Culture Shock (Comedy of manners)

Underwear ordeal.

I confess I am posting this because I need to rant, and I am certainly shocked, although the connection with culture shock here is flimsy at best.

Yesterday I commited a stupid mistake: I went to an underwear shop that specialises in fashionable, cheap, very colourful and almost never "sexy" stuff. There are at least three different chains in Spain that do exactly that, and the shops are appearing like mushrooms after a rainy night. The thing is, I don't understand who buys in them. Who can fit into their bras? Certainly not me.

Let's see. For the information of readers who do not use bras, this is what you need to know: a bra size has a number, which means circumference in centimetres (in Spain) or inches (in the UK and USA), and a letter, which means how big the breasts are.  A is almost flat, the average woman uses a B, and so on.

First bra I see that I really like: cups A or B. Sizes: 70 to 85 (that is 28 to 34). Look here. The skinniest of East Europe supermodels are a size 85 (34). When I was twelve years old I had a 80. Who needs a 70 size bra? I'm not asking the right question. Who in bloody burning hell needs a 26/28 size bra? Seriously?

There was more fun awaiting me. I tried on bras of three different sizes and cups. It turned out that all sizes were too small: the back was more or less always the same, and the only front was wider and wider. It is as if the people who designed them forgot that bigger breasts tend to come attached to wider chests and stronger ribcages.

It is also as if we lived in a world in which suits came in assorted lenghts for taller or short men, but always with the same wide shoulders and narrow waist, to fit athletes. Or as if male underwear came with different sizes for genitals of different sizes, but with the back made to fit _only_ tight little buttocks. There are days in which, if I could ask for one wish only, I'd ask that the quality/pricing/sizes of clothes for men followed the tendencies of clothes for women and viceversa.

Euphemisms.

The world insists in shocking me. Those of you reading from outside Spain should know that people in Southern Spain are said to exaggerate a lot and that is considered a vaguely negative, humorous thing; the underlying thought is that people from more civilised, sophisticated countries, tell it like it is, or believe less is more. Spanish does not have a word to say "understatement".

I wonder is there is a word to say "understatement" in Swedish. The Swedes, in their wisdom, use the polite, discreet word that means "Hidden", instead of the blunter "illegal". That does not mean that unwanted foreigners are treated any better; if they go to the hospital, for example, the doctors are likely to call the police. There are 15,000 hidden people in Sweden. Out of these, 400 are children who have simply lost the will to live. These children one day refuse to do anything, get out of bed, eat. One such girl was on TV yesterday; she had a tube down her nose through which her mother injected a yellowish liquid food. If there is no place to go and the country you live in wants to kick you out, there aren't many options left but trying to see if you can let yourself die by sheer depression.

The small, understated word of the sophisticated, civilised, advanced Swedish society for this mass collective suicide is "apathetic children".

Seen every day.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS GLORIOUSLY ABSENT.

ANARKY IS INEVITABLE.

Grafittis on the walls near my dance school.  Originally in Spanish (in Spanish, anarquists call themselves anarkists).

I WANT TO SEE MY SON.

Graffiti on the ad of a realtor. Originally in Spanish.

DON'T WORK BE HAPPY

Printed on the oversized handbag of a beggar.  

Happy Burns Night

Spain and Scotland have a day each dedicated to clebrate the national writer: Cervantes, who invented the modern novel, and Robert Burns, who dignified and used creatively the Scottish language.

It says a lot about Scotland that, while Spaniards spend Book Day buying books, and we're supposed to give a book and a rose to the person we love most, the Scots give a party, eat local food and drink whisky. On the other hand, the Scots traditionally recite poetry after dinner tonight, insted of merely buying it.

I should live in Scotland, so that I can celebrate both holidays. Book Day is engraved in my genetic code and I must celebrate it wherever I am, but a Burns night  outside of Scotland wouldn't feel right.

