Awkward beginnings and broken Spanish make Margaret a dull girl.

So here's the thing, y'all.

When you're getting ready to go gallivanting off to study in foreign lands, and you're constantly followed by a chorus of every single human you know telling you how lucky you are and how much fun you're about to have, nobody mentions that there is necessarily going to be a period of serious adjustment.

Nobody warned me that I wasn't going to instantly have more-fun-than-anyone-ever-has-ever-in-history. Even if someone had, I probably wouldn't have believed them. LIVING in SPAIN? How could it be anything other than glamorous and exciting and nonstop fantastic? There'd have to be something wrong with anyone who didn't instantly click!

Well.

Contrary to my every expectation, I spent a lot of the first couple weeks feeling bewildered and emotionally exhausted and, honestly, apathetic. It didn't make any sense to me. To borrow my sister's favorite self-description, I'm an "easily amused and overly excited" kinda gal. Why wasn't I interested? Or motivated? Or at the very least, happy?

Maybe it had something do with the Things I Didn't Read in that stupid dumb pamphlet on culture shock I was given. Maybe it didn't. Whatever. But for no specific (or at least identifiable) reason, my first two weeks here were actually kinda rough, and I spent a lot of the time--though not all of it! don't get me wrong--feeling pretty damn bummed. I'm sure there were a lot of factors at work, not least of all my complete rookie status in this whole international deal.

I knew I was inexperienced, but it took getting dropped in the middle of ALL-NEW SENSORY OVERLOAD OF UNFAMILIARITY for me to realize just how sheltered I'd been. Until only a couple weeks ago, I had never been in a situation where someone expected me to know a language other than English. (This realization hit me in the Copenhagen airport, when not one, not two, but three Scandinavian flight attendants made indecipherable attempts to engage me in conversation, only to receive the response ''Guhhh... English?'' Guess my Danish grandma's genes were doing some false advertising.) So I go from being a capable communicator with a huge lexicon of language and cultural capital with which to relate to people, to being a stuttery and nervous girl clumsily navigating something entirely unfamiliar.

Which, if you'll excuse the language, really fucking sucks.

And as much as I wanted, hypothetically, to completely go to town blogging every little word/detail/image of my experience, I couldn't hack it. I'm really not the fake-it-til-you-make-it type. As anyone who knows me even a little bit could say, I have zero skills in the Hiding How I Feel department. I wanted to wait til I felt better-- cause I knew I would, even when things were hardest.

And now I do. I am lucky enough to be able to say that I turned that ship around: I now feel all the way like myself again, silliness and scatteredness and enthusiasm and all. It feels damn fantastic.

(Also, big grateful hugs to the people who helped keep me happy through the worst of it. You know who you are, and you made a world of difference.)

So, here I am: back in action as your resident spanojournalist. Or something. I'm living and eating and sleeping SPAIN, and I have a lot lot lot to talk about.

I'm happy (finally). I'm ready (mostly). And I'm going to do my best to write it all down.

Granadablog, take two: launched.