Mediterranean Exile

2008-10-16T02:30:00.000-07:00

Preface
The First Step
Maybe Just One More Skillet?
Leaving
An Introduction
Why Valencia?
Shelter
Spanish Soccer 101
A Beginner's Guide to Las Fallas de Valencia
Summer
Bars and Restaurants
Vacations and Memories
The Spanish "Work Week"
Cooking, Eating, Shopping
La Corrida de Toros
Lifestyle a la Español
Learning Spanish

Preface

2008-10-15T02:26:00.000-07:00

Preface

Although I had years to think about what would become my self-imposed exile, in the end I didn’t really put much planning into it. I would rate my preparation for the move somewhere between a panic-stricken escape from a burning building and the care most people put into making arrangements for a three day weekend. Packing and planning for an extended trip aren’t my strong points. Just what my strong points are have yet to be revealed to me, but I think that I’m pretty good at dropping everything and moving across the country or across an ocean. I think I’d make a great fugitive.

Who among us hasn’t flirted with the idea of uprooting yourself from the security of a comfortable life in a beautiful American city; moving to a country whose language you speak badly and where you don’t know a single person; plopping down at random in a city you visited only briefly long, long ago; moving into an apartment with total strangers who look at you as something along the lines of an exotic pet; changing absolutely as much about yourself, from your name to the food you eat so as to fit in better—you pray—in your new surroundings? Me neither, at least that’s not the way I looked at this move before I left. I was either too naïve, foolhardy, or ill-informed to give the possible downside of moving much in the way of consideration. I suppose that I had reached a time in my life when all of the risk of this move was completely outweighed by what I thought I would gain.

Of course, before leaving I had no way of knowing just what those gains would be, or even what sort of stuff I was going to learn, other than a new language. Even what language I would be required to speak was a matter up for a bit of discussion. One thing that I can say now is that if I were going to do this all over again from the start, this book would be one of the things I would put in my suitcase. Although this isn’t anything like a travel guide, you may be able to learn a few things about life in the corner of the Mediterranean where I chose to live, a place where trial and error were my constant escorts. As most of you already know, those two make lousy travel companions and I wish that I would have left them behind (preferably in a shallow grave). I’ll try to do that the next time I move 5,500 miles from home.

The First Step

2008-10-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

The First Step
The story of most journeys starts off with something about taking the first step—which to me is a cliché within a cliché. Magellan was on a “journey,” I'd say the same about Columbus, ditto that for Lewis and Clark; most of us now just book our travel online which doesn't leave a lot of room for true adventure. No, I don't really like that word “journey.” For starters I can’t even tell you how long a “journey” is—either in miles or kilometers. Most of the time the journey being discussed is of metaphoric length; you can check for yourself—the self-help sections of bookstores are packed with this sort of memoir. There are countless recollections of journeys of self-discovery; journeys of drug or alcohol rehabilitation; there are journeys of discovery, weight loss, sexual orientation, spiritual awakening, personal salvation, moral enlightenment, and many other things that are probably a lot more important than what I was going to do. I just wanted to pack my bags and get on a plane. I was moving to Spain.

The truth is, I'm not even very good at traveling. I don't really like being a tourist, at least not nearly as much as a lot of people. I get tired just looking at a travel guide—too many hotels to book, too many restaurants to decide on, and humping around some museum pretending that I care about 17th century ceramics is pretty far from my idea of a perfect way to spend an afternoon. I'm not against museums. I've actually been to several, but don't ask me anything too specific because I was probably paying closer attention to the other museum goers than to the stuff hanging on the walls or crammed into glass cases. I'm certainly not anti-travel but I'm not the check-list variety of tourist that insists on seeing everything you are supposed to visit during your limited stay here on earth. I just like to go to a place and hang out and try to observe how the local people do things. Like Dian Fossey and her gorillas. Call it the chimpy-misty style of travel, although I’m sure that I am a lower form of primate than most of the people I have studied in my many moves. To do this sort of study correctly you need to spend a lot of time in one place. Hanging out in one place is something that I think that I do pretty well.

If I had to put a finger on when this trip began, if I had to retrace my steps and find the first step, I’d have to go way back. If I had to describe the moment, I would say that it wasn’t a step at all, or I would say that my first step was the act of sitting down in a French café.

My introduction to European café etiquette started when I was a 19 year old summer school student in France—my first time in Europe. I would go to a café for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, drink it, pay the check, and leave. I quickly noticed that everyone who was there when I arrived was still there when I stood up to go. I became self-conscious of my haste. I quickly began to see cafés as a sort of game, a waiting game.

I began to take note of the other patrons when I first took a seat in a café. I would nurse my coffee or beer to make it last while I waited for other people to call it quits. If I was alone I would write letters to pass the time, or read, or simply people watch. I quickly learned that there are worse ways to spend time than sitting on the terrace of a Parisian café. I have since come to believe that there are few better ways to spend an hour or two or three.

I got pretty good at the waiting game my first summer in Europe, but I never won. It didn’t matter how patient I was; I could have been in the middle of the best book I had ever read; I could have been engaged in the most interesting conversation of my young life (that wouldn’t have been saying much at 19); it didn’t matter. There would always be some grizzled old French guy in a beret and a seemingly bottomless glass of red wine who wasn’t about to be hurried out of his spot by some hyperactive American kid raised on too much sugar and way too much television. I would tip my imaginary beret to him as I left. “Today you win, but tomorrow is another day, yes monsieur?” I always said this to myself in an exaggerated, Pink Panther French accent. For all I know that old French guy never left that table, ever. Maybe they buried him at that table. All I know is that I liked his style.

Back in the United States this sort of behavior would be called loitering. Loiter: to spend time idly. In America we have equated loitering with not spending money, or not spending enough money, or not spending money fast enough, and we have actually made that illegal. After several years of living and traveling around the Mediterranean, the most café-influenced culture on the planet, I learned that if loitering were against the law there you’d have to build a pretty big fence to contain the guilty. In the Mediterranean they have a different word for what we would call loitering. The closest English equivalent to this word would be “living.”

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of the café in the quotidian life of many Europeans. Cafés are a meeting spot for friends, or a place where you won’t feel out of place sitting by yourself. You can read the morning paper, or write a letter. They are a place to be among people, or a refuge from the crowded street. A café is a good spot to begin an evening out with friends, or the last stop on the way home. A café terrace is like your living room with better coffee and a view.

I had been brought up to believe that consumption was the purpose of going to a bar or restaurant. I soon learned during that first summer in Europe that what you bought at the café was definitely not the main point of the whole exercise. That glass of wine was merely the rent you paid for the wonderful piece of café real estate that you had chosen or had chosen you. The food and drink aspect is a secondary concern; service—good or bad—hardly matters at all, at least in the grand scheme which in this world is the only scheme worth considering.

When I go to Europe the first thing I do is head for a café. When I come back home cafés are what I miss the most. The explosive growth of coffee shops in America is a response to this basic human need for community. Coffee shops aren’t quite the same thing, they aren’t as utilitarian, they are a lot more casual, but they are a good start.

The primary function of a café is to offer a shared public space. The spot you are sharing may be next to some movie star at an ultra-chic Parisian café, or next to a shepherd in a remote Greek mountain village, but the idea is still the same. It doesn’t matter what language you use to order—maybe all that you can manage are hand gestures—the same rules of the café apply. Sit back, slowly sip your wine, and try not to think of loitering as a bad thing.

The real beginning to this story was a few years after my first trip to Europe when I sat down in a restaurant on a small Greek island. It was already about two in the afternoon, a little late for lunch, especially if you only had a cup of coffee for breakfast.

I was living in Greece at the time and had been for almost two years during my brief career in the United States Air Force. I loved going to restaurants when I lived in Greece because every time that I did I felt like I was in the middle of an exotic vacation. That's a nice feeling to have every time you go out, for several years. I suppose the afternoon in question was a vacation within a vacation because I was traveling with a couple of good friends. We took a passenger ferry from where we lived in Athens to Paros—an island in the Kyklades archipelago. We set out on this trip as we always did: without plans, or expectations, or credit cards, definitely without guide books, and with very little money. Our backpacks were as light as our wallets back in that time when I wasn’t averse to sleeping on a bench in a train station or on the deck of a ship if it meant saving a couple dollars, or drachmas, or francs.

It was our second day on the island and we had already gone our separate ways but we had agreed to meet up and have lunch. I’ve always been an early riser so I spent the first part of the day snorkeling along a section of the shore. My friends, definitely not early risers, probably spent their time sleeping, but you’ll have to verify that with them.

We sat ourselves at a table in a taverna overlooking the public beach in Paros. The café was split by the main street. Half of the tables were in the restaurant itself and the others, where we sat, were across the street on a tree-shaded stone patio pressed against a sea wall. Like every taverna in every small village in Greece, the place had small tables with the tablecloths clothes-pinned down to keep them from being swept away when strong winds blow across the Mediterranean from Africa; the salt and pepper shakers were clogged from the wet, salty air; the chairs were made of wood with straw webbing on the seats; and it was also inevitable that you would have to wedge a matchbook under one of the table legs to keep it level. Fishermen’s nets were drying in the afternoon sun on the sidewalk adjacent to our table. I’m not making that part up; Greece is almost embarrassingly quaint that way, as if the entire country is a prop for tourist photos.

