Valencia: Week 2

  Valencia, Spain and Canary Islands
Saturday, July 12, 2008

Valencia: Week 2
 
This week I began working for the LEA program.   I have lunch and dinner with Spanish students who are learning English and speak to them in English.  I'm partially worried about it because the food isn't particularly good (it's cafeteria food from the university).  But, I've learned more about the Spanish culture by talking to the students (however slowly).
 
The girls who I talked to for most of the week told me they had a teacher from Ireland and they all hate his accent, lol, they have a lot of trouble understanding him.   Being that they're in Spain and close to Britain, they learn British English (for example, they call the letter Z,  "zed," which is how it's pronounced in every other English-speaking country).   They all had trouble hearing the difference between the letters C and Z.   It's not a sound in Spanish.  The letter Z in Spanish is pronounced with a "th" sound in words, at least in Spain.  Also, the combination of "ci" and "ce" is produces the "th" sound as well.   One girl kept correcting me when I said "gracias," saying it was pronounced "graTHias."  I'm pretty sure this is a strictly Spain pronunciation, as I've not heard many (if any) people from Latin America pronounce it this way.
 
From the groups of people that I talked to, I realized that Spaniards have their own TV shows (obviously, this I knew), but also a good deal of them watch American tv shows.  They all knew what Lost was, and several of them said they loved Grey's Anatomy and House.  I think a big TV show right now, at least for kids around my age is "Los hombres de Paco."  Or something like that.
 
Through out the week, I generally had similar conversations with everyone.   Language barriers make it difficult to have much variety, plus everyone was shy to use their English (which is how I am with Spanish).  Something I heard repeatedly was that the regions in Spain are very different from each other. http://www.top-tour-of-spain.com/Map-of-Regions-of-Spain.html  There were a number of students from the northern part of the region Castile and Leon.  And they all told me that the weather there is much cooler and they didn't like the heat in Valencia as much as I did, they aren't used to it.  Also, they all said the regions were very different.  From the bits of conversations in Spanish I could pick up the students were surprised to learn different things about the different autonomous regions.
 
Spain actually has an interesting history regards to the regions.   Under Franco, Spain had a highly centralized government.  Then, after his death, only a few years later, many different regions were offered almost near autonomy.   Every region has their own government.  The central government helps to control different things in different regions.   (For example, the central government might help with education and tourism in Galicia, but not in Valencia, where they met help with housing and agriculture).  However, for the most part each regional government gets to control what happens inside the region.  Each Autonomous Community, as they're called, has their own leader, government, legislature and Supreme court.   As Hooper puts it in The New Spaniards, "In just over four years, one of the most centralized nations on earth had been carved into seventeen self-governing administrative units, each with its own flag and capital."
 
With the LEA program, the one thing that really worried me was my Spanish.   I'll be spending a good 2 hours a day speaking in English.   But, I no longer think that'll be a problem, the students are constantly breaking off into Spanish with each other, so I can try and decipher that.   Plus, on Tuesday, I visited the center of Valencia with a group of students and they talked to me in Spanish, so it was good practice.
 
During the tour, we visited similar areas to what we visited on my tour with ISA.  But, I feel like I got a little more out of it.   La plaza de la Virgin seemed prettier in the evening light. 

Wider view of altar in the cathedral

Also, we entered La Catedral this time.  Like the other churches I've seen, the altar is very ornate and pretty with a lot of paintings of heavenly bodies (like clouds and angels).   The inside was very large and spacious too. 
 
Most interesting, was that the cathedral has the severed arm of St. Vincent.  I don't know why it's there as the church was closing and I didn't have enough time to read the sign.   I'm sure it's an interesting story (how could it not be?).  

Arm of St. Vincent

 

My classes this week have been fine.  My grammar class is a grammar class.   In film course, we watched two old TV shows, once called El pícaro and Historias para no dormir.  Historias is the Spanish equivalent to The Twilight Zone or Outer Limits.   In the episode we saw, psychics were killing themselves for no apparent reason.   Our professor never really explained why we watched that episode.
 
