We flew in Friday evening and were met at the airport by one of my favorite people in the whole world who had both graciously offered to pick us up but who also let us crash on her couch bed for 2 nights.  AMAZING.  We decided pretty early on that we didn’t want to build too much rigidity into our schedules for the weekend and we mostly just wanted to chill.

Saturday after a delicious breakfast of homemade blueberry pancakes we bundled up and headed into Bucktown/Wicker Park to window shop and to wander for a few hours.  I had been searching for a vintage-looking large chain for an antique pendant I bought back at Christmastime and after going into pretty much every boutique on Damen between Webster and Willow (which is A LOT of boutiques), I found the perfect chain!  The owner of the boutique was working and I got to practice my Spanish a little as she is from Venezuela.  Hooray!

Later that afternoon we met up with another of my favorite people at a tea shop in the neighborhood for high tea.  Yep.  High tea.  It was kind of expensive, but so ridiculously fun that it was totally worth it.  The food was tasty, the tea was phenomenal, and the company was perfection.  Want to see some pictures?  OF COURSE YOU DO!

Scones!

These babies were absolutely dreamy

Tiny sandwiches and pastries

Who doesn't love tiny food?

Rotating tiny-food stand

I've already bought one to take to Juarez...

The proper tea-drinking position

Also: look how cute my friend's dress is...she's so fabulous

After utterly gorging ourselves on pastries, tiny sandwiches, and tea (SO. MUCH. TEA.) we headed out to the lake to walk around a bit.  It was freezing and super windy but the lake was so pretty and I totally could have stayed out there for hours just watching the water.  Have I mentioned that Chicago is my favorite city in all of the U.S.?  Obviously I haven’t been to every city, but I’ve been to many of them, including most of the large cities on both the East and West coasts and Chicago is hands down the one I love the most.  I love the architecture, I love the history, I love the river and the lake, I love the giant buildings interspersed with tiny parks, I love the L, I love the museums, I love the food, and I really love the people.  People in Chicago are generally just nice.  They’re fast walkers and they walk with purpose, like New Yorkers, but they’re more polite and friendly, like Los Angelites (I totally made that name up).

Anyway, after visiting the lake we went to a coffee shop in Lincoln Park to warm up for a bit.  Then we wandered around the neighborhood a bit, got a fairly graphic view of a woman’s lady business*, and got a drink.  Later, a bunch of our grad school friends met us at Cafe Ba Ba Re Ba for tapas and sangria.  I didn’t take a single picture but I wish I had…so much good food and so much good fun.  We have such smart, interesting friends.  Seriously.  In the group we had:

• A successful journalist turned International Relations specialist turned blogger (check out her blog, Wanderplex, in my sidebar!)
• A corporate big wig for a major accessories store in the U.S.
• A Safety Engineer who travels the world giving conferences on the importance of workplace safety
• A Japanese enthusiast/scholar working on her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (she speaks Mandarin AND Japanese!)
• A former JET program member, who has worked for a bunch of super cool consulting firms and who wrote one of the best theses from my graduating class.

I seriously love my friends.  They are awesome.

Sunday we got up and went to brunch at another of my favorite spots in Chicago, Mindy’s Hot Chocolate.  After gorging ourselves on Mexican hot cocoa and homemade donuts with raspberry coulis, we headed to Millennium Park to visit the Bean and to check out the new pedestrian bridge between the park and the Art Institute.  After a lovely, if cold, walk around the park, we hopped back into the car and headed down to Pilsen to check out the National Museum of Mexican Art.  Before this trip, I didn’t even know this place existed but it was truly fantastic.  It’s not a huge museum, just 4 exhibits right now, but all of them were really well curated and incredibly interesting.  Plus, they were entirely bilingual so I got to use my Spanish as I read all the placards!  That definitely made me feel good about my skills because I read the Spanish text almost as fast as my husband read the English text.  Maybe I really do know Spanish?

