Desayuno

The first meal of the day. i.e. breakfast. It’s even a compound word, like “breakfast”, since ayuno means “fast” (as in not eating), and des- is a negating prefix, so you’re literally “un-fasting”. Unlike the US or the UK, the typical Spanish breakfast is very light and completely devoid of protein. The most common breakfast is a café con leche with some type of pastry or cookies.

I always assumed that Spanish farmers or other people that do long hours of manual labor in the mornings probably eat a heartier breakfast, but I know a few of them and they don’t.

A typical Spanish breakfast: coffee with milk and a pastry.

Almuerzo

This one is complicated. The dictionary says it’s “food eaten in the morning or midday”. Spanish-to-English dictionaries always translate it to “lunch” and there are those who use it synonymously with comida, but I think the best English translation would be “brunch”. The few times I’ve had one, it was more substantial than a simple snack or tapa, and left me with no desire to have lunch afterwards. It’s normally served at around noon, or just before.

Interestingly, almuerzo breaks the etymological rule of thumb that most Spanish words starting with al- came from Arabic. This word comes from the Latin word for “bite”.

A typical Spanish almuerzo: a concoction of fried eggs, bacon in a tomato sauce, served at noon with plenty of wine.

Comida

Translating best to “lunch”, this is the primary, and largest, meal of the day, eaten at midday. However, what the Spanish call “midday” is not what an American would call “midday”. In Spain, they eat their lunch between 2:00 PM and 4:00 PM. Most shops are closed during this time and reopen at 5:00 PM until about 8:00 PM. While the noun comida and verb comer mean “lunch” and “to have lunch”, they are also more generally used to mean “food” and “to eat”, and there is rarely any confusion.

Traditionally the midday meal consists of two courses, one of which normally requires a spoon to eat, like a soup or legume stew, the other is usually rice (e.g. paella), pasta or a small serving of meat. All restaurants assume that you will be having two courses. In daily home cooked practice, however, one course is all we ever eat.

Last time I checked, nutritionists and dietitians agree that it’s healthiest to have your biggest meal in the middle of the day like the Spaniards, rather than at the end as the Americans do. It may be healthier, but it can make it difficult to become productive again in the afternoon, especially if there was any wine involved.

A typical Spanish lunch: beans with wild boar, followed by…

…a steak with fried potatoes.

Merienda

This is another in-between meal – like the almuerzo – and best translates to “afternoon snack”. I never really heard it used until I became a parent and saw that every Spanish child has an afternoon snack of some sort, be it a piece of fruit or a small sandwich. From what I can tell, most adults don’t eat the merienda, but I suppose the word could be used for some British-style tea and cookies.

A typical Spanish merienda: a small serrano ham sandwich.

Cena

The final meal of the day is strangely similar to the US or UK breakfast: high in protein. Eggs are a common ingredient, often in a tortilla de patata (Spanish omelet). Meats and cheeses are often included. If you go out to a restaurant, sandwiches and hamburgers are a common supper.

A typical Spanish dinner: tortilla de patata.

If there’s one thing Spaniards love, it’s food, and I think it shows in their language. Of course no one ever eats all five meals, but no matter what time of the day you get hungry, you’ve got a Spanish noun and verb to use.

He also speaks up at The Last Supper in John 14:5. Jesus assures his disciples that they know where he is going, but Thomas protests that they don’t know at all.

In Thomas’s best known appearance in the New Testament, John 20:24-29, he doubts the resurrection of Jesus and demands to feel Jesus’ wounds before being convinced.

An apostle with critical thinking skills and an emphasis on evidence-based belief!??! Go Tommy-boy! It’s too bad he’s just a literary tool to silence future skeptics.

These are talos, flat bread that meat, typically txistorra, is wrapped in. The lines were at least an hour long, so we didn’t have any.

The txistorra is typically consumed with a glass of sidra.

These knock-offs of trademarked personalities always crack me up. Check out Pooh Bear Dog.

