Eurovision

We need to talk Eurovision. If you have not sat through a Eurovision contest with a group of Europeans, you have only lived a half-life, my friend. And by that I mean that you have avoided something that would have inevitably dragged down the quality of your life, so good for you.

Eurovision is a music contest, in which every European country (and, inexplicably, many definitely non-European countries. Israel? Azerbaijan? Sorry y'all, the credited response is ASIA) sends a musician/treacly ballad singer to compete with the other countries. Votes are cast through phone lines in a 15-minute period at the end of the show, and you aren't allowed to vote for your own country. It's like American Idol with a passport and truckloads of trashy Europop. And no Simon Cowell (by the way, I hear American Idol is still on TV even though Simon Cowell left. How can this be, America? This does not compute. He was the one and only star of that show.)

Eurovision has been going on every year for fifty-ish years, and it's a Very Big Deal. It draws 120 million viewers, which is 10 million more than the Super Bowl record. Seriously. Every year, Europeans gather together in their homes to watch this strange spectacle made of equal parts trashiness, campiness, and mediocrity.

If you ever watch Eurovision though (despite my warnings) you should be prepared for the side sport: the Super Bowl's time-honored sister activity is eating buffalo wings, and Eurovision's is complaining about the fairness of the votes. Everyone votes for their neighbors, or so the saying goes. English speakers vote for English speakers, Ukrainians vote for fellow Eastern Europeans, the Portuguese vote for the Spanish and the Spanish for the Portuguese. Complaints abound. Everyone thinks that everyone else is voting against their act because of political reasons, but everybody's song looked equally awful to me. As an outsider with no skin in the game, I claim neutrality - everyone was equally embarrassing. Voting for political reasons or because you simply like the inhabitants of a certain country over another feels like a perfectly reasonable option to me when there is nothing else to distinguish by.

Anyway, if you have watched Eurovision and you think it's amazing, feel free to tell me in the comments. I thought it was amazing...ly funny. In a ridiculous sort of way.

Not that I didn't enjoy myself, that is.

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.

Euro kiddies don't ride horses

When Spanish kiddos are outside the supermarket, whining because they didn't get their favorite cereal and that they can't believe their mom makes them eat wheat bread and all that normal kid stuff, they don't get bribed with a ride on the dime-a-ride bucking bull or horse.

They get to ride on a kiddie moped.

Everyone has to aspire to culturally appropriate dreams - and modes of transportation, apparently.

(file this under: awesome)

End of the year party that never ended

I wanted to blog on Friday but was held captive in a veritable hostage situation.

Here's what went down: The Mister and I were invited to an end-of-the-year celebration lunch at a fellow teacher's house.  There was to be paella and a nice dose of fresh air, since the guy's house is in the countryside a little outside of Málaga.  Sounds like a nice thing to do on a Friday afternoon, doesn't it? Doesn't it?

Here are some pictures of the party, all excellent quality courtesy of the iPhone (*ahem*).

Then the night started to go dark, in more ways than one.

When it's 10 pm. and you have to be up at the crack of dawn and the party is showing no signs of ending and people are lighting alcoholic drinks on fire and you are dependent on a ride that is showing no inkling to leave (or to stop drinking)...well then, ladies and gentlemen, the fun meter starts to crater downwards pretty fast.

When the 55-year-old math teacher abuela starts getting friendly with a pole, to a Justin Timberlake soundtrack, the party has officially jumped the shark.

But still, we couldn't leave. An hour outside of Málaga and no way home.

We finally got home at midnight, after someone luckily remembered that they had children at home. Only in Spain, I think.  When we got home, we had to scramble to do all sorts of last minute things before I went to Madrid the next morning to attend an event for the camp we're teaching at next month.  Bed at 1:30, alarm went off at 6.

I was not happy.

At least the paella was good.

An afternoon at the local chiringuito

When my friend Pilar heard that The Mister and I hadn't yet tried Málaga specialty espetos - something we Americans would call "fire-roasted sardines on a stick" -  she was so startled that she literally stopped in her tracks, like in a movie, forcing me to walk three steps without her before realizing that she was still behind me.  "We absolutely must go," she said, "what are you doing Saturday?"

