American in Spain

We had a major breakthrough in potty training this month. Several months ago we prematurely tried to have Nora not wear diapers at night, but the result was a full week of having to get up sometimes more than once during the night to change sheets. After ten nights or so, we called it quits and went back to the peace and tranquility of wearing a diaper at night. Lately the diapers have almost always been dry, and I considered suggesting we try it again, but we came up with a plan. As a computer nerd, I like algorithmic rules, so we decided that “Until she gets up by herself at night to go pee, we’ll continue to use diapers. When she is capable of getting up to go to the bathroom at night, we’ll try without diapers again.”
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Tonight we did our annual October tradition of pumpkin carving. Unfortunately, the pumpkins we were able to get this year were pretty sad. The shape was okay, but they were small with incredibly thick walls. So small, that the face I carved had to have its features so close together that we had a bit of an accident in which the eye hole broke through to the nose hole. Mistakes happen even to the worst of us pumpkin carvers.
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We have this trip coming up in a few weeks to the United States to visit my folks, and my three year old daughter, Nora, is very excited about seeing Grandma and Grandpa. Lately, her video conferencing hours have skyrocketed. She speaks to and sees her Grandma and Grandpa nearly every day lately to fill the second hour of her two hour lunch break from school, and often until phone battery death on the weekends. Ironically, despite the ocean between them, I don’t think they’ve ever been closer.
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One of my religious conservative friends on Facebook linked to a blog post entitled 10 Questions a Pro-Choice Candidate Is Never Asked by the Media. There’s a bit of redundancy, but overall, they are pretty good questions. Abortion is a very slippery topic, and, although it often detracts from arguably more important issues in politics, I think it’s a very good litmus test for how advanced a society has become, in much the same way capital punishment or gay marriage is. Personally, I quite enjoy being asked probing questions of my morality and world view because it forces me define it better and better understand my underlying philosophy and its arguments. So I thought I would have a go at these ten questions.
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I was weak once. On my first ever trip abroad to Scotland as an early teen, when given a day to myself to wander about and choose my schedule, I ate lunch at a Burger King. And later, as a 20-year-old, having moved abroad for the first time, it didn’t take me long to visit the McDonalds in the center of Copenhagen. When in Budapest, someone talked me into entering what was described to me beforehand as “the most beautiful McDonalds in the world”, and, while I can’t speak for the entire world, I must agree that it is quite pretty. Each time, my justification was curiosity about how my American culture had been translated to another culture, but I’d be lying if part of it wasn’t the comfort of familiar food that makes these chains so successful.
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Lately I’ve been reading some books on parenting, and the paradigm that best jives with my morals and ideals originated from a psychologist named Thomas Gordon, who became an expert in relationship conflict resolution, valuing negotiation and collaboration over the use of power. I had not heard of him until recently, but he was thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, so he’s not a complete kook. It makes sense that losing an argument because the other person played the power card would breed resentment and poison the relationship. I’ve had some success with talking through conflicts with my child, but sometimes when you’re parenting, you don’t have thirty minutes to work through the peace process and converge upon a solution of compromise for every item of clothing your kid refuses to put on in the morning before school. I have found a few shortcuts that I’d like to share with you.
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The town in which I live is situated at the mouth of the river Asón, which begins way high up in the mountains and flows down into the tidal basin estuary you see in the current header image of this blog. Occasionally I have noticed a fog hanging over the river in the mornings. The fog yesterday, however, seemed more dynamic. I could see it churning with my naked eye. I’ve always been a big fan of churning and flowing clouds in timelapse videos, and the visibility above the clouds was fantastic, so I raced to set up my tripod, camera and intervalometer before leaving to walk my daughter to school.
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The second “must see” tourist attraction in Brussels after the Grand Place has got to be the Atomium, a bizarre and unearthly structure built for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, which is, in theory, modeled after an iron crystal. I saw it once when I was flying into or out of a layover at the Brussels airport, which makes sense given its proximity to the airport. If nothing else, it’s very big and very bizarre.
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On Saturday, October 13th, my fifth anniversary, I took the Metro into the center of Brussels with Simon, and from the train station, we bought tickets to go to Antwerp. I like train travel; I miss it from my days in Denmark. It’s a lot more comfortable than traveling on an airplane. The trip from Brussels to Antwerp took under an hour. I had been impressed by the architecture of the Brussels train station, but then I was absolutely floored by the majesty of the Antwerp station.
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I have long been a fan of my blog buddy, Simon’s, penchant for blogging about his hobby of going to really expensive Michelin Star restaurants. He really is quite prolific. I knew it was an expensive hobby, but I always wondered just how much it costs, what the ambience of the places feels like, and, of course, what such exotic food must feel like in one’s mouth. When he asked what kind of restaurants I would like to try during my visit, I immediately got excited about maybe going to one of these fancy places. He sent me a list of possible options, with links to menus and his blog posts about each one, and I very quickly settled on the most expensive one, Comme chez Soi.
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