Homestay

As some of you already know, I am staying with a Spanish family in their home during my time here in Valencia, so I wanted to share a little about them. When I arrived there were four people living in the house, the father Jesus, the mother Julieta, the daughter Ainoa, and the grandmother (I don´t know her name because she is always called Grandma), but our second day here Ainoa and Grandma left for northern Spain for the rest of the summer to spend time with other members of the family. The family is originally from Asturias but moved to Valencia about 9 years ago. Before I got here I was informed that Jesus was a chef and I was very excited because I LOVE to eat, but unfortunately Jesus has only cooked for us once (Spanish tortilla that was delicious). I am under the impression that Jesus is sick but I can´t really understand exactly what is wrong with him. He is only in his mid 50´s but he uses a walker to get around and I saw him with tubes that looked likes IVs in his stomach. Jesus doesn´t work right now and sits in the bed most of the day watching day so unfortunately I don´t get to interact with him very much.

However, I do interact with Julieta all the time and she is a very nice woman who does all of the cooking, cleaning, etc. Sometimes she speaks very fast and is difficult to understand but I have already been able to understand her a lot better as my first week here has gone on. Even though she slurs a lot of sentences and phrases together, I normally am able to get the gist of what is going but not always the details (like the night she asked me and my roommate to join her for drinks at a restaurant below our building and we both almost left to go somewhere else). So far we have eaten traditional Spanish meals (pastries for breakfast, baguettes for lunch, Spanish tortillas) and then there have been some very American meals (hamburger steak and french fries, spaghetti, pasta salad, pork chops). So far I have tried everything that has been put in front of me and I liked most of it except for some type of fruit that was horrible and a Calamari sandwich I had in Madrid.

The family lives in a typical Spanish ¨apartment¨ which is more or less a flat. The apartment, on the third floor of a high rise building, has three bedrooms, a connected kitchen and den, two bathrooms, a dining room that was turned into the parent´s bedroom, and a terrace that looks out over the plaza behind the building. As you can probably tell a living room isn´t really included. It is very uncommon to invite friends and family over to your home in Spain because everything is done out in the open, at restaurants, pubs, plazas, etc. So there isn´t really much of a common room for the entire family and normally all that is done in the home is eating, sleeping, and bathing. Its definitely different but its not a problem for me because I can do about everything I need on the beach! That doesn´t include using the Internet but I do that normally around the time that I have class anyway. The apartment does not have air conditioning but that isn´t too much of an issue because there is almost always a breeze that helps to cool things off.

I know I will have more to share about my family as my stay here continues but this is a good start.