Paso a paso

Still functioning with the USB-stick Internet and it’s painful ;/

Today I had the Erasmus orientation day and well… For the first time here, I felt really alone. All the Erasmus people were in their own groups, usually depending on their nation, and they weren’t very inviting. It didn’t touch me much, as throughout the years I’ve got used to loneliness, to observing instead of participating, but it would be nice to have someone to talk to, preferably in Polish. What also hit me was the fact that, when I was trying to talk to someone, they responded in English or Spanish and then went on to talk in their own native language as if I didn’t exist.

Anyway, the orientation day resulted in me having to write a few e-mails after which it turned out that they, at the University of Murcia, don’t know whether I can participate in Master degree courses here. So where the fuck can I? And who is supposed to know that? Damn their fucked up organization.

Speaking about their organization. Imagine living a week without a fridge with the climate of 29 degrees each day. Impossible? I thought so too but then it turned out that it wasn’t all that bad and that now I understand people who don’t have a fridge. They simply buy less and plan one day ahead instead of storing everything for the whole week and then throwing half of it away. But telling people that a fridge is an unnecessary extravagance is not my purpose. My purpose is to show the Spanish way of solving such a problem which could be counted as existential.

In the case above, in Poland, in a middle-class family, when a fridge breaks down, one goes to a shop and buys a new one paying either the whole sum or buying it on the instalment plan. No such thing here, or maybe no such thing with Ana. It took her a week to find a second-hand fridge, or more precisely, it took her 2 days to find one. The rest five days she was thinking how to get rid of the kaput one (by the way, she damaged it by trying to defrost the freezer with a knife!) and how to bring the new one in. After all this thinking we finally took it downstairs by ourselves (I never thought I could muster so much strength as to take a fridge down from the second floor with very narrow staircases with only one more person) and in the evening some bunch of guys brought the functioning one. Normally, one would now connect it, clean it and then put the things that had yet to go off inside. Surprise, surprise! Here it was put off until 3 p.m. the next day. Again, if I hadn’t done it, Ana wouldn’t have done it either, because c’mon, after 8 hours of work they are dead tired here.

This is the way it all functions, step by step (with the steps being very, very small) and I don’t have to mention that every step is cherished like some great accomplishment. I don’t and I won’t understand it. I like my things finished once I begin something.