One of the first phrases I learned to say here was "Gracias pero estoy llena" which means "Thank you, but I am full". When you have a host mother who (just like all mothers in every part of the world) is always worried about making sure you're eating enough and therefore feeding you large amounts of delicious food, you pick up on that phrase quite quickly. This habit of eating a ton of food at every meal overwhelmed me at first, but I have since realized that is it truly a labor of love and that I am very much allowed to express when I am full. This initial experience and lesson stuck with me so much that I brought it up in class.
We have a supplementary study abroad class with our lovely, amazing, practically-perfect-in-every-way graduate student named Hannah Grace. In one of our first sessions she asked us to use one word to describe our first two weeks and share it with the class. I, at first jokingly, chose the word "llena". This got a few laughs from the class because we all know what it is like to live with a Spanish host mother who is always feeding you well. But when Hannah Grace asked me to explain why I chose that word, I realized that it described much more than just a feeling in my stomach. It truly described the feeling I was having in my brain and my heart and my soul (but at that moment, mostly in my stomach).
Everyday here is FILLED (está LLENA) with new experiences. It is new words, new people, new sights, new smells, and new sounds every single day. At first this was a completely exhausting sensory overload. That is also one of the things that sometimes makes it difficult for me to sit down and choose a theme to write my weekly blog post about because there are just so many things happening!! When I FaceTime a friend or family member back home and they ask me "How's Spain" my first thought is "where do I even begin?!"
Even things that I always thought I knew, and that I didn't think I would discover for the first time, became new. For example, one of the first phrases a beginning Spanish speaker learns is "Dónde está el baño?" (where is the bathroom). Thought I had that one down. Wrong. Turns out in restaurants in Spain the word is actually "servicios" instead of "baño". Another one: Spongebob. I though that would be pretty cross cutural, right? Wrong, here he is known as Bob Esponja. Oh and the the tooth fairy! No such thing, here it is a tooth rat named Ratoncito Perez who leaves children gifts (my host brother lost two teeth this week so I learned that one).
Now I don't want you to feel like I'm complaining and that this is a bad thing because it's not. There is something completely beautiful and amazing about becoming comfortable with the unfamiliar. Everyday I step out of my bedroom door, I don't know who I am going to talk to or what I am going to see or what I am going to learn. Example: a few days ago when I was riding on the bus with my friend Danielle a man overheard us speaking English. He ran over to us and it turns out he is a Norwegian Mormon who spent many summers in America and now has a brother living there. He is currently doing mission work in Spain. He told us speaking English makes him feel at home and he was excited to be able to speak it with us. I never could have guessed that would have happened just on my usual route to school but it was a fun surprise and became a fun story.
So even though some days are exhausting, it's fun to feel like I'm making new memories every day. Especially with things that I normally would take for granted in my own country like people who I ride the bus with or the smell of the bakery I walk past on my way to school everyday or just being able to talk to people in their native language. But this coming week, I get to have a little taste of the familiar. My real family is coming to Spain for my spring break to come visit me and they arrive tomorrow!!! It will be weird having them here but it will be AMAZING! It will be my first time seeing them in about two months and really my first time seeing people who I knew before this trip in two months. I can't wait to show them everything that I have been up to and all the cool things I get to see everyday. I am hoping by the end of the week I get to leave them llena (full) in all senses of the word. I already know they will fill me up and recharge me for the second half of my journey here in Spain.
Since my theme this week was llena, I'm ending this post with some photos of delicious foods that will probably leave you more hambre (hungry) than llena.