A note about the photos

The Mister and I leave tomorrow on a trip - first to London to visit friends, and then to Amman, Jordan to visit another set of friends. I'll be in touch here and there, but I may not get to blog on the road. Both places are incredibly photogenic so I'm excited to get another chance to photograph them (you can see some of my London and Jordan images here).

By the way, if you ever see any photos on my site or in my Flickr feed that you'd like to purchase, let me know (my email is on the sidebar). I sell them for very reasonable prices and if you buy one then I tend to love you forever and ever.

Overheard

Overheard in English class recently:

"Computers are curly." (Trouble with adjectives.)

"Michelangelo's father was the local hammer." (Correct answer: magistrate.)

"Señorita Sarah, what is a fu*k ton?" (My first thought was "an awful lot of something" before I realized that the student was trying to pronounce function. My mistake.)

"You have McDonald's in America?!" (I told her that McDonalds is American and she said "Oh. I thought it was Japanese.")

Also: "There is Coca-Cola in USA?"

"We have relation boat." (Relationship.)

Home cooked meals

The appetizers

If you went over to your Spanish friend's house for lunch, like The Mister and I did this weekend, here's what the menu may be like (it was for us):

Appetizers:

Jamón

Cured cheese

Sausage slices

Olives

Potato salad with hard-boiled eggs, pickled asparagus and tuna.

First course (called the primero plato):

Spanish lentils made by your friend's mom (mothers always make them best), with bread to soak up the liquid.

Second course (segundo plato):

A whole fish, (fins, head and all - remember what I said about eating the whole animal?) sliced in half, drizzled with olive oil and broiled.

Dessert (postre):

Your choice of fresh strawberries, bananas or oranges, topped with a touch of whipped cream.

Beverages:

Spanish wine (of course)

Then, you try not to waddle out the door.

Is all curriculum this bad?

  

I know, I know, it's cliché to be a teacher that's complaining about the curriculum. But I have to get this off my chest. We've been doing science classes on the Solar System, which has been amazing because the kids are fascinated by it and it isn't hard to engage them. Being somewhat of a nerd, I actually love these topics, so I get really jazzed up in class. Happily, you don't have to know all that much about astronomy to teach it to third graders.

But you do have to know a decent amount in order to write the textbook. Right? Right?

Well, let's take a look inside the book, shall we?

There are three dwarf planets? False. Five. 

Pluto is the furthest planet from the Sun? False. If we're going to go with this whole three-dwarf-planets thing, Eris is three times the distance from the Sun as Pluto. Also, it isn't furthest it's farthest.

Assertion: The atmosphere is 1000 kilometers thick. False. The atmosphere is about 100 kilometers thick.

Assertion: The Moon is 49 times smaller than Earth. False. It's 4 times smaller than Earth in diameter and is 1/81 of its mass.

Wrong again. Saturn doesn't have seventeen moons, it has sixty two.

Between this and telling kids that they'll put their lives in danger by sleeping in a room with a plant...for the love of Pete, Spain, it's time to shape up.

This textbook, by the way, was published in 2011, so it isn't simply that it's an old textbook hanging around the elementary school. I think just nobody bothered to do their homework.

And you know what's really depressing? This is only one unit.

Stop and listen to the music

Do you ever have those moments in your life when you wish you could reach out and grasp the whole thing, just to scoop it up and bottle it for later? Then, in a darker, rainier season of life, you could open the bottle and let the essence of your summer invade the gloom of autumn.

I had one of those moments the other evening. The Mister and I had been out having tapas with some friends, and we were walking home in the warm flood of the streetlights.

We were just passing by the cathedral and it was all lit up like a candle in the night. We heard him before we saw him - a street musician, sitting quietly with his head bowed over his guitar, playing notes so luxurious and rich that it was almost impossible to think there was only one set of hands playing. He opened his mouth and started singing, and we slowed to a stop, awed into stillness.

His voice rippled over the notes like water flowing over river rocks. It was deep and rich, a perfect symphony of sound. It was stunning.

The Mister and I marvelled. He tugged on my hand and pulled me toward a set of steps, and we sat there, in shadow, listening and watching. It was at this point that I wanted to bottle the memory, every part of it: the angel voice and the quiet song; the feel of The Mister's strong hand in mine; the chilly winter night with the warm pool of the streetlights; the feeling of gratefulness for it all. I never want to forget it. Any of it.

When the song was finished, the player bowed his head over his guitar again. The quiet tinkling of a nearby fountain sounded like muted applause for the player's song.

Wordlessly, The Mister and I started clapping. We were joined by several other passersby, people like us who had been going about their rather ordinary evening before the unexpected gift of beauty stopped them for a moment and made them take it all in.

The player looked at us in suprise. He had been so involved in his song that he hadn't noticed us.  He smiled at us.

It was perfect.

  

Wet, dry or somewhere in between

You are thinking: laundry hanging outside! How pretty and quaint!

They are thinking: ugh it looks like it's going to rain, I'm going to have to wash everything again tomorrow. If I had a clothes dryer I would never complain about laundry again.

