17. Last time around

Coming back to Madrid after summer wasn’t all that bad. I had my old creature comforts back – public transport, shops 2 minutes away, being in a more familiar setting than before. But I was also sad to leave. Always sad to leave people you’ve come to love.

Luckily Madrid had plenty for me to do. On my fourth day back I met up with some of the new exchange students. They would be spending the next ten months in the city I had been calling home for the past eight. And a day later we all went to the Inbound Orientation, where all the exchange students in Spain had gathered for the weekend.

It was amazing to be surrounded by such a big international community again after having had a very Spanish summer. I hardly spoke any English (Yes, of course I missed it!). It was so much fun meeting everyone and exchanging pins and hearing stories from all over the world

Too soon it was over and the next big challenge was standing in my way.
School.

Yes. School. I had returned.

I was more optimistic this time, knowing that my Spanish was mil veces mejor than it had been back when I first came here. I also had a better feel for the Spanish and how they were as people, so understanding the social dynamics would come easier too. And I wasn’t wrong. School was really nice. This class was completely different to the class the year before and even though I didn’t immediately click with everyone, I did find my place. I enjoyed my classes and my old teachers were happy to have me back. I didn’t introduce myself to my new teachers (no one in my class did), so I just assumed that everyone knew I was The Exchange Student. I mean, it was clear enough in my accent that I was not a native, but none of the new teachers ever said anything. This led to two funny instances of, I guess you could say, mistaken identity. The first one happened as follows:

It was the beginning of break one day and we were all making our way outside when I found myself next to my History teacher with whom I’d just had class. She turned to me and, very confidently, asked me from which part of France I was from.
“France?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh no, Prof, I’m not from France, I’m from South Africa.”
“Really?”
“Yes Prof, Cape Town.”
“But your accent, and your name…”
“Yes Prof. Here it sounds French, but in South Africa it’s quite… normal.”
She nodded. “Yes, in the younger grades we’re learning about the Cape of Good Hope and Vasco da Gama. Extremely interesting.”
“Yes Prof, that’s where it all started.” For Europeans and where Africa is concerned, at least, I wanted to add.

The other instance took a bit longer to resolve itself.

We were in English one day and the class was uncommonly empty, so the teacher gave us worksheets to do. The last question on the last page was “Translate the next sentences from English into your own language.” I thought, this is cool, I’ll just practice my Spanish, because I’m not going to learn anything by translating the sentences into Afrikaans. So I finished it .
A while later the teacher looks up and starts speaking to me in French. She says, “Mart-Marié, if you want, you can do the last question in French.”
I look up, alarmed and reply in English, not having time to think in French. “No no, Prof, that’s okay, I did it in Spanish.”
She just nods and smiles. My mind is racing. How did she know I could speak French? And why would sh– and then it hit me.
“Prof,” I ask in English, “Where do you think I’m from?”
“From France,” She answers in French.
I shake my head, smiling. “No,” in French, “I’m from South Africa.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes,” I laugh.

It turns out that, once again, because of my name and accent, I sound French and therefore that is what everyone assumes I am. And also, as it turns out, our English teacher speaks English, French, Italian and is learning German. She can teach English and French and apart from teaching English at our school, she’s a theatre actress, in Spanish. Uhm goals??!!

I can definitely say that I was enjoying school more this time around. I felt that I hadn’t been doing enough over summer, a feeling I usually get over long holiday periods. Yes, I love swimming and eating and sleeping in, but because I’m so used to the rhythm of school, doing something that isn’t school starts to feel strange after a while. I’m used to learning and when a period of time passes when I don’t, I feel off balance. So, jumping back into academic work was fun – for a while. I think after the first month and a half I lost a bit of steam with some of the subjects I didn’t particularly enjoy. History of Art, French, English, History of Spain and Geography were my favourites. So, for those I wrote every exam and studied hard (thankfully it went better and it was easier to study) and got… okay results. But, for other subjects such as Maths, Lengua (Spanish) and Psychology, it didn’t go as well. I tried, I truly did, but my heart just wasn’t ever in it. That didn’t mean I did have a good time during those classes. No, we found many ways to amuse ourselves during those 50 minute periods.

Because I’d arrived in January (in the middle of their school year) , there was a whole trimester of work I hadn’t done, which I now had the chance to do. In Spanish History we learned about the Iberian Peninsula in prehistoric times, the Celtic invasions, the Greek invasions, the Roman invasions, the Gothic Invasions, the – you get the picture. In many ways

Spain reminds me of South Africa. It's at the edge of a big and powerful continent, with rich soils and important trade routes, used and misused over hundreds (and thousands) of years, having many different people calling it home, people moving through, different cultures and peoples leaving their marks (and scars) upon the country… and the most important part of it all – surviving. Spain and South Africa both went through hard times, up until the last century. Spain having been a dictatorship for 36 years until 1975 and South Africa having been under Apartheid laws until 1991. It makes me able to sympathize and recognize that they have the same wounds we do, albeit a bit more healed over.

In History of Art we also learned about the Greeks and the Romans, as well as Byzantine Art. Geography was probably the biggest challenge. We studies geomorphology. When at last we finished with that chapter I was extremely relieved! Later we went on to Weather, Climate, Water and Vegetation – all a great deal more interesting and also easier to study. I even learned some new things in English, which surprised me a lot! We learned about Simple and Perfect Past and although I could recognized it, I could now also put names to the different tenses. Apart from the perfect tenses, we did modal verbs and active and passive voice and I learned what a transitive verb is. Who knew I’d learn more about English here than back home.

Well, now you ask, what happened to those new exchange students you met? Did you see them again? That answer would be yes and again yes and yes yes yes yes. We saw a lot of each other. It doesn’t help I go into detail about each outing (there were so many), but I’ll give a brief description of each one and you can look at the photos to figure out the rest.

I think that in the past three months I’ve had more Rotary events than I had in my first six months! If it wasn’t a Rotary Exchange event, then it would be a Rotaract event or a Rotex event. I don’t know if this is because there is someone new in management or because everything always happens at the “beginning” of the year and when I got here in January, all the exciting things had already happened. Even so, we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, meeting so many new people, it was crazy. We had a games day one Saturday with all the new Rotex, Rotaract took us to Toledo, there was Dia de la Hispanidad, Spain’s Heritage Day, when we all endured the autumn rains to go watch the military parades. We toured an old part of Madrid and went to a theme park the next day and on our own we as exchange students have also explored Madrid – the new ones more than me!

These past three months have been some of the best times I’ve had in Madrid thus far and I’m so thankful that I could have had them. There weren’t always good times and sometimes the only thing I wanted to do was go home, but I continually looked for the silver lining and once I’d found it, I clung to it until the skies had cleared once more.