch. Then, we would return to our hostel, pick up our bags, walk to the aerobus stop, and be on our way to the airport in plenty of time to check our baggage and board our 9:55 pm plane back to the UK.

Unfortunately, even the best laid plans sometimes are not followed to completion. Packing, checking out, and even exchanging the stockings went smoothly enough. However, as we were preparing to leave El Cortes Ingles, the rain that had plagued the latter half of our trip began again in earnest. Our clothing and shoes still damp from having trudged through the previous day’s downpour, we opted to forego our final meal of tapas in favor of reclining in a Starbucks (Angela’s favorite haunt, as I discovered on this trip) located only a few blocks away. Securing chairs by the window, Angela sipped her latte and read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty while I worked on catching up in my journal and drafting the first blog entry I would post upon my return to Holland house.

We arrived at Starbucks at about 11:30am. By Angela’s calculations, we would need to leave by approximately 5:30pm in order to return to the hostel for our bags, particularly since we needed to find out which metro stop to get off for the aerobus (because now that it was raining steadily, we were certainly not walking to the stop; not with her in a skirt and ballet slipper shoes). Needless to say, six hours is a long time to spend in a Starbucks. I hadn’t thought to bring my own book—David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day—along, particularly because my purse was already full enough, so I just amused myself by alternating staring out of the window, napping, and writing in my journal. Six hours worth of those activities, even in unequal portions, means a lot of writing. And, consequently, a lot of ink.

By 3pm, I had used up both Angela’s pen and my own pen. I was stuck. I neither wanted to spend yet more money on this trip, nor did I want to go out into the rain again, but my alternative was not acceptable: it meant sitting idly for another two-and-a-half hours with thoughts swarming my brain and itching to get onto paper. Reluctantly, I ducked out of Starbucks and headed to the closest place I thought might sell pens: the !Hola! tourist stand. When I requested a “bolígrafo,” the man running the stand handed me a blue Bic pen. It was the kind you can buy at Staples or Office Max in boxes of 25 or 50. Had I not seen him fish it out a box on the counter labeled Bic, I would have thought it was his own personal writing instrument, perhaps having come from behind his ear or his coat pocket. “Setenta,” he told me. Seventy eurocents for a cheapo Bic pen? Did he know what I could have bought this for in the States? Sighing, I handed over one euro, but when he began serving his next customer, I indignantly demanded my thirty eurocents change. He might be able to overcharge a desperate writer for a pen, but he was not going to cheat an American out of her thirty cents change.

Useful High School Spanish

The vocabulary we learn in school is not necessarily what is used in the practical, modern world. For instance, upon landing in the Madrid airport, I failed to find a sign anywhere labeled, “cuarto de baño.” Instead, I found the universal womanly outline indicating bathroom (or “toilet,” if you are British—even English speakers cannot seem to agree on the same word for this location) beside the word “aseos,” so I quickly imprinted this term in my memory. Later, I learned that the word “aseo” is not even the correct country-wide word for bathroom; in Valencia you might say “lavábamos,” and in Barcelona, the café workers in El Parque Güel didn’t understand why I was staggering around with my legs crossed until someone finally said the word “baño.” A “calle” in Madrid is a “carrer” in Barcelona, and “plaza” turns into “placa” when you go from one city to the other, as well. Luckily, mentally translating these words this just became common sense after reading so many maps.

Granted, I would never expect a high school Spanish class to teach every dialect of every city, much less every country of the world that speaks Spanish. That would be impractical, never mind impossible. However, I think that high school Spanish should better equip its students with vocabulary that will prove useful to them when they travel rather than just teaching them lists of random vocabulary words. After all, more students in a foreign language class are likely to travel to foreign countries that speak the language they studied than are likely to pursue the language formally (and would therefore need to amass as many nouns and verbs as possible). For instance, not once on my entire trip did I need to name an animal or describe the items in a classroom. I would, however, have given a great deal to know the terms for “left, right, behind, beyond, near, under, beside, etc.” Map reading and describing locations would be particularly useful, as well as more emphasis spent on the actual artificial practice of ordering foreign (i.e. unrecognizable) food in a restaurant and trying to buy tickets in a train or airplane station. If someone had told me that the train was actually a more practical means of transportation in Spain, I might have paid more attention to that unit when we studied it and consequently had an easier time navigating the stations in Madrid, Segovia, and Valencia.

