Happy New Year!

  • Filed under Spain

  • January 1, 2014

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My twelve lucky grapes for a wonderful New Year 2014.

¡Feliz Año! ¿Que tal las uvas? This is an expression that will be said thousands of times today in Spain. “Happy (New) Year! How were the grapes?” No, it’s not that everyone owns vineyards, and grapes are not code for anything else—they really do mean, “How were your grapes?”

To understand the question, allow me to paint a picture of how a typical Spanish New Year’s Eve goes: you get together at a relative’s house (or welcome all your relatives to yours) and begin with appetizers around 10:00 PM. It’s a bit early for dinner by Spanish standards, but it’s a long night so you have to get an early start. By 11 PM the main meal has been served, and at about 11:50 PM the table is quickly cleared and the grapes are brought out—either one big bowl or, more often, individual servings, depending on the customs of each house.  A this point everyone turns their attention to the TV,  which is tuned to the channel where they are filming live from the Puerta del Sol, a plaza in downtown Madrid (kind of like our Times Square in New York City) which is packed with people waiting to count down to the New Year. When the clock begins striking, everyone back at home picks up their little bowl with grapes and quickly pops one grape in their mouth with each strike of the clock.

Of course, after about the fifth or sixth grape it’s really difficult to keep adding them to your mouth and still try to chew–especially since the grapes are sometimes fairly large and always have seeds. It’s a fun and silly tradition and there are always hilarious stories about how many you could actually fit into your mouth and if you kept up with the chimes of the clock and if seeing your aunt or four-year-old niece stuffing her face full made you laugh so hard you ended up spitting yours out, and whether someone actually cheated by removing the seeds from their grapes in advance. I remember a person who would not only remove the pips, but also peel each grape so she could just swallow them quickly and get them all down before the clock struck twelve!

After the clock strikes midnight, there are the customary two kisses, one on each cheek, to everyone present, and then you return to the table for cava (Spanish champagne) and dessert, eventually followed by coffee. At around 1:30 or 2:00 AM everyone puts on coats and goes out for a stroll.  The streets are packed with people, and you see lots of them making the gesture with their hands, palm upwards, and bringing their finger tips together with their thumbs as they marvel at how many people are out and about. Perhaps the really old folks will go back in around 3:30 or 4:00 AM, but most everyone else will be out till about 7:00 AM, at which time they’ll purchase chocolate con churros from the street vendors, and then finally head back home to go to bed.  From about 9:00 AM until well after 3:00 PM the streets are absolutely deserted—the street cleaners have the whole place to themselves while the throngs that were out at 5:00 AM, are, of course, all sleeping away the first day of the New Year. I know. I’m not one to sleep late, even if I didn’t go to bed until after dawn, and I could not believe how desolate the streets were on that first day of the New Year.

But I digress. The unique custom of eating twelve grapes on New Year’s Eve began in Spain and was first documented in the late 1800’s according to Wikipedia.  In 1894 it was already considered an “age-old” custom to gather in the Puerta del Sol and eat a grape for each of the twelve chimes. However, Euroresidentes states that it wasn’t until the first decade of the 1900’s when grape growers in southern Spain found that they had an unusually large harvest that they needed to market, that these producers made a concerted effort to have this custom of eating “twelve lucky grapes for a great new year” spread widely across Spain. Nowadays eating New Year’s Eve grapes as the clock tolls has been adopted in quite a few Latin American countries as well.

Another fun tidbit: until 1962, people listened to the twelve chimes as they were broadcast from Madrid over the radio, but after that, the event began to be featured on TV.  Now, of course, it’s the big TV personalities who are often at the center of festivities ushering in the New Year and announcing the grape eating ritual.

So I hope your grapes went down well—or go well next year, if that’s the first time you try to eat them as the clock strikes. And most of all I hope you have a fantastic New Year 2014!

If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also like my series of novels, Bueno, Sinco and Brujas, which takes place in Santander, Spain.

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Turrón

  • Filed under Spain

  • December 25, 2013

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The white turron on the right-hand side is the typical one that has been around for centuries. The chocolate turron on the left is a very yummy modern turron.

One of my favorite Spanish holiday treats is turrón, and if you’ve never had it, you are missing out! It’s a typical sweet eaten around this time of the year, along with marzipan, and it’s similar to peanut brittle, except much less sugary.  In the picture you can see that the proportion of nuts to nougat is much higher than it is in brittle.

Almonds, the main ingredient in turrón, are, not surprisingly, a huge crop in Spain. As a matter of fact, according to Sabor Mediterráneo, a digital magazine about Mediterranean cuisine, Spain is the second largest producer of almonds in the world (the U.S. is first.) One of my favorite things to do in Spain in early spring is to walk along the rows upon rows of almond trees clad in their delicate and fragrant white blossoms.  Many villages have lined the roads leading in and out with almond trees, and you haven’t lived until you’ve gathered fresh almonds in the fall and spent an afternoon shelling and devouring them. It’s a taste you just don’t get in store-bought nuts.

Honey, sugar and whipped egg white are the only other ingredients traditional turrón.

