New Year's Resolutions

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  Vigo, Galicia, Spain
Friday, February 25, 2011

Most of us start the month of January with anticipation and motivation to fulfill our litany of New Year's resolutions. We find ourselves walking amidst a spotless house, with cupboards full of vitamins and high-fiber cereal, staring at a refrigerator covered with our new weekly workout schedule. I started the year of 2011 with the same motivation and anticipation as every other good American.

Actually, let me back up… I started the first day of January asleep at a table in a café while trying to eat churros and chocolate. I spent the entire second day of January in bed resting in a slightly comatose state. And on the third day, I rose again, with that American motivation brewing inside of me, retrieved some oversized A4 Spanish style paper and my favorite pen, and inked my resolutions into existence. The list unraveled as follows:

-      Learn how to grocery shop efficiently in a Spanish supermarket

ˇ      learn how to keep a room full of 30 students quiet and focused for 50 minutes

ˇ      learn how to use the subjunctive and conditional tenses in Spanish

ˇ      learn how to make and live with a budget

ˇ      learn how to train for a half marathon without Bengay or TigerBalm in my medicine cabinet

ˇ      learn how to keep my diet balanced without a reliable source of peanut/ almond butter



I had a lot I wanted to learn.

A month and a half after I scribbled my goals down I’ve decided to spend a few moments in reflection and really analyze my progress… what in fact, have I learned since I switched my family calendar from the 2011 to the 2011 version? 

1. shopping efficiently in a Spanish supermarket is entirely dependent on the preparation done before you even enter through the sliding glass doors (yes Spain is THAT advanced, they too have sliding glass doors)

 Proper preparation requires prior evaluation and selection of typical recipes and dishes from SPAIN instead of the comfort food I was accustomed to back HOME. Searching for taco seasoning and canned black beans for hours needed to stop. Scouring through the freezer section for frozen turkey burgers and sweet potato fries had proved to be pointless. And relentless requests of all-natural peanut butter seemed to be making no impact on the supermarket’s weekly re-stock shipments. Most unfortunately however, no matter how many times I re-arranged my living room, there just simply was never room or proper ventilation for a barbeque. Fantasizing about grilling my burgers while wandering through the foreign aisles of a supermarket was only hurting my efficiency quotient. So I started looking for "recetas" online instead of “recipes” and paying lots of attention to the food Pedro’s mom prepared for our weekly Sunday meals. Soon I found my cart filling up with fresh fish, whole chickens, lots of potatoes, and all kinds of vegetables… in record time. Whoever thought mussels and octopus would take less time to track down than the frozen turkey burgers?

Another key component is to conduct all recipe investigation within the constraint of the metric system. Trying to figure out how much flour and sugar is necessary for your favorite cookie recipe is difficult when you’re reading cups and your measuring cup is telling you grams.  Also it might save you some embarrassment to know ahead of time that 1 pound is not similar to 1 kilo. 1 pound of sliced turkey may be a hearty portion, but a1 KILO of sliced turkey makes you look a little silly and you lose time trying to explain that you don’t in fact want enough turkey to feed turkey sandwiches to a cafeteria full of kids for a week.

2. This resolution still needs a bit of time, because I have yet to master how to keep my CLASSROOM full of kids quiet and paying attention yet. Actually one girl informed me just like week that “time’s have changed, the STUDENTS are the BOSSES of the teachers now.” My look of shock and confusion didn’t need to be translated. She decided to continue by telling me that during the times under Franco’s rule in Spain the teacher’s practiced lots of strict discipline. At times the students were punished so severely they would be hit or humiliated in front of the class. Now, the tables have turned and the students get to be in charge. They decided if they want to do their homework, take their tests, or participate in class. Surprisingly, she isn’t the only girl in the school with this attitude. And unfortunately its an attitude I have no idea how to conquer.

However, I have learned that in my private classes, kids between the ages of 3 and 8 will do anything for a sticker. It’s the most miraculous, genius, and simple motivational tool a teacher can carry. The dollar tree sheets of stickers my mom sends me result in the most attentive and well behaved children I’ve ever seen. The joy it brings these kids to pick out their favorite sticker and put it on a blank sheet of a paper with their name on top is touching and life-saving. With my triplet boys, Julian, Mateo, and Fabio, I’ve even mastered the art of “rigging” our English Vocab Bingo games, so that all three win at the same time and can EACH get a sticker. Oh how wonderful  my private lessons have become.

3. Learning the subjunctive and conditional forms in Spanish was probably my most ambitious and pertinent resolution. I’m here to improve my Spanish, and although I spend lots of time every day conversing in this new language, I sometimes cheat the system by only using the verbs, tenses, and vocabulary I’m used to. It’s quite amazing how easy it is to twist our speech into a more basic level, but its also the easiest way to stunt my improvement. I realized I was avoiding these tenses by avoiding conversations about hypothetical or conditional situations. Instead I only discussed concrete things. What I did yesterday, what I was going to do today. Things you are certain about you can easily use the present, past, or future tenses. However to say a sentence like “if it isn’t raining tomorrow, I’d like to go to the beach,” or “if my Dad loaned me some money, I would buy a Vespa and a new moto helmet” well, those sentences just get a whole lot more complicated. So to avoid using this verb tense, I stopped dreaming big and only expressed ideas I was certain about. “Tomorrow, I know it is going to rain, so I’m not going to go to the beach,” or “I don’t have enough money, so I can’t buy a Vespa, and I suppose I can settle for this jenky helmet with no face protector.” However, armed with my new grammar book I stole from my school and lots of dreams I’ve been locking away… I’m ready to start to share my secret, and not so secret (Vespa) desires in their full fledged subjective and conditional glory.

