Potato chips, museum trips, linguistics

1. At home I eat potato chips, oh, maybe, once or twice a year. Usually because somebody else has bought them and brought them to a party that I am attending. In Spain I eat potato chips, oh, maybe, one or twice a WEEK. That's because here they are made with olive oil, and, ergo are very delicious. Also, I spend a lot of time waiting in the Beasain train station with a vending machine as my only companion. I like to think that the olive oil makes them healthier, too, but I have no idea if this is actually the case.

2. I went to the Guggenheim on Thursday with a few classes from my school. It was pretty amazing and I had that same feeling that I get whenever I go to museums, namely, "why don't I go to museums more often?" I wish I'd had more time to wander freely and to hang out with the amazing, massive, and amazingly massive Serra sculptures, but instead I had a guided tour of "Art in the USA: 300 Years of Innovation" conducted entirely in Basque. One of the teachers on the trip translated a lot of it into Spanish for me, but it was still a pretty strange experience: American art history through the prism of Spanish-Basque culture. Huh. It was funny to have this Spanish woman telling me things like "in the 1920s Jazz was becoming very important to American culture" or, even better "this is a picture of George Washington, the first president of America." What? Who? Really? I've never heard of him.

3. Generally, I tend to reject the Sapir=Whorf hypothesis (which at my level of understanding amounts to the belief that the language we speak shapes the way we think in pretty clear-cut and unbending ways) but I do have a tendency to import certain grammatical structures from English into Spanish. There are certain ways of saying things in English which are so intermingled with my sense of the logic of how things work that it is difficult to get rid of them. For example, the present progressive: common in English and appropriate in a variety of circumstances ("I am drinking tea," "I am teaching English") and rare in Spanish, generally being restricted to what is actually happening in this very moment ("I am drinking tea," but not "I am teaching English," rather "I teach English). And yet. I use the present progressive all the time in Spanish because to me it just....sounds right. I don't know that thinking in the present progressive really shapes my wider world-view that much, but still it is an English construction changing how I conceive of something. Then again, probably as I start thinking in Spanish more (presuming that this will indeed happen) the good old P.P. will leave me alone. I'll keep you posted Sapir and Whorf.