Furthermore, American high school Spanish teachers might want to take a quick trip to Spain just to collect some real menus before teaching their food units, because not too many of the food terms I remember learning showed up on those menus. It’s nice to know that “lechuga” means lettuce and “carne” means meat, but it’s much more important to me to know that if I am ordering “paella con pollo y conejo,” I am going to get a dish containing chicken and rabbit meat.

Spain: danger, sidewalks!

In spite of my previous “kind elderly lady story,” Angela and I did not received immense amounts of hospitality in Spain. Rather, to the contrary; I have never encountered such poor customer service in my life—across the board. Every soingle place we went, the cashier seemed even more irritated at our interrupting his or her dayto make a purchase than the last. Maybe it was our initial inability to speak perfect Spanish, but I swear that the waiters and waitresses we had acted annoyed with us before we even opened our mouths. Americans are condemned for our capitalistic ways (seen as greedy and money-hungry, I have discovered), but at least we treat customers nicely for giving us their money. The idea is to make customers feel good so that they will return and give your store/restaurant/etc. more money. I wouldn’t go back to a single one of these places, I was treated with such disrespect!

Perhaps a lack of personal courtesy is the way of life in Spain, though, because sidewalks in that country are more dangerous than those in New York City. People make no bones about bumping into you or pushing you out of their way, whether or not they are in a hurry. Meanwhile, they have no concern for getting out of your way, no matter if you try saying excuse me or make it very apparent that you are trying to get around them. Walking three, four, even five abreast, the concept of forming a single-file line when approaching oncoming pedestrians must be foreign to Spaniards, because no one follows that unwritten law. I brace myself every time I approach a crowd, now. It’s like constantly playing the childhood game Red Rover: crash through the opponent’s line or you lose!

I found the most dangerous sidewalks to be located in Madrid and Barcelona. However, this was not due to the most obvious, logical the reason one might assume: the fact that because they are the two major cities that we visited, they were the most crowded. Instead, two other factors made these cities’ sidewalks particularly dangerous: cobblestones and rain, respectively.

In Madrid, all of the sidewalks were made of what one might call cobblestones or cement tiles. This in itself would not have been problematic, had the streets appeared distinctly differentiated, the way I am accustomed to streets appearing: made of black asphalt, with one or two yellow stripes running down the center. Rather, the streets in Madrid were simply continuations of the sidewalks, made of exactly the same materials. What’s more, there were no curbs to separate the cars’ territory from that of the pedestrians; usually, a few widely-spaced knee-high black poles stuck in ground hinted at that invisible border. In effect, Angela and I often wandered into harm’s way while reading maps, looking for streets signs, and gazing into shop windows and now owe each other our lives several times over.

Walking among Spanish pedestrians is dangerous to begin with, as I noted earlier in their refusal to yield to fellow sidewalk-ers. Walking among Spanish pedestrians in the rain is even more dangerous. For all the sun we enjoyed in Madrid, we received equal measures of rain in Valencia and Barcelona. When weaving in and out among stubborn Spaniards who refused to give up their positions on the pavement in these cities, I encountered another hazard by this refusal to yield: because the Spanish population seems to be, on average, about two to three inches shorter than the American population and because I am at the higher end of the American height spectrum, all of the unyielding Spaniards’ umbrella spokes jutted out at just the most perilous altitude: right at eye level. Fortunately, I have had a great deal of experience avoiding precisely this hazard ever since grade school, when I towered above that population, so I ducked a dodged my way through and have returned to Brighton unscathed, determined that on my next trip out of the UK, I will remember to pack my own umbrella.

Spain: first reflections

I have returned, and in more ways than one! I have returned to blogging because I have returned to the UK; for the past two weeks, I have been traveling around Spain: Madrid, Segovia, Toledo, Valencia, Alacant, Barcelona, and Taragona, to be more precise. I would love to have posted entries during my trip so that all of my thoughts would be fresh and immediate, but time and technology can be as restrictive as they are liberating, so I will be forced to use hindsight and reflection to tell you about all that I have learned and observed during my travels.

My traveling partner was my friend and fellow Holland housemate Angela, about whom I believe I have written once before. She is from Singapore, and this makes her a fabulous traveling partner for these expeditions to foreign countries. She is much better than an American traveling partner, because this way we don’t constantly compare things to “how they are at home,” nor are we as likely to act like or be perceived (and therefore treated) as a pair of “typical American tourists.” Then, she is much better than a European traveling partner, because this way everything is just as new, exciting, and foreign to her as it is for me.

