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.
So true. The Spanish women here in Bilbao seem to never get wet in the rain or sweat in the sun. How???
ReplyDelete