S2W2-Eight Arms, Three Languages: The Tentacles of Tradition
Bon dia a tots i totes, i feliç dilluns, el tancament d’una setmana i el començament d’una altra.
Looking back on this past week, it was very chill in comparison to some of my more “wild” ones. Yes, of course, there was a weekend trip and a few activities throughout the week, but nothing super crazy. If anything, this week has given me some time to catch up on some much-needed sleep (two-hour siesta, anyone?) and reflect a little deeper on this second season of “Delia in Spain.” On that note, thinking about the title, I’ve come to realize this week that it really is “Delia in Catalunya” or “Delia in Barcelona” because, in a way, I don’t feel like I am in Spain at all. Catalunya, and Barcelona especially, has a very distinct culture from the rest of Spain—for better and for worse.
For example, while I may have studied Spanish for eight years and arrived ready to speak it here, during my meeting with the study abroad agency this week about the whole “work situation” (see last week’s blog for more details), they told me that I had to be more “mindful” about the language differences. Yes, they said that to me—the one who just took a class on sociolinguistics this past semester and is headed to Oxford in spring 2027 to study exactly that (well, and psycholinguistics). But here’s the thing, and this may be an unpopular opinion, I really don’t know: I don’t speak Catalan, and they don’t really speak English (at least not well), so would meeting in the middle with Spanish not make sense, especially when you are hosting interns from the United States?
As an example, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton, as one can gather from the title, hosts both Spanish and Portuguese with varying language levels among the students. There are professors who speak only Spanish and others who speak only Portuguese, so sometimes they meet in the middle with English because, in a way, it carries a sense of neutrality. As my last host family in Barcelona told me, “todo el mundo habla español.” While the city of Barcelona may advertise it as a “foreign language” on their website, the reality—as I understand from my host family—is that in school half the day is in Spanish and half is in Catalan. Yes, Catalan is what is spoken at home… unless you’re hosting a student from the United States, in which case it’s Spanish. Everyone speaks Spanish, and they speak it well.
So to tell the interns that you invited from the United States that there is a language barrier, refuse to speak Spanish around them, and instead conduct everything in Catalan feels like they’re simply not being inclusive or welcoming to us. Technically, only beginner Spanish was required for this position, so the fact that both my roommate and I can understand and speak Spanish well should be to our advantage, not labeled a “language barrier.” I write all this not to hate on Catalan. As you all know, I am learning it on Duolingo and think it is pretty cool. I am writing this more to explain why the reasons for me sitting on my couch on a Tuesday morning, bored and scrolling on Instagram, or doing cross-stitch on the beach on Friday keep getting more ridiculous. So, that was reason number one: the language barrier.
Reason two: culture shock.
Okay, maybe it has some validity to it. The work culture in Spain has definitely been a culture shock, less so from what I’ve experienced first-hand and more from this long document we had to read about leave policies just so we could better access the office space. Have a doctor’s appointment? Take as long as you need—it’s all paid, unlimited time. Need to take a child or another family member to the doctor? Also paid, unlimited time. Feeling sick? It’s fully covered. On top of that, work hours fluctuate based on the time of year. The winter schedule is 37.5 hours, but the summer is 35. You can take up to a 20-minute break and have it paid, with an unlimited number of breaks. In the US, lunch is normally 30 minutes, I think, so a 20-minute casual break seems pretty long. Spain also has a legal limit on overtime—no more than 80 hours a year.
Then there are the holiday weeks. I think the biggest shock was actually a negative one: the fact that they get 27 paid vacation days, but three weeks of them must be taken in August. Furthermore, they can only be used in full-day increments and three-day blocks (minus long weekends). What if I want to go on a trip at another time during the year? I guess as a future professor, these kinds of restrictive scheduling rules will apply to me anyway, something that I am just realizing in this exact moment. Maybe I haven’t thought this out entirely, lol!
And what exactly is a “personal day”? When you have unlimited sick leave and substantial vacation time, what does a personal day even mean? Better yet, why do you get four of them?
