Two weeks ago, student groups in Madrid and across Spain organized protests in response to the government’s new education reforms. These reforms include the “3 Más 2” initiative, which aims to redivide the typical university degree structure into a three-year bachelor’s and two-year master’s. Currently, the system is “4 Más 1,” and some years ago, there were simply five years for all specialties, without the expectation of an advanced degree.

If you’re like me, the change seems insignificant. As it is, those students that pursue a second degree usually do so in the same university, and if not, they can pick up where they left off almost anywhere else, thanks to an interchangeable European university system.

But it all hinges here: the price. Many students cannot afford the more expensive “3 Más 2,” since master’s classes cost more than bachelor’s. What’s the difference, you ask? Brace yourselves, Americans. For a public university in Spain, a year of undergraduate education costs 1,000€ ($1,100), while a year of graduate school costs under 4,000€ ($4,500). That’s right. With the new initiative, the difference is less than 3,000€. And two degrees is roughly 10,000€ in either system.

If you’re shocked, join the party. I pay in-state tuition at the University of Michigan, which, within the context of American higher education, is a steal. Compared to Spanish higher education, though, for an equivalent undergraduate degree, Michigan is an order of magnitude more expensive. Ten times. Out-of-state and private school tuitions border on twenty.

The proposed changes affect only Spain’s public universities, which are generally more prestigious than private ones. Public universities require high entrance exam scores, and they hold professors to higher standards. If you don’t make the cut, you go private. Additionally, college admissions aren’t the “game” in Spain that they are in the States; your entrance exam is the largest (or only) determinant. In fact, the population of the public Complutense University of Madrid, where I study, fluctuates year-to-year according to application volume.

By the way, the Complutense has 90,000 students. Ninety thousand. Let that sink in. The University of Michigan is large in American higher education, both in population and land mass, but it has nothing on this school. Michigan is its half. Yet despite its size, the Complutense does not have a defined “culture” like American universities, whose football teams, school spirit, and on-campus living communities cultivate an isolated world. Instead, Complutense students share flats wherever they affordably find them in the city or suburbs and commute to school. Spanish universities do not organize varsity sports conferences. Students do not share fierce patriotism.

And aesthetically, despite the unsightliness of certain Michigan buildings, the University of Michigan again has nothing on the Complutense, whose buildings are archaic (some, seventy years old), in disrepair, and plastered with graffiti. For decades, rebellious and anarchic student groups have tagged its facilities with anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-whatever-they-fancy messages, and university maintenance has stopped washing them. They have neither the funding nor the perseverance to combat the perennial.

This brings us back to the key issue: money. The public university system in Spain is government-funded, which is to say, taxes-funded. (By the way, the effective tax-rate in Spain maxes out at sixty percent, compared to the American forty percent. Twenty percent goes a long way: subsidized higher education, universal healthcare, and expanded public welfare.) But without delving into Spain’s political system, the current conservative government would rather shift the financial burden on those that actually seek higher education: the students. Incidentally, the Complutense has historically sided with the more liberal socialist party. Go figure.

The hitch in the initiative, of course, is that students can’t afford anything. It’s a universal truth, but it especially resonates here. Spanish students do not work. Or more accurately, they cannot work. Sidestepping a discussion of the messy Spanish economy, the unemployment rate is nearly one third, weighted heavily among the young, for whom the rate is fifty. Jobs do not exist for students. Or anyone, really. And if you wait tables, the minimum wage in Spain is half the American’s (yes, that’s right —about 4€ per hour).

It gets worse. Spanish parents do not have the tradition of saving college funds, the government does not offer educational loans, and scholarships are rare. Even for doctorate students, Spanish universities do not necessarily subsidize their PhDs like American ones; some students therefore work alongside research.

Consequently, asking students to subsidize an additional 3,000€ for their own educations is significant. Especially because those educations do not guarantee employment (far from it), and because assistance is virtually non-existent. Even though I envy these students, for my education costs (my parents) a fortune, empathy comes easy too. I identify with their struggle. We all share the same goal: to better ourselves with education, to pursue a brighter future. I treasure my education. And it’s enraging that political and economic circumstances beyond Spanish students’ control are threatening their access to it.

Readers, I have failed you.

I have spent three months in Spain and haven’t dedicated a post to croquetas yet. It’s a disservice to you. And to the croquetas.

As my friends and family and anyone that’s accompanied me to an eating establishment (or anywhere with Oreos) know, I love food. And that I tend to eat irresponsibly. Last semester, I frequented Wendy’s thrice weekly, minimum, and I wasn’t buying salads either. I once ordered a barbecue chicken salad and, bewilderingly, received a carton of lettuce doused in barbecue sauce. It felt wrong. But I don’t eat enough salads to be sure.