Roots

The town where i live is surrounded by suburbs that used to be villages. There's always a handful of old streets, with the traditional houses who don't like anything special, identical in all the villages, a small square or two with a few orange trees, and then row after row of new houses à la American Beauty in the places where the olive trees used to grow. For anyone living in a 30 kilometers (that's 20 miles) radius of Sevilla, the only difference between these villages turned neighbourhoods is how distant from town, or how well communicated, they are. They is absolutely nothing special, unique, even interesting about any of these villages.

Not for the locals, the people from the old houses.  The other day I went to the bank, and in the long queue I heard a few women chatting. The conversation started with one of them saying that locals who had moved to villages A, B and C a long time ago had just moved back to ours, and everyone agreed iin that they had been stupid to leave the village in the first place. They were talking about places that were two to ten kilometers away in the exact same tone that most people I know would say "La Guiri spent a year in the USA, and she just came back. Good for her, I can't understand why she went so far away in the first place". the conversation revolved around the same subject for twenty minutes: not about the advantages of our village, but about the perfect foolness of anyone who moved to a different place. It reminded me of a conversation I overhead a long time ago, also in my village.

-... and then Juan came to live here, because originally he is from Village B.
-Village B!? Why on earth did he come to live here then? 
-Because he married his girlfriend, and she was from our town.
-Ah, OK then.

It seemed to these people that the only reason why anyone would want to live more than two blocks away from their birthplace is to marry someone who lives a little bit (not too much) farther away.

What is it that makes people love home so much?

Democracy in Chile

I just saw this in the news: In Chile, it is compulsory to vote in the presidential elections! Another shocking thing: Chileans abroad cannot vote. I haven't found a source to tell me if there is regional absentee vote.

Isn't compulsory vote a contradiction in terms? If we are free to vote, shouldn't we be free not to?  

Cars and computers

What I'm going to say today is so commonplace I was doubting about posting it. Anyway, here it goes.

My computer,  a relatively new HP laptop,  is currently being repaired. For the year or so that I have had it, it has given me a great number of minor problems. Stuff that any PC user will be familiar with: programs that refuse to work today and work perfectly well tomorrow, a need to restart once in a while, mysterious error messages, and the like.

Yesterday I was telling the friend of a friend about this and about the relative pros and cons of the alternatives to Microsoft, which as far as I know, are Macintosh and Linux. Both have good and bad points. My acquaintance had used Linux, and he only knew about Macs what the average non-user knows. He disagreed with me on everything, because his PC hadn't suffered any major crashes in the last year or so (someone reminded him of a virus scare this summer). The end of the conversation was when I said this:

"I don't need anything special and I'm not asking much. All I want is a computer that works like my car."

Isn't that easy? My car stops when I brake. It turns when I turn the wheel. I don't understand how the motor works, but there is always a clear cause for anything that breaks. All buttons and pedals do what they are supposed to when I push them. My car is predictable.

Well, this guy's reaction was laughter. He started laughing and couldn't stop. The naïveté! The audacity! Someone who wants a reliable computer!  

Why does the average Microsoft user think that this guy's attitude is normal and mine isn't?  

Insurance.

I don’t know if this is clever or creepy. Or both. I have been told a bit about a way in which Americans go into housing complexes for old people (whatever the politically correct denomination may be). I’m not sure I’m getting the details right, but this is the idea:

Old people sell their house to (or through) an insurance company, and that money is used to pay that type of housing for them, with assistance if needed. Like all insurance policies, it’s risky on both sides. If the old person takes many years to die, the insurance company invested more than it gets back. If they don’t take many years to die, the old people’s heirs have lost their claim on the house.

 
Elderly Spaniards rarely go into housing. It’s not part of our tradition because we rely more on the extended family, and it is very hard to find housing you can trust. In Europe, the idea is that the Government is responsible, either to provide housing or to watch private providers very closely, and every year you get the occasional horror story in the news about bad food or hygiene. Considering that the real estate market in Spain keeps putting up the prices and that young people are desperate to buy houses, this American scheme isn’t colder or more calculating than ordinary life insurance and it might be one possible solution to two Spanish problems. However, I don't see Spaniards trusting the idea. 

On libraries, again

Two culture shock entries in a row, one about holidays and another about inefficiency. And then I will expect foreign people not to believe stereotypes about Southern Spain!

