- First and foremost, our host mom’s food, among other things at the house. I cannot even begin to describe how ecstatic I am to leave my host mom’s dog food and go back to my mom’s fantastic cooking. I know I sound like a snot, but please, let me explain. Our host mom doesn’t like to spend a lot of money on quality food, and it shows at mealtime. Katie and I thought that by living with a 62 year old woman, we would experience some of the best, most authentic Spanish cuisine, but were we ever wrong about that. I had three meals at my host mom’s house that I actually enjoyed, and everything else was a struggle for me to even eat half the plate (which is so unlike me). My three favorite meals were paella (a rice based dish with meat, because she actually cooked it), lentil soup (beans in a heavy broth cooked over the stove), and plain pasta with oil and vinegar, usually complemented by a salad. Those weren’t bad, but it was the hamburger patties cooked in the microwave, the “mashed potato soup” as Katie and I called it, the mystery meats, and the godforsaken store-bought, 1.17 euro tortilla de patata (basically a disgusting potato/egg pancake) that, you guessed it, was also prepared in the microwave... and in reality, the list goes on and on of downright terrible food, but I’ll spare you the details. I’m not kidding you, Katie and I could never plan to do anything for about 45 minutes to an hour after mealtime at our señora’s house, because that time was solely devoted to laying in our beds in the fetal position and making lists of our first ten homemade meals once we were back in America... I really wish I was kidding about that. We often used this time to contemplate sabotaging the microwave so she would have to actually cook something on the stove. Another thing that really bothered me was the lack of knowledge for health food regulations. Many times, Katie and I would get home from a weekend trip and find that Encarna wasn’t home but that she had left dinner on the table; and I mean literally, sitting out on the table. We’ve come home countless times to hamburger patties, mystery meat, and other nasty foods that were just sitting out on the table to be heated up for dinner; let me reiterate that... “meat”, not in the fridge, just sitting out, for hours. Usually we estimated our meals to have been sitting out anywhere from six to eight hours; now if that doesn’t make you want to just dig right in, I don’t know what does! On nights like these, Katie and I would actually take the food and throw it out in a nearby trash can outside our house, then go out and get tapas at our favorite restaurant, Tradevo. It was a godsend that we had Tradevo in our plaza where we lived (it is seriously about 10 steps outside our door). This restaurant saved us from beginning forms of starvation... Anyway, I think you can understand why Katie and I traveled so much during the past four months and why I’m always raving about delicious food I have at restaurants. Let me just add in a few things before I end this rant... Katie and I did indeed ask our host mom countless times for things that we liked! We even went to the store and wrote a list of things that we would love that are not too hard nor expensive to prepare: broccoli, asparagus, other veggies, pineapple, strawberries, nice looking chicken breasts, ground beef, etc., but do you think we ever got any of that?? She bought me nice strawberries one time, but only because I had went out and finally bought them for myself before her. Now to end, I have to add in two quick stories for you to really understand our pain... One night Katie and I got home to find lukewarm tortilla de patatas that had been sitting out for God only knows how long, and we decided, enough was enough. The infernos of Hell would have to freeze over before we were going to eat that, and we were not going out for tapas for the third time that week, so we decided just to cook ourselves. We went to the store and got pasta, chicken breasts, lettuce, broccoli, and strawberries. When we got home, we put the tortilla de patatas aside and started cooking a delicious meal for ourselves; I grilled the chicken while Katie made the pasta and steamed the broccoli. Our final product consisted of grilled chicken pasta with some oregano, grilled chicken caesar salads, and fresh strawberries for dessert; a meal that in reality cost maximum 10 euro to prepare that fully fed both of us with leftovers! We were just sitting down to eat our meal, when we heard the door handle cranking to unlock... Encarna was home... We were not prepared for this, as we were hoping to have cleaned everything up and hide the evidence before she got home. Normally, when she leaves for the day with her grandkids, she doesn’t get home until 1am so returning at 9:30pm was extremely early. Well, this one was going to be fun to explain... She walked in the kitchen and quickly addressed the situation, “What’s going on? What are you all doing? Cooking???” to which I very sheepishly responded, “Sí.” She asked why we weren’t eating the tortilla, and in my head I wanted to say because it’s DISGUSTING, and I wouldn’t even feed that to my dog, but I quickly averted the situation by explaining to her that it would have been the second time in three days that we would have been having it, and we simply just wanted something else. I’m pretty sure she was very offended because she went off on a Spanish rant to which she called herself a “bad cook”, when in my head, I’m thinking, how can someone be a bad cook when THEY DON’T COOK ANYTHING. Microwaving food is not cooking. So again, I tried to prevent a bad situation and simply explained that she wasn’t a bad cook (lie) and that we just wanted a little more variety, to which she, surprisingly, accepted my response and moved on. The real kicker was that the next day she asked me what the bag of green veggies was in the fridge, to which I was very confused and explained that it was indeed broccoli, and she replied “ahhh broccoli”. WHAT?! How do you not know what broccoli is?! (Ok, now you’ll need to remember this part of the story... it’ll be important later.) So after that weekend, things pretty