Old stones and well-trodden paths

Stone floor laid in the 11th century

Sometimes I like to look at the landscape, wherever I am, and I let my eyes blur and my mind imagine the people who must have stood at this very spot, these exact longitudinal coordinates, over time immemorial, looking at the same spot, shading their eyes from the same angle of sunlight.

When I'm on the east coast of the United States, I wonder where people may have camped in the pre-dawn of North American history - whether they took shelter under the same woodland trees I can see on the far hill, whether they bathed in the river I'm driving over.

When I'm in Phoenix, I look at the craggy red rocks rimming the Valley of the Sun, and I wonder how many people before me have loved the way they cling to the sunlight at the end of the day, and the way they so reluctantly give in to shadow and night, only to eagerly await the sunrise the coming dawn. 

And now here I am in Spain, and it's a playground for imagination and wonder.  Last week I was walking through a castle fortress, less than a mile from my house, whose foundation stones were laid in 1050 A.D.  I walked over to the Roman amphitheater, and looked at the well-preserved bowl-shaped stadium seating, just like we have today.  Who carved these stones? What did it feel like, smell like, sound like to chip them away day after day? 

Did they wonder, from their vantage point, about me from mine? 

Málaga has it's own microclimate so I can't speak for the rest of Spain

"The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain" - name that musical!

(Incidentally, it has been considered by a few to be one of my great failings as a human being that I've never been a fan of musicals, so I won't exactly be crushed if you fail this test.)

The weather in Málaga is, in general, one of its selling points. The climate here is very similar to San Diego - warm, fairly humid summers, and mild winters.  We get lots of sunshine in general (this part of Spain is known as the Costa del Sol - the coast of the sun) and a really cold January day is maybe 57 or 58 degrees, the warm ones topping out around 70. Not too shabby.

This winter and last, however, have been setting records for rain.  I was nervous about having good weather when my mama-in-law came in December and then again last week when my parents were here.  Both times, I pleaded with Málaga to show off her good side with her pretty blue skies and her sweet little ocean breezes.  The first time she showed me exactly where to shove my request with dark, forbidding days and bone-chilling dampness.  The second time, she rather haughtily provided hurricane-ish winds that took your breath away, and flipped me the bird with cold, scudding clouds.  (I am pretty sure Málaga does not like being told how to conduct her weather business, just as a helpful aside to those who might be considering asking.)

Ah, weather, she is a fickle mistress.

Zany parents, interviews, vacuum bag confessions, and weather

First off, the good folks over at Vagabonding interviewed me recently for a series on long-term travelers. They just posted the interview here, and I can't believe that I've now publicly admitted that I love vacuum-pack travel bags. I still feel like people should only use them in infomercials.

Second off (is that a phrase?), do you know how weird/awesome my parents are? Some highlights of their trip were:

• Watching my teensy-tiny mom almost get blown across the Mediterranean by the gale-force winds Málaga served up.  
• Watching my dad, hard-core coffee-lover, try to make do with instant coffee and then Earl Grey each morning because we don't have a coffee maker (things are rather quaint when you literally don't have room for a coffee maker)
• Drinking wine out of an assortment of Coke glasses, because our landlord apparently has something for Coke and has provided only drinking glasses with the Coca-Cola logo.
• Having dinner at our Spanish friends the Castillos - they made paella, grilled pork, Spanish salads, and had platters of Manchego cheese and jamón Serrano...it was Spanish cuisine at its absolute best. They teased us about how often Americans say "awesome", and "really?" which are completely accurate observations.
• Speaking Spanish in front of my parents - weird but fun when they didn't understand anything and The Mister and I could speak in secret code (just kidding, Mom and Dad! we didn't do that!)

Tomorrow, let's talk about the weather (but not in a boring way), because one question that always comes up from people is "WHAT IS THE WEATHER LIKE IN SPAIN?" and I will try mightily to answer correctly (just kidding, I will probably answer in a lazy and semi-accurate way, but it will be close enough).

Anyway, check out the interview.

A smattering of pictures

A Meal to Remember

Meal:  chorizo sandwiches, almond-stuffed olives, gazpacho, dates, figs, nuts, two parents and The Mister.

Can it get any better?

Mis padres are here!

This is them.

They arrived in Málaga today. I was so excited to see them, but it was so weird at the same time -  seeing somebody out of context is always weird, like when you see your middle school teacher at the grocery store.  We walked around, and ate food, and drank lots of wine, and marveled that we were here, in this place, together.

Hope you all have a good weekend!

We'll be painting the town red.

And sampling lots of olives.

And chorizo.

And more wine.

A Day in the Life

These are my parents. Jumping into the pool with their clothes on. For no good reason. I love them. 

Busy day today: 

School: 

Experience acute handsoap shortage in midst of school-wide influenza attack. Madre mia. Also, receive three hand-drawn pictures from my students.  All of them given in love, and all of them drawn in class when I was trying to teach them something. Little punks.

