2010 Wrap Up

Picture by my friend Tara at Third Book Photography

This year was a lazy year. We did nothing, had no dreams, and our biggest accomplishment was that our plastic grocery bag collection finally hit the 500 mark.

Kidding!

Obviously, we've had a real firecracker of a year.  We began it in Phoenix, land of the eternal (infernal?) sun, took detours to San Diego, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Portugal and Maryland, and we sold all our stuff and moved to Spain. We'll finish off the year with travels to Paris and New Year's Eve in Rome. This year, we took the LSAT, packed up our cubicles, went olive picking, slow danced a lot in the kitchen, learned Spanish and jumped in pools with our clothes on.

Favorite reads of the year included A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as anything by Jane Austen.  This holds the distinction as being the year that I finally waded my way through Lord of the Rings, both the movie (extended edition!) and the book.  I was under obligation to read the book, having lost a bet against the The Mister, and I liked it alright, although I liked the movie much better.

This was also the year of developing photography skills, and it's a little hard to believe that we just got our beloved camera La Rebel a year ago this Christmas, because I might elect to have it surgically attached to my hand if I could.

It's been a big year for the blog too. It went from about 100 hits a month at the beginning of the year to four thousand a month by the end, and had a major design overhaul. So many new opportunities and new friends.

In short, this year has been jam-packed with action and love and big grand life moments, and we couldn't be more grateful. To all of the friends that we've shared belly laughs with this year, thank you for making our lives a little bit better.  To our families, our parents and sisters and brothers, in-laws and outlaws, we love you all fiercely and are pretty sure that you are incredibly lucky to be related to us (kidding!).

2010, you've been good to us. You'll go down as one of the great ones.

On to 2011!

Holiday plans

Our Christmas, like our Thanksgiving, will be a tad different this year.

On Thanksgiving, we were able to Skype my family in during their big turkey fest:

P.S. It's awesome when your sister shows up wearing the same sweater as your other sister's boyfriend. 

For Christmas, my mama-in-law is here in Málaga, so no extended Skyping sessions, as we will be painting the town red.

My family sent us a huge box full of Christmas goodies, including my mom's world famous maple fudge.  She makes regular (chocolate) fudge every year for everyone's stocking, but I am not so big on chocolate, so every year my mom makes a whole batch of maple fudge, just for me. I love maple so much I may have Canadian roots somewhere.

After Christmas, we don't have to be back at work until January 10th, so our plans are as follows:

Paris

Rome for New Year's

Naples

Pompeii

Capri

Siena

Milan

Pictures and stories will follow, I'm sure.

We leave on Sunday, so things will be a little quiet around the blog, except for a few posts I've scheduled.  Can't wait!

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. 

A baked potato like you wouldn't believe

Yesterday was the kind of day that both started and ended with spectacular, crashing thunderstorms and pounding rain.  Yesterday the name of the game was dodging rain puddles, figuring out wet umbrella etiquette on the bus, and eating steamy bowls of soup.  In short, it was fantastic.

Late yesterday evening The Mister and I splashed through the rain to meet up with some Spanish friends Irene, Máru and Lidia for dinner.  They promised us that they knew this place in town that will lay everything they've got into making you a baked potato so big and elaborate that it is literally impossible to eat a whole one yourself.  The Mister took that as a challenge, of course.

I normally think of a baked potato as a rather humble food item. It's perfectly acceptable, but I don't think I've ever craved a baked potato or anything.  But these were completely unlike any other one I've ever eaten:  at least 20 different menu options of all sorts of varieties: The Veggie Baked Potato, Bolognese Baked Potato, Ham and Cheese, and on and on.  And they were ENORMOUS.  We girls split two baked potatoes between five of us (Polish/Finnish friend Marta came too) and there were leftovers. The Mister got his own and broke into a cold sweat halfway through, but he somehow managed to get the whole thing down, although I am fairly certain that he privately was regretting it, and will share next time.

The toppings options were endless

This is Potato#1: Kebab. Lots of roasted chicken, ham, a few olives (because we're in Spain), and tons of mysteriously awesome "yogurt sauce". SO good.

