Every day on my way out of the house, no matter what time of day it was, I passed either a man or a woman in a grey uniform shirt outside my host mother’s building. They stood by the cars parked along the side of the street, hands folded in front or behind them, monitoring everyone driving by with an almost inordinately vigilant gaze, like they might only have moments to react—to whatever it was that was coming for them down the street. My roommates and I never interacted with them. When we first started leaving the apartment at the beginning of the semester we would all smile in their direction, still a little too nervous with our levels of Spanish to say something—lest we accidentally start a conversation that we couldn’t handle—but we never even received a nod in return, so after a while, the smiles and nods stopped and all four of us simply integrated them into our daily walk as something to pass on the way to school or the rest of the city. It wasn’t that we were trying to be rude, or even thought that they were trying to be rude to us. We were in a foreign country and nearly everything had subtle differences to it. Assuming that the “street monitors” were upset with us—the American exchange students that would really only be there for a couple of months—was silly, and to be honest we were all too overwhelmed with the rest of Spain to even care if they were upset with us, for whatever reason that may be. Continue reading →