Lunch:

Butter and chorizo sandwiches (remember what I told you yesterday about the sandwiches?)

mandarine oranges

olives

Coffee date:

With mi amiga Irene, who has short fabulous brown hair and is on double mission to 1.) teach me all the Spanish slang that I can learn and 2.) to show me all the best cheap food places in town.  Did I mention that I like Irene? Oh, and it's pronounced ee-RAY-nay.

Private English class:

With my coworker and friend Soledad.  She is having a unit on consumerism in her English classes. Consumerism.  She's learning how to say things like "Wow, that's a good deal!".  It's kind of awesome/weird.

Go to the market:

Wine

Olives

Chorizo

Persimmons (one day I will write a whole post devoted to the Spanish persimmon)

Honey tea (maybe a whole post on that one too)

Bread

Then, I will go to bed because did I mention my parents are coming tomorrow? My parents are coming tomorrow! 

I am super excited.

Oh, and I miss ordering tap water at restaurants because it's not considered polite behavior here

My friend Jacob asked me recently about cultural adjustments.  What things are weird? How am I dealing?

The boring but truthful answer is that the biggest culture shock came the first time I went to Europe.  I was fifteen and staying with a Spanish family about twenty miles down the road from where I live now (crazy coincidence, eh?) and it all made me wide-eyed.

This time, having spent lots of time in Europe before, and even having been to Spain before, I was expecting nothing less than warm sodas, pizzas with corn and tuna on them, shelf-stable milk and bidets in the bathroom.

But it's true that there are some things that surprised me (for example, air kiss etiquette is muy importante here and it takes a while to observe all the subtleties of that delicate custom).

But for the sake of conversation here are a few things I miss from the States:

• Websites being trustworthy - Spain is just not the biggest tech geek country out there, not by a long shot.  If a business has a website at all, it's usually something someone threw up a few years ago and hasn't touched since.  They don't really always get the whole "update regularly" part of the build-a-website kit.  It isn't unusual to find websites still reflecting special events from 2006.
• A sandwich with more than one ingredient. The Spanish are big on sandwiches. Ham, chorizo, and so on.  But they really like them with bread, one slice of meat, and butter or mayo. No lettuce/tomato/onion, and certainly no Ruebens or anything messy and clever like that. Meat, bread, butter/mayo, done.
• Dryers.  As in, clothes dryers. Warm, fragrant, SUPPLE clothes.  Do you know how stiff things get when they air-dry? Ugh.

The French and the Spanish being so very...French and Spanish.

Did I mention that we saw a big nativity scene in Paris?

It looked slightly different than the ones here.

Behold the French nativity: chic, elegant, highly stylized, minimalist.



And the Spanish belén: full of people, activities and snark.



Sounds about right.

Gosh I love this country.

I speak both English AND Normal

Today one of the little boys in my class of five-year olds looked up at me.  "How many English teachers do you have?" he asked.

"Well, I don't have any. My parents taught me English."

He looked at me, perplexed.

"How did they learn?"

"Because my family speaks English, just like yours speaks Spanish."

"Oh, Seño" he laughed, sure I was jesting with him, "my family doesn't know how to speak anything.  We just speak NORMAL!"

On Italian food: Olive Garden versus the real thing

Antipasti platter including all sorts of interesting and non-American-palate-approved things

The Italians have the best food in the world.  A bold statement, I know.  But I'm going to stick by it.

But here's the thing about Italian food: it is way different than we Americans think it is.  When The Mister and I first ventured to Italy, on our honeymoon, we were looking at menus night after night thinking "WHERE IS THE SPAGHETTI AND MEATBALLS?"  We kind of just thought that restaurants in Italy would serve food like the Olive Garden or Macaroni Grill, only with better ingredients and fresher pasta.

But oh, we were wrong.

Here's a sample of things I have never seen on a restaurant menu in Italy:

Chicken parmesan

Actually I've never seen chicken paired with pasta in any capacity whatsoever

Shrimp scampi

Fettucine alfredo

Stuffed shells

Baked penne

Calamari or deep fried ravioli of any kind (okay, who didn't see that one coming?)

In Italy, the pasta is the first course, and your second, main course is a meat dish.  So pasta isn't even the biggest focus of the meal.  I know, I'll give you a second to pick yourself up of the floor.  I felt lied to.

So after our first time to Italy, in which we ordered pickily and ate good food despite ourselves, we girded up our loins.  This time we went in knowing what we were expecting (basically: not the American/Italian fusion food that we were used to), and we ordered bravely, and didn't have a bad meal the whole time we were in the country.