Turrón is such an emblematic part of the holiday season in Spain, that to miss out on it because of economic hard times is a really sad thing. According to Europa Press, Jose Manuel Sirvent, the CEO of Almendra y Miel, a big turrón making plant in Alicante, said that it’s important to show solidarity with less privileged groups, especially in these hard economic times.  Over the years this company has been committed to social responsibility and this year they will be donating turrón to 1000 families who are in need. “Turron, just like toys, is something we all look forward to, it’s tradition and it brings families together.” Bravo!  (This company makes the brands “1880” and  “El Lobo.”)

But, just like toys, you may be wondering? I dare say, turrón is even more emblematic of the season than toys are and that’s partly because it’s been around for a long time. According to my favorite resource, Wikipedia, almonds and honey were already used to manufacture sweets when the southern portion of Spain, Alicante, was still under Arabic control between the years 711 and 1492. As early as the 11th century, an Arabic doctor wrote a treatise about medicines in which he mentions “turun.”  Fast-forward to 1582, and there’s a document in the Alicante municipality stating that every year, since time immemorial, the city of Alicante pays salaries at Christmas time partly in money, and partly in a gift of turrón.

Nowadays there are several different varieties besides the traditional hard and soft ones: there’s one with chocolate as its nougat instead of honey, there’s one with egg yolk in the nougat, some with jellied fruits and even with one with coconut. I’ve been able to purchase all the different flavors in the U.S.

If you want to try to make some turrón for yourself at home, here’s a YouTube video. It’s in Spanish, but there are only a few ingredients, and I think you’ll get the gist by watching how it’s done.

This is my last post for this year. Wishing you the best holiday season, full of love and joy, and a wonderful start to the New Year!    ¡Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo!

If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also like my series of novels, Bueno, Sinco and Brujas, which takes place in Santander, Spain.

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Villancicos: Spanish Christmas Carols

  • Filed under Spain

  • December 18, 2013

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Another beautiful nativity arrangement featured on the Decofilia.com website, used with their permission.

(Several quick notes before you begin reading this blog post: unless you are from Spain and already know what I’m talking about, this post is best read with access to the internet—and perhaps headphones—so you can listen to the songs as I discuss them. Also, for most of them, you might want to minimize the screen or shut off the image as most of the videos are very lame. Finally, the recordings are of the full length song, but usually after listening for about  a minute, possibly less, you’ll get the gist of what I’m trying to say, at which point, unless you have lots of spare time or just adore that music, feel free to click off the site and continue reading.)

I grew up adoring Christmas carols—I like them so much, as a matter of fact, that even though my son was born in July, I sang him carols pretty much non-stop as I held him through the summer.  But, my first year in Spain, by the time Christmas rolled around, I was feeling a bit homesick and ready to hear the familiar “jingle-bells,” “silent night,” and “sleigh ride” songs. I had learned many of these in Spanish, along with “Feliz Navidad—I wanna wish you a merry Christmas” in high school Spanish classes, and I figured I was prepared.  So imagine my astonishment when I heard this one about bells, appropriately named “Campana sobre campana” but not sounding a bit like sleigh bells, silver bells, or any other bell song I’d ever heard:   Besides being a completely different melody, I was surprised to learn that, like the majority of the Spanish carols, it was sung by groups of children. In the US, other than the chipmunk song, the vast majority of carols you hear on the radio are sung by adults.

Although many of the villancicos, as Spanish carols are called, end up speaking of the birth, or refer to the Belen,  some of them do it in a very roundabout way. This one, for example, is called “Los peces en el rio” which means, the fish in the river, and the chorus is all about the way the fish in the river are “drinking and drinking and drinking some more” as they contemplate the birth. It also talks of the Virgin Mary combing her hair, made of gold, with a comb made of silver. It’s a catchy tune, and one of my favorites, though I had a hard time finding a version that I liked for today’s blog. I settled on this one, even though the pace is a little slow, but you’ll see what I mean:  In any case, once again, both the melody and the words are completely different from carols we have in English.

The word, “villancicos”, it turns out, has its roots in “villas”—villages. According to Wikipedia,  villancicos were originally non-religious songs, popular tunes, which the church decided to bring into its Christmas liturgy beginning in the 15th century. My guess is that villagers would have resisted having the church completely alter some of their favorite songs, like the one about the fishes in the river, so large swaths were left intact and then some Christmas lines were added.

Some of my favorite villancicos have words that are tongue twisters and to this day, I have trouble singing them as quickly as the song demands. For instance, the one called Una Burra Rin-Rin has a slow part and very fast part–great practice for conjugating verbs. Another fun one is called, “Ay del chiquirritin” It’s really great if you need practice rolling your “r’s”.  And then there’s another beautiful one called “A la nanita nana” which is sung by  Sofia Rimoldi in this clip. This was one of the few videos I found sung by an adult, and she does a lovely job. I don’t think she’s a famous artist—just someone who made a video of herself. Doesn’t she have a wonderful voice? This is one of the few versions that I enjoyed listening to the whole way through, and watching her sing and play the guitar. I can really hear the Arabic roots in this melody as well. And, no surprise, it’s more of a lullaby than a carol.

