I entered my friends Ben and Jelz’s room and swung the door shut behind me, my hood up and my head spinning.
My friend Josh looked away from Black Ops 4 for a second and said, “Noah, you look like the Punisher.”
“Josh, what’s the Breaking Bad episode where everything goes sideways for Walter? Was it ‘Ozymandias’?”
“Yeah, that sounds right.”
“Today is ‘Ozymandias’.”
I never got drunk in Spain, but I think I got a little drunk off the experience. That’s the only plausible explanation for why I thought taking 16 credits in the spring would be a good idea.
As for running for Student Senate during the sweatiest semester I’ve had at Calvin, I have no explanation.
People asked me why I was running for Senate during campaign week. My stock response was that I didn’t want to be an armchair critic, and if I had problems with Calvin (which I do) becoming a senator would be the most direct method of dealing with them. But that wasn’t the only reason.
Maybe it was because a few of my mentors had suggested the circle of friends that would come from a club or student org would be healthy. Maybe it was because a few of my friends were on Senate, and working with them sounded fun. Maybe it was because student government would be killer for my LinkedIn page. Maybe having something as time-consuming as being a senator would be the kick in the pants I needed to get my life in order. Maybe it was a little of all those things. Whatever it was, I ran.
If you couldn’t tell by now, I didn’t make it.
I think I went through a couple of stages following the announcement of the election results.
Stage 1: Acceptance. The person with the most votes didn’t surprise me; she was an RA and an international relations major, so she had an entire dorm behind her along with a major that by its nature gave her political acumen.
Stage 2: Indignation. That came from the second winner and first runner-up. Two people made it to senate through the initial election; the second winner was knocked out with an ear infection for most of the campaign week. The person who came in third was a surprise; I didn’t even know she was running until the night before results were announced. After some snooping, I found out why: because she hadn’t campaigned. Which is where the indignation came in: Are you telling me I lost to someone who couldn’t campaign and someone who didn’t campaign? How little trust do people have in me?!
Granted, there were other people who had beat me–I came in sixth–but those two results really got under my skin.
Stage 3: Discouragement. I was not in Stage 3 when I burst into Ben and Jelz’s room asking about Breaking Bad episodes. That came the week after.
I’m confessing to the world: I almost had a date.
I asked one of my friends if she wanted to get Bob Evans on a Monday where we didn’t have class. And she agreed.
Then things came up over the weekend, and she decided to call it off, and told me she didn’t feel the same way.
Which is where I ended up: sitting off in a corner, seriously considering whether I was going to fail two of my classes, not a senator, and trying to figure out what the phrasing for getting rejected after a yes is. (Conclusion: asking out=shooting your shot, rejection=missing, my situation=ricochet…or something.)
Which leads into Stage 4.
Stage 4: Introspection. After the emo stuff had gone on for long enough, I started thinking.
I’ve taken some serious L’s this year. What I’ve mentioned is an incomplete list, but they’re the big things. As I thought through it, I started to see something resembling the bright side. I was on the come up in my struggle classes (or at least, it felt like it), so those weren’t as much of concerns as they had been a few weeks before. Being on next year’s Senate might be a bust, but I got my name out there. I took a risk, something I feel I don’t do often enough, and got good information that could be used for a future shot at Senate. I got 445 votes, and proof of something I sometimes have a hard time believing: that there are people in my corner.
As for getting shot down? Rejection SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS (did I mention it sucks?), but as punches to the soul go, this was more of an angry toddler punch than a prizefighter punch. This friend, who I’m purposely leaving unnamed, named not leading me on as her reason for calling it off, so yay to not getting strung along. And she set the tone: things are only as awkward as you make them, and there’s been a minimum of awkwardness between the two of us.
Stage 5: Turning the Phrase I’d Been Muttering to Myself on Its Head. Which brings me back to Ben and Jelz’s room, asking about the titles of Breaking Bad episodes.
The episode title comes from “Ozymandias”, a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The narrator meets a man who stumbled on the ruins of a kingdom while wandering through the desert. On the pedestal of a statue of the king are these words:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
I found myself muttering those words to myself a lot as the school year wound to a close.
Welcome back to The Lost Stories of Spain! With most of the installments, I will restrict myself to a specific time frame. However, there were a couple of events during my time in Spain that bred so many stories that they are worthy of their own volumes.
My weekend at a youth camp was one such event.
1. Wat?
“Well, wait a minute, Noah!” you might be saying. “You’re above youth group age, right?”
That’s what I was thinking when Prof. Pyper presented the idea to my group. Through talking to her and people at the church, I came to realize another cultural difference. The average American youth group usually considers people age 11-18 “students”, with the expectation that students “graduate” around the time they would be leaving for college. In Spain, “youth” is considered to be around age 11 to around age 30.
I don’t know why, neither did I ask why. I just went, alongside Tanner and Elizabeth.
2. Marisol
Allow me to introduce Marisol.
Clockwise from Marisol: Liz Smith, one of our Bible study buddies, who was from Virginia Tech; some dork in a green shirt, Tanner and Elizabeth
At one of our Bible studies following the youth camp, the topic of first impressions came up, and I told Marisol I had entertained the possibility of her being an angel when I first met her.
Allow me to present my case, readers!
For starters, she just kinda showed up. I had rode up to the camp in Cangas de Onís with Liz, Elizabeth and Tanner, so she wasn’t in our car, nor could I remember at what point she had started talking to us. One second she wasn’t there and the next, she was, chatting away as if we were old friends. She had been a member of Bible study before our arrival, but she only began attending the meetings at the same time as us after the youth camp.
Second off, she helped strangers in need. Most of the campers spoke English, but most of the staffers, including the main speaker, didn’t. Marisol, out of the good of her heart, took the role of our translator.
Third, she disappeared as quickly as she had appeared. When we were packing up to go, she gave us hugs. I looked away for a second and she was gone when I looked back.
Fourth, she is incredibly attractive. (Admittedly, this is the weakest piece of evidence; I’m pretty sure the Bible has no words on angels’ supernatural beauty.)
