Archives for January 2017

The Great Iberian Siesta by Alex Tatem

IMG_9770  If you go out to the narrow roads, passageways, and alleys that make up a Spanish town between 2 and 5 in the afternoon, you will find the normally crowded streets ghostly empty. You can find a few people scattered in bars enjoying tapas and a midday drink, but most people go home to spend the break with their families.

On my way to class in the morning, I can stop at a coffee shop for a café con leche and tortilla and there are still people drinking coffee before work with friends or reading the newspaper. My classes start at 9:30 in the morning, but the professor doesn’t arrive until a quarter ’til. The culture is much more relaxed and the mornings start late. You won’t find very many people out of their houses during the 8:00 hour.

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A typical workday for the Spanish begins at 9:30 or 10:00. There is a break for siesta from 2 until 5. The midday siesta is important to many workers because most stores in Spain are really small. Often, only one person works in a store during the day, so their only break is during siesta. Even schools have a midday break. Children go to class at 9:00 am with a break at 2. They go back to school at 4 until 6. Most schools have an option that allows children to stay at school and eat lunch during the break, but it often costs money and can be expensive. After siesta, the worker returns to his job and arrives home at 8:30 or 9 in the evening. For this reason, dinner is usually served between 10 and 11. It is not unusual to see children running around the town with their parents at midnight on a school night. Spanish people typically have family time after dinner and go to bed around 1 or 2 am.

An alternative to eating dinner at home is going out for tapas. Tapas are small snacks that you receive for free when you order a drink. When you go into a bar, you can order a beer, wine, or grape juice, pay less than 2 euros, and receive free food. In some bars, there are a list of tapas to choose from, but other bars may just have one tapa. A group of friends or a family can eat dinner by going to two or three bars and eating tapas. Typical tapas include potatoes, chips and ham, calamari sandwiches, and morcilla.

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Every Wednesday and Saturday from 8:00 until 2, you can find a flea market among the streets downtown and a farmers market in Plaza Mayor. The open air market is a popular source for fruits, vegetables, spices, cheeses, and meats. The plaza quickly fills with locals, and it is easy to strike up a conversation with the customers and vendors. The market was my favorite place to practice Spanish outside of class. There are three or four cheese vendors, but I always went to the same one. There was always a long line at his cheese truck, but no line at the other cheese stands. While in line, he would pass out samples to every kind of cheese that he had. My favorite kind of cheese is aged goat cheese. After buying cheese, he would encourage you to drink wine from the botello de vino hanging from the awning. It is a canteen pouch made out of leather, designed to keep the wine cooled all day. To drink from it, you hold it at arms length slightly above eye level and press on both sides of it with both hands. You open your mouth wide, and a stream of wine will leave the small hole in the top of the canteen. You just have to aim for your mouth and hope for the best — don’t wear white!

When you walk down the streets with a Spanish person, expect to stop often. In Spain, the cities are old and are designed to walk through. However, a ten minute walk can easily turn into a twenty minute one if you are walking with a local because the Spanish will stop to make small talk with people they know on the street. They greet each other with a kiss on each cheek and chat for a few minutes. No one is in a rush to arrive to their destination. For this reason, expect your Spanish friend to be at least ten minutes late to any plans you make.

Spain has a very social and laid-back culture. The workday schedule is designed to spend most of the day with friends and family. Even the weekly shopping is a social situation. Families are really close and most people visit their grandparents at least every other weekend. The elderly are taken care of and highly respected. The relaxed and leisurely lifestyle in Spain contributes to the stress-free labor force and keeps families strong. In Spain, happiness and relationships are prioritized higher than working and making money. The great Iberian siesta encompasses this mindset and encourages rest and revitalization in the middle of every day.

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Three Schedler Honors College students named semi-finalists in Fulbright competition

One student and two alums in the Norbert O. Schedler Honors College at the University of Central Arkansas have been named semi-finalists in the 2017-2018 Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant competition.

The largest U.S. exchange program, Student Fulbright grants enable recipients to spend an academic year teaching, attending graduate school, or conducting research overseas.

