pixels and palabras

May 10th, 2011

Here I am in Belgium, with unreliable internet and a moderate amount of free time in the evening.  I’m chaperoning a group of 38 5^th and 6^th grade students from Galicia on a trip to visit a sister school of theirs.  I’m torn as to whether or not it is appropriate to describe this place as suburban or rural.  Either way, there is not a lot of local neighborhood exploring to be had, and I can’t really leave the hotel anyway.

We got here yesterday night, and it took a full day of travel.  I left my house at 7:15 am, and we got to our hotel at 8:30 pm, 3 bus and 2 plane rides later.  Of course, just my luck, I’ve also come down with a cold.  We’ll be here for 6 more days.

Some thoughts from the ride over here, in chronological order:  Asturias is beautiful.  Just like Galicia, only the hórreos are square.  I slept through a lot of the drive to the airport, since I stayed up late the night before watching the King’s Speech, because I am a party animal.

The students I tend to like the most seem to be the ones the children like the least.  Is it a pity thing?  Is it because I am an adult now, and thus uncool in the eyes of a child, so I am naturally drawn to other uncool people?  In any case, it makes me feel bad for having disliked some classmates so strongly in elementary school.

On our arrival in Belgium, I noticed a small difference that made it apparent I was in another country: the radio.  In Spain, I take the bus nearly every day and the radio is always tuned to either Galician news or Spanish current top 40.  You hear the same music constantly, with so little variation.  It’s all Shakira all the time.  On the bus ride from the airport to the hotel, I heard Salt N Peppa, Whatta Man, a Morrissey song that was playing too quietly to make out, but it was definitely him, and Celebrate (good times, come on?).  Today, I heard Meatloaf, I Would Do Anything for Love.  I mean, these songs are clearly more than 5 years old.  I’m definitely not in Galicia anymore.

When we got to the hotel, there was a double rainbow in the sky.  What does it mean?

A thing that constantly amuses me about the people I know in Spain is their sensitivity to hot food and spices.  At dinner, we ate some minestrone, and two of my co-workers commented to me that it was spicy.  I assumed they meant just that it had a lot of spices, not that it was actually hot and spicy, so I tried to clarify.  We started discussing things that are actually spicy, not just heavily spiced, and someone mentioned ketchup.  When I objected to this, my co-worker insisted that he had indeed eaten spicy ketchup on many occasions.  But, as other Galegos have told me that garlic fries are also spicy, I’m thinking we either differ wildly in our opinions about spiciness or that some nuance is being lost in translation.  I’d assume the former, but hope for the latter.

Day Two:

Estoy fatal.  Pero fatal.  I woke up sick and have been popping pseudoephedrine and acetominaphin all day.  It’s about all that is keeping me going.  I’m not even sure how I’m still awake right now.  Perhaps it’s my internet addiction, making me do something on my computer despite being unable to connect to the WiFi.  Weefee.

Because I’ve been taking meds all day, I’ve turned down beer 4 times.  Yes, there have been 4 separate beer drinking occasions during the work day today: at lunch at the school, during an afternoon meeting/reception, again at dinner, and then back at the hotel immediately after dinner.  I guess they might not all count as “the work day” but I felt very much on the clock during all the aforementioned times.

Beer in Belgium is serious business.  There are over 400 types of Belgian beer, and each brand also manufactures their own special accompanying glass.  When you order beer out, it always comes with the proper glass, and the Belgian school director actually apologized for serving beer in the wrong glasses earlier in the day.

The school that we are visiting is an elementary school in the forest.  The building lets in a lot of natural light and has a pleasant atmosphere.  The teachers, students, and their families have all be welcoming and friendly.  My students have been making an extra effort to try to speak English, as it is the only language they have in common with the other children their age.  There are also students visiting from Malta and Finland, our two other sister schools.  My students seem to finally be catching on that I understand Spanish.  I’m surprised it took them this long, honestly.  When they ask me questions in Spanish, I answer them in English, so you would think it would be obvious, but I still get conversations that happen like this:

Student A (to Student B): in Spanish: Hey, how do you say what time are we going to the buses in English?

Student B: I don’t know.  Just ask Katy.

Student A: Yeah, but she doesn’t understand.

Student B: I don’t know, ask anyway.

