Café

(I should have posted this a few weeks ago, sorry!)

I’m officially a “regular” at my favorite café. It’s called Cáscares and after several weeks of loyal patronage, my (endearingly grumpy) waiter finally paused, smiled, and said: “Hola, ¿qué tal?”

This place is great – it’s got a long bar, always stocked with croissants, donuts and various tapas. Bookshelves packed with colorful books separate the bar area from the restaurant. It’s well-lit with warm, friendly light and feels spacious despite a consistent crowd of regulars who have stopped in for lunch with friends, a drink on the way home from work, a caña and tapas with co-workers around three, or perhaps a quick café on the way from one place to another. I nearly always see a group of 40-something men in suits, often accompanied by one or two fabulously-dressed women, standing at the bar sipping on cervezas and gesticulating animatedly with their cigarettes or the toothpicks they’ve just used to spear a yummy golden wedge of tortilla española, and laughing in that easy irresistible way that can only arise as the organic overflow of satisfaction with life.

Cáscares provides the perfect ratio of laid-back to cheerfully busy, with good food and interesting clientele, and despite its chic décor it is a firmly traditional Spanish cafetería that gracefully merges the modern with the classic without missing a beat. The mercifully high ceilings welcome the upward drift of cigarette smoke and persistent café chatter so that their presence merely flavors one’s sensory experience, rather than overwhelming it.

All of these things converge to form the perfect background atmosphere for my musings and, fuelled by the fantastic café con leche and the occasional delicious slice of chocolate cake, I always find myself pulling out my notebook to make note of the various rich details of Spanish life that I have spent so long observing and trying to absorb.

From what I can tell, “cáscares” comes from “cáscara,” which means shell or peel, although personally I like to think that it means “cocoon,” because that’s what it feels like: a warm safe space that, insulated with good vibes and nourished by good coffee, allows me to do some linguistic and cultural growth before reemerging into the real world again.

Part of this growth, I think, is to just sit for a while and enjoy. That is the most Spanish thing to do, after all. And when I finally pack up my stuff to leave, my waiter says “hasta luego” with a wave, because, needless to say, I will be back.

¡Más Fotos!

Here are pictures of Getafe (southern Madrid, where my university is), and getting there and back from Madrid. Also last weekend we went up north and visited the regions La Rioja (where the wine Rioja comes from) and País Vasco (Basque Country). The pictures are of Burgos (birthplace of the written Spanish language), Haro (where we visited a bodega and drank some good wine), San Sebastian (BEAUTIFUL), and Bilbao (mostly the Guggenheim, but gosh is that city beautiful too).

Grocery Shopping

So I’m in Madrid again, in my lovely little apartment near Plaza de España, feeling decidedly more Spanish than this time last semester. I’ve been spending a lot of time at the grocery store lately (seeing as I finally am able to cook my own food, and all). Ordinarily, I love grocery shopping. Back in the states I have been known to plan my day around going to Trader Joe’s to ensure that I have a large block of free time in which to put in my headphones and stroll around, taking as long as I please.

But here it is not so. The first time I went to my local Corte Inglés supermarket I was there for quite a while, but rather than relishing in the vast gastronomical landscape I felt a rather jarring sense of confusion. I wandered through the maze-like aisles, with my little basket-cart trailing obediently behind me, feeling disorientated by the seeming lack of organization (for instance, why are there two bread sections?).

I was intimidated by the produce section because I couldn’t pick my own fruit or vegetables but rather had to request them from the supermarket employee with the sterile-looking gloves and hair net – like a deli, but for bananas. I appreciate that this is to ensure that my vegetables remain uncontaminated by the germs from shoppers’ sticky fingers, but the prospect of trying to articulate my rather particular produce preferences to this formidable Spanish lady is so stressful that I have yet to buy a vegetable or fruit that does not come in a bag or box.

