I never thought I'd hate the sight of an advertisement so much. It wasn't sexist; it didn't exoticize people of color; it was, admittedly, a touch paternalistic toward people who can't afford health care, but eh? The dentistry ad in the Madrid airport, featuring a little boy's painfully white smile, was not itself the problem. The issue was that I'd been staring at it for about seven hours on end.
A word of advice: If you're ever flying out of the Madrid airport in January, expect massive delays and flight cancellations. My program-mates and I arrived in Spain on January 13 at about 7:30 in the morning, but a blanket of dense fog hovering over la Meseta (the central plateau in Spain) kept Iberia from boarding flights, including my 3:50 to Sevilla, until hours later. Half of us were able to squeeze onto the first flight; the other half were stuck in the airport until 7:50pm. ¡Qué lio! The important thing, though, is that we all made it to Seville on the first night of the program.
Culture shock? Maybe. But I'm pretty sure I was in medical shock by the time we arrived in Sevilla. Even before I stepped off the plane, I felt como pez fuera del agua, like my American-English gills were choking on the Spanish-heavy air. I confused at least a handful of Spaniards with my garbled questions before I shuffled my bags out the airport doors and into the trunk of a waiting taxi. Thank goodness I shared a cab with my friend Kat--she just spent fall semester in Madrid, so she was able to make conversation with the driver while I quietly suffocated in the next seat.
After we taxi'd ourselves to the Hotel Alcanzar, the UNC in Sevilla SAS people had a quick meeting with the program directors, almost exclusively in Spanish. (After over 24 hours of plane travel and 2 sleepless nights, I was definitely struggling to keep up!) We finally got some food at a nearby restaurant after that, returned to the hotel and promptly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Y'all, please understand: I love my fellow program participants already, but the hours we spent in the airport, our first dinner together, the first couple of days were hard. Nothing could make me long for a return flight to the States like small talk among strangers who know they're gonna spend the next five months together in another country. I think it helped that we were forced to break the ice as we waited for the fog to lift in Madrid, but, of course, it takes time for people to get to know each other, and the interim can be painful. Until I got settled in here, I couldn't help but feel like my international flight was just an irrational flight from the faces and places I love. I didn't realize how close I was to falling in love with a new place, to finding community in a group of new faces.
(To be continued...)
(To be continued...)
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