Back in the USA

And we're officially back in the USA! We landed in Maryland just in time to meet Irene - Hurricane Irene, that is.  If we had gotten in 8 hours later we would have gotten completely stuck in the airport chaos, so we were lucky with a capital L.

Take a look at the damage:

We were fine - just lots of debris all around, and we lost power for about 24 hours. A nice welcome home from America!

Simplicity and still life

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First, please behold the glory of this rules and regulations sign. I spotted it next to a swimming hole in the river in western Spain last week, and, well, just try to really clear your mind and take it all in, the whole blinding awesomeness of it:

I can't decide if this sign is genius or if it displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons someone would need to do their business at the park.

Arguments for the genius side: If you don't speak Spanish, you still know exactly what the sign is telling you not to do. There is no ambiguousness here. None at all. Not a speck.

Arguments for the stupid side: If matters come to a point where someone needs to contemplate dropping trou and leaving a poo pile in the flower patch at the town pool, they aren't going to be deterred by the fact that it's against the rules. If they are willing to flout the infinitely stronger societal rules of etiquette by committing such an act, then let's assume it's an emergency. Emergency kind of emergency. Which, by the way, I can only assume they acknowledge by the addition of zooming lines in the painting near the buttock region - I believe they are indicating velocity. At which juncture, who cares about the rules anyway?

So in summary, the sign tells you exactly what you're not to do, but I can't think of a single situation in which someone on the way to doing it would be deterred by a sign.

While you noodle over that, I'll share one more: 

Please don't shampoo yourselves in the water, the nearby fish might start leaping and shouting (well, that's what the picture would indicate anyway). And, the sign admonishes, please don't drive your car into the pool and try to wash it either. This is not a car-washing kind of pool, no sirree it isn't.

Spanish skies

 

   

The stormy sky above produced the biggest nor'easter I ever done saw (can you tell from this sentence that a.) I don't know what nor'easter means (I've always wanted to use it in a sentence though, and this seemed close enough) and b.) what I really meant was a summer hailstorm?) 

(oh, and it WAS still the biggest one I've ever seen) 

(i.e. it was the only one I've ever seen)

   

But it also produced this:

and, much later, this:

Tomato, tomAHto

Is it weird that I like taking pictures of tomatoes? To the point where I am carefully selecting them for their color and then arranging them on a table? As if I am doing an actual photo shoot with tomatoes?

 What does this mean for my life?

Well hello there, praying mantis

We've had so much fun this past week out in the country.  We helped bartend at the town medieval festival, picked tomatoes off the vine and figs off the trees (eating a few here and there on the way to the basket, naturally) and spent hot, lazy afternoons by the freshwater pool that trickles down from the spring.

Our friends Becky and Martin hosted us, and they had a few other friends in town as well - a pair of Aussies and a trio of Brits. So really, we were a huge rollicking fruit salad of English dialects, and hardly a moment went by without someone chortling "you say it like THAT?", and the classic tomato/tomahto debate raged at every meal. They tried to teach us how to eat European-style (knife and fork held at all times, fork in right hand facing downwards and knife in left) and we taught them how people eat in the LAND OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE BRAVE. There was a lot of "my country can beat up your country" talk. The Americans boasted, the Brits clung to their dignity by invoking their illustrious past, and the Aussies put on their sunglasses and excused themselves from the whole thing so they can take a snooze by the pool. Standard.

For some reason I got a lot of pictures of bugs while I was there.  Would you like to see some bug pictures? I'm going to go ahead and assume that you exclaimed "yes!" at your computer monitor:

I think I get double bonus points for this one - this is actually one bug (the green praying mantis) EATING another bug (the hapless locust).

It's a tough world out there.

Coming home...sort of

This evening I am back in Málaga for the first time all summer.  We've covered a lot of ground these weeks, The Mister and I, and familiar turf is almost exotic in its overwhelming familiarness (familiarity?).  But it feels really good to be back, to drive into town in the sloping hills and down towards the sea.  The city is humid and swarming with sunburned tourists, and I am secretly a little glad that we've fled for the summer.  We will return again in the fall when the hubbub has died down and all is quiet and the old grizzled chestnut roaster man is back at his post under the towering oak trees.

For now, we're here for a few days, staying with our friends Rosa and Mauricio, and getting all sorts of last-minute errands done (visa paperwork! pharmacy! bank! luggage exchange!) before leaving Thursday to start our journey toward America, where we'll be visiting for a few weeks. 

America! Will she be the same? Will we be the same?

   

Hey there internet, it's been awhile

We've been hanging out in yet another rural Spanish town this week, spending time with our British friends Martin and Becky who have a farm in western Spain. We've been chasing chickens, swimming in waterfall pools, picking grapes and eating them off the vine, and sleeping like angels in the country fresh air. All that combined with eating gourmet food picked out of the gardens that morning, and you have a pretty perfect vacation.

We'll be back in internet touch on Monday, but for now, here's what our summer's looked like lately:

Summertime and the livin's easy

I've been such an erratic blogger lately.  I've been busy cheating on Love & Paella with another blog, the camp blog for the summer camp I'm working in, posting 3-4 times daily in a job that, as you can imagine, rather dries up my desire to blog for pleasure.

But we've missed so much together.  I didn't even get a chance to tell you about how the Spanish kids at summer camp play "bullfight" instead of cowboys and Indians.  Or how The Mister and I combined got three wasp stings and two bee stings in one week (I was only responsible for one bee sting out of that bunch, but I feel like I contributed more if I combine the numbers).  Or how this medieval monastery is haunted like crazy and how it seems funny in the light of day but how I can't sleep at night because I'm afraid the ghosts are going to get me.

This summer we've gotten salsa lessons on hot nights, practicing outside after class under the light of the full moon and the sky scattered full with country stars.  We've taught Spaniards how to play the classic American college game of flip cup, and we've eaten fewer vegetables than ever before thanks to the decidedly non-gourmet camp food. We've gone wine tasting in a room that had windows on all sides so we could see the slope of the sunflower fields arching off into the distance, and we've been more tired than we've been in years.

We've made up bar songs, gotten EFL lyrics stuck in our heads, fallen in love with funny kids and gotten annoyed with annoying kids.

We've made good friends, had long days, lounged at the pool, worked until the late hours, watched the sun setting over the countryside. This is our last week of camp, and I've got to say, I am exhausted.

But it's been a good ride.

Sunflower fields

The monastery we're staying in here in Castilla La Mancha is surrounded by sunflower fields - miles and miles of sunflower fields.

Enjoy.

Here you can see the pointed roof of the monastery in the background. Home sweet home.