Student A: (still in Spanish) Katy: what time are we going to the buses?

Me (in English): Oh, you want to know what time we are going to the buses?  We’re going to the buses in twenty minutes.  Twenty.  Minutes.

Then five minutes later, with the same students, a nearly identical conversation ensues about some other topic.

In the afternoon today, we walked through the forest and came out the other side to get ice cream from an ice cream truck.  It was pretty good, and the Belgian director told me that it is homemade.  Anyway, when my own school director mentioned the plan for the afternoon to me, she said something like, “This afternoon, at 4 o’clock we will go to the school and we will eat a delicious ice cream.”  Technically, there is nothing wrong with that sentence, but it sounds awkward to me. It got me thinking: a lot of non-native English speakers I meet in Spain use the same rather extreme adjectives over and over again.  In particular, I hear a lot of things being described as “beautiful,” “terrible,” or “delicious.”  This is a beautiful school.  These students’ projects are very beautiful.  I like this playground.  It is beautiful.  I hear this echoed in their Spanish descriptions as well, and wonder to what extent they are simplifying their language for me.

It got me thinking: what words do I use excessively in Spanish?  Do my co-workers every think to themselves, “That Cati.  She thinks everything is “muy interesante.”  Moreover, what words do I use excessively in English?

And while I’m on the subject, here is the number one mistake I hear from advanced speakers of English in Spain who make fewer other mistakes: confusing “this” with “next” in relation to the calendar.  If today is Tuesday, May 10^th, that means tomorrow, May 11^th is “this Wednesday,” not “next Wednesday.”  “Next Wednesday” would have to be May 18^th.  I feel like this is a nuanced, tricky detail in English, and I have never heard a single person get this right.  When I have tried to it explain it, people have tended to either get confused or think I don’t know what I’m talking about.  I’m sure they are thinking to themselves something along the lines of, “Well in ENGLAND, I’m positive that ‘Next Wednesday’ means tomorrow.”  Yes, it is technically the next Wednesday that will occur, but I assure you, we don’t call it that.  I know you think I speak a bastardized English, as I was raised in the former colonies, but trust me.  I know this one.

More about Belgium to come.

On Tuesdays, I have an hour to kill waiting for a bus, so lately I’ve been spending it in the park, since the rain has mostly stopped.  I’m growing increasingly popular with the little old men who take turns about the park during the daytime.  Four people randomly stopped to talk to me last week as I was reading the newspaper, although only two today.  I enjoy speaking with one man in particular, who seems to like to talk to me because he likes to see young people reading a newspaper.  He looks to be at least 80 years old, minimum.  He wanted to know what the paper said today, so I told him a lot of it was about Osama bin Laden.  He is not confident at all that Osama is dead, and is waiting for hard evidence.  (By the way, the different approach to yesterday’s events in the Spanish vs. American media could be a blog post unto itself, but I’ll maybe follow up on that another time.)  He only speaks to me in Galego, and I only speak to him in Castellano, but it works out well enough.  Later on, on a separate lap around the park, he brought over a friend to comment that when he was a young man, he too used to be able to sit on a bench cross legged, but now he can’t anymore.  He said he hoped he didn’t offend me by so forwardly discussing my sitting position.  All in all, these conversations amuse me.

I left a little before my bus was scheduled to arrive and continued reading the paper at the station.  Just as I was about to board, I noticed that an entire column on the back page was dedicated to publishing a love poem.  There was no introductory paragraph or anything putting into context why it was there.  I’m not sure if this has to do with promoting Galician writings, since Galician Literature day is coming up soon (May 17th, mark your calendars!), or if someone merely sent his poem in because he wanted to publicly and on record declare his love.  I hope that it is the latter and would like it if the Galician newspaper is in the business of facilitating that. (You can read the poem here.)

On a related note, something I’ve noticed many times living in Spain is how different the graffiti is here.  A lot of it has to do with political opinions (anti-Franco, pro-Franco, anti-Castellano, pro-Galician, pro-independence, etc.), although sometimes it’s kind of baffling.  About a week ago, I saw graffiti denouncing the wearing of striped trousers.  But a lot of what I see are declarations of love and longing, sometimes anonymous, sometimes not.  It’s everywhere and I think it’s kind of cute.*  A lot cuter than graffiti proclaiming how awesome the east side of San Jose is.