I nearly sprinted out of the aisle that was dedicated almost entirely to tuna – tuna in every possible form and every conceivable type of packaging (can, tin, jar, box, bag…). I hurried past boxes of tuna burgers (yes I am serious), tins of baby squid, canned lentils and chorizo, tomate frito (is that fried tomatoes? honestly, these Spaniards…), jars of pickled white asparagus, cans of mussel meat… until I emerged in the seafood section. Not being a huge fan of seafood, this was rather unfortunate. I peered through the glass at the whole shrimp with all their crumpled legs and eyes that look like little black peppercorns, and a large bulbous purple octopus – still in possession of all it’s tentacles and suckers – slouched in defeat on a scale, and watched a fishmonger slapping down enormous whole fish, fins and all, onto bed of ice – the sight and smell of which could make you forget that Madrid is neither a seaport nor part of the 19^th century.

Another sizable corner of the supermarket was dedicated to the Tienda de Jamón, where you could buy a whole leg of cured Iberian ham (hoof included) for 50 euro. I like ham, and Jamón Iberico is a particularly tasty variety that comes from black pigs who live in the southwest provinces of Spain and eat nothing but acorns, but I have to say it is a bit off-putting to see all these amputated crusty brown pig legs just hanging there in a grocery store (to be fair, it’s not very appetizing to see them all hanging in the window of a museo de jamón either).

Desperate for a bit of familiarity, I sought out the dairy section (it couldn’t be that different – everyone needs to refrigerate their yogurt), and aside from the fact that milk and eggs reside in separate, unrefrigerated aisles, it was a comforting sight. That is, until I went about trying to pick a sandwich cheese and realized that for whatever inexplicable and infuriating reason Spanish dairy producers can’t seem to be bothered to label their cheese – you know, like with a name. No, they just write “cheese” on it, say whether it is whole, semi-skimmed, or skim, and call it a day. After several frustrated minutes of trying to guess (based on texture, price, and ingredients) which package of sliced cheese was which, I gave up and just picked one at random. It turned out to be American cheese – without the American, of course.

Moving on down the aisles, I found myself in the row of “international” foods, with such exotic things as tortillas, salsa (very mild), and – holiest of holy – peanut butter. It was allotted only one row of one shelf, and came in a single variety (creamy salted), but I have never been so happy to see a jar of Skippy in my entire life.

In a country where eggs are treated as a meat and tuna is for all intents and purposes a vegetable, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that the supermercado is so, well… Spanish. Seeing how Spanish life is translated into its food makes me think about my beloved American grocery stores and what our large grocery carts, well-labeled cheese, germy vegetables and modestly packaged meats might say about us. On second thought, maybe I’d rather not think about that…

Pictures!

FINALLY, pictures from Santiago and Portugal, Toledo, Valencia, Segovia, Sevilla and Córdoba, Madrid, Granada, and Extremadura (Guadalupe, Cáceres, Mérida and Trujillo). I'm sorry it took me so long!

Also, yes, those are square watermelons.

The Cultural Halfway House

Being stuck for three days in the general vicinity of the Madrid International Airport might be at the bottom of the list of things I would have liked to be doing during the last few days before Christmas, but alas, there I was. My flight to Boston via Zurich was canceled due to the ridiculous amount of snow clogging runways on both sides of the Atlantic, so Swiss Airlines ever so kindly put me up in a hotel to wait until the next available flight. I felt a bit like I was passing through a cultural halfway house on my way from my Spanish home to my American one.

Everyone in the hotel spoke English and Spanish, and thus all my conversations inevitably included both. But the hotel staff just switched back and forth with me as if this was absolutely normal (apparently Spanglish is the official language in this in-between place). Lunch was available between 1:00 and 3:00 pm, gracefully encompassing both the traditional American and Spanish mealtimes, and all instructions and pamphlets were also written in both languages.