From Conway, Arkansas, Laura Craig is a senior Political Science and Digital Film double-major. She hopes to enter graduate school at the University of Sussex, England to earn a Masters of Arts in Media Practice for Development and Social Change.

Maleka Momand, from Fort Smith, Arkansas, graduated in December 2016. A Political Science major, she has applied to teach English in Bulgaria.

Hailing from Texarkana, Texas, Madison Sewell graduated in May 2016 with a Health Science major.  If awarded a Student Fulbright, she will serve as an English teaching assistant in the Czech Republic.

Fulbright U.S. Student alumni populate a range of professions and include ambassadors, members of Congress, judges, heads of corporations, university presidents, journalists, artists, professors, teachers, scientists, and health-care professionals, among others.

 

Winter in Argentina by Justin Stanley

IMG_9701On December 26th I woke up a day after a good Christmas celebration with my family to leave for South America. My mother and brother dropped Rafael and me off at Levi’s house and from there, Rafael, Levi, and I drove to Dallas. We parked Levi’s car at the Dallas-Forth Worth Airport Hotel and took a shuttle to the airport where we met the rest of the gang – Scotty, Tony, and Ryan. After waiting a few hours for the plane we finally boarded and began our sixteen-day journey.

It was at the Dallas-Forth Worth Airport that my first feelings of being a foreigner manifested themselves. When we were standing in line to board the plane, the realization that I was about to spend a little over two weeks in a land of people that didn’t look, talk, or come from the same culture as me really sunk in. The flight attendants made the boarding announcements in Spanish, which I know very little of, the people in the line spoke Spanish and all looked different from me. Thank goodness we had Rafael as a translator, because I the trip would have been nearly impossible without his bilingual talents and the alienation I experienced would likely have been maddening.

Eventually our first flight landed in Mexico City where we spent a thirteen-hour layover sleeping in the airport. We then flew to Santiago, Chile and had our first sleep in an actual bed in over twenty-four hours. It was a nice night except for the fact that we got to the hostel around midnight and had to wake up at four in the morning to catch our bus to Mendoza. Also, Levi lost his phone that night after misplacing it in the cab from the airport to the hostel. The fact that he lost his phone was disheartening at first, but it eventually became a running joke throughout the trip and even Levi joined in the jokes. After arriving at the Santiago bus station and making friends with several stray dogs, we were finally on our way to Argentina. After about a five-hour bus ride through the Andes and fearing we would lose Rafael at the boarder, we made it to Mendoza, the wine capital of Argentina.

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Mendoza was a very pretty city. However, due to the flat terrain of the city and the way the dense trees lined the streets, I almost felt claustrophobic in some areas. The first night in Mendoza was spent at the hostel. There we met many interesting visitors, some from Israel, Brazil, and the Ukraine. We mingled with them all night and learned a lot about life in their homelands. The next day we went horseback riding and afterwards ate some of the best steak we had ever had. At the horseback riding place I met an electrical engineering student named Raphael from Quebec. He told me of his optimism for renewable energy in the future and hoped the newly elected Donald Trump would aid in rather than hamper that process. Raphael really admired the work of Elon Musk and was glad to see Trump meeting with the visionary engineer.

In Patagonia we spent two full days in El Calafate and Bariloche. This was probably my favorite part of the trip because it’s where we did the most outdoorsy-type activities. We visited the Glacier Moreno where we saw huge chunks of ice fall off the glacier and make a sound upon impact with the water comparable to thunder. We hiked up a tall mountain in Bariloche and took a ski lift down, which was admittedly my favorite purchase of the whole trip. It was so peaceful. From Patagonia we went to Vina del Mar where we relaxed on the beach before returning to the USA.

The biggest thing I got out of this trip was an inspiration to learn Spanish. It was such an inconvenience not to be able to speak the language of the people in the countries we visited. Since the trip I have been learning a little more Spanish with the Duolingo app on my phone and watching Spanish cartoons with English subtitles on Netflix. The practice is helping, but I still have a long way to go before I become comfortable holding conversations in Spanish. I now have the deepest empathy for Spanish-speaking foreigners travelling in English speaking areas.
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