And don’t get me started on all the holidays. There is basically a holiday every other week. Between September 11, September 24, December 8, December 25, and December 26, the year is packed. Then you ring in the new year with January 1 and January 6, followed by April 3, April 6, May 1, May 25, and June 24. On top of that, there is Maundy Thursday on April 2, and a “morning-only” schedule of just 3.75 hours on January 5, April 23, June 23, and both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
Then there’s the rest of the bureaucracy: a death in the family grants you three days off—five if you have to leave the province. Moving houses gives you two days. They even allocate 18 hours every single year specifically for parent-teacher conferences. How long and how frequent are these school meetings supposed to be? Finally, we have the legal “right to disconnect.” In Spain, there is basically no such thing as a work emergency outside of operational hours because you are legally not obligated to answer your phone, and supervisors must avoid sending messages entirely. Legally.
So yeah, things are different. But the funniest part was when I was told that the “culture shock” I was experiencing was simply that in Spain, “we’re not going to give you a stack of work to do… it’s more open.” This absolute gem of a response came after I explicitly asked if we could have a second project to work on, since we were doing absolutely nothing with the primary office project while waiting for survey results to come in. I was asking for more work! Or really, any work at all, because as I’ve hinted, I’ve been doing a whole lot of nothing. Instead of giving us a task, we were told we were just in shock. Well, I must have simply been in shock these entire two weeks—honestly, I’m still in shock now. It’s just so jarring that Princeton sent us abroad for me to sit on my couch all day. I’m shaking just thinking about how “shocking” it all is.
Roommate Reverse Engineering
My other big update from last week is on the roommate front. While we may not exactly be friends—though they are like best friends to each other—we are cohabitating decently enough. They’ve taken out the garbage a few times and finally run the dishwasher. I’ve figured out that if I want them to pull their weight, I should simply stop doing the tasks I want them to handle. I just have to let the sink overflow with dishes until they get the message, or let the trash pile up to the ceiling and the floor get sticky. It’s all a game of chicken to see how much I can tolerate before I end up doing it myself.
That, and maybe I’ve been stealing their salt here and there to make up for them stealing my onions and other food last week—and perhaps a splash of milk too, after they used it all and left me with absolutely nothing for my coffee at 6:30 AM. Other than that, I’ve resolved most of the boundary issues. I moved my food into the second refrigerator, so I basically have an entire fridge to myself, and I hid the rest of my snacks in a sealed drawer under my bed to keep it entirely separate and avoid any more “accidents.”
Yeah, it isn’t the nicest thing to overhear them talking down about me at 10:30 PM when I’m tucked away in my room and they have no idea I’m actually in the apartment. I’m sorry my dishes are on the table and not in the sink, but you made cookies and there was so much stuff in the sink they didn’t fit. But I’m used to it by now, and I’m doing my best to be a good roommate. We’ll just have to see how I can reverse engineer them to clean the bathroom this week, lol.
I did discover one more giant difference between our rooms in the apartment, though. They have air conditioning! While there is AC in the main living room, there is absolutely no AC in my bedroom, which allows it to get quite hot at night. Apparently, this is just a “me” problem.
I also discovered that our beds differ drastically. While my mattress is literally less thick than the mattress topper I have at Princeton, leading to some serious back pain, they have entire orthopedic mattresses in their rooms. To be a lucky person. The good news is that the pain from the 10k is finally wearing off.
Becoming a Master Chef
On a much brighter note, my big highlight for the week was some incredible cooking. I successfully tackled albóndigas en salsa española, pan con tomate, and pulpo a la gallega—and, of course, I threw together another classic tortilla. Everything came out so incredibly good that I don’t even know if words can do it justice, minus the slightly undercooked potatoes I made to accompany the octopus. It has been so fun to try out new recipes, discover weird new products in the supermarket, and slowly become a master chef.
I’ve actually learned a lot this week about Spanish supermarkets. Apparently, Mercadona primarily sells its own store-brand items, and according to a video I saw on Instagram, the US equivalent is Trader Joe’s. What? I would never go grocery shopping at a Trader Joe’s in the US—expensive and weird food, though I do love their lentil chips. It’s so odd that I’ve somehow ended up in this niche supermarket ecosystem in Spain.
