Superstitions in Spain

   Superstitions: funny, inexplicable, and totally cultural.

I thought of this subject today when my second and fifth grade science classes were told in no uncertain terms that sleeping at night in a room with plants will kill you. Seriously. Kill you. If that were true every flower-filled hospital room would be homicide of some sort, right? Anyway, the thought is that since plants release carbon dioxide at night, you're competing with the plants for oxygen - an epic battle which, according to the Spanish school system, you will lose. (Don't worry, myriad internet sources and common sense assure me that this is false.)

This is the English version of their textbook. Sorry for the subpar iPhoneography.

Other Spanish superstitions that I know of: Tuesday the 13th is bad luck, not Friday. Salt shakers shouldn't be passed hand to hand, they should be placed on the table to be picked up. If you are sweeping and your broom hits the feet of someone who is currently single, they will never get married. Watermelon and alcohol are a lethal mix. And if that last one were true, we'd all be dead.

Not a fan

   

I give private English classes throughout the week in people's homes, and I've got ten students. My youngest is eight years old and the oldest is in her 40s. For the most part, I adore my students and I'm pretty sure I learn just as much from them as they learn from me (I know - cliché alert! Only it's actually true. I teach them verbs, they teach me all sorts of cultural gems like how to properly slice a leg of jamón.)

There is one exception, however. A coddled (I mean it, they literally have a servant in their house) eleven-year-old who hates English and spits fire. She sulks, she pouts, she wants to hang with her friends or look up puppy pictures online or do anything except study English with me. I've tried the sweet tactic and the veiled threats and pouting right back. She won't have any of it. She is unmoved. She does not want to study English and that's that.

Finally, I hit on an idea. She's always telling me how smart she is (she's a real gem), so one day I brought her an English book that's two years above her grade level. "You're smart," I told her, "so let's hit it. Enough with this baby stuff." It's the only thing I have ever said that has actually impressed her.

Anyway, since then she's been pretty docile - for her, anyway - and actually smiling at me occasionally. I thought we were making real progress. And then, the other day we were playing a game out of the English book that called for gamepieces, which I had forgotten. She darted into the other room to get what she assured me were perfect gamepieces.

She came back with these. Can you guess which one she designated as me and which one is her?

Guess I have a ways to go after all.

    

Rain and sickness

It's been a beautiful winter here, full of warm and sunny days. This weekend it's supposed to rain though, pretty much straight through, and I tell you, I am ready for it. I miss the rain. 

It seems that all of Málaga is sick right now, especially if you are under the age of 10. Today I showed up to my private class to find an impromptu sick house - three children laying on couches amidst blankets, tissues and thermometers. Great. 

I began class and within an hour one looked at me with enormous eyes and said "I have to throw up." And then she did. In the toilet, thankfully, but nonetheless I'd had enough. I called it a wrap for the day and went home to take a scalding hot shower in an attempt to disinfect myself. Note to parents: just call and cancel the English lesson for the day, please.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to a weekend in - just me and my own germs, thank you very much.

  

Broken bridges

Pont Saint-Bénezet

Avignon, France

Taken on the very first day of 2012,

as the bridge celebrated 827 years of life.

Broken, but beautiful.

La Disciplina

Unrelated inappropriate picture. If you're not sure why it's inappropriate...well, it's just a very anatomically correct statue is all.

Let's talk discipline in Spanish schools. I overhead two Spanish girls today talking about the school systems in England, since they had just spent a few weeks there student teaching at the schools.

"They are obsessed with lining up straight" the one sniffed.

"And only speaking when you raise your hand first. I mean, not even a word without the teacher telling you can talk" lamented the other.

They laughed together: "that's why they line up so straight at bus stops." 

This got me thinking about how our education systems really speak volumes about us as a culture, and shape the next generation not just intellectually but also culturally.

British kids are encouraged to be restrained and disciplined and definitely non-chatty. Americans are encouraged to think for themselves, compete with their peers (sometimes respectfully, sometimes not) and consistently strive for their best. (By the way, if you think that list seems universal, you are probably American. None of them are particularly important in Spain.)

