Everyone must be a member of the “clean plate club”, every single meal. This is harder than it first appears, even though all of the food my “se�ora” cooks is to-die-for delicious. Food is forced upon you and piled atop your plate like a volcano that is slowly erupting an entire other meal upon the one already served. Don’t let the breakfast of toast with peach jam and hot chocolate mislead what is to come the rest of the day. Lunch is the largest and most extensive meal consisting of salad, soup, bread, homemade french fries, a protein or two, and it always ends with a perfectly ripe, peeled orange. Dinner is smaller and served much later than in the States, usually around 9:30 pm. Most nights eggs (which are never served for breakfast) are involved.  Tonight we had a medley of sauteed vegetables that were sweet enough to be the dessert of a five star restaurant and fried fish that would put to shame the most authentic batch of English fish and chips. 

The soft denim of the new American Eagle jeans I am wearing lay atop a bed shorter than my 6’2″ older brother, and covered in blankets more worn with history than my great grandmother’s family stories. My room fits a twin bed, two mismatched dressers and a small desk meant for a non-electric sewing machine and in its entirety is barely larger than my parent’s walk-in closet at home. All the floors in the apartment are covered in discolored shades of tan tiles and the green-sherbet colored walls of “my space” house a single picture of a BMW. However, not the same BMW my father drove me to the airport in only a few days ago. Instead, it is of a, fittingly green, 1929 soft-topped car too old for me to recognize.

The lack of technology here is somewhat soothing and provides fewer distractions. It allows me to see what life was like before everyone had a cell phone and I must learn how to navigate a city without google maps and simply select a time and place to meet with friends. However, one thing never changes here. Every meal is consumed while watching the television, without fail.  Mostly the news or political debates where fast talking business people cover the screen. It is the written captions that give me an idea of what is happening in the World. The other night President Obama appeared in the news, my se�ora proceeded to ask me my opinion of him as a president. Talking politics is dangerous with strangers and hard enough to do in your first language, asking me for my political view point in my second language, not a chance. I’m sorry, but I never had a “political” themed vocabulary list in high school to help me. 

My life is a game of charades where I am a street performer who can only use their extremities in order to communicate with my audience. Panic strikes when the climax of a simple sentence transforms into a horror movie where the epiphany of the next word could be lurking behind any door. And at times, the epiphany is never realized. Last night the se�or in my house asked me what my father does for a living. The word for lawyer had escaped me faster than the A I earned on my occupation vocabulary quiz in high school. My life then became a game of Taboo, me against the entirety of the household. “A person who helps criminals”, I finally mustered. Though inaccurately describing my father’s profession, they were able to correctly guess the word for which I was searching. By the end of my stay I hope to increase my proficiency at winning Taboo and to not need to use charades in order to express myself.  

Location: Sevilla, Spain