Intercultural Communications from Ireland to Spain

I´m back to blogging!

OK, so what I´ll be posting about in these next few blogs is all about that stupid cow Miriam, the one I used to live with (I´ve told most of you about her already and you have all concluded that she is a total nutter). I´m blogging about this partly for posterity purposes, so I will be backtracking from our trip to Dublin to the fallout from the bitch that followed:

WEDNESDAY MAY 27 - DUBLIN

O and I depart for Dublin! We got our stuff prepared, left the house and managed to get lots of luck with catching all our trains and metros, so we made it to the airport in 55 minutes, the quickest time yet.
We arrived at the airport and we got separated in the queues – with EU passengers and Non EU passengers. The same thing happened when we went to London and the line for the EU side was longer and slower than mine, so I was confident I´d come out first this time around. No such luck – my queue was MASSIVE and there were only 3 customs officials. So O was waiting around for me and got worried when I wasn´t appearing, thinking I´d been arrested or detained (He´s such a positive dude, isn´t he?) He didn´t see how huge my line was, as it had been split into 2 and there was a ´Disneyland´ queue which was visible to everyone. What wasn´t visible was the other line outside of the customs area, which is where I was when O was trying to look for me in the Disney queue. Being the chivalrous bloke he is, O suggested beforehand we swap backpacks so he could carry my heavy one with his laptop in it, while I had his virtually empty one. I wanted to call him to let him know I was alright, but my phone was in my backpack that he was in possession of at the time! 15 or 20 minutes later I appeared and he promptly hung up on the Australian Embassy in Ireland :)
My friend from Perth, Caroline, was flying into Dublin on the same day as us. Her flight was to have landed 15 minutes after ours. However, our flight was around 10-15 minutes late in flying out from Madrid, so I imagined we would cross paths, if not find each other at the airport – seeing as we would have landed at the same time. I decided to wait around for a bit, hoping to bump into her and catch up even for a little bit before seeing her later in the week as we had planned. No such luck, so O and I left the terminal. (It turns out that she was in the first part of the queue when I arrived and she was looking out for me too. And she walked past O a few times as he was waiting for me, but as they hadn´t met before - and Caro was judging just by photos she has seen of him, she didn´t ask him if he was waiting for me. But I met up with Caro later in the week and it was all good :) )
We were to have called O´s great uncle once we had cleared customs so we can get picked up promptly with very little waiting around by our chauffeur. What happened instead was that he was there waiting for us! Something we weren´t expecting! We were driven to O´s grandma´s place and I met some of his family, which was just grand :)
O and I have been pretty much been left to our own devices, which suits us just fine. After eating and setting our bags down, we went for a walk around the neighbourhood, to the shops trying to listen out for the Irish accent and wondering exactly how long it´s going to take for O to start talking Oirish! Up to now he is starting to perfect the Irish twang, but there is still plenty of time to go, epecially when we go out and meet the rest of the family!
When we got back to the house we were enjoying our chicken and chips dinner when O got a curious phone call from back in Madrid. I´m going to blog separately about this in Spanish so that Miriam the bitch can read it without misunderstanding - one of her many failings. See you in a bit :)

EVENING OF WEDNESDAY MAY 27 – WEIRD PHONECALLS AND THEIR AFTERMATH

To pick up where we left off, O got a call from Madrid as we were having dinner. It was Miriam, the roommate who had ignored us the day before we left. O was on the phone with her and I didn´t realise it was her until a couple of minutes in, when all I hear are speedy Spanish mumbles, and the only person I know crazy enough to speak in that speed is her. She started to mention about how upset she was with him about the blogs (finally she speaks up about it – right when we´re on holiday!) and also mentions how pissy she was in relation to the note I left about our friend Magda staying in the house for a week. (Here´s the crust of it: our friend Magda needed a place to stay for a week to study for her last exams before heading home. There´s a spare room at our place that the landlady wants filled. O asked all the roommates if it was OK for her to stay. They ALL said yes and asked O to check with everyone before the landlady is advised. He did, everybody was on board. So we gave Magda the spare house key because we would have been in Dublin and unable to greet her upon her arrival).

