I listened to the other American girls my age waiting for their parents, too, and tried my best to disassociate with them. ;) We learned in class last weekend about some psychological term for "positive face" and "negative face" and how cultures deal with them differently. In America, for example, there is a certain social supposition that by interacting with another individual you are invading their personal space and thus you need to act very overly nice to make sure you don't bother them too much. In contrast, Spanish culture has the supposition that everybody is on an equal level to everyone else, so you can more or less act real with them, as if they were just another friend or colleague of yours. This can be seen in a bar where an American would say, "May I have a beer, please?" whereas a Spanish person would simply say, "Gimme a beer." When she presented this notion, I sorta thought she was full of it, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. And those girls at the airport were a perfect example; they were chatting on and on about how inconvenient the metro strike was that morning and where they lived and how they got to the airport. But it was all so overly animated and fake. A group of Spanish girls in that situation probably would have just made a sincere, one sentence complaint about it and move on. Sheesh. Spanish people feel little desire to be super fake to impress other people. This is why I like them. ;)
Anyway, in no time dad and I were on the train to school, me talking his ear off and him looking out the window like a wide-eyed puppy. Ha! His first comment was about how surprised he was that there were so many apartment buildings but no houses. And it's true - houses don't exist in Madrid. The closest you'll come to a house is a quadraplex of condos, but those are usually just for families fairly well off. But after having lived in Spain for 10 months in total, a lot of these "strange" things have utterly ceased to seem out of the ordinary to me.
I'm really excited to hear everything else that seems different to him here that I've totally stopped noticing! :) It's just so difficult for me to grasp that this is his first time here and everything is completely new and foreign... Because it all feels so much like home to me. But at the same time, it's a really exhilarating feeling to realize how I've really made a life for myself in a foreign country in a foreign language and with a foreign culture... And gotten so immersed in it all that it feels completely familiar as if I'd always been surrounded by these things.
Two and a half hours after he'd landed in Madrid and we were at my school! It was way surreal to have him there - school is one of those things that's like an entirely separate world for me that nobody that knows me has ever entered before. Sometimes I feel like I am living a bunch of different little lives, and when two of them happen to coincide for a moment, it is the strangest feeling!! :) But it was awesome having him at school!!
I'd talked up his visit for a whole week and by this point, it was all every single kid in primary could talk about. Teachers were texting me, asking me when my father would be coming to their classroom, because the students were getting restless! Teachers were stopping me in the hall, begging me to visit their classroom next. Basically, Dad was the school celebrity of the day - and it was adorable!
I'd asked him to bring candy for the kids, and he took my request super seriously! He'd brought a Costco bag of peanut butter cups and DumDums, as well as a box of toffee just for the teachers! :) I'd sort of thought all the kids would care about would be the big bags of candy in his arms, but they all were actually super interested in him and asked him all sorts of questions, full of excitement and enthusiasm to get a turn to speak with him. :) Adorable! I felt kinda bad dragging him from room to room to perform like a show pony, but despite being a bit jet-lagged, Dad seemed to be loving it all as much as the kids were! ^_^ He answered all their questions with a big smile on his face and passed out candy to 200 kids throughout the day. When we went to and from the cafeteria, a bunch of kids waved at him and yelled, "Hi, Dan!!!" grinning from ear to ear.
The cutest parts of his visit were the following:
1) When Laura's 3rd graders stood up as if they were going to sing the Star Spangled Banner, and then burst out in a rousing rendition of 50 Nifty United States! Omg! They did a great job and I didn't even know Laura had been working on it with them!! It was super cute and Dad (and, perhaps even more so myself!) was super impressed!
2) When the 1st graders all whipped out their homework from their desk - which was to write and draw my dad a Welcome note - in exchange for a DumDum! Their pictures were the most adorable things ever - as was their bubbly excitement. <3
3) When the question from the students that most stumped my dad was, "What's your favorite animal?" Ha! He had to think about it before answering that it was probably a tiger. :) Cute.
4) When we saw my Bachi Boys and Pineapple outside during recess and hung out and chatted with them for a little while! Yay!! ^_^ My dad was way impressed with their English fluency, but even more impressed by our rapport. As we walked away from them, he told me how amazed he was by how well I was able to relate to them and understand them... and how much they seemed to like me. :) I seriously adore them and think it is so funny when they say other teachers get upset with them, because I can't understand it. I would gladly teach my Bachi Boys and Pineapple English, Spanish and whatever else I would be fairly knowledgeable in and get their grades up in no time simply by motivating them through being real with them instead of talking down to them. Too bad I couldn't drop some of the other classes I don't like half as much and spend extra time with them. Ha.
5) When (and this is the coolest one) Dad met the director of the entire school in the hallway and they had a mini chat! First, it had been long wondered by just about every teacher at that school (and especially myself) as to whether the director spoke English very well or not. Despite the fact his first words to my dad were, "I'm sorry my English is not very good..." he actually spoke very well!! He went on to tell my dad that everybody at the school absolutely loved me and be congratulated my dad on having such a wonderful daughter. Omg!!! Most adorable thing ever!! And coming from the director of the school - whose opinion everybody seems to take quite seriously - I felt rather honored. :) What was even better was that he said all this while dressed in one of his typical suits, but today had on a yellow tie with tiny, mint colored elephants all over it. Um, dashing. ;)
After an exciting and eventful day at school, dad took a nap while I tended to a small bit of work and later we explored Alcalá. A brief tour later and we were off to Madrid to get him checked into his hotel and to go to dinner where we'd made reservations at paella restaurant- which turned out to be very fancy, indeed! They literally chilled a bottle of white wine for us in one of those little metal stand things with ice and a bit cloth napkin. O_O Whoa! The paella was really yummy and everybody talked to me only in Spanish (which is a serious rarity here, actually). It was by far the fanciest meal I've ever had in Spain and I had a great time living the life of a foodie again. :)
XOXO
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