American in Spain » Videos

Talking on the phone with Abuela

erik — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:28:26 +0000

I’ve been focusing lately on Nora’s English, as my readers are more likely to understand her, but I thought I’d post some videos showcasing her Spanish development. One of Nora’s favorite pastimes is talking on the phone with her abuela (Spanish grandmother). There are times when Nora is entertained with some other task and won’t even take the phone, but there are other times where they have spoken for more than an hour, once to the point where Nora got a little hoarse. It’s very much a stream of consciousness sort of conversation, with Nora at the helm, and her abuela interjecting comments here or there to keep up the flow, sticking around long after I would’ve bored of the conversation.

The first video is from a few mornings ago. Nora talked quite a bit about her friends at daycare and about how some of them can reach the sink and use the bathroom by themselves and others cannot. Unfortunately that was before I got the camera. In this video, you can see a very minor manifestation of Nora’s manipulative tactic that prolongs these calls; begging “Don’t go!” when the person on the other end of the phone makes one of those, “Well, I’ve gotta…” comments that we all use to end conversations. Sometimes her dramatic performances make it seem like the person on the other end of the phone is breaking her heart by hanging up. She’s got her Spanish grandmother and aunts wrapped around her little finger…as a little girl should.

She talks about taking her computer (she mispronounces ordenador as denador) to work, and also staying home to work like I do. She also mentions the “Mommy took a big bag of money from work!” allegation that I mentioned earlier, adding the spurious claim that her mother “hides her money on the floor under her computer”. I did search for said treasure, but in the end, I had to conclude: Myth BUSTED. Her abuela playfully tries to get her to give up some of the riches, but Nora counters with evidence that her abuela already has money in her wallet.

Let me provide some context for the second video. Nora’s abuela is currently out of work on medical leave because she has a problem with her knee, and she has to go to physical rehabilitation a couple times a week. Also, Nora went to the doctor yesterday with her mother because her mother’s got an ear ache, so a lot of their conversation is about doctors and medicine.

They discuss las barracas, general term for carnival rides or booths that trucked into small towns in Spain during that town’s holiday week. Nora remembers them well from the time she spent with her Spanish grandparents over the winter solstice holidays. Sometimes she likes to ride them, but she has a very low tolerance for noise and centripetal force.

At one point she switches gears to talk about Parchís, a Spanish board game that is a cousin of the game I know as Parcheesi™ (they share a common Indian ancestor), that Nora and her abuela like to play together.

Her gestures are so hilarious in this video. I’m sorry it’s so long, but the cuteness refused to wane enough for me to stop recording or make an editing cut.

What blows me away most about the current stage of my daughter’s mental development is just how observant she is at noticing causes and effects and intuiting the motivations behind the agents in her world. Of course she probably asked her mother “Why are we at a the doctor?” about seven hundred times when they were there, but she has understood the reasoning and generalized it to “when someone is sick or part of them hurts, they go to the doctor to get cured”. The daycare workers tell us that her verbal and reasoning skills are considerably more advanced than her peers. And yet, her ability to identify colors, numbers or letters are at about the level of a sleepy dachshund. No doubt those abilities will arrive soon, but it’s truly fascinating watching her develop. I’m enjoying every minute of it.

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What’s in a name?

erik — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:44:22 +0000

In preparation for her entrance into the school system in September, we recently began teaching Nora that her name is longer than just “Nora”. A lot longer, in fact. I would be very, very surprised if there existed another person on the planet with Nora’s two surnames. In Spain, you see, people have two last names, the first from the father, and the second from the mother. Her first is Rasmussen, which is both difficult to spell and pronounce. Her second last name is Matamoros – a fairly rare surname in Spain – that probably originated from a myth about Saint James slaying moors.

Not surprisingly, she pronounces her Spanish surname better than her Scandinavian one, but she’s just started learning them.