Here is a list of some of the things we ate on our recent trip. Every single one of them we'd order again:

Pappardelle (a wide, flat pasta) with wild boar ragu

Quail wrapped in bacon on a bed of kale

Pasta with goose bacon

All manner of patês and livers

Jellied figs, onions and eggplants

Cured meats and cheeses

Wild boar salami

Toast with lard

Gosh, it was good.  The Italians may have inflicted Mussolini, the Mafia, a lot of questionable fashion, and prime ministers with a thing for teenagers on the world, but damn these guys can cook!

Oh, and now we both totally have a thing for wild boar meat.  I wonder if those javelinas in the Arizona desert would taste good on a cracker?

P.S. I apologize to all vegetarians who had to read this post.

P.P.S. I love Olive Garden and always will.

Siena, you have two new fans

Last stop on our trip was Siena, a little medieval town in the undulating Tuscan hills. We spent our time there sleeping in late, eating absolutely delicious Italian food at every meal (always accompanied by a bottle of the local Chianti), and strolling the streets hand in hand, utterly charmed by pretty Siena.

Sound cliché? I know.  But it really just was that great.  Hands down our favorite stop on the trip.

Naples, the city of trash and pizza and Mafia guys and more trash

Stop three on our recent little trek was Naples, Italy.  You might think that "Naples, Italy" has such a singsongy ring to it and sounds like a nice, romantic little town and you would be utterly, dead wrong.  Naples specializes in the following:

• Streets overflowing with trash (because the Mafia runs trash collection)
• Pickpockets
• Filthy buildings
• An astonishingly rude populace
• A particularly brutal organized crime ring known as the Camorra

It also has the distinction of having the worst metro system I have ever beheld - one that has no maps at all, multiple names for each station that are rotated according to whim, and old lumbering passenger trains doubling as metro lines. 

When we checked into our hostel in Naples, the receptionist was a young Canadian guy (He said "Let me tell you aboot the hostel" and I said "oh, where in Canada are you from?" and he said "Dang, I thought I was hiding it so well").  We asked him how he came to be there and he said that he had come for a few weeks, but oh you know, "Naples is a charming city" and so he stayed on to find work.  The Mister and I chuckled at this repartee, only to wipe the smirks of our faces when we realized he was entirely serious.  Charming?  The Mister confessed later that he was thinking "where have you BEEN lately?  Riyadh? Pyongyang? Baghdad? Darfur?"

Now at this point in the blog post you must be thinking that Naples sounds like it was a bust.  But here's the real genius: we did not go to Naples because we thought it would be charming or beautiful or polite. We went because they have the best pizza in the world.  And in this, my friends, we were not disappointed.  We were there for two and a half days and I am proud to say that we imbibed nothing except pizza for every.single.meal.  And I left wanting more.

Pizzeria da Michelle is known by the locals as having the best pie in Naples, and was made famous internationally when a little book called Eat, Pray, Love happened to mention that the pizza there was better than...well, you get the drift. We ate there on a dark cold night, next to a guy that looked rather startlingly like Frodo Baggins, and made plans to come back the next night before we even finished our first slice.  Cripes, that pizza was good.

We did do one respectable activity during our time in Naples, and that was to visit Pompeii.  The old Roman city was completely wiped out when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 and was buried in volcanic ash  well enough that it's surprisingly well preserved.  

Mount Vesuvius looming over the ruins of Pompeii

Our twinkly-eyed Italian guide was in his eighties at least and tottered around rather gingerly in some parts, but he gleefully pointed out every instance of phallic symbols carved into the rock (and called them "lucky").  Ancient Pompeii was a rather racy place, it seems.  His favorite is the one below, which is carved right into the road and it points in the direction of the brothel.  World's oldest highway sign? Billboard? Compass pointing to true north?



I loved this hitching ring for horses' reigns.  I kept thinking, I wonder who used this last? Where were they going? What did they look like? What did they eat for breakfast that morning? Were they wearing socks? And so on.

So we were glad to escape Naples with our safety and property intact, and I doubt it will make our list again.

But seriously, guys, that was some RIGHTEOUS pizza.

Rome, the eternal city

In front of St. Peter's Basilica

Rome.  On our honeymoon a few years ago, The Mister and I went to Florence and Venice, among other places, and we were always a little regretful that we hadn't left time for Rome.  So it became the next stop after Paris on our winter break. In Rome, we made the happy discovery that speaking to each other in heavy Italian accents does NOT get old.

We also made the discovery that the Sistine Chapel is overrated. *Gulp*  That's right, I said it.  Here's the deal: the actual painted ceiling is pretty cool. But you pay 20 dollars per person for the privilege of seeing it, and you cannot go straight in - you have to walk through about 30-40 minutes of a winding maze, packed with people, that they call the "Vatican art museum."  Whatever, we had just been to the Louvre.  I like art as much as the next person, but after 5 hours of medieval paintings in two days, I felt like if I saw one more "Pietá" or "Madonna and Child" that I would stick my museum brochure in my eyeball and swirl it around, just for a different view. But no matter, I still had to squeeze my way through this museum, and then finally, at the end, you are ushered into a small dark chapel that is packed cheek to butt with people looking straight upward. If you are the kind of person who sticks out your foot to trip people for fun, the Sistine Chapel should be your mecca.