"I'll keep waiting for you"

Tell me how you really feel.

No translation needed.

*the love graffiti is cute, that is.  Some of the political graffiti is more serious, and I wouldn’t lump it all into the same category.

I kind of like talking to strangers.  I know when you are a kid, you aren’t supposed to, but that rule went out the window a long time ago.  Striking up random conversation with people I’ve never met usually leaves me in a better mood than I began with by the time we’re through.

The exception to this is when I am taking any kind of public transportation, for two main reasons: I have no way to escape the conversation, should I want to, until I arrive at my destination, and I’m usually doing something else like reading or listening to music.

So, when I found myself on a bus to Segovia from Madrid, I pulled out a book to read for the hour plus journey (do androids dream of electric sheep???  I think probably they do.)  I was at a particularly engrossing part of the book, when a man came on the bus with a ticket for the seat next to mine.  We politely exchanged hellos, and I went back to reading, but I didn’t get more than a page along before my seatmate started making small talk: How am I doing?  Do I live in Spain?  Where is Galicia?  Is my family doing well? and on and on.  I was answering his questions as concisely as possible and turning back to reading between each one, but after about 10 minutes of this, I gave up and put my book away.

Since this conversation was going to happen whether or not I felt like it, I started asking him his same questions back after responding, and he began to tell me his life story…which turned out to be fascinating.

Here’s a rundown:

He is 34 years old and speaks Spanish and French.  He has been in Spain for the last nine years, the first four of which he was an undocumented immigrant.  For the last five years, he has been here legally, and he currently works in the agriculture industry near Segovia.  He immigrated from Mali, and it took him 22 days in transit from the time he left his village to the time he arrived on Spanish soil.

In order for him to get here, he had to pass through Mali to Algeria and Morocco, close to Melilla (a Spanish exclave on the Moroccan coast), then onto a raft across the Mediterranean, until he reached Mallorca.  The cost of all aspects of the trip, including transportation, supplies, bribes, and payment to the coyotes helping him, totaled €900.  He said that is about standard, and he has paid that same amount 6 times to help his younger brother come to Spain, who didn’t make it over successfully the first time.

On his way here, he would travel as far as he could, but he would frequently get stranded for a day or two along the way, while he waited for a means of continuing on.  He took buses part of the way, but when he was in Morocco, he and 40 other passengers crowded into two small vans and spent 24 miserable hours like that driving to the Mediterranean coast.  Once they arrived, they had to buy bread and sardines, as well as water to take with them on the raft.  He waited for 5 days near Melilla while the coyotes prepared the raft.

He said that it’s really important for the paint to be thoroughly dry on the raft before they set out, because if it is wet, it won’t be properly sealed and the raft could sink and everyone on board could die.  If there is a storm, everyone could die.  If they run out of gas or if the motor breaks, everyone could die.  But he said the biggest danger is entering and leaving the water.  Getting into the water, they have to wade in as far as they can, pushing the raft ahead of them.  Once they are in far enough, they pull themselves up into the raft.  The water is rough, and people who get thrown back by the waves can drown.  In the boat itself, the coyotes sit in the middle, and the immigrants around the edges, and they have to be careful not to fall out.  When they arrive at the Spanish shore, sometimes they have to turn back if the coast is being patrolled and they are spotted.  Sometimes they don’t have enough supplies or gas to make it all the way back, and everyone dies.  Some people don’t have the heart to turn back with the rest and jump out of the boat to swim to shore, but they don’t make it.  Everyone looks out for themselves because you could die trying to save someone else.  He spent 3 days on the raft between Morocco and Spain.

When he arrived to Palma de Mallorca, he was picked up by Red Cross volunteers who gave him food and shelter.  He praised their kindness.  I asked him how he was able to stay in Spain without papers, since their arrival was discovered.  The Red Cross gave him a card that said he was a refugee, which did not grant him legal permission to be in Spain, but which prevented Spanish authorities from being allowed to repatriate him.

