¡TENGO AGUJETAS!

How would you feel if you suddenly had to join the cast of a play and you didn't know any of your lines? Well, that's one of my recurring dreams, and I felt like I was living it for real in the aerobics class I took today. Claire (roommate) and I decided to do an aerobics class today at the gym we go to, and it turns out the bulk of the class is choreographed, and it's like we're in a Britney Spears music video, or something, that's how complex it was. It was quite effective in making us sweat/raising the heart rate, though, so hooray for that.

When Claire and I arrived at the class, the instructor was super enthusiastic about us being there and, as if we didn't stick out enough already, she shouts "¡Estadosunidenses! ¡Qué chulo!" (Americans, how cool). Then she said some other stuff to the class and us about what we were going to do and then she addressed Claire and me again to say "Guiris, síguenos y hagad lo que podéis," which means "foreigners [think "gringo," but the Spanish version], follow us and do what you can." I had no idea it was going to be so ridiculously difficult! But it was fun, so ultimately, vale la pena (it's worth it). So that was my ridiculous experience of the day.

I've been going to the gym a ton lately to run/do pilates and now aerobics in order to ponerme en forma or get myself more in shape for the upcoming swimsuit season. Claire has done a great job of being moral support, Colorado mountain woman that she is -- she is by far the most athletic of the group of Americans here. She's run a damn marathon, for god's sake, not to mention she was on a bazillion sports clubs in high school. What did I do in high school? Drama club and traveling choir and church choir cantoring...oh, and I rode horses in the first part of high school before I gave it up and then picked it back up when I was 21.

School has been good here ~ here's the Easter poster I made:
And yes, I did the drawings -- that's about as far as my drawing skills go, don't judge. I basically made little doodles in my notebook and then redid them, bigger, for the big old poster. So I made an Easter egg, an Easter bunny, and a Peep. I miss Peeps...! I also printed out 2 of my old pic's : my first communion and a pic of me with my bro's when I was 2 and we got a pro picture taken complete with bunnies. I also wrote out and translated part of the chorus from the "Easter Parade" song (you know it: "In your Easter bonnet / with all the frills upon it / you'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade"). Oh, and I translated it to Cuando llevas el sombrero de Pascua / todo de vuelo / serás la mujer más distinguida del desfile de Pascua.

Euro-DST starts today, woop

I only now just figured out how to change the date settings on my phone so it would read month-day-year instead of day-month-year. The time also used to read that obnoxious 24 hour military thing, now it's back to good old American 12-h time. Hooray.

Big week coming up after this upcoming one. :-D Thursday, we'll be going to a Spanish production of Jesus Christ Superstar (YAY), then we'll be leaving for Germany on Friday morning. It'll be a pretty stressful day, Friday, first getting to Seville on a 3- hour bus (luckily for me, I have the delightful ability to sleep in any/every environment), then we'll mill around the dinky Seville airport to get to Frankfurt that night. This will mark the first time I'll be in a country 1) without speaking the language and 2) not knowing anybody ELSE who speaks the language.

Sure, I'm not completely fluent in Spanish, so I've discovered how body language comes in handy when I've reached a communication impasse, but I'm going to hit a huge wave of culture shock in Germany. And the German language always freaks me out, since you can say anything and it sounds like a death threat. That's probably just being an ignorant American...then again, the Spaniards I've mentioned that to laugh and say they agree, so who knows.

At least my trip to Germany/Austria will be a nice little segue to Belgium, since Dutch and German sound really similar to my ear, kind of like Portuguese and Spanish, like they are mutually intelligible. Not sure, though.

By the way, my Belgian relatives are descendants of my Grandma Boberg's first cousins. Cool, right? My great grandparents left Belgium in 1918 or 19 after WW I with my grandma's older brother and sister, but my grandma wasn't born yet...she was born in 1925, in Illinois. Sidenote: if my grandma HAD been born in Belgium, then I would have an in on the highly coveted dual citizenship, since American grandchildren of European-born grandparents can get a European Union passport on that merit alone. So frustrating! That would mean, then, that my second cousins on my dad's side are eligible for that dual citizenship, since their grandparents (my great uncle Renee and great aunt Irene, both deceased), were born in Belgium. And yet, I'm fairly sure none of them have any interest of living or working in Europe. Murphy's law?

