20 Apr 2008 - Expectations and Rain

In not-exactly-new news, Elena’s boyfriend is now staying with us all the time. When I first arrived, he came for lunch once or twice a week, and spent a couple of nights here a week. He’s funny, and even though he has pretty bad taste in movies, we get along pretty well. So when Elena said that he was going to be staying here all the time, because he is now taking a course early in the morning here in Sevilla, and it doesn’t make sense for him to go home to his parents’ house outside of the city every night, I didn’t really think anything of it. But I’ve realized now, that whenever he’s not here, Elena and I end up talking a lot more. Thinking about our relationship, and my “home dynamic” or whatever, has made me reflect a little bit on perhaps what she could have expected of me. She’s never had an international student before, and maybe she imagined that we would talk a ton and become best friends, or maybe even just watch movies a lot. Maybe she thought I would help her a lot with her English. CIEE makes this situation a little bit awkward, because she’s being paid for me to live here, and therefore she is expected to provide all of my meals, do my laundry and clean my room. For most of the students, they live with older women who don’t have other jobs, but in my case, it’s kind of like telling one of my roommates to do all the cleaning, and I’ll just live with her. Unfortunately, I think its part of the reason that we don’t have a closer relationship. Since I don’t have anything to really DO in any part of the house other than my room, I tend to stay there. It’s pretty awkward for me to go and watch TV with Elena when she’s ironing all of my clothes. So although I feel like we’re getting along really well, and we do talk a lot at meals, and I sit and watch a movie with them at night every now and then, in general I’m a little bummed about our CIEE-defined relationship. I don’t think either of us is really getting what we expected.

But anyway, today was the third hiking trip offered by CIEE, and once again, we got caught in the rain! Although last time it was only a mild drizzle, and this time it was a full on hailstorm, I still am going to go ahead and consider the hike a success! It was a really beautiful walk along a river (at the moment raging from the rain that we’ve been getting recently) and through mist-covered mountains. Luckily, it didn’t start really raining until nearly the end of the hike. At first it was a pleasant rain, and the steady sound of rain falling made it hard to talk, and I found myself thinking a lot of Vermont and just how nice it is to get out of the city and have a little change of pace. Until we came out of the tree cover and it actually started hailing. But of course, already I’ve dried off and made a full recovery. There is one more hiking trip planned and maybe, for an area that doesn’t actually get that much rain, it will hold off on that one day!