Not that it wasn’t already, but here is where his story became even more interesting to me:  back in Mali, he comes from a village of 3000 people.  His parents are alive and well, and he has a wife and daughter back home.  He only has one living sibling, who is also in Spain.  His village has rich soil that is red and black and they grow or raise all their own food.  It is warm and rains a lot, so the crops grow well.  Mostly, the food he misses from home are corn and peanut dishes.  Alcohol and drugs are forbidden by his religion, and people don’t go out to bars or clubs like they do in Spain.  Instead, people get together with family and friends.  Men can marry up to four wives, if they can financially support all of them and their children, but he only has the one.  He is working in Spain, but does not plan to stay here forever.  He sends money home, and will go home as soon as he feels he has saved enough to help his family become more prosperous.  Spain is too cold for him, and he misses his village.

Of the 3000 people in his hometown, 245 of them live in Spain.  I was surprised by that number.  They are all men.  He said single women from his village do not travel out of the country, and he claims that if you see young, female immigrants from Africa, they are probably Nigerian.  The men from his village have a network here and when new people arrive from their hometown, the others help them land on their feet by housing them, giving them food, and helping them figure out how to find a way of making money.

There are three men who are older and have been in Spain the longest that act as community leaders for the rest of his expatriate community.  They keep track of everyone’s phone number and if there is an emergency, he can call them and they will call whichever people live closest to the person in need, who will in turn gather to figure out a way to help.  Each month, they contribute money into a bank account managed by the three leaders, which they use to help in an emergency and to make improvements to their village.  The community is strong and supportive, and not helping each other is unthinkable to him.  I asked him if any of them plan to stay in Spain, and he said no, quite emphatically.  None of them want to stay here, they just want to earn a little money to help their family and community and then go home.

Our conversation took up the entire bus trip and before I knew it, we were pulling into the Segovia bus station.

I guess I wanted to write about this because it seems to me that undocumented immigrants in Spain are almost invisible, in that you never really hear about their lives.  When they are discussed, it’s usually in terms of numbers or the economy, or how they are changing the culture here in a bad way.  They are so dehumanized.  But everyone has a story to tell, and I wanted to share his with you.

Three days out of the week, I carpool home with a coworker.  It takes about 30 minutes to get home, so we end up discussing all sorts of things on the way.  We spend a lot of time comparing our two countries, talking about food, and discussing Galicia in general.

Today was a “Galicia in general” sort of day.  I don’t know exactly how we got on the subject, but my coworker started telling me about some fascinating local legends, that are just too interesting to keep to myself.  I’ll recount some of them here for your reading pleasure:

Galicia has long had an association with witches.  I’ve noticed little witch dolls in souvenir shops all over the region, and never really understood what the exact connection was.  I asked her about it, and she wasn’t 100% certain herself, but she hypothesized that it has to do with the spooky, haunted atmosphere of Galicia in general.  I’ll agree with her on that one.  Galicia is a beautiful place, but there are deep forests in the hills, lingering fog, rainy skies, and a lot of overall darkness.  At the time that these folk tales began, there weren’t street lamps or freeways either, so people traveling overland had to steel their nerves against the empty darkness.  It’s a witchy kind of place.

I think we got on this subject because she was explaining to me how people gather medicinal plants on the day of San Juan, and also jump over a bonfire three times to ward off witches.  Warding off witches and evil spirits is a pretty big deal around here, as I will explain in greater detail in the following four stories.

La Estantigua:

A woman who had sinned in life, now she dresses all in black and wanders the earth, carrying her sins in the form of a black handkerchief.  She walks slowly and searches for someone to whom she can give away her punishment.  If she catches you and gives you her handkerchief, she will be free of the burden, and you will assume her role, doomed to wander the earth yourself.  Historically, people walking along the roads would carry a stick with them, and if they feared la Estantigua was approaching, they would stop in their tracks, use the stick to draw a circle in the dirt, and then put a cross inside the circle.  They would then stand inside it and wait for her to pass by, knowing they were safe.