This is the path, looking towards the hotel, my wedding procession walked. I said to Marga, “This festival would be a lot more fun with about 70% of the people.” And she said, “Yes, I’m sure they feel the same way about you.”

Some future txistorra napping in a crate.

The masses gather to see crafts booths under the horrible gray structure they built last year that looks like a gas station.

Baaaaa-shful.

An adorable little baby goat with his adorable little hornlets.

A disturbing boar creature that will come get you while you sleep if you don’t buy cheese from this booth.

Henson knock-offs.

A better view of the talos with some sweet, sweet bacon frying in the background. I think the talos are corn-flour-based.

Doh! A deer! A female deer!

This little week-old burrito got a lot of attention.

(here come the “is it okay to eat a week-old burrito?” googlers…)

Mmmm!!! Donkey milk!

My sister-in-law, Belén, insisted that I get certain activities on video to show my mother, to whom she had proudly written an English email about the Santo Tomás festivities, particularly the dancing. So here they are.

For lunch, we were invited to join Belén and about 25 friends to a meal in a restaurant.

This is how sidra should be poured. I love the captured droplets in this shot.

Sing along with me here:

Cider Man, Cider Man,
Fills a glass with cider, man!
Pours it high, let’s it fall!
Not a splash on the wall.
Here comes Cider Man!!!

Basque sisters.

Some handsome Basque gentleman that stopped by.

Belén was beaming all day because she’d received flowers and a digital camera from her boyfriend for their third anniversary. Man, time flies!

We literally spent from 2pm to 2am between bars ordering drinks. When our feet and livers couldn’t take anymore, we walked home briskly through the brisk night air.

Marga explained that -txu is an endearing diminutive suffix in Basque. So “Maritxu” is sort of like “Little Mary”.

When we arrived in Mondragon, it was foggy and raining. We got dressed and went down to see the singing. Marce and I got there first, and she suggested that we get right up against the barrier to “see better”. When Marga and Belén came a few minutes later, Belén told us that if we were that close, we’d almost certainly get hurt or burned by the fireworks. So we backed off. We ended up waiting there for 30-40 minutes while the street filled up with people.

I certainly wouldn’t call myself agoraphobic, but I really dislike being in a situation when I’m physically pressed up against other people. My tolerance for this is particularly low when I’m stone cold sober, like I was on Friday night. To deal with my discomfort, I decided to watch and evaluate how uncomfortable everyone else was. No one likes being pushed. It was particularly interesting to watch someone trying to move from one place to another, thereby pushing other people around to make a path. From the person in motion, a compression wave of animosity would radiate out like the wake of a boat. Moving person pushes person A, who gets upset, but before they can get too upset, person B, who person A bumped into, starts bitching at person A for pushing them, but then they’re interrupted by person C on the on their other side, etc. etc. etc. Everyone was really as miserable as I. In the front, there were some teenagers that thought it would be fun to annoy people and start what are called avalanchas, forcibly pushing people around just to annoy. See video below:

This was the environment I was in when my colleague, Alan, called my cell phone from work. It’s usually some kind of emergency when such a call is made, but I was unable to hear anything he said, and unable to do anything to help him even if I could. He described what he heard as, “It sounded like you were in a room of a thousand people who were told to scream as loud as they could.” Pretty close.

Just before the event began, some Basque separatists used the opportunity to make a political statement. It’s pretty annoying to have your presence somewhere be exploited to make it look like you support a cause that you don’t. They knew there would be a crowd, so they took the opportunity to hold up posters saying “PSOE Facista”. The PSOE is the current governing party in Spain. They’re the more liberal of the two main parties (the S and O stand for “socialist” and “workers”). I suppose from the point of view of separatists, the government you’re trying to free yourself from would seem fascist. Everything is political in the Basque country. Apparently, earlier that day, there was a demonstration in Mondragon with police firing rubber bullets at the protesters. Glad we missed that.

Belén told me that the sign reads, “We aren’t all here.” The photos are often seen around Mondragon. They are the ETA terrorists that are in prison for, well, terrorism. The shape is that of the Basque Country.