So this past weekend we met up with her and her boyfriend Juan and another friend, Maria del Mar (who I will forever love because her real, actual first name is Maria del Mar) and we went to the chiringuito.  Chiringuitos are little open-air restaurants, right on the beach, that specialize in fish, seafood, and all types of marine life delicacies.  They usually have a little fire somewhere nearby on the sand or in an old carved-out boat, over which lots of whole fish are smoking and roasting.

I belong to the category of people who are somewhat ambivalent about fish.  I try to get used to the taste, the smell, but have never warmed up to the whole thing.  I am, however, a firm believer in food experimentation and strongly in the Anti-Picky Eating Club, so I had to give it a shot.

The verdict was that it was all pretty good.  I didn't mind eating around the head, and when the little fried anchovies came along, I ate them whole like everyone else.  Fins, eyeballs and all.  They ended up being my favorite thing.  So crunchy (maybe it was the bones?) - yum.

So if you're in Spain anytime soon, especially on the Costa del Sol, get yourself to a chiringuito and try some espetos.  And then afterwards, try to find yourself a friend named Maria del Mar. It's even cooler than it sounds.

Pilar, Maria del Mar, and me.

A thing to love about Spain

Conversations like these.

I walk into the local kebab place. Kebab is of Middle Eastern origin, and it's the fast food of Europe. It's roasted meat, usually chicken or lamb, with lettuce and tomatoes and various yogurt sauces stuffed inside a pita.  It's amazing.  I can't believe I haven't taken pictures of one yet; instead you get pictures of a lovely but unrelated spider's web.  Lucky you.

Anyway, I have to be somewhere early, so I'm trying to eat dinner at the unheard-of hour at 6:00 p.m.  The shop's door is open, but it's rather deserted-looking.

The conversation goes like this:

Me: Are you open?

Spaniard Worker : No.

Me: What time do you open?

Spaniard: Six o'clock.

Me: It's 6:12

Spaniard: Six, six thirty.

Me: So you'll be open in fifteen minutes?

Spaniard: Gimme a half hour.

Awesome.

   

Rosa's stamp of approval

This is Rosa.  Rosa is one of my favorite Spaniards.  She and her husband Mauricio are good friends of The Mister and I, and since they lived in San Diego for a bit (we've even compared notes on the same restaurants, half a world away) they have a rather unique cultural perspective.  We hang out all four of us, and the conversation flows in English and Spanish, often all in the same sentence, which gets really fun when someone says something really ridiculous, like "el wino," a mixture of the word wine and its Spanish counterpart vino. El wino.  Oops. It has a ring, no?

Rosa offers independent verification of my Stuff Americans/Europeans Like lists: she agrees that salad dressing is, like, weirdly popular in the US and that one of the things she couldn't get over about living in the US was how everything just worked (i.e. item #10 efficiency) - if you had to call the plumber, the plumber came right away, and if you needed something, you just went and bought it.  

Rosa is also European in the following ways: she freely admits to eating the whole animal, she likes tuna, and she is one of those people that's just hopelessly cool - I include this picture as proof.  She is sautéeing mushrooms, people, and she still looks chic - she can't help it. 

Europeans always manage to look pretty cool.

It's a cultural trait.

Europe isn't all rainbows and butterflies

Looks like a cute, innocent little market, right?

Look, I love living in Europe, I really do.

But it isn't paradise, not by a long shot.

Europe has seedy parts, overflowing dumpsters, and philandering politicians that seemingly number in the thousands. Just like everywhere else.

The most awkward part for me is the racism.  I am not going to sugarcoat here - there is a pretty strong underlayer of latent racism here in Spain.  I'm not saying they're even necessarily going to show it to you right off the bat, because Spaniards are still quite a genial bunch, but being at least mildly racist is still pretty socially acceptable here in a way it hasn't been in the States since, oh, 1982? ish?