The “meals” section of my bilingual hotel handbook included a list of the caloric and nutritional contents of most of the available dishes (for the “health-conscious traveler,” i.e. for Americans). It also included little symbols next to the meals that are “heart healthy,” low-calorie, or vegetarian. This is the first time I have seen such things in Spain.

I felt comfortable among these familiar American food neuroses (my mere existence as a girl in America’s culture makes this well-known territory), yet I also felt a new distaste for such unnecessary anxiety. I’ve never liked this obsession we seem to have about food, but now it seems just plain silly. How many books have been written entirely about food? I’ve spent four and a half months in a country where “splenda” is the mispronunciation of “espléndida.” Food is supposed to be a source of nutrition, not stress. You either take your coffee with sugar or you don't. How simple.

In my lovely three-and-a-half star halfway house, I found myself attended to with impeccable upscale, American-style service (except without the tips), yet not without a touch of that famous I’m-being-judgmental-for-your-own-good Spanish attitude. On the one hand the hotel staff were so polite and helpful that it almost made me embarrassed to ask anything of them, yet on the other hand the concierge (who should be the most obliging and least judgmental of all the hotel staff) just couldn’t seem to resist pointing out to me how much money I was spending on phone calls. For my whole time in Spain, I have just not been able to get my mind around the idea that someone working for a company would openly disapprove of and discourage a customer’s decision to spend money in a way that directly benefits the company (I hope that doesn’t make me a republican). It’s kind of like closing your store for the entire afternoon so you can take a nap. Do you not care that you’re sabotaging your own business? No, of course not. I equal parts love it and find incredibly frustrating.

On the second day I took an excursion to the airport to get cold medicine at the pharmacy, and I was shocked to see how much the situation there had deteriorated since the day before. Terminal 1 of Barajas was packed with people camped out on their carts of luggage, blocking so much of the check-in area that there was only space for a single-file line to pass in each direction. Women were sitting on suitcases nursing babies, children were sleeping curled up on coats on the floor, and several people held hand-made signs saying “¡Déjanos volver!” (“Let us go back!”). I felt like I had accidentally taken a bus to the refugee camp of exhausted and cranky travelers. And, in typical Spanish fashion, some of them were protesting. I wondered if any of them had considered that there really was no point in protesting against the weather, since there’s not a whole lot that even a non-bankrupt airline can do about a tundra in New England.

That’s another thing I don’t totally get about the Spanish: it certainly is a terrible thing to be spending an unspecified number of wretched hours living on top of your suitcase on the floor of an airport during the hectic week before Christmas, but it would never occur to me to protest. I would just do what I did, which was go back to my complementary hotel room, make expensive phone calls to the Swiss Air reservations department until they confirmed me on another flight, and then bill the phone calls to the airline. Efficient and effective – and no camping on suitcases necessary.

But what struck me about the situation at Barajas was the solidarity amongst all these weary travelers: let us go home – all of us camped out here on the floor in front of your desks. We all want to go home for Christmas.

It’s very interesting to see what role culture plays in how people handle situations like this. My first instinct is to figure out how to get myself home, while my Spanish counterparts decide to spend their time objecting to the principle of leaving hundreds of people stranded in an airport – for everyone’s sake. I guess they really are socialists.

Being at my hotel, I wasn’t really in Spain anymore (or I would have been slumped down on my duffel bag in Terminal 1), but I wasn’t in the US yet either. I spent three days in a sleek-looking, Spanglish-speaking in-between place with room service and a minibar.

Do I love Spain? Oh yes. Am I ready to be home? More than anything. But what I realized during my comfortable stay in this cultural halfway house is that those feelings are not incompatible. Madrid is dazzling, exciting, wonderfully different and thrilling to explore, but as a friend recently said to me, America is home – it’s where I’m from – and that makes it irreplaceable.

