Spain... feelings

So I finally posted a super-long post on my trip to Spain, complete with about a million pictures. It's postdated since I've been working on it for awhile now, so be sure to go down the page and check it out.

And ten days in Spain was such a blessing for me, and exactly when I needed it. Spain does good things to me. It makes me feel confident and happy. I was talking with someone the other day about how I honestly believe that people are better people in their second language. When I'm speaking Spanish, I'm more thoughtful, more honest, more straightforward. I use more elegant words and phrases. I try to speak beautifully. Because even if I am fluent, it's still not my native tongue. It still takes just that little bit more effort. And I think that effort makes me a better person. English can be too easy for me to be crass, unkind, short. In Hungarian I am still at a low level and just sort of sound like an idiot. I think I was missing that part of me, that beautiful and delicate me that I am when I speak Spanish.

There were a few times wandering the streets of Madrid, and especially of Salamanca, that it hit me that I lived in Spain four years ago. Or, to think of it another way... high school ago. College ago. Four years is still a significant amount of time for me (and I suppose that if I continue teaching in Hungary, in four-year cycles of students, that it will continue to be). Spain made me who I am. And I became who I am only four short years ago. Or four long, incredibly full-of-growth years ago, depending upon how I feel on a particular day. Because it feels like it was yesterday, and it feels like it was my whole life ago.

I really like who I am. I wish I could be a bit kinder, and I especially wish that I was a bit better at reaching out to people... I don't call people enough, message them enough. But beyond that, I like who I am. And I really wonder who I would have become if I hadn't gone to Spain and started this crazy adventure.

Popping into the bars and hangouts of my time in Spain also made me realize that I am no longer a teenager. Which is something that I have realized before (I can't party quite as hard as I used to, for one... at least without feeling serious consequences the next day!) but it really set in there. I have friends with children, I am starting to recognize my own need for sleep, I really enjoy cooking a large number of meals on Sundays so that I have dinner ready on the busy weekdays. I check the weather forecast the night before, regularly mop my kitchen for the first time ever, my dreams now include buying a little flat and a dog and working a job that I love instead of only the single word: travel (though of course travel continues to factor in rather heavily). I'm starting to demand respect in exchange for the respect I give.

I feel like I'm an adult. A woman. I noticed in the past few weeks, only, that I have almost always stopped referring to myself as a girl. And while the word woman still feels rather strange on my lips, I know it won't for long. And woman is a label I am very happy to wear.