Skipping Town

This afternoon, working at home, I was startled by a loud knock at the door. Thinking it might be the super--the electricity was strangely sporadic yesterday--and failing to see anyone clearly through our scratched-up peephole, I opened the door, only to be faced with a grim Jehovah's Witness, offering me a flier that would, presumably, save my soul. Remembering my mistake last time, when I inadvertantly propositioned the Witness by telling him my boyfriend wasn't home, this time I said loudly "NO GRACIAS" and closed the door in his face. I lacked the language skills to even make a pretense of being polite.

Tonight, feeling a bit ambitious, I decided to make a fusilli-with-wild-mushroom recipe that I made several times in New York and loved. Going in, there were obstacles. I don’t actually have the recipe here in Spain, but I was sure I could remember the important parts, and improvise the rest. I don’t know the translations for any of the types of mushrooms I like to put in, but I rounded up a few that looked similar: dark, dried mushrooms in a small box, sliced white mushrooms in a Styrofoam tray, and a can of what seemed to resemble shitake mushrooms (which, I know, don’t ordinarily come in a can, but I was improvising). And our grocery store had no fusilli, so I chose regular penne instead. I soaked the dried mushrooms, boiled the pasta, and cooked everything up with olive oil and thyme. It smelled delicious. When we began eating, Andrew praised the meal, claiming he loved it. However, I soon noticed that he was covertly pushing all the mushrooms to one side of his plate and eating ju...

After over a month of living in Spain and regularly lurching through my repertoire of ten or so vocabulary words, it was somewhat of a relief to be in London for the weekend, where I could once again request a glass of water and eavesdrop on the Tube. Andrew and I flew to London on Thursday night. My favorite part of EasyJet—and there aren’t many, it truly being bare bones, without even a cup of water available fee-free on board—is the small sign on the back of each seat reading “Seatbelts must remain fastened whilst seated.” It’s the “whilst” I love, such urbanity among the garish orange-clad flight attendants and the crumbs falling on my skirt from my airport-purchased sandwich. There’s also the somewhat shocking safety lecture, easily ignored on most flights but rather captivating here since it’s punctuated with copious instructions on what position to assume if we suddenly hear someone yell “BRACE! BRACE!” Brace, brace, is repeated several times. This would be a meet-the-parents’-f...

This weekend, on both Friday and Saturday night, Andrew and I found ourselves getting home around the time the sun started coming up. This is not necessarily an unusual thing when we decide to have a night out, since Spanish nightlife doesn’t get going until around 2 or 3 in the morning. It was, however, unusual for us to have such a night two nights in a row. On Friday night, we went to Bikini, a huge club with several rooms, many bars, and an abundance of go-go dancers, both male and female. The male dancers were ridiculously chiseled; they looked like they were wearing sculpted plastic suits. At regular intervals, the scantily-clad dancers would leave the elevated platform, and a single male dancer would make his entrance. He had long black hair and wore a long, black, cassock-like garment with a brooch of sorts at the collar, which, in the strobe light, looked like the visible inch of a priest’s white collar. He began dancing dramatically, interpretively, not in the style you’d ima...

A few weeks ago, we ate at Canota, near our apartment, intent on having a meat-focused meal. We’d both been quite tired and I suspected we both needed some iron and protein after several weeks of crackers, cheese, and salad (this was pre-big-pot purchase). We’d eaten at Canota once before, months ago, and had a revolting meal. Andrew had unwittingly ordered blood sausage and lima beans, mistranslating the menu, and I’d unwisely ordered sodden cod that was drowning in butter and salt. The food was virtually inedible. Meanwhile, the restaurant was crowded, and everyone seemed to be ordering the same thing: platters of sizzling meat. We heard it sizzling throughout the restaurant as waiters delivered the platters to table after table. It looked ridiculously good. We chalked up the terrible meal to our own failure to do as the locals were very obviously doing. This time, the meal was a success. We weren’t sure what on the menu would lead to a delivery of a platter of sizzling meat, so Andr...

Last night was a big night for soccer: the night of the European championship. Barcelona was playing Arsenal, a team from London, and the match took place in Paris. Andrew and I went to a small bar in a weird shopping mall near the beach, which friends of his from school had rented out for the evening. Because the bar was full only of Andrew’s classmates, there were approximately 60 men and around 7 women, a typical ratio. London scored early on, and as the first half ended and the clock in the second half steadily ticked away, the Barcelona team—and I’ll attempt to make a critical comment about a sporting event here—panicked and started playing desperately, missing all their shots. There was a lot of drama on both sides, with players who were barely bumped making sweeping, dramatic falls to the ground, often punctuated with rolling, writhing, and grimacing. I gasped each time, thinking the player looks to be in genuine pain, while everyone in the bar yells things along the lines of “F...