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Union Rep

erik — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:05:16 +0000

Nora was being particularly cute recently during her nightly routine of barging into my office to interrupt my work and inform me of the state of dinner as it is progressing in the kitchen. So I grabbed the video camera and shot her. The result is pretty representative of her English abilities. The phrasing is a little off, e.g. “You no can work” instead of “You cannot work”, but she has the general structure down. Sometimes it takes her a moment to figure out where her sentence is going. In general, I’d say her English skill is about 80% that of her Spanish.

Somehow she’s picked up the British term “sitting room” – rather than the American “living room” – from her mother. My “close the door from the outside” trick didn’t go so well in this video, but sometimes it works smoothly.

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Sunset Flock

erik — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:43:22 +0000

During the months when the northern hemisphere of our pale blue dot on which I reside is leaning away from our stellar space heater, the light from our star enters my office window at sunset and distracts me from my work, causing me to get up and go to the window to shut the blinds. Depending on the formations of water vapor in the atmosphere, the view of the setting sun can be either boring and gray or spectacularly amber and crimson. Today, when I went to shut the blinds, I saw a lovely display of long wavelength visual electromagnetic radiation, which I felt compelled to take a photograph of.

This occurrence is so common that I felt it didn’t deserve much more than a tweet. What I heard a few minutes later was, ironically, exactly that, a bunch of tweeting. It is fairly common for birds to be perched on my building’s antenna at dusk, but today there were so many that they didn’t all have a place to sit. And then I saw…

Flocking birds really must be one of the most gorgeous phenomena in all of Nature. The natural ebb and flow and organic rhythm of their movement is what ballet dancers mimic on stage. Up and down and left and right, all in perfect synchronicity, and…without a choreographer!

What I love most about flocking birds is that we scientifically minded apes, using computers, have figured out just how incredibly simple an algorithm is needed to create such a seemingly complex emergent phenomenon. I know, because I wrote a program to do it. And yet, none of the beauty of said phenomenon is lost by our understanding of it.

My ability to identify birds is almost as strong as my ability to identify flowers or mushrooms or insects in that it’s pretty much non-existent, so I don’t know if these were starlings, and could thus merit the awesome term murmuration, a word which came to the attention of internauts recently with that video from Ireland. My video is not nearly as jaw-dropping as the one from Ireland, but I was certainly mesmerized as I was filming it and the several times I’ve watched it since. I just wish I’d had a less obstructed view and a better microphone to capture the whoosh! as they changed direction in an instant.

As quickly as they arrived, they departed, leaving me feeling lucky to have witnessed their momentary aerial ballet.

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I asked my mother for fifty cents

erik — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:24:59 +0000

When my parents last visited, I got to hear my mother sing songs to my daughter that I haven’t heard since I was a child and she was singing to me. One of them was this rhyme that Nora has come to call “July”, since she loves to emphasize the ultimate word. It goes like this:

I asked my mother for fifty cents
To see the elephant jump the fence.
He jumped so high,
He reached the sky,
And didn’t come down ’til the fourth of July

Searching for the origins of this rhyme has been quite interesting. It seems to primarily be a playground rhyme sung whilst jumping rope. There are some indications that the origin is from the African American traditions in the southern United States. For instance, it is included on the 1956 album Music from the South, Vol 5.

It later appeared as a verse in Rufus Thomas’ 1965 classic, Walking the Dog, which was covered by Jackie Shane, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Sonics, The Count Bishops, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Grateful Dead and Aerosmith, among others. Quite a list, eh? Here’s the original version, which I think might be the best of them all:

I suspect the version my daughter learned from her grandmother is much closer to the original playground chant. Without further ado, I present I Asked My Mother For Fifty Cents:

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Papa Americano

erik — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:15:28 +0000

Over the past two years, a song by an Australian group, Yolanda Be Cool, called We No Speak Americano (known colloquially as Papa Americano), has swept across Europe. Every so often a Spaniard who knows that I am both a United States citizen and a father, will think they are being clever and original by calling me “Papa Americano” and singing a bar or two of the hit song. I think it’s cute, and I enjoy the song, so I decided to make it my ringtone. Over the course of the last few months, my daughter has fallen in love with my ringtone, often reminding me out of the blue, “Poppy, your phone says papa americano!!”, adding, “Sometimes.”

