Spring Awakening

Spring has well and truly sprung in Barcelona, seemingly overnight (or at least over one weekend which I spend in Dublin, enjoying the daffodils and tulips that have sprung themselves in the Botanic Gardens). I had a wonderful visit from one of my oldest and best friends, and I'm anticipating another from my lovely little Mum. The sun is shining that little bit more, the sky is that little bit bluer, and the lecturers are piling on that little bit more work. Make that a lottle bit more work - I spent four hours on a Linguistics assignment today. I've spring cleaned my room - Life Laundry as my older sister calls it - and some things are springing in my brain.

It's struck me that when you move abroad and have to live your day-to-day life through a different language, you really learn the importance of communication. Small things like buying food or asking where something pave the way for the big things like reaching out to people or listening in class. The whole point of going on Erasmus is to improve your language skills, which I feel I have in leaps and bounds - I used to be extremely shy about speaking Spanish in class, and I must admit I didn't make much effort for homework exercises or things like that, whereas now I know I have to put in the time to do things properly, and I have to try to communicate as best I can, which has made me happier and more confident about speaking Spanish.

The whole idea of communication is paramount in our translation classes, where Angels (teacher of Translation I) tells us "mmm we wouldn't say that, how can we express this better?" and Johnjoe (teacher of Translation II; actual name Juanjo) tells us that the message is the most important thing to convey. These translation classes are hugely helpful for learning Spanish, from bits and pieces of vocabulary to methods of analysing translation before starting the process, but sometimes it's almost overwhelmingly difficult to communicate the overall message.

One thing that is definitely not difficult about communicating while on Erasmus is talking to people at home. Say what you will about the constant contact people have with each other, and let the critics rage and rave about texting, Facebook, Skype and Twitter - means of communication are often what keeps me sane when I'm feeling sad, lonely or simply out of touch with home.

A lot of people highlight their opinion that the whole point of being away for a year is to cut yourself off from the familiar and throw yourself into the unknown with wild abandon. I agree with the latter, but definitely not the former. By all means, cut yourself away from the familiar as regards food and habits and things like that, but keeping in touch with friends and family has been an unbelievably huge support to me in the last six months. Last night I spent a total of over two and a half hours on Skype to four of the people closest to me - nothing of huge importance was discussed, but what made us stay talking (to two people in particular for over an hour each) was just the pleasure of being able to chat. About nothing. Last year in the study month my friend Laura and I gave each other the nicknames of Talky McChat and Banter McNatter, because we were doing a bit too much chinwagging and not enough studying. This year my friend Carina and I were forcefully separated in French class for engaging too much in the old bavarde. It's a given that there's a time and a place, but very little can top a good chat.

So let me chat just for a while. Last week I met the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, who is a lovely woman. She is smiley and pleasant and friendly and involved, and she made an admirable effort to speak Catalan to boot. But this very pleasant instance (which involved free cava and cakes with the Irish flag on them) collided interestingly with two others.

One of these was an assignment for my class on teaching methods, whereby I had to find a video on the subject of gender inequality. The video I chose was a TED speech by Chilean author Isabel Allende, who spoke wonderfully about passionate, strong women. Never having been interested in my teenage years, I've lately felt the vague presence of feminism tapping at the door of my consciousness, and slowly that door has been creeping open. Last week, Isabel Allende blew it right off its hinges.

This had particular resonance for me as the other instance occurred a few nights previously, when I was on my way home from the gym. It was dark. It was raining. It was about 10pm. I was walking to get a Bici from the station nearest the gym (which is still in the back arse of nowhere in Barcelona terms), and I noticed an alarming frequency of girls. Girls standing in the rain. Young black girls my age, standing in the rain with hot pants and umbrellas. Not even someone with as innocent a mind as my own can be naïve to the incongruence of their attire, their half-attempts to seduce despite the adverse weather conditions and the lack of passersby. I saw a girl sitting in a car with a man. I've seen this sort of thing late at night, off the Ramblas, but never so obvious, so clichéd, so upsetting. It's one of the images of Barcelona I'll keep with me. And I can tell you it's not going to be stored in the same mental storage box as the Happy Lobster, the colour of the sky behind the purple trees in full primavera bloom, or the warmth of the sun on your face as you cycle down Carrer de Enric Granados in the early morning, while the shopkeepers and baristas clackityclack open their shutters.

All these things came together in one week and became lodged in my brain. I realise there's little I can do on my own to change anything right now, but with a degree in Spanish and Politics behind me and the inspiration of women I come across on my travels through life, Isabel Allende and Mary McAleese being the most recent, maybe there will be in the future. Not only is Erasmus about learning a spoken language, for me it's also about learning the language of life in a different country, and my experience living in a big, bustling, wonderful, electric city like Barcelona has opened my eyes to a huge amount, an extent to which I hope Cork will never close again. And maybe it's important to communicate these sort of thoughts, even though they're not the sort you have during chats over tea and Milka chocolate.

