How to get your way through cleverness

It was a pretty bad dinner. But I didn't want to admit it, and I didn't want to waste the food.

Anna! Finish your dinner! Right now!

Jack grabbed a Post It, wrote NOW, and stuck it to the table in front of her.

Anna grabbed the pen and added an -AY to the end of Jack's command.

We didn't even try to suppress the laughter. Resigned to her victory, we picked up the plates and ended dinner.

Name that body part - i.e. Fun at the butcher stall

I admire the value that other cultures place on using every part of an animal, not wasting a single part. But I am squeamish, and I cannot force myself to eat organ meat. I realize this is a cultural weakness, but I am not willing to work through it and make myself conquer this fear of less-than-large muscles. To hell with "while in Rome." You should see the kids at the butcher stalls, pointing, groaning, laughing, gagging. I'm kind of embarrassed to be taking photos. Who but an Americano would think the meat stall is worth pictures? What do they do with this stuff?

Alex: "That's not offal. That's terrible."

Lengua de ternera – veal tongue

Cow snout on a bed of tripe

Sangre - blood

Sesos - brains (each kind of animal gets its own special sized brain box

Cabeza de cordero – head of lamb

Riñón es de ternera – veal kidney (left)
Criadilla de ternera – veal testicle (right)

My favorite alternate definitions:

criadilla - noun
1. Testicle of an animal. (f)
2. A small loaf. (f)
3. (dim.) A little worthless servant-maid. (m)
4. Truffle, a kind of mushroom. (Botany) (m)

Overheard:
"What do they call cow testicles again?"
"Big."

Here, There, Anywhere

Anna has the bug. She knits here. She knits there. She knits anywhere. Here she is on the Metro.


There she is in a bar in Burgos.

Grammar escapism

I love grammar. It is the logistics of language. The process of delivering meaning. You can have words in storage, but you need a system to deliver ideas, and an orderly system is best. The more I understand Spanish grammar, the more comfortable I feel pulling words out and trying them on the street. Even in grade school, I loved diagramming sentences. Analyzing a process is much more comfortable to me than trying to speak to strangers. I was beginning to think that my obsession with direct and indirect object pronouns was simply displacement behavior. Perhaps I was just distracting myself from really trying to communicate, a guise for my shyness. Maybe my insistence on knowing exactly which past tense verb form to use was really an excuse for not actually speaking. Understanding the system is very comforting to me. But now the hours of hand copying my giant spreadsheet of verb conjugations is paying off. I am starting to understand how Spanish grammar works, and I am elated.

I find the sound of language difficult to grasp. In my learning process, the sounds often don’t make sense to me. They confuse me. Other people love the sound of language – its rhythms, melodies, syncopation. Anna must be one of these people. I can see that Anna hears the music. She learns the language by hearing it as song. When she corrects my Spanish she corrects the sound of it, both the pronunciation and the rhythm. She tells me, “I think it would sound better if you said it this way….” Then she offers me a more graceful way to express the idea. Often her construction shocks me. It does sound much better her way. It delights me that her Spanish sounds beautiful, beautiful in her accent and her phraseology.

Alex focuses on efficiency. From the very beginning he has been able to sort through a very limited vocabulary and use the fewest words possible to transmit a message. With a small vocabulary you often have to talk around your subject. Alex is a master of this. While I am still wondering how to simplify an idea down to its core, he has already shuffled through his deck, pulled out a few effective cards, and placed them on the table. He has no difficulty getting words out of his mouth. Even a few months ago when I had a much larger vocabulary than he did, he always outmaneuvered me. He arranges the words masterfully to get to the point. Perhaps it is like playing chess or solving a puzzle for him. He listens to me struggling until he simply can’t stand it for one more second. Then he swoops in and completes the language transaction for me so that we can move on to more important matters.

Sigh. I love my verb lists. Probably because they provide a place for me to hide inside my head. But, happily, they are paying off. Me gustan mucho mis listas.

It's still looking a bit like Christmas

Normally I look forward to New Year's Day so that I can take down the Christmas tree, reclaim its space, and return to a bit of normalcy after the holidays. But this year, I still have the tree up. I still turn the lights on in the evenings (when the one outlet has a free plug).


One day a couple of weeks before Christmas, Anna disappeared for awhile. She had promised she would stay close by, but she had something important to do. She had decided that we needed a tree even if we weren't going to be here for Christmas. So she went out to the China store and told them she wanted the least expensive tree they had. When she returned home, she had this little Christmas tree under her arm.

This year, I just might keep that tree up until summer. I think it's the most beautiful little Christmas tree I've ever seen.

