A whole year?

Gmail invites

I have a few Gmail invites. If you’d like one, click on Contact Me on the left and e-mail me your first and last name and the e-mail address you’d like it sent to. If you have only a Hotmail or Yahoo address you’re out of luck because they have decided to not play nicely with Gmail and they reject anything sent from a Gmail address.

Little pleasures

Yesterday after school Alicia and I went to get some pictures developed. She walked by the hair-accessory section and stopped because she needed ponytail holders because she “has only one.” She brought just one? Chloe loses several a day and Alicia’s been here almost a month.

Then she saw the price: $1.92 for a big card full of brightly colored ("shiny") elastic bands. “Is this the price for one? Or all?” When I said all she couldn’t have been happier. She counted 30 ponytail holders and then muttered exclamations of delight in Spanish. To further add to her good fortune, a bonus: she noticed that there was a free digital watch included. It’s a little capsule, with a clock in it, attached to a ponytail holder. Worth maybe thirty-two cents. Her watchband broke this weekend and now she’s so pleased that she has a new watch to wear. Apparently elastic bands are more expensive in Spain.

Oi, la lengua

There’s a boy from Mexico at Chloe’s school. She doesn’t know why he lives in Spain, but he speaks very good English. He asked her if she’d like him to speak in Spanish to help her learn faster, and she said, “Yes. No.” She knows she should be speaking only Spanish, but since everyone at the school has been learning English since they were seven years old, it’s a little easier to communicate. It’s surprising, though, at how much of a language barrier there is after so many years of study. So much so that sometimes it’s easier for Chloe to figure out what they’re saying if they say it in their English, and then Spanish.

Chloe took a test in Language (Lengua) class (equivalent to our English classes) and one of the Spanish kids copied her answers. Doesn’t seem like a good academic career move to copy a Spanish test from an American who speaks little Spanish, but Alicia said they copy each other all the time.

And, contrary to her earlier reports, Chloe said people always ask her lots of questions about America and lots and lots of people have done exchanges in America (or have friends or relatives there), but usually a lot shorter than a school year. According to Alicia, the short exchanges don’t involve school attendance, so they are mostly for language learning.

There are some pictures of Chloe and Abby and their new friends before the dance where they got smoked out and finished at 4:00 AM here. One of the captions (very) roughly translates to "Americans, we recieve you with joy. You sing with me!" How nice is that?

Photos coming

I’ll be adding the photos Chloe sent in the next day or so to the In Spain photo album that you’ll be able to get to by clicking on a link in the right column, but in the meantime here’s Chloe in her uniform (or, Laura’s uniform – Chloe’s won’t be ready for a while). That’s Abby on the right.

This picture was taken before Chloe had been to school. I showed this to Alicia, and Steve asked her, “So that’s what you look like when you go to school?” Alicia, ever the diplomat, said, “Umm. More or less.” That seemed to imply, “I wonder if my mother dressed her.” Chloe said that since then she has paid close attention to the way the other girls wear their uniforms.

Only temporarily ours

Chloe and I talk on the phone every day so I think I know what she does every day. Today she mentioned her host mother’s cousin and said she’s really nice and they’ve had dinner with her a few times.

Irrationally I ask, how could she have, when I didn’t know about it? Once, maybe, but a few times? I know a full day can’t be covered in a phone call, but it’s still odd to think that I don’t know most of what Chloe does there. She’s just a kid and if she had dinner with someone’s cousin here, I’d know about it.

For example, Chloe is living in an eighth floor apartment, which could hardly be any more different than the only house she’s ever lived in, which is all on one level. I want the details: is there a lobby? A congenial doorman who bids you good day and is happy to sign for your packages? How many elevators? What’s it like to take an elevator to your home? Do you chat with your neighbors in the hallway as you juggle your school things while trying to unlock the door? Are there hallways? Do the floors stay clean because by the time you get in the front door any dirt on your shoes has already come off? I’ve never lived in an apartment so these are questions I want answers to, and until now I’ve forgotten to ask them.

Much like we don’t know everything they do here, we know way less of what they do there. There’s an attitude among some exchange organizations and some host families that the exchange students are the host parents’ kid for the duration of their stay. One host mother posted on a message board that her college-age son had taken her 16-year-old exchange-student son to a college party of which she knew no details and they wouldn’t be home until after 2:00 AM. She said she didn’t care if his parents would allow the same because he was her son now and there was nothing they could do about it. That strikes me as reckless and insensitive and is not the same as allowing a forbidden-at-home snack before a meal.

While we consider Alicia an honorary member of this family, we don’t have the right to allow her to do things that her parents are adamantly opposed to. So far, our job has been easy because she’s a really good kid. Maybe they don’t have ice cream freely available, but it makes Alicia so happy that I make a point now of always having some on hand. That’s no worse than something an indulgent grandparent would do. We’re responsible for Alicia but we are not her parents and it’s not our place to contradict her parents’ values. Although she did miss mass last week because she wasn’t home Saturday night and we sort of forgot on Sunday morning. I haven’t asked where mandatory mass attendance is on the spectrum of her family’s values but she didn’t lose any sleep over it.

Holiday plans

It’s for sure – Alicia’s sister can come here for Christmas. It really is fun making people happy and these are two happy girls. I just have to find an itinerary that works and then their dad can pay for it.

You meet a lot of nice people being a parent and host parent of exchange students. Abby’s parents (where Laura will be living at Christmas time) generously offered to drive Laura to one of the main airports nearest to them, which are each 200 miles away. The Rotary guy in charge there gladly gave his permission for Laura to come here. This will be fun for everyone and make it easier on us because there will be happy kids here to help divert the focus away from Chloe not being home for Christmas.

