No pasa nada / “Don’t Worry About It”

¡Hola otra vez amigos! Today I have some thoughts on culture and some thoughts on life. Culture will come first because I think this part is probably more interesting.

FASHION: People in Europe do indeed dress up more. Their outfits are more coordinated and always match. They don’t do sweatshirts or sweats. However, this is not to say that their fashion sense is better. I’ve seen some VERY strange things on Spanish women. For instance, they wear these pants that are tight on the top, very tight at the bottom, and completely loose in between. They look like what Aladdin wears (yes, in the Disney movie). They only look good on really thin people, and yet I’ve seen a LOT of people wearing them. People dress up a lot for church and oddly, people were dressed up for the bullfight. Women do wear heels more here, but their heels look like they are made more practically so as not to completely destroy your feet. Another weird trend: women let their shirts ride up and their pants fall down, and their underwear matches their shirt. Strange. And you would think with the generally more dressed up style that professors would dress up – but my professors here dress much more casually than professors at UCLA. People repeat clothes a lot too; my host mom has this one shirt and leggings combination that she wears all the time. I’ve heard the same of other host moms. These specific observations aside, I do like that people look coordinated and put together. It’s just different from what I’m used to seeing.

FOOD (as Aunt Roberta requested): The food here is pretty simple. Nothing spicy (which I like, because I can’t handle spicy food), and everything is well-balanced. Salads are very hearty (ours usually includes lettuce, corn, shredded carrot, raisins, cheese, apple, etc.) and Spaniards put olive oil on EVERYTHING. According to one of my professors, if you look at a lot of nice “Italian” olive oil, the back will say that it’s made of olives from Spain. One of my favorite dishes is tortilla española, which is kind of like an egg and potato omelet. Bread is served at every meal (this is something I will REALLY miss in the U.S. – my apartment here is over a bakery so we always have fresh bread). Lunch is the main meal of the day, though dinner is not small (there’s so many hours between lunch and dinner that I’m usually pretty hungry for dinner). If I don’t eat lunch at home, I take a “bocadillo” (sandwich), usually ham and cheese (very common for Spain, they call it a “sandwich mixto”). Breakfast is usually cereal and an apple. Water and soda are what we offered to drink at meals. I pretty much live on water. Of course, going out to dinner I’ll usually get soda or sangria because water costs money too (they don’t do tap water at restaurants here). That’s all the food stuff I can think of right now but if anyone wants to know anything else specific let me know!

OK, now for the life stuff. The title of this entry is “No pasa nada”, which I’m roughly translating to “Don’t worry about it”. It’s a very common expression that basically means don’t stress, it’s all good. Literally it means “Nothing happens”. It’s the type of attitude that is really working for me right now. I’m an easily stressed person, and I think this is something that should change (for my health as well as my sanity). My junior year of college was really rough. The worst of it was when Uncle Bill suddenly died in February, but there were other rough things too (Women’s Chorus was cut after I only got to be in it for a quarter, my eyes developed a dryness problem so I couldn’t wear contacts, I screwed up my ankle and had to quit running for months, the combination of having to wear glasses and not being able to run was a major blow to my body image, I was hardly sleeping from too much stress/schoolwork, grief had messed my mind up, there was some difficult friend stuff, there’s more but I’m not going to post it in a public blog). It was the unhappiest I had been in a very long time. This summer, a lot of that stress started to go away and I got to be myself again. I’m naturally inclined to be a happy, bubbly person and so feeling sad all the time was especially hard. Here in Spain, I feel like I’m slowly learning to take care of myself mentally again. Here I just get to focus on me and my experiences. I get to make time for myself. I’m not trying to say that I needed to go abroad to fix things; that’s not it at all. But I’m learning from my experiences here a different way to look at life and a better way to deal with stress and change. I’m learning about myself too. I hope to develop a healthier approach to life after this. No pasa nada. :-)