Discipline in Spanish classrooms is more lenient in some ways, harsher in others. In general, the noise level is outrageous and "speaking in turn" is totally unenforced. Kids are always up out of their seats, and they often interrupt the teacher in the middle of the lecture. Cheating is a minor kid offense that everyone is expected to do at some point, like picking your nose. Cheaters are usually just told to keep their eyes on their paper, without any of the disciplinary fuss that would be raised at an American school. 

On the other hand, I'm inclined to believe that lung power is part of the requirement for being a Spanish teacher, because they are a real bunch of screamers. They yell at kids, individually and collectively, in ways that Americans would feel are unnecessary and harsh. They will get in a kid's face and yell "WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? USE YOUR HEAD FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE! WHAT A BABY!" in a way that has me wide-eyed in the corner. But everyone takes it in stride and five minutes later the teacher is kissing the kid on the cheeks and telling him how handsome he is, like normal (Spanish teachers are demeaning at times but are much more affectionate than American teachers are encouraged to be, so the pendulum swings both ways!) 

In Spain, individual thinking and initiative is not particularly encouraged. Everybody is mostly supposed to stick to the script. Grades are public property, and a teacher will read out everyone's grades on a test to the whole classroom, to the jeers and cheers of the audience. 

This isn't the complete picture, of course. I've worked in three elementary schools over the past two years, and The Mister in a high school, and four schools total isn't exactly a wide sample size. Andalucía, particularly Málaga, is known for being laid-back even for Spaniards, so maybe it's just a bit wild down here in the south?

Either way, it is never boring.

   

Barca - Madrid death match

Last night was a big night here in Spain: the latest Barcelona-Madrid soccer throwdown. I love these nights - it's all anyone talks about all day, and the whole country practically shuts down. Waiters sit down at their customer's tables for a few minutes to catch some action here and there, and good luck doing anything except plopping down at a pub and watching the game. The bars are humming with activity, and nervous fans smoke, drink and cuss their way through the 90-minute playing time.

Sports writer Bill Simmons said it this way: "Here's how I would describe Barca-Madrid: Imagine if the Mets and Yankees were the two best baseball teams by far, if they measured themselves only by each other, if they played six to eight series every year, and if they had many of the best players in the world. Then imagine if baseball was the only sport that anyone cared about in America, imagine if they were throwing at each other almost every game, and imagine if the players hated each other as much as the fans did. That's Barca-Madrid. And on top of that, Barca plays soccer at a higher level than any American sports team does anything AND it has the best athlete in the world (Messi, who's the closest thing to a sports genius that we've had since Michael Jordan)."

The Mister and I are Barca fans, and they won last night. Today at school the kids were wild, obsessed, breaking down every play. My fifth grade class was learning the grammatical construction "getting + comparative adjective" as in "it's getting darker" or "she's getting taller." I asked them to make up their own sentences.

One disgruntled little Madrid fan raised his hand.

"Barca is getting more annoying."

    

More from Nimes and Le France

Nimes

Nimes, France.

January 2nd.

10:29 a.m.

Taken just after eating a croissant.

53 degrees

This is what it usually looks like.

Today the thermometer peaked at 53 degrees Fahrenheit, and it rained for part of the day, both of which made Málaga residents feel like it is the end of the world. It's been a warm, sunny, dry winter here and it's amazing how fast you feel entitled, isn't it? I was wearing a thick sweater and leggings under my jeans and I still got scolded by a motherly old lady at the bus stop for not wearing gloves. Another teacher noted my lack of scarf. "That's how you get sick" she clucked ominously. I was wearing a turtleneck, for crying out loud.

I've got to say though, even though 53 degrees sounds unbelievable wussy to those of you spending a winter in actual cold temperatures, the difference is that here there is no heat in buildings. At all. And the buildings are all built for the heat instead of the cold, with marble and porcelain and never, ever with carpet. So when it's in the fifties outside, my school is in the low to middling sixties, which is a pretty cold temperature to hang out all day in, and our apartment is often colder than it is outside.