One of the songs which seems to definitely have a tropical slant to it, and may have been imported from Latin America is one about a donkey, called “Mi burrito sabanero”  Do you agree? And are you beginning to pick up on the pattern of having some lines sung by one person, while the chorus is sung by a group? According to Wikipedia,this is typical of the folk songs that were popular during the renaissance period in Spain and Portugal. So I could be completely wrong about the tropical roots of this song.

And there are more favorites, which I loved to use as I taught Spanish. Ones like “Fum, fum, fum”  which repeat the date, and say fun nonsense words in middle, pronounced foom, foom, foom, surrounded by short rhyming verses. Or this one with a really fun, upbeat rhythm and lots of repeating choruses. “Ande, ande, ande la Marimorena”

Another of my favorites is “Dime niño de quien eres”, Tell me child, whose son are you? I found another rare clip with an adult singing it, and thus preferred this video by singer Rosa Lopez, who has a very nice voice. You’ll also see that the dancers in the background are doing an adaptation of the traditional flamenco dance, dressed in red and white holiday fare.

And there are so many more, all with music completely unlike any of the carols you can find playing on your radio stations here, (even the ones playing non-stop Christmas songs between Thanksgiving and Christmas!) I’ll leave you with just a few more. “Ya vienen los Reyes Magos” is about the three kings coming,   Tutaina is about the shepherds coming to see the baby, and is interesting because the entire chorus is nonsense. “Tutaina tuturuma, tutaina, tuturrumaina, tutaina, tuturruma turruma, tutaina, tuturrumaina.” Makes me wonder if it’s ancient words from a forgotten language. El niño Dios ha nacido is sung by a school choir in Madrid.

The last link, is a composite of about 6 carols in a row. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this blog post, and if you’re polishing your Spanish, I recommend you try learning some villancicos—music helps both in pronunciation and rhythm of another language. You can find the words to any of these songs by Googling their title as I’ve written them, followed by the word “letras.”

If you enjoyed this blog about Spain, you might also like my series of novels, Bueno, Sinco and Brujas, which takes place in Santander, Spain.

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Christmas in Spain: Belenes

  • Filed under Spain

  • December 11, 2013

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This stunning image is used with permission from the good folks at Decofolia.com

 

Everything about being in Spain was so new and different for me, that it’s no wonder that Christmas was too. I grew up with Santa, Christmas trees and stockings hanging over the fireplace, and naively thought these were universal. Not so. Santa only recently got exported to Spain and is still not very popular. Traditionally, gifts are exchanged on January 6th, the Three Kings Day. Christmas trees were also rare, small and frankly, not that pretty. Most houses did not have one. But nativity scenes, or Belenes de Navidad, (Belen is the Spanish word for Bethlehem) were very common Christmas decorations and they were–and still are, amazing. Most of the nativity scenes I’d ever known in the US consisted of the nuclear family, some barnyard animals and maybe a few shepherds or the magi. So, altogether, 10 figures on average, and maybe the larger ones had 20 or so. But the ones in Spain are extensive and elaborate, and can sometimes include hundreds of little characters depicting not just the nativity scene in the barn, but the entire village and sometimes the neighboring villages as well. Every time I saw one in a shop or storefront I wanted to stand and stare for hours, admiring the artisanal labor.

As a matter of fact, there were often contests between different shops, and people would go from one store front to the next judging them. And it was not uncommon to hear people in cafe’s and on the street discussing which ones they liked better. Belenes were in all of the houses too. You would rarely ever see a Christmas tree or stockings hanging, but everyone’s house, religious or not, had a Belen.

So, exactly how old is the custom of recreating the nativity scene? I was surprised that it was not as ancient as I would have thought. According to Wikipedia, the first one was done by St. Francis of Asissi in 1223  in a cave close to a tiny church in Italy. He didn’t use statues or even real people, just a small empty cradle, an ox and a mule, to illustrate the humble circumstances of the birth. St. Francis sang a captivating hymn and told the story with such passion that the owner of the cave, Juan de Greccio, later assured everyone that he had actually seen the Christ child in the cradle and that St. Francis had picked up the baby and rocked him to sleep in his arms.  After this first nativity scene, it appears that re-enactments were slowly incorporated into liturgical drama. In the next hundred years, the Franciscan monks, who were among the poorest group of monks as they took vows of poverty, continued to represent this humble picture of the nativity scene and it gradually spread from the Italian peninsula to all of Europe.

Nowadays it’s not just stores and homes with nativity scenes on display—entire cities get involved. As a matter of fact, this year, Bilbao, on the northern coast of Spain (and where parts of my novels are set) is having a contest, hosting 40 of the best Belenes from all over Europe. This video is an interview with one of the men hosting the contest, and it shows some fine-looking nativity scenes they began making back in April. He also acknowledges that Belenes are not just for the religious, but are part of the Spanish culture and tradition.

There are many blogs about Belenes, and one in particular caught my attention: Decofilia.com  has some gorgeous photos of creative nativity scenes made from all manner of materials. There’s even one made from wrenches! I wrote to them and asked if I could use some of their pictures for my blog, and they graciously agreed and wished me well. Such nice people!

