Welcome to my little Spanish apartment...

Oops, just realized I sent my blog announcement as a "reply to all" from my email last year when I left for China. I will be returning to China again, but that trip is scheduled for the end of March. For those of you who did not know, I will be spending the next 5 weeks working in Santander, Spain at the University of Cantabria. There is a woman here who is a fabulous embryologist, and she and I are working together on a project that will require me to do very delicate surgeries on chick embryos. Surgeries I have never attempted. Surgeries at which she is an expert. Surgeries at which I am hoping my best not to eff up :)

So after being up until 4 am the night before my flight finishing the last bits of things in lab that couldn't wait until I got back, I overcame the stark denial that I was actually temporarily moving to Spain and boarded an overnight flight to Madrid hoping to take a Tylenol PM and zonk out for the 6 hour transit. The flight attendants had other plans. Every time they came down the aisles with meals or beverages, up went the cabin lights at full candle power. So while I did have a whole row of seats to myself on a mostly empty plane (a whole row of two - don't ask why I didn't move to the center of the plane where I could have slept in more than an egg shell of space), it was less than restful.

My first lesson about spain in the winter - even though it's a lower latitude than Boston, it gets light here *way* later. I arrived in Madrid and had to go through passport control before proceeding on to the connecting flight to santander. It was pitch black outside so without checking the clock I thought perhaps it was only 6:30 am and I had loads of time to mosey on toward my 8:50 departure. The first clock I saw said 8:05! And Marian, the woman with whom I'll be working, gets into lab by shortly after 8 am every morning. I am solar powered. I don't get up easily if the sun is not up first. But somehow I will be managing to drag my corpse out of bed and into lab before the sun rises. So much for my late nights out discothequing with the Spaniards.

So I am checked into my little studio apartment in downtown Santander with a private bath and a little kitchenette. I have an under-the-counter fridge and two cook tops that should suffice to feed myself so that I don't have to depend on my abysmal (read: almost non-existent) spanish. I have already made one shopping trip to supplement the generous rations that Marian presented upon arrival, and I am in the midst of preparing my first meal in my little Spanish apartment as I type: some sort of pre-marinated pork chop with browned potatoes and a spinach salad with oil and vinegar. I'm not going to be able to do anything fancy like pot roast and cheesecake while I'm here, but I can at least take care of myself which feels liberating. And there are a ton of little specialty "alimentacion" shops in this area full of fancy meats and cheeses and jars of interesting delectables. I don't think I'm going to have a hard time eating my way through the next few weeks.

Other than that, my sweet little apartment seems to have walls made of paper. The outside noise isn't so bad, but I definitely have neighbors above and on either side, because I think I can hear them breathing. And I can hear everything else. TV, cell phone ring, slippered feet sliding across the floor above... But the nice thing about paper thin walls is that I can also hear the organ of the church next door at the evening mass. We'll just have to see how early that starts and how charming it continues to be. But for right now it's quite delightful.

I'm going to feed my addled brain and try to turn in soon so that I'm on the way toward getting circadian-adjusted. I'm going to try to update this from time to time with my misadventures of trying to survive as a non-spanish speaker living in Spain. At least Darren gave me hours and hours and hours of spanish lessons on CD before I left, so I can spend some of my spare time in the room and perhaps while I'm dissecting listening to spanish lessons so that perhaps by the time I leave in 5 weeks I can say that I speak a little spanish. At least more than the dirty words I learned from the Mexican kids in the back of the bus in grade school...

Hasta luego...