Back to the phone conversation. I wasn´t on the phone with Miriam – it was O. So we have a native Spanish girl screaming and rambling VERY quickly on the phone to a guy whose a) NOT a native Spanish speaker, and b) whose listening comprehension of Spanish was not that great at the time of this conversation (it got better after this whole night went by, trust me!) and we have a huge miscommunication because she is rambling away and he is just saying ´yes.....yes......yes....´, feigning to understand – and because she is under the impression that he understood what she said, she just kept going on and on. So when I soon realised it was her calling to crack the shits, I took the phone off O and hung up. O was a bit taken aback by it and said, ¨That could have been important¨ and mentioned how she brought up Magda (Later on he had said that if Magda wasn´t brought up in the conversation, he would have been happy with my hanging up on her and him not calling back. Inversely, if I had heard her bring up Magda, I wouldn´t have hung up in the first place).
O called her back. The rambling continued on and I still couldn´t hear what was going on,except something to do with Magda now not being able to stay in the house and some other silly things like, ¨This is the last straw, you´ve done too many things like this already¨ (Absolute bullshit, by the way!). It kept going on and on until she asked, ¨Is that clear?¨, to which O said yes. She then hung up on him. This had been around a 15 minute conversation with her dominating and not letting him speak. So when I asked him what it was all about, he just gave me the main points, which is the only part he got. Her problem was how O gave Magda the house key without telling anyone about it because as far as she was concerned, she doesn´t know Magda and she was pissed that someone she doesn´t know has access to the house (mind you, she KNEW that Magda was coming because O told her!) At the end she said, ¨I don´t want her in the house, I DO NOT WANT HER HERE. I know that you already asked us all if it was OK for her to stay and we agreed, but things have now changed. Things were fine between us when you asked us, but now they are not. If your friend comes on Sunday I´m going to call the police because we don´t know who she is and she is not on the lease and doesn´t have a contract – the landlady doesn´t know she´s coming so she´s a trespasser. I will call the police. You better call her and tell her she´s not welcome and arrange to get the key back from her because she is NOT staying in MY house. Is that clear?¨ (And silly O says yes. DAMN IT, WHAT A FUCKING TOOL!) I cannot begin to tell you all the myths that are in that rant, what I was thinking at the time and what I wanted to say to her fucking face (unfortunately it wasn´t my fight and I have enough class to not get involved in other people´s fights, unless they involve me either directly or indirectly. Wish I could say the same for the other roommate who got involved when he didn´t need to). Actually, I WILL begin to tell you and I´ll now start dissecting her version of the truth:
a) How else was Magda going to get into the house? And if she´s going to be living there, she needs a key. Do you want her to ask you for your key everytime she leaves the house?
b) You have acknowledged that O asked everyone – and everybody said yes. It´s a VERBAL CONTRACT. And you have admitted the only reason you have rescinded on this deal is because you now have a problem with O because of things he wrote about you in HIS blogs. You have already agreed to having Magda stay. Don´t take this out on an innocent person who is not involved. In your eyes, the only crime she has committed is being O´s good friend and that is NOT a reason to go back on your word, just because you are angry with him. The problem is between you and O – and it should stay between the two of you. Call the police if you want, but at the end of the day, she has a key and was given permission to stay.
c) Most importantly this final point, IT IS NOT YOUR HOUSE! YOU are not the owner, YOU are not the landlady – Sole is. If YOU WERE the owner of the house, YOU wouldn´t be charged and paying rent every single month, would you? SO DON´T CALL IT YOUR HOUSE! YOU MAY HAVE LIVED THERE THE LONGEST, BUT IT DOESN´T MEAN YOU OWN THE HOUSE. GET THIS FACT INGRAINED INTO YOUR WEE BRAIN, AND THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT FROM NOW ON. IS THAT CLEAR?