much went back to normal, Encarna kept giving us less than mediocre food, and Katie and I kept fighting over who got to go to the bathroom first after mealtime (just kidding, we didn’t fight, we took turns... ha!) Anyway, so last weekend, Encarna’s family came over to spend a few days at the house: her sons, little grandsons, everyone. Katie and I came home from school one afternoon last week, and when opened the door, to our surprise, we smelled a heavenly smell coming from the kitchen. Did we walk into the wrong house?! This couldn’t be real. I peeked into the living room and saw one of her sons eating some nice steamed broccoli, and I walked out in the kitchen for a minute, to find chicken breasts roasting on the stove and what looked like homemade chicken noodle soup; I was so happy!! I couldn’t wait for lunch that day. Katie and I went into our rooms to study a little and about an hour later, Encarna called us out for lunch. We practically skipped to the dining room to find......... rice. A clump of rice that was so overcooked that it was practically melted together and hardly edible, with some cold tomato sauce on the side. Our second course consisted of a cheap hamburger patty that was indeed cooked in the microwave because it was so disgustingly pink in the middle. We had no steamed broccoli and no homemade chicken noodle soup. I wanted to strangle her. I hardly ate any of it that day and went straight to my room. It pissed me off so much that she can cook a quality meal (with broccoli that she didn’t even “know what it was” when she asked me a few weeks before) for her sons and grandsons, but we get crap... Let’s just say that I’m ecstatic that I’ll never have to live there again, and solely based on what we were served. Encarna is actually a decently nice person most of the time, and our house was always spotless! She did all of our laundry, folded all of our clothes, and made sure everything was clean. I just hated the food and the fact that we rarely had sufficient hot water in the shower, even after I complained to our program director (to which she was really mad at me that day, and I’ll never forget her walking through the door screaming “alguien?!? alguien?!?” meaning “is someone here?!?” and then going off for 20 minutes on Spanish rants that I didn't understand anything besides I should have “just asked her if there was a problem”). Well, asking her after that didn’t really solve the issue either because our problem with the shower just went from having cold water to lukewarm water; I can count the times on one hand that it was actually hot. Great for shaving. One last thing that really made us mad was the day in April that Katie finally worked up the courage to ask if the vent looking thing near our ceiling was for air conditioning, as it was starting to get really warm outside. Encarna replied by telling us that it was only for “calor”, meaning heat. So I’m so glad we suffered for three months getting out of cold showers and walking into a cold room (60 degrees to be exact) AND spent 30 extra euros for the thickest blankets we could find for our beds when I already had five blankets on my bed AND wore flannel pajamas, a sweatshirt, gloves, socks, and winter beanie to bed... because we could never get warm, when in reality, we had heat all along. Frustrated doesn’t even begin to describe the emotions I’ve experienced at our house this semester. I will say that it could have been a lot worse (because some of my friends didn’t even get meals at times), but it could have been a lot better. I also have countless friends that did not have one complaint about their host families because everything was so great; for example, my friend Tony’s family had their own personal chef and our friends Dan and Stephen practically had Rachel Ray herself for their mom. It really is the luck of the draw. My advice to anyone studying abroad in the future is to communicate with your host families early and often about any of your issues, because you can always be moved into a different place. Katie and I didn’t want to move because we were gone a lot of weekends anyway, but we actually liked our location (being one block from Dan and Stephen), speaking Spanish everyday, our room, and how clean everything was; and surprisingly, most days, we actually got along with Encarna and had good conversations with her... So all in all, there were ups and downs at our house, but the most important thing is that we made it through alive :)
- The post office. The postal service in Spain is downright terrible. The word efficiency is not in their vocabulary at all. There were several times where they tried to deliver a package to me when I was AT HOME, and if I didn’t have exact change, I had to watch the postman walk away with my package, to which I would have to go pick up at the post office the following day. I couldn’t even pay with a card. What kind of system is that?! Then, when I would finally go to pick up the package or try to take care of any other sort of business at the post office, it was necessary to devote at least 30-45 minutes standing in line because everyone is so relaxed all the time, and everyone just likes to stand around and look at each other.
- The Spanish stare. I will NOT miss this at all. God forbid you wake up late one day and have to throw on some yogas, a sweatshirt, and your sneakers to run to the metro. Most mornings, I would have thought I had three heads the way some Spanish people looked at me. I still don’t understand why what I’m wearing matters so much to anyone else. Even when I wasn’t dressed down, so many people (women especially) would stare at my backpack, at my shoes, or at me, in general, to which I would reciprocate by staring (more or less, glaring) directly back at them until they looked away. I think they got the point after awhile.
So those are my top three things that I won’t miss about Spain! Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved living here, especially since the city of Sevilla was so amazing, but like anywhere you live, there’s always going to be a few things that aren’t so peachy.
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