Holidays

I'm back in Spanish classes, and the demographic this time around is about a third Korean, a third Japanese, and a third "Estadounidense". The teachers face an interesting challenge in translating vocab words because there's no common language besides Spanish, so they draw pictures and jump around the room trying to act things out. I just laugh the whole time.

In the afternoon conversation class, our teacher wanted to know about holidays special to our home countries. The Koreans definately won for quantity. They had a day for little girls, little boys, teachers, grandparents... They even split Valentine's Day into two parts: the men give gifts on February 14th, and the women give gifts on March 14th. The Japanese won for "most special". They were saying something about a New Year's tradition where families prepare a special food that keeps for a while, so mom doesn't have to cook so much in the first week of January. Isn't that sweet? They also get an honorable mention for including "Earth Day" in their list of important holidays. Team USA, my team, struggled to produce the variety and nuance of our competitors. On New Year's Eve we get drunk. On St. Patricks Day we wear something green and get drunk. And I tried to explain Groundhog's Day in my broken Spanish -a total disaster.

As the discussion progressed to summer, things got a little tense. The Japanese brought up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which made me feel guilty/sad, and then the planets aligned on the date August 15th. That's when the Japanese commemorate the end of WWII in a somber day of reflection, the Koreans celebrate their independence from Japan, and we won the whole shebang (V-J Day). By the time December came around, and class was running overtime, I decided against mentioning Pearl Harbor. We had already been through so much.

-PJ