I know because I currently have sheets hanging up to dry. They are our only pair of sheets, and so I'm praying that they'll be dry before bedtime. We repeat this process frequently. Sometimes we end up with damp sheets.

In the summer things dry in 24 hours. In the winter we have to plan two or even three days ahead. No last-minute jeans washing here. 

I miss clothes dryers.

Tropical winter

Puentes

December puente, 2012 in Sweden.

October puente 2011 in Cádiz province.

My dad sent me this article about puentes, which is how Spaniards refer to long holiday weekends. The topic makes me smile, because it's one of those things where the people in the culture have a completely different perspective than people outside looking in.

If there's one stereotype about Spain that most of my Spanish friends dislike, it's the idea that Spaniards are lazy and that they don't work very hard. It hurts their dignity, I think, and quite understandably. The problem is that according to the standards of most foreigners, they actually don't work very hard, which of course gives the whole land a feeling of pleasant laziness. I don't mean actual hours of work or the generous stream of holidays, though those are factors –- it's more that the overall level of hustle would disappoint even the most lenient Little League baseball coach.

Anyway, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Spain might not be a great place to get things done, but it sure is a nice place to relax and enjoy life.

Me attempting to enjoy life while holding a chicken on last December's puente. Experiment: failed.

October 2010 puente, Granada.

Typical

January 14th, 2012

Málaga

Taken on a walk with The Mister 

(while hungry).

  

Jamón

Before I came to Spain, I thought Spanish cuisine could be more or less summed up in three words: paella, gazpacho, sangria. Turns out that only tourists drink sangria (the locals drink tinto de verano, which is a mixture of red wine and lemon or club soda) and gazpacho, while popular, is only eaten in the summer. Paella is the only one of the trifecta that's as ubiquitous as I thought it would be –- but if someone asked me now, it still wouldn't be the number one most Spanish food item out there.  That prize would have to go to something I hadn't even thought about before I came here: the Spanish jamón.

Ham is practically a religion here. The sight of greased-up pig legs, hooves and all, dangling from restaurant and shop ceilings is as ordinary as sunshine. Their slightly musty smell is familiar to anyone who's spent time in Spanish pubs, and if you've been in Spain you've eaten it in some form or other, whether you are a vegetarian or not (they slip it into everything)(sorry if that just ruined your day).

In Andalucía, there's a saying that a house isn't a home without a ham. So, for Christmas, our friend José gave us a whole ham leg because he is awesome. It looks like this:

This is what The Mister looked like when I asked him how we were going to cut the jamón. We were so clueless that we had to look up YouTube videos to figure out how to slice the dang thing. As a point of interest, there are literally professional ham cutters in Spain. I even met a professor of ham cutting one time. A professor of ham cutting. Only in Spain.

As you can see, it doesn't resemble American-style ham in the slightest. It's not even cooked, it's just cured somehow. Lunch-meat ham is called jamón York here, although I'm not sure what exactly the York references.

Don't you want a slice?

(If you're a normal American, the usual first response is a squeamish but emphatic NO. But you get used to it. It's good.)

   

Video killed the radio star

Check out two of my kiddies performing for the Spanish sort-of holiday "Día de la Paz" (day of peace). The whole school performed this little number to celebrate. Cute!

Also, check out this clip of a Spanish TV show that featured our friend Martin and his farm in Extremadura. Celebrity!

In which I yell PENIS to a group of children and get paid for it

I´m going to go ahead and start with a disclaimer: if you are easily embarrassed by body part discussions, stop here.

Things were looking stormy from the outset, seeing as this was on the first page of the unit. Who ARE these textbook makers? And do they think the people actually in the classroom ought to keep a straight face?

I knew it was going to be a fun day when I showed up to my fifth-grade science class and the other teacher opened the book to a new unit: Human Reproduction. I looked out at the students and they were already snickering at body part drawings in the book. Oh boy.

As if teaching basic here's-what-she's-got-here's-what-he's-got to a bunch of ten-year-olds isn´t hard enough, teaching them in another language opens up a whole new glitter box of mischief. I swear, you guys, I swear, that they had bonded together ahead of time and made a pact to pronounce all the most sensitive words incorrectly so that I was obligated to correct them.

"Pay-nees?" one sweet-cheeked little cherub asked, his face full of innocence.

"Penis," I enunciated, trying to act as casual as possible.

Then more:

Peh-nies?

PENIS.

Pie-nos?

OH FOR CRIPES SAKE IT´S A PENIS.

We repeated the process with breasts (bray-asts?) and vagina (va-hee-na?) and over and over again, them crowing gleefully with victory, me ruefully repeating funny words and knowing I´d been had. (I know some of you out there are thinking, for heaven´s sakes it´s only a body part, there´s nothing funny about the word penis. To this I would agree in principle and then suggest that you say it twenty times to a classroom full of ten-year-olds and then let me know how it goes.)

The final score was :

 Devilishly clever fifth graders: infinity

Me: zilch.

Who can blame them though? I´ve been laughing ever since.