La Santa Compaña:

It’s unclear to me if this is a variation on La Estantigua, but I’ll just relate the story as she told it to me.  Between midnight and 1am is a very dangerous time to be out alone, especially in the vicinity of a graveyard.  At midnight, a group of ghosts leave the graveyard, led by a pack of dogs with the eyes of wolves, and they wander the town looking for passersby to harm.  My coworker asked me if I had noticed large stone crosses around Galicia anywhere.  It would be impossible not to notice them, since they seem to be everywhere.  She said that they are usually built at four way crossings, which are unlucky places that are more likely to be haunted.  The crosses were put there to ward off bad spirits.  According to legend, if you come upon a crossroads and hear a noise, feel a strange breeze, or just spook yourself into believing a ghost is nearby, you can go to one of the crosses and hug it tightly.  The ghosts will perceive a protective light radiating off the cross that will keep you safe from harm.

Just How Seriously These Stories Were Taken, Part One:

An elderly neighbor of my coworker’s was in his forties at the time this happened.  He had been out somewhere with friends, and left to return home just after midnight.  The streets were empty, and he found himself walking passed the graveyard, when his jacket was suddenly caught on a plant’s thorn.  It was dark out and he could see neither the plant nor the thorn, but his jacket was firmly caught.  He pulled against it, but it did not give easily.  Scared and alone, he thought he had been caught by a malicious spirit and began to speak to it.  “Please, let me go.  I have a family!  I’m young, I’ve done nothing wrong.  Sir, please…don’t detain me.”  He didn’t turn around and he didn’t try to move forward.  He stayed right there, pleading with the thorn the entire rest of the night.  When it got light out, he realized that he had been talking to a plant the whole time, and went on home.  My coworker said he was deeply embarrassed, but obviously not embarrassed enough to keep the story to himself.

Just How Seriously These Stories Were Taken, Part Two:

I’ll warn you now, this one has neither a humorous nor a happy ending, so skip it if you would prefer to.  A different neighbor of my coworker’s–an older woman–had a reputation locally for being very cynical and not believing in any of the Galician ghost stories.  Her friends and neighbors always thought she claimed to believe less than she actually did, and they tried to get her to prove that she really wasn’t afraid.  They challenged her to take a hammer over to the wooden cemetery gates, and to drive in one nail at midnight, alone.  If she didn’t believe in ghosts, she would not be afraid to make lots of noise and draw their attention during the most haunted hour of the night.  If her friends saw in the morning that the nail was there, they would know she was really as impervious to the ghost stories as she said she was.  On the designated night, she put on a utility apron and took her hammer and nail on over to the graveyard.  This next part is conjecture, but people believe that because it was a windy night and very dark, her apron must have blown up in front of her, because she nailed the apron to the gate along with the nail.  When she turned to leave, her apron was stuck, and she may have thought that she was being held in place by a ghost.  There is no way to know for sure, because she had a heart attack and died on the spot.  Her friends found her there the next morning.

Those last two stories seem extreme, but they also demonstrate just how deeply rooted some of these folk tales must have been for some people, particularly in the older generations.  I don’t like walking alone at night in empty places, nor do I particularly even like driving alone if it’s through a dark forest at night.  I have had Ichabod Crane moments, as I would imagine most people have from time to time, but  I wasn’t raised believing in much of anything, so I can’t imagine how strong of a hold these stories must have had on people .  Still, it’s easy for me to see how Galicia lends itself to this type of folklore.  My coworker’s father taught these legends to her when she was little, and she tells them to her own children.  She says she doesn’t really believe them, that it’s just tradition.  But, she says that she still stops on occasion and draws a circle with a cross to stand in if she is out alone and starts to get nervous.

“I like to say a prayer and drink to world peace.”

-Bill Murray, “Groundhog Day”

Yesterday was Día de la Paz here in Spain.  Everyone I work with kept asking me if we celebrate it in the U.S., to which I said no.  The answer is no, right?  I’ve never celebrated peace at school or done anything special for it.  Judging by history, peace is pretty un-American anyway.

So, in my English classes, we spent the week leading up to Día de la Paz getting ready by preparing a song that all 250 students were going to sing together in the gym: “Wind of Change,” by Scorpions.  Yes, that’s right.  Scorpions, as sung by 250 out of tune children.  The music teacher is a big fan of metal bands, but, as he told me, he “only likes the ballads.”  When he mentioned this, I kept thinking of those CD compilations with names like “MONSTER BALLADS!”  that they used to sell on TV (used to, right?  I assume that digital audio files have doomed that product.)

