American in Spain

On the last Friday of August every year, the nearby tourist town of Laredo hosts their annual Batalla de Flores (Flower Battle). It consists of a parade of floats, decorated entirely with real flowers. The floats range from fairly simple – but more complex than I could construct – numbers with a cartoon character or two, to huge elaborate contraptions with various animals or other themes. Each float is decorated with some sort of Homo sapiens specimens deemed to be cute, usually small children or young maidens in elaborate costumes. The floats are judged on a variety of categories:

• Presentation: relative to the size of the float, the combination of diverse pieces and parts, and complexity of the float
• Art: the general beauty, composition, design, originality and “wow factor”
• Flowers: how well the flowers are nailed to the float, and the general quality of the floral craftsmanship
• Quantity of flowers: the percentage of the float covered in flowers

There is also a separate prize for the best dressed human ornaments. During the video you’re about to see, the announcer mentions that this year, there were floats that had more than 100,000 flowers on them. Wow!
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When discussing what sort of mischief and/or tourism we could get up to last Sunday, my wife mentioned that a friend had recommended visiting “the oldest town in Cantabria”. With only this tidbit to go on, I turned to Google and discovered a Cantabrian tourism site with the sentence, “It is said that [Bárceno Mayor] is the oldest town in Cantabria, and possibly even all of Spain.” Yet nowhere on the great big internet could I find out how old the town was thought to be. It was also unclear how one would even determine how old a small town is when it’s nestled in the mountains near a cave with 15,000 year old Paleolithic cave paintings.
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If the dozen or so hours of “travel in Spain” television shows I’ve watched are any indication, one of the tapas capitals of Spain is San Sebastián. There’s one particular district where every bar you glance into has fifteen or twenty different tapas to choose from, all laid out on the bar. The quality is really high, just like the prices. Just the previous week, I had been at a tapas festival in Santander, and I’d noted that 2.50€ for a tapa and drink was a little expensive. Well, in San Sebastián, all three tapas we tried were at least 4€ each (with drink). Pricy!
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Our two-year-old daughter, Nora, has been in Extremadura with her grandparents for all of last week and will be there for another two weeks, one of which we will be visiting her. It’s hard to be away from her for a whole fortnight, but we’ve been video conferencing with her with some success. We thought it wise to take full advantage of our childlessness and do some tourism that would be a lot more difficult with Nora around.
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Every year, right around Santiago, nearby Santander celebrates its Semana Grande (Big Week), with the most Spanish of traditions: bullfights and tapas. My interest in bullfighting has waned in recent years, but my interest in tapas is as strong as ever! On Sunday, the last day of the festival, my wife and I went to sample the wares that the restaurants around Santander had to offer.
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On my recent return from the United States, I had the displeasure of taking Spanair flight JK 6116 from Madrid to Bilbao on an Airbus A320. I’m not a big air traveler, but I take about ten flights a year. This A320 had the least amount of legroom on any plane I’ve ever been on. Spanair should be ashamed of themselves for cramming so many seats onto this aircraft.
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On July 4, 2011, my country’s 235th birthday, my family and I visited Tweetsie Railroad, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. I would be the first to agree that the name sounds like some sort of social networking app (and they might do well to unload tweetsie.com before the bubble bursts), but Tweetsie Railroad is actually a “Wild West theme park”, from back in ye olde days when theme parks actually had themes. The primary attraction since its opening in 1957 has been an old coal-burnin’, steam-tootin’ train engine that takes visitors around a three mile track.
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In North Carolina in the summer, it gets very hot. Like in southern Spain, there are several hours every day when you simply can’t be outside unless you’re actively cooling yourself with water. Marga and Nora spent a lot of time in swimming pools. First, they went to the municipal pool at the Morganton Recreational Center, which has a nice kids pool where Nora can touch the bottom. It’s in a nice location because they can walk there from my parents new house they bought a year ago. Later in the week, they decided to go to the swimming pool at my parents old, yet unsold, house, a pool my mother has spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours cleaning in the twenty years they lived there. That was a lot of fun too. At first, Nora was a little skeptical of the water, but eventually she made it to the point where she was throwing herself into the pool from the steps.
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One of the interesting must-see places in the Boone and Blowing Rock area of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains is the Mast General Store. Built in the late nineteenth century (that’s like America’s equivalent of a medieval castle!), it is a store that has retained an old style of nineteenth century consumerism: the general store. When rural people would “go into town to the store”, they meant they were going into the general store. It was a store that sold absolutely everything, not unlike the Chinese stores in modern day Spain, be it bolts, rice, pillow cases, cheese, jigsaws, milk, rope, candy, razors, motor oil or olive oil…everything but deals on cheap package holidays.
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To travel to the United States this June, we packed our bags and got our passports in order. We were concerned with how well our two year old, Nora, would do on our long journey (it ended up being 23 hours from door to door). In all the hubbub of travel organization and packing, we totally forgot about another two-year-old: the ridiculous Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) law enacted by the terrorist paranoid (paranoia = terrorist win?) United States that requires non-residents to fill out an application over the internet and pay a small fee of $14 to be allowed to enter the United States. It’s hard enough to find cheap holidays abroad without your destination country trying to extort money from you. Our first flight was from Bilbao to Lisbon, our second flight was from Lisbon to Philadelphia, and our third flight was from Philadelphia to Charlotte.
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