No matter what the lore of the laundromat—soulmates found and so forth—I never liked doing laundry in New York. A basket of clean, dry, folded clothes was satisfying, but getting to that point was never fun. In my first apartment, near Columbia, there were washers and dryers in the basement of the building—but there were also gigantic, slow-moving cockroaches, so going to the basement was a horror. In my second apartment, near Columbia but actually in Harlem, I had to walk one block and one avenue to the laundromat, pulling my laundry along in a wheeled suitcase. The laundromat there was filthy—the clothes always seemed dirtier after being there, not cleaner—and there were always several wild children running around, screaming and knocking things over. Once, a child hurtling through the laundromat knocked over my open bottle of laundry detergent, which I’d (unwisely, I see now) balanced on top of my suitcase while I arranged the clothes in their washers. Detergent poured into the suitc...

I've finally procured a large cooking pot. I had a frustrating afternoon of running around Barcelona trying to find a pot, thwarted in my efforts first by the stunningly high prices at El Corte Ingles, a department store, and then by the closing of all possible cooking-pot shops for siesta. I had a less-than-enamoured-with-Spain moment. But I finally found a pot in a home-accoutrements store near our apartment, for a reasonable price. The pot is not glamourous, not nearly as nice as my heavy, heirloom-quality pot I have packed up in a box in Connellsville. "Are you sure this pot is okay?" Andrew asked, dubiously pinging the bottom with his knuckles. "Are you sure it won't catch on fire?" I was pretty sure. So we bought it. Yesterday afternoon, we went to the grocery store to buy some things to cook in the pot, including some vegetables. Buying vegetables in a Spanish grocery store is a fairly daunting task, since after putting the chosen vegetable in a plast...

The day I left New York was so hectic, with packing last boxes and loading the Uhaul and carrying armloads of things to the curb, that when I finally locked my apartment door—the crazy landlord waiting right behind me, his hand outstretched for the key—it was a shock to suddenly find myself on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn, essentially homeless. No longer a New Yorker but someone about to begin a long journey away from it. Barbra and Chris had helped us pack all morning, but they were gone now. The crazy landlord had disappeared—back to the Queens, back to the Keys, who knew?—as soon as he pocketed the key. It was just me and Andrew and the Uhaul...and the microwave sitting between us on the sidewalk. I’d sold almost all my furniture, and it had trickled out of my apartment in the days and weeks before the move; the rest I’d put by the curb, hardly blinking before someone scooped each item up. The only thing that remained was the microwave. A man had called me several times that morning, aski...

In a desperate attempt to add variety to our dismal dinner options, tonight at the grocery store we found attractive a can of tapas-style meatballs with peas. On the can, they looked tasty, which suggests how bored we really are with our usual selections. I had assumed we'd make pasta as usual, with our usual tomato sauce, and eat the tapas-style meatballs with peas on the side. Once the pasta was done cooking, however, and the tapas-style meatballs with peas were done simmering in their own small pot, I reached for the jar of tomato sauce--but Andrew stopped me. "Just mix it in," he said, indicating that I should just pour the tapas-style meatballs with peas in their sauce over the pasta. "Mix it in?" I said. "Just mix it," he said. So I mixed the spaghetti with the tapas-style meatballs and peas. There are two points to this story. First, there is something inherently disgusting about canned meatballs--there's just no getting around that, no matt...

I went for a long walk today to the top of Montjuic, all the way up to the Olympic Stadium. There are some nice gardens and beautiful views along the way, and the ornate National Palace is visible the whole climb up. For the past couple of days there has been abundant sunshine, but the air is still cool, even chilly when the wind blows. It was a lovely day for a long walk. When I neared the top of the hill, a man standing by a bus stop addressed me in Spanish as I passed by. He held a map in one hand and a cigar in the other, and he was gesturing at the map with the cigar. He was struggling to ask me a question. It seemed like he didn't really speak Spanish, but I didn't know for sure. "No hablo espanol," I said, holding my hands up to ward off further speech. He looked at me, and I looked at him. It was a strange, awkward moment. He had addressed me in halting Spanish, to which I responded "I don't speak Spanish," also in halting Spanish. What now? I wa...