The song is an impressive example of what can be done today with computers by taking old music and resampling it to create an entirely new and exciting sound. The original song used is a 1956 swing/jazz Italian song – sung in Neapolitan – called Tu Vuò Fa’ L’Americano, which was made popular by a 1958 movie called Totò, Peppino e Le Fanatiche. The original song is quite catchy and was a hit in its time.

Here’s the original:

Here’s the remix by Yolanda Be Cool. The actual singing doesn’t start until the 30 second mark. Just try not to tap your foot, I dare you!!

When my parents were here, and Nora began talking about my ringtone as she does sometimes, my father realized that, using his iPhone, he could call my phone using FaceTime for free over my wifi network and make my phone ring. Absolute hilarity ensued. We did this about 75 times that night. No, really, that’s how many missed calls my phone had on it when I recovered it from Nora’s grasp.

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A Basque Christmas

erik — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:07:47 +0000

We spent Christmas in Mondragón, in the Basque Country, this year like we have every year for a while now. This year was a little more somber than most because of the recent death of the family patriarch, but I think we did a pretty good job of being respectful but not wallowing in our sorrow too much. The best part was catching a glimpse of the wonder of Christmas through the eyes of my two year old daughter.

The Basques have the Christmas legend of the Olentzero, a giant pipe-smoking beret-wearing coal miner (or charcoal burner, depending on who you ask) who lives in the Basque mountains and comes down on Christmas Eve night to leave presents for the good boys and girls, and coal – which his profession gives him easy access to – for the bad boys and girls. Some say he’s the sole survivor of the jentilak, a race of giants that used to live side by side with the Basques. Apparently the jentilak saw a cloud or star one day and decided it was an omen that Baby Jesus had been born and that they all had to die, so they marched into a dolmen and were never heard from again. Olentzero was left behind to give the Basques the good (?) news. It seems he wasn’t a very good communicator, though, since it took Christianity between 500 to 1200 years (depending on who you ask) to gain a foothold in the Basque Country. Most of the Christmas traditions surrounding the Olentzero are fairly new and are clearly adapted from – and intended to compete directly with – Papa Noel (Santa Claus) and the Three Wise Men. They came back with special vigor in the last few decades after being brutally suppressed under Franco.

I have witnessed the festivities in Mondragón for several years. There is a parade through town with the jolly old Olentzero tossing hard candy into the crowd. The parade ends in the main town square, where children dance, songs are sung, and the Olentzero continues giving out candy to the crowds. Young people who have carried torches during the parade then light a big bonfire in the middle of the square. In some parts of the Basque Country, they actually burn an effigy of the Olentzero. From what I can tell, the bonfire is an old pagan solstice practice of rebirth.

A little complimentary plate of beans, with blood sausage, to go with my Rioja.

Nora and her Tía Marga serve a champagne sorbet that Tía Marga makes.

It looks like the party’s gotten out of hand, but really it was just me demonstrating the proper amount of brandy to put in a snifter. It should just reach the lip of the glass when it’s set on its side. Nora said, “Poppy’s wine fell over!”

Chocolates after dinner.

Nora was delighted to receive a toy ironing board and iron from the Olentzero for Christmas.

While I an generally against gender stereotyping and am 100% sure that there’s no way this would’ve been the present if she were a boy, I cannot deny that she really and truly loves her ironing board.

She kept asking people to give her some item of clothing that needed ironing.

She also got a sleeping bag and some mittens.

After going to bed at 2 AM on Christmas Eve and having an exciting Christmas morning of presents, Nora was exhausted.

Later we met up with the rest of the family for even more presents! Here she is opening a Hello Kitty dollhouse.

Playing with her Hello Kitty dollhouse.

