why didn't i take spanish in high school???

so far, i'm not impressed with UPF. this could be because my expectations were too high, i admit. i chose this MLTA program for several reasons:

1. it was cheap (the whole program is about $5000)
2. it was one year (rare and not actually ideal for a master's program, but enticing)
3. it was in barcelona (the #1 tourist destination in europe at the moment, great weather, etc.)
4. the acclaimed linguistics department (in fact, pompeu fabra, UPF's namesake, was a linguist)
5. the website was impressive, informative, and kept up to date
6. the whole master's program is guaranteed in english

1-5 are still true, but that pesky #6 is proving hard to enforce. 


thursday i went to my second ever class (Cognició, comunicació i competència lingüística) with of bunch of other linguistic students. the professor began speaking in spanish. then she noticed some faces lacking the comprehension look and asked whether everyone spoke spanish. a girl from macau (who speaks chinese and english) and i raised our hands to signal that we don't speak spanish. she explained in english that it would be too hard for her to maintain english for the three hour class each week (well, for 5 weeks) so she was just going to speak in spanish. she said not to worry, though, because the powerpoints and handouts would all be in english. 

wtf. 

some girl next to me kindly interpreted a few important things the teacher said during the next couple of hours, but i was just sitting there seething and hardly cared what she said.

that night i went home and wrote an email to the teacher, citing the page of UPF's website that guarantees the possibility of taking the entire linguistics major in english. i told her how i (and the other girl must have) felt isolated, discouraged, frustrated, and angry. i asked for her suggestion about what i should do about this class, as i won't be sitting through spanish classes any more. 

friday i went to the registration office to pay and confirm my schedule. i asked the nice ladies up there (who speak english on a lower intermediate level) what could be done about this lady who speaks english but simply refused to, or if not about her, about my schedule, since hers was a mandatory class for my discipline. they said i should tell the department head. since i'd already written an email to the lady, i decided to wait for her reply before doing anything else. 

after registering and paying, i went to my only friday class, only to find that not only was the professor speaking in spanish, but all the materials and powerpoints would also be in spanish. i walked out of the classroom less than a minute after i walked in and headed back to the nice ladies in the registration office to tell them another class of mine needed to be changed (thankfully, this one was optional at least). while i was telling them, i started to tear up in frustration. they were so sweet and assured me they wanted to make me happy and comfortable at UPF. they said they'd talk to my adviser and get me out of the optional class. then they'll get the department head involved, who will talk to the first teacher, and if she won't switch, then they would help me change my discipline to get out of taking her class.

changing my discipline would mean my mandatory classes change and my classes would be better suited for a professional or research career than an academic career.

my expectations have been lowered a lot now, but so far i'm not impressed with UPF (except the admissions and registration ladies). 

Xander's first day in Spain

liz (and some lady named sandy) did everything to get xander to follow me to spain and today was the day to get him! 'get xander from the airport' sounds easy enough, but as with the other countries i've lived in (USA excluded) the bureaucracy is enough to drive you to drink.

i got some nice taxi driver to take me to the airport (35 min drive) but it was at 8am rush hour, so it took more like 1hr20mins. awesome. i'd put in the only address i had for the pick-up place in my GPS but it wasn't recognized. so i called the two phone numbers i had (and had the taxi driver talk to the people in spanish), and they told us to go to the cargo park (which we already knew, we just didn't know where exactly to go in the huge cargo park surrounded by cargo company offices). so we just asked someone at one of the cargo companies where the office was for the company we wanted. though it was close by, they'd never heard of it and weren't interested in helping. (red)

so we went to terminal 1 to the information desk (orange). they didn't know anything. so we went to the united airlines office upstairs and the lady there called around and found the cargo office we needed. yes!! (this was already 3 hours into our trip)

so we went to the cargo office (yellow) and got some paper which would permit us to get a series of other papers. they made a copy of my driver's license and i had to pay 162 euros to get that paper.

then we took that paper to the vet (green) where we waited while she called some people. i emailed her my flight itinerary to prove i wasn't going to sell xander (idk how that proves that). she made a copy of my driver's license. when she was ready she took us to the agricultural cargo park (light blue) (a giant warehouse filled with farmy stuff and boxes) where we wandered through ceiling high shelves to a heavy refrigerator-looking metal door which she opened with a swipe of a card. inside was my precious baby!!! he was all alone in a locked and pull-tied cage. he wanted out so badly and i wanted to hold him so badly but we didn't have any scissors or knives to cut him free! :( the vet asked a warehouse man who came back with a knife and we finally cut the ties holding his door closed.

blessed reunion!!! :D :D :D we were so happy, even the taxi driver grinned from ear to ear.

the vet checked xander out to make sure he was ok after traveling and had no signs of disease, then we had to put him back in the box and leave him there. neither of us were happy about that, but she assured us we'd have him in 30 minutes (lol). she took his paperwork from the crate, glossed over it (GLOSSED!! after all that work!!!!), and gave us a magic paper.

we walked back to the office (idk why that vet made us walk but since she did we were without our car) where the vet told us we'd get xander (medium blue). wrong. we needed that magic paper stamped first... before they'd even move xander.