The curious nature of curiosity

So I’m taking this journalism class called “The history of writing, printing… (and something else)”, and I am only taking it because I needed the credits in order to meet my program’s requirements (nothing else fit into my schedule). But the class is so painfully boring (could you tell that from it’s title?) that my friend and I sit in the very back row with our computers and skype with each other about our weekend plans (this class is on Mondays, by the way). I think the last time I went to this class (three weeks ago?) our professor was saying something about papyrus and hieroglyphs, which I took as my cue to tune out and focus on more important (and more, um, contemporary?) things such as making a list of all the books that I have read out of the top 100 most banned books (I have read 26 of them, by the way).

The point is that this class appears to have absolutely no educational value. I think of it as kind of like the educational equivalent of really cheap beer: it’s really gross but you’ll drink it if it’s the only option because it satisfies your need for an alcoholic beverage, even though it’s just empty calories and has no nutritional value whatsoever.

In my sociology class, called Societal Problems: family and gender, we answer study questions about the readings and hand them in every Tuesday. Recently our professor handed back one of these prácticas, and as she did she started telling the class about the very original and interesting answer that I had to one of the questions, and then, as if I hadn’t slouched down in my chair enough, she told me to read my response out loud to the class (full of oh-so-guay Spanish students).

In my práctica I talked about how the culture that has been created by men and for men maintains an unattainable and contradictory fantasy of the “perfect woman.” This isn’t something I came up with myself – it’s a very basic part of domestic violence psychology. But when I finished reading it my professor said that she found it to be a unique and “curious” idea, that she thought it was different and strange – she didn’t seem to be able to get over how very “curious” it was and kept repeating the word curioso. I spent the rest of the class wondering whether or not I should be flattered. Later I told a friend about it and she immediately said, “Oh, did you analyze something?”

And she’s absolutely right. How curious indeed that I should make connections between what we’re reading in class and – oh, I don’t know – anything else. All the more curious that I have an opinion about what we’re studying. And that I chose to express it – that’s just downright loca. The more I understand what’s going on in my classes, the more I realize that I actually wasn’t missing as much as I thought. I think I was expecting that the frustratingly incoherent gobbledegook that I was trying so intently to decipher was some kind of elite-American-University-style analysis that was only exacerbating the already-exhausting language barrier.

Nope. Turns out the professor lectures, the students usually go to class and sometimes listen, and then they dutifully regurgitate the lectures in test or essay format. I felt incredibly elitist and arrogant when I found myself wondering if that even counts as a class. But it’s not that these students aren’t intelligent or capable of thoughtful analysis – it’s just that class is not where this creativity is expected to be engaged.

School is for learning concrete facts, formulas, data, etc. You learn what you need to know for your real-life job. None of this off-in-the-clouds reflective contemplation hosh-posh. Just like nobody drinks beer for its nutritional value, Spaniards don’t go to university to exercise their creative analysis.
How curious.

The Spanish "Actitud"

I mentioned before that “awkward” really isn’t a part of Spanish culture – un marrón can mean an awkward situation, but there is just no way in Spanish to call a person “awkward." I take this to mean that Spaniards are all just so guay (cool) that awkwardness simply isn’t in their genes.

As I think about it more, however, I notice that the lack of awkwardness coincides with a certain attitude of directness. For example, during the first week of classes I wanted to switch to a higher level language class because the one I was put into was much too easy, so my friend (who also wanted to switch up) and I approached the professor and, at her invitation, went to her office hours. She shares an office with the other language professor, whose class we would be switching into, and barely had we started explaining why we wanted to switch, when the two of them began chastising us in increasingly louder and faster Spanish, and we sat there, sandwiched between their two desks, our heads bobbing back and forth from one profesora to the other, trying desperately to follow what they were saying, and even more desperately trying to understand at what point exactly we had done anything to make them this mad.