4. So the budget plan started out great. I was buying a WHOLE chicken on Monday’s for   3.50, cooking it in the oven on Tuesday, and using the plethora of remaining meat in a wide variety of dishes for the rest of the week: chicken pesto pasta, chicken fajitas, chicken and rice soup, chicken stir fry, it’s quite amazing how a many different flavors you can give chicken. Anyway, so I started stocking up on chicken and cutting back on how many times a month I treated myself to sushi, and thought that within no time I’d have enough of a nest egg saved up to buy my treasured and lusted after powder blue Vespa.

Think again. One afternoon, upon opening my mailbox, I discovered a nice little envelope with 4.5 months worth of electricity bill waiting inside. Turns out my life changing purchase of a dehumidifier back in December was able to reduce the levels of moisture in the air, while simultaneously sky-rocketing my monthly expenditures. Ciao baby blue Vespa. Hello real world.

5. My friends and I signed up for this half-marathon. At first I was excited. My girlfriends and I had conquered this task once before back at Pepperdine, and it was a bonding experience that I consider to have shaped a large portion of my senior year. However, I soon found that training in Spain would be a different type of feat. There was no pancake house to feast on after our long runs, no protein shakes to replenish with during the week, and it rained, a lot. I also found my muscles aching and screaming for a heating pad or some Tigerbalm, neither of which could be found in my cabinet or a local CVS. So I signed up for yoga and left my medicine cabinet empty.

Yoga classes started off a little rough. When your body is twisted into a pretzel, and the teacher says in Spanish “hold the position and DON’T turn your head” it’s important to do just that “hold the position and don’t turn your head” otherwise you risk injury of your neck right? Well, when your second language is Spanish, and your having trouble focusing because your face is closer to your buttocks than you even thought possible, you may not understand the phrase “don’t turn your head” so naturally, you turn your head to look at the person next to you and copy their position. This results in panic and increasingly rapid instructions on behalf of the teacher, all of which more or less kills the atmosphere Yoga practice is supposed to evoke. Whoopsies. However, I’ve been reviewing the parts of the body and am really beginning to enjoy the practice of yoga.

As an added bonus, I was able fill the vacancy in the medicine cabinet with some wonderfully smelling candles. This stash came in handy when the manager of my building posted a sign on the elevator requesting that all residents abstain from using any water (showers, laundry, flushing toilets, etc) between the hours of 9 am and 9pm for 5 consecutive days. Imagine not being able to flush the toilet until 9pm for 5 days straight. It’s just as terrible as it sounds, and the candles were more necessary than ever.

On day 4 of no water usage, Pedro came over to my house for lunch, falling within the 8-9pm time table. I had made a little note with my red Sharpee and index card and had put it on the top of the toilet that said “NO FLUSHING” I’m still not sure if it was the habit of routine, or that the international language of NO somehow got lost in translation between English and Spanish, but Pedro flushed the toilet. I heard the sound and rushed into the bathroom to ask him what he was doing, and fearing what was going to come of our mistake. Sure enough, 20 minutes later, 2 angry construction workers came pounding on my door and proceeded to give Pedro and I a substantial lecture about how our actions had effected the daily project, and sent one worker home to change his clothes. I even learned the word “turd” in Spanish when we were informed of our luck that it had only been #1. Can this even happen in the States? Don’t they just cut water completely? How can they be working in pipe, trusting people not to use water, and leaving themselves vulnerable to the potential flushing of waste down the same pipe they’re working on? Anyway, we stifle our giggles, apologize profusely, and vow not to make the same mistake twice. Pedro then marches back to the bathroom and stacks my make-up bag, hair dryer, and two rolls of toilet paper on top of the button used to flush the toilet, to literally blockade himself from flushing it again. Fast-forward to an hour after we eat, and I hear the dreaded noise of the toilet flushing again, and Pedro beginning to yell at himself. He literally went THROUGH his own blockade to flush the toilet, and this time it wasn’t #1. We hid in my living room with the blinds drawn and the TV low for the next few hours. It was terrifying.

6. My last resolution was to learn how to survive without peanut butter. I quickly realized this resolution was just simply un-reasonable. It’s impossible to survive without peanut butter. Thus when my last glass jar of all-natural peanut butter fell to the ground one morning and shattered, I only had one option: salvage it. 30 minutes were spent slowly spreading the peanut butter over a cutting board and picking out the shards of glass. My mom warned me it was a health hazard, but I really didn’t see any other options at that point. Every bite held danger, and the term crunchy suddenly seemed like a sick joke, but I finished every last scoop of that stash, and just as it finished, my wonderful mother had another package waiting in the mail for me. The best.

Can’t wait to see what the rest of 2011 holds.  

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