My case fell apart post-camp, when she hosted Bible study in her apartment and I met her family and learned she was in grad school. So if she is an angel, she’s a pretty deep-cover one.
3. CLARITY!
Youth camp answered a question we didn’t know we had.
For as long as we had been in Spain, Tanner had been received with looks of confusion. Tanner is a bit of an acquired taste: to really appreciate Tanner, you must first accept his having an absurd amount of energy for having a condition that messes with his sleep cycle, and prepare yourself for the hijinks that will come from this. Once you’ve done those two things, you’ll love him. I chalked up people’s confusion with Tanner to cultural differences and moved on.
That was, until Tanner introduced himself to somebody and got the familiar look of confusion and stumbling pronunciation of his name. Thankfully, this person explained their confusion.
To understand, I have to give a short lesson on Spanish linguistics. Every letter in Spanish has a singular sound, as opposed to a hard and soft sound like they do in English. This is why names like Anthony and Matthew have Spanish equivalents, because with each letter having an individual sound, the “th” sound does not compute. As a result of this, double lettering is mostly nonexistent in Spanish (the exception being “ll”, which is pronounced “ee” like in tortilla or pollo). I’m pretty sure a Spanish person trying to pronounce my dad’s name would give themselves a brain bruise.
Well, Tanner has double letters in his name, as well as a very Dutch last name, hence the confusion. (Kassidy had the same problem, but not as badly.) This person also told us that his first name sounded like tañer, the Spanish word for strumming an instrument.
What to take away from this? Thank your lucky stars if your parents gave you a Biblical name, because they cross linguistic lines.
Or something.
4. The Edgelord
Edgelord:
A poster on an Internet forum, (particularly 4chan) who expresses opinions which are either strongly nihilistic, (“life has no meaning,” or Tyler Durden’s special snowflake speech from the film Fight Club being probably the two main examples) or contain references to Hitler, Nazism, fascism, or other taboo topics which are deliberately intended to shock or offend readers.
The term “edgelord,” is a noun, which came from the previous adjective, “edgy,” which described the above behaviour. (urbandictionary.com)
Confession time: I’m a former edgelord. I apologize to anyone who knew me from age 11 to about age 14. That is not to say my sense of black comedy has entirely left me, but that it was its most gratuitous around that time.
Anyhoo…
The campers, particularly the ones around our age, had no shortage of questions about American culture. We did our best to answer. Then this one kid, THE EDGELORD, started in. He asked about those parts of American history that can be summed up with the “side-eying monkey” meme:
When you’re talking to a person from another culture and they start asking about Jim Crow…
We tried to answer the questions and move on, but the guy kept steering the conversation back to slavery or the KKK or something uncomfortable.
About the only good thing that came from this experience is I taught Tanner a new word: edgelord.
EDGELORD, if you’re reading this, I have one thing to say to you:
5. “Poopy”
In this same conversation, I started talking to another guy (whose name I learned and then forgot—sorry, Brazilian guy in Spain). Out of nowhere, he asked me a question: “what is a ‘poopy’?”
I was thrown off, and a little worried where this was going after the impromptu op-ed on slavery I delivered to THE EDGELORD. I started explaining the excretory process, and he stopped me. “Why do you call a poop a ‘poopy’ and an animal a ‘poopy’?” He asked.
This added another layer of confusion to an already confusing conversation.
We went in circles for a few minutes, and another cultural difference emerged as we did. Remember how I said every letter in Spanish has one sound? Well, in Spanish, U is pronounced “ooh”. To a person who has learned English in a Spanish (or Brazilian) school, “puppy”–an infant dog–and “poopy”–the brown stuff deposited in toilets–would be pronounced the same way.
I explained my revelation to this guy, and his curiosity was sated. An anticlimactic ending to a confusing few minutes.
6. Todos nacemos para morir.
Our last story takes place during the sermon on Saturday of our weekend at the camp. Spanish youth camps follow the format of American youth camps: morning/early afternoon service, usually followed by a meal and stuff to do until evening service. Being that the sermons were in Spanish, Marisol, being the beautiful human being she is, voluntarily sat with us and provided a translation. I was only awake to catch bits and pieces of it during the sermons, but when I was, it was helpful.
Well, in this particular service, we sat down from worship and the pastor started in. I only caught every couple of words, but Marisol’s face grew increasingly confused as she listened and translated. I don’t remember the exact message, but it went something like this:
Pastor: *Jesuses in Spanish*
Marisol: We are all born…
Pastor: *more Jesus-ing*
Marisol: …to die.
My Group: *blinks*
The meat of the sermon has been lost to time, but I do remember it being very nihilistic.
So I’m sure THE EDGELORD ate it up.
That will conclude today’s edition of The Lost Stories of Spain. May your names be understandable to Spaniards, your EDGELORDS be nonexistent, and your sermons not sound like Also Sprach Zaruthrustra excerpts.
A friend and Green Book have forever ruined the idea of being a tourist.
My suitemate from last year dated a girl from Hawaii for a few months. At some point, the topic of her home came up. It was at that point she told me about the love-hate relationship most Hawaiians have with tourists. Tourists to the Hawaiian islands have a tendency to not only be incredibly rude and disrespectful to locals (obviously a big no-no), but also highly disrespectful to the local flora and fauna. If you’re looking for a way to make Hawaiians hate you, it’s disrespecting their nature. She also told me that as much as most native Hawaiians hate tourists treating their home like crap, at this point Hawaii’s economy depends so much on tourism they have no choice but to grin and bear it.
After she was finished talking, I blinked and said, “Well, never going to Hawaii.”
The conversation was dredged up from my memory a few weeks ago when I saw Green Book.
There’s been a lot of conversation on the unsavory aspects of the film. Having seen the film myself, the nicest term I can come up with as a description is “tone-deaf.” The film shows a fictionalized version of the relationship between black pianist Don Shirley and future The Sopranos actor Tony Lip. Lip acts as a driver and bodyguard for Shirley while he does a tour through the Deep South.
On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with the movie. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali have great chemistry, the dialogue is good, and the film’s aesthetic is a good one. It’s what is under the surface that presents a problem.