The country, if you remember, was pretty closed off for a huge part of the 20th century under the dictatorship of Franco, and non-Spaniards didn't really start flowing in immigration-wise until the past couple decades.  It still shocks them, especially older Spaniards, and they'll tell you with kind voices and gentle hands on your arm to not go into that one neighborhood "because it's full of Gypsies," or that the best place in town to buy cheap goods is from the Chinese, putting their fingers to the corners of their eyes and stretching their skin for emphasis.

To an American (and a millennial to boot), it's....awkward. I know I said that twice but I don't know what else I can say about it.

There is no moral to the story and no cute anecdote or anything.  I just thought that since I give a pretty solid majority of this blog to the many joys of Europe in general and Spain in particular, I thought it would be fair to step back and do a little audit occasionally.  Maybe I'll make it a series called "Europe has dumpsters too!"

Here's the sign above that little fruit market. The barely civilized indigenous man serving the white man his afternoon tea. AWKWARD.

All other nativity sets will now seem boring next to this

Here is one of the charming things about a Spanish Christmas: the Spanish love nativity scenes.  No wait - the Spanish adore nativity scenes. They call them belénes (Bethlehems, simply enough) and they are everywhere.

In a country so infamously work-averse that there is literally a national napping championship, building a nativity set is attacked with all the vim and energy of NASA in the days before the moon landing. The one at my school is the size of a large ping pong table and has a full-on market scene, chicken coops, and rather ambitiously,  an elephant on a rooftop.

About a quarter of the whole thing - I couldn't maneuver myself well enough to get it all in

Uhh sorry for the focus on this picture - I have no excuses

So given the seriousness with which belénes are contemplated here, imagine my surprise when my friend Irene told me the Spanish in-joke about the nativities: in each big nativity, if you look hard enough, there will be a peasant man, somewhere half-hidden, with his pants pulled down and his butt waving in the air, cheerfully taking care of business.  As in, he's pooping. In the nativity scene. Next to baby Jesus.

At first I thought she was pulling my leg, like hazing for the newbies or something, but she assured me that she was not.  I went back to the one at my school, and had a closer look, and finally, in the corner, look what I found:

I didn't have my camera so this is a borrowed picture - but it looked just like this

The Spanish grow dearer to my heart every day. 

I like it when people are easy breezy

I'll admit that it's easier to be in a good mood when you live here.

Today I was walking out of my apartment building, in pursuit of my little neighborhood market across the street.  I have been engaging in a playful flirtation with Andalucía's famed green olives, and I think it's getting serious.

So there I was, breezing out in pursuit of olives when a small, pleasantly plump grandmother waved me over. She was on her way into the building, and she was rolling behind her a little suitcase filled with groceries, the exact same type of suitcase that seems to be standard issue for all European women over the age of 65. "Niña," she asked politely, her face creasing into a smile, "can you help me up the stairs, please?"

Of course I said yes, and we bumped along up the steps, her making polite conversation and telling me how kind I am to help her.  When the task was complete she embraced me, kissed me on both cheeks, and called me a darling little niña.

I tell this story for one reason: nearly without exception, every single person I have met so far in Spain has truly been this nice.  Unlike their northern neighbors the French, who are infamous for being a bit prickly, and their Mediterranean cousins the Italians, who can be known to be a bit...unscrupulous, the Spanish are about as nice as they come.  Friendly, engaging, helpful.  

More than once I've asked for directions to a stranger on the street and had them walk along with me the first few blocks to get me started.  Unfailingly, the Spanish are enthusiastic about my Spanish and compliment me on language skills way more than is probably merited.  The Mister and I already know the names of a lot of the small business proprietors on our street and they recognize me in my little food market as la americana.  My butcher smiles in greeting when I walk up to the counter and waits for me to tell him what exactly I have in mind for my meat, whether soup or stir-fry or baked, so that he can pick the appropriate cut, since I don't know the cuts of meat in Spanish yet. This isn't a special-price-for-you-my-friend culture either, and cheating someone by overcharging for a dinner or taxi ride is bad form.  

So here's to you, los españoles. World champions of soccer, and good-natured to boot.