How to cook in a Barbie Doll Kitchen

When we arrived in our apartment in July the biggest shock was the kitchen. Jack was even more troubled by it than I was. I’m not sure why since he doesn’t cook. Maybe he thought I was likely to develop serious depression or withdrawal from our beautiful new kitchen back home. Maybe he thought the food coming out of the kitchen was going to be as bad as the kitchen itself looked. I don’t know. I looked at it and thought, “I can deal with this.” I’m not sure why I was so upbeat. I was trying hard to develop a can-do attitude and be a more flexible person than I normally am. Moving abroad is a full immersion experience in being flexible and adapting. I was trying hard to get used to living in a somewhat dumpy apartment. I prefer to think of living in this place as very elaborate camping. That way I feel really spoiled. And after seeing some kitchens that others tolerate, I realize that I actually should feel spoiled at having a kitchen as large and as well equipped as we do. It’s all matter of perspective. And creativity. Maybe it doesn’t deserve the moniker Barbie Doll Kitchen after all.

Here’s what we’ve got in the kitchen: a small stove with four gas rings and a small oven. (What luck! Our friends Ann and Charlie have two burners, no oven.) One small fridge. A dishwasher and a washing machine. Two frying pans, two pots, a couple of knives, two metal pans to roast or bake in and a couple of casserole dishes. Actually, that’s incredible now that I think about it. Here’s what I bought: an electric kettle, two replacement frying pans when the handles broke off the ones we started with, a box grater, a hand held blender (I can see now that I probably shouldn’t have bought this, but I was thinking I needed it to make gazpacho), a silicon spatula, and a paella pan from the Rastro.

For a rolling pin I use a vermouth bottle. I don’t really like the vermouth here, so the one bottle I bought never runs dry and is always on hand. There is virtually no prep area, mostly the top of the dishwasher. And there’s not much storage to keep a decent stock of staples.

I cook more without recipes than I ever have before. This is necessary because the markets are always closed when I need to buy ingredients at the last minute, so I’m forced to make due with what’s in the fridge. I have recently purchased 1080 Recipes which is supposedly Spain’s Joy of Cooking (mine is the English translation). I still find most of the recipes a little scary (they don’t look very good to me), but I am looking for ways to use all that stuff in the markets that I don’t understand. (Adapt. Adapt. Adapt.)

Innovative cooking techniques

During a low moment when I was looking for excuses for my grumpiness, I googled cooking in small kitchens to see what would come up. Mark Bittman makes a compelling argument to quit whining about a small kitchen and get back to it, in my case, get back to feeding my family something that makes them feel good – hopefully physically and spiritually. Sometimes they just have to grin and bear the misery of the food explorations and frustrations. But mostly they are remarkable good natured about what is presented.

This is what I’ve discovered. A few good ingredients go a long way, and being forced to be creative with the equipment at hand is good for me, good for my cooking confidence, and entertaining to watch if nothing else.

Besides my make-it-up as you go meals, I can make a mean Spanish tortilla, can whip out my favorite pimientos Padron in minutes, and I’m working on putting that paella pan to good use. And here’s how I know I’m doing okay in my Barbie Doll Kitchen. One day at lunch Alex shared a bite of his tortilla with a kid at school who said, “This is really good. Is your mom Spanish?”

Name that Fruit

Mercat San Josep in Barcelona

Like many travelers, I enjoy visiting local markets. But I also admit that it is mostly a feast only for my eyes. I am usually baffled not only by what I find but also by how to buy it and what to do with it. Am I alone in this? I don't ususally think of myself as passive and insecure, but, honestly, shopping does me in. I gladly hand the reigns over to someone else. Sigh.

In Mercat San Josep in Barcelona, I decided to play the Name that Fruit game to distract me from my discomfort. I haven't seen any of these fruits in Madrid except for Chirimoya which is in every market here. I don't know where they all come from. They look too exotic to grow in Spain.

Pitahaya – Dragon Fruit

Longan

Madrono

Chirimoya

I didn't get names for these two. Do you know what they are?




Coming up: Name that body part

Mamma Mia en Ikea

Photo courtesy of keyzaro

Ikea stores are exactly the same everywhere – the products, the store layout, the food in the restaurant. But we saw something in the Madrid Ikea that was a surprise. After a long Metro ride to South-of-Nowhere Madrid and a long shopping ordeal through the Ikea maze, we found ourselves at last near the checkout lines.