Green Book is a white person’s civil rights movie. Previous films about civil rights issues, films like Selma and Detroit, did not shy away from the human rights violations black people could face at the time simply because of their skin color. They didn’t shy away from the violence or the verbal abuse or the humiliation brought about by racist policies or how their families or non-black allies were put in racists’ crosshairs. Green Book does.
Despite wanting to project an anti-racism message, the brutal reality of the racist South is downplayed in the film, seemingly to not make the viewer uncomfortable. Don is beaten up once and harassed by police, but these matters are quickly resolved. He rides comfortably in the backseat of Tony’s car for scene after scene. And the internal turmoil Shirley experiences in a racist society is relegated to one or two scenes.
While it would be accurate for a white man to have some bigoted ideas in the time period, it’s the writing of Tony Lip’s character that really makes the film qualify as “tone-deaf.” In one of his first scenes, Tony and several of his male family members loiter in his apartment as two black workers renovate their kitchen (an obvious reference to the “black men can’t control their sexual urges around white women” idea) and throws away drinking glasses that the workers drank from. A few scenes into his tour with Shirley, he stops at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and all but forces Shirley to eat a couple of wings, claiming that Shirley’s “people” love the stuff, and in spite of Shirley voicing his dislike of the food. And a few scenes before the previously-mentioned “internal turmoil of Don Shirley” scene, Tony labels himself “blacker” than Shirley, listing off several stereotypes of black people that he fits and Shirley doesn’t. Even the seemingly-happy ending–where a changed Tony Lip invites Don Shirley to Christmas dinner–rings hollow. Society has not changed, Shirley will still experience racism, Jim Crow laws still loom over African-Americans, and the titular green book (a safety guide for black people traveling through the more openly hostile parts of America, which is relegated to a few brief shots and one cursory glance by Tony) will continue to be needed for years to come.
Whatever message Green Book has about racism is drowned out by its bending over backwards to cater to a white audience.
*exhale*
Sorry, this blog post briefly turned into a review of Green Book. There was a purpose to it, though.
For my Calvin class in Spain, we read a book called There and Back. Chapter 2 of the book provides a definition of what I’m talking about in this post: tourism mentality. I quote:
“A tourist seeks to escape from his or her life situation and circumstances in a search for entertainment and the exotic. […] Even though tourists want to empty themselves of their routine or imposed timetables, they remain separate from the culture they visit and like moviegoers observe rather than participate.”
If you don’t quite get it, here are some of the things I found when I Googled “tourist”:
This is tourist mentality: the entitlement, narcissism and sometimes life-threatening stupidity towards other cultures that demands a whole culture kowtow to your wants. Tourist mentality permeates through Green Book, which glosses over the dark parts of America’s past to pander to a white audience.
But despair not, reader. There is an alternative to tourist mentality: pilgrimage.
Unfortunately, There and Back is on my bookshelf in my dorm room, and I type in my bedroom, so definition of “pilgrimage” instead comes from a Patheos article:
“Now the pilgrim takes joy in the journey with the understanding that the journey only exists because of the destination. […] The pilgrim — somewhat idiotically, I suppose — is interested in some thing at the end of his pilgrimage.”
I don’t know if my time in Spain could be called a pilgrimage. I definitely enjoyed the journey, but I’m not sure what the thing at the end of my pilgrimage was. Better comprehension of Spanish? Making a tight-knit circle of friends? Gain a new appreciation of Calvin College because holy crap, Spanish universities are for the birds?
Who knows? But here’s what I do know: I hope to travel again, some day.
I’ll be honest: had I been more on the ball while blogging in Spain, you guys would probably know most of these stories already. I’d definitely have a better sense of time.
But I want to have some kind of preservation of these memories, as well as beef up The Keene Chronicles. So here I go.
Oh, before I do, let me introduce the rest of my group. They obviously play roles in the majority of these stories.
Clockwise from the middle: Max Israels (between the pillars in the dark blue shirt), Cameron Behnam (sunglasses), Prof. Marcie Pyper, Jessica Wilcoxen (jean shorts), Elizabeth Koning (green shirt), Noah Shin, Amy Bristol, Kassidy Brouwer, Elise Allen, Kennedy Genzink, Matt Rossler, Tanner Huizenga, yours truly, Amy’s older brother Jamie, and Benji Steenwyk. Cameraman: Enrique, our tour guide
I should also warn y’all: a lot of these stories involve alcohol. You should expect as much when you let a bunch of college students (even from a Christian college) into a country where the drinking age is 18.
Alright.
1. THE IRONY!
This happened the first week. I think we were in Granada.
The night that we were staying in Granada, our group split up in the search for food. I ended up in a restaurant with Elise, Elizabeth and Jessica. They ordered alcoholic drinks with their food, while I stuck with Coke. (After a few months there, I can attest: 90% of Coca-Cola’s stocks must come from Spain. If you could prick Spain with a needle, it would bleed Coke and Fanta.)
After they’d had a few to drink, they shifted into more personal conversations: relationships, past jobs, their relationships with their parents, and so on. Seeing as I am single, have worked the same job for the past two summers, and my relationship with my parents is fine (love ya, Mom and Dad) I stayed quiet.
Now, none of these girls are Amazons, but they all held their liquor pretty well. That being said, were we to go somewhere else, we would be walking around a busy, foreign city at night, with three of the four people in the group being not-completely-sober young women. I can put on an intimidating visage, but I doubted I could scare off every creep and pickpocket, so I decided to take the girls back to the hotel and turn in early.
I took them back to the hotel, got them into the elevator, and started the ascent to their floor.
Elise touched my arm. “We’re not trying to make you uncomfortable,” she assured me.
Blink blink.
What?
Now, you need to understand something: I don’t drink. Never have, probably never will. When I told my friends not a drop of alcohol had passed through my lips for the entirety of my time in Spain, I was met with a room full of hanging jaws. Even if I found something appealing about being drunk, I would die at the irony: the son of a man who works with addicts chugging alcohol. That being said, the fact that I go to a Christian college doesn’t mean I’ve never been around drunk people, and seen some truly mind-boggling stupidity caused by drunkenness. These girls were giggly, far from falling through any doors or screaming like they were getting murdered because they were too drunk to find their phone in their pocket.
