Journal Entry Three

This week one situation where my cultural interactions stood out to me was when my friends and I met another girl here from Italy. We had just spent a night having dinner with one of my friends' family friends who is living in Barcelona. We ate fish tacos and talked about the transition to Barcelona life. The family friend was from New Jersey, and in my opinion didn’t seem incredibly ethnorelative in terms of adapting to the Barcelona lifestyle. She does for the most part follow the time schedule, but she doesn’t speak much Spanish. She knows the frases she must use in order to get by. Her friends are mostly her Irish boyfriend’s friends who happened to live in Barcelona before their move, but it does not seem like she has intermingled with many locals. They seem to keep to themselves and I’m sure that is sufficient to some people, but I don’t just want to adapt some of the customs here, I want to know the language well by the time I leave, I want to have gotten to know people well enough to consider them friends here. I want to have my traditional Spanish food spots that I enjoy, and not latch onto my American customs. But back to our new friend from Italy. Following our dinner with the New Jersey resident, turned Barcelona resident, we were hoping for a calm night, so we went downstairs to the common area in our student residency. There we met this girl named Giulia who told us about her love for tennis, her studies, human nutrition specifically, how she goes to school for five years instead of four like we do in the U.S. and how she just arrived here and she’s made two friends in the residency but her roommate is always going out at night. It was really nice to meet her. It was a little challenging to understand her English, especially with her accent, but I tried to apply my Personal Development Plan in order to get the most out of this encounter. I paid close attention to her words, remained invested in what she was telling me about herself and was skeptical of my own view, not allowing myself to fill in what I didn’t understand, but rather ask her. We bonded over our love for tennis and she asked if I brought my racket with me. I told her that while I didn’t I would absolutely buy one so we could play. Then she was trying to explain to me that I could rent one, however she didn’t know the word for rent. I asked her to describe when she meant, or tell me in Italian because while I don’t know Italian, I do know Spanish and I know there are some similarities and crossovers. Through working through it I came to the understanding that she was talking about renting, and something about that was very exciting.