Life is not peaceful for Hello Kitty in her house, as it is rocked by furniture-rearranging earthquakes every few minutes.

We had a great time eating, drinking and playing with our family in Mondragón.

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State of the Offspring Address – December 2011

erik — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:29:00 +0000

We’ve taken a bit of a slide backwards in our nocturnal potty training efforts this month. There was one week when we had to change wet bed sheets every single night of the week. Plus, with my parents’ visit and the loss of a family member this month, we have gone back to having Nora wear diapers at night to avoid the hassle of midnight bed making. While disappointing, when one takes a step back and gains some perspective, this is really not that big of a deal. It took her seventeen months to walk (and longer to crawl), and her English was slow to develop at first, but is now staggeringly advanced. We’ve decided we’re in no huge rush with the nocturnal bladder control.

Nora has become very aware of her surroundings and has begun to orient herself a bit in town. She can name at least six different bars around town. How many American two-year-olds can do that? Recently when I was pushing her down the sidewalk in the stroller, she asked, “Poppy, can we go in Willy’s and have a coffee?” I don’t know why we have a bar with such an “anglo” name. Pleased with her well formed petition and up for a beer myself, I agreed that yes, we should go in for a drink. I ordered her a descafeinado de sobre, which is a cup of hot milk with a packet of instant decaf coffee. I asked for the milk to be half hot and half cold so she wouldn’t burn herself. I’ve never understood why someone would pay the same amount of money for instant coffee as real brewed decaf coffee out of the espresso machine, but it’s a very popular order in Spain. Also, it was nice for me to have fine control over her coffee-to-milk ratio (which I kept very low). She had a great time drinking her coffee, sitting at the bar like a grownup European.

Drinkin’ mah coffee.

My two year old loves bar hopping.

It’s cute to watch her make bilingual mistakes. It’s rare that she attempts a direct translation from one language to another, but when it happens sometimes it can go wrong. I remember when I learned Spanish, I had great difficulty with the words “todavía” (still) and “ya” (already), particularly as they were combined with “no” to form phrases: ya no = not anymore; todavía no = not yet. I know I’m not the only one who gets confused by this, because Spaniards make the same mistakes going the other way. Anyway… That was a long preface to tell you that the other day Nora said “already no” when she meant to say “not anymore”, which I found cute.

One weekend this month the weather was really horrendous and we had no plans, so we spent most of Saturday and Sunday at home. At one point when we were bored and getting on each others’ nerves a little, my wife suggested we play with the Wii, which, like most gaming consoles, sits dormant after the initial novelty wore off. The only game we thought Nora might have any shot at playing was Wii Bowling. We set up a “three person with two remotes” game, with me and Nora going first and third with one remote, and with her mother bowling second. We explained to Nora how she had to hold down the button, swing her arm, and then release the button at the end of the swing. It was pretty complicated holding her finger on the button, swinging her arm, and pulling her finger off the button to demonstrate. About her third turn, her mother said, “Why doesn’t Nora use my remote instead?” I said, “No, that won’t work since we set up the game for her player to use my remote.” To which she repeated, “Why doesn’t Nora use my remote instead?” Aaaahh, yes! An excellent idea. So for the rest of the afternoon, we bowled with Nora swinging her mother’s remote while I, seated on the sofa with my remote hanging out of sight, flicked my wrist in time with Nora’s flailing. It worked perfectly. A little too perfectly, in fact, as Nora won almost every game. No matter what I did when playing for my character (Nora made me stand up and do it properly), I could never best the wrist flick that was controlling Nora’s ball.

“Poppy, I stepped on you by accident. It’s okay, I forgive you.”

