American in Spain

Last weekend we received a visit from my internet friends, Simon and Paola, whom I visited in Brussels last October. They’ve been long time readers of this blog and I was excited to get to show them all that I love about my little corner of the world, from the sea to the wine, to the mountains, to the wine, to the food, to the wine. Oh and introduce my family to them. It wasn’t easy, but I took a day off work and showed them what we have to offer.
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The following is a document written by my father, Paul Rasmussen, about his trip to visit us in Spain in June 2013.

We left Morganton at 1:15pm on Sunday, and landed in Bilbao a little before noon on Monday. It had been just a little more than two months since our last visit, but during that span our second (and probably last) grandchild had entered the world, so we needed to go visit.

I can’t sleep when flying overseas, and I find the long flights much easier to tolerate since I stopped trying. The US Airways flight from Charlotte to Madrid did not provide us with seat-back screens, so the selection of movies was out of my control, which explains why I watched Jack the Giant Killer, Die Hard 12, and Parental Guidance. After a three hour layover in Madrid we took a one hour flight to Bilbao. Erik met us at the airport and drove us the rest of the way to Colindres, where we arrived just in time to pick Up Nora as she left school at 1:00pm. After a quick stop at Susinos to buy bread, we walked home and met Ian Rasmussen Matamoros.
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We baptized Ian this past Sunday, June 9, 2013. Personally, I don’t believe that splashing some water on a baby means anything at all, but some people I care about do, so I was happy to participate, especially since it meant having a big party to celebrate the birth of my son, something I do feel very happy and celebratory about. It was the very first mass I’ve attended in the town church that has been ringing its bells next to my house for the past eight years.
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For the first time all year, we’ve had sunny weather with blue sky. Except that we’ve had a big cloud of smoke over our town for those two days. There has been a controlled burning of a forest on a nearby hill. It’s a favorite forest of mine, because it’s where the sun and moon first appear on the horizon during the winter months. Luckily the smoke has stayed high above the town, but today I noticed that all the cars were covered in a light dusting of ash.
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The biggest event this month was Nora going off to camp for three days and two nights. Her preschool has been doing this for seventeen years, and the kids love it. Nora was pretty excited about packing her suitcase, with her stuffed animals and flashlight and bathing suit, and myriad other items on a list we were given. In the weeks leading up to the trip, she kept commenting on how she was really going to miss us, and especially Ian. She also never tired of saying that she was going to pasarlo pipa, a Spanish expression meaning to “have a great time”.
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It’s really hard to believe, but my daughter is already finishing her first school year. Like in the States, school isn’t mandatory until age six, but study after study shows nothing but advantages of a good preschool education. For a post she’s preparing, my blogrollmate, the very popular Kaley, from Y Mucho Más, asked me for an interview about my experiences in the Spanish education system. Her questions were excellent, and it felt sort of like an exit interview after this first year.
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Today Ian turns one month old. It’s been both a long and a quick month. He’s grown quite a bit. While he weighed less than his sister at birth, she was only 3.6 kg at the one month mark, and he’s already up to 4 kg. His size difference is already noticeable, as he’s much larger, especially his head, than he was at birth. Probably because he never stops eating. All the parenting pamphlets say that newborns need to eat roughly every three hours, but apparently Ian can’t read the pamphlets, because he’s hungry pretty much every hour.
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Well, we finally had our first incidence of one of my children making the other cry with pain. To be honest, I was surprised that it was the little guy that initiated what every prognosticator of sibling relationships assures me will be at least a dozen year conflict. Let the record forever show that “He started it!” Although it wouldn’t take much of a baby lawyer to throw charges of premeditation into doubt. He was only 16 days old.

My infant son was looking so adorable on his changing mat, which his sister got plenty of use out of, and I had the idea of having her lie down with her head next to his, for a cute sibling photo shoot. I only got one good photo before things turned ugly.
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Several months ago, amongst random meandering thoughts, I realized that there would be a day this year that would match three consecutive numbers on the Fibonacci sequence. For those of you who can’t remember your math teacher’s face, the Fibonacci sequence is the sequence of numbers that starts with 0 and 1, and creates each number in the sequence by summing the previous two. So it goes: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89… You may notice that three of those numbers are 5, 8, and 13, which are today’s date. In the United States and nowhere else. Anyway, this sequence is important throughout mathematics, including the awesomeness of the Golden Ratio and its surprising, but not so surprising when you think about it, occurrence in Nature.
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Recently I was contacted by InterNations, an organization I registered my expat status with several years ago and have since been diligently ignoring all their newsletters about meet ups in Madrid. They asked if I’d like to do an interview with them and to be featured on their site. I agreed, but then life got complicated, and they ended up having to nag me several times, but we finally did the interview and they published it. They’ve given me permission to re-post it here for your enjoyment. Some of my regular readers might not know my answers to some of these basic questions.
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