Life is made up of….

As you’ve probably seen before on my blog, I have found moving overseas to be full of challenges, I don’t think that the cultural differences have been so hard to grasp, more the issue of picking up a new language. Funny how the simple things that we all do every day become fraught with pitfalls; when just working out how to say “hello” in whichever situation can cause a few minutes of frantic memory searching and word repetition.

I have also found my capacity to work around these problems and to adapt to my (now not-so) new country and language remarkable. (I am sure this is true of everyone in my situation but I can only actually speak for myself).

Yesterday I had an epiphany moment which showed me just how far I have come in the 1 year and 9 months that I have called Madrid home.

The realisation, as with all the best moments of enlightenment, came to me in a bar. This bar to be precise:

I had a meeting in the city centre yesterday morning and so jumped in the car, zipped into town (some hairy driving on the way of course, couldn’t possibly post without mentioning driving now could I?), headed straight for the car park nearest my meeting, dumped the car and then trotted happily off in the sunshine. I arrived early and decided that I should get a coffee and kill some time. On the way I had seen a guy dive into a likely looking place and had made a mental note. I retraced my steps and headed into the bar.

Really great little bar by the way, very Spanish, or rather Madrileño; go in and head down a couple of steps; standing only area at the actual bar with a small restauranty bit off to one side. As I walked in I was greeted with a sturdy “buenos días” by the barman. Appropriate response made, coffee ordered, milk selected to my taste and there I was. Coffee in hand pondering how marvellous life can be and how simple things can make you smile and then The Epiphany came upon me.

6 months ago just navigating into the centre would have been a major issue, forget finding the car park and I wouldn’t have even thought about going to order a coffee at a little local bar like that on my own, without a Spaniard to back me up. This one of those places where the waiters chat to you after all. I would have not been able to deal with the idea of thinking of and then making the appropriate responses, I would probably have broken out in a sweat at just the thought of it but yesterday I did it without thinking. And I was happy doing it. I enjoyed the bar, the waiters, the coffee and standing there on my own in the heart of the Spanish capital, not a Starbucks in sight.

Cue proud face because it hasn’t always been easy.

Incidentally, I really recommend going to a place like this if you are ever in Madrid, they’re not posh or swanky but they are really Spanish.

Today I had another cheers-cheers moment: I called a doctor’s surgery and made an appointment. As far as I can tell I made it correctly, with the right doctor and I have noted the time and date down right. You will be the first to know if I have screwed it up.

Life is made up of…small victories and tiny things that can really make you smile.

One of my perennial (petty and stupid) rants

You may have noticed that I rant, quite a lot, on my blog about driving in Spain. Here's a perfect illustration of the attitude to driving over here that provokes the aforementioned rants. I don’t want to be too sweeping but, many people here approach driving & road use with the kind of selfishness that would normally be preserved for something more tangibly own-able, like chocolate, or Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. It’s an “I-own-the-road-and-have-the-right-to-do-precisely-as-I-please-without-regard-for-other-road-users” attitude.

The picture was taken of the road outside my house. As you can see, it’s a smallish two way side street in Madrid. I watched the guy park, actually let’s call it what it is; I watched the guy dump his car. It wasn’t that the space was tight; he simply could not be bothered to park properly, nor was he nipping in and back out; the Mercedes stayed parked like that for 3 days.

Ok, next post will not be driving related. Promise.

Driving force – The Sequel

Back in November last year I had a little mardy fit about Spanish driving. After more than a year of driving here I have a) something else non-ranty to add to it now and b) miraculously survived.

So. Traffic lights.

We all know what they are, they are the life-saving devices that allow us to work out whether we should stop or go at intersections (when our common sense and patience cannot be trusted to do this for us). In the UK we have three pretty colours of lights, each with their own specific meaning:

 Red: STOP

 Amber: PREPARE YOURSELF TO EITHER GO OR STOP (in London this is also seen as a dark green i.e. go anyway)

 Green: GO GO GO

Now, in Spain the system is rather simpler, they have red and green. Easy peasy we shout, stop and go!

