Flatness

Greetings from Lleida!

As of my last post, I was leaving Italy and heading for yet another foreign adventure. As I told my mother, my first reaction when I arrived in Lleida, Spain with all of my worldly possessions and only a smattering of the Spanish I once knew was, "What the hell was I thinking?" However, a very kind professor took me in until I could find someone else to stay, and he and his wife and his very intelligent children made me feel very welcome. His seven-year-old son decided that I was the perfect target for a new gaming buddy, and he taught me how to play and then subsequently beat me roundly at a series of board, card, and memory games. Also table soccer. He would sit and very seriously and quickly explain the rules of a game to me in Catalan (the Romance language spoken in this region of Spain), and I would feel very dumb pointing and asking questions using a combination of broken Spanish and Italian and, if his 10-year-old sister was around to translate, a bit of English. I must admit that, even though I really wanted to be in my own place, it was a bit sad to leave them.

Which brings me to . . . my flat! I have four flatmates, two women and two men. They are all university students, and one is from the Czech Republic. It is very much a student flat, complete with a fold-out chair, squeaky bed, front door with a lock that only opens if you jimmy it and hold your tongue just right, and living room with mismatched couches. But it is in my price range, right near the university, and my flatmates seem nice enough. I am well-pleased. Plus, (and they bragged to me about this when I was deciding whether or not to take the room) they get BBC and German MTV on their TV. I am well pleased, all things considered. I spent last night unpacking, and opted for low-budget decorating, affixing the city maps of various places I have visited these last few months to my walls with a euro worth of sticky tac. Also, and I am sure anyone who has ever seen my college dorm room would predict this, there are scarves draped over everything that a scarf can be draped over. It's a pleasant effect.

My internship is going to be a combination of a crash course on applied linguistics and my own thesis research, which deals with cognitive poetics and Romance language poetry (it's not nearly as impressive as it sounds, which seems to be a general characteristic of senior theses).

More on this city I find myself in later. Suffice to say, it is tiny yet urban yet traditional. I attended a ceremonial reenactment of the crusades which was, interestingly enough, delightful. It was preceded by a parade of all the various groups of Muslims in Christians. Each group had its own costumes and banners and marching band, and everyone, men, women, children, babies in strollers, marched side-by-side in their costumes. Have you ever seen a baby in a fez? Because it's pretty darn adorable.

I am still a little overwhelmed, but I think this is going to be quite the adventure.