Winter break abroad has landed me in Spain and Portugal. As I have traveled to each new country, I have ventured progressively further out of my comfort zone, which likely has something to do with the fact that I have also been venturing into countries whose languages I speak less and less of.
When you're in a country that speaks your native language, you can feel pretty well at home. When in country that speaks a language that you've been speaking for eight years, you can feel like a bit of an outsider at times, but you adjust to feel pretty comfortable. Spending time in a country of your third language makes you rather conscious of the fact that you're foreign, but you can get by with just a few communicative innovations. In a country where you don't speak the language at all, such as Spain and Portugal for me and the group that I'm traveling with, things get weird.
Upon our arrival at the hostel in Madrid, we discovered that not only was it the receptionist's first night working there, but she could only say a few things in English and didn't speak any French. This was where we had to start getting creative. Clearly, nobody in our group can understand Spanish at all, so the receptionist and I made an attempt to communicate in Italian, which mainly consisted of her saying things fluently for me to poorly translate into English for the group, and me responding in mostly misconjugated Italian until I realized that I didn't even know the infinitive for the verb that I needed. Our most effective communication in that country consisted mostly of pointing at stuff and hoping to find somebody that spoke some English or French.
Over the course of the past several months, I've grown pretty well accustomed to hearing French spoken with various foreign accents, but hearing various accents with Spanish was entirely new to me. There was a little convenience store called Food and Fruits (later dubbed Fruit n' Shit by our group when we couldn't remember its name properly), owned by a little Chinese couple. The american accent on Spanish must sound absurd to Europeans, but for us to hear a chinese accent on the language sounded crazy to us, even in a conversation limited to "hola," whatever the price was, and "gracias." Hearing our two accents combined in a single conversation would probably be hilarious to a native speaker.
We ran into the most linguistic problems due to the fact that we all had the plague. Trying to obtain cold medicine in a Farmacia proved to be an adventure in Spain and even more of a challenge in Portugal. In Madrid, we ended up learning that the spanish word for "to cough" is "tosar," which was easy enough to remember since it's so similar to the french "tousser," but it proved harder to communicate in Portugal. First off, Portuguese sounds an awful lot like a combination of Spanish and Russian, neither of which I can speak, so I was disoriented beyond the static fuzz that illness was placing upon my mental faculties. Beyond that, despite trying out the "international" farmacia, the employee there clearly didn't speak English a whole lot better than I spoke Portuguese. Then it got weird.
I told him that I had nasal congestion and a sore throat, possibly also a fever, and asked him if he had anything to help with those symptoms. He stared at me for a second, walked off, and returned with a box of cough drops. Due to my desire to one day breathe out of my nose, I asked if there was something that also helped with congestion, to which he responded by once again staring for a moment, giving a terse "No," and walking off to put back the cough drops and retrieve some pills that help with congestion but not sore throats. I took a moment to look at the box and pretend that I knew enough Portuguese to tell which symptoms it helped with, and then asked if there was anything that could help with both symptoms. Once again, he gave a quick no and disappeared with that medicine, this time returning with a Vitamin C supplement. I asked if it treated any symptoms at all. It didn't. It was just a vitamin. I went with the cold pills. I had clearly taken up a lot more of his time than he would have liked.
Working at Target back in the States, I had been in that farmacia employee's shoes numerous times, trying to help someone that clearly didn't speak English at all, wondering why they were even in the country when they were so wildly unprepared to be there, but prior to my week in Spain and Portugal, I had never been someplace where I was the one that couldn't speak the language at all. I had never previously felt firsthand the panic of trying to find some word in some language that can get you by because you didn't anticipate needing medicine when you only intended to be in that country for such a short amount of time. I had never before been in the position of trying so hard to avoid pissing locals off while simply trying to pick up some of the culture, language, and scenery, proving to everyone around me how little I knew as I tried to learn everything that I could about where I was. As it turns out, being a dirty foreigner is really hard!
Everybody in Spain and Portugal that exhibited any level of patience with us seriously deserves a gold star, and I must say that the vast majority of the people that I encountered in the latter of those countries should be plastered in shiny actinoid accolades. The Portuguese, in contrast with the French, tend to sport a friendly look upon their faces most of the time, which was surprising when compared with the relative economies of the two countries. The unemployment rate in Portugal has been crazy high with the current state of the economy, but when we spoke to Joana, the owner of our hostel in Porto, she said that the smile is the most important thing for them to keep. So often, Americans will give in to negativity when they lack some material possession or another, whether they didn't get the newest iPhone or their dream car, but in Portugal, I found people who clearly couldn't get the health care that they needed, continuing to suffer from deformities due to polio, but they still greeted everyone with a smile. These were people that seemed to have the least to be happy about, but their happiness is the one thing that can never be taken away from them, even as they share it with others. Portugal is beautiful for much more than its scenery.
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