That’s when the music started. Mamma Mia. The music caught our attention, but it was the clapping that drew us over to see what was happening. There were dozens of Ikea employees doing the Mamma Mia dance. Customers started joining in, even a security guard or two – all joining in the Mamma Mia line dance as the music blared with everyone around watching and clapping along until the song ended, a security guard threw his hat in the air, and everyone went back to work or their cash register line. Everyone a little happier than they had been just a few minutes before.

Cabalgata de Reyes (Wise Men Parade)

Today is Dia de los tres Reyes (Day of the Three Kings) the 12th night, when Christmas presents are given. Last night there was a spectacular parade that it seems every Madrileño was at.

Persistence pays off

Some said it couldn't be done.

Visa application process started: Friday May 8, 2009
Official one-year visas in hand: January 4, 2010

Twisted Bilbao

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is a twisted and mind bending experience; it had me dizzy for most of our visit. Literally. I was dizzy during the time we were in the building. I don't know if there is a single right angle in the whole place. It is an amusement park ride for arty adults. Anna summed it up well, "The building is the art." The rest of the family generally does not enjoy art museums, especially modern art museums. But we spent hours here, and going to the galleries was almost an afterthought.


"That was my favorite modern art exhibit I've ever been to." - Jack after walking through Richard Serra's, The Matter of Time, above. Just more food for orientational confusion.

An aside: The architect, Frank Gehry, has also designed the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, dedicated to the fight against Alzheimer’s Disease. It will be a treatment center for people who suffer from confusion. You're kidding, right?

What do you do when it's raining in San Sebastian?

You know how when you’re married to someone and they want to do something weird you just say, “okay, sure, whatever”? Well, here we are in the part of Spain known as the Basque Country. We Nevadans know about the Basques because there are a lot of Basques in Nevada; there is even a Basque Studies program at UNR, but most people wouldn’t have a clue who the Basques are. Anyway, here we are in the Basque Country, having had insufficient snow to ski our brains out as desired. We’re on our way home from the Pyrenees, and we find ourselves in San Sebastian, a lovely town in northern Spain that has changed my formerly bad attitude about the Basques.

It’s January, we’re on the Atlantic Coast, and it is raining. Really raining. Walk around town and get soaked to the bones kind of rain. But, what can you do? This is where the part comes in about your husband suggesting something that is really unusual and you say, “Sure, Honey, that sounds great!” Last night when we were making plans for today, Jack suggested going to the Concrete Museum. Yes, there is a museum dedicated to concrete here. And you know what? Every single one of us said, “Cool, let’s go.”

Okay, a little history here. Jack’s dad was the go-to guy in the New York City area for getting your concrete rebar reinforcing put in correctly. You had a trick concrete job to do – the TWA terminal at JFK, a fancy bridge or museum job with fancy concrete work – John Hayes was the man to call. So it comes by Jack genetically to be interested in building technology. And the rest of us have been happily pulled along for years. So when Jack suggested going to the Museo Concreto in this lovely town in Northern Spain, well, we were in.

When we got there we were afraid that it was closed because there weren’t any cars in the parking lot. Happily though, it was open, and we had the place to ourselves. The place was pretty cool. We learned something about how concrete is made. Cement is part of concrete (we knew that), but there was more to learn. Here’s where my confusion was: I remember going to Greece on a family vacation when I was a kid and my brother and dad had a conversation about how Western Civilization had lost the recipe for concrete during the Dark Ages. I had an image in my mind of a recipe card that was misplaced. I don’t actually know what they were talking about, but please, Dad and Brad, weigh in on this. (Alex actual lectured me on how it was totally inappropriate to use the term “Dark Ages”. I admit that I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to his protests, but I’ll check back in with him on that later.)


It turns out that concrete (as opposed to cement) was developed in the mid 1800’s as a product that could be used to form rock-like molded structures. That’s different from cement that had been used for centuries as a kind of building glue. (No mention in the museum of losing the recipe card for an era.)

Did you know that to make concrete you have to bake the first two (of many) ingredients at the incredible temperature of greater than 1400 degrees C? Holy cow. That’s hot. And it makes you really wonder how one works out the resource economics of this process. That takes a lot of fuel to heat the ingredients to that temp.

Anyhow, that’s how we spent the morning, the only vistors to the Concrete Museum in beautiful but wet and cold San Sebastian, Spain. We all enjoyed it, and would have even more if we’d been able to understand more of the exhibit’s explanatory documentation which was in Castilian and Basque. Our Spanish is getting better, but, we couldn’t get all of it. The bottom line is, if you find yourself in San Sebastian in January and need to escape the rain, check out the Concrete Museum. You could do worse.