Angela has done significantly more foreign travel than I have, so she’s a bit more apt at the hand-gesturing, talking slowly-and-loudly method than I am; still, since we went to Spain, I was able to make myself useful by recalling a bit of my high school Spanish. This came in quite handy one time when a bakery worker insisted we hadn’t paid for our pastry and coffee—I managed to make myself understood with the rudimentary sentences, “Compra este primero. Pagamos a la caja.” (So much for tense conjugation, though—present tense is all I could come up with fast enough. It was enough just to correctly match subject with conjugation under such pressure.) Another time, I came to the rescue when Angela had to exchange a pair of stockings. Being unable to read labels or understand the saleslady makes buying prepackaged clothing rather risky, she discovered, and I had been grocery shopping during the initial purchase. Luckily, however, I knew “negro” stood for black—the color Angela wanted—and was able to tell the saleslady we wanted stocking “con pies” (with feet) so that we found the correct stockings. Then, with some motioning at Angela’s previous purchase and the receipt, the words, “Ella compra este,” seemed to get across the message that we wanted to make an exchange. Angela even got money back!

While I may have managed to make myself understood a few ties, I utterly failed at understanding anyone else. Beyond recognizing a few items of food on a menu, finding exit signs (salida), and telling Angela how much money cashiers wanted (“Dos cincuenta y seis—two fifty-six.”), I couldn’t make sense of a thing anyone said. This proved especially frustrating when we got lost and needed directions. Usually, we had better luck if Angela approached a stranger and asked for help in English, with me interceding (in awful, broken Spanish) only if we were receiving completely blank stares and one-word answers. Ordinarily, we just had to do our best to follow pointing fingers or waving arms, particularly in Valencia, where no one seemed to speak English. The best response we ever got was in Barcelona. We were looking for Parque Güel in a drizzle, hoping to beat the rain (we didn’t and ended up sipping and sliding down a mountain of sandy grit under torrents of rain Angela claims not to have seen the likes of since she left Singapore). We finally stopped an elderly lady who, since she didn’t speak English and we obviously couldn’t understand Spanish, actually walked us to the street where we needed to turn. When we parted, she actually kissed us on our cheeks. We didn’t know how to thank her properly. The only word we knew was, “Gracias.”

Abuse for Knowledge

I am reading a scholarly, scientific article, “Mapping From Motor Cortex to Biceps and Triceps Altered by Elbow Angle,” by Graziano et. al. It’s for a paper I am writing that will count for 70% of my Sensory and Motor Perception grade. I am researching what has been found to be anatomically different in the brain between reaching and withdrawal behavior, particularly concerning these areas’ visual and tactile receptive fields.

Unfortunately, this particular article has disrupted my research, today. I was happily (or at least diligently) plodding along, deciphering what was meant by “We hypothesized that the effect of cortical stimulation would vary depending on joint angle in a manner consistent with pulling the joint toward a goal angle” (395)—which means that they thought by zapping some neurons in the brain, a monkey would either flex or extend its elbow depending upon how the elbow was initially angled—when I started stumbling over the experimental procedures. And by stumbling, I mean became increasingly horrified.

• “The monkey sat in a Lexan primate chair with the head restrained by the head bolt…. An acrylic skull cap was fixed to the skull with bone screws…. A steel guide cannulus (18-gauge syringe needle) was lowered through the hole in the skull.” (396)
  
• “During the experimental session, the monkey was given an injection of ketamine (10 mg/kg im). Within 10 min of injection the animal was fully sedated, that is, no longer emitting spontaneous behavior and no longer reactive to touch…. On five testing days, the monkey was allowed to awaken from the initial ketamine dosage during the following 4- to 5-h experimental session, such that the effects of stimulation could be tested in the awake condition.” (396)
  
• “One monkey was killed with an overdose of sodium pentobarbitol and perfused through the heart with 4% paraformaldehyde…. The second monkey is still in use in experiments.” (398)
  

This article was published in 2004. That was only three short years ago, not back in the dark ages, when animal torture was perfectly acceptable for scientific advancement. I have never read about this sort of treatment of animals for scientific research before. It truly makes me want to write about this, and not reaching or withdrawal or receptive fields, at all. How can I care what part of the brain scientists think I use to pick up my glass of water when they are drilling into the skulls of monkeys and forcing them to sit, sedated, for hours a day with metal helmets on just to find that information out? Monkeys are living creatures. No one would dream of drilling a metal skullcap onto a human baby. Behaviorally, there isn’t much difference between a monkey and a baby; in fact, a monkey is probably more advanced. You might even argue that it is more cognitively advanced, as well. So where lies the justification?