Potato #2: Mexican.  This was easily the most passable Mexican food I've had the whole time I've been here in Spain.  The guacamole was pretty awesome and corn was an unexpected choice, but rather delightful in the end. I could eat this every day.



In other news, my mother-in-law is coming to town tomorrow to celebrate Christmas with us here, and I'm super excited.

Should we feed her baked potatoes?

Rain is pretty and cozy and a TOTAL PLAN KILLER

Well, I hope you had a good weekend.  The Mister and I had planned a lovely trip to a nearby pueblo called Antequera with some Spanish friends, and then Spain had the audacity to rain on us instead. The whole day, without ceasing. Even threw in thunder and lightning for good measure. Show off.

The weekend ended up being salvaged though.  We went salsa dancing with our friends Beatriz and Salvador, and found out to our shock and bemused annoyance that Beatriz and Salvador are actually really good salsa dancers. Dang them.  The Mister and I twirled helter-skelter around the floor, trying desperately to look like we a.) had a clue, and b.) weren't really making a beeline for the bar. It was, as you can imagine, a ridiculously good time, despite the gaping holes in our dance capabilities.

Still kind of mad about the rain though.

A winner of a contest, and a winner of a video

First, thanks to everyone who entered the drawing to win Bittersweet!  I used a random number generator to pick a winner, and the number out of the hat was #20.  The 20th comment was left by...*drumroll please*...

Yard

You lucky duck!  Thanks again to everyone who entered.

And now, I leave you for the weekend with this lovely video, copyright The Mister.  As you can see, he and I are dandy farm hands, and there is no hint of ineptitude about our manual labor skills.


Extremadura from Gski on Vimeo.

How British People are Secret Evangelists

Marmite....really, England? REALLY?

Staying with our new English friends Martin and Becky was a bloody rockin' good time.

We learned about tea cozies, digestive biscuits, milky tea and lots of it, tried Marmite, and acquired an entirely new vocabulary of words like "bloody", "bollocks",  and "bloke". We learned that "rain boots" are actually "wellies" and rain coats are "anoraks" and that a "minger" is defined as a "right-proper slappy tart", which in the end didn't really clear up matters at all.

Teatime!

We watched The X-Factor, the British American Idol, which, by the way, Simon Cowell is actually nice on, leading me to conclude that it isn't that he hates mediocre singers, he actually hates mediocre American singers.

We stopped for tea several times a day, and we learned that boy bands are still a cool thing in England. We learned the difference between Essex girls and East London girls, and we learned that up north french fries are served with a side of mushy peas.

In short, we experienced some pretty serious cultural immersion last week, and you're lucky that we are still American and aren't wearing Union Jacks and throwing down bangers and mash.

One thing though distinctly non-British:

the food.



Did I mention that Becky and Martin are fabulous cooks? If I did not, let me remedy that: Becky and Martin are fabulous cooks. They used to own a restaurant, and so the whole "British people have terrible food" thing was not part of our experience.  Moroccan-style vegetables and couscous, cinnamon-y risotto, homemade pear and vanilla jam on homemade toast, and lentil soup that was warm and inviting as the crackles of the logs on the ever-present fire.

Warm loaves of fresh bread

Salad straight from the garden

Overall, it was the best possible kind of cultural interchange.  We Yankee-fied them a tad and they U.K.-ed all over us, and nobody threw anyone's tea in Boston harbor and nobody claimed anyone else's land as their own and no one got tarred and feathered.

A right proper success, I'd say.


P.S. Last day to get your entry in to win a free copy of Bittersweet.  I'll be announcing the winner tomorrow!

On the finer points of olive picking

Here's what olive picking entails. First, go to some impossibly picturesque rural place where there are lots and lots of olive trees.



If it's a nice big tree, you spread a big net around the ground, set your feet in one place, and then start picking the olives in great big clumps, letting them fall on the net for later collection.  If it's a smaller tree, just pick them and put them in a bucket.  Get a partner, if possible, because then you can sing duets.



Repeat. Two hundred or so times. Oh, and don't be alarmed that they look like grapes. Exactly like grapes.  Don't taste them either - they aren't good yet. I know, because I tried one. Once you've collected a big bunch, you are ready for the next step.



