You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October, 2007.
Well, what a (near) month this has been…(7th October to the 25th).
We’ve had stupid storms, immature and strutting in their colossal bigness; malarkey in Corte Ingles, where we struggled with the simple task of buying birthday cards. The Spaniards, bless them, love cards to be either a) immensely girly and pink or b) really, really focussed on toilet humour and nudity, which made it an interesting time trying to pick out birthday cards for my elder brother and dad. Plus further trips to the cinema – most notably to watch ‘El Últimum de Bourne’…no prizes for guessing that one. Well, lot’s to cover, better get cracking.
I better tell all you wonderful potential Alicante students what to expect in your first lesson of the ERASMUS Spanish course.
First you go over some admin: a register, some papers about what you will be doing in your few months etc. Then you get stuck in. Each person in the class (about 20-24 – so like seminar groups in Bath) takes it in turn to stand up and give a little speech-ette about who you are and where you are living, scary huh? It was at first, but it was kind of fun because I tried to crack a few jokes, which actually went down a treat, and the lecturer is a cool lady who asks you questions should you freeze up. You know those awkward silences when you don’t know what to say and the lecturer is waiting for an answer without prompting or helping, and everyone is looking at you, just waiting. You feel hot and prickly, you want to be anywhere else but there right now. You want someone to say ‘okay cool, good stuff, next’. You have a mental block you can’t break down and you are just going ‘um…ah…uh’ in a pathetic, embarrassing stutter. You know that? Well that doesn’t/didn’t happen, it’s all good stuff. Then we had the, what I like to call, the international banter game. We went through each of the nationalities present in the class (English, Italians, Austrians, Germans, Dutch, Portuguese and a Kazakhstani) and thought of adjectives or words that are first thought of for that country.
· Italians – Pizza, pasta, wine, good food, over-the-top, greasy
· Spanish – Loud, rude, good food, good looking
· Dutch – Flat country, nice, clogs, windmills
· Austrians – Nothing
· Portuguese – Port
· Kazakhstani – Borat
· English – No cuisine (I protested at this quite vocally), everyone drinks tea, get in fights, drink lots of beer, closed people (I said ‘no, reserved, not closed’)
· Germans – Efficient, punctual, ordered, sensible, and as one of the dumb, stupid, idiotic, slick-back haired Dutch boys said…’la Guerra’, which means the war. In fact he said this twice just in case someone misheard him. Bearing in mind about half of our class are Germans, this comment went down like the bloody Titanic…what a first class load of prat!
From then on the course works its way through the tougher bits and bobs of Spanish grammar. Right now we are wading through the murky, confusing and seemingly fathomless depths of SER and ESTAR, you Spanish students will know what I mean. Oh, one last important thing to remember about the ERASMUS course, that we found out through hours of lunacy, it’s worth NO credits, so choose your courses wisely when the time comes.
No we come to one of my rants, and this one is dual-pronged. The topic? Spaniards with regards to zebra crossings and walking slowly.
The good old zebra crossing was first implemented in the UK (clever people) at 1000 sites in 1949 to introduce and allow safer crossing for pedestrians. This wonderful little creation soon spread itself around the world, improving on-foot safety everywhere. Spain has these little contraptions too, but to them it’s about as meaningful as writing ‘Hey simpleton, keep driving!’ and they do. They don’t stop! One time though really threatened to launch me into a breakdown. I had just finished some food shopping up at the big, busy shopping centre near where we live and was trying to cross the road outside it, so that I could go home. I was waiting at that crossing for more than a minute! A minute? That’s not very long I hear you scream. Well, when you are carrying hundreds of bags and the sun is quick-roasting you on a high heat and you want to get home because you forgot to apply cream, a minute is a long time when you should be permitted to cross!
The next point of unlimited fury is slow walkers. Now I walk at a comfortable pace, I don’t amble and dawdle, I go from A to B and don’t dilly-dally. People, and I use that term with the lightness of a feather in a vacuum, who walk slowly, heads in the clouds, or stopping in my way, incur in me an anger so foul that is could quite easily leap out of me, happily hop on a large mower and sluice them all where they stand. To illustrate, I am in the aforementioned shopping centre, food shopping again, as one does, and I find myself stuck in a busy aisle with my trolley. Behind me are people trying to get through and in front of me is a young couple and their child in a pushchair. The pushchair, and you must realise that this is a narrow aisle, is at right angles across the width of the aisle, whilst the parents dreamily look at the products on the shelves. So I am standing there, and standing there, and standing there but they don’t move. At this point I felt like grabbing the child, shouting ‘got ya baby!’ and dropkicking it into the next aisle – and lo, at 12:30 on the 14th October, a fair splat was heard in foreign foods – and then sliding past with my trolley. I didn’t do this, for I am a rational man, but my God it was irritating, and it happens all the time.
