"What Do You Do All Day?" (by Dave)

“So, what do you do all day?” It’s a question that I’ve gotten from colleagues and students alike. Before 2004, BYU’s Madrid study abroad program was based in Madrid itself and BYU program directors, along with their TAs, typically taught a couple of classes, which were supplemented by classes taught by local faculty and CES instructors. Classes were then held at the Institute building on the Madrid temple complex. But since 2004, for reasons legal as well as practical, we have been affiliated with the Alcalingua program of the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. That means that local instructors take over the bulk of the instruction. Now I am not teaching any formal classes at all, although I am directing a required 2 credit class (based on excursions to Madrid and our longer excursions outside the city) and a directed study course called “Contemporary Spanish Culture.” But my classroom responsibilities are neglible. Hence, the question (which is invariably posed by colleagues who have never directed a study abroad program), “What do you do all day? It seems like a nice vacation.”

I haven’t often done a good job of answering this question, other than saying, “A little bit of this, and a little bit of that.” It’s certainly not a vacation, although it’s hard to imagine any other way that we could have flown our entire family over to Europe on a Spanish professor’s salary. We’ve got a great group of students, and they’ve turned out to be mature and motivated. But there’s no denying that responsibility for 26 students and one’s own family in a foreign country is always a stressful thing, especially when the program requires me to spend so much time doing a bit of this and bit of that. So, I thought for once I’d try to keep track of how my time is spent on a fairly typical day. Here goes.

6:15: Get up. Read local, national, and international news online. I’m following stories about the falling dollar pretty closely. We’ve paid our major program bills already; fortunately most of the money was sent over to Spain when the euro was in the 1.34-1.36 range. It seemed outrageous then, but now that the dollar has fallen to 1.40 against the euro (i.e., one euro costs $1.40), there’s some cause for concern.

7:15 – 8:15 am: Catch up on e-mails. These include an e-mail to my cousin Iñaki, who’ll be showing us around Gernika, and another friend (also named Iñaki—can you see the Basque theme here?), who was looking for some help translating some software documentation for Family Search for a conference talk he’s giving. I also sent out a couple of messages to specific program participants related to a variety of issues, a general message to all our students about our weekly “tertulias” or culture workshops, and a message to Malcolm Botto, a representative from the Study Abroad office who’ll be visiting the program next week. I’m still working on the details of Malcom’s itinerary.

8:15 – 9 am: Breakfast, shower, get ready for the day.

9 am: Go to the bank to withdraw funds for excursion to the Basque Country. We aren’t taking this trip for some ten days, but because of the way the program burns through funds on these trips, and because of daily withdrawal limits, it takes a fair amount of strategizing and planning in advance to have sufficient funds on hand for any group activities or trips. On top of that, getting cash advances in just the right combination of bills (for disbursement to students to take care of their meals and other traveling expenses) ends up being fairly complicated as well. Not a big deal, but it’s the sort of little thing that can end up taking some time to take care of.

9:30-10 am: More e-mails: to the students enrolled in Span 395R, to the Spanish dept chair, to the accountant in the Study Abroad office about a reimbursement, and to the director of the Museo Chillida-Leku that we will be visiting on October 6, sorting out the details of our visit.

10-11: Grading of student work for 395R.

11-11:30 Finalized details with Jorge Rodríguez Padrón regarding our next tertulia, on Picasso’s “Guernica.” We’ll be looking at the painting together and then adjourning to a café to discuss it with him. Phoned the Prado Museum to arrange for a group visit on October 11 at 5pm (we’ll be looking at some of El Greco’s work with Jorge).

11:30 -12:30 pm: Reviewed submissions for BYU Studies (I’m on the journal’s editorial board).

12:30 – 1:30 lunch (a tortilla and chorizo sandwich with campo real olives. Absolutely delicious. See Michelle's olive photos from a few weeks back)

1:30-2: painted pictures with Eva.

2-2:30: laundry and ironing; get ready for temple excursion

3-7: baptisms in the Madrid temple. A fantastic experience. About 18-20 students and I went to the temple to do work for many of my family’s ancestors from Spain and France. Things got a little bumpy when a stack of other names requiring ordinances were mixed in with the names we had brought, so we ended up being there much longer than we had initially expected. But it was a marvelous experience.

7 pm: quick phone call to check on a sick student: sounds like she's doing better but I'll check again in the morning.

8:15: arrive home

8:30- 9 pm: dinner

9 – 10 pm: more e-mails, including business concerning BYU’s International Cinema and a proposal I’ve been involved with to explore the possibility of BYU forming part of a Basque Studies consortium.

10 pm: write this blog entry.