Google, of course, also has some great photos of intricate nativity scenes.

I hope you’ll take a look at some of these links, and if you ever get the chance to be in Spain in December, I hope you’ll take some time to go admire their glorious Belenes.

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I love origami and thus was particularly intrigued by this one! Thanks again to the nice people at Decofilia.com for allowing me to use their image!

If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also like my series of novels, Bueno, Sinco and Brujas, which takes place in Santander, Spain.

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¡Aupa España!

  • Filed under Spain

  • December 4, 2013

A small plaza in the city of Leon

A small plaza in the city of Leon

This week, Friday, December 6th, is a national holiday in Spain: the Day of the Spanish Constitution. It’s equivalent to our 4th of July holiday, though it’s not commemorated with fireworks, nor do people happily don the colors of their flag. But it is a day when everything is closed, and the Spanish will celebrate that it’s been 35 years since their constitution was ratified.  My first year in Spain, the democracy turned 8 years old. It was pretty neat.

Having grown up in a country where even my great grandparents were not alive when the democracy was founded, it was extremely interesting to me to hear the stories of the young/old country of Spain. According to Wikipedia, modern humans first came to Spain about 32,000 years ago. It’s hard for me to imagine that! Different peoples lived there before the Romans conquered the Iberian peninsula around 2,000 years ago, including the Iberians, Celts (or Celtiberians—this explains the proliferation of very old bagpipe music in northern Spain), Tartessians, Basques (who are still there, of course) and even Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians (who also lived in France.) After the Romans came the Arabs, and after they were over thrown, the Catholic Kings and Queens ruled. There were different dynasties, and even a constitution of 1812. Spain became quite modern in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, and there were many societal advances in all areas including science, art, education and women’s rights. Unfortunately, in the mid 1930’s, Spain underwent a very gruesome civil war, and was then subsumed under a dictatorship until Generalisimo Franco finally passed away in 1975. The country was kept in poverty and all of the “enlightenment” that it had undergone was systematically destroyed over the years. When the country finally emerged from this awful nightmare, it took a lot of work to bring itself into modernity. I applaud the Spanish for their immense work in picking themselves up by their bootstraps and turning themselves back into a first world country in the short span of under 20 years, an effort which I witnessed as I lived there from the mid ‘80’s till the end of the 90’s. They faced staggering obstacles, including an attempted military coup d’état in 1981, which could have led to another dictatorship, if not for the fact that the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, stood up and said “no” to the troops. Bravo!

It’s unfortunate that the world economic crisis of 2008 has taken a tremendous toll on Spain, and they are still reeling from the consequences. Unemployment is still more than 20%, and among the young, it is close to 50%. Many of their brightest young minds have to leave the country to find good work. This is such a shame! That’s why I cannot applaud generous and kind people like Bill Gates enough for investing in Spain, to the tune of $155 Million. Good for him! And I hope many others will do the same. Spaniards are a wonderful people, spirited, hard-working and resilient.  And even through their difficult times, they still reach out and help others, as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation highlights in their article from February 2012.

So, please join me as I send my heartfelt congratulations to Spain for 35 years of democracy, and my sincerest wishes for a speedy and sound economic recovery.  ¡Aupa España!

And, just so you know it’s not just my imagination, here’s a wonderful video that a friend just alerted me to about the wonderful Spaniards making it through this crisis. Let me say it again: ¡Aupa España!

If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also like my series of novels, Bueno, Sinco and Brujas, which takes place in Santander, Spain.

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Thanksgiving

  • Filed under Spain

  • November 27, 2013

My first Thanksgiving in Spain was marked indelibly with the feeling that something was “wrong” as I went about my day; it felt like there was a hole there. Sure, the weather was cold and it may have even snowed. I spent the day with friends who were becoming as close as family. Turkeys are not commonly eaten in Spain, and even turkey lunch meat is difficult to find, but I don’t think not having turkey was the reason I felt out of sorts: it was more the fact that everything was “business as usual” that threw me off. Classes still met. My experiments needed to be done. Yesterday’s business transitioned smoothly into today’s with no hard stop to demarcate this holiday. It felt surreal. No Macy’s parade to be ignored on the TV all morning, followed by the drone of football all afternoon. No sitting down with my siblings to work on 1000 piece puzzles or play pinochle till it got dark. No pumpkin pie. Still, I had expected not to have these things and all together they did not constitute the reason for my feeling that something was amiss.

But I was busy, and it took several days, perhaps weeks for me to figure out what it was that had made me feel off kilter: I had missed the yearly inner reckoning of all that I am thankful for.  There is nothing like stopping work and school for an entire day to meditate on all the good things in one’s life. I have since learned not to wait for Thanksgiving, but rather to make a regular, if not daily, practice of acknowledging my good fortune.

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This beautiful plate was hand-crafted in Spain and given to me by some most wonderful friends.