“Elise, I [have been around drunk people–not mentioning names],” I told her. I held a hand over my head. “This is the drunk idiocy scale.” I dropped a hand down to ankle level. “You guys are like a .45.”
We reached their floor, and I motioned them down the hall. “Oh no, we’ll walk you back to your room,” Jessica said.
Blink blink.
What?
I find videos of women fighting men fascinating. Not because I find anything amusing about violence against women, but because just about every one follows the same formula: it’s always a woman who could be knocked over by a stiff breeze throwing hands with a guy 10 inches taller and 90 pounds heavier than her. Like, what do you expect, lady?
For some reason, this situation reminded me of that. Let me reiterate: the three drunk girls were trying to escort me, the one sober guy, back to his room.
“Wha–no! Come on, your room is down the hall.”
I got them in their room and bade them good night. I stood staring at their door for a few moments and came to this genius conclusion:
People are weird when they’re drunk.
2. The Great Discovery
I can say with near-certainty that this happened in Córdoba.
I’ve mentioned our tour guide, Enrique. On the one hand, he’s a super-cool guy. He has that personality type of someone who would be a dope uncle. He was funny and knowledgeable about his country’s history and a ball of energy. On the other hand, he was also taking my group on a 7-day turbo tour of southern Spain when we were still working through the jet lag. The length of the tour through Toledo also made me come close to pooping myself. (You can read a blurb about that particular experience here.)
But one thing I will be forever grateful to Enrique for: he introduced me to 100 Montaditos.
It was lunch time, and Enrique rattled off a couple of places we could go to eat. He started off by pointing directly across the street to a hole in the wall. The place’s name was 100 Montaditos, and as the name suggested, its niche was montaditos (eninglés, “small sandwich”). I was feeling a sandwich, so I walked in with Elise, Tanner and Elizabeth.
100 Montaditos is what I might call a carbine restaurant. A carbine is a short-barreled rifle, either chambered for the standard 5.56×45 mm cartridge or in a smaller caliber. It’s not as concealable as a submachine gun or pistol, but more maneuverable than a full-length rifle. The same thing can be said for a carbine restaurant: it’s not low-quality enough to be fast food, and not fancy enough to be high-class. I got my food quickly, a la a fast food restaurant. It also served fast food-y…food: French fries, pop, nachos, and cheesy bites. On the other hand, this food was waaaaaay too good to be slapped with a title as derogatory as fast food.
So anyway, I got an order slip, put down the sandwiches and drink I wanted, and handed it to the guy at the counter. When my name was called, I took my plate and started eating.
This place was amazing! I had some great food in Spain, both modern and traditional. But 100 Montaditos was my first food love. I about squealed like a little girl when in one of my explorations of Oviedo I found a 100 Montaditos.
Is it wrong that 100 Montaditos is one of the things I’m most looking forward to should I go back to Spain?
I’m going to assume the answer is no.
3. The Faux Pas to End All Faux Pas…es
As previously chronicled, that first weekend with my host parents was a rough two days. The cringiest moment came when I was done unpacking my stuff and walked into the living room, looking to talk with Elisa and José.
The living room was always dim, even with lamps on. There was a man sitting on the couch, on his phone, who I assumed was a family member I hadn’t met yet. Circe, the family dog who seriously needed to chill, started yapping.
“La perro necesita menos azúcar en su comida,” I told the man. The man laughed and nodded. I held out a hand. “Me llamo Noah.”
That’s when the man stood up and walked into the light, revealing himself as José, my host dad.
I don’t remember if I figuratively or literally facepalmed, but it was one linguistic blunder in a weekend full of them.
4. The First Day of Lit Class
Being an international student is a weird, weird thing.
While at the University of Oviedo, I was technically enrolled in three schools. I was at the University of Oviedo, obviously, taking a literature class. I was also at La Casa de las Lenguas, an international school that shared campuses with the university, but was a different entity. That’s where the bulk of my classes were. And of course, I was still a Calvin student.
The first day of lit class, I walked in with Kassidy, Tanner and Noah Shin. We stuck out like sore thumbs: Me and Shin were the only black and Asian guys in the class, Kassidy’s blonde hair might as well have been a neon sign, and while Spanish men might not be as short as stereotypes say, Tanner towered over even the tallest of our classmates. We all sat in a row at the back of the class.
Our professor walked in and began speaking Spanish. I looked down the row, and I’m sure all four of us looked like this:
We had been told that the Lit class was going to be taught in English. As much as I love books, trying to talk about themes and symbolism in Spanish for the next three months sounded like a one-way trip to an aneurysm.
Our professor had a rather odd accent. (We actually had three professors, and none of them had the typical Spanish accent, despite all of them being natives. Our main professor, Luz Mar, had gotten her degree in Ireland and picked up an Irish tinge while she was at it. Marta, who substituted for about a week while Professor Mar was on medical leave, sounded like a French expatriate in the last stages of losing her accent. And Carla, who plays a role in a future story, sounded like she was from one of the posher parts of England.) After maybe 10 minutes of speaking, Professor Mar looked back to our row and said, in that odd Spirish accent, “You do not speak Spanish, yes?”
We all nodded frantically.
She switched to English, which I think was her plan the whole time. We were on the Humanities Campus, and most of our classmates spoke very good English, albeit the Queen’s English.
But anyhow, bullet dodged.
5. Dang It, Maxwell!
If you, the reader, are from Calvin, then you probably already know this story. I’m telling it anyway.
Allow me to reintroduce Max.
Hint: he’s not the guy on the left.
Of all the people who went to Spain, he was the guy I knew best. To heavily paraphrase Captain America, “Even when I was surrounded by strangers, I had Max.”
And then everything changed when laneumonía attacked.
It started out as a cough. Me and Max met up a couple of times to wander Oviedo, and he had a bit of a cold.
Then I showed up to class one day, and Max wasn’t there. Professor Pyper told us he’d gone to the hospital, citing some kind of lung issue.
I was definitely concerned, but not surprised.