(dark blue) we went to the stamp holder's building where they copied our IDs to give us visitor's badges. then into the stamp people's office where they wrote down our DL numbers. the stamper was on a coffee/lunch break. i ran into a cafeteria and got a sandwich and drink since it was 1pm by then. stamp lady came back and stamped the magic paper, but not before making a copy of my DL.

we went back to the office, this time with the stamped magic paper (purple)! we waited like 45 minutes for them to bring xander to the office (we would have gotten him ourselves if we could have).

forever reunion!!! :)

i gave xander some of the meat from my sandwich in the car - he was famished!! we were anxious as we went home, though it was much faster at this point. we walked up the million stairs to the apartment and xandy checked the whole place out. i emptied his crate, cleaned it, him, and all of his things, then we had a little cuddle for a while before i decided to attend class at 5:30 since i'd already missed one (big mistake).

when i came home xander was just where i'd left him: snuggled up on the couch. we went on a walk around the block and settled in for the night. roommate isn't here so it's just us.

just like it was always meant to be.

first day of school

today i started the master of applied and theoretical linguistics program at UPF. the welcome session, meant to start at 10am actually started at 10:30something due to the presenter being MIA. the other teachers present didn't know what she'd planned to say so they voted for us to wait for her to arrive. during this time i started talking to the two chinese girls next to me. they're doing their masters in translation, so we'll only have a few classes in common, but it felt nice to chat in chinese or in english about china with them while we waited. they told me nothing in spain ever starts on time and i should get used to it. (i hope not...)

finally the teachers switched the order of the orientation sessions and the librarian came in to talk about all the resources available to UPF students. i could tell immediately that she wasn't a teacher by the way she talked non-stop without checking for understanding or even looks of understanding. she spoke for nearly 90 minutes (JUST HER!!!) and we all almost died.

then an IT guy named herman (well, german, i think) talked about how to log in to the intranet and access your classes online, etc. which is pretty useful and important information. unfortunately, his accent was so thick and his speaking voice so quiet, no one had a clue what he was saying... but that didn't stop him from rambling on as if we were all following along well. (we had to clarify with the next speaker everything that guy said.) my patience was long gone and that point but then my head started hurting so i had to switch off. the chinese girls tuned out and played candy crush and i could hear others breaking out into hushed conversation.

when we couldn't take any more, some lady rescued us and took us on a tour of the campus. UPF has three campuses (health and medical, humanities, and communication ... or something). ours is the medium sized one with just a few buildings. the classes and library are all geared toward communication, linguistics, translation, and language science. handy that the books we'll need are all in that library (which we didn't see on our tour). the tour, unfortunately, was in spanish. there were a handful of us there who don't speak spanish, so it was a bit pointless. some girl offered to translate but i declined, having been on tours of cities in languages i don't understand and having already used up my pretending-to-care ability for the day. nearly everyone in the university speaks english so if i have questions, i'll just ask.

one more session that vaguely described our disciplines ended up raising more questions than it answered. the teachers mostly said they'd keep us informed as we go. the first trimester is supposed to be pretty light, then the last is super hectic and we should be prepared. mmmk.

we were supposed to have lunch and go to class then. but i didn't know what or where any of my classes were because my adviser didn't send me that pertinent information. several emails to the school went unanswered so i had to stay after and hand-write my schedule off of a master sheet and look up the times, room numbers, and days. i had a quick lunch of salad and pasta in the cafeteria and went off to class.

all the classes are THREE HOURS. i don't know how i'm gonna make it. today's was a class on syntax, though today we just talked about what the class will be like, listened to the teacher a LOT (for 2 hours)... thankfully he was 16 minutes late and hadn't set up anything (or i wouldn't have made it - information overload). at the end of the class he asked us to go around giving introductions and answering questions about our backgrounds. he interrupted 18 of 20 people, so this took like an hour and we still ran over. he gave us an assignment on the class website which we don't yet know how to access.

i haven't paid or finished enrolling or shown my authenticated documents or seen my schedule. so far, i'm less than impressed with spanish school. the people are all friendly and helpful, at least. tomorrow i have two classes but i'm more excited about picking up xander at the airport.

day 1: meh.

update 2013

 I’ll try to maintain a better blog for my own sanity when I’m in Spain. Drop by and check it out whenever you’d like.