Really, the quality of a supermarket here just depends on its size. The bigger it is, the better it is, regardless of the chain. I’ll easily take a massive Carrefour over a Mercadona any day. Interestingly, Mercadona is the most popular supermarket in every single province in Spain except for the Basque Country, where a chain called Eroski takes the crown. I had never even heard of it. Nationally, Lidl comes in at number two, followed closely by Carrefour.
Speaking of Mercadona, I’ve officially spotted a whopping four of them in total over the past two weeks. I’m really slacking, but when there is a single Mercadona located just one manzana (block) from the casa, it’s hard to justify trekking anywhere else. That being said, I’ve made some incredible Mercadona finds this week. The absolute best discovery is their premade Belgian waffles with chocolate sauce—all you do is pop them in the microwave for 20 seconds, and you’re set.
Other finds included some perfume dupes, specifically one for a Chanel fragrance that my host family in Barcelona had last year. I really loved it at the time but didn’t have over a hundred dollars to drop on a bottle. I also found some Sol de Janeiro dupes. I’m not really a perfume person, but I figured for 13 euros total for two bottles, maybe I could become one.
A Cautionary Tale from the Perfumería
Consider this a cautionary tale if you ever find yourself in the perfumería section of Mercadona, spraying a bunch of testers around and trying to look like you know what you’re doing. A Spanish abuela may very well approach you to ask about the best champú to buy in the store. To which you’ll say you have absolutely no idea, but somehow, you will still end up picking out a shampoo for her.
For the record, I handed her a bottle of Pantene—it was the only brand on the shelf I had actually heard of before. She really picked the worst person in the store because I know nothing about shampoo, let alone the selection of champús in Spain. But hey, I helped, and I finally got to use some Spanish!
The Sound Mapping Saga
Another adventure for the week was attending a Sound Mapping event organized by the city of Barcelona. This essentially involved walking around tethered to another person and a recording device for an hour and a half. The description stated the event would be held in both Spanish and English, so I went expecting to get some language practice in. Instead, the entire thing was conducted in English.
To make matters worse, it was supposed to take place in my current barrio near the Sagrada Família, but they changed the location to Gràcia—aka exactly where I used to live last summer. My head was on a total swivel the entire time, praying I wouldn’t accidentally run into my old host family. Luckily, I didn’t; that would have been an incredibly awkward conversation.
Beyond the event being entirely in English, the worst part was that my headphones attached to the recording device didn’t even work properly. Consequently, I had to walk around Gràcia attached to a total stranger who had zero interest in talking to me for ninety minutes, all while not really being able to hear anything. Quite the experience.
An Impulsive Volunteering Crisis
After that failed attempt at meeting people and practicing the language, I impulsively signed up online to volunteer to visit elderly residents in the city. Shortly after, a woman sent me a WhatsApp message stating she needed to call me. This was the exact moment I thought about backing out. I absolutely hate making phone calls in English, so imagine my absolute dismay at the prospect of a phone call in Spanish.
We scheduled the call for Friday afternoon. I waited anxiously for two hours, literally practicing everything I was going to say, and then… she never called. She is supposed to call today (Sunday) in the afternoon, and I am once again ready to back out of the whole thing over a single phone call where I bet she will be doing most of the talking anyway.
However, I am committed to answering the phone if she actually calls today, if only so I can give you all an update next week. Though, if she doesn’t call this time, I am officially giving up because this is lowkey too stressful. Sorry, Mom!
The Great Power Outage of 2026
I also learned a lot about Spanish electricity this week after we lost all of it on Monday. At first, I thought maybe we were experiencing another one of those massive blackouts like the one back in May of last year, but I looked out into the hallway and saw the lights were still on. Clearly, this was a personal problem.
I quickly jumped into electrical engineering mode and dragged a chair over to get up to the breaker box. With some help from Gemini, I flipped some switches around and was fully ready to be crowned the hero of the apartment. But no. That didn’t work. Instead, my roommate called some guy on the phone who clearly had no actual idea how electricity works, and he told her to just flip random switches on and off. She started flipping random stuff, and all of a sudden, the power snapped back on. I am entirely convinced that the power just decided to turn on by pure coincidence at that exact moment because I had already flipped the correct switch according to Gemini.
