The most difficult and expensive part of arranging this entire trip was getting Duke here. Today I went to the Barcelona Airport. It took me 8 HOURS to take him home and I missed my first day of class. The paperwork and the language barrier were not as problematic as I thought. The most difficult part was the intense lack of organization. My feet are sore from walking back and forth between 5 different organizations that absolutely do not communicate. I wanted to take over everything and actually use my MPA degree on that madness. An extreme silo situation and a Spanish perception of time - I never thought I would crave a good ol' American bureaucracy that operates on hierarchy and efficiency. Everyone I interacted with was sweet and tried their best to help me, but they didn't use email or telephones and when I the animal importation guy pecking at the keyboard with his pointer fingers, I thought I would squirt blood out of my eyes. Seriously.
Of course, this really is just culture shock...or maybe it's Blackberry withdrawal. After I finished fuming about the situation, I got to thinking. Barcelona has the best transportation infrastructure I've experienced. There is no schedule because it runs what seems like every 2 minutes. The stations are all over the city and they are wheelchair accessible. I can get across town in about 15 minutes or so. Everything is in English, Spanish, and Catalan. There are about 5 different ways to get to the airport by mass transit. There is no bad traffic despite being a huge metropolis with tons of pedestrians that walk wherever whenever because they have a really effective one-way street system with lots of roundabouts.
I had to check myself and think about what exactly each culture prioritizes in terms of efficient design. There are days when I've idled in my car on I-5 for a couple hours and only passed a few exits. I've also cried out of frustration when trying to navigate the streets of Seattle. Oh yeah, there's also The 91 (you so-cal people know what I'm talking about). It seems so obvious now that I should have recognized this as a situation where different cultures value different things instead of jumping into a snotty cultural critique.
I always thought I was more culturally aware and flexible than the average American, so I'm going to be gentle on my ego and call this a "learning experience". Apparently, I need to work on my chillax skills.
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