You see, alongside [having been around drunk people—still not naming names], I am also surrounded by smokers. My freshman year roommate loved him some cigars, and it was regular to be lying in bed with the lights off and hear the crackle of a vape being hit. Just about everyone in my group of friends smokes and/or vapes, Max included, and Max had been hitting the Kools spectacularly hard in the absence of a vape.
Along with Professor Pyper, I was the first person to visit him in the hospital. I walked in the room, got a good look at the oxygen tubes, and said something to the effect of, “Max, you look like crap.”
I’m joking about it now, but it was a scary time. Seemingly overnight, Max had gotten so sick that I heard whispers of whatever was wrong with him potentially being fatal. Whether the rumors were exaggerated or not, it was serious enough that Max’s parents flew over to check on him.
The test results came back, and by God, if it wasn’t a strange one.
I’m still not 100% certain on the cause, but here’s what happened to the best of my understanding.
Max told us pneumonia was the problem, and just about everyone agreed that it probably happened because of his riding the Camels. We were only half-right. Along with cigarette residue, the doctors also found vape juice. A vape (or vaporizer) vaporizes flavored liquid to produce scented steam, which is inhaled and exhaled like cigarette smoke. Apparently in all of his vaping, Max’s vape had malfunctioned, giving him a breath of juice instead of vapor and trapping the juice in his lungs. When he got pneumonia, the combination of cigarette smoke and trapped vape juice had caused a nasty reaction in his lungs, which prompted the hospital visit.
Max was discharged from the hospital soon after, with the doctor telling him that for his health’s sake, his smoking days were done. Max had the option to stay in Spain, but he ultimately decided to go home. The decision was mostly a pragmatic one: a guy who just left the hospital for lung issues is going to have a hell of a time in Spain.
Seriously, everyone smokes in Spain. I asked for a non-smoking host family on my form, and I got a needle in a haystack.
So, with Game of Thrones shot glasses and much internal crying from me, Max left in early October.
I think the wind just picked up. I don’t know where this sand that blew in my eyes came from.
That’ll conclude today’s edition of The Lost Stories of Spain. More to come, both blogs and volumes of The Lost Stories of Spain. May your vapes function properly, your host dads sit in the light, and your 100 Montaditos be delicious.
Wow. Um…I didn’t know it was possible for a digital space to get cobwebs.
Well, hello, readers. I know it’s been a minute. But I’m back, and I’ll be making an effort to make more posts.
How do these things usually go? Example that seems unrelated that leads into the topic of the day. Right…
The Rudyard Kipling novel Captains Courageous revolves around Harvey, a proto-Kardashian who has spent his whole life being pampered by his wealthy parents. When he is lost at sea, he is picked up by Portuguese fishermen. Harvey is at first thrown off by the rough lifestyle of living on a fishing boat, but eventually joins in the work and grows adapted to the lifestyle. The novel ends with a matured Harvey reuniting with the parents and, with previously unseen resolve, heads off to Stanford to prepare himself for running the family business.
Now, I’ll be honest: I’ve never read the book. This is a summary cobbled together from passing references to the book I’ve heard and a cursory glance at the summary on Wikipedia. But there’s one aspect I’m pretty sure Kipling skimped out on: Harvey’s process of readjustment.
Going from a life of luxury to a life of menial labor with no warning. Being dropped into a crowd of people from a foreign culture, whose mother tongue is not your own. Going from never having done a day of honest work in your life to working your fingers to the bone regularly. I can imagine the reverse culture shock would be real for Harvey.
Well, I don’t imagine. I know.
Today marks 3 months since I started the trek back to the United States. I was lulled into a false sense of security upon returning home. Aside from jet lag, nothing seemed crazy different. Of course people wanted to hear about my experience, but I went to church, visited family, celebrated Christmas, and vegged out on the PlayStation. Nothing different from my time in the summer, aside from a lot more thoughts in Spanish.
Then I returned to school.
My first clue that things were different, and not in the good way, came on my first night back in my dorms. As me and my friends were getting caught up, we talked out into the hall and ran into three girls I only sort of knew from last year. They joined us, and I ended up sitting around, nodding idly as a bunch of references to events I wasn’t present for flew past my head.
Then they started private school kid-ing.
Private school kid-ing: [prahy-vit skool kid∙ing]
verb
A condition in which adolescent or young adult-aged humans from an upper middle-class to upper-class background become so absorbed in their upbringing that they form an echo chamber where the unifying point is: they have money. Named for the commonality of many victims of private school kid-ing having gone to private schools.
Examples of private school kid-ing include, but are not limited to: casual discussions of crashing your car, mentioning you’re going to your cottage this weekend, extended discussions revolving around Patagonia or Lululemon, reminiscing about your senior year class trip to Costa Rica, or breaking from one of these or similar conversation points only to see your friend(s) who went to public school and/or don’t have parents paying their way through college with a glazed-over expression.
Once the discussion turned to AirPods, I made my leave. My thought process can be summed up as such:
The hard thing about returning is the realization that time didn’t stand still while you were gone. The freshmen you live with aren’t the strangers to each other they were when you left; in the case of my dorm, they’re a tight-knit bunch. Great for them, not so much for the guy who was gone for all semester and is trying to make new friends like a socially-healthy human bean. New friends of old friends are great, too; these new friends having in-jokes and/or drawn-out conversations revolving around stuff you don’t know about? Not so much.
Now, enough talk that makes it sound like my friends and floormates are horrible people. (Much love to the broskis, the…siskis?, and 2nd Boer.)
I should mention that I came back during interim, which is Calvin’s equivalent of a J-term. It’s a time where you can take a class, but it’s also a time where a lot of people take some R&R or go on month-long study abroad trips or non-academic trips. You can imagine the kind of disappointment experienced when you haven’t seen someone in 4-13 months, return to school, only to learn they’re in [Arizona, Ireland, Mexico, Cambodia, Austria…] I enjoyed my interim class on The Inklings (read The Great Divorce if you haven’t), but in many ways, it was a lonely three weeks.
Are you guys getting sick of this ‘feel bad for meeeeeeee’ crap? Because I know I am.
