It’s official. I’m now a resident of Alicante, Spain… and I’m shocked by my good luck as of late! I live in a barrio (neighborhood) called Benalua, on the southwest side of the city and not too far from my school – so I’ll be able to walk there tomorrow to kick off my first day of teaching! I’ll update you all on how teaching goes later this week.
My roommates are both studying at the Universitat d’Alacant. Anna (“Ani”) is a 24-year-old graduate student from Bulgaria; this is her second year living in this flat in Alicante, and her second year in the graduate program for Economics at the university, which is ranked 4th in the country for her field. Ramona (“Mona”) is a 25-year-old student from Germany doing Erasmus, a study-abroad program without affiliation for students from the European Union. They’re both very sweet and I’ve been learning more in the cultural exchange of living with these two – which is a bit different than the cultural exchange I was expecting, living in Spain! It’s been great learning more about life in Bulgaria and Germany, though, as well as their impressions of living in Spain.
Here are a few photos of our flat in Alicante.
It’s been interesting trying to re-adapt to Spanish life. For one thing, during my first trip to Spain, I noticed differences – the food is different, they eat dinner on a different schedule, they do laundry differently – but it’s quite a new experience to have to actively participate in these things.
New experience #1: Grocery shopping. We’re lucky enough to have a Mercadona supermarket just down the street from our building, and I made my first trip there this weekend with Mona. But the normal brands, salad dressings, meat marinades – I’m clueless when it comes to grocery shopping here! I recognize a few things Ana used to buy, like breakfast and sandwich meat, but I’m going to have to explore and experiment quite a bit.
The other highlight of grocery shopping was that, while browsing different aisles in Mercadona, I suddenly found myself in the ‘seafood’ section – with everything fresh from the sea! Obviously no one else was as fascinated and excited about having fresh seafood at the corner market, but who wouldn’t go wide-eyed upon finding an octopus in a plastic vat? My one-year cooking goal is to buy one of those beauties and attempt to cook it. (It’s a hefty goal, I know.) I’m 100% positive that this experience will be documented in my blog, don’t you worry.
New experience #2: Doing laundry without a dryer. During my college years, most of my experiences with laundry consisted of realizing I needed nice clothes for a presentation the next day, followed by frantically tossing clothes in the washer, popping them in the dryer, and folding them – all within a span of 2-3 hours. This would be a considerably larger problem in Spain, where nearly no one has a dryer, and whether or not your clothes dry quickly is determined by the weather. I tried to do laundry yesterday, but Alicante seems to be under siege – we’ve had two days of inexplicable torrential rain. (“Not normal,” Ani tells me.)
Fortunately the rain let up long enough for me to dry a load of clothes on the line outside our window… and after drying, it’s absolutely essential that you iron everything – and I mean EVERYTHING. My host mom used to spend her Sunday afternoons standing over the ironing board, watching the moto races on TV, and I was always shocked to see her ironing everything from jeans to underwear. She said it made them ‘softer,’ which I understood – if you’ve ever line-dried clothes, you know they get a wonderful crunchy feel to them. My Fulbright handbook helpfully explains that you also need to iron line-dried clothing because flies sometimes lay eggs on clothes, and ironing kills them off before they could hatch and burrow into your skin. Lovely thought!
Needless to say, I’ll be ironing all of my clothes – even my underwear.
