"Los fundamentales contemporáneas" ("Contemporary Fundamentals")

Ay, it has been awhile! I will blame mostly exams (I had my first one on Monday) and the studying that has been taking place, but also there has just been a general lack of exciting things going on lately (ha, yes, hence exam period). Exams and fun are not normally two things that go together, although exam period has produced a few interesting stories, which are worth repeating. And, of course, there will also be the usual randomness...

So, exams first. I had my exam for Anthro of Contemporary Societies on Monday from 3-6pm. At the beginning of the period, we had to turn in our 15-page paper. I wrote about time and progress (yes, it was the paper that I have been publicly complaining about for several weeks), and I actually am somewhat proud of what I produced. I ended up with 17 pages, which is easily the longest paper I have ever written in Spanish, and I can happily say that almost all of it was not bullshit, as I was expecting it to be. I don't think what I wrote would fly in the US--it was a lot of summaries of other people's theories and understandings of time and progress, like Walter Benjamin and Max Weber--but I think here in Spain, where the expectations are that you digest and regurgitate, it will be fine. Good, maybe, even. There's potential. Like I said, i was proud.

So anyway, I turned that beast in at the beginning of the exam period. Then we had the exam. Our professor (my lover, remember him? Antonio, probably a grandfather?) wasn't there--he has been in Cuba for the past month doing research, I think--so we had a different professor proctor the exam. He said that the directions Antonio had left him were incredibly vague, which indeed they were. There were two parts to the test. For the first part, we were given three "questions" and had to pick one to answer. The "question" I picked was the title of this blog entry: "Los fundamentales contemporáneas", or "Contemporary Fundamentals." What?! Not a coherent question and probably the vaguest prompt ever imaginable other than just straight up writing "life" and having the class respond to that. I basically just took everything I knew about the class and went on an hour writing rant. I think that was what Antonio wanted, but it was SO different than what I'm used to in the US. It was the first time I have been in an exam and bullshitting the answer was actually also the correct answer. It was weird. That said, there was of course a lot I could write from what I had learned in class, but still. I feel like someone who never went to class (and there were a lot of people like that; I am in Spain) could still do reasonably well. It's ultimately a question you can answer (passably, anyway) from just observing the world around you.

That was my first exam experience. Oh, and the second question we had was relating this article to the material that we had learned in "theme one, section one" of the class, but I couldn't remember what topic that was! It was weird to me that Antonio would expect us to remember, but then I do remember the other Spanish kids highlighting their syllabus like nobody's business and always looking back to what we were talking about in class and where it fit in with the outline of the material we were going to cover. I guess now I know why. Mental note for the future!

Now I have 2 weeks until my next exam, the one for local development, but I also have to turn in 13 pages worth of work at the start of that exam, too. Two weeks is definitely sufficient time, but Lauren, my best friend from Ann Arbor, is coming on Monday(!!!!!) for a week with a friend of hers from college before she goes off to Paris for the semester. Lauren is leaving a couple of days before my exam, so I should probably get my essay on sooner rather than later. But motivating myself to start this early is hard... I wish my exams weren't so spread apart, but hey, at least I don't have to be taking the Anthro of America one that's on Monday!

And now, onto the more random pensamientos of the last week:

1) Mayte spells her name with a 'y', obviously, as you can see. But in Spain, everyone always spells this nickname with an 'i', like "Maite." It turns out that Fernando is responsible for changing the spelling of Mayte's name. Her real name is "Maria Teresa," so Fernando decided that her nickname should be "MaYte" for "Maria y (which means 'and') Teresa." Get it, get it, get it?! I think it's genius. It also explains Fernando really well...

2) When I get back to the US and see all of the clothes that I have and didn't bring, it is going to feel like Christmas. Or, er, Hannukah. Not to say I miss them, per se, but I have gotten so used to wearing the same 2ish weeks of clothing over and over that it will be weird and very nice to have more of an assortment of clothing again. Who knew such excitement could come from going through things that you already had! It's good. Simple happiness, plus less consumerism on my part. All around win-win situation.

3) I had two good intercambios in the past several days. One with a really nice Chemical Engineer (ChemE, in Cornell terms), Cristina, who is 21. We had fantastic conversation and just clicked. It was really nice. Then I had another one yesterday with a girl named Angela who is working on her dissertation on Art History. I think I held her to unfairly high standards... :P But anyway, she was still nice and I will probably contact both of them again after Lauren comes and I finish exams. Maybe I can start actually forming relationships with the people I have intercambios with! What a concept!

4) I watched the inauguration on my computer last night. Everyone was talking about it and a lot of classes, etc, were canceled here, too. It wasn't just a big deal for Americans, but for Spaniards, too. It's just a follow-up example to the election, and it shows how much people around the world tune into the US in ways that we never bother tuning into them. So people here paid a lot of attention to the inauguration. I liked the speech a lot. Obama definitely has skill.

5) Ha, this should probably be a subpoint of 4), but I'm not feeling pathetic enough to organize my blog entry as such. Anyway, the Spanish news channels were playing coverage of the inauguration, Obama, etc, for most of the day until 6pm, when the inauguration was our time, and they kept replaying the Spanish 'vota por Obama hoy' song that was used to get the Latina vote. I had never heard it before. Maybe I live in a box and you all already know it (I don't know how popular it was), but I thought it was really interesting and somewhat funny how bad it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoT_tWJLgfI

Ok, nothing too interesting coming up, but I'll write if anything worth sharing happens. Hasta luego!