Dinner is proving to be a challenge. Not willing to eat cereal or crackers and cheese for dinner every night, as my dear novio was before I arrived, I'm trying to expand our dinner options beyond pasta but have, I'm afraid, reached an impasse. We have a kitchen, but we don't know how to use the weird oven, which you have to light--somehow, somewhere--with a match. We have no measuring cups, measuring spoons, sharp knives, or mixing bowls. We don't have a large pot, or glass Pyrex pans (not that we can use the oven anyway). No blender or food chopper. Andrew said we didn't have a can opener, but there was, thankfully, one in the drawer. Only yesterday did I finally find salt and pepper at the grocery store. Besides pasta, omelettes and other egg-related dishes, salads, and toasted-cheese sandwiches, we have few selections, unless we start buying frozen food items, which seems to be an unnecessary, college-type last resort. I suppose you could argue that there are an ...

I went to a crazy English-language-used-bookstore today and saw my first kooky ex-pat. He runs the bookstore, I'm assuming, which is basically just a decrepit little shop with piles of books in absolutely no order on tables. There was a strange, cluttered kitchen in one corner, the counters overflowing with what looked to be stale bags of pastries and dirty coffee mugs. He directed me to the back room when I asked about travel guides, and part of the back room looked like basement storage--part of the ceiling was even open to the outside. There were a couple of broken, low-to-the-ground armchairs and a small table supporting a beer bottle and more dirty mugs. Not quite the cozy place it could be, the shop instead felt like the inside of someone's attic or a haphazard flea market stall. Or just a big room where boxes of books were dumped out and forgotten. It had an end-of-the-road look, like the grizzled backpackers on the Ramblas. The bookshop owner was listening to something ...

A very large conejo (rabbit) lives in the courtyard below our apartment, and during the day I sometimes see it peeking around the corner of its little basement area. It is a timid, slow-moving conejo, and I've seen it move from its corner spot only a couple of times. I took this picture from our balcony last August, zooming in on the conejo. When Andrew first moved into this apartment, he swore the conejo was actually a cat, not a conejo. It's really difficult to tell the difference, since the conejo has a sleek, long body and sits very still, with its paws in front of it, much like a cat. However, during the contract-signing with the landlord, Jordi, before Andrew moved in, Jordi informed us that we couldn't use the apartment for any commercial activity--"Like raising rabbits," he said. I am the only one who heard Jordi say this. However, it makes sense, since there is indeed a rabbit in the apartment below. Eventually, Andrew saw the conejo hop, so he conceded t...

More on Valencia... With our own car and our own schedule, we weren’t in too much of a hurry to get back to Barcelona when we left Valencia on Monday morning. We had café con leche and madelenas at our hotel, and, the sky cloudy and the air cool, headed up the coast, intending to find a small beach town to stop in for lunch. According to our wholly inadequate map, in the fully inadequate Valencia section of our Lonely Planet Spain guidebook, we’d reach a small town called Sagunto right at lunchtime. As usual, we got lost immediately upon leaving the hotel. This had proven to be a theme of our weekend away. We had decided to take this road trip to Valencia somewhat at the last minute; we’d planned to take a train, but the return trains were sold out, so we rented a car instead. We didn’t really think about buying a road map, figuring we’d easily find Valencia if we just headed south on the main highway, autopisto 7. Indeed, we got to Valencia without much trouble, but we were hopelessly...

Finally getting around to writing some things about my trip to Valencia... The brides appeared as soon as we exited the Metro onto the sunny streets of Valencia, meandering through the town on our way to lunch at Pizzeria La Vita e Bella. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and even that was just a café con leche and a croissant inhaled at the bar of the small café inside the metro stop at Espanya, near home. It was getting on toward four p.m., late for lunch even by Southern Spain standards. We were so hungry that neither of us noticed much of the walk on the way to the restaurants. But the brides in store windows were hard to miss. In window after window, beautiful wedding dresses were modeled on headless mannequins, each dress more unique and more wonderful than the last. We turned down a side street and finally found some lunch. We arrived at the centre of the old city in late afternoon and peeked inside a church called Nuestra Senora de los Desamparados. A wedding was underway, the b...

