Hello, tender friends! This is a copy of the speech I gave at the January meeting of my toastmasters group. I hope this description of my occasionally hapless foray into living abroad in Valencia in college for the first time entertains you! Here we go!
I lugged my suitcase into my dorm foyer and obtained my room key from Fidel, the man who worked the front desk. I nodded as he spoke, even though I understood nothing, because I didn’t know what else to do. He spoke so fast and I understood so little that asking him to repeat anything seemed futile.
My roommate, Jackie, was a Cuban girl from Rutgers I’d never met. She was bombshell Kim Kardashian level gorgeous. (As an aside, she still is. If you have HBO and have ever watched “Generación Porque?” she’s the producer and star of that show. Even though we were roommates for 6 months and shared the type of wild times that happened when you’re 2-21 year old girls from Rutgers traveling around Europe together, even though we were very close friends for years after we graduated, I still felt a little starstruck when she told me her show got picked up by HBO. I didn’t know it was possible for someone as low-key as me to ever experience proximity to quasi-fame).
We became fast friends because we both loved dressing up, playing with makeup, and considered learning outside the classroom to be more important than our actual academic classes.
We also both loved to dance.I’d never taken dance classes, but she’d grown up dancing. I watched her do a simple two-step in between songs the first night that we went out dancing together. It turned out to be the move I needed to fill out my own informal but decent repertoire of dance moves.
Shakira’s song “Hips Don’t Lie” was huge that year. We hung up a poster of her in our dorm room and danced in a tiny space between our twin beds when we got ready to go out at night. Every time Shakira sang about hips not lying, I thought, “Neither do ours!” ( That might sound lame, but cut me a break. I was 21).
Men twirled us around (more her than me), bought us drinks and whispered in our ears, but we always stuck together and made sure we got home safe.
One night, one such man asked her for a light. In Spanish, this phrase is “Tienes fuego?” which translates literally to, “Do you have fire?” Well, like I said, Jackie was and is gorgeous. She was used to men telling her how pretty she was all the time. Her Cuban Spanish, even though it was native, was so different from Castilian Spanish that she understood no more than your average white girl.
She didn’t answer his question and just laughed. He asked again. She laughed again.
“Jackie, tell him we don’t smoke,” I told her.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“We don’t smoke. You don’t have a lighter. He doesn’t get why you’re not answering him.”
“Oh. He needs a lighter? I thought he was telling me I was on fire, like he thinks I’m really pretty.”
She processed her own words after uttering them and we both burst out laughing at the same time. Jackie wasn’t embarrassed and wasn’t afraid of her blunder making her appear arrogant. I’ve always admired that about her.
As the weeks turned to months, I felt less and less like I was walking around with glue in my ears. But I was still self-conscious about how I sounded when I spoke Spanish and my mouth made me feel like a duck-billed platypus.
There were other blunders: when my friend Bridget, who was a vegetarian, was offered cabbage, she declined it because she thought the waiter was offering her chicken. (The words for chicken and cabbage are very similar in Spanish, “pollo” and “repollo,” respectively).
She kept insisting, “No, I am a vegetarian!” until the poor bewildered waiter walked away and sent a colleague to our table. When we realized what was going on, we said to Bridget, “You’re on fire!” By that point, it had become our catch phrase for our blunders.
One of the fun things about Valencia was that there were places to buy cheap clothes and jewelry, even as broke college students. One day Jackie and I walked into a jewelry store. I glanced very quickly at the prices: 21 euros, 32 euros, 15 euros, etc. A little pricey, but I was feeling good and thought I might treat myself.
The shop assistant was so nice! They even offered us coffee and tea to sip as we shopped. What luxury!
Jackie and I browsed, agreeing that 32 Euros was a little pricey for costume jewelry, but what the heck? You’re only 21 in Spain once in your life. I decided to splurge.
As the shop assistant took the necklace out of the case, she asked how I’d be transferring funds. Transferring funds? I have 36 Euros in cash, I thought but didn’t say.
I just nodded like it was a natural question and took out my debit card. The shop assistant looked surprised but took my card. She rang up the necklace.
It wasn’t 32 euros. It was 32,000 euros. It wasn’t costume jewelry.
Jackie gasped. I gasped but avoided looking at her and tried to keep a neutral face.
I looked back at the case it came out of, noticing the third zero after the period and remembering that in Spain, they used periods instead of commas in prices. I misread 32.000 as 32.00.
“I’m sorry, but your card’s not working,” the shopkeeper said. She smiled politely, clearly expecting me to provide some other “transfer of funds.”
My face reddened. I wanted to exit the situation in a way that wouldn’t let the shopkeeper know what an idiot I was.
“Tengo que almorzar!” I blurted out, which means, “I need to eat lunch!” and was apropos of nothing. “Gracias,” I muttered, and said that I’d come back after I ate.
I grabbed Jackie’s hand and dragged her towards the door as she began to giggle. Out on the sidewalk,my cheeks flamed and I hustled down the sidewalk as quickly as I could without running.
“How red is my face?” I asked Jackie.”Pretty red,” she said. “You’re on fire!”
Ok, that’s all for today, tender friends! I know that was a bit off brand, but it was fun to write and fun to deliver the speech.
Thank you for sharing!
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