We were hungry but we didn't know what we wanted. I knew what was on the menu because almost every taverna in Greece offers the same wonderful fare with a few variations. I had studied Greek quite extensively before I even arrived in Greece, but my vocabulary had a few glaring holes in it as I was soon to discover upon arrival. On my first foray into the heart of Athens I stopped for lunch at a way out-of-the-way taverna. This was my first meal in a Greek restaurant and immediately upon taking the menu from the server I realized that I hadn’t learned any vocabulary for food. I had to go into the kitchen and point at what I wanted. I took a copy of the taverna’s menu home with me and quickly memorized every item. That was the most important vocabulary lesson I learned in Greece and it served me well for the rest of my stay.

Back on Paros the waiter walked across the street and asked us what we were having. We began the meal at the beginning, the way to start any meal on the Mediterranean, or any meal emulating life on that great sea that is the center of life, food, and culture for everything around it. Our beginning was a cold bottle of beer and a bowl of olives. Olives are the perfect appetizer, almost a pre-appetizer. They stimulate the appetite without filling you up in the least and they go well with beer or wine. Kind of like when people say that you shouldn’t go grocery shopping when you are hungry, olives provide just enough substance to let you think clearly about the next course.

We ordered a bottle of a Greek wine that we knew wasn't half bad and was fairly consistent from bottle to bottle. Greek wine making was extremely unsophisticated back then but has improved greatly in recent years. We drank a lot of bad wine when I lived there but our philosophy was as simple as it was hedonistic: drinking bad wine was better than the unthinkable alternative of doing without this essential. The wine came with a basket of bread. Greek bread, depending on a host of constantly varying factors, is either good or bad, which is why we always ordered tzatziki—a yogurt, garlic, and cucumber dip—which was always cool and delicious. We toasted to our health (Υ Γίεια Μάς) and enjoyed the view of the beach from our table in the shade.

The next logical, if not inevitable course when dining in a Greek taverna is a Greek salad. This is probably as good a time as any to set the record straight on this staple of Greek cuisine. It is called a horiatiki salad in Greece, a peasant or country salad. I had one the very first time I ate in a restaurant in Greece and it immediately became my favorite dish—and it still is. I never cared for salads before because I don't care for lettuce. In all of the time I lived in Greece I never saw a Greek salad that contained a single shred of lettuce, and that was fine with me. I suppose there is a little room for improvisation when it comes to this dish but not much. There's never room for lettuce. Here is my recipe:

Greek Salad (Ηοριάτικι Σαλάτα)
1 cucumber
1 onion
1 green bell pepper
2 tomatoes
several Greek olives
feta cheese
pepperoncini peppers (A classy option)
anchovies (A very classy option)
Olive Oil and Vinegar.

Chop the cucumber, onion, tomatoes, and green pepper into same-size bits. Most tavernas prefer a larger, rougher cut, but I think a smaller dice helps the vegetables absorb the dressing. Portion out the vegetables on plates along with a couple olives, pepperoncinis, and anchovies. Top the salad with a piece of feta and drizzle with oil and vinegar. That's it. I would use the lettuce to line the bottom of my bird cage but I don't have a bird.

As you finish up a horiatiki salad there is a nice pool of rich olive oil on the plate that is the Mediterranean culture's answer to butter. Often the simplest of dishes are the most flavorful. Try this one.

Mediterranean Oil
1 cup of good Greek olive oil
2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar
a couple cloves of minced garlic
salt and pepper
2 tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese (I know it’s not Greek but so what)
a pinch of red pepper flakes
a pinch of chopped parsley
a pinch of oregano

Mix these ingredients together and let steep. Serve with bread.

At about this point in the meal we began to realize that we were in the middle of something out of the ordinary. It is important that you are aware of such moments as they are happening. This was becoming the quintessential Greek lunch. The three of us had spent dozens of afternoons in tavernas at dozens of places in Greece but this was like a pitcher during the late innings of a perfect game. Everything was exactly as it should be: The food was excellent, it was a perfect summer day, we were just beginning a week of travels among these islands, and we didn't have another care in the world beyond what was happening at this small table.

The most difficult thing to explain about this afternoon is that we were exactly where we wanted to be. Our enjoyment of the moment wasn't clouded by anxiety about the future or regret of the past. Nothing could have made this time better for me. I used to read the French magazine Paris Match back then to practice my language skills. I remember sitting in a Greek cafe looking at pictures of French celebrities summering somewhere on the Riviera. I remember thinking that those glamorous people had nothing on my life. I was spending my summers in the most beautiful place in the world. The rich and famous would have envied my knowledge of and access to secluded Greek beaches and beautiful villages few tourists ever visited.

I had become used to sitting around in restaurants and cafes for hours and hours simply talking. We would bring someone into our group who hadn't reached this level of saturation in café life, a newcomer. They still hadn't accepted the pace of Greek living. These people would complain when a waiter didn't approach the table quickly enough. We knew that the waiter would get to us eventually, and we were there more for the companionship than whatever the restaurant had on the menu. The newcomers would want to plow through a meal with drive-thru-window speed. We wanted to stretch the meal out as long as possible. Invariably the new person would say something like, "Let's go do something." What they didn't realize, and perhaps never would if they didn't stay in Greece long enough, was that we were doing something.

Although that particular afternoon seemed to go on forever, it did eventually end, and I eventually had to get on an airplane and return to the United States where I have lived ever since—not counting vacations. As much as I missed living there, I gained consolation by bringing how I lived in Greece back home with me.

Maybe that day was just a false start, or a misstep, or a bit of a dead end, but I definitely remember that as that particular afternoon unfolded I knew that I was experiencing some sort of defining moment in my life. I had no idea exactly what was being defined, or for what purpose. That has never been entirely revealed to me and I doubt that it ever will, even after this book is finished. What I do understand is that I felt like I was learning something of incredible value through the simple act of living my life. These have always been the most exciting times for me, the times when I learn by living, and these times are not the result of just traveling, but of stopping to learn how to copy how the people around me are living, to take the best aspects of their lives and try to incorporate these into how I live.

Some of the places where I have lived had more to teach me than others, but I like to think that my present lifestyle is the sum total of everywhere I’ve been. There isn’t anywhere on earth where people have a perfect lifestyle. I’m sure that everyone, everywhere strives for perfection wherever they call home. I am equally certain that we all have a lot to learn about how to go about this pursuit.

I’m having a bit of a problem coming up with the right word to describe whatever it is I am beginning. Is it a journey, a pursuit, a mission, a quest, a life? These words all sound pompous or pretentious which completely undervalues the subject. I need to find the right word, or tip-toe around the subject, or find something a little more concrete to write about. The problem is that I don’t know enough about anything else to write about it—not that I’m any sort of authority on life, or living, or whatever this book is about, and you can forget about journeys. It seems unlikely that I’ll be able to pull off a book about such a serious concern if I can’t even find the right word for it. How about if I just say that I’m going away for a long time? As I said, I’m going to live in Valencia, Spain.

Going away for a long time means giving up my apartment and almost everything that is contained within its walls, only one of which I got around to painting a color other than the battle ship gray, standard-issue in my building. The entire time that I lived in Seattle I was fairly conscious that I would be moving at some point, so I tried to keep down on the accumulation of stuff, but stuff, like an unwanted house guest, has a habit of moving in, inviting friends over, and never leaving.

Everything material in this world is fleeting. Even the pyramids will be gone some day. A moving truck was parked in front of an apartment building near mine a few weeks before I was scheduled to leave. I watched as the movers hauled off a house-full of stuff. Someone’s life was being boxed up and placed on the truck. It made me stop and think of everything that I have left behind in my many, many moves. I seem to become less and less sentimental about my belongings every time I move to another time zone or another hemisphere. I learned the hard way that being sentimental can get really expensive.

There isn’t anything among my possessions that I can’t live without. For the most part, anything that can be bought can be replaced. Is there anything I am leaving behind that I will miss? Not really. For the most part it is a relief handing stuff off to the new owners. It makes me feel lighter, more mobile.

There is a wonderful freedom in not being burdened by stuff. I suppose that this is mostly true if you are by nature a traveler. When I go away anywhere, whether it’s a short trip or a journey, I pack a single, medium-sized backpack that fits in the airline overhead. What I leave behind in the way of creature comforts I more than make up for in ease of movement. Once, on a trip leaving Los Angeles, the cab dropped me off at the wrong terminal at LAX and I had to run about a half a mile to make my flight. Had I been encumbered with luggage I would have missed it. I think about that modest little metaphor just about every time I buy something that isn’t made for instant consumption. I consider that someday I may have to either carry it with me or give it away. More often than not, this sobering thought sabotages the sale and I leave the item on the shelf.

I understand people who don’t feel the need to get up and move every so often—I’m just not one of those people. Seattle is as beautiful a place as you’ll ever see, I certainly can understand why people feel no urge to leave. But I was just visiting. I always knew that sooner or later I would move on to visit some other city. That time had come. Seattle will be one of the few places I have lived in my life that I will desperately miss. I hoped that where I was going would measure up to Seattle’s high standards.