I missed a total of 13 Thanksgiving holidays when I lived abroad, though in my later years I worked at an American school and we commemorated the day as best we could. We still had to work, but we’d bring a small slice of Thanksgiving to our world. We’d have turkey sandwiches and hang the pictures of pilgrims that the elementary school kids had colored. There were garlands made from orange, yellow, brown and red construction paper, and poems that the older students wrote on papers shaped like autumn leaves. Pumpkin pies were still not feasible, but occasionally we would have brownies, which were such a rare treat, we were all satisfied. And, as a school, we’d take a few moments in silence to be thankful for the good things in our lives.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.  It’s wonderful having all my children home from college and grad school, and the house noisy and busy, if only for a few days. Final exams are right around the corner, though, and they will soon go back to their studies, hopefully energized and refreshed from the break.

So today I’d like to send good wishes out to the world, thanking the universe for all the wonderful things in my life, and share a poem I wrote:

Sparseness is overtaking my garden,

as the trees cling feebly

to their last pale leaves,

and a lumpy, colorful carpet

envelopes their rooty feet.

The air nips at me with small but sharp teeth

and as I watch, the timid morning light wafts

into the wider spaces between gnarled branches.

Inside the air is rich

with smells of kindness and love:

a turkey roasting,

a pumpkin pie baking

cranberries bubbling in burgundy goodness

and my children, now grown,

laughing and catching up with each other,

their busy lives of studying and learning

growing and changing

eagerly shared in these fleeting moments

before Thanksgiving ends.

I wish you, dear reader, a wonderful Thanksgiving, even if it’s not a national holiday where you are. May the good things in your life abound!

IIf you enjoyed this blog post, you might also like my series of novels, Bueno, Sinco and Brujas, which takes place in Santander, Spain.

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Spanish gestures

  • Filed under Spain

  • November 20, 2013

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This is a Spanish “botija” that one of my friends sent me.

Non-verbal communication, as we all know, is a huge part of how we interact with each other.  A smiling “no” can be an invitation, while a morose “yes” should probably be considered a negative. But what about other gestures and sounds we make? I had not really paid much attention to how people communicate thoughts without words until I moved to Spain and found that besides lots of new vocabulary, I had to learn a rich assortment of non-spoken cues.

I often felt like an anthropologist when I lived in Spain. No, these Europeans were not some uncivilized tribe with whom I barely had anything in common. Al contrario. They were definitely first world and Western, and yet, there were gestures I had never seen and certainly did not know how to interpret. Learning them was a fun adventure, and eventually integrating them into my own body language helped me to really fit in.  The first time I can remember puzzling over a gesture was on my way home from lab, one afternoon. Time was short and I had taken a bus rather than walking the 3 kilometers as I usually did. As I peered out the window I saw it: a hand raised, palm upward, fingers together and kept horizontally, held fairly close to the torso, perhaps at the level of the shoulders, and waved quickly back and forth. We were passing a park with a children’s jungle-gym playground, and there was a young woman, probably the mother of a four or five year old child, making this gesture to him. It was a brief glimpse, and the bus was already speeding away, so I didn’t get to see what it meant. A week later, I saw it again, in a restaurant: a father at a table made the same gesture to a squirming child. The child was about 7 and he reacted by pouting slightly, but then sitting up straighter. Then I saw it again in our university cafeteria: two of my friends were teasing each other and one of them did it to the other, adding the words, “a que te doy.” That I will give you. I was intrigued, and since everyone loved being my teacher, I decided to ask my friend and she explained that it meant something like “I’m gonna slap you if you don’t shape up.” Not, “that I will give you,” but rather, “if you don’t watch it, I’m going to give you [a slap].” I smiled and my friend smiled too, asking how an American would convey this thought.

Soon after this I learned another gesture which lots of my friends used when they were in heated conversations, usually about someone who had wronged them. “That so-and-so,” they would say, “she has some nerve,” and they would bring their hand to their face, fingers outstretched and held together and gently smack their own cheek. Sometimes they would turn their hand around and, fingers still all together, smack their cheek with the backs of their fingers. Both mean the same thing. Except, of course, they didn’t exactly say, “she has some nerve,” but rather, “what a hard face she has,” or “what a muzzle she has,” and hence the taping of the cheek. Sometimes they would even leave off the second part, saying only, “That so-and-so” and tap their cheek. Everyone (now including me) would understand what was meant. If you’re a soccer fan, keep an eye out when watching players from Spain–as soon as one of them feels wronged, you’ll see them quickly raise their hand to their cheek and smack it.

Another gesture, which is the equivalent of flipping someone off, is to raise your hand, bending it at the elbow, in a quick upward motion, keeping all fingers extended and together. One of my closest friends from college came to visit me once as she and her husband celebrated their ten year anniversary, and somehow we got on this subject and we discussed this hand gesture which, by this time, did actually feel like an insult to me, but to them it was a nonsensical motion. I laughed with them as she later told me that they had taken the gesture home and continually used it when they were teasing each other or pretending to be mad at the world.  And this brought home the notion even more sharply that in order to truly speak another language, you must use your whole body to really convey the message, and that not knowing the gestures keeps you from fully understanding more subtle levels of meaning.

