As close to cultural analysis as you'll probably get

After a discussion about Spanish life with some fellow uprooted New York students and a mandate from a professor to develop a list of things we don't like about Spain (for real), I started thinking about my painless transition here, and began making a mental list (because that's how my mind works) about what elements came from New York and which came from California, and then it turned into a real list during a particularly boring session of my grammar class (this is truly my modus operandi). And then I realized that it was less of a list and more of a compilation of my thoughts on city life and Spanish-American cultural differences, and that it might be interesting to other people. And thus, this post.

Useful skills obtained in California:

1. Anything related to a citrus fruit. Specifically, how to choose the ripest and juiciest orange and how to eat it without making a huge mess and getting orange juice all over everything. (After watching a girl from Chicago get orange peel, pith and juice all over herself, her bag and her friends in a particularly messy and horrifyingly funny way, I've realized what a valuable life skill this actually is.) The citrus fruit is delicious here; instead of the small, hard and rock-like oranges you get in New York that I categorically avoid, everything I've eaten so far has been delicious, ripe and wonderful. I eat an orange or a tangerine at least once, and usually twice, a day. Some people can't even peel them without a knife, and I feel sad that they have been deprived of such a wonderful, portable snack.

2. The concept of water and household energy conservation. Although we do it for different reasons in California (instead of a drought, water and electricity are just much more expensive here), the concept of paying attention to how much water and electricity you use (taking shorter showers, opening the blinds instead of turning on the light, turning off the faucet when you brush your teeth, etc.) has, at this point, been firmly engraved on the inside of my skull for all eternity (thank you, family). My host family sits in the dark all the time and is even more concerned with turning off errant lights than my father is. I'm used it, for the most part, but I think it's hard for a lot of people in the program here who usually just blithely turn on the water and every light in the house all the time and just leave the room.

3. The weather! I am basically living in California climate here. Everybody freaks out when it snows and has no idea what to do, the forecast always says it's going to rain but it never does, the temperature rarely dips below freezing even in January-February, the proportion of mostly-sunny days to overcast days is delightful, and I never need to wear more than two layers. I'm loving it. (You poor, poor people in New York right now. I am so glad I'm not there.)

Useful skills obtained in New York:

1. How to keep people from talking to you in the street. Although the canvassers here cannot even hold a candle to the ones in New York ("Do you have a minute for gay rights?" "Support your local animal shelter!" "Do you have five minutes for Obama?" "Donate to Saint Vincent's breast cancer research!" "Are you registered to vote in New York City?" etc.), both in terms of sheer volume and obnoxious perversity, there are still some that hang around asking for your money. ("Time" is code for "You stand in the street, probably in the rain when you're late for class, while I talk at you in a tone of moral superiority and then ask you for money." I'm sorry, I'm sure that many canvassers are lovely people and I almost always support their many and varied causes, but accosting me in the street when I obviously have other things to do is not going to endear me to you.) However, the skills that I have cultivated in New York to minimize my exposure to people dressed in green with clipboards actually allow me to avoid Spanish canvassers altogether! The classic evasion methods (head down, fiddle with iPod, pretend to answer your phone and begin a loud tirade about some disaster if you see them far enough in advance, increase your walking speed until you're practically running, press your lips together in an unfriendly way, begin a loud and dramatic conversation with the person next to you, hunt for something in your purse, glower, etc.) that usually let you escape with a grimace and a headshake when asked if you have a minute for starving puppies and that minimize your chances of being followed and/or yelled at succeed universally here. They don't even bother talking to you! It's amazing.

2. Relatedly, how to walk efficiently. Yes, people here are generally less efficient walkers than people in New York, but that can really be said for anywhere that isn't New York, and I try not to get too worked up about it unless people are being truly sidewalk-inept. (It happens.) New York has, however, given me the skills to actively dodge old ladies (old ladies walk exceptionally slow here, as an aside), women with strollers, men with umbrellas who flail them as they walk, giant groups of teenage girls who travel in packs, lost tourists with cameras, and all other sorts of roadblocks. True to form, I also seem to have developed the most efficient path to take on my walk to school - what street to cross when, which signals take forever to change, which intersections have convenient crosswalks, etc. I don't even do it on purpose, it just happens.