You are wrong.

In Spain ALL colours of traffic lights are entirely negotiable.

Here are some handy tips for dealing with the lights in Spain:

1. Light has just turned from green to red: rather than stopping you must now put your foot down and speed through the red light. Ignore honking and pedestrians. NOTE; if the light has been red for longer than 5 seconds you MUST screech to a halt.

2. Light has just turned from red to green (without the handy amber warning period): stop faffing with the radio / doing your hair or makeup / shouting at the kids / reading the paper / cleaning your glasses. Floor it.

ALTERNATIVE

Carry on with what you were doing until someone honks. Floor it.

3. Waiting at a red light and all appears tranquil i.e. no cars to be seen: jump the light. There’s no-one coming (we hope).

Please remember that there is also the added complication of the flashing amber light. This makes its appearance at times of the day that are considered to be less busy traffic-wise. It basically means, “feel free to go if there is nothing coming, but do please slow down and think about it first”.

I have to admit that the rule-adherent pedant that lurks within the darkest recesses of me gets all cross, nostril-flarey and tutty when it sees this sort of rule-breaking. It also grudgingly admits that somehow it seems to work.

Of course, you get the occasional tosspot who throws caution to the wind and dices with death (their own and that of others) but generally it’s ok. Drivers (again, generally) look, assess and THINK and then make a decision on whether it is safe to go or not.

In my musing it has become apparent that this could be seen as a sort of (rubbish) metaphor for the Spanish attitude to many things. (My metaphors are not world renowned, just in case you were wondering).

In Spain you are expected to use your common sense and to try break as many rules as you possibly can. How refreshing.

Breathing space

I shall start this by stating an obvious fact that anyone would know. Spain is geographically larger than the UK. Very roughly put, it is about twice as large. Which, to the average Brit, is bloody humungus.

Spain also has a much smaller official population that the UK. Below I include figures and stats for those of you who care but, Spain’s population is roughly 1.3 times smaller than the UK’s.

Basically this should tell you that, in the UK, we live really close together and don’t have a lot of space to spread out. (Jeremy Clarkson talked about this very thing in his column in this week. He plans to invade France apparently).

I have to say that I noticed this long before I moved to Spain. When I was on my gap year I noticed that you could drive for hours without passing a house or a village, try doing that in the UK.

The Spanish are (obviously) used to the scale of their country. This is reflected in their language. To me, if you say something is ‘next’ to something else it means that it is, at most, a 5 minute walk. Here if they say that it means it’s roughly a half hour drive.

Every summer (mainly August) Madrid literally empties of everyone who is not a tourist as it is considered too hot for sensible people. I make no judgements on the tourists but the Madrileños are correct, it’s bloody hot. Anyway, the roads fill with people heading out of the city for the coast or the Sierra nearby (that’s the Spanish definition of ‘nearby’ btw, so roughly an hour or so). Off they drive on their hols, to the various coasts and they think nothing of a 3 hour plus drive, in fact, that’s considered to be pretty close really, all things considered.

I know people who drive 6 hours every other week to go and visit their families back in their pueblo. At least they have the decency to admit that 6 hours is a bit of a step.

I wonder what they (meaning anyone from a larger country than the UK) make of the UK. This is a place in which the farthest you can ever be from the sea is 80 miles. They must have constant vertigo. I mean, they have barely started driving and there it is, looming in front of them, The Edge. It must be very disconcerting.

I on the other hand consider any drive over an hour and a half to be really rather long and tedious. An hour or, at a push two, seems a perfectly reasonable time in which to reach the edge of the country and have a look over, just to see how the sea is and things.

I often had the sensation in the UK that I couldn’t get away from people. That wherever you go, you are surrounded or never far from people and things and noise. I may have been exaggerating slightly. I definitely didn't have that feeling in NZ or SA so I know what it is like to have a bit of space for your thoughts, a bit of peace. The sky also seemed bigger outside the UK, somehow limitless. You could really breathe it all in.

