Feeling better and gypsies

I´m feeling better about the Ikea situation. I suppose I overreacted slightly last entry with all those caps and exclamation points. I was gchatting with my sister and I said "OMG I am so annoyed" and she said "Oh no what happened?? Did your new apartment situation fall through???" and then I felt diabolically foolish (I know I´m not using that word right but what of it) because I realized... ok... there could be many, many, many many many worse situations.

So now I feel better. And have a culturally significant and truly arresting issue to discuss: gypsies.

I had never even realized gypsies were real people (that sounds so ... stupid) until I visited Spain for the first time 2 years ago. It was Granada and gitanos are everywhere, but my professor taught us their culture in the classroom with a sort of reverence and respect, such that I never really realized their implications and complications when mixed with modern Spanish society. And I saw those implications and complications in a weird, physical way today.

I was running late to school and when I got here, my normal Tuesday professor had gone so I went with another professor, an especially charming and genial teacher who doesn´t bother memorizing students´names but makes them laugh a lot (give and take, right?). The class was especially rowdy... which means 40x more rowdy than what you´re thinking, fellow American middle class suburb high school graduates. Students up and down the aisle, opening and closing windows, shouting, winking, yelling "profe!!" and asking me questions I don´t really understand. (BY the way, quick interjection.. these students aren´t supposed to know I speak Spanish and the profesors tell them I don´t speak Spanish, but then the profesors speak to me in Spanish in front of them. Am I supposed to respond? I do, but my brain still punches itself a little when it happens). Ok anyway, the class is about 1/3 populated by gitanos, or gypsies, and I would have had no idea if the profe hadn´t told me and brought it up to them. They´re all super proud and vocal about it, which I thought was cool, but I was also trying to take in the conservative, blatantly sexist traditions these students still follow, and then the amount of eyeliner and tight clothing they were wearing.

Everyone keeps talking to me about gitanos like they are basically leeches on the city of Madrid. Gypsy girls marry between 14 and 16 and supposedly the government pays gypsy families to have their children attend school so that they aren´t on the street. But because girls marry so young and are often converted into housewives after that, modern school means nothing and these students are usually the most rowdy/unattentive/disruptive students in the school. It´s weird because I keep wanting to think "that´s racist!!" when people talk about gitanos like they´re rats infesting a city, because.. they are people with strong traditions and how can it be in our power to deem it right or wrong? But at the same time, it´s bizarre to see how these students act, and to know that their parents don´t emphasize education at all, and that they´ll probably have a baby at 17 and work at a stand on the street for the rest of their lives.

Oh, but the weird physical thing that happened was two girls got in a fight. They started pulling on each others´hair (gypsy girls don´t cut their hair, and apparently if your husband sees you misbehaving, he cuts your hair and it´s a big disgrace--or so told me 3 of the gypsy students). Anyway, that´s what started the whole thing and everyone was shouting and the disciplinary profe had to come it. It was all loco.

I´m sort of losing track about what point I was going to make. I may have already made it. Or I most likely don´t have one. It was just a big culture "woah" for me. Already the lack of discipline in a lot of the classrooms is crazy to me.. the students here are totally fearless. I can think of maybe 3 people in my high school that were even slightly close to the level of "I don´t give a f***" (my parents read this I don´t want to drop the f-bomb in front of them) as the students in some of these classes. A girl was sitting on the floor in the back corner of the class for half of yesterday´s period. Two others ran up to me and grabbed me on the shoulders to sing to me. Another put her face literally 1 inch away from the face of a profesor to talk to him and he looked not even phased. It´s not even a hesitation for them to talk back or fight back or get up and move around while a profesor´s talking. God, was I a great student!!!!