With the start of the semester came the return of several things I had been missing: human contact, friends who had been elsewhere, more opportunities to see said friends since people were out of their rooms for more than three hours a day, and a little more time to get readjusted from the relatively lax schedule of La Universidad de Oviedo. (Thanks for that last one, polar vortex. Could you freeze fewer people to death next time?) Last month, I went to Calvin and Hope’s first Re-Entry Conference, a conference designed to help returning students get readjusted. I laughed and nodded along with people returning from Ghana, the south of Spain, Hungary and other places as they told of their good times and their struggles with reverse culture shock. I wrote down suggestions to help me and walked away thinking that was what I needed.
Maybe I’ll never be the same after my time in Spain.
Some things I have abandoned as I’ve gotten older.
For example, I have pretty much phased white shirts out of my wardrobe. Any stain on the material is a thousand times more noticeable when you’re wearing a white shirt. Many story ideas that seemed like 24-karat gold when I first came up with them are now in some graveyard of the mind.
I think I can bury defining years as “good” or “bad” in the same yard.
In times past, I put years under good or bad umbrellas. 2013 will go down as one of the worst years of my life for the foreseeable future, and 2015 will go down as one of the best. But even those years had their ups and downs.
And I think that’s the best way to describe the year of 2018: ups and downs. Well, that, and long. When I think back on some of the things that happened this year—the Parkland and Santa Fe shootings, the death of XXXTentacion, the Brett Kavanaugh trial—it’s mind-boggling to me that it happened in the last 12 months.
I’ve heard that the older you get, the quicker time seems to pass. And, paradoxically, I’ve found that to be true. It doesn’t feel like that long ago I was kicking open my dorm room door and doing the whip in greeting. (Don’t ask; my friends and I are weird.) But at the same time, it feels like this year has moved in slow motion.
So, what to make of this year? Well, I said it already: it had its good, and it had its bad. After the preview of hell that was my first semester, interim and second semester was what I needed. I made some great memories with my friends and family, I met Alvin Plantinga, I learned that Calvin College is the place I want to be, and of course, I WENT TO SPAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN!
But on the other hand, there were low points. There was the second preview of hell that was the weekend of my uncle’s wedding. (No offense to my uncle, but going to New York is not ideal when you have two papers and the paperwork for studying abroad due.) The summer saw the death of a family friend and some spectacularly bad time management causing me to shoot myself in the foot when it came to getting my driver’s license. It was an uphill battle actually getting to Spain, a struggle to learn the language when I got there, and my closest friend on the trip had to go home early–curse you, pneumonia.
I think the end of the year is the ultimate hill point. OK, death is probably the ultimate hill point, but the end of the year is the penultimate hill point. Behind us is this year, the fantastic moments, the godawful moments, and everything in-between. In front of us is 2019, our returning to our daily routines with nary an idea of what is to come. But the only place to go is forward.
So happy new year to one and all. May everyone have a great new year.
Camila Cabello, Holden Caulfield and Trip Lee are my best friends right now.
Camila Cabello, in her breakout single “Havana”, sings “Half of my heart is in Havana.” Holden Caulfield, that kid who you either loved or hated in 10th grade English, spends the duration of The Catcher in the Rye feeling trapped between the innocence of childhood and the…whatever it is…of adulthood. Trip Lee recorded the album Between Two Worlds, centered around the feeling of being pulled between the realm of God and the world.
What I’m trying to say is, I’ve been feeling pulled in two directions lately.
The pull was first felt twice in a three-day period. In late October, I FaceTimed my old roommate for the first time since I left. We caught up, had some banter, a few of my friends popped into frame to ask how I was doing, and then he hung up after he recommended I watch The Haunting of Hill House and I told him I wanted to finish Avatar: The Last Airbender first. (Which one of us watched all of The Blacklist seasons in a two-week span, Mitch? You overestimate my power!) I shook my head and tossed my iPad on the bed. It was about 2:30 in the morning, and I started getting ready for bed. I paused and thought over the good times of freshman year, and I felt something like a hole open up inside of me. I shook it off and went to bed.
I couldn’t shake off the next time it happened. I was walking to school and listening to music, per usual. Lecrae’s “I’ll Find You” slid through my shuffle as I reached campus. I paused and listened to Tori Kelly’s chorus:
Just fight a little longer my friend It’s all worth it in the end But when you got nobody to turn to Just hold on, and I’ll find you I’ll find you I’ll find you Just hold on, and I’ll find you
If the hole had been previously poked open with a stick, it was now blown open with a cannonball. I found myself leaning against a tree, trying to avoid crying in the middle of campus. Oh God, I miss home!
A visual representation…
The term “liminal space” was introduced to me in my literature class. I looked it up and found this quote from a friar named Richard Rohr: “…where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown…”
If that doesn’t describe me right now, I don’t know what does.
On the one hand, I don’t want the experience of Spain to end. At some point, I finally reached the threshold point of speaking Spanish where I could have a conversation I’m sure in those conversations, I still sound like a third-grader with a head injury, but the point still stands. I’ve laid down roots: I have a great host family, have made friends from Spain, other American colleges and other places on the globe, and have learned so much, even if the Spanish university system kind of stinks. (Hey, I said I’ve grown to appreciate the country; I said nothing about liking the country’s inner workings.) I’ve made possibly the deepest connections I’ve ever made with the other Calvin kids who came with me, and have made some of my best memories alongside them.
On the other hand, I know I’m living in a snapshot, that just as the Detroit and the Calvin College I will return to will not be the Detroit or the Calvin I left, the Spain I could return to will not be the Spain I left. My friends, Calvin or otherwise, will scatter. My host parents are in their golden years; it’s a very real possibility that one or both of them will be dead if I ever return.
There’s also the changes I will return home to: political changes (hello, Michigan legalizing marijuana and Republicans’ incompetence being back in my bubble!), a freshman class virtually unknown to me, changes in my group of friends (new relationship count as of today: 5), and changes in myself.