Old habits die hard. Here in Spain, there are these candies with red, gummy exteriors and sweet, white filling. They taste vaguely like strawberry (“strawberry”). Really, they’re just molded sugar, and I don’t even know their name. But I’m obsessed. Mondays and Wednesdays, when I walk home from the Prado Museum, and some Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, returning from the Complutense, I buy a bagful of them.

Now, I frequently exaggerate on this blog, but this is sincere: I am addicted.

You can buy them in any of the ubiquitous convenience stores: On every street corner, there’s a store run by Chinese immigrants. Spaniards call them “chinos” (“Chineses”). The more politically correct name is “alimentación,” or food store, but political correctness doesn’t bog down Spaniards. In any case, they make the candies dangerously accessible.

If they’re available in the States, I’ve never seen them. And that makes me nervous. So please, if you find a bulk, wholesale retailer, inform me at your earliest convenience. Direct your correspondence by text, call, email, or carrier pigeon. Thank you. —No. No, hold on, Nolan, you can’t do this to yourself. Let’s try this again. Readers, please, if you care at all about my well-being, I beg you: Ensure I never learn of them. I say this now, in my transiently lucid state. Take heed. Before I change my mind.

But beyond gummies, I have a greater Spanish culinary obsession: croquetas.

Croquetas are the Spanish answer to fried pockets of meat, a staple in every culture: the pierogi, the ravioli, the McDonald’s chicken nugget. Spaniards have many varieties. The typical Madrid croqueta is a creamy bechamel sauce and bits of ham, rolled into a ball, breaded, and fried. (That’s right. My favorite Spanish food is fried. I’m American. Sue me. Litigation —also American.) Each region has its favorite, like mussel or cod croquetas in Granada, Sevilla, and the coasts, but from what I can tell, the most popular is ham. Spaniards worship ham.

Every bar, restaurant, and household serves croquetas. Their presentation is disillusive: a plate that’s nearly empty, save four or six croquetas that occupy a skimpy third of it. Maybe some lettuce shreds as a garnish (a “salad,” if I am to understand salads). But you cut into their crispy coating to release an intoxicating steam that delivers you to heaven. The filing is creamy and salty, contrasting the exterior, satisfying, filling, an ambrosia of fried potatoes. They warm your insides and caress your soul and remind you that life is for the living.

But here’s the thing.

I love croquetas, so much that it would be easy to reduce Spanish cuisine to just them. In reality, there’s so much more. I recently attended a cooking class where we learned paella, Spanish tortilla, and tarta de Santiago. All hallmarks of Spanish cuisine: paella is emblematic, tortilla inescapable. My host mother regularly cooks lomo de pollo or cerdo, or filets of chicken or pork —typical. And during Semana Santa in Sevilla, I ate torrijas every day, a traditional Easter dessert that resembles french toast soaked in honey.

Spanish cuisine is distinct. It is mature. Spaniards consume far fewer “ethnic” foods than Americans because their native cuisine is satisfyingly diverse, more so than ours —and healthier, too. But when I started this post, intent on exploring Spain’s hallmark dishes, I wrote for however long and reviewed what I’d done and wait, gummies and croquetas?

This is a challenge of studying abroad: cultural caricatures. I have only five months in Madrid, barely enough to internalize the basics. Spain has a diverse, thousands-year past, and their cuisine reflects it: Muslim occupation, spice wars, American colonization, intercontinental commerce, a geography and climate that’ve marked it since first human settlement. I can’t appreciate this in five months. Instead, I develop a fragmented perspective that reduces the complexity, distorts it, renders only the most impressionable experiences. For me, culinarily, those are apparently gummies and croquetas.

I fight the reduction. I force myself outside the comfort zone. I taste adventurously and take recommendations and eat everything my host family offers. After all, I am in Spain to experience Spain. But there’s an internal conflict: the desire to diversify (or the fear of not experiencing the fullest), which drives exploration, that clashes with the reaction against discomfort, which encourages routines and reversion to American habits. All compounded by limited time.

Try as I might to “become” Spanish, I won’t. I can’t. In fact, my one study abroad goal had been for locals to mistake me as Spanish. Just once. I put that goal on paper. To my dismay, though, it hasn’t happened yet, and I no longer expect it either. In this case, there are other confounding variables, like my decidedly un-Spanish appearance and sloppy American-and-Latino accent. But there’s also the obvious limitation that, within five months, I couldn’t possibly absorb enough of the Spanish “being” to fluidly imitate natives.

As a result, I remain trapped in cultural caricatures, which portray Spanish culture with an emphasis on novel experiences and which disregard (or, more exactly, remain ignorant of) sizable swaths of the culinary and political and cultural complexity. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating what I can; any effort is commendable. But it disillusions me that my first thoughts on Spanish cuisine were gummy candies and croquetas, because there exists so much more.

Correction: May 29, 2016
A post in April about cultural caricatures and Spanish cuisine misidentified the ingredientes of croquetas as potatoes, cheese, and ham (among other varieties). The ingredients are bechamel sauce and ham.