Interesting fact I learned from my film professor: the longest prison sentence anyone can get is 30 years in Spain.   There is no life-sentencing and no death penalty.  THe professor says that the difference between the US and Spain is that US is more concentrated on punishment while Spain is more concentrated on rehabilitation.   Whether or not that is actually completely accurate I don't know, but I thought it was interesting none the less.  Even though crime has a less sentencing time in Spain, they have less crime than the US.
 
Anyways, the movie we saw this week was Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988), a movie by Pedro Almodovar, a famous director in Spain.   It had a young Antonio Banderas in it.  Depending on your interpretation, it's a good example of the liberation Spaniards felt after Franco's death; women becoming more independent and society being less conservative in regards to sex.
 
Also, we saw some tidbits from a children's show called La boda de cristal.   It was very popular in the 1980s.  Our professor explained that it was also a good example of the liberations Spaniards felt after the death of Franco.   It seems that another unique thing about Spain is that they went very liberal very fast after the death of Franco, more so than one would expect from a once very conservative country.  La boda de cristal was really interesting to watch.  It was a children's show, but the clip we saw showed a man wearing a wedding dress, singings "stand by me," while someone dressed in an egg costumed danced around.   I was really surprised that this would be in a children's tv show.   But, some of the girls from LEA program told me that the show was very controversial in different regions.
 
On Thursday, the last day of the program for the week, I had an interesting conversation (in Spanish!) with a girl about American and Spanish movies.   She told me that she was surprised that her other American friends had been horrified at the violence in Pan's Labyrinth when American movies have a lot more violence in them.   I said she had a point and said that the movie had disturbed me slightly because of the violence.  I couldn't really explain why.  In the end, we agreed that the violence in the Pan's Labyrinth was more realistic than in a lot of the shoot'em up movies from Hollywood.
 
I enjoy talking to Spaniards about their culture and history more than reading about it in a book or going to a museum or lecture or watching TV.  I feel that those things (often out of necessity) can't fully cover the range of emotions and feeling that people have about different topics.   Books and TV and such can often be misleading it making you think things a certain concrete way in different countries.   Also, it seems that a lot of the prejudices books or television says a society has (like Spain) really only holds true for the older generations.   These students were all my age and we all had similar hobbies and interests.  TV made me think that all Europeans hate Americans.  This is not the case (at least in Spain), none of these students expressed any dislike for America.   There certainly are things that they may not like about the US, but they didn't bash me or my country for it.
 
  Also, different media sources and movies had led me to believe that Europeans know everything about the US and everyone knows English because they all speak 10 different languages.  Again, this is not the case in Spain.  Most of the students and people I meet don't know where Ohio is (and I think only a quarter even knew there was a state called Ohio).  I don't fault any of them for this because when I realized that don't know as much about America as I thought, I knew there was no reason they should know about Ohio.   Most only know about the big ones like NY, CA, and TX (because of Bush).   I don't think Spaniards are ignorant for not knowing as much as I thought though.   I definitely think that my own arrogance about the US's importance made me assume that everyone must know everything about the US.   On the whole though, I believe that Spaniards know more about America than Americans know about Spain.  
 
As for the languages, it's more customary for Spaniards to know 2 other languages besides Spanish.   Most of the LEA students knew another language (generally French or Italian).  A far cry from 10 languages.
 
Again, I'm not trying to say that Spaniards are stupid, not at all.   I think that not only was I being arrogant about US's importance but I was also putting Spaniards as a whole (and all Europeans) on a pedestal of intelligence significantly higher than Americans, which just isn't the case.  This isn't a bad thing, if anything, it makes me like them because I don't feel as intimidated by them because I understand more that they're just like me.   For example, the LEA students are in Valencia to learn English, but they weren't all jumping at the opportunity to Speak to me in English the first day, they preferred to speak in the language they're comfortable with, just like us in the ISA program.   I still think that Spaniards are better versed on current foreign affairs than most Americans, but this doesn't mean all look down their noses at America and American culture like the media and movies portray them. 

Group of LEA students in Plaza de la Virgen

 

Note: I realize it's sad that some of perceptions of real people come from Hollywood movies, but I don't want to hide that fact because I know that a lot of people pick up their perceptions of others from movies.