"Americans! Strange people. Lovely manners."

 

Three days with 150+ Fulbrighters have left me wondering what exactly unites "Americans" beyond all being slightly strange.

Fulbrighters in Salamanca's Plaza Mayor.  "A Washingtonian, a Hoosier, and a New Yorker walk into a plaza..."

I should start out by saying that the title for this entry is a quote from the film Mrs. Henderson Presents, a comment of the title character (played by Judi Dench), upon being informed that a character is American.  I would never subscribe to the "lovely manners" generalization (frequently the stereotype of the ugly American is just the reverse), but the "strange people" certainly echoes the insightful John Oliver's comment in one of his stand up routines that Americans are "much weirder than you give yourselves credit for being."  I must say I think the Fulbright Commission in general is to be congratulated for coming up with a nicely wide sample of people who are both "decent human beings" but also interesting human beings, who have in fact very little in common, but are therefore very fun and interesting to talk to when the opportunity arises.  Three days in Salamanca actually made me curious about visiting parts of the US I've never visited before.

Storks and the City of Light

 

An interesting phrase I learned today

My Spanish is pretty good, but one of the nice things about being here is that I keep learning new idiomatic phrases, some of them somewhat dated, but which provide fascinating insights into the culture.  I may have mentioned the somber "hambre que sabe la hartura no es hambre" (literally "hunger which knows what it is to be full isn't hunger") which means that it's different being hungry when you know where your next meal is coming from and are looking forward to it and when you don't know when you'll eat again.  Obviously, this came up in the context of discussing the post-war period.

Today in class I learned a much lighter phrase, when discussing the gender theory of Judith Butler, a subject where sense of humor is generally severely lacking.  My Complutense mentor, in an explanation of how gender is a learned performance, told the story of overhearing a small child of three or four years old at a polideportivo being picked up from his swimming lesson and telling his father that "hoy aprendimos a nadar como señoras" ("today we learned to swim like ladies").  My mentor, emphasizing that the child was linking an inherently neutral action (a type of stroke) with being a "señora" added that this was clearly a child who was too small to have an adult conception of human sexuality and that he still "piensa que los niños vienen de París."