Andrew and I have chosen the destination for a weekend trip in June: Santiago de Compostela, a small town in the northwestern part of Spain, in the Galicia region, and the final destination of many pilgrims who walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, a pilgram trail. It's the kind of town where museum discounts are offered to senior citizens, students, and pilgrims. It looks beautiful. As we looked through stacks of Santiago hotel brochures we'd picked up at the Tourism Expo this weekend, trying to choose a place to stay, we noticed that many of the nicer hotels listed "piped music" as one of the room amenities, along with linens, mini bar, private bathroom, and so forth. Piped music? Like Musak? This is apparently some kind of widely-accepted nonsensical translation of something, but we're not sure what. Radio? CD player? The hotel we chose doesn't offer piped music, so I'll have to do some outside investigation to find out what this is.

I found out yesterday that the celebratory soccer riot that seemed so harmless and happy did, eventually, turn a bit violent. Twelve people were arrested for breaking windows and streetlamps. One of Andrew's friends had been there; he denied that things had been too crazy. Then he held out his palm--there was a hideous burn mark the size of a quarter. He dismissed it as nothing; he'd simply grabbed onto something that had been on fire.

I met Andrew at IESE today after his classes to watch a series of four short plays put on by his MBA classmates who are in the drama club. The idea of a drama club at an internationally renowned business school gave me pause. First, among team meetings, classes, enormous reading assignments, exams, and so forth, I couldn't imagine any IESE student having time to write, cast, rehearse, and perform a play. Second, and perhaps more troubling, is the idea that a large group of MBA students who are racking up debts in excess of $100,000 are still struggling with a Love of Acting that generally seems to afflict only high school kids and anyone unfortunate enough to major in Musical Theatre in college. Andrew suggested that these MBAers wanted to try their hand at acting to improve their management styles. In any case, these four short plays turned out to be a really big deal on campus. Tons of students went to see them--so many that they were divided up into two groups, so each short pla...

Among the many (minor) concerns I had about moving to Spain, how I'd manage to spend my days while Andrew is in class was not one of them. However, this is the first question people ask Andrew when they ask how I'm doing. Sometimes they gasp when they find out I don't have a job. "She's home alone all day?" they ask, amazed and concerned. "What does she do?" They think I'm bored and lonely. They're wrong, of course. Days are never long enough for all the things I'd like to do. How do I spend my days? I get up early, shower, have coffee. I work on freelance stuff, do my own writing, read. I walk in the city and stop for a cafe con leche at a sidewalk cafe. I email and write my blog postings. Once I have less freelance work to do, I'll go to the beach and to museums, linger longer in the cafes, write more. I want to get yarn to do more crocheting. One of these days I'll be taking Spanish classes, and my learning of Spanish will invo...

Last night, Andrew and I went down to the Barri Gotic to an Irish bar to watch a soccer game. Barcelona (FC Barcelona--there are two Barcelona teams; I'm still trying to figure out the whole thing) was playing against Celta, another Spanish team from, we believe, somewhere in the north. It was my first-ever soccer game, and I liked it quite a bit. I found it much more interesting (don't tell Andrew) than baseball or football. And the players all looked really fun and happy. Barcelona won the game, which meant that they'd clinched a championship of some kind--the Spanish championship. They were now the "campiones." This was a big, big deal. When we left the bar, masses of people wrapped in FC Barcelona scarves and flags were parading down the narrow Calle Ferran, singing soccer songs (there are a surprising number of them), chanting, and cheering. Huge bottles of beer were being waved around (no public drinking laws here). Sometimes one group would start a song and...

It's official: I live in Spain. When we got back from Valencia on Monday, I logged on to the Northwest website and cancelled my return ticket, which had been scheduled for yesterday. I'd booked the round-trip because it was cheaper than the one-way and would raise fewer questions at passport control, but that return ticket is now gone. I'm here and I'm staying!

Yesterday, someone knocked on my door while I was home alone, working on Bleak House. I knew I'd be unable to speak to whoever it was but thought it might be a mail delivery of some sort, an interaction that can be easily mimed. I opened the door a few inches to find a black-suit-clad Jehovah's Witness, holding out a booklet and saying things in Spanish. Shaking my head, I shrugged and said, "No hablo espanol." He said, "Ah," then continued to speak to me in Spanish. He seemed to be asking me some questions, like if this was my apartment. "Si," I said. As he continued to speak, I said, "Mi novio no aqui"--"My boyfriend no here." I assumed this would be easily understood to mean "My boyfriend, who speaks Spanish, isn't here right now." Later, however, Andrew pointed out that I'd actually given this Jehovah's Witness a provocative invitation, akin to a winking, bathrobe-wearing housegirlfriend greeting the el...