Post museum, my friend dropped us off at the Hotel Palomar in the Streeterville/River North neighborhood.  I have always wanted to stay there and this was the perfect excuse.  Plus, the restaurant there is INCREDIBLE.  Seriously.  Everything about it is awesome.  The ambiance, the bar, the bartenders, the wine list…and as awesome as all of those things are, they don’t even come close to the awesomeness of the food.  The menu is designed so that you can either order full portions of things and eat them like a traditional meal or you can order half orders and share them, tapas style.  Obviously, we chose to share so that we could try as many things as possible.  We had pumpkin gnocchi that was to die for.  Chicken and waffles straight from my dreams.  Fried cheese curds that were both interesting and delicious.  Shrimp and grits with hot sauce and crispy sage.  Pork belly flat bread.  Gingerbread cake with a mini gingerbeer float.  Salted caramel ice cream with chocolate souffle cake.  I could have spent the entire night there and I am already counting down until our next visit so I can go there again.

Monday we checked out of the hotel and then headed down to Hyde Park, our old stomping grounds.  After a quick stop to pick up coffee and ham and swiss croissants, we met up with my old boss at one of the museums on campus and caught up with her for a few hours.  It was super fun to be back in the museum and it really made me miss working there.  After a few hours of catching up, we jointly gave a sort of impromptu talk to a group of graduate students about our post-grad school career trajectories and our current work.  It was pretty weird to be on the speaking end of that conversation and to have students asking us for advice.  I can’t believe how far we’ve come in the year and a half since we finished grad school.

After our Q & A session, we headed to the airport to head home.  Whew.  It was a whirlwind trip but we had SUCH a good time and it was exactly what I needed to decompress from what has been a super stressful few months.

*Note to Lincoln Park citizens: If you live in one of those modern houses with the full glass windows running 2 stories, it’s probably not a good idea to leave the curtains open and to sit, wrapped only in a bath towel at the top of the staircase with your knees bent and your ladybits facing the street…just a friendly recommendation. 

HOLYFREAKINGCRAPIPASSEDSPANISH!*

*I should quickly note here that I feel like now that I’ve finished Spanish I can finally start learning Spanish.  Anyone who has taken an FSI language class can probably attest to this post-language-course feeling of being vaguely prepared to work in a foreign language but not at all prepared to live in another country and carry out daily tasks.

Today I picked up our shiny, new, black diplomatic passports.  As I was looking over the information and checking for errors it hit me in a big way that I am really going to do this thing.  This move-to-a-new-country-every-two-years-thing.  Immediately, my first thought was OHMYGODWHATHAVEIDONE?!? But after I took some deep breaths, I remembered why I’m doing this and why it’s important: because I believe in this country.  Because I believe in public service.  Because I believe that the long term goals of our country are more important than my desire for comfort.  Because no matter what douchy politicians (and even some of my own “friends”) say about State Department employees, I know that what we do is vital to our country’s prosperity and to its security.

I’ve been writing this blog for about 6 months now and I still haven’t written about why I chose to call it “Cupcake Diplomacy.”  First of all, anyone who knows me knows that baking is my (not so) secret joy.  But more than that, I have personally experienced the power of food as a tool for cultural exchange and, yes, diplomacy.  And while I regularly joke about using cupcakes to create world peace, I’m only kind of kidding.  I really do think that cultural exchanges, including foods, are some of the best ways to forge alliances between nations–between peoples–and I cannot-freaking-wait to learn about Mexican pastries and candies from a tiny, adorable Mexican abuela and to share with her my family’s pancake recipe, my favorite chocolate cake recipe, and my secret frosting technique.

This is going to be awesome.

Monday my husband takes his French exam at the FSI, bringing his week of language exams to a close.  He did well on both the Arabic and Turkish exams last week and I am really proud of him for being able to switch languages so quickly.  Once he gets the French one done he’s got just about a month till his Spanish test which is good for both of us since it means we’ll be doing a lot of practicing together.  Monday evening I have my weekly Bachelor viewing party with one of my best friends in the world.  The show is terrible in every way, but I love it and I love watching it with her because she’s so snarky and funny.  Plus it gives me an excuse once a week to bake something yummy (like brie, covered in Raspberry Jalepeño Jam and puff pastry).

Tuesday is Valentine’s Day which for us just means take out of some kind and a movie in our PJs.  However, Tuesday is also probably the last day I’ll see one of my fabulous A-100 friends (Hi T!) before she takes her adorable husband and precious new baby to Sierra Leone.  I’m praying that her pack out goes quickly and that she has time to see me one more time before she leaves…I’m really going to miss her!!

Wednesday looks so far like it’s the only day this week when there isn’t something going on, which usually means that at the last minute something will happen and we’ll end up going somewhere.  I’m hoping we can keep it an empty day though since I could really use a free night to study, and to chill the $%^# out because I am positive that by then I will seriously be freaking out about my exam.

