Aaron Uses the Spanish 'F' Word and My Teacher Gets Mad at Me Again

The last two days have been very busy.

I dropped an F-bomb by accident on Tuesday night at a bar with some CELTA friends and two Spanish girls while celebrating Barcelona´s football ¨victory¨ (more on that later).

Reminiscent of the first time I used the c-word (I was reading a dialogue in a theater class), we were in the middle of a conversation, which somehow turned to my new flatmate, who I mentioned offhand compared Obama to FRANCO, and that stopped the conversation right there.

That doesn´t really do it justice. I had killed the conversation with extreme prejudice. The Spaniards gasped and looked away, the CELTA kids didn´t say anything, I think someone died at the table next to us. I don´t think I´d have gotten a worse reaction if I pulled the head of Osama bin Laden himself out of my pants pocket.

It didn´t help when I tried to backtrack and say that I was referring to James Franco. Apparently you are not allowed to say Franco´s name in Barcelona. This is understandable, as he wasn´t a very nice man, and he was particularly not very nice to the Catalonians. I apologized, and they knew I hadn´t meant anything by it, but the damage had been done. My feau pax had deflated the conversation for a good five minutes. I guess I won´t do that again.

I don´t know if there´s an equivalent in the US. Someone suggested Hitler, but you can say Hitler in the US and nobody will care. Maybe in the wrong context, it might raise an eyebrow or two, but I´d say someone tries to make at least one Hitler joke per dinner conversation/house party/poker game/etc.

The n-word is pretty bad, I guess. That´s a word, regardless of context, which is going to get a strong reaction. In some parts of the country, mentioning the Civil War or global warming or Barbara Streisand might get people foaming at the mouth.


A few hours earlier, there was a football match, and I got to see up close just how crazy people. Not during the game, which was relatively uneventful and we wound up watching it in a pretty slow bar. The game ended 1-1 and the immediate reaction postgame was so comatose that I had to ask the people with me if the result was good for Barcelona or not.

But it was, I got to see that when we walked over the Ramblas which was a sea of people celebrating and acting like dangerously drunken fools. People were climbing up lampposts, taking their clothes off, throwing firecrackers around, hugging people around them and chanting. I feel like at one point someone shot a round up into the sky. It was total pandemonium. Especially the people on the lampposts, about 20 feet in the air. That was insane. My favorite part of the time we were there was when two people were climbing a flagpost, and the lower guy grabbed the flag and feel 10-15 feet back to the ground. The guy on top looked down for about 15 seconds, I guess just to make his friend landed dead or alive back on the pavement, and then started cheering wildly again.

This was great to see because I´m not sure until now that I realized just how dangerously passionate people are in Europe about football/soccer. This goes beyond fandom, it´s a religion, and it was scary. On the one hand I wish there was something in my life which could get my aroused as much as the people I saw on the Ramblas, but then again, I feel like some of those people are not in control of their lives, because as crazed as they are they will never be more than passive receivers of the football experience. To live vicariously through something so detached from one´s own life is kind of absurd (I´m being a little hypocritical here as I have my own experiences being an intense sports fan, but I´m reasonably self aware about it and if I ever killed someone for insulting the Mets, there probably would be other factors involved).  At least as of yet, I haven´t found anything which is worth that kind of devotion from me, except maybe LEGOs.


In other news, my Spanish teacher is awful, enough that I´m going to complain after Friday to the administration. She treats us like toddlers and refuses to answer questions about more complex phrases. For example, we were talking about city streets, and I wanted to know the verb for ¨fail¨ because I was trying to say that the city of Barcelona tries to clean certain streets like the Ramblas but they fail because every morning the streets are still dirty, but she just nodded her head politely and completely dismissed me.

We had another clash over what constitutes a joke again. I was describing my partner and said of her, ¨no tiene una barba¨ (she doesn´t have a beard) and the teacher got very angry. She said, ¨remember Aaron what we said yesterday about talking about real things? Only talk about real things, don´t talk about things in your imagination. It´s wrong.¨

This goes beyond just not recognizing humor. I wasn´t ¨trying¨ to make a joke, maybe that´s why me and the profesora are oil and water. The way I normally think and talk is apparently anathema to her and besides, if we really wanted to press the point, I would invite her to visit the circus and then ask if its outside of ¨reality¨ to identify a woman by her facial hair (or lack thereof). But that´s beside the point.

The real issue here is her not answering questions. I am not 12 years old, this is not seventh grade, I paid good money to take this class and I should reasonably expect a teacher to at least try to help me with more complex phrases. If I want to actually use Spanish, I´m going to want to say things that I would say in English, not just using ¨esta bien¨ for everything. If the class cannot teach me how to talk like a real person, then what´s the point?

Note: the last bit was written yesterday. The teacher was a little better today, and even asked me about my life after the class, but even so, we´re not going to be facebook friends.