Perhaps an analogy is the best way to close what I feel like is a very confusing blog. My high school, Henry Ford Academy, is a very unusual school. Along with, you know, sharing ground with a museum, the 10-12 campus is in a bowl of sorts, with a hill leading down to the campus. It’s HFA tradition that on the seniors’ last day, the other three classes gather on either side of the hill so the seniors can say their goodbyes to their underclassmen friends before moving on to the next stage of life.
I’m at the hill point. At the bottom of the hill is my time in Spain, a time I know is coming to an end and a chapter I am both happy and sad is ending. At the top of the hill is my life back home: familiar, but with enough of an unknown factor that it makes me apprehensive.
Yeah, I don’t know how to start this one. So story time, I guess.
I’ve been in Spain for about a month and a half now. My Spanish has advanced—I’m not fluent, but I can ask questions as well as answer them. I’m picking up on Spanish culture, through observation as I walk through the city, learning the country’s history in the classroom, and interacting with the Spanish students in La Universidad de Oviedo.
All that being said, dose of reality, thy name is fútbol.
Feeling the need to interact with my host parents more, I sat down with my host dad and watched the England vs. Spain fútbol game a little while ago. As the game went on, I came to a realization: wow, I know no Spanish words relating to fútbol. I had sat down hoping to make conversation with my host dad, but the topic at hand was one I was out of my element in. I didn’t know the Spanish for positions, so I couldn’t ask who’s on offense? or how is the goalie doing this season? When England scored a point, my host dad pulled out his phone and started looking for his translator. “Yo sé,” I assured him. “En inglés, they scored.” I watched a few more minutes of the game, feeling a familiar sense of frustration returning. My frustration was broken by dinner, but I had been served a healthy dose of reality. From this incident and another, I got firsthand experience of a concept introduced in class: humble idiocy.
The second occurrence happened this past weekend, when I traveled to the Picos de Europas mountain range with a group. I gulped as my eyes followed the cable car cables up the mountain. Oh geez, heights. Not helping was my friend Adam hypothesizing about what would happen should the cable car malfunction. I exited the car, walked up the stairs, and then walked out to the viewing platform.
And this is what I saw…
This might have been the first time I’ve really been in nature. Sure, I’ve been in forests and to the ocean and such, and the fact that I came up on a cable car and took my first couple of pictures from inside the cable car and then over the rail of a viewing platform sort of undermines this statement, but something felt different about this experience.
I felt…tiny.
And I loved it.
As we continued down the path, there was a branch-off that took you down into a field and a natural overlook. I made my way down into the field with a few other guys and walked a stretch. As I weaved through the stones in the field, I gaped at the mountains in the horizon that seemed to go on forever.
I’m…insignificant. And I’m…strangely OK with that.
We live in a cynical world, one where jokes about wanting to die are the norm and everything is met with an eye roll and a sigh of resignation. I’ve been striving to be a more positive person, but even with that goal in mind, my resistance to cynical thinking hasn’t risen from that. To walk among these huge rocks, to see a mountain so tall that the clouds flowed under its peak, to make the trek up a not-so-steady pebble slope to try and get close to a pair of mountain goats, it made me feel…like a little kid. And that was…a surprisingly enjoyable thing.
Those few hours in the mountains got me thinking about something my friend Tanner had mentioned in class, “humble idiocy.” It’s an in-between between the tourist demand that other countries bend over backwards to accommodate them and the in-over-my-head despair.
Humble idiocy is finding joy in your limits. Limits to your experience, to your skill. No entitlement and demand that a culture kowtow to you, no “woe is me” and feelings of hopelessness, just rolling with your confusion and persisting in spite of it.
I’ve got about 7 weeks left in Spain. Here’s hoping for more humble idiocy.
El Idiota Humilde,
Noah
P.S. I’ve mentioned my host family a few times now, and it only seems fair that I actually show them.
From left to right: José Villa, my host dad; Sayaka, my sorta-host sister who was with us the first few weeks but returned to Japan at the end of September; yours truly; Circe, the schnauzer who needs less sugar in her dog food; two past host students whose names I didn’t catch; and my host mom, Elisa Villa.
The most infuriating things in life are the things that are annoying, but necessary.
Take politics. I would try to put my opinions on the Democratic and Republican Parties into words, but said words would probably be quite vulgar and my parents read this blog. On the other hand, history has shown us the alternatives to a democracy, and they aren’t pretty. Or medical treatment. Multiple times a year, we have to go to different doctors to have them examine our eyes, our teeth, our—OK, you get the point. But what’s the alternative? Going blind? Having three teeth in our heads? Rectal cancer?
Perhaps the first and foremost necessary evil? Fear.
I have a unique relationship with social anxiety. Performances and public speaking, I have almost no problem with. I’ve recited poems, sang, preached, and spoke to audiences with no problem–in fact, I’ve rather enjoyed the experiences. It’s experiences out of the spotlight that make me tense up. I went to prom with a good measure of reluctance and spent the entire time I was on the dance floor thinking, Don’t look stupid. Don’t look stupid. This day-to-day anxiety combines with that widespread millennial affliction known as FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. I sit on the sidelines, observing other people my age acting like socially-healthy 18-25-year-olds and think, I’d like that. My decision to apply for a semester abroad was, in fact, largely an attempt to combat some of this melting pot of “Dear God, I’m a freak of nature and I’m probably going to die alone”. I told myself I was already getting out of my comfort zone, so I could stand to tread some unfamiliar water.
This Past Weekend Me cursed that thought as he tried to not plunge to his death and/or severe ouchies.
Saturday, I went out to a beach in a city called Aviles. I say beach, but there were two: one big one that we ended the day at and a smaller, rockier one that we started the day at. In between those two, my group found a staircase that led down to a natural rock shelf. Next to that was a “””””””””path”””””””””””” that could be walked over to a pebble beach with a cave. My friends Tanner and Benji immediately beelined for the “”””””””path”””””””””. Me? I was a little more reluctant. I looked at the “””””””””””path””””””””””, then at the crashing water below it and the big, unforgiving rocks they were crashing against, the rocks I would land on were I to lose my footing. Finally, I took a deep breath. I came here to get out of my comfort zone, I thought and started the trek.
Oh, dear Lord, why did I do this?!?
