Freshman Week of Abroad
Well, I have made it through the two and a half weeks of abroad and I am alive to tell the tale. It’s a struggle though. Every morning I wake up feeling like someone put a syringe in me and sucked out all the energy. I don’t get how these people live like this. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Barcelona is an amazing city. I already feel so immersed in the culture, besides the fact that I don’t speak any Spanish, haven’t really had any local cuisine, don’t know anything about Spanish history, go to the most touristy locations, and live with four Americans. Ok, it’s been like 15 days. Hopefully immersion will come, but at this point the beginning of abroad is feeling oddly like the beginning of college for many reasons. No one tells you that it’s like graduating from high school all over again…in a good way. Scratch that, in a great way. Barcelona definitely seems to trump College Park, but I am starting to draw some similarities. Thank God my lack of independence forced me to come with my friends or this would ACTUALLY be like the beginning of freshman year. Even though I knew my roommate then too…
First of all: the food. Just like you went to college not wanting to gain your freshman fifteen, you go abroad not wanting to become a morbidly obese whale, which is proving to be extremely difficult. The only reason they don’t have a funny alliterated name for an abroad weight gain is because no numbers start with an “A.” Abroad eighty sounds dec (slant rhyme?), but 80 pounds in a semester might be a bit of a hyperbole. Actually with the lack of dietary products here you never know. They don’t have skim milk or Splenda abroad! Or egg whites! Or Weight Watchers Ice Cream! #JapAbroadProblems. No joke it’s such an ish. The reason my Chai Tea Lattes from Starbucks (so authentic) taste so much better here isn’t because I feel euro chic drinking coffee in Barce, it’s because they use all fat milk in them even though I say “skim milk.” They don’t even know what that means, so they just give me tons of milk straight from the cow, unprocessed and retaining all of its original fattiness, along with massive amounts of real sugar.
The desire to not get fat applies to the gym as well. Going to the gym abroad is just like going to the gym at school. You gotta know the right gym to go to. As a freshman girl, you’re still too young and inexperienced to know that going into the weight room at 5:30 pm on a weekday is a death sentence. You are guaranteed to see every guy you’ve ever hooked up with, tried and failed to hook up with, or just want to hook up with sometime in the near future. (Even though those guys don’t usually know who you are so it’s fine that they’re there at the same time as you… they’ll just think you’re some random geed.) Having just ellipticaled your ass off to burn off the four (cough seven) beers you swore you wouldn’t drink (it always starts with a vodka seltzer, but never does end with one), you might not want to be seen pumping five pound iron next to any of the above mentioned men- unless you’re a feminine looking athlete or cheerleader, which absolutely no one reading this blog is. As a freshman boy, you simply don’t understand that if you go on the elliptical you are subject to mass humiliation because there are more girls on those ellipticals than there are at a midnight premiere of Twilight. It’s tredmill or nothing, bro. Same thing goes for here. Except for the fact that I fucked it up and joined the wrong gym and therefore never have any “awkward” run ins by the water fountain, which you always say you don’t want but in all honestly that’s the only reason you go to the gym in the first place. I joined some local gym and have to run next to ridiculously fit Spanish women every day. Nothing makes you want to hit a vat of paella like a beautiful Spanish hottie running in her underwear next to you. Never felt paler. Seriously…
Just like you’re scrambling to get notebooks before classes start as a frosh, unknowingly wasting time and energy by making yourself go to the bookstore at the most crowded time of the year (except for before a white out tailgate…who owns white Maryland shirts?!) even though you wont have to take notes for another week, the same thing happens when you’re abroad. Well, unless you’re me and taking Photo in Barce and a class about blogging (sidebar: I am a pro at both because, well, obviously I’m an expert blogger and I was in AP Photo in high school. Oh yeah buddy. Straight A’s abroad. Too bad it’s pass/fail). However, I did think having a notebook could be useful, and already knowing where the wack Spanish version of Staples was from my super glue buying experience (only good pair of wedges broke night one, that’s what happens when you fall…a lot), I decided to buy a single notebook and a single pen. I also needed something to fill my beautiful, new “abroad girl/jappy jetsetter” North Face backpack with something other than my Blackberry. Yet, this country doesn’t understand the concert of lined paper. Only graph paper. Literally every single notebook in Barcelona is graph paper and I honestly, for the LOG (love of God), cannot understand why. Is this a country of expert graphers in which TI-83+’s are all replaced by manual graphing? If not, can these Catalonians make a deal with Five Star or Mead and get some lined fucking one subjecters up in this bitch?
Well, regardless, having notebooks would require being able to understand your teachers, an issue that further links the beginning of freshman year to the beginning of abroad. However, this time there is an actual language barrier. Freshman year, I just had no clue what the hell Blackboard was until like mid-November when I realized I missed like 14 assignments that I was supposed to turn in on Blackboard. Could have contributed to the subpar GPA. The same goes for abroad. Thankfully I am a pro photographer and blogger, like I previously mentioned, because these accents go right over my head. In actuality, I’m pretty sure none of my teachers really even have thick accents, I’m just so all consumed with Long Island being the only way of speaking out there that, to me, anyone from outside the Tri State Area sounds like they grew up in a hut in Tim Buck Two.
Two and a half weeks in, I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of things. Listening to promoters, quite similar to the faceless sophomore frat bois, on where to go at night, figuring out how to run into the right people where, and most importantly finding a convenience store that is open 24 hours and befriending the owner- it’s like I’m in College Park. Why am I making my parents pay all the extra money for this bullshit? It’s CP with better architecture and slightly, scratch that, intensely more serious night life. Now I know why. JK…it’s all about the Tapas baby. Like WTF?!
- Share:
