Spanish Malady

You know how whenever you feel sick it doesn’t really matter how old you are, you still want your mommy to come and scratch your head and make you some sick food and place that beloved throw-up pot beside your perch on the couch? Well being under the weather in a foreign country doesn’t change anything. Now you just have to deal with a language barrier in a weakened mental condition while at the same time wishing you could just curl up on the couch and watch illness daytime classics (Over the years I’ve become a fan of weirdo TLC stories of strange people’s lives, game shows and the occasional talk show-except for Tyra makes me want to pull my hair out strand by strand and Oprah is kind of gaggy.) but you can’t understand anything going on in the telenovelas except that all the girls are either pregnant by one of three men, or dying.

This is not complaining about being here and being an infirm; rather it is documenting the peculiarities I have encountered in this condition. Blanca apparently has many years of practice taking care of ill foreigners (but most of the other girls took too much of a liking to the sangria to get them in that state, leave it to the Mormons to stick her with communicable flu-like symptoms). I would like to say that I have now officially drank my weight in the Spanish version of Gatorade that Blanca swears by, eaten carrot/rice soup puree as well as a plentiful supply of cooked apples and some weirdo fruit called quince and frustrating tried to watch every movie we have here (Dear Dell Company, You guys suck at creating computers that can play either the whole of one movie or even the beginning of others. Sincerely, Katie the Sicko).


Thank you Spanish mother for providing bland delights to please my disgruntled tummy (even if I have not eaten a real meal in days, you did say I was looking skinnier-needed after all those Rebuenas). And thank you pharmacy lady for teaching me that some words are the same in any language when it comes to matters of the stomach. And a final thanks to my lovely roommate Megan for resisting the urge to punch me in the face as you heard moans in the night and for helping me to sneak-eat contraband apples with peanut butter as well as teaching me interesting words for old classics (and looking on thesaurus.com for new ones). You people have combined to make my Spanish infirmity a little more homey and a lot more memorable. (But if you want to give me that head scratch when I get home Ma, no complaints here!)