It is interesting to note that Brits are a pretty antisocial lot in spite of our proximity, or maybe because of it?

I could go on to comment on the sociability of the Spanish but that will make a post on its own so I’ll leave it until I can be arsed to write it.

Here’s a pic taken a 40 minute drive from the very centre of Madrid to give you an idea of how quickly you can get away and be largely alone here.

The stats

Spain’s population (as of Jan 08 which was the latest census) is 46,157,822. The UK’s 60,944,000 (projected population based on 2001 Census growth figures). Spain’s size: 195,884 square miles. The UK’s: 94,600 square miles (inc NI).

Bullfighting

I will get round to writing about bullfighting at some point, but right now, I cannot deal with the stream of abuse I would receive from the Legions of the Ignorant.

This columnist has a very valid point. My opinion is formed but I found this thought provoking, if rather preachy. The point about the British tendancy towards making statements that smack of Imperial Paternalism is embarrassingly true. We like to preach at people about things upon which we don't have a full grasp.

Hypocrisy is not pretty.

Sorry what?

I am currently suffering from a strange identity crisis that seems to be leaving me in a rather rebellious state of mind. I have lived overseas for a long period of time before (South Africa) but didn't feel enormously disconnected because I was in an essentially English speaking country. Moving to Spain, while geographically much closer, has proven to be an exponentially larger mental leap.

The first thing that happens when you arrive in a truly 'foreign' country (which for my purposes here constitutes a country in which English is not one of the main official languages) is that you realise that you can't actually communicate with anyone.

I wasn't one of these who arrives in a terra incognita expecting everyone to speak English. I arrived with a working knowledge of Spanish. I was by no mean fluent, but could make myself sort of understood using a clever combination of painstakingly constructed sentences using creaking present tense, laughably bad attempts at future and past tenses, along with expansive hand gesturing and meaningful looks.. I thought this was good. It worked well in bars, which, let's face it, are my natural habitat. It is only when I moved to actually live in Spain that I realised how total my linguistic impotence was, and what's more, how vulnerable and powerless that inability to communicate makes you feel. I am a communicator by trade and found (still find at times) the experience of being unable to express myself especially restrictive and frustrating.

All the colloquialisms people naturally use mean that what you learnt at school is completely bloody useless, overly formal and (to the Spanish) faintly amusing. Basically forget chatting amiably to people. Not only that, if someone veers off the 'script' in a shop or restaurant you are left blinking in confusion, startled and panicking like a rabbit-in-the-headlights. You can't make jokes or enjoy the true and deep connection that moments of real silliness bring. I miss those.

Another problem is that, well, how to put this...I am quite opinionated. I have things to say, points to make, valid and important things to share with the world *chortle* and with the language barrier it's a battle to sound even vaguely competent, let alone worthwhile. You sit there expressing yourself like a 10 year old child while quietly fuming. Fuming is bad for you. It adds wrinkles and gives me a headache.

The key here: you are taken back to a point in your life when you were learning everything for the first time. Your grasp of language and how to express larger concepts is pretty tenuous. You are effectively a child again and it is AWFUL! Something you have spent a lifetime perfecting is rendered totally useless.

A year on, I still get scuppered by simple things like calling a doctor's to make an appointment. And what about calling the police or an ambulance? Don't even get me started on trying to take out insurance or open a bank account. Things that you can do easily at home take real preparation and courage to do when you don't have a complete command of the language. It is not helped by the soul destroying amount of bureaucracy, paperwork and hoop-jumping there is to be done in Spain. There's also lots of queuing, but that's fine, you can queue in English, nobody minds, it's when you get to the desk the fun starts.