I feel like maybe I’m the wrong age to know much about Scorpions, being neither old enough to have been around and cognizant of them at the height of their fame, nor young enough to have parents that were big into metal in the 80’s.  In my mind, I just kind of lump them in with all those other bands that I know of mostly through the faded black t-shirts I used to see while growing up in Northern California on guys with questionable grooming habits.  You know.  Skid Row, Poison, Whitesnake, Warrant.  (By the way, I just googled “Skid Row Poison Whitesnake” to make sure I was not unjustly lumping together wildly disparate bands, and I was directed here.  I guess some of those compilation CDs are still around!)

Yeah, these ones! Also, this pricing makes no logical sense to me.

A thing about Scorpions that I learned last week is that, in addition to being “Bad Boy Heartbreakers,” they are a German band.  The teacher I work with had thought they were from England.  (Is this common knowledge?  Am I the only one who didn’t know this?)  I’m not sure if being German is the cause, but they have some lyrics that sound slightly awkward, grammatically, like:

“Take me to the magic of the moment on a glory night (cont. below)…”

I can forgive its slight irregularity, because they are not native English speakers.  (I can also forgive it because I, myself, frequently construct grammatically questionable sentences.)  Sadly, I cannot forgive cheesy, overly symbolic lyrics:

“(cont. from above) …where the children of tomorrow share their dreams.”

Any talk about children being the future and I start to inwardly scoff in disdain at the lack of originality.  And THEN I start to feel guilty for being so judgmental, but I really can’t help it.  I know 1990 was an emotional time in Germany, but I also have a hard time keeping a straight face when confronted with lines like, “Let your balalaika sing what my guitar wants to say.”

Despite my own (silent) opinions on the song selection, I spent the last week helping the kids learn how to sing it, and yesterday was the big performance.

We filed into the gym, and each grade level sat separately in their own section of rectangular wrestling mat.  Grade by grade, student delegates came up to the front to pin up little pictures of handprints, doves, and Ghandi.  Different objects representing peace.  Then, a student or two would explain over a microphone what their class chose, what it meant to them, and why peace is important.  Needless to say, it was very cute.

We slowly got through all the grade levels (from 3 year old pre-schoolers all the way up through 6th grade), and then it was time to sing.

The lights went down, and a video screen lowered.  The youtube live karaoke version of “Wind of Change” began to play along with the projection, and my students all began to sing.  Mostly, it was incomprehensible until they got to the chorus, which was much louder.  And then it was arms waving back and forth, hold-up-your-lighters-cause-it’s-the-end-of-the-concert, enthusiasm.  All while sitting down.

And then a strange thing happened.  I started to get teary eyed.  Like the effin’ grinch looking down on all the Who’s in Whoville.  Of course, having been assigned the task of videotaping the entire spectacle, I was at the front facing back towards everyone.  I had to make sure to not genuinely start crying, just in case anyone was watching me back.  As someone who has cried watching such heartbreaking, tearjerkers as “Hairspray” and “the Karate Kid” (2010 remake), I know I don’t exactly have the reputation of being hard, but I like to at least try.

They finished singing, to my great relief…but then they stood up and started the whole song again, from the top!  And it was even more heartfelt the second time around.  To top it all off, after they finished their reprise, the music teacher just turned the music down slightly and kept it looping in the background during the 10 minutes of chaotic, frenzied hugging that ensued.  It is a Día de la Paz tradition at the school that everyone hug and give besos (that double cheek kiss thing that Southern Europeans are so fond of), and North American Conversation Assistants like me are no exception to the rules of participation.  Most of my colleagues and I exchanged hugs and besos.  Unsurprisingly, as it goes along with the “they only want attention” theory, almost all of my most difficult, trouble making students came up to me for theirs as well.  It was enough to melt my ice cold heart.

I'm just glad no one got hurt in all this peace mongering.

And you know what?  Now I kind of like that MONSTER BALLAD!

Peace on Earth.

Back by popular demand (and by popular, I mean more than two people, not all of whom are related to me by blood, have asked about this blog)!  So, here it is.

I live in Viveiro, Spain,  in the province of Lugo, in Galicia.  Galicia is all the way west and all the way north, right above Portugal, and bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and the Cantabrian Sea.  That link is to the Wikipedia entry for Viveiro in Castilian Spanish (hereafter referred to as castellano), because it has more information and better pictures than the English entry, but if you don’t read Spanish, the links to other languages are listed on the bar at the left side of the page.

