American in Spain

Over the past several weeks, as a project for his own personal blog, a colleague of mine, Cole Watts, has been interviewing me about my blogging over email. It was a fun experience, as I’ve never been interviewed as if I knew something about anything, well, almost never. I suspect many of my readers might be wondering these exact questions about me, but perhaps not. Here, reproduced with permission, in its entirety, is Cole Watts’ interview of Erik Rasmussen, blogging expert.

Most of us daydream about traveling but many of us will often not leave the United States. I’ve recently had the opportunity to be a coworker of Erik Rasmussen, who took the idea of traveling and ran with it. Erik currently resides in Spain and is known to some as an American in Spain.
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Late last year, a blogrollmate of mine, Jagosaurus, turned me on to a project by an acquaintance of hers, Dustin Timbrook, an artist, musician, and all around creative guy. As a challenge to himself, he announced that he would attempt to do one drawing each day, of absolutely anything that was requested of him. Jagosaurus submitted this request:

I’d like to see something involving any of the following: hippo, cuttlefish, penguin, octopus, praying mantis. They don’t have to be playing poker and smoking cigars. Really they don’t. I mean, that would just be silly.

Timbrook produced this:
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My blogrollmate, Simon, shared this article with me today, by a US citizen who has lived in Europe for a decade, about the superiority of American domestic appliances. I must say that, after having spent a decade myself living in four houses and a dormitory in Europe, I agree completely.

Allow me to address my experiences with a variety of appliances.
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Before my current blog, I hosted static web pages with photos and comments to share my travels with my family and friends. What follows are adventures I had, photos I took, and comments I wrote in August 2001, when I went to visit my girlfriend, Marga, in her new apartment in Walsall, England. Four months later, I would end up moving there and living there for almost four years.

A few thoughts about what you’re about to see… Wow, we look young! I still retain a little of this photo-caption-photo-caption style in my present day blogging. At the time, I was really preoccupied with the whole “driving on the left” novelty; the original post had another video that was just us speeding down the motorway with the cars going the other direction on our right. Ten years later, we still have some of these clothes…how embarrassing. And finally, this is why I blog: so I can look back at photos and thoughts like these. Okay, without further ado…

This past week I went to visit Marga in England. When I arrived, I was given an hour or two to sleep and then Marga and I went down to Oxford to meet up with some of her friends that had driven there earlier. We got there in time to search for the Bed & Breakfast and then go out dancing.
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Recently, I mentioned that Nora now knows how to respond to “How are you?” with “I’m fine, thank you.” Yesterday, she looked so cute in her dress and pigtails that I decided to interview her on a few things to see how her conversational skills are developing. She did need a little coaching, even on questions she definitely knows the answer to. I can’t help but giggle every time she says “I’m fine. Thank you!”
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The following is a document written by my father, Paul Rasmussen, about my parents’ March 2011 visit to my home in Colindres, Spain.

Betsy and I are old hands at traveling to Bilbao, Spain. When possible, as it was on March 19, we fly overnight from Charlotte to Germany (in this case, Munich), and then on to Bilbao after an hour or two lay-over. Betsy is always able to catch a few winks, and now that I have totally given up trying to sleep on these flights, I get by nicely watching movies and reading books. To my surprise, the Lufthansa flight from Charlotte to Munich allowed me to access the movie screen on the back of the seat in front of me from the moment we boarded the plane. I watched almost half of True Grit before we ever left the ground, but the pilot cut a few corners and caught back up to his schedule before we landed. There were no movies on the two hour flight from Munich to Bilbao, but I kept busy reading the book, A Course Called Ireland, I needed to finish so I could leave it with Erik.
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I’ve mentioned before how amazingly talented my grandmother is at making greeting cards. For Nora’s second birthday, my grandmother not only made a beautiful card, but also totally nailed Nora’s ability level for following a story, and made the surprise at the end a photo of the person Nora most likes to look at: herself. The card itself, was the most fun Nora had opening her birthday presents. Luckily I caught some of the magic on film.
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Nora’s English has been improving by leaps and bounds lately, which is due to many factors, but I think the fact that her American grandparents visited for a week and that her Spanish grandparents haven’t visited for a while made a big difference, by enabling/forcing us to use English primarily at home. Little by little, I have been requiring more of her when she asks for things. When she wants her hands cleaned, she used to get away with just saying “sucio“, but since then we’ve stepped through “sucia mano“, “dirty”, “dirty hand”, and now up to “My hand is dirty.” We’ve climbed a similar ladder for cookie requests, from “más” through “more”, “más cookie”, “more cookie”, “cookie please”, “more cookie please”, “May I have more cookie?”, “May I have more cookie, please?”, to finally, “Daddy, may I have more cookie, please?”
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