Beginnings are frightening: first day in an unknown country

by Antônio Mesquita Neto (Brazil)

A leap into the unknown Spain

After over 10 hours flying and 100 hours of anxiety, there I was: super excited getting off the airplane in Madrid, Spain. I went towards the check-out area to take my huge Harry-Potterish bag. When it finally came out in the carousel – and mine is always among the last or lost ones – I pulled it out with some difficulty due to its weight – while regretting my sedentary life – and continued the check-out process. I got on a moving walkway – I can’t help riding them – and on the end of it there was a woman wearing a uniform blocking the way. When I got close enough she greeted me in Spanish – by then I had already forgotten I was abroad, as I was focused on getting out of the airport. I greeted her back with my rusty not-practiced-in-ages Spanish. Then she asked for my passport, which I immediately handed out to her. She took a look at it and said some unintelligible sentence – was that still Spanish or had she changed into Greek? I smiled at her and as I didn’t get it I just tried taking my passport back from her hands. She dodged immediately while frowning at me, as if I was trying to do some suspicious illegal thing. She repeated the same sentence and for my surprise it wasn’t Greek, it was actually Spanish after all! She wanted to know where I was going to, to which I promptly replied: ‘Salamanca.’ After noticing I had a student visa, she let me pass. The next boss in the check-out game was La Policía Nacional (National Police) – a public position for which being good-looking was a requirement. I got to a cabin where to two officers were chatting while doing the interviews. I approached the cabin and said ‘¡Hola!’. As my Spanish was very much unpracticed and I didn’t feel confident, even such a simple greeting came out too softly and therefore inaudible. After a minute standing there, one of the officers noticed me and said ¡Hola! quite slowly and strongly, like when you talk to someone and don’t expect to be understood. I replied both his greeting and some questions. As he interviewed me, he would report every single answer to his colleague – for having a chatting subject, not because it was part of the procedure! I could clearly listen to them, but they didn’t really seem to care. At some point he told his colleague with some surprise: ‘This one is going to study Philosophy in Salamanca!’. After over three hours in a train, I got to Salamanca, the city in which I was going to spend the next five months. Shortly after arriving, I went to the nearest market, looking for something ready and easy to eat, as I was tired and starving. I grabbed a bag of chips and went towards the counter. ‘It’s €1,20’, said the woman behind the counter. I gave her the money and waited for a plastic bag, for in Brazil they would always give you one. As she didn’t offer me one and I didn’t know how to say ‘plastic bag’ in Spanish, I just went home holding the bag of chips, worried that the police would think I had stolen it – what a mindset, huh! Later I found out that in Spain plastic bags (which I properly learned to call ‘bolsa’) couldn’t be given to people for free by law, in order to promote the sustainable use of bags. Therefore, they wouldn’t even offer them to clients who could clearly carry their items without a bag. I ended up very fond of that law and still avoid getting too many plastic bags in the market. In one of my last days in Spain, watching a classical music concert, a young boy, who was getting a habilitation for playing the trumpet, started his speech by saying ‘beginnings are frightening, endings are sad, what matters is the way in between them…’. Oh, ‘frightening’ was a very good description of my first day, although I had loved it! And soon enough I would find out that ‘sad’ was also a very good description of my last one, as foreseen by the oracle youngster.