I was livid by this point, mainly because O allowed her to walk all over him despite him saying in the past that this was not the case. But Miriam is used to getting her way and being the Queen Bee – she walks all over her boyfriend and expects to do the same with mine. And at that time, it looked like she was winning too. She´s just lucky she hasn´t tried any of that shit on me, because THEN I will pounce.
But the main person we were both concerned about was Magda and our main goal was to get her to stay in the house. We spent the next 2 hours formulating his comeback (in all honesty O wanted to fight back and defend himself, but even he admittend that it was difficult going up against a native speaker who just so happens to also be a whack job. So that´s where I came in. Thanks to my Argie family, I´m used to dealing with uncurable headcases who don´t know their head from their ass, so this for me wasn´t going to be a problem!) and he told me the things he wanted to say in English and I translated them into Spanish. These are the brainstorming notes we came up with – which honestly was a 2 hour venting session between the 2 of us. It´s what you do when you don´t have internet access and cannot blog! :)

. We had an agreement and the only reason you´re backing away from it is because of what YOU READ and what YOU UNDERSTOOD, which are 2 different things.
. After the adult way you have conducted yourself – by ignoring me and then confronting me by hiding behind a phone when I´m in another country - I´ll put my blog back on public for all the world to see WITHOUT deleting my posts that you were so offended by.
. I asked you all if she could stay, you all agreed. THAT is why I gave Magda the key.
. If things have changed between us, it was because of the blogs. I don´t think you understood what I was talking about. You didn´t even ask me if you understood correctly, you just ignored me. You could have been the so called 23 year old adult you are and come to me directly about it instead of being juvenile and ignore me without knowing what´s going on. You could have showed the same respect our other roommate did by coming up to me to discuss it.
. What I published was a moment that I believed was unfair. By the time I finish blogging, I don´t care anymore and I am over it.
. The landlady wants the room to be occupied because it´s more money for her. If she doesn´t want Magda in the house, she can ring me personally and let me know herself.
. If you´re going to be hunting for information about you on the internet, chances are very high that you WILL find something that you don´t like and you have to be prepared for that. If your ego is too fragile to handle it, DON´T LOOK!
. In 2 weeks this won´t even matter anymore because all of us will be gone and you´ll have the precious house to yourself. In 9 days, you´ll NEVER see us again, so put up with it and shut the fuck up.

This was most of it, but we had neglected 2 of our main arguments that we were going to use right up until the end. But we formulated what was going to be said in what order, tweeked it to make it sound less judgemental (remember, our number 1 goal was to change her mind to let Magda stay in the house so I had to curb my anger towards the bitch). This is what we planned as our opener:

. There is a language barrier between us. Sometimes I need more time to think about what has been said to me, what I have understood and even more time to reply in Spanish. If you understand English enough to have read my blog and be confident that you have not misunderstood what I wrote, then we can talk about this in English.

. If you have a problem with me, that´s fine. But this has nothing to do with Magda. We had an agreement that she could stay in the house, everybody was on board with the idea.

The whole thing was that we had to bring Miriam away from the blogs – what she was pissed about in the first place – to Magda. That was the plan. After the 2 hour brainstorming session, O called back. It was a nervous wait, but O had everything planned out and was eager to not allow her to dominate the conversation. I had a polite way to tell her to be quiet, which was ¨Please, I gave you your time to speak. Now I just ask for you to listen¨ (Not my style, but we were thinking of Magda, not me!)

He started off very well and by the time he said, ´we can talk about this in English´, she nervously laughed, as the tables had been suddenly turned on her. He could tell she was just as nervous as we were – he had 2 hours to think about what she said and come back strongly. Instead she stuck to Spanish, so O continued in English with point 2. She started to come back with stuff, he told her politely to let him speak (she was taken aback and said, ´go on´). He went on saying it was unfair to punish Magda all because of the misunderstanding of his blog, telling her she didn´t quite understand the meaning. She went off here. She then dominated again, whilst I was gesturing quite animatedly to get him BACK to our plan. He ignored me and just let her continue talking for another 10 minutes straight!! I felt pissed and had to leave the room because I thought he was allowing himself to be walked all over yet again and couldn´t handle it.