Well that was venomous, but on with the show. I also spent a weekend in Barcelona with some friends. Five-hour road-trips were endured, much was imbibed, Maharaja style clubs were frequented, fried chicken and pasta salads were cooked and friendships were forged. It was from the afternoon of Friday through to the evening of Sunday that I had my brief but intense injection of the urban drug ‘Barcelona’, so quite the action packed weekend.
Apart from these anomalies, life has been pretty much tickety-boo, with lectures, cooking, making/meeting friends and working. Until the next one then I suppose…
(Note to self: buy mallet for future use in the shopping centre)
So we come to the first two weeks of term (24th September to the 7th of October), our taster course, our trying out of lectures. On the Monday we had a meeting/presentation for courses within the faculty of Business and Economics. There are, on each day, meetings by each of the faculties for the purposes of explaining to the Erasmus students what they are all about. Ours was a bum-numbing hour and a half about stuff we really already knew; how the credits system works, how to register, how to use the website etc. On the other hand our meeting/presentation on the following day, by the languages faculty, was hosted by a witty young lecturer who kept us entertained for the hour duration and helped us avoid numbage of the glutei.
The first lecture of each subject of each course is a presentation lecture. Basically whether it lasts ten minutes or an hour, there is no teaching, just presenting to the avid audience what the individual course is going to consist of. I tasted lectures for prehistory, ancient world history, Russian and publicity. After the two weeks I am settled on my meal of prehistory, Russian and publicity, along with the obligatory Erasmus Spanish course. For the Spanish Erasmus course (you will have done an entry test for it in the summer holidays, along with an accommodation application) you are assigned a preliminary level, for example I was designated Avanzado 4, and then attend a lecture. At your first lecture you will have an easy creative writing assignment (for Avanzado 4 it was ‘write a letter of complaint to the town hall because your flat is crap’ – not exact words) and a little individual ‘oral exam’ about general things about your current collegial life, with whichever lecturer you have. Then, a few days later when all the students have carried out their tests, the classes may be reshuffled. For example, if I talked complete drivel in my oral or wrote Polish in my writing exam, I may have been moved down a level (levels: Inicial-1, 2, 3, 4; Intermedio-1, 2, 3; Avanzado-1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Superior-1, 2), but I didn’t and I wasn’t…so there.
One thing, just to gallop away at full steam from any point I may or may not have been making for a few minutes, that annoys me intensely and to the point of imminent mass slaughter on my part, is Spaniards and queuing. I shan’t pound my point home for too long as there exists a well documented, sub-conscious, cultural history that the English are the only, the only nation that can queue properly. We’re just so God damn good at standing in single file waiting our turn, denying any common sense that says you could easily get served quicker and have your business sorted out faster by pushing, punching, biting or flailing your way to the front of a queue…like the Russians. The Spaniards know this, and their abnegation of the art of queuing is pulled off with a laid back, Latin American, nonchalant and frankly flagrant demeanour! So I stand there AT the bus stop, CLEARLY waiting for the bus at the OBVIOUS front of a POTENTIAL queue, then the Spanish students waltz up lazily and take their places in a scruffy horde IN FRONT of ME. They couldn’t have been more obvious if they had tapped me on the shoulder and proclaimed ‘excuse me you big bag of international crap, please move. Why? Because I want to be first on the bus!’ It’s not my fault we had a better Empire! Anyway, enough of this hatred/banter, it’s all jest I assure you. Jest laden and smothered with copious, viscous layers of national pride and manners scorned.
Hollie and Nicky went home for the week so a few of my days blended into a bit of a indecipherable mulch. Things I did in no discernible order
1. ) Watched hours of online debates about religion and the environment
2.) Started hacking my way through the pre-history textbook I had been longing to get my greasy, keen hands on
3.) Filmed Jah, our favourite Rasta…and made a feature film on him
4.) Was made nauseous by an over affectionate couple on the bus in front of me having a conversation interspersed with lil kisses, oh, how sweet…nauseating. I had nowhere to look round this bus but at them because it was so busy.
5.) Went to more lectures; Russian and prehistory
6.) Went for a solo walk in the local hills, and went to the beach with Imogen a couple of times
7.) Cooked various meals for various groups of people
8.) Made a Spanish friend called Elena
9.) Experienced major storms again
10.)Had a date with Sonia from my Russian class
That’s about all for this last two weeks. It’s all about getting into a routine now; lectures, eat, sleep, lectures, forget to apply sun cream and pay the price, sleep, sleep, drink, lectures, etc, etc. Now all I need to do is my matricula (registration) and I am officially a student of the University of Alicante!! Good eh? So…hasta luego…
