You must always be a member of the clean plate club here. This is a harder task than it may first appear, although my se�ora’s cooking is to-die-for delicious. Food is forced upon you and piled atop your plate like a volcano erupting an entire other meal atop the one already served. Don’t let the breakfast of toast with peach jam and hot chocolate mislead what is to come later in the day. Lunch is the largest meal of the day and consists of salad, soup, bread, homemade French fries or potato chips, a pasta dish or 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, normally around 9:30 pm. Most often eggs, which are never served for breakfast, are served for dinner. Tonight we had a vegetable medley that was so sweet it could have been the dessert at a five star restaurant and fried fish that would have put to shame the most authentic fish and chips.

A different World it is when you live in another country. There are different rules, different customs, and very different ways of living. 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 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. Every meal is consumed in front of the television. Normally the news or political debates with fast talking business people covering the screen. It is the captions that inform me of the happenings of the rest of the World. The other night President Obama appeared on the news and my se�ora asked my opinion on him. Talking politics with strangers is dangerous and hard enough in your first language, asking me to do so in a second language, forget about it. I’m sorry but I didn’t have a “political” themed vocabulary list in high school to help me out.

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 ask 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 be proficient enough in Taboo to greatly increase my winning percentage and to not have to use charades in order to express myself. 

Location: Sevilla, Spain