Back in the days of the ancient Egyptians I guess that they didn't have yard sales or internet bulletin boards so they stuffed all of their junk into a pyramid. They also didn't have the option of giving most of their stuff away to their Haitian immigrant neighbors like I did when I left south Florida a few years ago. That was when I moved from the lower right hand corner to the upper left hand corner of the United States—try making that move while hanging on to a collection of thousands of books. The best thing is to resist accumulating so much junk in the first place. Having less stuff means not needing such a big pyramid. I picked up so much junk since I’ve lived in Seattle that it was either time to find a bigger pyramid or pull up stakes and move again. I chose plan B.

As the day of my departure grew near, I was frantically trying to part with most of the material world I had accumulated while living in Seattle: three bicycles, a car, furniture, appliances, and books—lots of books. With every bookshelf and table that people hauled out of my apartment I felt like someone in a hot air balloon dropping ballast before takeoff.

I felt absolutely no regrets in leaving behind a city I had loved at first sight, and I certainly didn’t feel any sadness as I jettisoned almost eight years’ worth of material accumulation. In fact, instead of a sense of loss I felt rejuvenated, I felt like those people must feel in the “after” photos in “before and after” weight loss pictures. And as those dieters vow to keep the weight off, I vowed to keep down the clutter in my next life because I’m certain that moving day will come once again. Moving day will come again because I am not searching for one thing, I’m not looking for the perfect place. If I had I would have stayed in Seattle.

Maybe Just One More Skillet?

2008-10-12T10:43:00.000-07:00

Maybe Just One More Skillet?

The first leg of my trip to Spain begins with a flight from Seattle to Chicago where I’ll be spending some time with my brother and his family. I had already shipped a few vital things to Chicago. For the flight I would be limited by the airline baggage constraints: two checked bags, a carry-on, and another smaller personal bag. I’m planning on this being a rather lengthy trip so I’d have to push the boundaries of these restrictions. Unfortunately, the boundaries are rather strict. Who would have thought that baggage weight limits would be enforced with a scale?

I spent the last couple months that I lived in Seattle sorting through what I owned and making decisions on what to keep, what to sell, what to give away, what to throw away, and what to flush. As the date of my departure neared, when push came to shove, I pushed and shoved most of what I used to own into hands of friends and strangers and the rest into the dumpster of my apartment building.

A day before I was scheduled to leave I was in a panic to clear out my apartment and get everything I now owned to fit into the bags I would carry on to the plane. I was frantically packing, cleaning, and taking stuff out of my apartment and throwing it into the dumpster. The analogy of sand pouring out of the top bulb of an hour glass suited my lack of time and my possessions flowing out of my apartment.

At one point in this chaos I lost track of where I had put my passport. I did a cursory search of places where it should have been and came up empty-handed. I had already packed the two huge bags that I was going to check at the airport. I didn’t think that my passport was in either of them but I tore them apart and searched them anyway. Nothing. Now I was beginning to worry. If there was one thing that I would definitely need in a move to Spain it would be my passport.

I looked through everything as I repacked the bags. When I had finished I was in a full blown panic. The only thing that I could think of is that I had thrown it out along with one of the many loads I had delivered to the dumpster. I had no choice but to climb inside and root through everything. What added insult to injury was the group of Hispanic kitchen workers from the restaurant below my apartment who witnessed my dumpster diving while they took a cigarette break in the alley. The good news was that they ended up taking a lot of the stuff I had thrown out as I sifted through it in another futile search for my goddamn passport. I finally found my passport inside of my computer bag, but at least the hour I wasted looking for it meant that a lot of what I had tossed out went on to another life with the kitchen workers. Recycle, reuse, and reduce as they say in the environmental pamphlets.

I have always been fascinated with the quantity and quality of stuff that we Americans simply boot to the curb. I have something bordering on a fetish for thrift stores. I visit thrift stores like some people cruise seedy bars and night clubs. They are looking for Mr. Goodbar while I am looking for…well, I can’t really say but I always know it when I see it. I find books, clothes, sports gear, furniture, rugs, pots, and pans. It was this last item that pushed me over the airline baggage guidelines.

I plan on doing a lot of cooking in Spain so I wanted to take some of my favorite pieces of cookware along for the ride. Unfortunately, one of my favorite items is a really heavy, cast iron skillet with a lid almost as heavy. Hauling this thing to another continent probably doesn’t make a lot of sense but I’ve really grown fond of the thing over the years. I knew that my two bags to be checked were heavy but I didn’t have a scale and I didn’t bother to find out the airline’s exact weight limit.

When I got to the airport my friend suggested that I use the curb-side check in with the hope that perhaps they wouldn’t be such sticklers on this whole weight issue. As soon as I saw how they strained to lift my bags I knew that I was busted. Both bags were well over the 50 pound limit. They told me that I could transfer contents from one bag into the other so I would only have to pay the fine on one bag no matter how much it was over the limit. I left one bag on the scale and started taking stuff out of it to bring it down to 50 pounds. The two Punjabi bag handlers watched in bemused amazement as I took the huge, cast iron skillet out of the bag and packed it into the other. I’m sure that they have witnessed a lot of weird baggage in their day but they probably haven’t seen anyone dumb enough to travel with a cast iron skillet.
I was within about five pounds of the bag being legal and was searching for anything inside that might put me under when one of the handlers said in his sing-song accent, “Maybe just one more skillet?”

Maybe it had to do with the fact that I was completely stressed out and exhausted from the move but I thought this was the funniest thing I had heard all week—and it was only Thursday.

Leaving

2008-10-08T00:48:00.000-07:00

Leaving

My entire life now fits into four checked bags weighing 50 pounds each (exactly 50 lbs.), a carry-on bag, and another small shoulder pack. As I recite the list of my material possessions I realize how much stuff I still have after breaking down my apartment in Seattle a little over one month ago. As it turns out, the heavy cast iron skillet will have to wait until someone comes to visit and can haul this over for me. The skillet would probably have been difficult to explain to perplexed border officials. As it is it will be a huge relief to clear customs with all of this swag.

Although it is sunny and warm here in Chicago, I will be wearing a lot of clothes when I board my flight at O’Hare. A heavy shirt, a leather sport jacket, and a really heavy winter coat will weigh me down so that I can spare some extra weight in my checked baggage. This was a very complicated and technical packing job. I am leaving with everything I planned on taking. I have left behind a few boxes of books that I hope people will bring over for me. Tops among the books that I will miss is my very dog-eared Cambridge Complete Shakespeare that I’ve had since my university days.

By this time tomorrow I will be in a cab in Valencia, Spain looking for the apartment I have rented for the first couple of weeks. After dropping the bags off, the first stop will probably be for a café con leche. That will mark the starting point for my life in Spain.

An Introduction

2008-10-07T01:59:00.000-07:00

An Introduction

What am I trying to accomplish in what I write about Spain? I am not trying to over-romanticize the country or paint it like some Photo-Shopped post card you find in tourist trap rip-off joints. At the same time, there is just way too much to love about having the wonderful opportunity to live in Spain for me to spend much time on anything negative. I’ll let the citizens of Spain handle all of the criticism, Most of the time I stick to highlighting all of the things I love and admire about life here. Sort of the flip side to the aphorism, “No one is a prophet in his own country,” is the one that says you should only be a critic of your own homeland—no matter where you live; you probably have your hands full critiquing your birthplace, or at least the place you know best. It is especially annoying to read travel writers who bitch about the places they visit without understanding them in any meaningful way. I always find it more insightful for a writer to explain something to me than to blindly criticize. Isn't travel supposed to be joyous and fun? No one said travel is always going to be easy. Even if I were on the verge of freezing to death in Antarctica I could probably appreciate the view.

It's not like I'm some sort of starry-eyed Pollyanna who can't see any of the ills in modern Spanish life, but I think it is more important to convey to American readers how Spain deals successfully with the some of the challenges inherent in creating a modern, urban society. I must highlight the urban part. Spain's urban nature is one of my favorite characteristics of the peninsula. Spain is incredibly urban, even many of the smallest hamlets are set up like major urban centers with people living in apartment buildings of 4-6 stories. Valencia has a population of over a million yet I can walk practically anywhere in a matter of 30 minutes. There is great public transportation here but it hardly seems worth it when you can just walk to about 90 percent of your destinations. I can get anywhere in town on my bike in less than 20 minutes. Seattle is very similar to Valencia in size and in the robust nature of its urban center. I walked or rode my bike almost everywhere in Seattle. I have been singing the praises of city life for quite a while; I am positively evangelical on the subject. I'm a fanatic, an urban extremist. Even if there were no ecological benefits to be derived from city living, I would still preach its quality of life merits.