Thursday is my birthday.  I wanted to do something fun and ridiculous with my friends but I think that doing something like that the day before my exam would probably mean that I’d a) not really enjoy the night because I’d be worried about the test and b) not do well on the test because of staying up too late/an abundance of delicious, delicious whiskey.  So instead of celebrating with everyone, the husband and I are going to go to a tasty restaurant a few blocks from our house for a nice dinner and a glass of wine and then we’re going to call it a night.  I’m hoping that doing something low key will help minimize my pre-test jitters.

Friday is THE DAY.  Test day.  I have class in the morning and then an hour-long one-on-one session with a teacher before my test* begins in the early afternoon.  The test is scheduled for 2 hours and most people seem to take the full 2 hours.  The good news is that, unlike the language tests taken during A-100, they tell you what you scored right then and there so there will be no nail-biting over the weekend.  I’ll know when I leave the FSI if I’ve passed and can continue with my current schedule, or if I’ve failed to make the grade and will have to stay in Spanish for a few weeks more.  I am really, REALLY hoping that I pass so send me your good vibes and all your Spanish grammar power.

*I just realized that I definitely have readers who don’t know anything about how the language tests work at the FSI.  I’ll try to put together a post sometime soon that gives an explanation so you all have a better idea of how this works.  No promises on getting it done this week but I’ll try.

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…and I am actually somewhat pleased to announce that I was not placed this bidding cycle.  This means I will bid again in the next bidding cycle which will take place sometime this summer.  This is a good thing because traditionally the summer bidding cycle has a lot more positions.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let me explain a little more how this process works for those of you not up on your Foreign Service trivia. 

I entered the Department under what was then called the Critical Needs Language Program.  I’ve already explained about the benefits of the program-formerly-known-as-CNL (see this post) so I’ll spare you a recap of that and skip to the part about how this plays out once you enter the service.  It works like this: if your first tour is not in a post where your CNL is spoken, you must bid during every subsequent bidding cycle until you do get placed.  So since my original bid was done in the summer and obviously they don’t speak Arabic in Juarez, I had to bid in the most recent cycle. And because for whatever reason I didn’t get placed this cycle, I have to bid in the next cycle which should be this summer.

It’s pretty common knowledge here in the Department that if you want greater job options, you try your hardest to bid summer cycle, but for people outside of the Foreign Service world the reasoning behind this might not be intuitive.  The issue is mostly one of timing.  Usually, the cycle you bid in is the same cycle in which you transfer.  For example, if your position ends in June you’ll need to be placed in a job that starts pretty soon after that so that the Department doesn’t have to come up with a ton of filler training between your end date in one post and your start date in another.  There are tons of exceptions to this and no one’s training schedules and transfer schedules are the same, but more or less that’s how it works.  For people with kids, of which there are many in the FS, it’s far better to have this gap between posts during the summer because that means their kids can finish out the school year in whatever country they’re in before moving to a new place.  Bidding in winter usually means transferring in winter, and not many people want to pull their kids out of school in the middle of the year in China and then re-enroll them, again in the middle of the year, in Djibouti!

This bidding structure also means that people without kids and single people sometimes get the shaft in terms of bidding because they don’t always have compelling reasons to switch cycles so often they get “stuck” on whatever cycle they started out on.  For us, I’m happy to get to bid summer cycle because I’m hoping there are more Public Diplomacy jobs available for me to bid on.  Doing an in cone assignment is pretty important for me career-wise at this point so I’m crossing my fingers that the summer list has more than one or two PD jobs to bid on.

Unrelated:  My exam is in 9 days.  HOLYCRAPINEEDTOBESTUDYING!

Only 12 more days till and I’ll know if I’ve passed and get to start ConGen or if I’ve failed and have to stay in Spanish-hell another 6 weeks.  Cross your fingers and send me all your good Spanish-speaking-ability-vibes!

Yep, you read that right: I’m still three months from starting my first tour I just submitted my bids for my 2nd tour which won’t start until 2014.  I don’t have time tonight to fully explain what that means and how it works, but I will try to write something for later this week or next explaining the process.  For now it will have to suffice to say that we spent literally all day yesterday researching and working on our preference point-system and then writing up our bids and justifications.  I can’t really speak about the posts on the list but once I know if I’ve been placed this cycle you can bet your buttons I’ll let you all know the results.

