Week Two: Life With and As a Local

A day in the life of an American student with a Valencian host family and other things I learned along the way

The majority of my time spent in Valencia was at my host family’s apartment and I have some of the fondest memories there. As I briefly mentioned earlier, my host parents were an older married couple who were grandparents with grandkids that would often visit. I also had a roommate who was the same year as me at our university and had already been there for a month already for the first summer session. 

When I first walked into the apartment, I was immediately captivated with how beautiful it was. There were art on the walls and tables, floor-to-ceiling stuffed bookshelves, and smalls spaces used so well that I wondered why houses even exist.

A typical day for me: Wake up at around 9am and take a shower. Our host mom will ask me if I want coffee, to which I always say yes. After eating a more-American breakfast than I usually feed myself of cereal, lactose-free milk, coffee, and the occasional strawberry Greek yogurt, I’ll do homework in the sun-soaked and heat-soaked living room with a mechanical fan pointed directly at me. After a couple hours of doing homework and studying, I’ll go to a landmark or museum that is usually an impulse plan on whatever I’m feeling that day. Usually I’ll try to come home for comida (lunch; the word “almuerzo” is not used in Spain) with with my host family around 2pm, although it was usually just me and my roommate eating together occasionally joined by grandchildren. Then, I’d catch the 79 bus to get to my 3pm class. The classes that I took during this program were two 3-credit Spanish language and grammar classes with four consecutive hours of work which (most days) were not as bad as it sounds. After class, my group of friends in the class and I would find a restaurant or bar that had an open kitchen for drinks and tapas (our go-to is patatas braves). Then, I would leave to have dinner with my host family at around 9pm which was always an enjoyable, slowly paced time of eating food and fruit, watching TV, and talking about whatever was on our minds. Afterwards I would retire to my room where I would attempt to do homework but it was always too hot and dark in my room for me to be motivated to do anything besides lay in the heat. 

A lot of the differences in the way that the household was run differently than what I was used to stood out to me and I embraced them fully. Here are a list of the things that I found the most interesting (and cross-referenced with my other friends in other households around Valencia as well as other resources from personal research and given to me by my university): 

1. There is a strongly-rooted maternal dominance of the household. For all of the host families for the students in the program, the mother was the main point of contact, cooking, chores, and whatever else we needed. For my host family in particular, my host dad never ate comida with us although he would be home in time for dinner. My host mom was there for everything that I needed throughout the weeks and even when my roommate and I left their apartment for the last time, she was the one to wake up with us at 6am to make me coffee and hug us goodbye while our host dad got up just as we were leaving just to give a little wave and “adíos”.  
2. Energy in Spain is extremely expensive, so certain luxuries such as leaving lights on, long showers, and even AC are not common. Although the latter was the hardest for me to get used to (and I don’t think that I ever really got used to it), one thing that I loved was that the windows were always open. Always. I remember one day during the first week that I was in Valencia and saw a cloud of June bugs in the living room and freaked out. However, by the evening they were gone and never really came back. Open windows also meant hearing most everything that happened outside which was something that I found so charming: I soundhounded a reggae song that I listened to and liked while I was in the bathroom, the most beautiful accordion music played through the streets at night while I was taking in the nighttime, and I was amused by the American music that neighbors blasted. 
3. Similar to the small usage of energy in Spain, washing machines are very small and dryers are nonexistent in households. To dry clothes (along with the vein of open windows), lines were placed outside of windows to air dry. The functioning of them were quite genius with sort of a pulley-system so you could rotate the lines and retrieve clothing while standing in the same place. One day, my roommate asked my host mom what happens if clothes fall. Her answer: “fishing.” She then informed also informed my roommate that she has had to do that for some of her clothes before. 
4. A small thing that I still find fascinating: Refrigeration is actually quite an American concept which I had always taken for granted, but the refrigerator in my host family’s house was always quite bare and after dinner the leftover food would either sit out for a long while or just be tossed. It was more extreme in some of my other friends’ homes: one told me that her host family would leave dinner out on the table and then come back to eat what was left for breakfast. 
5. Baguettes were always on the table of our dining table and were used to be eaten with basically anything: sauce, soup, tortilla (see my post on food), paella, even pasta. An important thing about the bread is that it is viewed more as a utensil so while you were eating it, it was to be placed on the table and not on the plate. 

There were a lot of aspects of my host family’s home specifically that I loved to observe. Dinner conversations were expected and being quiet wasn’t really an option (but would be smoothed over by explaining that I was tired and having silences filled by the TV in the dining area that was playing from sunrise to sunset). 

After a conversation with my host mom about her family, I learned that big families were the norm for her generation (she has eight other siblings), but nowadays it is typical for families to have only two to three kids. Between my host parents’ combined eight grandchildren who visited often, it was fun for me to get to interact with Spanish children ranging from a mature 14-year old, to an enthusiastic 7ish-year old who demonstrated his English skills during our last week, and an endlessly-energetic 3-year old who I have cleaned up broken glass after, attempted to take a knife away from, and been absolutely enchanted by how adorable he was. 

Most of what where I observed and learned Spanish culture as well as asked about and practiced Spanish language happened with my host family. My first and fondest memories of Valencia will always be in that spacious third floor apartment near the heart of the city. 

Cultural TL;DR: My daily schedule balanced experiencing home life, landmarks of the city, and classes. There are a lot of differences in lifestyles in Spanish and American home life (although small and often-times varied).