I can barely remember back when I needed to drive a car every day, I only know that it irritated the living shit out of me and I felt cars were stealing my life. Even if you forget about how much they cost and how dangerous driving is, to me just being inside a car is a soul-deadening experience—and double down on that if you are in stuck in traffic. I would have to sit down and think long and hard to remember the last time I was even in a car. I consider this sort of forgetfulness a huge luxury, much more so than driving around in an expensive sedan. There isn't a sports car invented that has more appeal to me than a seat on a comfortable train. In my opinion too much of American society is built around the automobile. I consider this bit of urban/suburban architecture to be one of the greatest mistakes of the 20th century, a mistake we will have to rectify in the next 25 years if we want to continue improving human life on the planet (not to mention saving the lives of countless other species). I know that we can't simply do away with cars, but we can marginalize them to a certain degree.

I see automobiles as much more of a convenience than a necessity here in Spain. For anyone living in Valencia, you can get around just fine without one. Cars provide a bit of convenience, especially to people with families. I suppose getting the whole family on the train for a trip out of town could prove a bit of a challenge, although it is certainly within the realm of possibility. Getting around Valencia in a car seems more of a nuisance than a convenience, with or without the family. Like almost every other urban center, Valencia suffers the ills of traffic congestion and lack of parking. One of the most exciting urban developments is going on in many European cities in which they are simultaneously removing parking and narrowing roads in urban centers. I think that this is about the only way to effectively deal with parking and traffic. The more you try to give in to congestion and parking, the worse they get. Widen the roads and you’ll induce even more traffic. Offer even more free parking and the problem only gets worse.

I'm not trying to paint some idyllic water color of Spanish life, but I do think that it is useful to detail the aspects of this society which I feel are worthy of emulation. In a lot of the travel writing that I read, not only do I get the feeling that the writers don't really understand the culture of the place they are describing, but I think many don't really care enough to insinuate themselves fully in the host country. In the case of those writers who just seem to be slumming it long enough to crank out an article or a book, I find this attitude to be incredibly condescending. A lot of other writers just seem to take their preconceived notions about where they are going and stow it into their fanny packs with the rest of their travel gear. I never learn anything from these authors as I have my own preconceived notions about the places they are talking about: Tuscany is sunny and people drink wine, Provence is choked full of quaint villages and olive trees, or whatever boilerplate travel magazine view of the world they are regurgitating. I remember thinking that I sort of wanted to be a travel writer in that sense. Who wouldn't want to get paid for traveling? Then after I read about three travel magazine articles I realized that I could never hope to bend my writing style to fit that model. Most travel writing seems to have sort of a one-size-fits-all formula. Start off with some little historical tidbit, throw in something about how you, too, can be an “insider,” and then top it off with descriptions of expensive meals and even more expensive hotels. I've never been a big fan of guidebooks when I travel and I certainly have no interest in writing one.

So just what is it that I am trying to communicate in what I have written about Spain? More than anything I would like to make people laugh with the stories I tell about my life in Spain. Humor is about the only way I can make my writing the least bit entertaining, and usually the joke is on me. I don't think that I have the skill to simply write entertaining descriptions of life here, at least not yet. I am hoping my writing can improve to the point that I don't have to be a fool to have people read my stuff. There are worse things than being foolish. Right off the top of my head I can come up with “boring.” I also try to explain how to go about daily life here in Spain without stumbling every step of the way, as I did when I first arrived. I would have loved to read essays like some of mine to help me decipher the simplest aspects of life here that seem anything but simple to the outsider.

What I like most about reading travel writing is when I feel I have learned something about where the author has been. I have tried to write something that I wish I could have read before I got here, something to walk me through the ways and enigmas of everyday Spanish life. I had to learn everything through trial and error, sort of on-the-job training. There were many times when I felt like the whole process was like trying to put together a complicated piece of furniture without a set of instructions. I want what I have written to be the instruction manual for anyone who cares to know more about how people live in Spain. I write quite a bit about Spanish food and cooking so consider this to be a recipe book about how to...how not to make all of the same mistakes I did upon arriving in Spain.

Why Valencia

2008-10-06T02:01:00.000-07:00

Why Valencia?

As far as where I chose to live when I moved to Spain I have to say that my selection process was a bit on the random side. I knew for a long time that I wanted to live in Europe again, somewhere, anywhere. I was deciding between Paris and Madrid when a trip I took with my younger brother to Spain ultimately influenced my decision. We visited Madrid, Sevilla, and Toledo on what was one of the best vacations I've ever had, thanks mostly to some friends who live in Madrid who shaped our travel plans. When the time had finally arrived for me to move to Europe, I knew I was going to Spain. However, as much as I loved Madrid and the other places we visited on that trip, my past experience of living in Greece tipped the scales towards living somewhere on the Spanish Mediterranean coast.

I knew that I wanted to live in a fairly large city as I was comfortable living in a city the size of Seattle and anything smaller would have been like wearing a too-small shoe. I must admit that I never considered Málaga, another rather large Spanish Mediterranean city. I considered Barcelona but I was a bit reluctant to move there because of the heavy Catalan influence—I was moving to Spain to learn Spanish, after all. The truth is that before I started looking seriously into moving to Spain, I wasn't even aware that people spoke Valenciano in this part of the country. I didn’t know Valenciano was a language (it is very similar to Catalan). I would say that it is merely a dialect of Catalan but I might get beat up by some of the more chauvinistic locals for saying that. My knowledge of Valenciano/Catalan is fairly scant, but I am still unable to tell them apart whether spoken or written. I apologize for that.

With a little research into the matter I determined that Valencianos were more apt to speak Spanish—at least in the street—than their counterparts in Catalonia. I had traveled to Barcelona twice before and I loved the city, as almost everyone does. The language issue bothered me a bit and also its size, as I figured that a big city like Barcelona would be more expensive and perhaps less user-friendly for a recent immigrant. I had also traveled to Valencia once before and stayed there for only a day or two on my first trip to Europe. I couldn't remember anything about the city from that trip except the beautiful train station and the huge central market.

I wish that I could say that I spent hours and hours doing painstaking research into my choice for where I was going to move in Europe. I mean, I didn't exactly throw a dart at a map of Spain and then move there with nearly all my remaining worldly possessions. In truth, this would be an insult to dart throwers as there is a bit of skill in that game. No, my selection of my new home was more like a behind the back, over the shoulder toss. I'm not a lucky person by any means—I don't even believe in luck—but in hindsight I would have to say that by choosing Valencia, I hit a bull’s-eye with my throw. I wouldn't change my choice for anything. Once I arrived I thought about perhaps moving to another Spanish city to get a fresh perspective on the country, but I could never bring myself to leave Valencia. It's my home. I chose rather well as it turned out. As random as my selection process may seem, I suppose that if I examine it more thoroughly there is quite a bit of logic involved.

I think that I would be very comfortable living just about anywhere on the Mediterranean, my life in Greece taught me that much. I could have moved to Marseilles, or Genoa, or Tunis for that matter, and I would have found much to love about living in those places. The Mediterranean has its own climate with which I was familiar. The weather is far from perfect but there are many months of perfection throughout the year. Time had not erased those cold, wet winters in Greece from my memory, but I could never forget the wonderfully sunny summers. And of course there was the food.

There is an indelible stamp on Mediterranean cooking that can be found in every corner and cove on this inland sea. In our era of global trade, it's possible to get just about any food product you want anywhere on the planet but there were many things I had missed about Mediterranean food. It wasn't just the basic ingredients, things you can probably buy in any good, upscale supermarket in the United States, what was missing were all of the little things that when taken together make up the essence of the Mediterranean diet. Things like the wonderfully odd-shaped tomatoes that are impossible to beat when the season is right. The different types of beans that are native to the basin. Olives of every character, shape, and flavor, along with olive oils to match any dish. But it wasn't so much the flavor of foods that I missed, it was something else. A grilled sardine, some fried squid, roasted lamb or pork probably taste the same anywhere they are prepared, to say otherwise would be dishonest or verging on the overly-romantic. The element that was missing from Mediterranean cooking when I lived in America was their reverence for food. It's difficult to overstate the importance of food in the lives of the people who inhabit the shores of this sea that has been called the “middle of the earth” by many of the cultures that border it.

On a clearly anecdotal basis, I have to say that everyone I have met from Spain, France, Greece, and Italy all seem to have a much greater appreciation for food than most of the Americans and Brits that I know, unless those Americans or Brits have learned to revere food while living on the Mediterranean. This isn't to say that Mediterranean people are superior to us, they just take their food more seriously than we do. We all have different priorities and values. The importance that these people place upon food is something that perhaps we reserve for other things. I wouldn't care to say what these other things might be, but I will say that I find American and British humor to be far superior to the Spanish or French version. They have paella, coq au vin, and risotto. We have Seinfeld and Monty Python's Flying Circus. The good news is that we can share.

I have met Italians, Greeks, French and Spanish people who admit that they can't cook but who can whip up veritable miracles of simplicity in the kitchen using ingredients common throughout the region. I've never met an Italian who couldn't make some sort of memorable dish with only a bit of pasta, some olive oil, and a vegetable or two—I've also never met an Italian who doesn't eat pasta every day, if not with every meal. It never ceases to amaze me how the Spanish will raise the lowliest of food items to an exalted level. A slice of tomato and a single anchovy will be shaped into an elegant tapa to accompany a beer or a glass of wine; a plate of olives will prime a first course at dinner; even a bag of store-bought potato chips will be decanted into a dish before being served. They have a great respect for food because it is their inheritance, their solemn birthright handed down over centuries.

