No te creo.

Right now and since I have arrived, I have had so many feelings in my head that I don´t know where to start. I´m definitely not having as hard of a time adjusting as Caroline, but only because I´m here with other Americans and I speak the language well already. I send my love and as soon as possible myself out to Caroline. (I think I may be able to visit as soon as next weekend!) She has all sorts of restrictions and whatever, yes, but I can go into town and say hi if I want.

One supposes that the best place to start is the beginning. There could not have been a better person for me to see first that Katie because I think that during the semester she will be the person I relate to the best. She is responsible, familiar with the language, independent, doesn´t put up with much, loves to travel, is generally quiet, and is very hard-headed. We are good friends and hopefully we will have lots of fun adventures together.


As we were standing, waiting in the Airport, I began to see the people that I was going to be spending the semester with. There are tons of girls and few boys, and 60% stereotypical JMU college students - look and act nice, then party party - par-tay! Oh boy. Well luckily they do indeed act nice, so it´s not really that big of a deal as long as I´m not being a stereotypeical American as well. Anyways, as previously noted, we took a bus ride to Salamanca. When the bus pulled up to the place we were stopping in Salamanca, I was sitting across the aisle from Katie and we heard all the girls in the back started talking about¨Look! Are those our moms? They´re huddled around Jesus (hay-zoose) our instructor... I guess they are! Look they´re so cute, I hope I get the nice one, I bet they´re wondering the same thing - I hope I get the nice kid! Haha oh look they´re so cute!¨And things like that. Oh wow, here it is, the moment I meet my mama for 4 months. Somewhat nervously I walked off the buss in a huge mass of confused students, coats and luggage flying everywhere, a million people talking around me all at once, Jesús calling out names, mamas calling out names, kids pointing at each other and calling out names... and then there she was, calling out my roommate -Ian... and ´Krris-toh-fare?´Si! I called out. Standing there was your quintessential strong old grandmother. About 5 feet high, big glasses, but brown coat, speaking very loudly and demandingly to Jesus - ¨Son mis hijos? Diles salir conmigo, eh! Hijos! Ian y Kristohfare? Kaeepay? Keep? Si? Bueno, vamos ahora! Mi hija sale con el coche, pero no sabe cuando porque de la trafica!¨(Are those my sons? Tell them to come with me, eh! Sons! ... Yes? Good, let´s go now! My son is coming with the car, but who knows when because of the traffic.) So up pulls her son, Pepe in a nice sedan... there I am standing stupidly with my tons of luggage apologizing for how much I have, but they are trying to assure me that it´s no problem and it´ll fit. Of course they are right and off we go.


It wasn´t that far before we pulled up to a little plaza, where they led us out and around the corner to a rather nice looking entrance to an apartment complex. There wasn´t enough room for all our luggage and more than one person, so I got in the elevator alone with the stuff and soon was being pulled out on the first floor by Pepe and Ian, around the corner and there we were at our new house! Around the corner, there was a red curtain providing the entrance to the hallway. The first thing that we noticed was that it was a smaller place, but very well kept and with ornate incredibly carvings all along the hallways. Later we learned that the late husband of our mama carved all of them by hand himself! These carvings describe various sights of the city of Salamanca, various historical characters of Spain and some inconspicuous scantily clad women... It took us a little while to realize they were there. The first thing that we had to do was to choose our rooms - there were two somewhat large rooms and a smaller one. Pepe and Mama insisted that we choose by lottery, and so the smaller room was picked by our missing house-mate. As we began to unpack, the first thing our mama presented to us, happily was food! In the livingroom on the table she had set before us a plate of fried-looking things and a a rich-looking soup. Come to find out that they were more or less thick meat gravy croquettes and a very delicious lentil soup. This is going to be a great semester for food!

In his loud southern-accented Spanish, Ian excitedly told them that there was nothing like that from America and ate himself silly. I could not help but follow suit. Sometimes I like to remind Ian to continue speaking Spanish when he gives up and begins describing things excitedly in English. Anyways his first day here, he decided to buy a guitar which turned out later to be a very nice choice, if not a top-quality guitar.