Since things are changing pretty fast these days, I thought I’d update you on what’s happening on my end. Hopefully it’ll fetch some replies so I can know what’s up where y’all are, too! (Y’all?! Well, I AM back in Texas, so I thought it fitting. J)

My life and job in China were promising, but things went belly up in just about every way I can think of. The first year was pretty good work-wise. I was grouped with a bunch of English people, plus an Irishman and a Scot, and basically had to learn English all over. I was amused at their vocabulary, intonation, accents, and obscure (to me) cultural references.

                                                                                                   

I learned a lot from them and about myself that year. I developed as a teacher, a member of management, and as a citizen of the world. My roommate and I (friends in America) fell out, so home-life was stressful, but work was alright.

This is my absolute favorite class, whom I taught for all four semesters in China. I’ve given them my contact information so we can keep in touch. I’ll continue to edit, proofread, or make suggestions on anything they send me in English so we can improve their odds of standing out above the competition in China. I’d really love to see them all succeed.

Sadly and predictably, the honeymoon phase at work ended and was replaced by deceit, backstabbing, insane ‘cost-cutting’, and other brands of human indecency. During the second year, I stepped down from my leadership role in protest and distanced myself from everything about the job but my precious students. Unfortunately, I did realize that I could never be truly happy working for or with anyone like the people I was working for and that the world of teaching English is absolutely teeming with them. As it turned out, it was an excellent decision from which both my students and I benefited greatly because my focus was just on them and lessons.

For about six months I was near depression because of my love for teaching and my kaput desire to do it. I barely hung out with anyone, overate and gained weight, and stayed home as much as I could because I was sure my little dog wouldn’t break my heart the way my job had. My sister came to visit me during this time and we traveled some in China during an 8-week long break between semesters while I thought about the next step.

              

Finally, I decided to make a huge career change: quitting teaching. Though I love being in the classroom and am actually pretty good at it, my deep need for a just, honest, integrity-filled workplace is just too impossible in the teaching world and I see myself being entirely miserable if I pursued it any further. Instead, I decided to develop one of my favorite parts of teaching, which is pronunciation. I’ve researched what other jobs I can do teaching/correcting pronunciation and have found accent reduction and modification interesting and doable. This will mean helping non-native English speakers reduce their accents, including pronunciation, intonation, cadence and even gestures! (Ok, that exclamation mark might not have been necessary but that kind of stuff really does excite me.)

Most of you know, then, that I applied to and was accepted to a postgraduate program in Barcelona where I’ll earn a master’s degree in applied and theoretical linguistics. With that, I hope to burst into the world of accent modification and help people sound less foreign, ghetto, regional (like southern, New Yorker, Bostonian, Texan…) or whatever they want to change about their accents. 

I’m home in the USA for about 7 weeks right now, the longest I’ve been home since 2008. I’m hoping to actually rest and recover from China this summer before Spain does whatever it’s gonna do to me. So far, I haven’t really experienced reentry shock (a phenomenon that happens when people live abroad for a while then return to their home countries), possibly because I didn’t really fall in love with China the way I thought I would (and the way I did with Hungary). I was happy to leave China, mostly to get away from my work situation, but living in China wasn’t really my cup of tea either.

I miss a few things about Chinese life – wide, safe bike lanes on every road, recycling opportunities everywhere, cheap/counterfeit things like electronics, perfumes, bags, cheap rent, shower sprayers in addition to stationary shower heads, awesome engineering feats of people balancing a TON of stuff on a moped or bicycle, the fact that people there don’t have know-it-all attitudes, all my 750 students, and a handful of dear friends I met there.

               I’m happy to be back in the States to experience clean, potable tap water, washing machines with hot water, tumble dryers, boneless meat, good and familiar food, driving – automatic transmissions!, swimming, people NOT staring and pointing at me, good customer service, English I understand (versus British/Irish/Scottish-isms), cultural references I understand, JOKES I understand, and most comforting, people I understand. It’s been far too long since I’ve hung out with Americans. I miss my people. I love my country. It’s good to be home.