What I first found to be close-mindedness on the part of Valencianos when it came to modifying—in any way—their local dishes, I soon found was just a respect for their own traditions. There are just certain dishes in their culture that they feel cannot be improved. I feel the same way about a handful of things that I prepare. Change just one ingredient every couple of years, or even every generation and before long you will have lost sight of the original dish entirely. Some of my first impressions of Valencianos regarding their cuisine were of a people hog-tied and impaired by their own traditions. I quickly realized how foolish I was for thinking this; it would be like mocking a person for caring for the foundation of his house. Without embracing their culinary past, every day in the kitchen would be like reinventing the wheel. It took me a while to come around to their way of thinking. I was a decent cook when I arrived in Spain, and inspired amateur at least. As my cooking experience with Valencian food expanded, I came to base my own recipes firmly on the basics. I gradually learned that to know your way around you have to know where you started.

Where Are You From?
I have had a sort of unwritten rule that I have adhered to in a life of many moves. I rarely ask people where they are from. Besides the awkwardness of trying to end that question on anything but a preposition (at least in English), I just don’t think that it is a very interesting thing to ask of someone you have only recently met. A person’s birthplace will usually become apparent after a bit of conversation without having to inquire about it directly, if you will only bother to listen to what they are saying.

I think I came to this conclusion back when I was living in the dormitory at Indiana University. Back then most of the dorms weren’t coed so we would arrange mixer parties in the lounge of our floor and invite one of the female floors in the same residence hall. At these parties you could hear the same questions being asked over and over: “Where are you from?” and “What’s your major?” My joke back then was that we should have made name tags for everyone that gave your hometown and major and we could have eliminated about 90% of the bothersome conversation going on. Students could just go around and read the tags which would free up energy for drinking whatever hellish punch had been prepared by the guy on the floor with the best fake ID (In this case that would have been me. I had my old Hawaii driver’s license which was like a credit card with raised numbers and letters. All I had to do was shave off a number and move it over to my birth date.).

This being the third time in my life that I have lived outside the U.S. for a good length of time, I don’t get that question nearly as often as you would think. Most people I talk to immediately realize that I am not Spanish and a guiri (foreigner) is a guiri is a guiri to most folks. It is also easy for me to tell where someone is from by their accent in Spanish, whether they speak it as a second language or with a Latin American accent. As I said before, I also don’t find a person’s nationality to be interesting in and of itself.

When people do ask me where I am from I have gotten into the habit of answering, “Seattle” (mispronounced carefully as Sea-ahh-tell to help non-English speaking people understand). Most Spanish people I have talked to have heard of Seattle and have a very favorable opinion of that great American city. Young kids here all associate Seattle with Grunge and Frasier, not the worst things to be linked to if you are a large American city, as opposed to, say, crime and violence. I think that saying that I am from Seattle defines me more accurately than simply saying that I am American. I actually chose to live in Seattle; it wasn’t just an accident of birth.

Despite what is portrayed in America’s far-right media, I have never had a negative reaction from anyone when I tell them I am from the U.S.A. I have never experienced any incident that was even remotely anti-American. People who do claim to have suffered insults for being American are probably misinterpreting the event. What they are experiencing is most likely an anti-asshole incident brought on by their own behavior. In fact, I would say that the exact opposite is true; people have an extremely high opinion of America and Americans. Europeans also seem delighted to meet an American who doesn't fit the usual stereotype, whatever that may be. Believe it or not, the fact is that most Europeans have never actually met an American. I'd like to think that I am not a bad ambassador for my country, a position I feel honored to fill.

All the History You Need to Know About Valencia
People had been living in this area of the Mediterranean since before recorded history. A city was founded here by the Romans in 138 B.C. which they called Valentia Edetanorum. In the 6th century A.D., after centuries of Roman decline, the city was taken over by the Visigoths. This is a part of their history that locals here rarely discuss. Most Valencianos sort of see the Visigoths are their hillbilly ancestors who ran things for a while until more civilized folks moved in. In arguments at home when the insults are flying, the Visigoths are always on the other side of family.

Valencia was under Muslim rule for centuries beginning in 714 A.D. They brought with them oranges, olives, silk, rice and ceramics which were to remain integral to the local economy for centuries afterward, some are still vital today. They also introduced irrigation to the area and because of this the region is one of the most productive agricultural regions in Spain. Other than these things, and the great architecture they introduced, and their relatively tolerant view of other religions, the Moors didn’t do much for Valencia and the rest of Spain, at least not if you believe the history written by the eventual victors.

In 1094 Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid from the Arabic meaning “The Man” or “The Boss,” took back Valencia from the Moors. El Cid converted nine mosques into Christian churches which went a long way in assuring his popularity with the clergy which was the only literate class in this era. He was rewarded for his deeds with the Lay of El Cid, the oldest preserved tale of heroic deeds in all of Spain. He died five years later in 1099 and the city was recaptured by the Moorish dynasty of the Almoravids in 1102. Writing a heroic tale of El Cid’s very short-lived conquest of Valencia would be like someone writing a song praising a bad car repair job. I would say that El Cid’s conquering and Moor-evicting feats were way over-rated.

The single most celebrated event and date in Valencia is October 9, 1238 when Jaume I, king of the Crown of Aragon, entered Valencia and freed it, once and for all, of Moorish occupation. You will notice that bats are everywhere in Valencia, at least pictures of the little beasts. The Valencia Football Club has a bat on their logo as does the Valencia coat of arms. The bat obsession comes from a legend that on the eve of when Jaume I was to reconquer Valencia from the Moors, he found a bat in his helmet. A bat was supposed to be a bad omen. In order not to break the morale of his troops he quickly adopted the bat as a favorable omen and led his men to victory on the following day. Now you see likenesses of bats everywhere in Valencia.

The people here are Spanish which means that they have a love for holidays, but October 9th is the most important of the dozens of holidays throughout the year. On second thought, the spring Fallas festival is a huge affair. They take their holidays here pretty seriously so trying to rate them in terms of importance is a dangerous business. Perhaps it would be safer if I were to simply say that October 9th is an important day for Valencianos. I don't think I am stepping on any toes when I put it that way.

This date in history marks the beginning of Valencia as an independent kingdom and has shaped the way Valencianos have thought about themselves from that day to the present. Part of the national character of Spain involves the ways in which the different regions of the country either try to emphasize how different they are from the rest of Spain or how their region epitomizes the true essence of what it means to be Spanish.

Shelter

2008-10-05T00:50:00.000-07:00

Shelter

Finding a place to live in Spain was relatively painless. I used an internet classifieds site much like the one I used to sell all of the stuff in my apartment in Seattle. At first I had to rent a place short-term for my first few weeks in Valencia for my brother and me. He came over to help Sherpa some of my belongings and give me a hand with getting settled in my new city. Once I arrived I looked for rooms to rent as I wanted to live with Spanish people to force me to speak the language all day, every day. My Spanish was a little rough when I first arrived and I wondered if I would be able to jump through all of the hoops necessary to convince someone to let me share their apartment. I’m not as swarthy as Borat but his English skills certainly were better than my command of Spanish.

As with apartment shopping any place I have ever lived, I usually try to look at no less than 15-20 units to make comparisons and find the best deal. I didn’t have internet access in my holiday rental apartment but every neighborhood in Valencia has dozens of locutorios which are businesses that specialize in communication of every sort. They have computers for internet use as well as telephone booths for making calls to anywhere in the world. To this day I still haven’t figured out how to use the pay phones you find on the street in Spain. The locutorios are a tremendous resource and I often wished we had something similar in the U.S. I am amazed at how much the price of international telephone calls have dropped over the years. In the three years I lived in Greece many years ago I think that I called the States only about three or four times because that was about al I could afford back in the 1980s. I have made international calls from the locutorios that have cost less than a pay phone call in the U.S.

Most of my communication with prospective roommates was done via email where my heavy accent wasn’t an issue but the ruse was up the moment I rang the buzzer on the apartment door. I was willing to live just about anywhere because I thought that I could write off any apartment situation as a learning experience, no matter how horrible it would be. Luckily, I found a great place to share with a university professor. Usually my good fortune in finding great apartments is because of the hard work I put into the search but this place just fell in my lap. I can’t imagine how I would have done all of this without the internet.

Once I got moved in to my new place I was able to dedicate myself entirely to the task of learning Spanish. I began watching television and I quickly became addicted to a couple of morning cooking shows in which the hosts of the shows get ordinary people to participate. They either teach them a dish to cook or let them whip up their own favorite meal. Not only do they show the cooking process but they also film the people as they go to the market to do the shopping. Daily shopping is such a big part of people’s lives here that it would seem disingenuous to leave out this essential element to dining.

After the shopping and cooking is completed, they show the ordinary person’s ordinary friends who show up to share the meal. I immediately noticed the difference in protocol between American and Spanish dinner guests. In America when you are invited to a friend's house for dinner it is unthinkable that you would give any sort of criticism about what is served. After watching a few episodes of Hoy Cocinas Tú (Today You Cook) I saw how Spanish dinner guests were fairly quick to offer suggestions as to how a dish could have been better prepared. This turned out to be a valuable bit of information and prepared me for when I would cook for Spanish friends. I now prefer an honest assessment of my cooking to an insincere compliment.

