American in Spain

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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I just got back from a ten day trip to the USA in which I ran a bit of an experiment: I never carried a single dollar or cent of US currency on my person. All my transactions were electronic using a debit card, even the extremely cheap ones like buying a $0.99 bottle of water from a convenience store. None of the cashiers even batted an eye when I pulled out the plastic for such a tiny purchase. In Spain, I suspect they would refuse your business if you tried to pull a stunt like that.
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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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On Saturday I was contacted, via Twitter, by an American blogger I have been following for over a year now. Her name is Erin, and she lives in Madrid and regularly takes me on fantastic vicarious voyages around Spain and Europe with her blog, La Tortuga Viajera (The Traveling Turtle). Since discovering her blog, I have been impressed by its professional look, and I have copied several of its features onto my own blog. She mentioned, in her Spanglish tweet, that she was spending the weekend very close to where I live. So close, in fact, that not getting together for a chat was off the table. Her weekend was fully booked, but she and her husband found time to stop by my humble burg of Colindres for an iced coffee this morning.
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This weekend we planned on visiting the local Parque de la Naturaleza de Cabárceno, a “nature park”, i.e. a zoo with wide enclosures where you have to get in your car and drive 300 meters from exhibit to exhibit. We were going to go on Sunday, but the weather was so great on Saturday morning that we decided to go on Saturday instead. It was closer than I thought it was, only a 40 minute drive from Colindres. It was not at all cheap, at 21€ for adults and 18€ for 6-12 year olds (free for two-year-old Nora), but we took a picnic lunch and spent a good five hours there. There is a 100€ year-long family pass that would be worth buying if we wanted to go more than twice a year. When we got back home, I discovered I had taken 393 photographs, which I trimmed down to a mere 217 photos worth uploading to the internet. I’ll try to keep the number in this post down in double digits.
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Recently my wife has discovered a blog by a Spanish housewife called Cocinando Entre Olivos (Cooking Among Olive Trees). I must say that I am extremely impressed with the quality of her posts, particularly the step-by-step photographs; you almost don’t need to be able to read the text. There really is a photo at every single step, often actually showing the addition of each ingredient. After several years of not adding any new recipes to our cooking repertoires, it’s quite refreshing to have some new things to cook. Recently my wife made some homemade chinese food, which consisted of cooking three recipes simultaneously (the recipes are in Spanish): Chinese Chicken with Almonds, Chinese Rice With Three Delights and Spring Rolls With Sweet-and-Sour Sauce.
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