                   

Right now I’m staying at Liz and Scott’s (my sister and brother-in-law) with our three dogs. It’s a full house, but a good time. We’ve taken a trip to Illinois to visit almost everyone in our extended family, we’ve done some light recreation, and we’ve eaten nearly everything under the American sun. I’m hoping for a trip to Florida to see my immediate family, depending on whether the government drags their feet with my documents, background check, visa, etc. but I think I’ll get to go. If you’d like updates from me (very sparingly, I promise), let me know. Call me, text, or email!

Many blessings and greetings to all the people who are helping make me who I am across the world. Feel free to share this letter with anyone who knows me whom you think would like to know what I’m up to. (Sorry for the American slang, foreigners… but I’m home after all! J)

Christie

relevant, funny, and sickening all at once (forgotten draft, now published)

Dear Cecil:

For decades I've wondered, and assuming the answer would be highly personal, have failed to ask: what's the deal with the extra-long pinkie fingernail on people from the Orient (Middle East, India, Southeast Asia)?

You're thinking I'm going to say I did all my research for this on the Internet. Well, not all. I have a buddy with a long pinkie nail and a high embarrassment threshold, so I called up and asked. However, let's face it: for topics resistant to conventional lines of inquiry, the Internet is hard to beat. Some theories, many lifted from the Straight Dope Message Board, this column's own little window into the demimonde:

• Organic coke spoon. As if we needed to ask.
• Booger scoop and earwax excavator. Gross, yes, but sure keeps that coke from falling off.
• In the old days in China, long fingernails were a sign you were rich and didn't do manual labor. Now they grow out the pinkie as a sign of culture, breeding and wealth. No doubt there's some truth to this. A bit of browsing turns up photos of ornate fingernail protectors worn by ladies of the imperial Chinese court. Bizarre though such talons may seem to some, one could argue that as an indicator of culture, breeding, and wealth they beat having to buy a Jaguar and read Proust.
• My Chinese students (all about 18 to 22) told me the nails are long so the little finger reaches past the last knuckle joint on the ring finger. If it does, you are rich and intelligent! Maybe, but if I'm Anna Nicole Smith trying to size up a prospective soul mate, I'm going to need to see more than a pinkie nail.
• My 76-year-old uncle keeps one pinkie nail long and sharpened to open envelopes.
• A sharpened, hardened nail is a dangerous weapon and can be a sign of prison time. Or of a man who opens a lot of envelopes.
• I thought it was a sign one was a pimp.
• My friend has one and always hints it is for sexual purposes. I really hope they don't involve earwax.
• Great for opening shrink-wrap. Ha! I bet that's what Mr. Sexual Purposes does with it.
• General scratching and ear cleaning. The longer nail also works well when trying to pick up something lying flat on a table, like a coin.Definitely seeing a common thread here. My assistant Bibliophage points to the French word auriculaire, meaning pinkie finger, of which Larousse remarks, "ainsi nommé parce que sa petitesse lui permet de s'introduire dans l'oreille" ("so named because its small size allows it to be introduced into the ear").
• My pinkie finger on both my hands is a bit longer than the other nails. I use them for playing the tarifs, or sympathetic strings of the sitar, in different fashions. I use the right one for playing a quick scale down the sympathetic strings between different movements of the Hindustani classical music I usually play. The left one I use for striking the tarifs as accents during the slow, first movement, or alap.I keep my right index nail a little long so that I can pluck each string individually (they are hard to reach) for tuning. And as a bonus, people think you're a pimp.
• The cashier at Subway had one nail grown long. I asked him why and he said he had a running competition with one of his friends as to who had the longest fingernail. This, on so many levels, is why I never eat at Subway.
• A Google search produced some interesting ones: that Picasso kept a long little fingernail for mixing paints, and that Turkish men commonly keep such a nail for opening cigarette wrappers.
• I am the only man I know that has 32 different colors of nail varnish, as I have one two-inch-long pinkie nail that I paint up like the Colombian flag. Whatever you say, partner. However, I have to point out that the Colombian flag only has three colors.
• Don't cut my nails, pinkies only ones that don't break off. My friend's answer. Give him credit for honesty.
• On a Beijing subway I saw a guy with a long pinkie nail clean his nose and his ears with it. Right after he wiped his nail on the hand rail, someone grabbed it. Wonderful place, Beijing subways. OK, I think we got it. Theory, at least in some parts of Asia: sign of culture, breeding, and wealth. Practice, regardless of locale: booger scoop.

— Cecil Adams

*from HERE