Today, I am home sick from work.  As a result of being home today, I was in town during the weekly market that usually takes place while I am busy working, so I thought I would bundle up and adventure out of my apartment the thirty or so meters it takes to get to the town’s square.  It seemed like a good idea to load up on produce, because rumor has it that that stuff’s good for you, or whatever.  Anyway, it stopped raining for a brief period of time earlier, so I took advantage of that and left my apartment.

Two interesting things happened at the market, and several uninteresting things as well.  Of the uninteresting things, I’ll tell you that I bought a giant bag full of clementines for a very small amount of money, and am steadily working my way through them as a means of trying to kick this cold to the curb.

While buying the clementines, though, Interesting-Thing-the-First took place.  Immediately after inquiring into the cost of said fruit, the woman working the stand asked me if I speak French.  I said, “…oui?” and she immediately switched over into French, saying “Don’t you think it’s nice that we can communicate in a language we both understand?”  I was uncertain at first as to what exactly was happening.  Three possibilities occurred to me: 1) The woman thought I was French because of my non-Galician accent.   2) The woman is one of those rare, older country folk I have only heard tell about who are monolingual Galician speakers, and as a result, she does not speak castellano.  But, she somehow speaks French, and better than one of the two official languages of her own region (although this possibility seemed to be unlikely).  3) She could tell I am not a native castellano speaker, but she does not speak English, and thought maybe I would be more comfortable speaking to her in French than castellano, so she gave it a shot.

Regardless of her motives for switching languages, as we conducted business, it became increasingly clear to me that both she and I speak French much worse than castellano.  Yet, we had started down a path, and it was hard to switch direction midway.  I probably should have clarified right from the start that while I speak French, I am not myself French, but her question had caught me off guard.  At one point, she said something to me I didn’t understand, and I asked for clarification in castellano, after which she apologized for how poor her French is, not realizing that the reason I didn’t understand had nothing to do with her ability to communicate, but rather everything to do with my inability to process what she was saying.  In any case, we switched back and forth a few times and finished up our business.  No big deal.  Except that this is a really small town where everyone seems to know each other and remember strangers that they meet.  So what I’m wondering is, when I return to the market on future occasions, should I pretend that I prefer to speak French at this vendor’s table?  The clementines are delicious and much cheaper than at the grocery store, so I would like to go back and buy from her again.

Interesting-Thing-the-Second happened a little later on.  Let me further explain the set-up of this market.  It’s in the town’s main plaza, and there are a handful of tables with coverings spread throughout, like any farmers’ market.  There are fruit vendors, meat and cheese vendors, and then there are also a bunch of people that look like they just went out into their garden and picked whatever they had on hand to bring to sell.  The last category of vendors show up with maybe a carton to sit on or a lawn chair, and spread their goods in bags around them.  I was trying to give them more business than the big vendors, because honestly, they looked like they needed it more, and there’s something depressing about watching people sit out in bad weather, waiting for business that is slow coming.  Well, I approached a woman to ask about the price of her potatoes, assuming she was selling them by the kilo, like most people at the market.  Of course, I should have realized there was no scale in sight.  She was only selling them by the giant-grocery-bag full.  The smallest bag of them that she had probably weighed about 12 pounds.  Once that became clear to me, I tried to say that I was going to keep looking, because I live by myself and don’t know that I can eat 12 pounds of potatoes before they start to go bad.  (I have since done some research, and found out that if you store them properly, you can get them to last months.)  Now, when I said that “I approached a woman to ask about the price of her potatoes,” what I really meant to say was, “I approached a kindly, toothless, elderly farmer grandmother to ask about the price of her potatoes.”  When I tried to walk away, she lowered her ridiculously low price even more, and I felt like an asshole and couldn’t say no.  It’s not that I didn’t want to pay what she was asking.  I just genuinely don’t know what to do with 12 pounds of potatoes.  In any case, that elderly, toothless grandma schtick is a good marketing strategy.  It makes it impossible to say no.

So, if you have any ideas for how I should use up all these potatoes, send them my way!