Sorting! Time to get all the leaves and twigs outta there using a special slotted table.  Now is also a good time to a.) set aside really delicious-looking olives for eating straight, while the rest to into the pile for olive oil, and b.) singing duets (are you noticing a theme?)




Then roll them all down the table, which is kind of fun actually. Try to resist the urge to start an olive war with your fellow sorters.



Now, collect your filtered, sorted olives into big sacks. If at all possible, this should be accomplished while wearing the most ridiculous outfit you can get ahold of. It makes the olives taste better.



Now, go to the olive press and get liters and liters of buttery yellow, delicious olive oil. We missed out on that last part, because we had to leave just a few days before the olive press was available. But I heard that the olive oil from the olives we collected was top-grade.

I'm pretty sure that the olives just like being sung to.

"I love olive picking", when said fast, sounds like "olive olive picking"

Well we had a dang good time in Extremadura/Portugal last week. I include "/Portugal" because our trip rather unexpectedly took us there - the farm we were on contains the international border, so we ended up spending a little time on that side, tootling around and doing a bit of sightseeing.

Olive picking turns out to be not too bad of a gig at all, and when you're in the deep rural country, surrounded by stunning views from basically any angle, the work goes by even easier.  The only sounds to break the quiet were sheep's bells, the clucking of chickens, and The Mister's earnest but rather faulty falsetto.

He decided that all farm work should be accompanied by singing, chain-gang-style; group sing-alongs preferred, but he isn't shy to go solo if need be.  Anything to suit his public.  So there really was a lot of singing going on.

The front yard

Pickin' olives in my olive pickin' clothes

Captured mid-song

I wasn't lying about the chickens

Bittersweet, Shauna Niequist, and Tigers, Oh My!

Note: Tomorrow we will return to our regularly scheduled programming (I'll tell you about the awesome time we had picking olives in Extremadura), but today I wanted to take a minute to a.) tell you about this awesome book, and b.) give away an early Christmas present.

Visit Shauna's website

 I once read a quote that the most powerful words in the English language were "me, too". 

If that's so, Shauna Niequist has penned one of the most powerful books on the planet . She writes collections of personal essays about going to Africa and going out for breakfast and everything in between, and they might as well be titled "Me, too"  because they are basically essays about her, but also about you and me, and our lives and her life and how we are all learning from each other in unexpected ways.

I wrote last year about how much I loved her first book, Cold Tangerines, when a friend unexpectedly handed it to me. I drank it up in one day, and then felt unaccountably good for days afterward, like I had taken vitamins or gone for a long morning jog. Neither of which I do, by the way, but other people tell me that they feel nice, and they're good people, so I believe them.

In Bittersweet, Shauna has written a big grand love letter to compassion and to honesty and to the pricklier side of life. It's a collection of essays on growth and loss and eating cold pizza at 2 a.m. Somehow Shauna manages to write in prose and poetry at the same time, telling stories about mundane details of life with such wit and sparkle that I feel like I am sitting next to her in some cozy coffee shop on a drizzly day, getting stories and advice from a best friend. 

On a more writerly level, holy cow can this girl write similes. Her work is chock-full of them, like seeds in a ripe pomegranate (see what I did there? with the simile?). Reading her books is a total sensory experience - you smell, you touch, you hear the scenes she lays before you. It's absolutely skillful, and I am thoroughly impressed by it.

My favorite books are the ones that I walk away from feeling like friends with the author.  If this is true, Shauna is one of my besties.

She just doesn't know it yet.

Shauna and her publisher must be in the Christmas spirit, because they're allowing me to give away one signed copy of Bittersweet to a reader here.  To enter, leave a comment below (the comment can be about whatever you want, but you've got to include your email address so I know how to contact you if you win!). I know there are a ton of international readers out there, and you can play, too - they'll ship it anywhere. I'll announce the winner this Friday, December 17th.

So come one, come all. Read it, drink it up, give it as a Christmas gift, buy one yourself and one for a friend. I honestly think you'll love it.

*Just so we're all clear, I'm not receiving any compensation for this contest or anything like that - they sent me a copy of the book, (which was really nice), but other than that I just really think you'll like it*

Back! (with a preview of things to come)

A preview. So many more from where this came from. Just you wait.