There is, however, a rather charming Spanish custom to combat all this. It involves gathering friends and family to a nice big table and draping the table with a huge tablecloth that reaches the ground on all sides. Then, put a space heater called a brasero under the tables and crank it up really high. Keep the tablecloth tucked around waists and dropped down nicely, and you'll have nice warm butts in no time! I've been told that it's an old-fashioned custom that had been going out of style until the recession kicked it right back in as a nice way to conserve the heat and save on electricity bills. I just think of it as a nice social way to keep my toes warm!

Ode to Claire

Oh, Claire.

Claire is my one American friend in Málaga. I like her for various reasons, including but not limited to her sense of humor (cracking sarcastic jokes to friends who won't understand them gets old), her famous ability to cook whole turkeys in toaster ovens, and the fact that Spaniards get us constantly confused because we are both short and blonde and foreign.

Also, I like her because she just went to the motherland and picked up a few Christmas presents for us.

See above.

Round. Of. Applause.

Monochrome Valencia

Valencia and Barcelona

After our few days in Morocco, we rested at home for a day and then headed out on a road trip to northern Spain and southern France. The cast of characters included our friends Fran (as in Francisco) and Belén (as in Bethlehem, yes, her name means Bethlehem). 

We lucked out with great weather, except for one rainy day in France, and having a rainy morning in France isn't exactly the worst thing that can happen to you. We were limited to a few old CDs (a perilous situation on a road trip), but  of the CDs happened to be the Forrest Gump soundtrack, which is more or less the best CD I can think of to have on repeat on a car trip.

So there we were, rolling down French highways with Spanish friends, singing about California dreamin'. We stopped in Valencia and Barcelona, both of which were pretty great. Valencia is very modern and looked prosperous to us, as we're accustomed to the poorer south. I kept looking around at all the clean, neat apartment buildings and wondering where everyone put their laundry. In Málaga laundry is hanging everywhere outside windows, which seemed odd to me at first, but I suppose now I'm so adjusted to it that the city felt a bit sterile without it.

Fran and The Mister 

Belén and I, quite well-lit.

Then, it was on to Barcelona, which is one of my favorite cities in Spain. I know this is going to be a controversial statement, but I'm gonna throw it out there - I really prefer it hands-down to Madrid. It's got quirky architecture lots of parks and huge avenues that are vaguely reminiscent of Paris. Also, there is a camera store near the Plaza de España that has a floor tailor-made for moonwalking. I know this because we stopped in and The Mister and I had an impromptu moonwalk contest (he won, naturally) because life is too short to pass up such perfect opportunities to attempt a moonwalk in public.

Also, the sunrise over the sea was my walk to work yesterday morning. It's titled "Why I'll be sad to leave Spain: Exhibit A."

The Tannery

So I was honest about my rocky relationship with Morocco, and I was interested to see that in the comments, some of you reported similar experiences both in Morocco and in other countries. Maybe we just all belong to the wussie traveler club and we should toughen up, or maybe it isn't us. But I'm not all negative, because today I'll share two cool things about our trip there: 2.) the food is really good. Couscous and dried apricots and dates and tagines and camel burgers. And sweet mint tea. We were well fed. And 2.) The tannery.

We were in the city of Fez, which has one of the oldest continually operating tanneries in the world. We went, and then almost dropped dead from the smell. But we powered through and captured the snippets below. The guidebooks all swear that you can't get down on the tannery floor and can only view it from a balcony, but we lucked out with a "tour guide" (special price for you my friend!) who apparently held the keys to the whole establishment. We got right down in the mess, dodging pack donkeys and stray chickens, past animal carcasses and men up to their waists in huge ancient vats of what we were assured are very carcinogenic dye chemicals. It was noisy and colorful and so very, very pungent. It was fascinating.

See:

  

Morocco