Five months in Barcelona! - Eleanor Soltes

Hello! My friend Eleanor made an amazing and really thoughtful reflection on her exchange as she is hitting her five-month mark in Barcelona, Spain. Eleanor is from Houston and doing exchange in Barcelona. Enjoy!!!

Five months in Barcelona! (Eleanor Soltes)

Hitting five months here feels like a pretty great feat. Some days it goes like that—getting through the day warrants celebration. My exchange is halfway over, I’m on the other side, it doesn’t really feel like I’m counting the months I’ve been here anymore, rather, the months I have left.

I chose Spain for its climate, food, architecture, and language. I think when it comes to Spain, I won the lottery being placed in Barcelona. Through my program, Rotary Youth Exchange, you don’t get to choose the city you’re placed in, meaning I could have been sent anywhere from towns of less than 500 people—like my friend Smera—to cities like here or Madrid. In Barcelona I have practically everything at my fingertips. My current host family’s apartment is a 20-minute metro ride from Plaça Catalunya, the very center of the city. Barcelona has a beach—although not a very nice one for swimming—as well as the mountains to the west; and in the city, dozens of museums and thousands of restaurants and stores; I can’t and won’t run out of things to do. I’m planning on pursuing architecture in the future- so you could say I am pretty lucky to be in one of the most architecturally interesting cities in not only Spain but Europe! I’ve gone on solo excursions to places like Park Guell, or to the Sagrada Familia, but practically anytime I go into Barcelona alone or with friends there are things to see. I can’t count how many afternoons I’ve spent just walking around the city, different neighborhoods and areas, stopping for gelato—when it was warmer out—or churros con chocolate—now that it’s much cooler—and if I wanted to go to the disco on the weekends, there are tons of places for teenagers and great public transport to get me around. In my first few months, when I was struggling with budgeting, I would complain that there’s not much to do without money, which is partially true. If you don’t have money to buy food out, you have to organize coming home to eat if you want to spend a day walking around the city. That’s all there really IS to do without money unless you take advantage of occasional free admission to museums. My host family pays for my public transport card, so I’m able to get around Barcelona.

I think one of the greatest misconceptions about foreign exchange is that you’re going to come here and it’ll be like a vacation or trip for an entire year; I remember telling my mom I thought hard days would be easier here because everything would be new and special, but that’s just not the case. I’ve realized that being here is still living! It’s still life—I’m going to have good days and bad days, I’m going to have exhausting and stressful weeks and I’m also going to cry over things I would’ve cried over at home too. You can’t expect your emotions or mental state to pause just because you’re experiencing this new great thing. Exchange is pretty unbelievably terrifying! There have been days it has taken everything within me just to work up the nerve to ask my host mom for something, or days I have felt like all of my friends here are merely conditional, or days I have found myself in sketchy areas alone after dark; I have found friends and people I know care about me here, but the notion that everything I knew before five months ago is an ocean away is extremely isolating. But it also goes to show that life goes on! Time means virtually nothing, and understanding the earth still spins even when you’re on a different side of it is essential. Life goes on. I’m myself no matter where I am, no matter which shampoo I use, which language I’m speaking, or how many prongs my phone charger has, and no matter if I eat dinner at 6pm (like in the U.S.), or at 10pm (like here!). I think that’s important to come to terms with. Nothing is permanent—just like in life—if you don’t want it to be.

When I go back home, I’ll still have my senior year to complete, because I’m 17 right now and am doing exchange as my junior year. I miss school in the U.S., school in Barcelona is long, the classes are not classes I would have chosen for myself, and the majority of them are in Catalan. I wasn’t prepared for the fact that mostly everything in Barcelona is in Catalan- schools, menus, all of my government documents… but luckily both my first and second host families have spoken in Spanish with me and I do my tests and work at school in Spanish too. I think it’s cool to be in such a historically and culturally rich part of Spain, but sometimes it feels like in my efforts to learn Catalan, (no matter how minimal those efforts might be…), it’s hindering my Spanish, which is what I came here for.

The last few weeks have been hard for me, it’s been freezing, and our school doesn’t use heating, getting up when it’s dark and going to sleep late because dinner is in the evenings, as well as the stress of moving houses and pressures to make the most out of my last months is hard. At times I want to come home, and then I often start to feel guilty because I know that pretty soon here I’m going to be missing the things I’m doing and eating and seeing. Then there’s the feeling of obligation, obligation always to please people here, something my Rotary district back home told me always strive to do. The fact is, this is exhausting! There are days when I need to rest, I need to do something that only I want to do and want to do alone—but it’s hard to rationalize when you feel like pausing and breathing for a moment is wasting time. Saying no or not giving your 100% in school feels terrible, I struggle with the notion that I can’t please everyone all the time, exchange is uncomfortable. It is always a little rocky feeling. But it makes you a little more selfless. Although constantly doing things can be exhausting, I never regret saying yes.

All things aside, it’s crazy to think how normal this feels now. Up until a month or so ago, this didn’t feel like my life. It felt like exchange—I think finally it feels like life and not like just a thing I’m doing. I’m excited to see how that feeling changes in my last few months here. Before I close things off, here’s an excerpt I wrote from the end of my first month, in September:

I am not entirely certain whether my first month was breathtaking or difficult to endure. I had moments where everything leading up to this point was worth it; I got to feel sun on my face and the ocean at my feet, see towering structures by Gaudi and tour enormous and beautiful cathedrals, walk streets of colorful apartments wedged in between each other, drinking endless coffees and orange juice in little glass bottles seated in little cafes. These moments were my honeymoon phase. It’s in moments like these, where stillness ceases to exist, that I know I am living the fantastic expectation of exchange. Then, there are the harder moments. Falling sick on my first week here—stomach flu—and not being able to call anyone back home without crying. Sitting through the first few weeks of endless lectures, my tired mind unable to hold onto anything short of a few words. Days spent with friends not my own, feeling like a burden when occasionally it’s convenient for their words to be translated for my understanding. Catalan, and the first few days of its impossibility. These moments were, and are, my struggles. These are the moments we learn of briefly, all put under the same umbrella of “adaptation” to “a new culture”. I think as I adapt, these harder moments will be less in gravity to me, but I doubt less in quantity. Exchange is the easiest thing I have ever agreed to, yet the hardest thing I have ever done—but that’s not to say it won’t be one of the most amazing things I’ve ever taken on.

Looking back on this, I realize that my predictions were mostly true. Mostly—Catalan is hardly easier! Harder moments are not in the slightest less in quantity, but they don’t weigh me down as much anymore. I’ve started to say that every just tear-jerking experience I have, is “for the memories”, “for the experience”. That kind of mindset lets me laugh about how stupid upset I’ve been about things here, how hard things get. It has been completely and totally worth it. Not just for bragging rights. But for memories and new priorities and perspectives, for people I have met—Melody from Taiwan, Addy from Texas, Ivy from Oregon—lifelong relationships I think only something like exchange could have manifested. I’m beginning to understand the things that are important to me, the things I can’t live without and seeing the way other people live and their own priorities, such an unexplainably eye-opening experience which is all helping me become a more well-rounded person. I’m at my halfway mark, feeling pretty proud of myself and of my friends for getting this far. It’s rewarding, when I’m able to hold a conversation for an hour or so with my host mom in Spanish, or when I look at pictures over the last few months with people who have suddenly become so important to me; and how I don’t need google maps to get around because I’ve memorized the Barcelona metro stations. Not one day of this has been easy, but it was easy to choose and it’s easy to be grateful for.