Just got back last night from our trip to the Spanish sticks to go a-olive picking.  I will be posting about it in the week to come, but there are a few things you should know right off the bat:

1. It was awesome.
2. It was fantastic.
3. It was great!

Also, one of my favorite authors had a new book come out a few months ago, and I am lucky enough to get a chance to review it on my blog. There's also a chance to win a free copy, so check back soon and tell your friends!

I'll have a Mister and coke, please

Note from Sarah: We are in rural Spain this week, so I've prescheduled this post by The Mister to keep you busy. Be back soon!

I am posting a picture of her because I can. Look at those baby blues. Mine mine mine.

The Mister here.

For reasons that I've never been able to understand, people have a lot of trouble understanding my name when I tell it to them.  More often than not, it takes multiple repetitions, me saying my name and them repeating what they think they heard, before we get it all figured out.

I get a lot of, "Ryan?"

Nope.  I say it again.

"Randy?"

Sorry, not that either.  And two syllables? Really?

Sometimes its so bad that I give up and just let the person believe my name is whatever they heard.

This has led me to question my own pronunciation of my name, at times practicing in front of the mirror, or recording it as a voice note on my phone and playing it back.  I always think it sounds impossible to mistake for anything else (but maybe I'm biased).

And apparently my name is also difficult for Spaniards to understand, even when its pronounced with a Spanish accent.  I was resigned to the fact that, even here in Spain, it would be business as usual during introductions for me.  Until I was given a virtual fast pass.

How excited I was when I discovered that my name happens to be the Spanish word for a certain type of liquor.  These days, introductions take a maximum of two tries.  The first is where I say my name, and they either look at me quizzically or respond with something that's not even close, followed by me saying my name one more time and adding, "sabes, como la bebida" (you know, like the drink).  This is usually followed by a good laugh from whomever I'm meeting, or sometimes an impressed look, or even a suspicious expression.  If you're named after a well-known alcoholic drink, you must be trouble.

I have yet to discover a fail-proof method for introducing myself in English, but I am enjoying my time on top.

HelpXing in Spain's Wild West

My last foray into self-harvesting: a fresh-plucked almond in Jerusalem last spring.

Mmmm...furry. And tart. Very, very tart.

Next week will be a little quiet around this blog.

It's a school holiday here in Spain, so The Mister and I don't have to work all next week.  We took advantage of the free time and are heading off to the rural Spanish province of Extremadura (sometimes referred to as Spain's Wild West) to stay with a family and help them out with their olive harvest.

We found the opportunity through a website called Help Exchange (HelpX), which hooks up travelers with people who own agricultural property (vineyards, farms, fruit orchards, and so on) to facilitate exchanges with travelers who are willing to get their hands a little dirty. We get an inexpensive trip to the countryside and free room and board, and they get company and helping hands.  Seems like a good exchange to me! We are headed to stay with a British couple who has a vineyard and a few hundred olive trees that are ready for harvest. It's our first time HelpXing (oh yes, it's a verb too), so we're pretty excited to see how it all turns out.

While my internet access will be sporadic at best and I may or may not get to post at all next week, rest assured I'll be photography and journaling the whole thing so I can share it in all its glory when I return. Agricultural humor, here I come!

I am always up for a good old-fashioned roundtable discussion

BLACKOUT. The Mister took this picture of me at a castle in Cordoba. He says it looks slightly creepy. He is a punk on occasion.

Travel Blogs at TravelBlogs.com (I know, who would've guessed that URL? It came totally out of left field!) was holding a little roundtable discussion of some of their favorite travel bloggers (it doesn't say that in the article but I swear I have it on paper somewhere that they said the word favorite) last week (we're going for the most parenthetical references ever in a single sentence) and they asked ME (Me?). Me!

They asked me what I would do in the event of a solar flare that somehow crippled all my communication systems.  What I would really do is snuggle up to The Mister, because he gives comforting hugs, and write letters to my family by candlelight because I miss their lovely faces.

That isn't what I wrote though - I wrote of an alternate plan.

You can read my actual, sure-to-be-scintillating response here.