Spain, the World Leader in Organ Donations

After studying abroad in Madrid for a year, I would say that I agree that study abroad doesn’t change who you are but helps you discover yourself. Many people study abroad in college, but studying abroad in high school is less common and, in my opinion, more daring. There were about 100 students from all over the world, Germany to Hong Kong, who chose to go to Spain last year. I always found it interesting that people from all different backgrounds and places chose to do the same thing I had done.

            Personally, I expected more of a difference that there actually was. Whether you are in Spain or the U.S., there are grocery stores, class clowns, coffee machines, etc. The teenagers my age worried about the same thing every American teenager might worry about. There are difficult classes and teachers we take more seriously than others. 7,000 kilometers doesn’t change human nature.

            However, there was one major difference that stood out to me. Spain is the world leader in organ donations. This is the most generous, kind-hearted culture I have come across in my short, 17 years of life.

Not only based off of statistics, I can also attest to this from my personal experiences. After being told that I would have to leave my first host family, I was sad about the possibility of having to move to a different town and start over, and I disclosed said information to two friends. In the matter of less than a week, Marisa and Eva, my new host mother and her daughter, were there to pick up me and my crammed suitcase, a year in a bag.

I have never been able to fully thank my host family. Opening up your home to someone, especially for a year, is a lot more than a simple favor than can be correctly appreciated with a mere thank you. Spain taught me how five, benevolent strangers can become your family.

“You cracked hourglass, with sand spilling from behind your ribs: you wasted my time.“

They say time is one of the most valuable things you can give to somebody. It’s maybe one of the only things you can give away and won’t ever and can’t ever get back.  We are all guilty of investing our time in things that we find out were never really worth it.  Sometimes we have too much time in day and other times it’s not enough.  Instead of judging our days on how much we’ve done in a day, we should judge them by how much we have learned in one.

            The most beautiful days are those of which you do something that you have never done before. If we wake up everyday and do the same thing over and over again, as fun as it may be, it’s really doing us no good. We should live each day to its best. Those are the days, of course, that we will remember for years and years to come.

I remember some of my most memorable days were the days when I took risks. Sometimes it can be good to do something crazy and not particularly safe.  Sometimes you’ll wind up at 1 a.m. taking a taxi-cab to strange places or nervously taking a bus in the afternoon to other strange places, praying to get off at the right stop.  Sometimes it’s okay to  pretend like you are leaving school with a mother and her daughter and running home to lay out in the Madrid sun for an hour before anyone gets home, and it’s certainly okay to run home in the rain with no shoes on and sit on a bench near home while watching your brothers play soccer.  Those are the days that you remember.

I certainly couldn’t tell you about each and every one of the days when I woke up, went to school, got home, ate lunch, took a siesta and studied for a few hours, ate dinner, and went to sleep. Once you do something every day, it no longer stands out in your mind. Yes, I know I did that most days, and they were numerous, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you about all the days that I did.

My point behind all this is to take risks. Sometimes you have to do something that sounds ridiculous. I mean what’s the worst that could happen?

            

Holidays

Yes, I realize that I haven't written in a good amount of time. It's because I've been really busy with school and vacation.

Here are my grades from the first trimester.

Ampliación de física y química- 8
Biología y Geología- 7
Ciencias Sociales- 6
Educación Física- 4
Ético cívica- 6
Física y Química- 4
Informática- 5
Inglés- 9
Lengua Castellana y Literatura- 4
Matemáticas- 7

The grading scale is, obviously, a little bit different here. Anything that is a 5 and above is passing. I failed 3 classes: P.E., Spanish Lit, and Physics/chemistry. I was actually very pleased with myself because there were many other students who failed just as many or more than me.

Katrina came the weekend we got out of school if I remember correctly. She spent the night in my house, and we went to Telepizza with my boyfriend and his friends so she could meet him in person. The next day, we went to Madrid with Lucia, Aidyn, Sean, and some of their Spanish friends.

Other exciting things that have happened:
I went to a Belén, which is a real live nativity set with tons of people dressed up standing still, with Asier's family.

We had Christmas in the house and Papa Noel came and brought us gifts. He doesn't come in the middle of the night here. He actually rings the doorbell at 12ish and leaves all the gifts on the doorstep.

New Year's Eve- we ate 12 grapes in the 12 last seconds of the year.

Afterwards, at about 2:30, we went to a party in Ajalvir and didn't return till 6:30 a.m.

Día de los Reyes- now the three wise men come, and they actually come during the night and they woke up to gifts

I lost my passport, credit card, and money or it was stolen in the metro

Later, I found my passport in the airport after talking to the police

“Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” – Farrah Gray

Today makes three months here in Spain. This weekend is a "bridge," which means there are 3 days, so we are in the mountains. It's a really nice house with a lot of rooms and it's farther out from Madrid (on the other side) but still only an hour away from home. 

I am very happy with my "new" family. My daily routine consists of waking up, going downstairs to eat a breakfast of hot milk and cookies, and getting ready for school. 10 minutes before school, we all pile in the car to arrive more or less 8:30 on the dot. School subjects change daily but it's 6 classes and a recreo after the first half of the day. The classes are 50 minutes(?). At 2:15, I walk home from school with a friend. At about 3:15, we eat lunch. Afterwards, we will either watch TV or I will siesta for multiple hours to wake up slightly confused, drink a tea, do my homework (maybe, maybe not) with my little host brother, Diego. Occasionally, if that's not my daily routine, it means I'm my friend's house. At 10:00, we eat dinner and watch TV after until 11:30.

I frequently hang out with my Californian friend, Lucia. We will go to either her town, which is a small city famous for its mansions, mine, or Madrid. We are always getting coffee and some sort of pastry together and now have found bus routes directly from where she lives to my city. 