I remember when I first came to Mondragon. One of my first thoughts when in a packed bar looking around at people was, “So this is why the Spaniards I knew in Denmark were so amazed by all the ‘exotic’ blond women!”

Yep, not much difference between 21st century Spain and Nazi Germany. Dumbasses.

Finally, the event began. Marga and Belén assured me that normally the crowd sings better and more in sync with each other. This year, the “miracle” was extremely lame. They threw little postcard-sized pieces of construction paper, each with one of “the seven wonders of Mondragon”, a list which included a bridge and a round-a-bout. After singing the regular song, you’ll hear them singing:

Madrid se quema, se quema Madrid,
Madrid se quema, se quema Madrid,
Madrid se quema, se quema Madrid,
Se quema, se quema Madrid

“Se quema” means “burns”. The rest you can figure out. Marga and family insist that the song is lighthearted and they don’t really mean for Madrid to burn, but I think it’s a little inappropriate. Even if it’s supposedly not taken literally, the separatist cause is still being supported.

After escaping the mob, Marga and I had to drive to the wedding restaurant to drop off a paper with information about table seating. When we returned, we found Belén and her friends. They had invited us to go up into the mountains with them to an old stone house that one of their families owns and have dinner. This is a fairly common practice. The food had been bought at a caterer and left in the house. When we got there, we warmed it up and had dinner. At 2:30 AM we returned to Mondragon and Marga and I decided to call it a night, since we had lots of wedding-based errands to run in the morning. Belén headed out for more.

Belén’s friends cleaning up after dinner.

Belén pretending to study at an old student’s desk in the old house.

I loved this old radio. If you look closely, there are parts of the dial for various cities.

Part of the Maritxu experience is buying a piece of paper to wear around your neck that says “Maritxu 2007″. I’ve seen these lying around Marga’s folks house for years.

And, as far as you know, it’s a custom to untuck your shirt on one side.

Marga and Belén, back at Grandpa and Belén’s house. I’ve seen several years’ worth of Maritxu photos posed in this doorway.

Ever since learning the word for it, Belén has stopped calling me by name and now calls me “brother-in-law” in English. It’s cute for now.

In the end, I wasn’t very impressed with this Maritxu festival, particularly after the years of build-up it received. According to Belén and Marga, we didn’t really “do it right”. You’re supposed to go out for drinks early, not stand so close to the virgin, and party harder.

This dwarf lemon tree was at the flower shop where we’re buying the wedding flowers. Pretty crazy, huh?

These string instruments made from leaves were in a nearby shop window.

The next morning we went to talk to the priest that will marry us. We got to the church at 11:00. We pushed on the door and walked inside. It was completely empty. There’s something a little creepy about being in a space that large all alone. We went back to the street and called the priest.

Marga: Sir, my name is Marga, we had agreed to meet at the church this morning.
Priest: Oh, right. I forgot all about that.
Marga: We’re here now. When should we come back?
Priest: How about 12:30? Is 12:30 okay with you?
Marga [very deferentially]: Whenever is best for you, sir.
Priest: Okay, let’s make it 1:00.

From what I can tell from meeting the ones in Colindres and Mondragon, the priests in Spain have such a high level of job security that they have become incredibly lazy (isn’t that a deadly sin?). This guy couldn’t care less that I wasn’t Spanish or Catholic. Hey, man, as long as you’ve got the paperwork done, I don’t care who you are. He warned us that we’d better not be scamming him, like some Nigerians tried to do last year. It’s always the Nigerians, isn’t it? Apparently they have a marriage crime ring where you can rent a woman to come be your bride at a wedding to help falsify immigration papers. He rambled on about that for a while. In the end, the most important rules to him were those that, if not followed, would cause him extra time or work: 1) Be punctual. We have to be walking down the aisle at 13:00 sharp. 2) Tell people not to throw rice until you’re way out into the plaza, so that he doesn’t have to clean rice up from church property.

I have about 9 errands to do today. Two of them include getting my eyebrows and the car waxed.