American in Spain

The more I watch the media coverage of the GOP presidential primaries, the more I’m struck by just how different Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are, physically. Newt’s got a pretty spherical noggin, and Romney’s is more oblong. My photoshop nerves are itching again, so I thought I’d try a face swap, like I did with Prince William and his bride. I searched around the internet for two high resolution photographs in which they are looking more or less in the same direction and are lit from similarly positioned light sources. Ideally for this, you’d have them both in the same photograph, but they don’t pose together that much. The result of my half hour of work is pretty mediocre, but I figure I’ll share it anyway.
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In 2007, Matt Morris, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, directed a short film about a barber shop near where I grew up. One of the owners of the shop, David Shirley, the well spoken gentleman with the full head of white hair in the movie, is the father of one of my best friends and guitar mentor, Phil Shirley. The movie does an excellent job of capturing a dying southern American small town bluegrass culture.
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In the United States, the existence of the Thanksgiving holiday does a pretty good job of preventing the Christmas celebration and capitalism from encroaching too far into November like it can do in other countries. Of course, like any pent up desire, when it’s released, it’s extreme, resulting in the consumerism orgy that is Black Friday. Aside from shopping, the weekend after Thanksgiving is when many Americans put up their Christmas tree and other yuletide decor. Since my parents were visiting, I decided to partake in this tradition as well and put up our tree on Black Friday.
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I’ve been very much enjoying the puppet show that is the GOP’s attempt to find a candidate that has any chance of defeating Obama in the 2012 presidential campaign. As the media’s interest in each candidate ebbs and flows, they are each shown to not really be a contender. The most recent fad in the race is the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. As I watch the news coverage, I can’t help but chuckle to myself about the possibility of having a president with the same name as a species of salamander. I figured it was time to dust off my morphing skills and actually turn him into a newt.
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A couple months ago, we started chatting in the street with our neighbors from three flights down, and their four-year-old daughter, Carmen, began playing with Nora. Immediately it was clear that Nora liked Carmen more than most children near her age. There was a certain je ne sais quoi chemistry between them as they giggled and chased after each other. So this year we decided to invite Carmen over for our household’s very American tradition of Halloween pumpkin carving.
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One of the things that most irks me, as an expat, is when someone claims that an entire country full of people are rude or lacking in manners. I guarantee you that if you go to live for even a short period of time in another country, you will notice general cultural behaviors that are different from your own culture; some will seem odd, and others will seem rude. I can also guarantee you that for every odd cultural mannerism you notice, the natives around you will notice at least one or two about you. With the right attitude, these cultural differences can add to the adventure that is having foreign friends and traveling and living abroad.
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A few years ago, I came to the realization that modern two-party democracies are like pendulums. Just as gravity will pull a pendulum down towards the center, building up enough momentum to push it to the other extreme, so human voters’ innate human ability to find something to be upset about will pull their votes away from one party and build up enough momentum until the other party has a majority. Rinse and repeat.
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When we visited Alcatraz last year (which I highly recommend), I couldn’t resist buying two souvenir magnets in the gift shop on the way out. During the tour, we learned that, when a prisoner first arrived to the maximum security prison and was shown to his cell, he found, on the fold-out table in his cell, a list of the prison’s rules and regulations. The two regulations on the refrigerator magnets I bought are fantastic for parenting a child. I plan to have them posted in the kitchen for the duration of my daughter’s stay under my care.
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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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