I need to learn some Spanish profanity

I HAVE SO MUCH TO WRITE ABOUT BUT I DON’T HAVE ANY TIME.

And I’m having so much trouble getting through the first thing on my list of things to write about, which is to fully explain Paquita.

This is not ever going to happen, because even if I understood her, which I don’t, I would never be able to capture it with mere words. But I can try.

For example: Notable Topics of Discussion During Lunch Today

1. How I need to get to know lots of boys, because I need to make sure I pick the right one. Slash she suggests tall dark haired guys with blue eyes, but she understands if I have different tastes. (Any tall, dark-haired guys with blue eyes reading this, come to Barcelona. She’d like to meet you.) This of course required bringing up her tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed but regrettably crazy ex-husband.

2. Which segued smoothly into the story of how she lost her virginity to said ex-husband. (Because you’re all dying to know: wedding day, she was changing out of her wedding dress into a different dress for the party that night. She asked him for help with getting the zipper of the first dress undone. They were apparently rather late for the party. I managed not to die during this story, fyi.)

3. Then we get into her favorite topic of conversation, aka, Kati you are so skinny! Eat more! You will not be strong! You need nutrients! Also, the chicos want chicas with tits and ass! (This sort of encapsulates the way she really freaks me out because she can do the hi-I’m-your-mom-clean-your-plate-thing AND the hell-yeah-chica-work-it-thing AT THE SAME TIME.)

4. She has gotten the (correct) impression, that my mother doesn’t eat. She would really like to meet my mother and tell her a thing or two. I would also really like her to meet my mother, as long as I get to film the encounter. Instant YouTube fame, people.

5. At this point (we’re in a bar, as usual, because, obviously, when one is hosting American students, one should take them to bars. And buy them shots. Ok, yes, arguably, this one also serves food.) Anyway, guy comes into the bar. He’s about 30, fairly good looking. She gets all “shhh…Kati, check out that guy.” Apparently, he was hitting on her the last time she was here and tried to get her number, but she didn’t give it to him, because he’s too young for her. (And also because she has this boyfriend who she thinks I don’t know about. But I digress.) She goes up to pay, but walks by him and stops to talk. For a while. I wait awkwardly. Long story short---she doesn’t pay, he pays. I suddenly realize how she can afford to eat out all of the time.


I have, thus far, lived a very narrowly Harvard-complex-focused life, and as a result, I have spent a lot of time banging my head against the wall. But all of it---the science research, the screaming parents, the never, ever having a life in high school, the passing out in the hallway, the scarring of multiple innocent first-year English teachers, the not getting into Harvard and going to Dartmouth instead and having an existentialist crisis that somehow resulted in being inexplicably pre-med and taking cell biology and dying, and passing out some more, and stumbling through Spanish class at 7:30 am which is not actually a real time, fyi, and not looking at grades and developing strange obsessions with government professors—in all of it, I would not change a goddamn thing because that was the path that resulted in me going to Spain and getting assigned this specific homestay family and thus spending two hours today eating lunch with the most I-don’t-even-know person I have ever freaking met and ALL OF IT was worth it for THOSE TWO HOURS that I can’t explain because it was just SPANISH and that is AWESOME.