Chloe’s a little worried about that, especially since she and Abby think they might be in separate homes by then, but I told her that it might not be so bad because Christmas there will be different than Christmas here. Alicia said sure, they have a Christmas tree. They get it out every year, dust it off, and slap 'er up. That will be a big change for Chloe. If we get snow for Christmas (which happens almost never), I don’t think I’ll tell her.

We are our vocabularies

Chloe showed her host mother a few pictures of school friends that I sent with the Spanish Verbs book. Looking at a couple of the pictures, she said gordo (they aren’t skinny, but they aren’t gordo). That made Chloe angry. I suggested that remarking that someone was fat there might not be as rude as calling someone fat here. Chloe said yes, it is, and if it’s not, it should be and what kind of person looks at a picture of someone’s friend and says, “Ah, fat person”?

There are so many nuances to language that we take for granted. Alicia’s father telling Chloe, in his "worst English but best heart," to “be quiet,” meaning that she shouldn’t worry about school, the language, being so far away from home (he told me to be quiet, too). I sometimes use five-dollar words as a form of sarcasm, but the joke is lost and only pretension remains for the newly arrived non-native English speaker who hears me. There may be ten different words we could use in a given situation, so we take advantage of the shades of meaning for each of those words, using just the right one in just the right place. In a foreign language, however, we might know only two of those ten words, so we can demonstrate only twenty percent of who we really are.

Those nuances are the seemingly trivial asides that define our personalities, and if we can’t use our words, we can’t access who we are. In Spain, Alicia is a talkative person. Here, she isn’t because she can’t adequately and quickly express herself in a conversation. Mostly, she reacts and that is not who she is. Sometimes she makes little noises like there are words trying to get out, but she stifles them because the comment will not hold up to explanation. She knows enough English to understand almost everything and communicate more than the basics, but not enough to participate in a free-flowing conversation. That’s why she’s here and I’m really curious to see how much more of her personality will be apparent at the end of her stay.

In Jane Bernstein’s essay How and Why, she writes that her retarded (her word) daughter is “fundamentally unknowable, because she lacks the language to describe her own moods, desires, and dislikes.” On a much smaller scale, that must be what it’s like for Chloe and Alicia and all of the other exchange students at the beginning of their exchanges. They are fortunate, though, that they are only temporarily unknowable.

Dirty memories

Chloe misses my dirt. Or me showing her the dirt that has collected in the vacuum canister before I dump it. Perhaps we should have stocked her up with more meaningful memories to share with her new friends and acquaintances. Maybe, if I showed Alicia the dirt, I’d be doing her a favor by creating one more memory that she can take home with her. If you were an exchange student, you probably wouldn’t forget your host mother’s insistence at showing you the dirt in her vacuum cleaner every time she used it.

All this talk of vacuuming suggests that I’m a fanatic keeper of the house. Meanwhile, Alicia is probably wondering what happened to the dirty clothes I asked for a few days ago. She’s yet to learn that, around here, dirty clothes sometimes take the scenic route on their way to becoming clean clothes.

Shaking on the eighth floor

Did you know they had earthquakes in Spain? Neither did I, but Chloe has now experienced a Spanish earthquake. According to the Earthquake Warning System of the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, it was a 4.8 and occurred on September 21 at 15:48 UTC in the Pyrenees. In searching for more information I came upon my new favorite word: seismicity, as in historical seismicity. Chloe was randomly thinking early in the morning that they must not have earthquakes because Alicia and Laura have a lot of things on the shelves above their beds. Twelve hours later the apartment is shaking. I told her to be careful what she thinks.

Chloe is so worried about being a pest and a bother, but she said her friends haven’t told her to get lost yet so she’s thinking that’s a good sign. It’s hard to know with the language barrier, but that she’s aware of it probably means that they don’t mind having her around. Then she asked if she could look into getting a cell phone because she misses it sooooo bad (I have to keep adding os to so in the spell checker), and I asked her who she’d talk to. Oh. Yeah.

Steve is never home during the day when the time difference allows phone calls, and this time of year he’s not usually around a phone at work during the day. About a week ago it occurred to me to give him the numbers from the phone card so he can call her from work if he happens to be inside. He did that today. She said she was so excited and surprised that when she realized it was him she yelled, “Daddy!!!” And all I ever get is a subdued, “Hi. What’s going on?”

She gave him a list of things to put in a care package (Johnny’s seasoning salt, garlic powder, and Starbursts, to begin with). Now Steve’s on a mission, but he said he was a mess for the rest of the day because now he remembers how much he misses her. I forget that I talk to her every day and so our conversations are rather mundane, but he hasn’t spoken to her since 4:00 AM here when she was at the Copenhagen airport. Anyone who knows Steve knows that, now that he has all the information he needs to make a reasonably priced phone call to Spain, there’s no telling how often he’ll call.

Holiday visit?

Alicia said her mother would like her and her sister to visit each other if at all possible because they have always been together and she doesn’t want them to go apart. I think she means that they are very close and it’s comforting to her mother to know that her only children are so far away from home sort of together. I doubt that their mother knows, on a practical level, how far it is from Kansas to Washington. She also said her sister told her she can see the horizon, but of land and not the ocean, which is very different from Pamplona or the Seattle area. I can’t think of any place in western Washington where it’s possible to see nothing but flat land on the horizon. Her sister thinks all of the trees and the “sea” (Puget Sound, actually) sound very nice.

So I told Alicia to ask her parents if it would be possible for Laura to come sometime during their Christmas breaks. Laura was very excited and asked her parents the next time they talked, and they told her to find out more. It has to be approved by Laura’s host Rotary club and the host parents, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t be possible. After all the bureaucratic hoops we jumped through this summer, getting a kid from Kansas to Washington for a week should be a relative cake walk.