Considering how much time I have to describe, and how much there is to describe, I will only continue talking about our living space and who I am living with. Later on, the second day, our third house-mate arrived: Austin. Austin is a JMU frat boy... and hasn´t had/taken? much opportunity to practice Spanish, it sounds like. But it seems to me many times that he´s trying more than Ian, in that even if he´s unsure of what the word is, he´ll try and eventually get his point across- he is trying in every sentence to use what Spanish he´s had in his few classes and is constantly learning: he has definitely gained my respect for his amount of effort put into his Spanish practice. The only problem so far is that while at home we don´t tend to be on time a lot because really many times it´s just not important... but the program directors here have been sufficiently clear that it´s important to be on time... but noone is. I try as hard as I can to be on time if not early, and we´re always waiting for the same 10 people to arrive, including my two house-mates. It just annoys me that people won´t pay attention to the people taking care of us here.

Apart from my house-mates, we´ve had lots of experiences already with the family of our Mama and Pepe, the day after we showed up, on Saturday all of a sudden Mama was setting a huge table and making lots of food - including Paella!!!. Extremely curious, the three of us stood around as family member after family member came in - and uncle, an aunt, another aunt, and 4 grandchildren! Honestly I can´t remember all of their names but if you remember, Ian bought a guitar and one of the uncles, Juan, said `Ay, permítame tocarlo`, literally `Hey, permit me to play that`. As soon as he grabbed the neck of the guitar, he began nail-picking a fast Spanish melody with very fast chord changes and a really beautiful sound. I don´t think it was a really good guitar, but he made it sing! We also talked a great deal, at least I tried to and Ian did his best. After a while I think that jet lag caught up with Austin and he just went to bed right after the meal. But with 12 people or so sitting around enjoying coffee and oranges, there were at least 4 conversations at once sinning around our heads. As was explained later to us, this family had its origins in Cadiz, Spain, which is renowned for particularly fast and blurred speech. Awesome. So we understood as much as we could and many times had to ask for clarification, but they were absolutely nothing but gracious and nice and accommodating to our lack of Spanish mastery. It turns out a great deal of the family are musicians! Of course the guitar-playing uncle (he claims it´s all just noodling around by ear... but he´s a little too good for that I think. I played Maria Schneider for him on my iPod and he said he had already heard it before which I found very unexpected) and there was a cousin who played clarinet and another who played drums and all kinds of things. Mama made a joke that we can all just play and the women will sing and dance. I was up for it.

I kept telling the family how awesome it was to have a regular weekend family meal, since I don´t have anything like that back at home. I´m more likely to have regular meals with all my friends than I am with my aunts, uncles, cousins and so forth. It was a very neat experience for everyone to be so intertwined in their lives and close enough to want to visit and hang out weekly. Being there with the family, while dizzying, was a delicious and very fun experience. Perhaps someday my own family may be so close, I´ll just have to keep up with wherever Aunt Becca might be living.

At any rate we continued talking and one of the uncles was talking about differences between the US and Spain and he mentioned that Spain´s madoals were different from the US. What? we asked. Madoals... They kept trying to repeat the word. Madonals... MacDonalds! It´s very interesting the way Spaniards use American words, they sound completely different and I keep tring to expect that it´s a Spanish word, but no, they try to mix and match. I suppose it´s like an American saying tor-til-luh.

When I worked briefly at Lori´s, I think I spent more time practicing my Spanish than being productive, and it has benefitted me I think. But the cooks used to say this one thing to me and continue to say it to me whenever I go in and talk to them again `No te creo`. So I asked the family if this meant anything, and we must have spent half an hour discussing what does it mean, yes I know what it literally means `I don`t believe you`, but is it an idiom, a saying, un dicho? No, they told me and kept trying to explain that it only means something literally, there`s no non-literal translation for it. After a while I just told them, `¿No tiene otro sentido? No se creo.` - `It doesn`t have another meaning? No te creo.` From then on it just became the joke of the evening to explain away just about any confusion. Good times. I guess you had to be there. You weren`t there? No te creo.