Graffiti and Dog Poop and Art and Vandalism
Culturally speaking, Spain is a nation of icons, whether they are vanished, fading, or continue to exert influence on modern Spanish society. The sword, once a symbol for Spanish conquest, is now found only in museums and tourist shops. The corrida, or bullfighting, although still present on the Iberian Peninsula, no longer instills the passion it once did in the hearts and minds of the Spanish people, at least not in the younger generation. The soccer ball has usurped the corrida as the dominant icon in modern Spanish society. It even beats out the Catholic Church; if you don’t believe this then compare attendance figures at cathedrals with the huge crowds at football stadiums. The spray paint can is also a dominant cultural icon in Spain although most people here wouldn’t acknowledge it or even understand what I mean by this.

I am talking about the graffiti that is everywhere in Spain, like some modern architectural curse. I have never felt that graffiti is much of an art form. In fact, I hate it, at least in most of its varieties. It is to visual art what rap music is to poetry, or what Keanu Reeves is to acting. It is puerile at best and mostly just petty larceny—sometimes not so petty (Think of Keanu in Much Ado About Nothing).

There are almost no sacred cows when a vandal teen intersects with a can of paint. There is very little real public art in Valencia that hasn’t been tagged. Even La Lonja de la Seda, the beautiful silk exchange building built in 1492, Valencia’s gothic architectural masterpiece and UNESCO World Heritage site, became a billboard for graffitists who scrawled “Copamericanos terroristas” in red letters on an exterior wall. Valencia was hosting the upcoming America’s Cup race and I imagine that La Lonja was easier to spray paint than a 12 meter racing sloop. This trenchant message reflects the world view of someone who probably painted the words while balancing on a skateboard and is too stupid to see that defacing of a cultural icon is sort of like terrorism. The Lonja had recently undergone a major restoration and the architect who oversaw the work said that anti-graffiti paint was not applied to the exterior walls of the Lonja because it gives the stone façade an improperly bright appearance. The blemish was quickly removed but not without leaving the stone slightly damaged. Damn those Americans sail boaters.

About 99.99% of the graffiti is just vandalism with not the slightest nod to artistic expression. Most of it isn't even communication; it is the urban teen's answer to a dog peeing on its territory. When graffiti does try to communicate something it often seems even more pathetic.

I remember seeing a slogan painted on a wall in Lima, Peru many years ago. It was some rather long-winded sermon about the communist party being the only political group that looked to the future. The vandal had begun the slogan in huge red letters, five feet high. He quickly realized that he was quickly running out of wall so he started making the letters smaller, and smaller, and smaller until the letters in the last word weren’t much bigger than this type font. So much for the foresight of the Peruvian communist party. If I had a picture of that work I would file it under "Ironic Metaphors."

Almost none of the graffiti here in Valencia is political. I can almost understand political graffiti but the tagging variety popular here and in most large American cities is a mystery to me. About the only thing being communicated to me is ugliness. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t care to get inside the head of graffiti vandals although I would like to see the outside of their heads connecting with an aluminum baseball bat, you know, for art’s sake.

I have read about the ways to prevent graffiti besides the anti-graffiti paint but one thing that I have noticed here in Valencia is that vandals usually won’t mark over someone else’s work. About the only thing little vandals with paint cans seem to respect are other little paint can-wielding vandals. If you are a business owner and you don’t want the little shits defacing your storefront, the best thing to do is have someone with at least a hint of artistic ability paint you walls first.

I don’t think that painting graffiti murals over every square inch of exposed exterior surface is the answer—I don’t think the human eye could handle that much vulgarity. That would be like having rap music on every radio station, or attending a Keanu Reeves film festival.

Besides graffiti, the other thing that detracts from the beauty of Valencia, call it another steaming cultural icon, is that which is left in the wake of man’s best friend. Lots of people have little dogs here and lots of little dogs means lots of little dog poop which most often is left on the sidewalk, or in tree wells, or in the grass at parks, but usually finds its way to the bottom of your shoes. Dog poop is little Barfy’s answer to graffiti. You quickly become adept at playing a kind of dog shit hopscotch as you walk down the sidewalk. France seems to have the same laissez-faire attitude when it comes to cleaning up after pets, but they also have legions of professional dog poop cleaners who scour the streets on motorcycles equipped with dog poop vacuums (I'm not making this up). Barcelona, among other Spanish cities, has done a better job than Valencia of educating pet owners to obey scoop laws.

Once again, a psychologist could probably explain these issues, graffiti and dog poop, with the same discussion of anti-authoritarian, post-Franco mentality of the Spanish people. It’s as if someone will be labeled as a fascist if they tell anyone to pick up after their dog or to stop defacing a public monument with a can of spray paint. Perhaps the Spanish do not view either of these issues as a problem, or not a problem big enough to warrant much of a response. There is a fairly aggressive anti-graffiti campaign but it seems that the average citizen here has become somewhat immune to the ubiquity of spray paint vandalism. Most of the dialogue you read about graffiti in the newspapers concerns the more benign, artistic forms.

In my status as a casual observer and recent immigrant I can’t offer much insight as to how they feel about these two matters which to me are rather obnoxious. I suppose that if and when they feel that they are worth addressing they will do something about it. Until then, watch your step. In the time I have lived in Valencia I have noticed a marked improvement regarding pet owners cleaning up. The graffiti problem still seems epidemic.

The Road Warriors
I want to like motor scooters, I really do. They get about a million miles to the gallon and take up very little room on the street. You can park about ten of them in the same space needed for one economy car. I should love motor scooters. I do love motor scooters, but I really hate the mindless bags of protoplasm that act as their guidance mechanism, sometimes referred to as riders. Motor scooters are the tequila of internally combusted transport vehicles; they bring out the absolute worst in people.

Here in Europe scooters are without a doubt the most lawless of all licensed vehicles. The single biggest transportation menace is people on bicycles in Amsterdam but that is another story. Car drivers have become progressively more comfortable with the idea of pedestrian traffic while the relationship between people on foot and mopeds is slightly more violent than what went on during the three Punic Wars. From the way I see things in Spain, it seems that they are using the movie The Road Warrior as a driver’s training film. I half expect people on motor scooters to be shooting cross bows at other drivers and hurling poisonous snakes at one another.

From the way the young hoodlums drive mopeds over here I am pretty sure that they don’t have accelerators, they simply have an on/off switch for the gas. They are either stopped at a traffic light, snarling angrily, or they are barreling full-tilt down the street. When you watch mopeds it appears that the riders have no control over their speed. Their necks whip back and forth violently every time they hit the gas or brake. I have seen bronco bull riders more in control.

AND SCOOTERS ARE SO LOUD. I’m sorry, was I screaming? My hearing has become slightly impaired lately. It is a common ailment in Mediterranean countries which all have more than their fair share of mopeds. Instead of mufflers I think scooters have a bullhorn they attach to the tail pipe to amplify their noise emissions. I can't imagine that anyone would actually build a machine this noisy so owners must remove any noise-reducing baffles so that their scooters are as loud as a prepubescent 747s. And this is just the engine noise. They have horns.

There must be some law in European Union countries that states that the smaller your vehicle, the louder the horn you are required to honk almost constantly, and never for any purpose. Yesterday I walked past a guy sitting on a scooter in front of an apartment building. Just as I walked past he blared his horn, I suppose to summon someone living in the building. From the volume of his horn he could have awakened someone from the dead on the 110th floor. I am still unable to react quickly or instinctively in Spanish. In this case I screamed a startled obscenity at him in English. The guy on the scooter just looked at me timidly like he didn’t know what I was upset about. He obviously doesn’t see anything wrong with inducing a 20% hearing loss in a complete stranger.

I have always thought that horns should come equipped with a meter that registers every time you use them. People should be required to pay 5€ every time they honk. When I first got here I thought that moped riders honked their horns for no reason but I soon began to understand their method. You honk your horn when someone pulls in front of you, when someone is about to pull in front of you, when turning left, when you are approaching a pedestrian crossing, when driving up on the sidewalk…I think you get the picture I’m trying to paint. If someone is riding a scooter alone in the forest, he will honk his horn. If a tree falls in the forest and lands on a guy on a scooter, how long will he honk his horn before he realizes that no one is coming to save him?

Researchers at the University of Valencia recently conducted a study to determine whether riding a moped turns people into assholes or if it is only assholes who buy mopeds in the first place. After months of interviews and study, the answer they came up with was “Yes.”

I get my revenge on motor scooters when I ride my bicycle. I can accelerate as quickly as most scooters and around town I can keep up with them pretty well. There is nothing a snot-nosed moped rider hates worse than being out-done by someone on a bike. When a scooter is behind me on a narrow street I keep to the middle so they can’t pass. I can hear their little two-stroke engines furiously red-lining behind me and I chalk one up for the home team. Scooters are kind of like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz; just one of them isn’t very intimidating but there are always hundreds, thousands of them. Sometimes it is nice to separate one from the herd and put them in their place.