Making the “tsk” sound, by raising your tongue to the roof of your mouth and sucking in, is another very common gesture in Spain. It’s funny because even now, when I have a conversation with someone in Spanish, I very quickly return to using this sound to help me communicate. Here in the US we use it to scold someone as in, “Tsk, tsk, tsk, shame on you!” But in Spain, it’s a simple and unobtrusive “No.” Often it’s two ‘tsk’s’, as in, “Is this the book you wanted me to read?” answered by “Tsk, tsk.” But among close friends, the “no” is quickly reduced to a single “tsk.” It’s so easy and natural now, but I clearly remember having to learn and practice it.

If you want to say “There’s a ton of people” you hold your hand up, roughly to shoulder height, palm up then bring the tips of all your fingers and your thumb together, rapidly opening and closing them. If you want to say, “that costs a lot of money” you start with your hand in the same position, but now you rub your thumb against the pads of your fingers.  And if you bring your index finger to your temple and then swiftly kick flick it away in a horizontal gesture, your saying that someone is crazy. And of course, the “hook-em-horns” sign that proud University of Texas students and alumni use means something totally different in Spain—it still refers to horns, but as in, “s/he is being cuckolded.” Yeah, not pretty.  All four of my children are Longhorns, and I love UT, but I will admit it took me a while to be okay with their hand signal after all my years in Spain.

The list of gestures is much longer, of course, and I’m sure there are regional ones from different parts of Spain that I did not pick up on. But for the purposes of this post, I’ll leave you with one last one: reach up to your eye with just your index finger and place it on your lower eye-lid, gently and quickly yanking down just twice, while simultaneously raising your eyebrow. You’ve said, “I’m watching you,” though it can also mean, “Watch out,” or “be careful, that’s dangerous,” depending on the conversation, and you guessed it, the rest of the body language.

I found a cute Youtube video about Spanish gestures, some of which I did not mention in this blog.

What gestures have you noticed on your travels? Feel free to comment!

If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also like my series of novels, Bueno, Sinco and Brujas, which takes place in Santander, Spain.

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In quest of a dolmen

  • Filed under Spain

  • November 13, 2013

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Many thanks to Asturgeografic (https://www.facebook.com/Asturgeografic) for kindly agreeing to let me use their photo for this post!

“Can you tell us which way to the dolmen?” my friend asked the woman standing outside the last house of the village. She seemed very old to me, though my best guess now is that she was in her 50’s. She shooed the clucking chickens away and stepped a bit closer, asking us to repeat the question. We were in Galicia, which is in the northwest corner of Spain, the part right above Portugal, and it was clear that she rarely spoke Castilian Spanish. Instead, like everyone in the villages we had been traveling through, she spoke Galician (called Gallego in Spanish), which is a language that is like a hybrid between Portuguese and Spanish, with some Celtic words mixed in.

“Here, let me finish feeding the chickens and I’ll take you there. It’s out in the field,” she said in a raspy voice, once she had finally understood what we were asking. Half of her words were in Galician, but from her good-natured smile I could guess what my friend later confirmed in translation.

We waited patiently while she changed from her short waterproof boots into wooden shoes, zuecos, with 3 heels: the regular one you’d expect to see at the back of the shoe, and two more under the ball of the foot. The toes of the zuecos (pictured below this paragraph) curled upward like classic Dutch shoes. Apparently these ancient clodhoppers are very good for walking through muddy fields.  We pulled our coats tighter around ourselves as the misty rain thickened, but she seemed not to notice the weather as she stood there in her flowered house dress and cardigan sweater. Her skin was a weatherworn red, and a few pieces of unruly hair escaped from the kerchief she had tied around her head.

“It’s about a kilometer and a half away—twenty minutes or so,” she said as she started walking, We thanked her for interrupting her farm chores to help us out and followed her single file as she strode down a narrow footpath through the grassy field. “We rarely ever get anyone out here to see it,” she said.

My friend had described dolmens to me—ancient stone structures built by Neolithic people thousands of years ago. According to Wikipedia, archaeologists still don’t know who built them—and without knowing that, there’s no way to tell why they would have done so or how they accomplished the feat. Most seem to be 6,000-7,000 years old, though that’s still a guess too. Some have yielded human remains, but there’s no way to tell whether these remains belong to the humans who assembled these megaliths.

The rain had let up by the time we reached the structure. “It’s a small one,” she explained, almost in apology. “There are bigger ones in other parts of Galicia, but this one is small.”

There were two massive stones, obviously weighing dozens of tons each, standing wedged up on their sides, like two walls, and then another large stone on top, kind of like a roof. It was different from anything I’d ever seen, and even now, as I think back on that experience, it once again takes my breath away. There, in the middle of the lonely windswept field, with the low lead-colored clouds brushing our heads, the haunting stone structure felt like it was full of magic. I felt as if our ancestors were reaching forward thousands of years in time to make us stop and look and wonder.

What were these dolmen used for? Were they some sort of altars for worship? Were they tombs? They certainly were too small to be houses—and too much work. The closest quarry from which the stones for this dolmen came was probably 30 kilometers away. And the wheel had not been invented yet. So how did the pre-historic people get these huge stones out to the middle of this field and then stand them up? What drove them to do this?

