Living is learning

I’m writing this as I sit in my political science class…aula 5.1.02 en el campus Getafe de Universidad Carlos III…while more than 50 students and a very animated professor rip into my home country. In so few and so many Spanish words, they dismantle a system that I have spent the last few years of higher education attempting to study, memorize, understand. And here, halfway across the world, I learn more. It’s one thing to read lines in a textbook, to select the perfect answers in perfectly round bubbles on a white and blue sheet of perfectly rectangular paper. It’s another thing to be stranded in a political debate in which I can learn more in 5 minutes than in 5 years, to see how a foreign policy decision made by tight-faced American men is not just a newspaper title but can somehow, after twisting and weaving and squirming its way through all the murky liaisons of politics, tangibly affect the young Spanish girl with rose-colored glasses sitting next to me.