Thanks to both the east and west coasts:

1. My willingness to eat anything once. I've always eaten most things and enjoyed food, traits that have grown exponentially in the past five years thanks to both California and New York, and they are continuing to serve me very well here. I've transferred quite easily into the adventurous "I have no idea what this is but I'm eating it anyway" mindset, and I've been having a much better time than I would be if I were worrying about what I was eating and whether or not I'd like it. In many bars/restaurants (the line is quite thin here) they bring you a tapa with your drink before you even order food, and usually don't tell you what it is (often they just bring olives, which are pretty self-explanatory, but sometimes they bring little toasts with unidentifiable toppings). A lot of people then ask the waiter (in broken Spanish) what it is, and usually have no idea what he/she says anyway, and then kind of poke experimentally at the food, but I am firmly set up in the Just Eat It camp, and so far nothing drastic has happened. The same goes with menus - if I don't recognize a listed ingredient but it looks good overall, I just order it anyway, and so far I've survived and eaten a lot of good food. This adventurousness (apparently that's a word) is a really, really hard concept for some people here, and while I understand the paranoia if they're vegetarian (a difficult concept for the Spanish, what do you mean you don't eat Serrano ham, it's not meat it's a condiment!) or allergic to certain foods, if they have no real excuse to be timid they're just making their lives so much harder.

On the other hand, one of my friends was served some sort of fried, congealed blood thing the other day and unknowingly ate it (apparently it was really gross, too), so maybe I've just been lucky.

2. On the street, no matter how weird you are, you cannot phase me. I grew up in the Bay Area, spending formative summers wandering around Berkeley and San Francisco, and then I moved to Manhattan to live in Greenwich Village. I guarantee that I have seen weirder shit on the street than what Trademarked Crazy Man is doing in Plaza Mayor. I'm sorry to tell you that you will get no reaction from me, besides possibly mild annoyance if you actively bother me, because even though you think you're "original" enough to weird me out, to make me stare? I've seen it. Thanks for playing, though. Try those lost tourists from Missouri, they look impressionable.

Elements of Madrid I was utterly unprepared for:

1. Unleashed dogs. I have never been a huge dog person and would even say that I am slightly uncomfortable around dogs I don't know, particularly if their greeting of choice is lots of loud barking and jumping. In Madrid, unlike California or New York, you don't have to leash your dog in parks, and you apparently don't have to pay attention to them either, because they are free to wander up to random strangers and pester them (how do dogs always pick out the one non-dog-person in the entire park, they're worse than cats). It's particularly irritating here because I don't know Dog Spanish - can't tell it to sit, or stop putting its muddy paws all over my white wool coat (true story), or even just go away, while its owner is invariably on the phone or having a Very Important Discussion with a fellow dog-owner and paying no attention whatsoever to the fact that their pet has no manners at all.

2. Roundabouts (or whatever they're called here, that's what they call them in England). As far as I can tell, where we would have a four-way stop sign or four traffic lights at an intersection in the States, the Spanish pave giant circles and install at least six sets of lights to control who gets to drive around in a circle when. While I do not drive here and therefore cannot comment on whether this is a more or less efficient method of traffic control (I'd go with less, but I'm biased), it is hell for pedestrians. If you want to get across the roundabout, which in the States would take you one, maybe two light changes and crossings, it takes at least four in Madrid. There is also, as far as I can tell, no logic behind which cars get to go when, and which lanes they drive in if they want to continue around the circle or get off, and it is therefore impossible to safely jaywalk because as soon as you step off the curb a car comes zooming out of nowhere right in front of you. Combine this with the fact that it takes anyone at least twice as long to get from one side of the intersection to the other, and my inner New Yorker starts going crazy after standing on the curb for five minutes waiting for the light to change. Angst.

3. Siestas. While I can't say whether or not people actually sleep every day between the hours of two and five in the afternoon, they do close their shops. Everything closes. (Alright, everything besides public transportation - thank god - and restaurants, because 2-4 is also the prime lunch hour.) It is so frustrating and completely foreign to me after I've spent the last two and a half years of my life in a city where you can go get anything you want at 2:30am on a Wednesday without having to walk very far.

4. The lack of real street signs. Like other cities in Europe (Paris, I'm looking at you), Madrid's "street signs" are small blue tiles painted with the street name and, theoretically, affixed to the outside of a building on every street corner. The problem arises when the inhabitants of the building proceed to build giant signs in front of this very important little tile, or hang their laundry in front of it, or graffiti it, or - for some unknown reason - remove it entirely. The end result is me, standing on the street, with my map, knowing which way north is, but still not knowing where I am because there are no street signs. I think the locals do it on purpose, and I kind of understand, but it's mostly just mean because the street names have no logic to begin with. Nobody hides street signs in New York. (It's probably a felony or something, come to think of it, but it's also just needlessly cruel.)