It's the Final Countdown

It is May 21. In less than one month, I will be gone. No more living with Mayte and Fernando, no more Sevici biking to class, no more odd Spanish encounters, no more, well, Spanish society. No more center, no more Cristina, no more volunteering, and no more tutoring English. It has all already started to wind down. Some stuff, like tutoring English, ends next week. My routine here is over.

I have been here for 9 months. And now, all of a sudden, it's time to pack things up and go. I don't know where the time went. The transition home (and just away from Spain) is going to be really hard. But, that said, I wouldn't want to spend another semester here -- I think I've outgrown this program and what it has to offer -- so I suppose the timing is good, even if this is the worst kind of change. I've never established myself in a different place like this before. I have a life here, I have a routine, a family. And all that is going to evaporate.

I realized recently that I find my blog more boring than I did early on in the year. Well, no, not boring, but it has become something like "hey, I went on this trip, look at my pictures, this was really beautiful, I loved seeing this person, I had a great time." I wanted my blog to be more of something of cultural observations, of new understandings and reevaluations, of learning and growing. And while I know that has always been reflected to some degree, I think recently it has been lacking. But, if I think about it, that's just another sign that I'm ready for a change. It means things that used to startle or surprise me before are now normal. Or, in other words, what was once foreign (aka this culture, this lifestyle) has now become the norm. I'm embedded in it; I interact in it; I don't separate it or look at it as an outsider as I once did. I'm not claiming total immersion or anything close, but I have adapted to my situation here, and the lack of cultural things to say in my blog recently shows that.

I just finished filling out some paperwork this morning for Cornell Study Abroad. It is the first school-related stuff I have filled out in English since sophomore year. It felt weird. Really, really weird. And easy, in a kind of stupid way. Like it wasn't challenging. Like I wanted it to be in Spanish. (Note: the first essay I write in English at Cornell in the fall is going to be an enormous shock to the system.)

On a totally random note, I had been wanting to share this: so, my center class was canceled two weeks ago because our professor, Pilar, had just come back from Mexico. She felt fine, but Michigan/Cornell/Penn decided that she couldn't come near us for a week. So fine, we didn't have class. When we did have class again, she said that she had been in a place in Mexico with zero gripe (Spanish word... I actually don't know what people are saying in English. Influenza?) cases reported. In Sevilla at the time there were over fifty cases. So, theoretically, she had more of a chance of getting gripe from someone in Sevilla than bringing it back from Mexico. Our universities are oh so logical... They had regulations like "Pilar is not to come within 100ft of the center, nor the students in the center...etc." I understand the formality behind that rule, but really, it didn't make sense.

Also, apparently the University of Sevilla does an exchange with our three universities. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but I think in exchange for us studying at the university here (and paying, obviously), Michigan, Cornell, and Penn each give a scholarship for two university students here to study in the US. It's cool. Today we all had a little schmooze session with the students. There is a boy and a girl coming to Cornell in the fall, both postgrad I think. One is studying CompLit and the other is doing Theater and Dance technical stuff. I had no idea that Cornell did that. It was neat talking to them, although the poor kids had no idea what they were in for. The boy thought he could roadtrip from Ithaca to NYC for a night of clubbing. He also wanted to buy a car to explore the US. We tried to explain how far away everything is, how Ithaca is small, and how he will have a lot of work, but I don't think it has sunk in yet. They are definitely in for a bit of culture shock. But, that said, it will be great to have the opportunity to meet up with them and have people to talk to in Spanish, if only in the beginning when they are still getting set up and figuring stuff out (as of now they know pretty much nothing, so we were doing a lot of question-answering).

I suppose that's all for now. This next week is my last week of class. I also have two exams. Then I have a week where I coincidentally have no exams, so I am going to bus over to Portugal with some friends from Fri night to Tues night. Then I have exams that next week on Tues, Wed, and Fri, with two other huge papers due, too. Angie comes on Saturday. So I'm fast approaching (slash already entering) the most stressful period of the semester, the period where almost all the work for all classes from the entire semester has to get done. I do that work and I think about the end. I think about progress and change. It is all getting very, very bittersweet.