To summarize, they told us that they thought we were very impatient, that they have been running this program for years and know what they are doing, that they thought we belonged in the class that we were in, but that if we were going to whine and pout about it for the whole semester then they would switch us because they didn’t want to deal with it. When I left their office I felt a bit like I had been smacked over the head with a two-by-four. Did they really think that I was impatient and whiny?? But wait - I’m not like that! I swear! I went home and wrote a very apologetic email to both of them explaining why I had wanted to switch up, that I had clearly not understood how this system works, that I trust their judgment and would be perfectly content in whichever class they thought was best. The next day they switched me up. And now they both wink and smile at me when they see me in the halls, as if it was all just so funny.

The moral of the story is that Spaniards live by the mantra: say what you mean, make your point, and then move on. No gentle tip-toeing “diplomacy” – just say it already, jeez. No beating around the bush, walking on eggshells, or any other English metaphor that really just means not saying what you ACTUALLY mean. For God’s sakes, people, say it! Better yet, yell it! Get it out there! And for the love of God - stop apologizing for everything!

…At least, that’s what I imagine Spaniards saying to Americans if they ever were to stop being so cool and Spanish for a minute and notice all of our apparently unnecessary niceties.

Don’t be too nice to your friends – being “polite” is actually rude to do with people you’re very close with, because courtesy and sugarcoating create distance between people. In circumstances of confianza (trust), rather than stumbling all over the formalities of “could you/can you/would you please…” you just say: “you’ll pass me the beans?”

In fact, if you want to show your friend that you’re mad, you’ll be super-polite. Rather than raising your voice (which is apparently not a sign of actual anger) you can just whip out your conditional-subjunctive conjugation combo and poof! You’re mad.

It is not customary to leave tips in Spain, and the wait staff might be nice and they might not. They will glower and mutter and roll their eyes as much as they please, and take their sweet time doing whatever it is that they’re doing back there, because they’re certainly not waiting on you. They don’t care what you think of them; if you like them, great - if not, well, no importa because they get paid no matter what and your opinion has nothing to do with it.

Having worked in customer service, smiling like a jackass to make tips, I can very much appreciate how liberating it would be to throw that jerk-off customer’s attitude right back in his face (act-itud!). But being a customer who is (in my opinion) very polite and appreciative, I am constantly caught off-guard by snippity, impatient salespeople. I want to say to them, hey! I am buying your stuff! Be nice to me!! But in my surprise and anxiety to not be an obnoxious American, all I ever do is blink and say lo siento…

Spaniards are feisty, and they like it that way. Everybody seems to snap at everybody, but nobody seems to be actually angry. It’s as if they want you to yell back at them, to retaliate in the lively, brash lengua corriente, so that they know what kind of cajones you got. The more aggressive and offensive you are, the higher your score. Bonus points for expressive hand gestures. Well, if they are measuring according to the degree of in-your-face retaliation, then I have absolutely no cajones whatsoever. Unfortunately, you don’t get credit for thinking feisty responses in English, or for muttering them to yourself in Spanish after the fact. Nope, it must be an organic eruption of irate Spanish passion - or it don’t count. But in the heat of the moment, of course, all I can manage to do is blink furiously and stalk off in mute frustration.

Spanish men, in helping themselves to a hearty (and maddeningly obvious) once-over as a woman passes and offering up their choice of provocative comments, almost seem like they too want you to yell back – put them in their place. (Or maybe they seem like they want that because I want to do it so badly). Oh boys, you had better wish I don’t get an even semi-coherent grasp on colloquial Spanish anytime soon… you just wait. If there is one time I really, really wish I could whip around in a fiery Spanish non-rage with wonderfully expressive, perfectly-formed profanities sailing effortlessly from my mouth, it would be on the street between the hours of 2 and 6 am. Well, actually, on the street at any hour. And really, I feel like Spain is just waiting for me to be able to do this, and each time I come closer and closer to actually doing it. They want me to do it, and I want me to do it, so why the &$%$#@ can’t I $#%*@*¥# do it already!?? @*&%!!

And my language professors call me impatient? Bahh.