Another thing that I do to thoroughly annoy scooterists when I am on my bicycle is to draft behind them in traffic. They really hate that for some reason. I can see them looking at me in their rearview mirrors, desperately trying to find more power to pull away. You can almost see their little brains working to conjure up every cliché about getting more speed: A ship captain screaming down to the boiler room to throw more coal on the fire, a Roman cracking the whip on a slave galley, Captain Kirk bitch-slapping the snot out of Scotty to go faster and screw it if the Enterprise breaks up in the process. If I am drafting I can keep up with most of the smaller scooters for as long as I want. I am like a tick on their butt that they can’t reach to pull off. You have to learn to enjoy the simple things in life.

I promise that I will stop picking on motor scooters as soon as they all lose their acute case of Napoleon complex. Guys, you have little bitty engines, just deal with it. I’m sure there are women that love guys with little bitty engines. I personally don’t see how it’s possible to please a woman with such little bitty engines but I may be wrong. I am probably not wrong but don’t give up hope, and keeping honking those horns. I'm pretty sure that women love that.

Etiquette
Living in an apartment building means taking the elevator regularly. I immediately noticed that Spanish people greet you when you are sharing an elevator. A simple, polite “Buenas Tardes” when they get on and then a “Hasta luego” when they get off. It is such a simple thing but it seems to fly in the face of the stoic American custom of ignoring other passengers. It seems rather ridiculous to pretend like others don’t exist when you are confined to such a small space. As when you enter and leave an elevator, people also offer a greeting when they enter and leave a business of any kind. What I found curious and charming is that other customers, most of the time complete strangers, will also bid you farewell after you finish your cup of coffee. This will be a tough habit to break when I live in the States again. Greeting total strangers will surely paint me as some sort of weirdo. Perhaps I will try to single-handedly impose a bit of civility on our culture.

I was so relieved to finally find a place to live, any place at all, that I didn't really give the place much of a look before I moved in. As it turned out the place was great. It had plenty of sunlight throughout the whole day. Many Spanish apartments can be pretty gloomy as only certain rooms have windows that open on to the street. They call these exterior and interior rooms with the interior rooms having windows that open on to sort of an open elevator shaft in the middle of the building, or they have no windows at all. I remember that after visiting a prospective apartment I looked up the word for dungeon: Calabozo. My new apartment was 100 percent exterior and had open windows in three different directions—something you really appreciate during the cold, damp winter months. And yes, it does get cold on the Spanish Mediterranean.

Brother, can you spare some long underwear?
or
It’s not the cold; it’s the humidity.
Without meaning to offend the friends and family of anyone who may have actually frozen to death, I am going to describe the weather here as bitter cold. Now, if you look at the actual forecasts for Valencia you will see that it has been in the 60s almost every day, with the lows in the low 50s. That’s pretty warm, but that’s if where you live you have any sort of insulation in your home. The beautiful parquet floors, which are like a solid slab of marble and which keep these places cool during the hot summers, actually conduct the chill right up into your bones. It’s like the opposite of insulation, it’s like anti-insulation.

I have a theory—a theory I hope to never prove—that the floors are so cold in my apartment that my tongue would stick to them. I have a little electric space heater in the living room but that thing is about as effective at keeping me warm as someone trying to fend off frostbite with a cigarette lighter during a Mount Everest blizzard. Nanook of the North, Scott of the Antarctic, make room in the igloo for John of Valencia. God, an igloo sounds so warm and cozy right now with a nice whale blubber fire burning in the hearth, or whatever the hell igloos have instead of a hearth.

Instead of sissy shit like insulation and central heat, I have the Spanish equivalent: brandy. Some people here will get a little brandy in their morning coffee, called a café tocado, or “touched” coffee. If the temperature keeps falling I may start the day with a brandy touched with coffee. Without meaning to offend the friends and family of anyone crippled by alcoholism, I am going to make a coffee and brandy right now.

It is a little after five in the afternoon and although it is still light for another hour or so, the sun has cowardly set behind the buildings to the south of mine, like a geeky kid with glasses hiding from the neighborhood bully. Who would have thought that the powerful Spanish sun that attracts so many visitors to the beaches here in the summer would now quiver in its boots at the sight of a 98 pound weakling? It is so cold that I am actually calling the celestial body that makes possible all life on this planet, the sun, a sissy.

Either the sun needs to butch up a little bit or I have to, and that ain’t happening, not when it comes to being cold. I can take a lot of pain. Without meaning to offend anyone tortured at Abu Gharib, I just don’t see what’s so bad about water boarding. I love water, bring it on. Isn’t it a bit like bogey boarding? Being menaced by guard dogs? I love dogs. Just turn on the heat already, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.

Right now I am trying to conjure up the hottest day that I have ever experienced. I am doggedly attempting to recapture how uncomfortable I was on that day, sitting in the blistering sun. Perhaps it was in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, or in the Amazon basin. That memory is as fond to me now as a child’s first Christmas. I would take away the memory of the first Christmas of every kid on the planet if it would raise the temperature in my apartment ten degrees. Sorry kids, and I’ll take that blanket, too. For you it’s just a security thing, I’m freezing to death over here. Grow up already! While we’re at it I’ll also take those cute slippers that look like rabbits.

It is summer in Argentina right now. They speak Spanish there, right? Before I book this flight let me just check the weather forecast for the weekend. It is supposed to get up to 69 degrees on Sunday. I can’t wait. I have been as cold as a stone for over a week. The only time I am warm is when I am in bed, in a hot shower, or at this kebab place around the corner where the ovens heat the place up nice and cozy. Beers are cheap there so it kind of works out on several levels.

Maybe they will let me shower over at the kebab joint, because although my shower is good and hot, once I turn off the water the real agony begins. I actually screamed it was so painful this morning. It’s not like I need to shower. It is so cold that my body doesn’t secrete anything. Nope, all my pores are slammed shut like the front door when a Jehovah’s Witness walks up to the house.

So if you come by my apartment and I’m not home, go over to the kebab place. I’ll be standing as close as I possibly can to the oven that roasts the meat, waiting for spring.

The Price of Conservation
The Spanish are frugal when it comes to energy consumption. It’s not because they are a country of eco-hippies; it’s because most energy here is rather expensive and they would rather spend their money on ham and wine than put it into their gas tanks or send it off to the electric company. Maybe instead of spending their money on energy they choose to take another day off and not even earn the money in the first place. What is more important in life: A couple of tanks of gas or a holiday with family and friends? Assuming that you don’t work for the oil industry I think most people would choose to have another day of vacation.

One of the first things that you notice as an American when you visit Spain is that they all drive small cars, some of them are really small, comically small. Some look more like children’s toys, like something that could run on a couple of D cell batteries. If you wonder why they drive these cars, your questions will be answered the first time you go to fill up. Gasoline in Spain costs about three times what most people in the United States pay. I just glad that wine in Spain isn't as expensive as gasoline.

As good as public transportation is here, I’m surprised that so many people choose to even own a car in the first place. Besides high fuel prices, there is no place to park and traffic is nightmarish during most of the peaks hours. I think it must be a sort of a status thing where people feel like they deserve to drive around town because they make enough to own a car. I have never been able to understand people’s fascination with the automobile. The idea that everyone should own a car for personal transportation was a terrible mistake of the 20th century and one we will be forced to correct in this century. Even if automobiles ran on water they would still represent a significant drain on natural resources when you consider their production and maintenance demands.

Hot water is a bit of a precious commodity here as well. When I lived in Greece many years ago I used to follow the Greek custom of only turning on my water heater before I was going to take a shower or do the dishes and then turning it off promptly when I had finished. Most people here have a gas hot water heater that heats the water directly when you turn on the spigot instead of storing hot water in a huge reservoir. These hot water heaters are also about the size of a small suitcase, an important consideration when you live in an apartment and space is valuable.

Clothes dryers are almost unheard of here. Valencia has nice weather with something like 300 days of sunshine a year so hang drying clothes is almost never a problem. During the summer and the months attached to it on either side of the calendar year, clothes are dry in a few hours when left on a line either on your roof or the balcony. If I have the choice I will never use a dryer again, not unless they make one as energy efficient as the sun. This also adds a lot to the lifespan of your clothes.

People also use electricity pretty sparingly. Air conditioning is not nearly as common here but it is becoming more so because it gets really, really hot in the dogs days of summer. I lived without it my first summer here and I made it through without much complaint. I used a fan for sleeping but during the day I really don’t mind the heat. The apartments all have wonderfully cool marble or parquet floors that are the next best thing to air conditioning. My apartment didn’t have heat which meant that I had to suffer for about five weeks during the chilliest part of the winter. Heat in homes is used extremely sparingly as most people just wear a lot of clothes at home. It really isn't too uncomfortable as Valencia is blessed with rather mild winter temperatures. Those marble floors that are so wonderfully cool during the hot summer months are incredibly cold when the temperature drops. I have found that most homes on the Mediterranean are built as if there were no winter when in fact there are several months of cold weather.