In other news, my normally super with it Spanish teacher somehow managed to assign us more than 50 pages of book work to do this weekend.  Keep in mind that on an average work night we have 3 or 4 pages…on a crazy homework night we might have 10.  I don’t think he really realized a) how many pages were left in this chapter, b) how many pages were in the supplement to this chapter, c) how many pages were in the review of the last 5 chapters.  At least that’s what I keep telling myself because if he actually was aware of how much work that was and then assigned us to do it all anyway we might be having some words tomorrow.    Needless to say with my ENTIRE day spent yesterday on bidding and a couple of un-breakable social engagements today I will not be doing all 50 pages.  I think I’ve only actually done about 20 of them but I’m tired of Spanish, annoyed that I had to do work crap all weekend, and I just need a break so I’m going to finish writing my paper for Area Studies and call it a night.

Area studies days happen once a week but not every student has area studies on the same day.  On these days, we get broken out in to groups by region our country for a special 3 hour class that is designed to give us historical and cultural information about our respective posts.  In the western hemisphere group there is a class entirely devoted to Mexico, which is logical seeing as they send hundreds of us there every year.  Central America and the Caribbean are lumped together but Haiti has a class of its own.  Then there’s Andean Republics (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), a class dedicated to Brazil, and finally the Southern Cone (Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina).  Other regions are broken out in similar lumps.  I’m not sure how many area studies courses there actually are but suffice it to say there are a lot.

I have mixed feelings about the Mexico class.  We’ve had some really great classes, like this past week’s where the Deputy Chief of Mission of Mexico to the U.S. came and spoke to our class.  But for the first oh, 3 months, class was for sure less than spectacular.  Every day we’d do the same thing: watch a movie then have a lecture with zero time for questions.  The speakers were mostly interesting but the lack of Q & A time was really really frustrating.  It’s gotten much much better in the last few weeks so I think we probably just came into the class during the slow period. Today’s class was pretty good again so I’m trying really hard to be optimistic. 

Area studies days disrupt my language learning mostly because of the way my particular class is structured.  See, in the Spanish section, we attend classes in shifts.  As I described in my last post, this means I’m in class from 8:00 – 10:00 and then from 12:00 – 2:00.  Area studies for the western hemisphere runs from 9:00 to 12:00.  Do you see where I’m going with this?  This means that students in the morning classes have 2 one-hour sessions of language instruction on area studies days: one hour before area studies and one hour after lunch.  For me at least, this means that by the time I get warmed up and functional in Spanish in the morning I’ve got about half an hour before it’s time to switch to English for area studies.  Ditto in the afternoon.  Coming back to Spanish-language-land after what usually amounts to 4 solid hours of English (area studies + lunch) is super hard and I find myself spending the first half of the afternoon session trying my hardest to remember that I actually do speak this language.

On admin days, we only have 1 two-hour session of class so for me that means I’m done with class at 10:00 a.m.  We get admin days so that we can take care of administrative stuff like getting our diplomatic passports, navigating the seemingly impossible bureaucracy of travel orders and travel paperwork, and meeting with mentors, language consultants, and attending seminars and conferences at Main State.  On the one hand, I love admin days because they give me some time to actually get non-language related stuff done and to not feel bad about spending my time at work not studying.  On the other, most of my teachers have used admin days as a day to give us tons of extra homework since we’ll “have extra time” which means my admin days are more like 10 to 12 hour days once I’m done with homework etc.  I don’t dislike admin days, I just find them exhausting.

Today was an area studies day so after a 3-day weekend and 2 one-hour sessions of class today I’m still a bit fuzzy and am trying to get back into Spanish mode.  Luckily, I worked ahead in the book over the weekend so I only have a few pages of homework to do plus a couple of other assignments but I should probably stop blogging now so I can get them done before it’s time to make dinner…

8:00 a.m.
Class. We spend this hour first talking about what we did the previous evening or over the weekend and then talking about news articles.  Everyone has to read and bring in a news article and then highlight new vocabulary, summarize the article, and answer questions.  Now that we have enough vocab we can actually have conversations about the articles.  Every week we focus on a different theme so I usually try to bring in an article that fits in with the theme but I don’t always stick with this if I find something really awesome/interesting.  The 8 o’clock hour is always brutal on Mondays because all of our brains are rusty and we’re all pretty much zombies but as the week progresses we usually warm up so the first hour tends to be pretty productive.

