American in Spain

On Saturday we went to a birthday party at a friend’s house. Remember that, in Spain, it’s the birthday boy that hosts the party and/or buys the drinks. Nora was quite well behaved, although when the group of fifteen or so friends got too excited, laughing loudly, she cowered from the noise. Several of the men at the party did a “BOO!” trick to surprise Nora, which Nora absolutely despised, running terrified in the opposite direction. Since the host was one of the guilty booers, he gave her a model car to play with. She and I played with it for quite a bit, away from the other guests. Knowing that my iPhone’s camera was particularly good at short range close-ups, I took some photos of the gorgeous car before Nora dropped it and broke off a piece.
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The big news this month is that Nora got one of the 21 spots in the three-year-olds program at the local school that we were hoping she would get into. When I say local, I mean that I can take ten paces out of my apartment building and touch the school. Needless to say, this will save all kinds of time and headaches that would normally be the result of having to drive her to and from a school every day. Of course it’ll be a few years until she’s old enough to walk there (i.e. cross one street) on her own, but we might have the zip-line installed from our sixth story apartment window before then.
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After surviving the more or less nonstop rain for all of April, we are starting to see some sun again in May, however we are suffering from some icy northeasterly (I love words that are their own opposites) gusts that will chill you to the bone if you’re not wearing a good sweater, the same sweater that will make you unbearably hot the moment the wind stops. As a result, it’s really not comfortable to be outside, no matter what you are wearing. On Sunday, however, we braved the elements to take a walk up to Colindres de Arriba, an older part of town, which I’ve mentioned before. I love being a short fifteen minute walk away from the green ovine-speckled countryside. Here are some photos from our walk.
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It was December 15, 2001, when I first got on a plane with my suitcase and guitar and the plan of no longer being a resident of my native land. I flew into Birmingham, England, and my future wife picked me up and drove – amazingly, to me – effortlessly on the wrong side of the road to the flat she was renting with a friend and coworker, a tall Basque girl by the name of Aitziber (pronounced eye-CHEE-bear). The three of us would be flatmates for nine or ten months. Aitziber moved back to Spain a couple years before we did, and we fell out of contact as happens in life. Aitziber, however, is one of those thoughtful people that, without fail, calls on my wife’s birthday to chat and describe what happened since they talked the previous year. We were pleased to be invited to her wedding this past weekend, especially since it was so close, in Getxo, a suburb of Bilbao.
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This weekend, I represented my local golf club of Laredo, of which I happen to be the reigning champion, in Cantabria’s Clubs Without Courses championship. You may snicker at that, but golf courses in Spain are pretty scarce. Part of it has to do with the lack of popularity of the sport and the ingrained notion that it is a sport for the rich, and part of it is the strict land usage laws. Laredo won the very first Clubs Without Courses National Championship five years ago, and the two best players from the winning club from this weekend will go on to represent the region of Cantabria in the national championship in Córdoba.
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This month included the holiday of Easter, which is considerably more fun (and tooth-rotting) for American children than for Spanish children. In Spain, most people get a week off of work and go on vacation. Nora and her mother went down to the family’s house in Extremadura to spend a week lazing around with Nora’s aunt and Spanish grandparents. After a suggestion from my parents, I seized the opportunity to travel to the United States to show my face at the office where I am normally only present via the internet.
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It’s not often that I think to myself, “I wonder what I was doing ten years ago?”, but when I saw on the news that the Queen Elizabeth II was celebrating her Diamond Jubilee, commemorating being the queen for 60 years, my mind immediately flashed to where I was during her Golden Jubilee ten years earlier. I very vividly remember watching the Party at the Palace on a small television in a little cottage we were renting for a week in the Scottish Highlands. That was my first year living abroad indefinitely, and I did quite a bit of traveling around the UK with my Spanish señorita who I’d just moved in with having only spent a few months together with her. For Easter that year, exactly ten years ago today, we decided to take her company car and head down to the southwestern coast of England, to a region known as Cornwall.
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Nora turned three years old this weekend. We drove to her Spanish grandparents’ house in Mondragón and had a party at their Centro Extremeño, a cultural center and social club for emigrants from the Extremadura province of southern Spain. Nora was quite wowed by all the presents and attention. She gets a lot of presents and attention throughout the year, but this was definitely a more special day. She got many dresses, and a doll, a wooden bowling set, and a Hello Kitty™ digital camera, which is iPhone-shaped, so she calls it her “mobile”. The digital camera was her favorite gift, which I’m proud to say came from her loving parents (it was marked down from 70€ to 20€!!), but her second favorite gift, the bowling kit, was more fun to play with in the wide open space of the cultural center.
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When I lived in the US, I remember meat being something I picked up from the refrigerators of the supermarket, shrink-wrapped between plastic and styrofoam. Then, I started dating and eventually married a slaughterhouse veterinarian, and hung out with a group of Spanish slaughterhouse vets, none of which had even remotely considered the possibility of abstaining from meat, a practice relatively common in my homeland. Every American can name at least one vegetarian friend, and probably a vegan, too. These are, of course, luxuries that our rich country can afford us.

Contrary to life in the US, life in Spain consists of personally knowing your own butcher (mine is my neighbor, Bruno), seeing – and often choosing – the cut of meat that is fed into the meat grinder to produce the exact quantity of ground meat that you desire, or asking your butcher to slice the chicken breast actually off the chicken and then into fillets for you.
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I’ve invented a new American in Spain tradition! It’s a little similar to my Fourth of July Hamburgerfest. Today, you see, is San José, Saint Joseph’s Day. All the days have saints assigned to them here in Catholic Spain, and March 19 happens to be assigned to Saint Joseph, the poor old shepherd who, according to dogma, never got to have sex with his wife and still had to raise a son that was not his own. That’s rough.
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