As I must have said before, Seville University doesn't have a library, but dozens. There are School Libraries, one for each different school of course, and then there are department libraries. A department is a section in a school: for example, the Medieval History dept in the History School, the Civil Law dept in the Law School, and so on. Not all departments have libraries. All university students can borrow books from all the school libraries, but you need to belong to a certain school to borrow books from department libraries. For example, that means that the books in the English dept library are for Languages students only. I could borrow books from the Psychology School library but not from any Psych department library.

This alone would be enough reason to be mad at the system. There's more. The English Dept Library catalog is online, but that's the only thing that is. I need a special library card that is useless in the rest of the university system. The books appear on the online catalog always as "available", because when they are borrowed, filing is manual. Yes. Little paper library cards on a cardboard box.

So. If you need a book from that library, you will have to go at an inconvenient hour (the library opeens three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, at times when the students are busiest). Wait to use the only computer that students are allowed to use. Find out the code of the book you already know you need: the online catalog doesn't have a keyword search AND students are not allowed to browse shelves. Once you know the code, the librarian will look for the book for you, if it hasn't been already taken. Then he will give you a slip of paper for each book, in which you will have to write the book's internal code, the number next to the barcode (even if the barcode system is a decoration until they get a barcode scanner), AND the book's title and author. Even though they have a file with your name and data and a library number, you have to write you name and phone number and Student ID number too. One slip per book.

Then, if you are an undergrad, you can borrow two books for a week, maximum (back in my last year as an undergrad, I had to work for professors that demanded three times as many sources quoted in an essay). I, as a grad student, can borrow the tremendous amount of five books for two weeks. And two weeks before Christmas holidays start, the librarian does not know if the holidays will automatically extend all late December borrowing until January 10th, or not.

Can someone remind me what was it that I liked about being a student at this University?

Making bridges

No, I don't mean the bridges that join two shores. I mean the excellent Spanish tradition of building bridges that join two holidays.

In Spain, if a holiday takes place on a Tuesday, people will do whatever they can to skip work on Monday. If Thursday is a holiday, people will avoid work on Friday. So: Thursday's a holiday, but Friday is a bridge. A bridge between Thursday and Saturday, of course. And we call that "building (or making) bridges".

It's not as bad as it sounds. Number one bridge builders are students at all levels, then teachers, then civil servants, and then everyone else. If you're not a teacher, your only way of making a bridge is to keep a few days out of your holidays to make yourself a long weekend here and there.

The best brigde of the year takes place this week. December 6th is Constitution Day, the anniversary of our Constitution. December 8th is a Catholic holiday. December 5th, 7th, and 9th may become bridges. And since this one is so long, some people don't call it a bridge: it's an aqueduct!

The UK is such a civilised country

After five years or so of travelling like my life depended on it, and reading like the future of humankind depended on it,I am convinced that a society is more advanced and more civilised the better it treats its women. Give me maternity leaves, free kindergarten (that’s day care if you’re reading this in the States), legal contraception, full civil rights, maybe even a woman president, and I will start to trust that your country has left the Dark Ages.

The recent news say that the UK is a less advanced country that I though it was. Courtesy of I Blame the Patriarchy , heartbreaking news. A third of Britons believe a flirty woman is at least partly responsible for being raped.

The article does not mention these other opinions:

• 34% of Britons do not think that a man who behaves in a flirtatious way deserves being battered by a woman who feels offended or threatened.
  
• 26% of Britons do not think that a child is partially or totally responsible for being molested if he or she is wearing especially cute clothes that trigger the fantasies of pederasts.
• 22% of Britons do not think that promiscuous straight men would be partially or totally responsible of being raped by a gay man.
  
• 8% of Britons do not think that men are totally responsible in the case above.
• 30% of Britons do not think that a drunk straight man is partially responsible if he is raped (I’m assuming a male rapist again)
• 37% of Britons do not think that a man is partially responsible of being assaulted if he fails to clearly say "no" to his assaulter.
  