From what I heard, she was completely going off at him about ¨I understood everything in that blog, I understood perfectly clear. I know what OCD is, OCD is a condition that people are obsessed with things and are continually thinking about and are constanly cleaning and cleaning and cleaning......I do not have OCD´ and continued to give him a dictionary definition of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder whilst O interrupted with ¨Miriam.......Miriam........Miriam.....I know what OCD is¨ (And funnily enough, that alone would make anyone think she has OCD – the fact she is calling to vehemently deny to a person who doesn´t even know her well enough to come to that conclusion speaks volumes). She started talking about herself again and what she found offensive in his blogs (turns out it was the OCD thing and also he described her as having some sort of ´phantom power´ over him – which I thought was hilarious – as that was more of a compliment to her and an insult to him! If you haven´t read O´s blog that offended Miriam The Cow, read it here). She was dissecting ´phantom power´ over the phone trying to tell him what she thought it meant bla bla bla. I was laughing even more because in that blog, those were the 2 least offensive things written about her. The post in question is also insulting my bf and myself – not just her, though it does say things about her which are not exactly the nicest, but they are true observations from what little we have seen of her. She got offended at the least offensive parts – she could have easily got pissed at my inference over her having her monthly pre-menstrual attack of the household – which just goes to show she didn´t understand the blog completely as she claimed. His blog is written with a very English sense of wit and self-depracating humour that only a native speaker of English will fully comprehend.

O let her rant away while I was being constantly pushed out of the room (Edit (by Oisin) Andrea was pissed, kept coming in and saying “STOP LETTING THAT BITCH TALK” and “SAY THIS”, so it’s difficult having a conversation when two women are talking to you in two different languages. Andy, sorry, you got the boot). She then was starting to get off the topic of the blog and was saying why she and the other roomie were pissed about Magda having the key – and we finally get to hear some common sense coming out of her (I was beginning to believe we´d have to wait until the next millenium for her to start making sense). They were understandably pissed that we had the spare key all along when they had thought the ex-roomy had it – and were concerned that this ex-roomy had access to the house. They were also getting hassled by the landlady about getting this spare key back (something we didn´t know about, otherwise we would have given it to them). But when it came to matters with the landlady and the roomies, the landlady wouldn´t talk to O because she didn´t understand him when he spoke in Spanish – he couldn´t understand her either – and the other roomies wouldn´t even bother telling O what was going on (believing it was nothing concerning O), so it´s not his fault he didn´t know that the landlady was getting narky over the missing spare key.

At this point the other roommate was getting pissed off as well – something that was regrettable because he is a really great guy. If it wasn´t for him telling O about Miriam´s pissiness over the blog in the first place, we´d be completely left in the dark about what was up with her and her infantile behaviour. And he´s a very friendly and fair guy who has been really great to the both of us (it´s because of him we´re able to travel a lot around Europe on the cheap) and we were both feeling bad that he was angry and that he had to get involved in this (that just shows you how much we respect him as a person and how little we think of the psycho bitch who just happens to be his close friend). O´s main argument was that the landlady has wanted the spare room to be filled for quite some time, no matter how little time Magda will be staying. Miriam was continuing to make other valid points (shock, horror! ABOUT BLOODY TIME, I SAY!) how the spare room Magda was to stay in was not ready to be lived in yet, as the ex-roomy broke the one and only light bulb in the room when he left and it is yet to be fixed – something that has been on the back-burner. O was starting to relax more because Miriam brought up the topic of Magda staying in the house. He was getting a little confused until he finally asked, ¨Can Magda stay in the house?¨ Miriam said yes. OMG AFTER ALL THAT, Miriam did a 180 degree turnaround and agreed again to have Magda stay. O was in as much shock as I was – while Miriam was having her long-winded rants I was thinking of alternative accommodation for Magda, thinking this would not resolve itself the way we wanted.