After our excursion I  learned that not only are dolmens to be found all over Spain, but also all around Western Europe, in the Middle East and Asia, especially Korea. Wikipedia  says that 40% of all known dolmen in the world are in Korea. And, apparently in Russia new dolmens are discovered in the mountains regularly. Again, we don’t know who built them or why, though most scientists point to sepulchral use.

As you wander around Spain searching for dolmens, be sure to also check out the stone circles (Stonehenge is the most well-known of these, but there are others scattered all over the UK, as well as in Spain and Portugal)  and  the mehnir , which are huge upright stones, each weighing thousands of pounds. Most are not in areas that are quite so out-of-the-way as the dolmen I describe above. And as you stand there next to one, see if you can also feel the magic and power of these places.

I would love to hear any dolmen stories you may have!

If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also like my series of novels, Bueno, Sinco and Brujas, which takes place in Santander, Spain.

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Chestnuts!

  • Filed under Spain

  • November 6, 2013

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Chestnut trees with their plentiful fruit on the ground–amazing, isn’t it! Thanks so much to my friends Luis Mariano and Marisa for the photo!

Before I went to Spain, chestnuts were something from a Christmas carol—they roasted on an open fire or pop-pop-popped while people sat singing around a fireplace. The word made me feel nostalgic, but in a vapid way as there were no memories of ever having eaten one before, or even seen one in a fireplace.  All of this changed in Spain, when on the way home from El Barrio Húmedo one night,  we stopped to buy castañas–chestnuts.

It was a frosty night, one of those where I was stamping my feet to wake up my frozen toes inside my boots and constantly rubbing my gloved hands together to try to get some feeling back into my frigid fingers. Stars twinkled above the darkened city and the rich smell of wood burning was in the air when we stopped by this little stand where a wizened woman, dressed all in black, sat on a little wooden bench by a barrel.  The barrel was filled with charcoal that glowed yellow and orange and little embers, tiny sparks, escaped every now and then into the air and shone briefly in the dark night before extinguishing themselves, like tiny errant falling stars. A grill had been placed over the top of the barrel, and on it were the castañas, little brown blobs that emanated a wholesome smell. One of my friends asked for 300 pesetas worth of nuts, and the old woman took a few sheets of newspaper from a stack on the cobbled stones of the road and expertly shaped them into a cone which she held in her left hand while she used a pair of battered tongs to gingerly remove the nuts from the fire and toss them into the cone.  As we headed back to the dorm, the nuts were passed around and soon I had a group of excited women showing me the best way to peel one: how to hold it gingerly so as not to get burned, and how to remove both its thin shell and the dark skin around the light-colored meat. Soft, sweet and deliciously warm, the chestnut tasted like a Christmas carol!

According to Wikipedia, it turns out that castañas were used as a food staple for thousands of years, and until the potato was discovered in the Americas, lots of people throughout Europe used chestnuts as their main source of carbohydrates. I found a lovely blog called “My Kitchen in Spain” by Janet Mendel which gives a mouthwatering recipe from Galicia for cooking ribs and chestnuts.  With all the health benefits of chestnuts—they are less caloric than walnuts and pecans, high in fiber, low on carbs and even good for your brain, according to the website, Healthy Eating–it’s no wonder they are so popular.

Today there are entire villages whose main commerce is chestnuts, exporting not only the fresh nuts to the rest of Spain and much of Europe, but also making chestnut flour, pickling chestnuts, chestnut jam, honeyed chestnut candies and much more. On one website called “Foods from Spain” I found that Spain exports more than 30 different products made from chestnuts. According to an article entitled “Spain’s credit squeeze thwarts small companies’ export plans”, one company alone exported more than $1.3 million worth of chestnut delicacies just last year, a thriving business (though unfortunately, even companies doing this well are having trouble getting loans from banks as restrictions are so tough, which is a terrible shame—I wonder if Bill Gates would be interested in helping them out too?)

The family of some of my friends from León own land where there are lots of castaña trees, and every year she heads north for several weeks to collect the bounteous crop which brings in enough money to sustain the family for the rest of the year. She and her husband kindly provided me with the pictures in this blog today.

So now that it’s getting chilly outside and the carols will soon be playing, why not pick up a bag of chestnuts in your supermarket, and try roasting them in your oven (but be sure to cut a small slice into the skin before you do so you don’t have one pop!) And if you find yourself in Spain in November, I’d recommend that you make plans to head out to the hills and mountains, especially in the north, with a good pair of water-proof boots, and have fun collecting this plentiful fruit.

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A closer view of this plentiful nut. Thanks again to Luis Mariano and Marisa!

If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also like my series of novels, Bueno, Sinco and Brujas, which takes place in Santander, Spain.

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That awkward moment when you don’t know what it is, but you eat it anyway: pulpo

  • Filed under Spain

  • October 30, 2013

botijasBeing the only foreigner in a small city, and a student, had its advantages. I was especially lucky that all of the women who lived in my dorm saw it as their imperative to “educate me” in the ways of Spain. Thus, when we weren’t touring the country-side, my dorm-mates often took me out on the town. We went to an area of León aptly named “El Barrio Húmedo” (the moist neighborhood) where there were tons of bars and a very dynamic night life.