Edited to add: I wonder how the people who do not express these opinions would feel if they were told that there were gangs telling white middle-class British boys that they could find excellent jobs in an exotic country, to which they were taken and forced to be sexual slaves.

 

 

Exoticism is just another form of racism

Quick background information for foreign readers: Hundred of Africans try to come illegally to Spain everyday, sometimes en route to Northern Europe, sometimes to stay here. Sometimes on wee boats across the Gibraltar Strait, sometimes trying to cross on foot the Melilla border (Melilla is a Spanish town in Northern Africa, right next to Morocco). The ones that come on boats often die. No matter what route they use, they are very often caught and sent back. Nevertheless, I know that my vegetables have been picked by someone who wasn’t born here, and every traffic light in town has a black man trying to sell me tissues.

What amazes me is that the average Spaniard is passively sympathetic of Subsaharians (that is the fashionable, politically correct, term for black Africans), but hostile as can be of Moroccans, no matter if immigrants or not. Why is it? I have a few theories.

• The average black guy by a traffic light is gorgeous. Seriously. Someone please go and make movie stars of the whole lot of them. Moroccan men, on the other hand, don’t normally fit into Spanish conventions of male beauty.
  
• Everyone knows Moroccans are Muslim, and Spaniards don’t like that (and this was so even pre-Al Qaeda). As a culture, we have plenty of stereotypes about Muslims, but very few about subsaharians. Hardly anyone knows that many subsaharians are Muslim too. Ironically, much of it is related to our myths of Muslim treatment of women; who said life is a bed of roses for women in subsaharian cultures?
  
• Get the two previous together: it is very easy to romanticise a gorgeous, exotic-looking person if you don’t know anything at all about their culture.
• In the Spanish imagination, Morocco is not desperately poor, and Southern Africa is that distant place in the news where wars and famine happen.
  
  In short: It is so easy to feel bad about people who are very, very far away, and so hard to do something constructive for people next to you!

Lost in translation: English to Spanish

Some words don’t translate well at all from English to Spanish: 

• Cute: Argh! “He’s not cute, he’s attractive”. “It’s a cute movie”. “You don’t want to look cute, you want to look pretty”. How do I translate “beautiful in the way that babies and Orlando Bloom are, soft, a girly kind of beauty” without saying “lindo”?
  
• Cheesy and tacky: In Spanish both words are translated as “hortera” and sometimes as “cursi” (rough equivalent of “cutesy”). I can translate the words, but I cannot translate in what way they mean different things.
  
• Afterglow is sunset light, once the sun is completely under the horizon: the glow after sunset. That’s what the dictionary says. But the first time I heard that word, it was used to mean the quiet but intense pleasure after something good has already finished. Something sensual. Find me a convincing translation and you’ll have my eternal gratitude (regusto no me sirve).
  
• Gender, especially Gender Studies. It isn’t considered completely correct to use the word “género” to mean “the social construction of sex”. I feel comfortable doing the shift Gender Studies/Estudios de Género, but the problem is that no one understands me when I say I’m working on Estudios de Género and what I do is definitely not a study of sexuality. So I know what I mean, but hardly anyone else does. Besides, most people who know the term identify it with Women’s Studies or with Feminist Theory, and that’s not the whole story.
  
• Queer or queerness: one of these days Spanish will have one short descriptive word, not an insult, to mean “not heterosexual, including those people who are not even sure of their orientation”.
  
• Soft. Surprised to find such a common word? Spanish has a word for “pliable, not hard” (blando) and another one for “smooth, not rough” (suave). Poetry in English sometimes benefits from the ambiguity of the double meaning and I can’t translate that.
  
• I don’t like to generalise, but it says a lot about the Spanish tendency to exaggerate that we don’t have a word, not even a phrase, to say “understatement”. 

Racism and jewelry

Sigh.

This happens every once in a while, although thankfully not as often as it used to. The other day I took my jewelry out and I showed it to a number of people who of course loved it and bought tons of it. Except one woman, who held an earring or two close to her ear and said "I like them, but I can’t wear dangling earrings. They make me look gypsy". Looks in horror at my portable mirror, makes a half-hearted tasteless joke about gypsy stereotypes (flamenco singers, this time), tries another earring that lightens up her sad sallow skin, gives up.

