Trav's Blog: Updates on Trav

For me, the experience of studying abroad in Spain is a lot like the experience of infancy. Every environment is unfamiliar and new, and I’m surrounded by innumerable things for which I have no words (or at least, the words I do have, much like infant blabber, are useless). Most of all, life in Spain requires a mix of ambitious determination to keep learning despite the overwhelming volume of new information, and tireless humility to necessarily and repeatedly make mistakes. I have to stomach the fact that nearly everyone around me has superior expressive powers. A college student is relegated to blubbering (but hopefully endearing) foreigner status.

But each day I improve, and everything gets a bit easier. In the nearly four weeks I’ve lived here, I’ve gone from a complete inability to express most thoughts, to the ability to express basic ideas and feelings on just about any subject that two people would talk about (though many subjects require aggressive, agile maneuvering around the words I don’t yet know). Class is no longer a frantic rush to write down every mysterious word I hear, and I can joke around with the program staff, my host family and Spanish-speaking friends.  Even if the joke may be really be on me….

Speaking of my family, I have the tremendous fortune to live with a great family of three madrileños, Flor and her sons Fabio and Marco (12 and 17). Flor is fantastic about making vegan food, giving me Spanish conversation, and generally giving me the independence I want in an experience like this. We live a good 45 minutes away from my program center (where I take two classes: advanced Spanish language, and 20^th century Spanish civilization and art) and even farther from the university (where I take one class English literature… what?), but that gives me nice chunks of time to read, write, and occasionally meditate.

And then of course, there’s Madrid, a behemoth-sized city in the heart of Spain, the capital, the cultural mecca, and the home of the famous “madriz” accent. It’s also the place I call home for the next 3 ½ months. It’s wonderfully sunny here, requiring as little as a t-shirt or as much as a light spring jacket, and I’m told it only gets warmer. Here in Madrid, I’m learning how to navigate a city many times bigger than any other I have ever lived in, how to find vegetarian restaurants in a nation of ham, how to do laundry in a kitchen (where one finds a dishwasher in the typical American home) and then hang my clothes three stories up over an unforgiving parking lot, how to eat lunch at two and dinner at nine without burning out too early or waking up too late, and a thousand other smaller things for which I had no concept of and certainly no experience with before I arrived. And of course I shouldn’t omit that every day I seem to learn something new about one Travis Webster-Booth.

In fiction, authors reveal their protagonists best by colliding them with other characters and circumstances. On a daily basis, that’s what I’m experiencing in the 1^st person here in Madrid. And I love it (In between my infantile babbling).

If you want to contact me, skype, e-mail or facebook work the best. If you want to send me something in the mail or call me, let me know and I’ll pass on my new number and mailing address (both are posted on facebook).