Odds & Ends

Well, we’re officially within a month for my return to the United States (29 days today)! Crazy!

This post is going to be a conglomeration of a lot of little or extraneous things that I’ve experienced over the last couple weeks. I’ll try to make it as least jumpy and scattered as possible, so just bear with me!

Halloween

They do celebrate Halloween here in Spain, but definitely not to the extent that we do in the United States. Here are some similarities and differences that I noticed:

• Kids still dress up, but more than anything they dress up in scary costumes or as TV/movie characters. Dressing up as animals or regular people (such as clowns, cowboys etc.) is done during Carnival and so Halloween is specifically a time for scary things.
• Because all housing in Alicante is apartments (where you need several keys or buzzing-ins to reach the actual door), I was curious how trick-or-treating would be done. It goes like this: whoever is in charge of the apartment complex puts out a piece of paper and whoever wants to hand out candy signs their name next to their apartment number (equivalent to the light system in the US). Then, groups of kids (10-15) all come together (sometimes with a parent, sometimes without) and buzz the intercom, saying “truco o trato” (trick or treat). You buzz the kids in and then they come to your apartment door, knocking on the door and saying “truco o trato” again. They go to all the doors in that apartment complex that signed the paper and then move on to the next one. To me, it’s much more complicated, but the end result is the same.
• We had three or four groups of kids visit our door.
• My host mom had me help her with handing out the candy which gave me the chance to see another difference between Spain and the US. The candy my host mom handed out included hard caramels, unwrapped sour candies, and unwrapped marshmallows. In the US, handing out unwrapped candy to kids is a huge don’t-do and kids (because of their parents mostly) won’t eat anything without a still-sealed package. I must confess that I felt a little weird handing out unwrapped, single marshmallows to kids, but no one acted like this was out of the norm. Very different from the United States.

Las Cositas (The Little Things)

I’ve begun to realize that having spent three months in Spain has started to have an effect on my brain and its language section. Here are some of the little things I’ve noticed in the past month in terms of my Spanish and Spanish abilities.

• One of my professors suggested that a good way to familiarize yourself even more with Spanish is to watch Spanish kid cartoons, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Kid cartoons are created with the purpose to teach language, grammar, and vocabulary, as their primary audience is learning how to communicate. Instead of watching kid cartoons, I’ve started watching Spanish shows on Netflix (in Spanish, of course, although they do have English versions if anyone wants to watch them — they’re very good) with the Spanish subtitles on. The subtitles help me because a) I’m a visual learner and b) my hearing isn’t quite good enough yet to catch all of what they say (my reading level far surpasses that of my ear). It’s helped a lot and is something I’m going to continue when back in the US.
• It might tickle you to know that I now catch myself talking to myself and thinking to myself in Spanish. When I’m thinking about what to do next, I’ll say “vale, vale, vale” (“ok, ok, ok”) or when I stub my toe or something like that, I’ll use Spanish interjections instead of English ones. It’s very weird, but also really cool.
• Another thing that has shocked me is that I’ve ordered food so many times in Spanish that I’ve begun to think that food ALWAYS needs to be ordered in Spanish, like a default. For example, when I went to Glasgow and would be ordering food in a restaurant, sometimes I would start to ask for it in Spanish, an linguistic reflex to ordering food. Very, very strange. I’m worried I’m going to do this when I get back to the US, haha.

Chocolate Factory Tour

Before you get too excited, no one blew up into a blueberry on this tour. In fact, it felt more like I was touring NASA rather than Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, as everything was mechanized and sterile.

We toured the Valor Chocolate Factory in Villajoyosa (town really close to Alicante) which is the number one chocolate-supplier in Spain. Their chocolate goes all over Spain, of course, but some also comes to the United States too. On the tour, we got to walk in this upstairs hallway that overlooked the factory (they were making some sort of chocolate bonbon when we were there so that was cool to see) and then we watched a video about how they make their chocolate. There was also this amazing sculpture (which is made entirely out of chocolate):

Then they took us to their gift shop where they had samples of four of their chocolate bars for us to try (they were all DELICIOUS!). Overall, it was a really fun experience and another cool thing that my program organized for us to do.

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Finally, here’s a picture of me and the beach and the starting sunset.

I must confess, it’s a bit strange to listen to Christmas music while walking on the beach (yes, I have started listening to Christmas music — yes, I am that person). But, as my mom mentioned, the Wiggles celebrated Christmas on the beach all the time, so I’ve just started thinking of myself as their fifth member.

Next blog, I’m going to share pictures and experiences from my trip to Valencia (super fun!), which will hopefully be a little less scatterbrained than this post was!

¡Hasta luego!

— Grace