I have never understood these women. You don’t like dangling earrings, you think they don’t look good on you, fair enough. But this stupid, racist, "looking gypsy" nonsense, I don’t get it. What the hell is wrong in "looking gypsy"? And the funniest thing, real gypsy women don’t wear colourful, original, inexpensive dangling earrings. They wear very conservative designs, in gold.

There is a whole bunch of stuff that some Spanish women won’t wear or do for fear of gypsiness. I wonder if other cultures have similar arbitrary, racist fashion rules.

Hunger

My beloved Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett once co-wrote a novel, Good Omens, in which the Four Horsemen of Doomsday were:

A young, very attractive war reporter.

Your average skeleton in a cloak. 

A young boy who seemed to atract disaster (Pollution took over when Pestilence had given up after the discovery of antibiotics)

A nouvelle cuisine chef and inventor of fad diets.

Hunger in this modern world is a very strange thing.  Many, many people die of hunger. Some people are even born hungry because a human body and a foetus inside it can survive a hungry pregnancy. Can you believe it? I don't, even though I am told it is true. Other people are not exactly hungry: they have enough amount of food to eat but it doesn't have enough iron (no meat, not enough beans), or enough protein (no meat, eggs, fish, or dairy; not enough beans), or enough vitamins (not enough of anything except rice, bread or potatoes). Hunger makes people tired, sick, weak, less resistant to disease, unable to concentrate, and in the case of children, it prevents mental and physical growth.

Other people curiously go willingly hungry and pay money for others to find creative ways of making them stay hungry. The last I have heard of this is something you can buy in drugstores; in Spain it is sold in pharmacies. So I go to the local pharmacy with my prescriptions and I see that they are selling "fit strips" (the name is in English!). This is the idea : you pay 15 euros and you get 72 thin strips of orange fiber, wrapped in loads of shiny plastic. You are told to stick one or two on yout tongue, allow to dissolve, drink a glass of water so that the fiber swells up in your stomach, repeat about 8 times a day. Which means a 15 euro packet will last for a week or so.

 Isn't it shocking that I live in a culture that thinks it is perfectly fine to pay 15 euros for 36 small portions of fiber?  What does it take for someone to invent un-food? And what sort of person does it take to buy it? I can't imagine someone with 15 euros in their hands and abso-fucking-lutely noting better to do with it than buying themselves... hunger.

Wow, and I didn't even make a feminist rant (I will leave that to someone who has her knickers in a knot).

Young people

Let’s see. The news today said that my town suffers the greatest amount of acts of juvenile crime per inhabitant in all of Spain, and it is second, only after Barcelona, in plain absolute juvenile crime figures. We are taking here about teens who have all basic needs covered; they beat up random strangers, and rob from supermarkets, cars and individuals. Sometimes they smash car’s windows, too. What they try to get from what they steal is certain expensive clothes from very specific brands, ditto cellphones, and "recreational" drugs (this is not a crime problem caused by drug addiction). Essentially, these boys and girls are bored.

In France, groups of about the same age are setting cars on fire, the easiest to explain reason being that they are fed up with being discriminated against. Rage accumulates until it explodes, like a pressure cooker.

And as usual, but this is no news, another 13 year-old has been murdered in Palestine because he was carrying a toy gun and some soldiers it was a real gun. Just another victim of a war that involves children from the day before they are born, only this time it has made the news with a name and a photo.

Days like these I wonder what’s the use of poetry, or of being in training to become a teacher, or of any of the things I like.

Patriot Watch

These are weird days. Spaniards have decided all of a sudden to celebrate Halloween, and I have discovered a blog that reveals ways in which American institutions and corporations invade people's privacy. It is an enlightening but scary read.

Wilma madness

Human stupidity never ceases to amaze me. Let's see.

Hurricane comes and flood New Orleans, and the authorities are not ready to organise an efficient evacuation, so the hurricane kills hundreds (thousands?). A big part of the problem is misinformation: people don't know how serious this will get, and they don't ant to leave their houses. So far, it's OK. Bad but understandable.