I saw my "first" movie in Spain a couple of weekends ago. I'm using quotation marks because I've seen movies here before but not in theaters. I went with Asier, his dad, and his dad's girlfriend. We also apparently saw many famous soccer players, which I didn't recognize. I felt like I could understand the movie pretty well, especially because some of the things that were funny were to be seen. Maybe I didn't understand everything, but I got the gist and I still thought the movie was hilarious. 

¨The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.¨

             Since I haven´t really posted about what I´ve been doing lately, I am going to tell you about all the really exciting stuff that has happened in the past three weeks, so this is going to appear like I´m constantly doing crazy European-like things. 

                In Spain, they have a lot of strikes against stuff that they don´t like. For example, right now they are having strikes with something to do with the trash, and Madrid is covered with trash that is not being picked up. Here, we had strikes against changing the school curriculum for budget cuts, so we didn´t go to school for three days. On the third day without school, Eva and I went to Madrid, met up with Angelina and Sam for a quick coffee date, and later went crazy shopping. Mind you, I hadn´t gone shopping in almost my whole two months here, and was in desperate need of clothes so I wouldn´t be walking around clearly looking like La Americana. 

                The next week, we didn´t have school Friday because Día de los Muertos. On Thursday night, we went to a Halloween party which was equivalent to a very small homecoming in the sense of dancing and music except it started at 11 or 12ish and ended at 4 a.m. Everything is so much later here. 

                  Friday, my best friend Katrina, who is currently living in Galicia, picked me up and I spent the night with her host family´s grandmother. It was in Velasquez, Madrid, which is a posh district of Madrid where all of the nicest stores are. Safe to say that even though it was an apartment, it was one of the nicest places I´ve been to. We even had our own maid who asked us what time we wanted to wake up, what we wanted for breakfast, etc. The next morning, we went to Taste of America and around Madrid with her host family. Later that night, we went to Kapital (lite) with Lucia, Sean, and Aidyn. It actually wasn´t that great, but we lost Sean and left him there. Then, Aidyn, Katrina, and I all got on the same metro and one-by-one got off at our stops. It was super said having to say goodbye to my best friend after only being with her for one day. 

                   I arrived at a friend´s house with the 14 girls at 11:30ish and we stayed there until 4 a.m. when all of our parents got home from a dinner. Sunday, the host family and I went to a birthday lunch at a really nice restaurant and ate so well. Anyways, this makes me look super exciting, but don´t worry because during the week I am mostly studying. 

¨Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.¨ -John Gunther

               So I think at first, this experience was about leaving the U.S. to go somewhere new and exciting because I needed something new. And yes, it still is, but I have realized so much about my own country. From what started out as a ¨break¨ from my daily life in the U.S. has made me realize how lucky I really am.

             Yes, there are plenty of American stereotypes which at first to me seemed to be somewhat true, but I´ve realized that a culture is so much more than its stereotypes. Just because some Americans eat really unhealthily doesn´t mean that all Americans do. When people ask me what is a typical meal in the U.S., it´s really hard to answer because there isn´t one thing that we always eat. (And don´t say hamburger or hotdog even though some of you may imagine us only eating that.)

           Also, our (collectively as Americans) stereotypes of the world are sadly really limited. I feel like we aren´t as educated as we should be about other parts of the world, geography, politics, and history. I don´t even know all of the history of American. How is anyone supposed to expect me to know the history of Spain or any other country?

            I do also think that I´ve gotten more pride in my own country. Some of you might laugh because that is supposedly what we are known for. When someone says some dumb stereotype of the U.S. , it actually does bother me because I feel like what they think of us is so warped, just what they see on T.V., and what is put on T.V. shouldn´t even be put on there. I can watch Teen Mom and Jersey Shore sitting here in my living room in Madrid, Spain.

“Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop.”

                   So I've been here for a little over a month and I have gotten into the swing of things. I feel confident with the language, that is not to say that I can understand everything or say everything perfectly, but it's coming along. I'm not sure how to subtly say this, but I will be changing families sometime this week. I was placed with a wonderful family that was super welcoming even 3 months before coming here and a family that gave me a lot. I'm thankful to have spent my first month, I would call it my "birth" in Spain, with this family. They have taught me a lot, not only in Spanish but in things about myself and about people in general. 

                   What's next? Originally, it was up in the air where I would be going. I could stay relatively in Madrid or I could go to somewhere as far as the Canary Islands, for example. When I told my friends this, they were naturally upset because now our 9 months left together, filled with many promises of prospective plans, had now been shortened to days. I had confided in 3 of my Spanish friends what was going on. Later, more people new just from talk and also the part that's coming next. Sunday afternoon, I went to my friend, Eva's house to pick up a shirt I had left over there and maybe say our last goodbyes. While I was there, she told me her plan that her family could possibly host me but that she wasn't sure because they were already a big family and her parents had to talk about it. I didn't really want to get my hopes up, but I really liked the idea. Then while I was at her house, another friend texted me and said their family would host me. I passed both of the numbers of the moms to my liaison, and them the rest is in the hands of AFS. 

      I think what will end up happening is that I will be staying in Eva's house. Her parents said yes, and today they are having the home interview. As of now, I am pretty uninformed of what all is going on. I get most of my information from Eva. 

               Above all, what surprised me the most from this ordeal is that I didn't ask anyone to host me, these families and friends of mine reached out to me once they realized what was happening. I can't express my emotions for this. First of all, this shows what great friends I have here and how lucky I am. And secondly, this is a perfect example of the Spanish culture. They really go out of their way to do good for others. Like after school Monday, once the other people found out that I would most likely be Eva's new sister, a boy asked her why she was doing this for me and her answer was, "a mi me da pena."