My Spanish Family

Although, you would never know it by reading my blog, I have been in Valencia for two weeks today. Whaaaaat?? How did that happen?? Time is just flying by and I have managed to fill my time with way too many things to adequately describe on here. If I tried, I would end up with a book instead of a blog. So I'm just going to write small snapshots of the super important things and hope I remember the rest.

Meeting my Host Family:
So once we left Toledo and finally made it to Valencia, it was time to meet the people that we would be living with for the next five weeks. ISA found from past experiences that it is much easier to have the students stay on the bus and call them up one by one to meet their host parents. It kind of left us with the feeling of a pet shop puppy. Noses plastered to the windows, "Oh Pick me!! Pick me! Bring me home with yoooou!" Of course, my roommate Meagan and I were some of the last to be called. I finally stepped off the bus and a short, round, blond woman came up to me and kissed me on both cheeks. Wait? What? This is my spanish madre? I was expecting someone more . . . spanish looking. She looks just like a soccer mom. Which isn't surprising since that's pretty much what she is. After she kissed me hello, her husband did the same. Then a guy in his teens followed. I knew that my family had a 16 year old son so you could have knocked me over with a feather when the guy spoke and I heard an American accent. It was the host son from spring semester! After his program ended, he moved in with his bartender and had came to help us settle in. There is no way to describe how incredibly helpful this was. He translated for us, showed us how to use the five different knobs in the shower (Yes, I said Five!) and told us how extremely laid back our host mom is. He also gave us a list of bars and clubs to go to and started every story with either "This one time, I was at this bar and . . ." or "This one morning I was really hungover and . . ." I'm pretty sure he was drunk the entire five months he was here.

Madre:
After living with her for two weeks, I can honestly say that we got the best mom in the program. She doesn't follow any of the rules laid out by ISA and she does 8 times as much work than she has to. ISA had given us all a list of rules, laying out how much laundry we can have per week and explaining that the host parents won't let us drink or have alcohol in the house. What a laugh. She does laundry every day and I don't think a lunch or dinner has passed without her offering me wine, beer or sangria. She also insists on remaking my bed every morning because apparently after 26 years, I still can't do it right.  When I first got here, I talked to her the most but somehow she has gotten harder to understand. I think she keeps forgetting to slow down and so I just do a lot of smiling and nodding. She absolutely loves showing me her photo albums and showing off the pictures of her daughters wedding. Sometimes, we hear her watching the DVD of the wedding over and over again.

Padre:
If my host mom didn't meet my expectations of what a spanish woman looks like, the dad more than made up for it. He looks just like the stereotypical middle aged spanish man in Saturday morning cartoons! For the first three or four days, we just kind of tiptoed around each other, neither one of us knowing what to say or if the other person would understand. However, once I started coming out to the terrance to drink coffee while he smokes, we started talking up a storm. I actually have a reason to be grateful that my parents got me used to the smell of smoke. I get a ton more spanish practice everyday than my roommate because she usually just talks to our host mom. El Padre purposely talks really slow so my poor overloaded brain can keep up and when I look confused, he will either repeat it, act it out or find another way to explain what he is saying. I've had hour long conversations on everything from the American Healthcare system, what I want to do when I get out of school, the spanish government, to the problem of forest fires in Spain. The last resulted from a extremely complicated article that I had to read for my culture class. I am pretty good at reading in Spanish but this article had me beat! Even with a dictionary in hand, I couldn't understand more than a quarter of it. So I asked him for help. He sat with me and read every single line of this three page paper and explained every single word that I didn't understand. If I had to describe this man in one word, the word would be patient! It took him an hour and even after I told him that I thought I could struggle through the rest on my own, he just kept going. That day in class, my classmates were completely confused but I was answering questions left and right.

Hermano:
My host brother is 16 and he actually speaks a little english. He learned it from playing online video games so he's a little inconsistent on the vocabulary but he has almost no accent. We don't actually talk that much because I have this weird habit of being unable to speak spanish with anyone who knows a little english. I really need to get over that but I can't seem to forget that I sound like an idiot in spanish. Plus, he speaks really quietly so I can almost never understand what he is saying. So then he tries to switch to english but then he gets frustrated with not being able to explain what he is trying to say so we both end up giving up. Not to mention, he is 16 so he spends most of the day in his room, playing video games. No matter where you go, somethings stay the same!