This is where you should be now

When it´s Christmas eve and you are on a crowded bus, in a place (Granada) that you used to live but now feel disconnected from, surrounded by strangers (some of whom maybe should bath soon), half car sick from the jolting stops, you do not feel in the right place. You miss your traditions. Your very own tradtions, however small.

But then later after making gingerbread cookies, you take a walk with an old friend. And you end up at the Mirador de San Nicholas over-looking a beautiful view (one of the most breath-taking ones you´ve ever seen). It is dark. The sky is all the arker for the contrast with an illuminated Alambra, with an almost full moon. It is quiet, quiet even though there are bells ringing. You are cold, but you like how it feels.

On the way home you stop at a church, right on time for midnight mass. You´re nervous, you´re not Catholic, but as you walk in you´re scooped up by nuns. You sit in the front with them, you sing Christmas carols with them. You listen to the service with them. It is new to you and you love it´s grammar, it´s history, it´s joy. Afterwards the nuns invite you back into a small room in the church. You sing more, you all eat chocolate and you drink liquor. Nuns play drums and guitar! Nuns love chocolate! Nuns drink liquor! And you are the only Americans and they make you sing the english part of "Feliz Navidad" so they can learn the words. You are laughing to hard to do it properly, but no one minds.

Just before 2am you walk home. You are exhilarated you are refreshed. It reminds you of swimming in the ocean late at night, of the waves, of the calm, of the thrill. This is where you should be now.

Warming Up

It has gotten cold here! Well, not Minnesota-cold, but cold nonetheless. Cold enough that I have had to take action. One such action was the purchase of a new coat. It is from Zara, it makes me feel classy, it is warmer than my old coat, and if you are interested I am willing to talk about it at much greater length. Another action in the war against the temperature? The mulling of wine. Yum. And what a great verb "mull" is, let's try to use that one more often.

Another good way to warm up is in the glow of friendship. That's right, I said it. And on that topic I feel like I'm starting to actually have Spanish friends! I mean really we are still hovering around acquaintance-ville (population: many) but this weekend I had this nice feeling of actual friendship, based on conversations that plumb below service level pleasantries. I'm really excited by the idea that I can make friends in Spanish! Like, I can express myself well enough in a my second language to seem like a person who is interesting enough to merit full on friendship. Wow. Like, wow.

Also, warming is the glow of impending holiday cheer. I spent today talking to my students about Christmas and in many ways their celebrations sound very familiar to American ears. There is even a Basque Santa Claus named Olentzero. Olentzero seems merry enough, dressed in a traditional Basque outfit, puffing on a pipe and bestowing gifts on well-behaved children, but he is rumored to be a drunk. A drunk! Yeah, so while I was leaving Santa ginger bread cookies, the little Basque children were setting out wine or champagne for Olentzero. Huh.

Your new nickname

Today I discovered that Spain, though sadly anti-peanut butter, is pro-honey roasted peanuts. Good call, guys, good call. They were just sitting there at my local super market in the frutos secos section (literally this means dried fruits but it is used to mean nut and the word nuez, which I was taught for nut, is ruthlessly ignored). They are so good. They call themselves "cacahuete frito miel" and the package provides the useful translation of "fried honey peanut." Aw.

I can't stop my brain

So, lately, I haven't been getting enough sleep. I mean, it's not like I'm terribly busy but I came out of the weekend tired and it is impossible to get enough sleep during my mini-work week (I mean, honestly, I cannot go to sleep early enough to wake up rested at 5:30am). This has led to a series of...mishaps:

1) Run in with a tree
(This is only a presumed run-in because I have no memory of it but I did discover a lot of sap in my hair yesterday afternoon. I have, then, inferred that I had some contact with a sap bearing plant based on the persistent stickiness of a small section of the back of my hair. I did not take immediate action on this front, aside from a pony-tail to keep me secret, but maybe I should have because this morning a very vigorous shampoo and generous conditioning proved ineffective in the removal of the offending foreign substance.)

2) Broken Knife
(You know that one really dull knife in the kitchen, come on there's one in every kitchen, you know, yeah, that one. Don't cut bread with it. Especially not day-old bread. Especially not before 7am. Yeah. Because the handle might snap in half and somehow wound your unsuspecting index fingers in the process.)

3) Spilled Nescafé/Shattered Nescafé Container
(First of all, this item was brought to my house and I have consumed none of it, though, in my European incarnation I am not strictly against the consumption of instant coffee. Secondly, who would have thought that shoving lots of food items haphazardly onto one shelf at increasingly bizarre angles would ever result in catastrophe? Not me, apparently.)

Well, today I've protected myself from further exhausted clumsiness through over-cafination. Yup, I've had 3 cups of coffee today. Interestingly, I did not pay for any of them. Though, I may be sleepy, I am clever. However, my cleverness not withstanding, I should be able to buy my own coffee for a while since the Basque government has finally (but, finally!) decided to pay me. So far I've used this money for: smoked salmon, mushroom ravioli and Hagan Dos chocolate ice cream. Maybe, soon I will buy clothes/shoes (one of my favorite conversational subjects is how I need better shoes for when it rains).

Oh, and lest I forget: Happy Hannukah! I have a tiny menorah with tiny candles (thanks to my lovely mother) and I just borrowed Carlos' lighter sneakily without asking. Oh, I do love tradition.

Potato chips, museum trips, linguistics

1. At home I eat potato chips, oh, maybe, once or twice a year. Usually because somebody else has bought them and brought them to a party that I am attending. In Spain I eat potato chips, oh, maybe, one or twice a WEEK. That's because here they are made with olive oil, and, ergo are very delicious. Also, I spend a lot of time waiting in the Beasain train station with a vending machine as my only companion. I like to think that the olive oil makes them healthier, too, but I have no idea if this is actually the case.

2. I went to the Guggenheim on Thursday with a few classes from my school. It was pretty amazing and I had that same feeling that I get whenever I go to museums, namely, "why don't I go to museums more often?" I wish I'd had more time to wander freely and to hang out with the amazing, massive, and amazingly massive Serra sculptures, but instead I had a guided tour of "Art in the USA: 300 Years of Innovation" conducted entirely in Basque. One of the teachers on the trip translated a lot of it into Spanish for me, but it was still a pretty strange experience: American art history through the prism of Spanish-Basque culture. Huh. It was funny to have this Spanish woman telling me things like "in the 1920s Jazz was becoming very important to American culture" or, even better "this is a picture of George Washington, the first president of America." What? Who? Really? I've never heard of him.

3. Generally, I tend to reject the Sapir=Whorf hypothesis (which at my level of understanding amounts to the belief that the language we speak shapes the way we think in pretty clear-cut and unbending ways) but I do have a tendency to import certain grammatical structures from English into Spanish. There are certain ways of saying things in English which are so intermingled with my sense of the logic of how things work that it is difficult to get rid of them. For example, the present progressive: common in English and appropriate in a variety of circumstances ("I am drinking tea," "I am teaching English") and rare in Spanish, generally being restricted to what is actually happening in this very moment ("I am drinking tea," but not "I am teaching English," rather "I teach English). And yet. I use the present progressive all the time in Spanish because to me it just....sounds right. I don't know that thinking in the present progressive really shapes my wider world-view that much, but still it is an English construction changing how I conceive of something. Then again, probably as I start thinking in Spanish more (presuming that this will indeed happen) the good old P.P. will leave me alone. I'll keep you posted Sapir and Whorf.