Just my thoughts
Yestaurday I wrote a whole lot of information so today is going to be more relaxed. It is raining hard here and I am still recovering from the cold that I have had since Thursday. I just got out of my first class, which only lasted 10 minutes because the teacher got stuck in traffic and was around 45 minutes late (it is only an hour long class). I took my first quiz here last Wednesday and knew that I did horrible! We got back our quizzes and I got a B not one of my best grades but hey I did a whole lot better then I thought I had.
I have been having a hard time deciding what to tell you guys and what you might not find interesting so if you have requests let me know otherwise you´re stuck with what I like. As you can tell right now it has been the history of Spain and it´s rulers, which I have even more on that. But right now I am feeling more in an cultural Anthropology mood so I am going to describe a little more about the differences I have been noticing about the people.
First cars are a whole lot smaller here! The streets go from normal streets to tiny little allies and I have no idea how they don´t have more accidents. It is normal for people to park on sidewalks and for sidewalks to just randomly disappear. Sidewalks are made for about one person and on one side they are lined with apartments and little shops. I find it annoying for me and other americans as we are used to walking down the street side by side. Buildings are taller here and there is not a seperation between the buildings.
From Thursday, Friday, and Saturday are big party nights. There is a limited amount of parking here so it is normal to see double parking. The unsaid rule here is that when you double park you leave your car in neutral so others can push your car out of the way when they leave. Also we have made a slogan for the Spaniards on parking places ¨there isn´t a sign that says I can´t¨ as they park in some of the wierdest places. Now you may wonder what about the police don´t they enforce strict parking laws, no. We watched a person actually obviously disobey a parking sign in front of two policemen, there is never one by himself, and they just walked away. I rarely see cops here and when I do they always seem to disappear in a matter of minutes. Only in madrid did I find them a whole lot more and there they spent a lot of time redirecting traffic.
Next store hours, can we say extremely annoying! The shops here open around 10 and close at 2 for lunch and siestas. In the really touristy parts of town they may reopen around 5 and close at 7 it really varies. Which gets me to banks they open at 8:30 ( it really varies) and close at 2. They are never open later and very few are open on Friday through Saturday.
Names I thought this was interestign in class so I have to share, how many last names do you think the typical person has here? Well let me explain first let´s have an example Wally Walters marrys Penelope Cruz and they have a child named Pedro. Pedro´s last names will be Walters Cruz making his name Pedro Walters Cruz (the man´s name first). then if Pedro gets married to a woman by the name of Elise Peterson and they name the child Bart his name will be Bart Walters Peterson, mom´s last name just disappears. Now comes the reason this was so important in the 16th century. In the 16th century they were having the inquisition so by keeping both parents´last name they could track if you came from a good catholic family or not. They just never got rid of this.
Hey I learned yestaurday and there is a piece of legislation being debated right now regarding the passing of the royal crown. In the spanish constitution they clearly state the women and men are equal, like the US´ constitution. However, when the crown is passed from generation to generation it is given to the first born son, if there is not a son then it goes to the first born daughter. This directly contradicts the Spanish constitution so they are changing it for Felipe´s children. I hear that it is pretty well supported by the house and senate and they are only trying to figure out when it will go into effect. I like that!
Oh some more anthropology stuff. I learned that a survey went out about work ethic differences between catholics and protestants. Nobody be affended please. They found that more of protestants had white collared jobs and more catholics had blue collared jobs. It was actually such a significant difference that anthropologists set to work to figure out why and they made a couple theories. Number one being the difference in the type of church services each had. The catholics had services in Latin and nobody spoke Latin so they had to depend on bishops to interpret the services to them and describe what the bible said about god. They had to be extremely trusting and follow along. While protestants had services in English and made their own interpretations of the bible. Another difference this causes is that the catholics unlike americans in general believe that status is passed down through lineage. Americans believe that status is achieved by your actions in life this belief is common among protestants as well. So it barely explains reasons that there is such a difference in the religious representation in jobs but I think there is a whole lot more to it and this explanation only skims the surface.
One last thing, I have a teacher that is actually a whole lot better at English then he even knows but he was talking to us about a difference that he noticed. This year at the beginning of the semester he had our class seperate into groups for a competition and we were given a bunch of words and one person in the group had to guess the words based off of what the group members said to describe it. Well, of course it was a huge competition and in the end my group, of course, won and we let everyone know ( we got chupa chups the next day). Anyways last year he was teachng in south america and he tried to play the same game and it failed miserabley because the kids would try to help the other groups on a word instead of only concentrating on their groups words. We are definately a competitive society in the United States.
Alright I am tired of writing now so later! Let me know what you thought of this stuff! I love the comments!