9:00 a.m.
More class.  Usually for this hour we either work from our textbook, “Nuevas Rutas,” or we do readings.  I like doing work from the book during this hour because my brain does a better job of processing longer readings in the afternoons.  Working in the book usually involves conjugating verbs, learning new particles and prepositions, and reviewing grammar.  The exercises in the book used to be largely written but as we progress in the book more and more of them are done with the audio files and are just oral.  I usually do them orally first and then in writing because I’m trying to work on my spelling.  Spelling in Spanish is hard sometimes because words are SO SIMILAR to English words and I sometimes have a hard time remembering which is which.  There are also a couple of categories of verbs that have spelling changes in different tenses or for different pronouns so I like practicing those too.

10:00 a.m.
FREEDOM…sort of.  Each member of the class gets a once weekly 50 minute speaking appointment with our instructor and I prefer to do my appointments during this hour if I can.  Our current instructor is really awesome during these appointments.  He always steers the conversation toward something related to the theme which helps build vocabulary and also helps me to think creatively when I have to explain something that I don’t know the word for.  This week we talked about immigration and immigration policy which, I’m sure you can imagine, was delightful.  As I’m going to Mexico it’s really vital that I understand what we’re doing vis a vis immigration but I’m not going to lie it’s a complicated and confusing set of policies and since I haven’t taken my Consular General training yet I don’t really have a firm grasp on things.

On days when I don’t have my speaking appointment I spend this hour in the cafeteria, at a sunny table studying and eating what is either a late breakfast or an early lunch, depending on what I brought for the day.  By the end of the hour the table ends up crowded with some of my awesome A-100 colleagues who are on the same schedule.  The regulars at the lunch table are mostly Spanish speakers but we usually have a couple French speakers, a couple Turkish speakers, the lone Kazakh student.  On lucky days we get a couple Hebrew or Arabic speakers and on really lucky days we get the lone Tamil and the lone Gujarati speaker.  I love love love my lunch crew and I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get to CJ and don’t have everyone there to mock CNN’s half-ass daytime “news” stories.

11:00 a.m.
Language lab.  I spend this hour conjugating verbs, practicing verb tenses, watching the most ridiculously awesome Spanish telenovela geared toward teaching viewers how to speak Spanish.  I’m not sure how useful this hour is for me but I’ve been trying to use it to reinforce grammar and vocabulary.  Sometimes I avoid the lab and find a sunny spot to write sentences using new vocabulary or to review readings/articles but most of the time I just stay in the lab.

12:10 p.m.
Class.  This hour usually gets spent doing a number of short readings.  Usually these are small newspaper-ish articles about various topics but usually related to the theme of the week.  We get 6 or 7 minutes to read all the articles and then our teacher asks each of us to summarize one of the articles.  There is usually one article that I don’t fully understand or that has a crucial vocabulary word that is new to me so I always hold my breath and cross my fingers that I don’t get assigned that article.  Sometimes it works and others, well, let’s just say that this week I learned that the word botones refers to both buttons and bellhops in Spanish and it just doesn’t do to mix the two up. 

1:00 p.m.
More class.  This hour we often play a game or we do more work from the book.  I like working from the book but we’ve played a few fun games too and I don’t usually mind switching gears and doing something a little lighter, especially if the readings were particularly difficult and my brain hurts.

2:10 p.m.
This officially marks the end of my day at work but we get between 1 and 3 hours of homework every night so I usually hurry home, chill for 10 or 15 minutes, and then get cracking on my homework.  I almost always call my husband at work as I hike to the parking lot but I only speak to him in Spanish so that’s fun for us both.  He’s taking a crazy early morning Spanish class but he spends his entire day speaking in English or occasionally Arabic so I like to think this little Spanish conversation helps him but I don’t know if it really does.

5:00 p.m.
I usually finish my homework around 5 and lately I’ve been trying to go to the gym.  That has not worked every night but I’m trying to get into the habit.  Then once my husband gets home we spend the evening talking in Spanish as much as we can and trying to plan and prepare for another day.

Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

There are two other types of days that we get out at the FSI:  Area Studies days and Admin Days.  This post is already pretty long though so I’m going to keep them for a subsequent post.   A subsequent post that will for real be written this week.  Not in a month.  I promise.