On a last note, another thing that happened (I won’t qualify this one as interesting or uninteresting, because for me it is the former, while I’m sure for a lot of people, it will be the latter) is that I found out that a lot of people bring eggs from their own chickens to sell at the market, so I can continue to eat eggs here without feeling that I’m supporting the factory farming industry, something that is becoming increasingly more difficult for me to do.  Hoo-rah.

More blog entries to come.  I’ll even try to catch up some for the long period of silence that lasted my first few months back here.

*UPDATE*

I am cooking a potato lentil soup with some of the aforementioned potatoes right now, and they have an amazing texture.  Before I came here, everyone was telling me how good the food in Galicia is, specifically the meat, seafood, and produce.  I had just assumed that they kind of tacked on produce at the end when they realized mid-sentence that I am vegetarian.  Turns out, it’s good stuff!

I would say I read a decent number of books.  I know people who read far more than I do, and others who almost never read, so I would place myself somewhere in the middle in terms of quantity of books read.  On average, I would say I go through between two and five books a month, depending on what else I have going on at the time.  However, it’s not always outside commitments, like school, work, travel, or social obligations that keep me from reading.  Generally speaking, if a book is interesting enough, I make time for it, or just carry it with me everywhere and squeeze in a few pages while waiting in a line or riding a bus (although this latter example doesn’t happen all that much in Los Angeles).  If a book is engaging, it seems to almost read itself.  I’ve even read through to the end some truly terrible novels, just because they kept the story moving along at a clip.

What slows me down is when I get stuck reading a book that moves at a glacial pace, or that just doesn’t pique my interest.  Maybe the author has a writing style I find disagreeable, or maybe the story feels like it is going nowhere.  When something like that happens, I get stuck not wanting to finish the book, but at the same time, not willing to resign myself to giving up and moving onto whatever is next on my neverending reading list.  I’ll spend weeks neither finishing the book nor starting a new one.  It’s hard to make the decision to just put the book down and move on.

In the past year or so, I’ve started and not finished three books: Mayflower, Gomorrah, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  The first, I stopped reading temporarily, and having lost the momentum, never found the motivation to pick back up again.  The second, while really interesting in terms of subject matter, seemed disorganized and lacking any real structure.  Both the first and second were books I really want to like and to finish, but gave up on anyway.  The last book, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, was just unreadable to me and I have no regrets about putting it down.

I guess the reason I’m writing this is because I wonder how other people approach this problem.  Do you force yourself to finish reading something that hasn’t really captured your attention, or do you set it down and find something else to read?  What are some examples of books that you have started and haven’t finished?  (I’m asking this if anyone even still reads this mostly abandoned blog.)

I know there are more books out there than I could ever possibly read, so I know I shouldn’t feel guilty about giving up on some of them, but I do anyway.  Does anyone else feel this way?

I’ve been back for a few months now, and have let this blog fall to the wayside.  I suppose that is because the original purpose of it was to document the experience of living overseas for a year.  Now that that has ended, I’m not too sure what direction this blog will take.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I had quite a difficult time deciding whether or not to return to Spain for a second year.  In the end, I realized that I was very happy to be home in California and that I didn’t want to leave again just yet.  That doesn’t mean I won’t ever leave again, but for the time being, I want to stay here.  I have had major doubts as to whether or not this was the right decision, but I know that if I end up regretting it too much, I can always go do something similar next year.

Summer has gone really well so far, and I just hope that life in Los Angeles will continue to be as enjoyable as it has been.  I’ve been going to the gym, playing piano, swimming, going to the beach, and hanging out with my roommate’s dogs.  I’ve also been cooking a lot and hanging out with all the people I missed while I was gone.  A friend and I are currently working on mastering the art of barbecued pizza.  I’m going to the farmer’s market down the street every week and eating delicious ice cream cookie sandwiches in the park more often than I perhaps should.  I’m looking for work and hoping to find something that I feel good about doing, and also thinking about what should come next.  I’ve also been catching up on some quality American television and playing more Katamari and Mario Kart than one would think possible.  Thrown into the mix has been the occasional karaoke bar, midsummer celebration, meteor shower viewing, midnight water fight, and road trip to the far north of California.

Travel is exciting and broadening, and I am not writing it off forever.  But there is no place like home.