Miriam had said that she and her friend were on board, but according to Miriam, there was one roomy who was still undecided about it all (which was bullshit because O asked the 3rd roomy and he agreed. He´s the kind of guy who doesn´t care. He doesn´t get involved much in the politics of the household) so she wanted O to call the 3rd roomy to ask him if he was OK with it (he was!) and to get this 3rd roomy to call the landlady to let her know what was happening – as the landlady did not know what was going on and had not been informed about Magda, despite being told that she already knew. We didn´t think it was necessary to call the 3rd roomy because he was already on board to begin with, but we didn´t want the bitch to cause any more trouble when we finally got her on our side (which meant I had to constantly remind myself that Magda was our first priority!). Plus we thought it was unfair to get the 3rd roomy to call the landlady, because, if you can´t tell by this stage, I´ll let you know now that this bitch thinks she is the boss. As an aside, it´s usually her or the 2nd roomy (the good guy) who calls and is in regular contact with the landlady, not the 3rd roomy. Also, the 3rd roomy speaks REALLY fast Spanish and it takes O longer to understand what he is saying. So O got me to speak to the 3rd roomy to ask him something we already knew the answer to. I spoke to the 3rd roomy and he agreed again, telling me that O already asked him about it. I said, ¨I know, but for some reason that I am not aware of, Miriam wanted O to ask you again¨. I didn´t bother telling him to contact the landlady because I knew it wasn´t his place – and everybody in the house has a love-hate relationship with Sole the landlady, which is why Miriam didn´t want to call her in the first place, so she tried to pass the buck off to someone else (and if Miriam has claimed that the house is HERS – even though we all know it´s not – then we all know that it is HER responsibility to let the owner know. Weird logic, but so is she)!

O called Miriam back after I spoke to the 3rd roomy. The only thing she wanted to know was if the 3rd roomy would make the grand sacrifice and speak to the landlady. We happily burst her bubble and told her he wasn´t going to call her, so she had to let Sole know herself. I was still coming to grips with the fact that the weirdo changed her mind after being such a cow to the both of us – but especially O - and acting so immaturely by firstly, waiting for O to leave the country to confront him over something she was upset about 2 days beforehand (and wrongly upset about, in my opinion. Read my previous 2 blog entries and you´ll know where I stand on this issue) and secondly, to let her personal feelings get in the way of an agreement that was already made between all the parties concerned, not just her – just because she misunderstood something and thirdly, I cannot believe the nerve she had to take it out on our friend who is innocent in all of this – and wasn´t even aware of what a blog was – and yet this was the reason she was no longer allowed to move into the house for 9 days. I was absolutely thrilled for Magda and that O was able to do this, but the complete 180 degree turnaround that took place when the majority of the time she was bitching and moaning about the blogs, it was just a situation we thought wasn´t going to work out in our favour. We are so relieved and glad that it did.

So on our first night in Dublin, we wasted a lot of time on the phone – and used up all of O´s prepaid mobile credit – to listen and be witness to the severity of a psychotic mind and how quickly it changes. I was trying to get into her mind and see what and how she was thinking so I could try and change her mind (ala Detective Robert Goren on Law & Order – Criminal Intent – my fave detective in the whole L&O franchise!), but I didn´t want to get anywhere near her obsessive and compulsive thoughts and was quite grateful that I didn´t have to delve deep. We were incredibly relieved that it all worked out at the end, despite not knowing exactly HOW it worked out! It was great to resolve all this at the beginning of the holiday though so we could focus on having a great time in Dublin. We let Magda know what was happening (although we couldn´t go into great detail, we just let her know that she was one incredibly lucky woman!) and the next day she told us something very interesting....

