Lost In Translation

I’ve been back on the ‘figuring out the foreign language’ lark at work this last week....this time it’s a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese, and the documents have actually been translated...well sort, but we still have to trawl through thousands of pages and decipher some of the oddities of the translation process. Sadly, the documents are more concerned with the legal aspects of running clinical trials, so it’s just a shed load of ethical jargon...pretty mind numbing stuff and almost certainly no use to me on my travels.

My grasp of Spanish is very poor...it should actually be a bit better considering I lived in Barcelona for 3 months, a decade ago. My PhD dissertation was in collaboration with the University of Barcelona's School of Pharmacy, who very generously sponsored me to go over and spend time in their labs, using their high tech equipment to figure out the chemical structures of the compounds I was extracting from herbal medicines. Your eyes are most probably glazing over by now, so enough already of the Geek Speak. Suffice to say it was a golden opportunity, academically, and the sole reason I managed to finish and publish my doctorate in less than 4 years. I was thrilled by the chance to travel overseas...I’d been to the UK with my family as a child, but mainland Europe was an unknown entity.

It was also one the hardest times of my life - the longest time I had ever spent away from B, and I felt very isolated in a city where few people spoke my mother tongue. I stayed in a students’ residential hall, in the section reserved for visiting post grad students and guest lecturers. Other guests came and went daily....it was just me there for the longish run. I had a reasonably nice room with en suite bathroom and there was a communal lounge and kitchenette at the end of the corridor. So I was comfortable, just incredibly lonely. During the week, I worked really long hours, never leaving the lab much before 9 every night. The other students (mainly South Americans) were all very friendly....we’d all break for coffee around 5 in the evening and get together in the student cafe for a bit of a gossip. They all spoke fairly good English and wanted to talk to me to practise as much as possible, which was great... it just meant I didn’t learn much Spanish!

But when the weekends came round, I was pretty much on my own and that’s when I felt the isolation. I would spend all my free time exploring Barcelona...I grew to love the city and got to know it very well. As I was on a really tight budget, I tried to walk everywhere, only using the Metro when I was venturing really far from my res. All this exercise meant I lost a load of weight (two bouts of a particularly nasty stomach bug also helped) and I felt very fit by the end of the 3 months. I had a few close shaves when I wandered into some dodgy neighbourhoods, and once I was followed for over an hour by an even dodgier looking man, but on the whole I felt safe and just seemed to blend in with the locals....to the extent that tourists were always coming up to me and asking me if I spoke English and if I knew the way to the train station. Most days I was generous and helped them out; once or twice I pretended “No entiendo” (one of the few Spanish phrases I did pick up) shaking my head tragically.

Parc Guell

One day, I helped a lady of Chinese descent find her way to the Placa Catalunya. She turned to me and said “You speak good Engrish...where you from?” I’d given up telling people I was originally from Zimbabwe (this just drew blank faces), so I answered “South Africa”, as it is the one African country most people seem to know and technically, I was representing my South African university, my home for 9 years. To my astonishment, the lost tourist’s jaw dropped and she blurted out “South Africa? But you can’t be.....you white!” How do you respond to that? Do you query “If there are no white people in South Africa, how did apartheid work then and why did Nelson Mandela have to walk a long road to freedom?”. Tempted as I was to reply: “Well you see, I was black when I left but as soon as landed in Europe, I turned as white as snow”, I bit my tongue. Some people are just best left alone to mull over their own ignorance.

Sagrada Familia

Years later, after we’d moved to the UK, I returned to Barcelona with B for a long weekend to celebrate our sixth wedding anniversary. I’d been itching to show him the city I’d explored that lonely Spring back in 1999. Isn’t it sad when you build up a place to be so wonderful....and it fails to deliver? Don’t get me wrong, we had a great weekend... but to me, Barcelona had changed. It had become far more tourist-orientated, scarily expensive and it all felt a bit tired. It probably didn’t help that almost all the city’s landmarks (those architectural wonders I’d raved about) were covered in scaffolding for repairs (Gaudi’s unfinished Sagrada Familia excluded....we expected to find scaffolding there!), so she wasn’t looking her best. Maybe we picked the wrong time of year (mid December is freezing cold!) or maybe I’d become jaded from all the travelling we’d done in the interim, but somehow the magic just wasn’t there for me anymore.

The one thing that hadn’t changed though....the delicious hot chocolate! Spanish hot chocolate is the best in the world....gooey, thick, creamy and really, really chocolatey.....

And amazingly, the Spanish Chocolate company is now marketing their gorgeous product in the UK. I picked up a tin last week in Tesco....and it’s the real stuff! Chocolate heaven....and not really  all that indulgent at a surprisingly low 91 calories a cup...yummmeeee!