Scarcely twomonths later another hurricane which is just as strong and dangerous goes to Florida. The authorities are a tiny little bit better prepared for an efficient evacuation, but hundreds (thousands?) are stranded and incommunicated and we don't know if dead or alive because they refuse to leave their homes. Lack of informations or means for evacuation are not a problem now. What the hmpf is going on? Is it something about being American that makes them prefer to die at home rather than evacuate or what?

I cannot simply say that Americans (some Americans) are idiots, but the truth is that I have never heard of anyone else in the world ever refusing to be evacuated for their own safety.

Bush Countdown!

Just the day I say I can't see anything culture-shoking, I find this I have to love a website with a countdown to know how many days until Bush leaves the White House.

Still 1189 days to go. As we say in Spanish, no evil lasts for a century.

Religion in schools, both sides of the Atlantic.

Since I came back to Spain three months ago (already!?), there is of course a lot less culture-shock to talk about. Seville can be a very quirky, culture-shocking place, but I don't really have my commedy-of-manners sensors in full operating mode. Also, my life is hectic these days so I don't really have time to reflect enough (hence the abundance of other people's poetry over the last month or so). So excuse me if I recycle something from when my blog had a different location. Anyway, it still applies.

For the last 10 to 15 years, the role that religion should have or not have at schools in Spain has made the news very often. This is so because of the political changes; the Constitution gives a wide margin of freedom to the government, and the only things that would be definitely anticonstitutional are to teach against any religion or to force children to take Religion classes against their parents’ wishes. Simplifying a lot, when the conservatives are in power they want Religion to be a school subject as important as Music or History, and non-Catholic kids can take a few bland alternatives like extra credit where needed, and the socialists (socialdemocrats? Anyway, the guys to the left of the conservatives and to the right of the communists) try to please everyone at the same time by keeping the Religion subject while reducing its weight in the curriculum (when I was a child the grade didn’t count towards my average grade) and giving some entity to the alternative for non-Catholics; some form of Education in Secular Moral Values. Every major change in the government over the last 20 years has altered the education system, or at least tried to.

The main argument used in favour of the Religion subject is that Catholicism is important to Spanish society; besides, conservatives have never taken seriously the secular alternative as a subject, which is not a fault of the principle but of the practice: in my school, there was a year or two when I and the other kids that didn’t want to take Religion were left alone and unsupervised in the school library, with a teacher coming to check on us if we were noisy.

The main arguments of the enemies of that course are: Spain does not have an official religion, Catholicism is unfairly privileged, and the time and the resources spent on it should go to teach “real” subjects. Leaving aside that they dislike Catholicism, of course, as a doctrine of oppression and misery (and anticonstitutional principles such as sexual discrimination, but that’s another rant for another day).

I think that the conservatives are missing the point. Their main motive is obviously that they would like to retain as much public presence as they can get. While they are in schools they can make an effort to keep children and maybe even teens under their influence. They are so shortsighted… no, excuse me. They are so fucking blind. Just go and compare with the American situation. In this country, as far as I know, the First Amendment forces schools to behave as if religions didn’t exist. All religions. If Evolution is out of the school curriculum in some States it is because it was judged to be against the beliefs of some Christians, not because the schools of that State are officially Christian. And still it is the developed country with the highest percentage of people going to church regularly (I mean church, temple, mosque, synagogue, place of worship in general). And the highest percent of people calling themselves Christian too. Why? Because you cannot make believers at school. Children believe first their parents, then their peers. You cannot inspire religion by teaching it, not beyond age five, not to people who live in a secular world the other 23 hours of the day.

The most the Spanish conservatives would get would be stealing one or two hours a week away from the real courses. Have children and teens study for Religion exams when they should be studying Literature and Science. Pay the salary of the Religion teacher with the money that should pay a new computer or books for the library. And then all those children would become atheists, as they so often do, as soon as they hit sixteen years-old. Because it is in the air they breathe. Simple as that.