Lauren
I have been having a hard time deciding what to tell you guys and what you might not find interesting so if you have requests let me know otherwise you´re stuck with what I like. As you can tell right now it has been the history of Spain and it´s rulers, which I have even more on that. But right now I am feeling more in an cultural Anthropology mood so I am going to describe a little more about the differences I have been noticing about the people.
First cars are a whole lot smaller here! The streets go from normal streets to tiny little allies and I have no idea how they don´t have more accidents. It is normal for people to park on sidewalks and for sidewalks to just randomly disappear. Sidewalks are made for about one person and on one side they are lined with apartments and little shops. I find it annoying for me and other americans as we are used to walking down the street side by side. Buildings are taller here and there is not a seperation between the buildings.
From Thursday, Friday, and Saturday are big party nights. There is a limited amount of parking here so it is normal to see double parking. The unsaid rule here is that when you double park you leave your car in neutral so others can push your car out of the way when they leave. Also we have made a slogan for the Spaniards on parking places ¨there isn´t a sign that says I can´t¨ as they park in some of the wierdest places. Now you may wonder what about the police don´t they enforce strict parking laws, no. We watched a person actually obviously disobey a parking sign in front of two policemen, there is never one by himself, and they just walked away. I rarely see cops here and when I do they always seem to disappear in a matter of minutes. Only in madrid did I find them a whole lot more and there they spent a lot of time redirecting traffic.
Next store hours, can we say extremely annoying! The shops here open around 10 and close at 2 for lunch and siestas. In the really touristy parts of town they may reopen around 5 and close at 7 it really varies. Which gets me to banks they open at 8:30 ( it really varies) and close at 2. They are never open later and very few are open on Friday through Saturday.
Names I thought this was interestign in class so I have to share, how many last names do you think the typical person has here? Well let me explain first let´s have an example Wally Walters marrys Penelope Cruz and they have a child named Pedro. Pedro´s last names will be Walters Cruz making his name Pedro Walters Cruz (the man´s name first). then if Pedro gets married to a woman by the name of Elise Peterson and they name the child Bart his name will be Bart Walters Peterson, mom´s last name just disappears. Now comes the reason this was so important in the 16th century. In the 16th century they were having the inquisition so by keeping both parents´last name they could track if you came from a good catholic family or not. They just never got rid of this.
Hey I learned yestaurday and there is a piece of legislation being debated right now regarding the passing of the royal crown. In the spanish constitution they clearly state the women and men are equal, like the US´ constitution. However, when the crown is passed from generation to generation it is given to the first born son, if there is not a son then it goes to the first born daughter. This directly contradicts the Spanish constitution so they are changing it for Felipe´s children. I hear that it is pretty well supported by the house and senate and they are only trying to figure out when it will go into effect. I like that!
Oh some more anthropology stuff. I learned that a survey went out about work ethic differences between catholics and protestants. Nobody be affended please. They found that more of protestants had white collared jobs and more catholics had blue collared jobs. It was actually such a significant difference that anthropologists set to work to figure out why and they made a couple theories. Number one being the difference in the type of church services each had. The catholics had services in Latin and nobody spoke Latin so they had to depend on bishops to interpret the services to them and describe what the bible said about god. They had to be extremely trusting and follow along. While protestants had services in English and made their own interpretations of the bible. Another difference this causes is that the catholics unlike americans in general believe that status is passed down through lineage. Americans believe that status is achieved by your actions in life this belief is common among protestants as well. So it barely explains reasons that there is such a difference in the religious representation in jobs but I think there is a whole lot more to it and this explanation only skims the surface.
One last thing, I have a teacher that is actually a whole lot better at English then he even knows but he was talking to us about a difference that he noticed. This year at the beginning of the semester he had our class seperate into groups for a competition and we were given a bunch of words and one person in the group had to guess the words based off of what the group members said to describe it. Well, of course it was a huge competition and in the end my group, of course, won and we let everyone know ( we got chupa chups the next day). Anyways last year he was teachng in south america and he tried to play the same game and it failed miserabley because the kids would try to help the other groups on a word instead of only concentrating on their groups words. We are definately a competitive society in the United States.
Alright I am tired of writing now so later! Let me know what you thought of this stuff! I love the comments!
Lauren
posted by Lauren Westling @ 1:15 AM
1 Comments:
At 10:16 AM,
Lauren Westling said…
The weather here is not cold at all I still walk around in a t-shirt and jeans because I think it is nice but everyone else is wearing sweaters. some other kids in ISA are wearing capris so it is not bad at all.
I am not sure about the legislation yet but that is definately something I would be interested in following and will keep you updated.
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