Mi Casa Segundario

My house here is a typical house in Granada, which means that it's completely different than the typical house in America. It's smaller, probably more an apartment than a house, tucked between a couple of colorful stores, and the architects had different priorities in mind when designing the house.

The living room is the largest part of the house. It's where my family spends most of their time here. It has seating and a TV, typical in all American houses but instead of one dining room table, it has two. One for important guests and another for more familiar guests. There are quite a few other differences. The dog is welcome on the couch during meals and the table is set for every meal. Everyone sits down for meals as long as everyone is in the house. There's a cabinet full of pictures of my host mothers two children and there are paintings that the youngest daughter painted hung up on the wall.

While the living room is the largest and most important room, the bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchen are much smaller than I'm used to. The kitchen only has room for one person comfortably at a time, but we've had the entire family stuffed in there at one point. My host mothers room is fairly large, but mine and the daughters are pretty small. But it's not typical to spend much time in the bedroom so more space isn't really necessary. One of the most interesting things I've noticed here regarding houses is that it's not uncommon to have two bathrooms for one family. The showers in the bathrooms are barely large enough for me, a 5'2 female. I can only imagine how some of the taller people fare.

My family is quite sweet. I have my host mother Conchi and her two daughters Majo and Imma. Conchi is a nanny and works mostly during the mornings. Both of daughters are older than me, but Majo still lives at home and goes to school. Imma works as a English and French translator. All of us work a lot, so we typically like rest in the house and charlar. A typical day with my family includes meals and watching a show or movie on the tele together. They like to teach me more about Spain and are curious about the U.S.  Although they don't practice, they take me to church on Sunday's and teach me about religion in Spain.

Of the three members of my new family, I spend the most with either my host mother or Majo since they live in the house. Majo likes to take turns teaching each other about the differences in our life's. She's personally taken the role of teacher for me. My host mother and I have most of our conversations in the living room with the noise of the television in the background. I like to tell her about my different experiences here and my life back home. Of the three, she has the best sense of humor and I find myself laughing more with her throughout my day, in spite of the language barrier. Imma is a sweetheart and I love when she comes for lunch. She has a great laugh and she doesn´t mind answering my endless stream of questions, in English :)