What just happened in the last 6 weeks? Spain happened.

I wrote this a couple of days ago when I was waiting in the airport, but just now got the chance to post it.


What I think about the last six weeks

I am sitting in the airport right waiting for my flight to Berlin, Germany to visit some family friends for a couple of weeks, and am absolutely flabbergasted with myself. I have just spent 6 weeks doing everything I could to immerse myself into a culture, language, and way of life and the thought of coming back to the United States in a couple of weeks where I am not learning something new just about every second or where doing something so simple such as ordering a pincho de tortilla is a prolific challenge, has me on the verge of tears. I need at least a year longer here. Every moment of this experience has been a challenge for me. I came from College Station, a small college town in rural Texas, where I was living in house in a calm neighborhood with my best friend to living in the largest city in Spain literally a 2 minute walk from the very center of Madrid with a middle aged woman who barely spoke any English. It was quite a shock.

Even though I had barely slept in the days before I had arrived, the excitement of my new way of life kept me awake for about the entire first week I was here. I would lie down in my bed and the thought of there being an entire city outside my window that I had never seen would make my heart race and keep me from falling asleep. I am going to blame my Aunt Deborah for that one. A few days before I left I had dinner with her and my Uncle Steve and when we were saying our goodbyes she gave me the best advice anyone could have given me, “Hit the ground running.” I had never thought of it that way, but it sunk in and from the second I landed to right now I never stopped.

I can’t tell you how fortunate I feel to have seen what I have seen and experienced what I have experienced. I learned so much about this place and fell in love with it. I couldn’t have met nicer people (even a few Americans) or learned more about myself here. I guess when you put yourself in a foreign country in a huge city where you don’t know anyone or the language, and you walk everywhere seeing everything you can there is a lot of time to think about things. As many of you may know I was supposed to be in Guadalajara, Mexico this summer and never had any desire to come to Spain or even Europe. I feel like a complete idiot for that and consider myself extremely lucky to have this opportunity fall into my lap.

I was immersed into a large international city with thousands of immigrants that speak all kinds of languages and live all kinds of different ways. There are Chinese people who run every single convenience store in Madrid and try to sell you beer on the streets after 11 o’clock at night, Africans who are trying to sell purses, belts, bootlegged DVDs, and cheap sunglasses, and the list could go on. I had never seen so many people just trying to survive by taking one day at a time and digging through the trash to find something to eat. It really opened my eyes and let me gain a new experience when I was able to see the struggles that people face every day and makes me feel extremely privileged. Walking on the street every day seeing beggars on their knees, women selling their bodies, and alcoholics passed out on the sidewalk with a bottle of liqour in their hand did something to me and it will be strange to not have the constant reminder of how lucky most of us are.

Despite the thousands of requests to keep the blog going for the rest of my life, it just probably won’t happen. I want to thank everyone for reading my blog, commenting on it, and keeping in touch with me while I have been abroad. I might put one up in a couple weeks about my trip in Germany.

Yours truly and my favorite,

Tony Kroschewsky