Diana Ramirez
02/24/10
Myself as an Outsider
I am Mexican and when I finished high school, I decided to go to Europe and spend a couple of months in a little Village in the South of Spain, a beautiful medieval town called Bocairent in Valencia. I stood in a small house in the middle of the town with a Spanish friend. I was very surprised by the way people lived. They didn’t have electric heating, even though winters are very cold. They warm up their houses with coal’s ovens, they put a thick blanket on top of it in the middle of a room and everybody sit around the covered oven and put their feet underneath it. When I first came to one of our neighbors’ house I had no Idea what they were doing all gathered together under a huge blanket. I accepted to seat down, put my feet underneath the green blanket without knowing what to expect. When I felt the heat in my feet and then my legs, I couldn’t stop myself from grabbing the blanket and looking underneath to see where the heat was coming from. Everybody started laughing! They couldn’t believe that I didn’t know what was going on.
Another day, I went to the grocery store to buy meat and salad for my dinner. The owner, a little fat lady, looked at me in the eyes and told me that today was Monday and that I should know that they “kill” only on Wednesdays, so there was never any meat in town before Thursdays. I immediately apologize for my ignorance and asked to buy some salad. She seemed offended by my request, and said that only rabbits like to eat salad.
Of course they didn’t have, who would buy it? She said. I took some potatoes and eggs instead, and I made a “Spanish Tortilla” for dinner that night.
I know now how does it fill to be an outsider in a foreign country. Even though I spoke Spanish and Spain is considered to be Mexican’s cradle, I felt like a complete stranger in that beautiful medieval town.