When giving a speech at a conferring ceremony in UCC last September, the author Theo Dorgan said in regard to those who were planning on emigrating, "send us your thoughts and your visions constantly, it's what the technology is for." I couldn't agree more. Then again, if I disagreed I wouldn't be writing a blog.

I've said enough for now, but here's a picture of the Happy Lobster to lighten the mood:

The Kindness of Strangers

I'm quite a friend-orientated person. I worry about them when they're sad or troubled, I miss them when they're not around, and I enjoy spending time with them. I like making new friends, but as I have an unfortunate propensity to be quite shy sometimes, I always feel most comfortable with my old friends. But something which has really struck me lately is the capacity for strangers to act like friends.

One example was last week, when I was introduced to Antonio. He had just retired and was hoping to spend a few months in Cork with his wife, starting in May. A mutual friend thought it would be good if we could meet and I could tell him a few things about Cork, and I wasn't going to decline because practicing Spanish is always a good thing, even if it does mean hanging out with a man in his sixties instead of people my own age. I hadn't met Antonio more than five seconds when he presented me with a gift to thank me for my time, a kind of teach yourself Spanish kit with a phrasebook and a cd. I thought this really was generosity which was pure of heart - I was teaching him about my home, so he wanted to help me learn about his - and I found myself genuinely lost for words.

But what hit me even more had happened a week previous. When Donnacha was visiting recently, we borrowed my flatmate's Bicing card so the two of us could cycle around Barcelona. It worked out in our favour almost all of the time, as we saved a lot on metro tickets as well as enjoying pedalling around with each other, something we had never done before. I adore Bicing, the scheme whereby you flash your card at a scanner at station, it tells you which bike to take, you take it, cycle where you need to go, and drop it off elsewhere. It means I don't have to buy a bike, or pay for huge locks to keep it safe, or replace it when it ultimately gets stolen, as it would in Barcelona. It also means that when I cycle somewhere and it's sunny, and when I'm ready to go home it's raining, I don't have to brave through the elements to get home if I don't want to. But for all its good points, it still means that whatever bike you use isn't yours, and as such people mistreat them. I've got bikes with broken gears, upside-down bells, stuck seat adjustments, punctured tires and a missing pedal, but unfortunately Donnacha was the one who got one with a slipped chain. Not having a huge amount of experience with cycling, he didn't know what to do with it, but luckily (depending on what way you view it I suppose) I have a bike at home that hates me, and slips its chain at every available opportunity. So I got down on all fours and rotated the pedal and hooked the chain back on, fixing the bike but covering my paws in oil in the process. As we were on our way to lunch I thought no problem, I'll just wash my hands in the restaurant, but then I remembered that en route there are a few public fountains, so I decided to give one of them a try. I scrubbed my hands under the freezing cold jet of water to no avail, but then all of a sudden a man came up to me and presented me with a small bar of pink soap wrapped up in a plastic bag. The previous week on my way to college I had seen a homeless man washing himself in the early hours of the morning with soap under one of these public water fountains, and I realised this man was probably in a similar position. It looked as though all his possessions were stacked up on his bike, and he seemed shabby but happy. And I was completely overwhelmed that this man who had so little would be willing to share it. And his soap got all the oil off my hands in one fell swoop.

It can be uplifting to know that the world is full of these random acts of kindness, but unfortunately you have to be aware that it goes both ways. A random act of meanness befell me and my friends on the beach at Sitges last Sunday night, when all of Cataluña was celebrating Carnaval in Spain's gay capital. The parade had finished and we had an hour before the bus was due to take us back to Barcelona, so we thought we'd head down to the beach to chill out under the stars with the rest of the partied-out partiers who weren't on the streets anymore. We were having a nice time talking when a group of six teenagers came over to us and started hassling one of the boys in our group. They started spouting in Spanish about how they were the Francoist police, shoving an identity badge in his face while they tormented him, asking did he have any drugs on him and why he had a Catalán flag on him. They yelled their fascist dogma at us for about five minutes before ripping the flag off him and trying to set it alight. When the flag didn't catch, they cast it into the sea. And they still wouldn't leave us alone. It took one of our number, a native Spanish speaker, to tell us to get the police for them to take fright and run away like the cowards they are. And so the circle is complete, where people can warm your heart with the kindest of gestures one day, others can erase all of that and replace it with anger as they invade your privacy and wreck and ridicule your belongings.

Given the tragedies that mark our planet as it spins on oblivious - from the economy collapsing and so many people tumbling into poverty to earthquakes destroying Japan and New Zealand - I think we could all use a little more kindness from family, from friends, from strangers.