When you go to a bar in Spain you rarely ever get what an American would consider a full-sized glass of wine or beer. Instead you get a modest-sized glass (roughly half a bottle) of beer (called a caña, see my blog, “Una Cerveza, Por Favor,”) or you get about an inch of beer in a juice-sized glass, (called a corto.) And you get a tapa, a savory bite to eat, with your drink. In this manner you can go bar-hopping (because it’s simply unheard of to have more than one drink at a particular bar) and still be quite sober by the end of the night. Or, maybe, just a little tipsy at most.

Many smaller Spanish bars, especially those in El Barrio Humedo, would specialize in just one kind of tapa, and consequently gained fame (or notoriety) for the food they served. So, there was the place that gave you a steaming cup of sopa de ajo (garlic soup with parsley and bread floating in it) which we often went to first as we’d be pretty cold after walking all the way to this part of town and the soup would warm our fingers as we held the cup. Then there was the bar that served patatas bravas, perfectly fried cubes of potatoes sprinkled with just enough salt and spicy paprika to make you want to wash it down with your cold beer. There was a place that served chorizo, the typical Spanish sausage, cooked in white wine and served over crusty bread, (my mouth waters as I write this) and another one that served morcilla, blood sausage, which sounds horrible in English, so I always think of it in Spanish as it tastes amazingly good. And there’s another one that specializes in tortilla de patata, the Spanish potato omelet that is one of the best culinary inventions ever, and other tortillas (all omelets—not anything to do with Latin American tortillas that we are used to in the US.)

Back to my story: this particular night, the women (most were undergraduates, making them 1-4 years younger than me) had decided that my Spanish vocabulary lacked tacos. No, I’m not referring to the Taco-Bell kind: in Spain, a taco means a cuss word. Somehow in all the years of Spanish I had taken, none of my teachers had remembered to teach us how to swear.  And, well, even if they had, I would still have needed this “class” that my dorm-mates had contrived because the Spanish have a whole different set of vocabulary words and expression than do the Latin Americans when it comes to cursing.

So here I was, out with this huge group of women, all of whom were swearing loudly, (making me repeat their words to be sure I had the exact intonation,) as we walked down the moist, cobble-stoned streets. It was cold and dark and we had already visited 6 bars, and, yes, I was beginning to get a bit tipsy when we got to the 7th bar, one that specialized in a type of sea-food called pulpo.

You have to understand that I grew up in land-locked Ohio, where the closest I got to sea-food was Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, or the blue gills that my grandpa was so fond of fishing. So, with the room just barely beginning to drift and with the loud chorus of crazy women, and my 7th corto in one hand, I reached for the plate of tapas they were handing to me and I realized that I didn’t recognize what it was that they were offering me.

“Pruebalo, te gustará” Try it, you’ll like it. What, did they think I was Mikey? Neatly arranged on a wooden dish were little white pieces of something medallion shaped, kind of  like a scallop, but sporting a maroon-colored ring around it. They were drizzled with olive oil and fresh paprika was sprinkled on top.

“But, what is it?” I asked, examining the speared white flesh on the end of my fork and they repeated the same nonsensical word they had said before: pulpo.

Pulpo, pulpo, pulpo—I ran it through my tired brain but no cigar.

“Viven en el mar”—they live in the ocean. Okay, that narrows it down—not! I still couldn’t think of anything that looked like that. A fish would have had bones…

Well, I reasoned, I’ve liked everything else we’ve had tonight, so what can it hurt? They huddled around me, watching as I popped it in my mouth, and… I found that I really liked it. A bit chewy, perhaps, but definitely a nice taste.  Although it was certainly not anything I’d ever tasted before.

Pulpo.

“Does it swim?”

“Kind of. These are small ones that hunt among the rocks in the shallower seas north of us, in Galicia.”

Pulpo. This guessing game was getting long and I really wanted to know what it was. I took another swig of beer.

“It has 8 legs,” one of the women said.

Okay, now they were putting me on! I had studied plenty of biology and there were no fish with 8 legs!  Maybe this was from some sort of lobster or other crustacean that had been peeled? Didn’t they have tons of little legs?

“Does it have a shell?” I asked. No, no shell. I took another sip of beer and popped another piece of pulpo into my mouth, feeling like there was something very obvious that I was missing in this equation.

“Creo que se dice (I think it’s called) oc-TOW-poos en ingles (in English.)”

And suddenly the coin dropped. Oh my goodness! I had been eating—no!—but 8 legs—it had to be! Octopus! Oh my goodness! My mind was racing and the room was eerily still—I remember that moment so clearly! Had I known that it was octopus I would certainly never have put it into my mouth. But…well, now that I thought of it…it had tasted very nice. Hmm. After hesitating for another moment, I made the decision that it was too late—I couldn’t object now because I already liked it!

For good measure I shouted out some of my newly acquired expletives, which everyone found hilarious, ordered a second, or should I say, 8th, corto, and popped another piece of pulpo into my mouth. Any wonder I have such fond memories of the place?!

If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also like my series of novels, Bueno, Sinco and Brujas, which takes place in Santander, Spain.

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