What I did actually learn from this saga, however, is that you cannot run the dishwasher, the oven, and the washing machine all at the same time in Spain. Apartments here have incredibly strict limits on how much electricity (potencia contratada) they can draw at any single moment, and if you exceed it, the whole system shuts off automatically. Lesson learned.
I headed into the office twice this week. First was on Wednesday for our “weekly meeting,” where we were treated to a massive two-hour tour of a two-story office full of empty meeting rooms. This is my polite way of saying the tour should have taken less than ten minutes, but somehow it morphed into a sweeping discussion about Spanish bureaucracy and the victims of online harassment.
Then on Friday, we came in for a breakfast event featuring a panel discussion between Barcelona and Madrid. I had absolutely no idea who the speakers were; one panel featured two professors, and the other remains a total mystery to me. The funniest part, though, was the ten-minute introduction. The entire opening speech was delivered in Catalan, and I had very little idea what the guy was actually saying. Then, at the very end, he said something along the lines of, “We are going to conduct the rest of this in Spanish so that the people from Madrid can participate.” Consequently, the next two hours of the event were entirely in Spanish. I guess the people in Madrid didn’t need to understand the introduction? Unsure. It was long, and the core message seemed to be: “We just make the plan. It’s up to everyone else to implement it and solve the problems.” Honestly, that might be closer to a direct translation than a paraphrase.
The Zaragoza Survival Guide (or Lack Thereof)
My big excursion for the week was a trip to Zaragoza, a city about two hours away from Barcelona via train. Since it’s bigger than Girona, I went in expecting a packed day of sightseeing and activities. Instead, I was met with sweltering 35-degree Celsius temperatures (95°F), dead AirPods for the entire two-hour train ride, more than 11 miles of walking, and a grand total of one main sight: a big church and a plaza.
Instead of limiting my steps and conserving energy in the heat, I brilliantly decided to walk in the exact opposite direction of the church to see the Exposition Bridge. It’s an indoor pedestrian bridge that houses a museum (which I did not pay to enter) and a free exhibition on the history of transportation, complete with a flying car.
To be completely honest, I went to the entirely wrong bridge at first. People must have thought I was absolutely losing it, standing there taking photos of a regular old, mundane bridge while I was convinced I was documenting the famous Expo Bridge. To be even more honest, I went on this trip yesterday, and it wasn’t until I sat down to write this blog and looked up a photo of the real Expo Bridge that I realized the structure I photographed was just a random overpass. Good thing that on my way to check out a weird statue of a person, I stumbled across the actual Expo Bridge by pure luck!
The rest of the day was basically a cycle of walking to the big church and plaza, staring at the church and plaza from slightly different angles, and melting. There were genuine points on my journey where I didn’t think I was actually going to make it back to the train station. Clearly, I survived, but it was just that hot.
The good news is that while the rest of Spain is suffering through an intense ola de calor (heatwave) with these crazy temperatures, Barcelona has been incredibly reasonable. Thanks to being right on the coast, it’s stayed under 30°C. When I finally stepped off the train back in Barcelona, the air actually felt cold. I would say I feel bad for all the students doing the Princeton in Spain program right now where the temperatures have been hovering around 37°C all week, but that was exactly how it was when I did the program last year. They are just getting the full, authentic experience. Hopefully, they scored a homestay with air conditioning—because I definitely didn’t last year.
While the pasantía has been a bit slow and the summer heat is officially cranking up, there is still so much to look forward to here. Between hunting for a La Roja shirt in a city that might not entirely share my World Cup enthusiasm, tracking the Tour de France, and mapping out a weekend trip to Bilbao and San Sebastián—which I managed to score for under 75 euros total—the schedule is filling up fast. Next week, I’m diving headfirst into some serious seafood cooking. Whether it’s squid or an ambitious seafood paella, I need to figure out the menu before my roommates decide to run the dishwasher while I have the oven on. I survived the great blackout of Monday, a harrowing 95-degree day in Zaragoza, and the absolute shock of having nothing to do at work, so I’d say I’m ready for whatever next week throws at me. Hopefully, it doesn’t include a phone call from a Spanish woman, but I won’t hold my breath. Until next time!
Que tinguis una bona setmana i ens veiem al proper,
Que tengais una buena semana y nos vemos en el próximo,
Have a great week and we’ll see each other in the next one,