The reason I have “”””””””path””””””””””””” in so many quotations is because it was less a path and more chunks eroded out of the rock that a person with good balance could use to walk to the pebble beach. Every chance glance anywhere but forward made the possibility of being shipped back to the States with my bones reduced to gravel seem more real. My legs turned to jelly when I dropped to the beach. Hyperventilating with relief, I walked over to the cave.
It was a half-circle, maybe 8 feet deep, and the other entrance led out into the ocean.
Are you [my parents read this blog]ing kidding me?
I took a few pictures and prepped myself for the climb back. Tanner noticed my apprehension and pointed out another path. It was less of a straight shot, but had vegetation and fewer death rocks. I [foolishly] agreed to take it.
It was only after we were past the point of no return that we realized our mistake. The “”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””path””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””” might have been carved out by lizards a few decades ago. The footing was just as treacherous as the way over, if not more so, and the vegetation I thought would serve as an anchor/safety net was thorny and unforgiving. With much struggle, me and Tanner made our way up the cliff. The top of the cliff was getting closer and closer. And then a problem arose.
What would have been my ticket out of needing a new pair of pants sloped into a near-vertical cliff. Tanner tried and failed to climb it. He slid back down to me and pointed out another way: another lizard-forged path straight through the thornbushes below us that we could make our way through that led to a lower cliff. I preemptively said goodbye to my future children and lowered myself into the bushes.
Several minutes, several mental cries for my mother, and one boost later, me and Tanner stood at the top of the cliff, admiring the view. Tanner asked one of those classically American “how you doing, dude?” type questions. I took that opportunity to launch into an anecdote I’d read in the book Wild at Heart, about a Southern judge who sailed as a hobby and considered his near-death in a tropical storm to be the highlight of his life. I concluded, “Someday, this may be my crazy almost-died-but-it-was-great story.” I paused to steady my shaking legs and then added, “But not today!”
So what to draw from this experience? Fear, at its base, is like a gun–while it’s meant for self-preservation, too easily and too often it can be perverted, being corrupted into anxiety, paranoia, or even clinical disorders like depression or a phobia. At the end of the day, the only things you can do are let the fear stay or turn and fight. As the old saying goes, “there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.”
My name is Noah Keene. I’m a sophomore at Calvin College, I’ve been in Spain for 7 days, and the last 48 hours have been some of the most difficult of my life.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, a quick and hopefully humorous recap of my first week to lighten up what may otherwise be a very bleak blog post.
9/2: First time on a plane. I survived it. I then went on to tour the city of Toledo and learned the hard way that public bathrooms are few and far between in Spain. We toured a cathedral with our very cool tour guide, Enrique.
9/3: I had my first and last cup of coffee, and gained a good idea of what charcoal would taste like as well as respect for frequent coffee-drinkers. We drove 6 hours to the city of Grenada, a ride that taught me I need to stay out of prison because I could not handle solitary confinement. We visited a cathedral. I also saw this guy:
9/4: We drove to the city of Córdoba. This day was very hot. We visited a cathedral. (Noticing a pattern?) We then crashed in the city of Seville for the night, and I bungled my Spanish at Spala Imagen, the restaurant we ate at, and only ordered a tapa/appetizer. (FORESHADOWING!)
9/5: We toured Seville. Three guesses as to what we toured. Here they are: 1. a cathedral 2. a cathedral 3. a cathedral. We also passed by the Maestranza Bullring, which is a very historic bullring in Seville. This night was the night we discovered how freakin’ awesome the staff of our hostel was and the second night we ate at Spala Imagen. I ordered a plato this time.
9/6: A quick last walk through Seville, and on to the city of Mérida. We did not visit a cathedral; instead, we visited a Roman amphitheater that had been built while Spain was still Roman territory. I mustered a lot of self-control and did not yell “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!?”, self-control that was for nothing because I will post it here:
I also got this picture of Enrique that made any downsides to Mérida worth it:
9/7: My first international birthday. Celebrations consisted of visiting a cathedral (yay?), my classmate Kennedy calling out “BIRTHDAY BOIIIIIIIIIIIIII!” at random intervals, eating chorizos at what I’m pretty sure was a Renaissance fair, getting a Punisher T-shirt at said Renaissance fair, and watching The Dark Knight with my friend Max in the room the two of us got to share. This day also marked the departure of Enrique. 😥
9/8: After a failed attempt to visit the castle the maybe-Renaissance fair took place outside of, we made our last stop in the mining town of Carucedo. The landscape could be compared to the red rock formations in the American Southwest:
The above picture is the roof of a cave that me and my classmates explored. Fears were faced as I made my way up a pretty sheer, sketchy path to the body of the cave. No pictures were taken, and I still have to wash all of the red dust out of that set of clothes. We then drove to a rest stop, I ate gas station steak (one commonality between US and Spain: gas station food is muy mal), and then drove to our home destination of Oviedo.
Which brings me to the last 48 hours.
The term “language barrier” is often thrown around when referring to people trying to communicate with different languages. The term is very accurate. Even in the first few minutes of meeting Elisa and José Villa, my host family, confusion ensued. I sat down in the backseat of their car and noticed a booster seat. I pored the deep corners of my brain, looking for the Spanish for “Do you have a grandchild?” I sagged a little as the Spanish eluded me.
The language barrier is a perfect way to describe the feeling: like you and the other person are on two sides of a thick concrete wall, and even though you yell at the top of your lungs, they only barely pick it up.
More frustrating are the moments of clarity followed by the relapse into confusion. This morning, I made it relatively smoothly through breakfast. I remembered the names of the food I ate, slipped on my house shoes when Elisa reminded me I wasn’t wearing them, and accepted a house key. OK, I’m improving. Then they asked if I was going out with my classmates. Uhhhh…crap.
The language barrier puts you in an odd place. I certainly don’t want to hide away from my host family–hey, thanks for letting me live here! Just gonna camp out in my room and only come out when I need my clothes washed!–but at the same time, how do you interact with people who you can only speak to in fragments?
I think Spain will be an adventure, but it will be an adventure with a rough start.
The Keene Chronicles 