THURSDAY MAY 28 – AN INTERESTING DISCOVERY

OK, so we all know that this madness started happening VERY shortly after the bitch friend requested O on Facebook. She had access to all of his friends and it was quite obvious that she had gone through his Facebook page with a fine tooth comb (other friends, photos, the works. Although I imagine she was looking for stuff about me. She didn´t find anything – my Facebook profile is set to uber private. Funny thing that my blog, however, is set to uber public and by the time this is posted, she will have the url to this blog because that is what I´ll be leaving her as my parting gift!)

I sent Magda a text message the night before letting her know some of the drama that took place with Miriam. Magda replied and told me that Miriam had sent her a friend request and a message on Facebook (so now Miss OCD has taken an interest in stalking O´s FB friends – you cannot tell me that is NOT obsessive OR compulsive)! Magda didn´t know how to take it. Up to now, I don´t know exactly what the message said – only what was talked about - but Miriam was being nice to Magda – which was a relief to all of us. From what I gather, in the message Miriam mentioned O´s blog to Magda and said if she wanted more background information about her, she could read O´s blog. FUCKING WEIRD! So now we can safely say that she is OBSESSED with O´s blog, so calling her OCD is no lie (Her main argument was that O had written lies about her. If they were lies to begin with, I can assure you now that they are NOT lies anymore)! After last night we thought we moved past the blogs. Let me tell you now, she´s only making things worse for herself by bringing it up again, especially to Magda, who, I will repeat myself again, had NOTHING to do with those blogs. It´s something we still can´t get our heads around. Like I said before, it´s probably not wise to delve deep into a psychotic mind.

The most important thing is that Magda is staying in the house. She doesn´t stay for long. O and I return to the house on June 3. On June 6 we´re gone and on June 8 Magda leaves for Poland. After this date, it´s not going to be an issue for any of us (possibly it will be for Miriam, as she seems to be the type of person who gives a shit of what people think of her – even people who don´t know her. Thankfully I passed that stage years ago – and all of my friends have passed this stage too.

So what´s the moral of the story and why have I decided to share this with you? Well, there are plenty! Firstly: Don´t get on my bad side (or my bf´s bad side either, as we tend to complement each other. I will come out all guns blazing, while he has a more calculated, cool, calm and methodical approach to getting even. You will get the best of both worlds if you ever get on our bad sides)!
Secondly: it seems that this girl´s major issue is what people will think of her – especially those who haven´t met her. Including myself – and including her too - only 3 readers of my blog have met her (and be relieved that you are one of the lucky ones that haven´t met her, folks!) But as I said before, leaving her my blog address is my parting gift to her – so that she and the whole world can read about a real-life case study on the absolute nonsensical mind that is Miriam´s. It will be kept in the archives as a momento and a memoir of a memorable period of time, but mostly it will be used as a reminder to lighten up – there´s no point in having a pole shoved up your ass.
Thirdly: If you are seeking out information about yourself over the internet, you have to have an open mind and be wise enough to realise that it´s not all going to be good – and most importantly be adult enough to handle it. If that´s not the case, don´t look!
Fourthly: Miriam, you are not completely innocent in all of this. We have heard you endlessly bitch, moan and complain about others openly. You´ve bitched about Sole the landlady on numerous occasions, about Jorge the ex-roomy, the current roomies, even your own boyfriend. No doubt you have bitched and moaned about countless others, myself included. What would you do if your boyfriend or your roommates heard you talk about them? Because trust me, one day they WILL overhear you because you are so damn loud. Just be aware that if you talk about other people behind their backs, expect them to speak badly of you. Didn´t you learn that in school?
And lastly, this has been another lesson for me about letting go (and yes, I am aware of the irony in this despite my 3rd point above. But if she keeps bringing it up, I´m going to do the same and enjoy it). It´s honestly taught me to think of others (I was biting my tongue so hard because it wasn´t my fight) and it taught me – and still is teaching me – to let go of negativity and of people who represent and epitomise negativity so damn well! After I post this, I´m going to be feeling so much better and I will be ready to let all this go.

As always, I welcome your feedback.