More about family -- I am completely unaware what happened with the Italian and Swedish sides of the fam (my maternal grandpa and paternal grandpa, respectively). My Grandpa Catanzaro grew up hearing his parents speaking Italian, so I'm going to assume you'd only have to go back a few more generations to find out who emigrated from Sicily. Oh, and they changed their last name from whatever it once was to "Catanzaro," for unknown reasons. Catanzaro is a name of a city in the southern region of Calabria in Italy, which isn't even in Sicily. They might have been fugitives, which is kinda funny.
The Swedes are even more of a mystery. Boberg is a swedish name, though, even though most people don't think that. And I don't have the typical Swedish looks, either. I might not ever figure out when or why the Swedes in my family decided to head over to the US, especially because my Grandpa Boberg died in 1996 and all of his siblings are also gone. My Great Uncle Ben died a few years ago. I met one of my Grandpa Boberg's cousins, Glen Slater, within the last 10 years, and he showed my dad and I some of the Swedish family tree, but that stuff is lost on me. My dad would probably know more than I would. I should probably ask my Grandma Boberg what she knows about this whole thing, because I'm confused/curious.

Speaking of closer relatives, I'll be heading to Illinois this summer for a least a week or so to hang out with the grandparents/cousins/aunts/uncles. I'm not exactly sure what we'll be doing, though, probably just catching up and hanging out, and I'll be answering a barrage of questions about what I've done/what I'll be doing with my life. I don't even know yet!

¿viviendo la vida loca...?

Right now I'm watching mindless American TV and mourning the apparent death of my built in camera card reader. Why did it happen? Come back to me, card reader. This is a cruel joke.

Lots of junk happened since I wrote last. The padres came to Spain, we did a whole lot of stuff, but I think anyone who reads this also sees my facebook. In any case, some photographic highlights (scenery/indoor shots to start, sorry):

Fans at the Alcázar in Seville

The ever-impressive Plaza de España

The enormous, medieval structure, Ávila's "muralla." Bonus points to you if you can find the storks in this pic!!!

Salamanca's "New Cathedral"

The ceiling of a cathedral in Madrid.

Now for pic's with the parents.

With mom in Ávila

With dad at the Alhambra in Granda

The parents doing their "cute" shot at the Alcázar in Seville

With both the parents at Ávila's ridiculously old pig (their city symbol, I think, apart from the wall)

With the girls: Claire, me being burned, Michelle, Emily and Becca (Kim couldn't make it)

Life is good otherwise, despite worrying about future employment. I've reached the home stretch of Spain life, which is weird, but cool. I still have plenty of trips on the horizon, which is exciting. Spring break, AKA "semana santa" (holy week) is not the next week but the one after that. I'll be traveling with Michelle, Becca and Claire for 4 days, then heading off to Belgium for 5. Yay. :)

Lots of stuff going on...sleepy time! Tomorrow is my long day...in Spanish terms, anyway.

In Madrid, otra vez

I´m being un-Spanish tonight, since I plan on faceplanting in my pillows in T minus one hour, more or less, seeing how I´m completely wrecked. Maybe I figured it´d be the best way to empathize with my soon-to-be jetlagged parents? I´m in Madrid por la noche, and I´m going to get my padres around 9-ish.

Luckily, I was able to meet up with Emma, another conversation assistant, working in Madrid. She´s from the British version of my same program and I met her at the hostel where I was staying in November, along with a bunch of other UK-ers and Aussies and Americans. It´s really odd to hear so many people speaking English, since I´m so used to constant Andaluz (Spanish dialect). The hotel where I´m staying even has two English news stations on, which is cool. It also has a French and a Portuguese station, and I watched the Portuguese one for a long time because I was simply mesmorized by how similar it sounds to Spanish --I could understand virtually every sentence, and if there was a word I didn´t get, it made sense it context. So weird. I had no idea that Portuguese and Spanish were THAT mutually intelligible, even though when I´ve heard Portuguese briefly, before, it sounded like the inbred child of French and Spanish.

Emma was able to tell me how exactly to get from the center of Madrid to my hotel, so that was pretty cool. Being alone in a hotel isn´t, so much, but oh well.

The padres and I will be hitting up Madrid, Toledo and Salamanca in the next three days, then we´ll be returning to the Andalucía region so I can get to work. After work, we´ll be going to Seville, Córdoba and Granada, on different days. It´s going to be a whirlwind tour and the guide is yours truly...I´m a bit irked about the being the group communicator, but it´s all good. The worst part will be ordering food, no doubt, seeing how I´m not quite knowledgeable about all food vocabulary, especially when it´s just Spanish food. I do have one tip for any potential visitors, though: a Spanish tortilla is not a quesadilla, or anything that is normally found in the US. You have been forewarned...


