American in Spain

We’re ending this month without our dear Nora at home. She left, on July 28, with her Spanish grandparents to go with them on vacation for three weeks in Extremadura, a hot arid region in southern Spain. She’s having a ball down there, but when she talks on the phone to us, she has finally learned enough about evaluating her own emotions to wimper, “I feel sad because I went away. I want you to come here with me.” It’s simultaneously cute and heartbreaking. We will be going down there to spend the second of her three weeks with her.
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On Saturday, my wife and I got to attend another live music performance at our favorite local sports bar, El Vapor. This time it was a classic rock cover band, Vermouth Band, billed as covering the works of The Eagles, America, Status Quo, Queen, The Police, Cat Stevens, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kansas and ZZ Top. That’s definitely my kind of tunes! Unlike the last band we went to see, this band was set up outside on the sidewalk. This being Cantabria, they had to stop playing for ten minutes once because of a light drizzle, but picked right back up when it subsided.
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We have been making slow, but steady, progress on Nora’s counting abilities. She can more or less get up to about fifteen in both languages, and she’s begun to make statements like “There are three cookies on the table” as well. The other day I thought I’d record a video of her counting to mark her progress, and she did very well, despite manifesting her most common errors.
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We had a wonderful weekend this week. A babysitter let us go out for dinner and dancing on Friday night, and on Saturday my mother-in-law and sister-in-law came to visit. I made a homemade pizza while the ladies went to the market in nearby Santoña and had it ready upon their return. A leisurely afternoon ensued with Marga painting her sister’s and Nora’s fingernails and toenails.
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It’s a bit of a slow news day today…

Usually when Nora and her mother come home from their after-daycare walk and playground romp, Nora comes into my office to give me a “Hello”, a hug and a kiss. When I ask her how daycare was or what she did after daycare, she’s normally pretty evasive, sometimes even coming right out and stating, “I don’t want to tell you.” So it was quite a change one evening when she came home shouting, “Poppy! Poppy! I have something to show you!”
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Last year we couldn’t have our annual Fourth of July party because we were in the States for the holiday, but this year we returned to tradition, throwing a party for some friends with hamburgers using my special “American” recipe. We didn’t give much notice, and it coincided with San Fermín, the enormous Booze & Bull festival in Pamplona, which some of our invitees were attending, so we ended up with a nice dinner party of seven adults and our little Nora.
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I’m pleased to see that some of the local businesses where I live are starting to use Facebook properly to announce events and sales. I’ve recently subscribed to the updates of a local bar that sometimes hosts live performances. Usually this only results in knowledge of the concerts I’d like to see, but cannot go to because of my parental duties, but this weekend, my in-laws were visiting, and my wife and I escaped to go see a local cover band, called Lost In Covers.
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For all the same reasons I outlined two years ago, I have had a very fun time watching the UEFA Euro Cup 2012 this year. The Spanish are never as patriotic as they are when their national fútbol team, La Roja, are doing battle in a tournament, and since I moved to Spain in 2005, they have been doing very, very well. People have started calling the never-before-accomplished winning of back-to-back Euro Cup, World Cup, and Euro Cup championships the “Triple Crown”.
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