Nora has begun a strange habit of asking for things with a negative question. For instance, rather than ask, “May I have a cookie?” she’ll say, “I can’t have a cookie, can I?” Rhetorically, it’s a terrible way to achieve your objectives. “You won’t hire me, will you?” isn’t going to advance your career. Negated boolean questions are also annoying because no one is ever clear what “yes” and “no” mean in response to them. The social norm is for “yes” as a response to “I can’t take my tricycle to the park, can I?” does not mean “That’s correct”, but it means, “That’s not true; yes, you can take your tricycle to the park.” It’s just confusing. Perhaps a case could be made that playing the poor “I never get what I want…” victim could be a potentially successful strategy, but it’s certainly not something I’d want to encourage. I suspect it’s just a phase, but it’s a strange one. Here it is in action:

Several weeks ago, at a local bar, the bartender gave her some chocolate euros, disc-shaped chocolates wrapped in foil to look like big 1€ coins. With no subsequent mention of them at all, weeks afterwards, she had some coins – she asks for money before she pretends to “go to work” in “her office” so that she can bring back the coins afterwards having “earned money at work” – and she started prying at them saying, “Let’s see what’s inside!” It took me several minutes to realize that she was referencing the chocolate euro coins from weeks earlier.

My two year old loves bar hopping. Often, as mentioned above, she will suggest we go in a bar that we walk past. She likes them because there are stools to climb on, flashing slot machines to bang on, and the bartenders often give her a little piece of bread or candy or something. I don’t need much of a push to enter a bar for a glass of wine, so she can be a dangerous influence on me. It sure is cute, though, when she says, “Let’s go to another bar!”

I’ve been trying to get her to apologize when she does something bad by accident, but it’s not going very well. She knows what to say when I prompt her, “What do you say?”, but with no prompting, she never initiates the apology herself. Today she did for the first time, but said the wrong thing. She said, “Poppy, I stepped on you by accident. It’s okay, I forgive you.” Hmmm…

As we finish out 2011, the state of the offspring is strong!

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Nora’s First Video

erik — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:41:06 +0000

You know how annoying it is when you take your modern digital point-and-shoot camera or mobile phone to take a photograph and the darn thing is in “video” mode? If you’re like me, you’ve taken countless one or two second videos when you thought you were taking a photograph. Well, it turns out that it’s also annoying when you are a two year old with your father’s mobile phone and you want to take a photograph of your father, the dinner he is preparing, and yourself.

I found the following video on my phone recently. I had no idea that she had shot it.

It’s a pretty common practice lately for her to say something, and if I don’t understand what she’s said after about four times she’s attempted it, and I ask, “What are you saying?”, she’ll look exasperated and say, “I don’t know!” and leave the topic.

Now that I’ve seen the video, it’s clear that she was asking “How do I get this thing into ‘photo’ mode so I can take a photo?” She’ll figure it out soon enough.

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Pickin’ and Trimmin’ – A Barbershop Documentary

erik — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:50:10 +0000

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.

It might have been the influence of my “yankee” born parents, but I never really felt at home in the deep southern culture. Something about it always annoyed me a little bit, although I can’t quite put my finger on what. Perhaps it is my lack of deep roots that allowed me to move so far away. But I definitely do recognize and know the culture depicted in the film, even if I never really felt a part of it.

I admit that sometimes I forget just how people talk back home and it’s a shock when I visit. The manner of speaking in this film is a very authentic example of western North Carolina speech. If you have any interest whatsoever in bluegrass music and how it’s really played in the Deep South, I urge you to spend nineteen minutes watching this film. You won’t regret it.

The music is absolutely fantastic. I particularly liked the pun-laden knickknacks. Here’s a list of all the awards this movie has won.

In case you’re curious of just how small the town is, you can have a look around on Google Street View. That’s the barber shop with the white awning and the pickup truck. Give a 360º spin to really appreciate the locale.

Unfortunately, two years ago, the head barber, Lawrence Anthony, the first person to talk in the film, passed away. His son intends to fulfill his father’s wish to keep the shop open. Since then, the shop has sustained some water damage and is in need of repair. You can find a follow-up video and a link to donate to Lawrence Anthony’s nonprofit Barbershop Preservation Fund here. I’ve just made a donation.

It would be a true shame to lose this culture. Thank you so much to Matt Morris for documenting it.