After the ´rents leave, I´ll have a few weeks just to chill in Cabra...hooray. Truth be told, I´m more of a homebody than a traveler extraordinaire, even though I like both...obviously. No doubt the constant moving around from my teen years has contributed to the omnipresent bee in my bonnet to travel.

(Wow, I am clearly out of my mind tired when I type things like that...woops!)

Time to watch more Portuguese TV and then hit it. ¡Buenas noches!

back from Irlanda

I spent the long weekend in Ireland (Andalucía had a holiday weekend -- funny that all the English speakers fly the coop, then)! My Irish family made contact relatively recently -- Bernadette, my cousin, already met several of my second cousins, some whom I still have never met in my life, for some reason. Probably has to do with the distance issue, being that we left Illinois in 1988. I can't remember who, exactly, made it to my Grandma and Grandpa Catanzaros' 50th wedding anniversary in 2004, either.

Woops on the tangent.

Ireland was incredible. And the saying is that the place is immaterial without the its inhabitants is true. Everyone was warm, welcoming and eager to meet more of their American family. I learned more about my Great, Great Grandma Moriarity and her reasons for leaving Ireland. It had to do with the Potato Famine (An Gorta Mór) which still managed to ravage the country decades afterward. Bridget was born in 1875 and I'm not entirely sure of the circumstances surrounding her departure and whether it was her idea or her husband's, really. Also, it seems like it must have been a miracle that they survived what was probably a horrendous journey by boat, for weeks, probably eating possibly rancid food and living in squalor, with nothing and nowhere to go, I'm sure.
Makes me wonder if they thought they had made a big mistake.

I read The Gravedigger's Daughter which is about a German family who emigrated to the states in the 1930s and the prejudice they endure about being Jews and, paradoxically, being looked down upon for Nazism. Anyway, the whole immigrant issue is fascinating to me. The fact that I could've ended up in Ireland, too, blows my mind. But I'm not only Irish, so I suppose I wouldn't have been born at all, since I'm such a mixture of the meetings of fellow immigrants, all milling about Chicago and building a new foundation.


The majority of my weekend was spent in County Kerry, or with the family in Cahersiveen, a cute, small town in the Ring of Kerry. I keep thinking about how I'll have to translate my trip into Spanish for my coworkers, tomorrow, and I'm curious to see their reactions. They were worried I was going off half-cocked and maybe my family wasn't sure if they wanted me there, but I can safely assure them I was prepared by my Great Aunt Liz's advice and her stories about Ireland and our family there. They really were fantastic, very accommodating, unwilling to take a quid from me, it seemed, which racked me with guilt. I spent 10 euro as a donation to Mary Daly's Special Olympics fund and I gave 20 p to the church to light a candle, a family tradition, and then I put some loose change in the collection basket and later in a cancer hospice care collection.

Mary Daly -- I can't say enough about her kindness, bubbly personality and active lifestyle. She is bursting with activity and life and is up for a good card game, chat, meal or hike at any given moment. She cooked for us (Cabbage and "bacon," which looked to me more like a ham and pork hybrid, to me -- the tenderness of good pork and a slight salty flavor of ham -- my favorite...it wasn't fried). She made tea and coffee (in a French press, too!) and also had tea biscuits. She has an infectious smile, too. She has had a very full life with a good deal of green pastures with the ocassional flood -- one would imagine that would be the case, what with 9 children. Oh, and 14 grandchildren. And the occasional visitor from the USA -- descendents of her own aunt, Bridget Moriarity.

Enjoy these videos -- more are on the way. Keep in mind, this is raw footage. I'll be putting up an edited video ASAP.





....Now I'm back to the grind. Here's some stuff I have coming up to do presentations about and so forth, and there will be comprehension exercises. We'll be chugging forth with present simple irregulars (barely right now, more in the future). Also, I like asking questions that will generate a negative response, because the kids have to think about it slightly more. And I don't take monosyllabic answers for it, they have to conjugate the verb and make sure the person is correct. Also, I have one student read the question then another respond. I have plenty of opportunities to fine tune (sometimes overhaul) pronunciation problems, which are generally predictable at this stage. My students really need to get to the point where they relinquish their idea that English is a phonetic language, because it isn't even a relative of the completely phonetic Spanish language.