But you know what was NOT overrated?  New Year's Eve fireworks next to the Roman Coliseum.  The Mister and I got a bottle of champagne and sat on what was probably a two-thousand-year-old stone wall next to the old ruins, made friends with some Argentinian guys next to us, and tried not to get killed by the rogue fireworks exploding helter skelter in the crowd.  Italians apparently aren't huge on the idea of an "official" fireworks display run by guys that actually have safety precautions.  People from the crowd just carried huge ones on their shoulders, put them down in the middle of a group of people, the more unsuspecting the better, and lit a match.  Unsurprisingly, ambulances were standing by.  It was ridiculously fun.

New Year's Day, we were in St. Peter's Square for the Pope's New Year's Mass and I achieved my first goal in 2011: get blessed by the Pope.  Check that off the ole' bucket list.  I know it looks in the video like there were hundreds of people there, but I am pretty sure when he did his up/down/across the body blessing ninja-move, he was looking right at me.

The inside of the Coliseum, where the Christians were fed to the lions and the gladiators fought to the death

More Coliseum - and the sun's finally poking through

Courtyard windows

View from a window built in 79 A.D. I bet the view's changed a bit.

Someone's old house

I'm back and I'm talking about Par-EE

Oh gosh, you guys. I was gone from this blog for a whole week and would you believe me if I say I missed it? I did. I'm glad to be back.

First stop was the land of guillotines, existentialism, and really wicked good baguettes. Le France.

Paris, city of love and light

Paris was freezing. Seriously, two-pairs-of-spandex-under-your-jeans-and-still-have-a-numb-culo freezing.  There was a blanket of snow when we first got there, which I felt was a generous gesture from France, sort of conciliatory, like "hey sorry about the butt hypothermia, I'll give you some pretty snow-covered vistas though, okay?".  And I said "throw in a hot crepe drizzled in honey and we will call it even." 

France and I reconciled.

Highlights:

• After years of being told that the real-life Mona Lisa is disappointing because it's totally smaller than everyone thinks it will be, I am proud to report that it was just exactly the size I thought it would be.  I am pretty sure that this can be extrapolated into a life lesson: the key to satisfaction is in low expectations.
• We went behind the scenes at the oldest bakery in Paris, and a guy who's been making bread for 40 years showed us how he works his magic. And then he let us eat some bread straight out of the oven. Heaven with a cherry on top.
• Getting completely confused by these futuristic pod-like street bathrooms Paris has. It's got a rotating door, more lights and buttons than a cockpit, and speaks to you in this disembodied female voice while you are trying to simultaneously do your business and not accidentally push the "open door" button. 
• Hanging out with our Jordanian friend Raa'fat, who was vacationing there the same time we were, and musing that we've now hung out in Phoenix, in Amman, Jordan, and in Paris - an unlikely trio.
• Eating snails. Lowlight. It tasted like...eating snails. Like slurping an earthworm. 

Not recommended.

The city of light was...lit up.

Notre Dame

The Mister and his mom

I had to walk up a half-mile of steps to get this picture so you'd better like it, dangit

Classique

And, as promised: the most  quintessentially French thing I've ever seen.  The last morning we were there, The Mister and I were taking the Metro to the airport when a man got on who was obviously in the midst of some hard times.  He was an accordion player, and he brought his accordion along, playing jaunty tunes for our listening pleasure.  When he was done, he walked around and passed around a hat to gather up some spare change.  And some delightful French person, on the Paris Metro on a cold Thursday morning, dug around in their pockets and decided that there was a gift better than cash - and produced, out of nowhere, a half-eaten baguette. The accordion man's eyes lit up like the Eiffel Tower at night. He took it gratefully and hid it somewhere in the folds of his clothing until it was invisible to the naked eye. My conclusion is twofold: 1.) That only in France can bakery bread substitute as currency in a pinch, and 2.) that both men, and by extension all French citizens, sew secret pockets in their clothing for the transportation and safe transfer of baguettes.

You ready for this?

Still traipsing around Italy, but I will be back blogging with a vengeance on Monday. I have so much to tell you guys, including but not limited to topics such as: phallic symbols as ancient navigation aids, the single most French thing I've ever seen, trying to eat the best pizza in the world while avoiding getting taken out by the mafia, and my personal encounters with the pope. Are you intrigued yet? Come back Monday for the full story.

P.S. This post brought to you courtesy of my iPhone and my sister Hannah, who emailed saying that I better post soon or else. Or something to that effect.

Come on in, 2011

Happy New Year!