I am lucky; I work in a completely Spanish speaking environment and have Spanish friends and husband and live in a city where the grasp of English is not particularly strong. I have been forced to speak Spanish the majority of the time. This has meant that within a year I have been able to become passably fluent which alleviates some of the mardiness to which I am prone when thwarted in any way. I still have those moments of total impotence but they come with less humiliating frequency than before. I still struggle when talking about some of the deeper things in life but then I sometimes struggle to find words to express some of the things that I feel. Some things leave me speechless with rage regardless of language. Words are ultimately clumsy and often inadequate.

There is an enormous sense of achievement when someone looks at you and says 'wow, you have improved so much, you can hardly tell you're foreign sometimes'. They are probably being kind and encouraging but it is genuine enough.

So we come full circle to the 'identity crisis' I mentioned at the beginning. You find yourself wondering who exactly you are. You aren't who you normally are because you can't convey that person; there is no way to make her known to the world. You are just some (slightly mad) English girl in Spain with an amusing tendency to get caught dancing to her iPod in lifts, a stranger in a strange land. You can't be witty, or clever, or even express your frustration. Which is...well...frustrating!

As I mention, it has left me rebellious, wanting to kick out against the things that I see as holding me back, stopping me from being me, whoever that is. It has prompted me to re-examine myself, work out what is important to me, the kind of person I want to be, the things I am actually interested in and precisely what I want to get out of life. I have rediscovered my passion for some things; things that are really important to me. I am setting out on a metaphorical road to find out more, to learn, to actually feel and fight rather than stolidly accept. So actually, it isn't an identity crisis at all; it's more an identity redefinition or rediscovery. Ah. It's a good thing!

I still have moments of darkness and frustration when I cannot express myself as I would like to but I have just discovered a song with this line in it which I actually think makes a great point:

'Even as we speak we kill the mystique' – I'm Making Eyes at You, Black Kids.

Tele Talk - Part 5

I think I have vaguely lost the plot with this one but I will include it anyway, as, well, you know.  It’s my blog and I want to whinge and moan.  I just want to. 

5. And now, coming to you from across The Pond…

This is not a complaint about American tele - although I have seen some series that never made it to release in the UK, and could probably come up with numerous decent reasons as to why - it is a complaint about dubbing.

More specifically, bad dubbing.  Oh, and subtitling.  Again.  Bad. 

We often watch these programmes in their original forma and have the Spanish subtitles on.  As my knowledge of Spanish has increased, so has my realisation that the people who actually write the subtitles clearly have not got the faintest clue what the story is about or the humour.  I mean, a lot of what the write doesn’t bear even a passing resemblance to what is said.  I am talking about tone here, not the actual words.  Everyone knows that a language has it’s own way of communicating something.  But. It’s the tone that is wrong.  Sometimes though, it can even be basic facts born of incomprehension of pretty basic English.  Or, I suppose of not hearing what they have said properly.  Either way.  It isn’t the same programme when they get it wrong.  

The above can be said for dubbing.  

They dub a lot here.  Everything that is aired in that was originally in any other language is dubbed rather than subtitled.  It is normal here.  The people see nothing strange in it.  They are used to it.  Spain is one of the only Spanish-speaking countries to bother with dubbing at all.  Most Latin American countries just air the programmes with subtitles.  

Oh, and the voices?  Well, the voices don’t resemble to original voices in any way.  Karen from ‘Will & Grace’ is an example of a character whose voice belies, well, her character but also defines it.  Here she talks normally.  It takes away from the humour of the characterisation.  Homer doesn’t have the same voice, he doesn’t even say ‘d’oh’.  Homer without d’oh.  I’m sorry, what?  

It’s all well and good to say that something doesn’t translate well so they have changed it, but, in that case, don’t air it.  Or don’t dub it.  Just air it as is with subtitles.  Those who get it, get it.  Those who don’t don’t.  

Dubbing also has the added irritation of just being really counter-intuitive.  At least for me.  It’s the mouths moving but the words not matching thing.  There are also times when the mouths have stopped moving and we are looking at someone else but the original person is still talking.  It’s just weird.  

Thank feck for that, I have finished.  I promise, my next blogs will be a more reasonable length and may actually be interesting...although I make no promises about the interesting part!