There are lots of lights on timers which shut off after a set time. You find these in the hallways of apartment buildings and in some public restrooms. Some of the timers are so comically short that I wonder whether or not I may be playing a part in some sort of funny home video pranks. Like the timers in these incredibly small bathrooms that go off after you are nowhere near ready for them to go off. You don’t know whether to stay the course or try to turn around and grope around for the switch. No matter what, it gets about as messy as a Stevie Wonder doing a drive-by shooting. They say that when you lose one of your senses your other senses become more acute. In this case, it’s usually your sense of embarrassment. In our quest to save the planet I don’t think that we need to limit restroom light use to less than 20 seconds.

At first glance, many Americans would view the lifestyle of the average Spaniard as rather austere: living spaces are small compared to those of Americans who own single-family homes; energy use is stingy in the extreme; most Spanish people live in dense, urban environments; people use public transportation, bicycles, or walk to effect most of their daily obligations; and Spain hasn't reached anywhere near America's obsession for material possessions. After quickly adapting to the Spanish lifestyle I have to say that life here is not any harder or less convenient than in America.

Granted, I already lived in a manner quite close to that of Spanish city dwellers back when I was a resident of Seattle. I lived in a dense urban city, in a small apartment, drove a small car, etc. I have become quite accustomed to life here and living any other way now would seem odd. I can't imagine ever using a clothes dryer again, at least not when there is anything like a strong sun shining. If at all possible I prefer to ride a bike to get around, my next choice is walking, followed by mass transit. Cars aren't even on my list.

With sharp increases in the cost of fuel, Americans are going to have to accept drastic changes in the lifestyle people have taken for granted since the end of WWII when the automobile lead people out of the cities and into the suburbs. After only a few months of record prices for gasoline, housing prices in the suburbs are falling and city apartments are gaining in value as more and more people are choosing to live closer to work and other amenities. People are beginning to realize that a ten mile drive—one way—just to rent a video is an absurdity that fewer and fewer Americans can afford.

The problem is that there are many areas in America that don't offer any sort of dense urban center toward which people can migrate. Cities like Dallas, Phoenix, Indianapolis, and Atlanta—to name just a few—have been built around the model of sprawl and suburbia. Most people in these areas live in single family homes and even the apartment complexes there are spread out over many acres. This makes it almost impossible to develop a mass transit system which requires a population density of something like seven housing units per acre.

The first thing that people complain about whenever I mention the advantages to urban living is how inappropriate city life is for raising children. This is a pretty ridiculous argument and assumes that no one in the city has children. Valencia is about as family-friendly a city as you are ever going to experience. This argument against cities also assumes that the mere idea of having a family is somehow at odds with living a remotely sustainable lifestyle. No one is telling you where to raise your family—you can live in a houseboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean for all I care. I just think that gasoline prices in America are finally starting to reflect the true value of oil and many Americans who bought into the suburban lifestyle are finding it difficult to make ends meet. The once unthinkable idea of living in the city is becoming more and more attractive to Americans with families.

What I find odd about Valencia, and the same is probably true of other large Spanish cities, is that as the city grows outward, they are starting to adopt some of the characteristics of American suburbia: Shopping malls with huge parking areas, big box stores, and homes with yards. Not only are these newer residential areas less environmentally friendly than the urban centers, but they are boring and lacking in anything remotely resembling character. I have noticed that the new apartment blocks on the edge of the city are being separated by wider and wider boulevards that can accommodate many lanes of traffic in each direction. The problem is that building more lanes of traffic never reduces traffic but actually spurs even more congestion in something traffic planners call “induced traffic.” I find these newer areas of Valencia to be completely awful on a number of different levels and I can't believe anyone would voluntarily live in these there when they have so many more agreeable choices.

The funny thing about Spain is that even in the smaller towns people live much like people do here in the big cities. Most residents of small towns live in apartment buildings which have businesses on the mezzanine floor. About as close as people get to single family homes are city townhouses which are mostly two story affairs, although some have three or more stories with a business on the first floor.

Instead of trying to accommodate the insatiable needs of the automobile, planners should be making roads narrower with broader sidewalks and bike paths. This has been the model in Amsterdam for over a decade. Fewer roads force people to abandon cars in what becomes the opposite of induced traffic which is “induced transit.” When Amsterdam first proposed the plan of restricting automobile traffic in its historic center, many local businessmen objected saying it would ruin commerce and turn the city into a museum, like Venice. In fact, the exact opposite occurred. Pedestrians flocked to the more peaceful center. The thing happened in Paris when they adopted their quartiers tranquilles or “quiet areas” which also restricted and consequently saw huge increases in pedestrian traffic. Get rid of the cars and the people will come.

My own energy consumption dwindled down to nothing as I took my cues from my new Spanish roommate. When his father retired he bought an orange orchard so I became very conscious of my water use as this is a tremendously valuable resource in Spanish agriculture. He even instructed me to turn off the pilot light for the hot water heater when I wasn't using it. That seemed a bit extreme but when in Rome...and when in Valencia, turn the damn water tap off when you aren’t using it!

I suffered a bit with the cold those first few months but I liked the apartment. I was used to city living from my years in downtown Seattle but Valencia was even more compact. I was surprised to learn that everything I needed to survive was less than one block away. This was a very dense urban living environment. The kitchen had a huge window that looked over the street eight floors below. It also looked across the narrow street to a block of adjacent apartment buildings.

The Real World, Valencia, Spain
I don’t need to turn on the television where I live to get a glimpse into the private lives of complete strangers; I just have to look out the window. In the narrow canyon of buildings separated by a strip of asphalt barely wide enough for a Mini Cooper to squeeze through, I can practically reach out and shake hands with people living on the other side of the street. I sometimes feel like I’m living in a fish bowl, but everyone else lives in one, too, so it all works out. Before I open the shades in my room in the morning I just have to make sure that I am decent. Opening the shutters is like raising the curtain on a stage. I try diligently to mind my own business but not becoming a peeping Tom is almost a full-time vocation.

Most of the time it is pretty easy to avoid looking into the apartments facing mine; I’ve got a lot of other distractions—we are in the middle of a very heated football season here in Valencia. This becomes a little more of a problem when I am at my kitchen sink because it looks directly towards the neighbors across the street, and what the hell else am I supposed to do when I’m washing the dishes? I can’t think of a stronger term than "captive audience" but that’s what I feel like. Unfortunately, what I see is as boring as the view the neighbors get of the illegal immigrant, that’s me, washing his dishes.

I should be more discreet when it comes to my neighbor’s privacy but the following is a brief inventory of what goes on across the street. A couple of floors below me on the other side I see an old guy with his back to me reading a newspaper. It doesn’t matter when I look over, he’ll be there reading. I can’t make out the date on the paper he is reading but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is April 23, 1979. I have considered calling emergency services to kick in the door and make sure that he isn’t decomposing. I’m sure the neighbors probably say the same thing about me sitting here at my desk on my computer so I make an effort to wave an arm every so often to prove that I’m alive. Give me a sign, old man!

One thing that I have noticed from peeking into other people’s lives is that Spanish people seem to eat a lot, although if anyone is looking into my apartment they must think that I never stop eating. I’ll spend the entire night making one dish at a time, eating it, and then moving on to the next course. Sometimes I'll use up to four pans for a single menu item. I sometimes don’t call it quits until one in the morning. I usually sample so much of a dish as I’m cooking that when I finish I immediately throw it in the refrigerator for leftovers. This was the case last night with the mashed yucca that I made. Besides being the world’s densest starch, I made this dish even heavier by adding about three heart attacks of butter. Remember that in the metric system one heart attack equals ten blocked arteries. Wasn’t that easy?

Seeing so many strangers going about their daily tasks I could say something about people living lives of quiet desperation but “quiet” and “Spain” go together like “President Bush” and “statesman.” When my neighbors aren’t making noise themselves they have probably exiled the dog to the balcony where little barfo will try to imitate the howls of a trapped coyote. No, the Spanish lead lives that are anything but quiet and desperate. I can practically hear their hand gestures as they talk to each other across the street.

It isn’t summer yet so people don’t spend much time on their balconies except to hang clothes out to dry or to smoke a cigarette. Most of my neighbors have balconies that are too small to do much else besides that. Mine, on the other hand, is big enough to live on when the weather changes for the better. I can hang laundry, smoke cigars, drink, eat, host an orgy, broker a huge drug deal, perform a human sacrifice, and play badminton on my balcony, but I don’t play badminton anymore so I’ll keep to the other vices.

On the fourth floor directly across from me live two beautiful young women. I think that they are twins, actually, and they must be models or something because they are always trying on stuff from Victoria’s Secret or whatever they call it here in Spain. From the looks of things, they don’t seem to get along very well together because they are always wrestling around on the bed. I realize that Spain is very liberal and way ahead of the U.S. on social matters, but what these two do to each other can’t possibly be legal between blood relatives.

OK, this last thing isn’t true. I’m sure that someone, somewhere in this world lives across the street from incestuous twins who wear incredibly immodest lingerie, but it isn’t me.

Just thinking about those hypothetical twins really wore me out. I’ll just have a cigarette, or do whatever it is that people who don't smoke do after they haven't had sex. After I figure that out I'll go to bed. Sorry neighbors, the show’s over. I’m closing the shutters.

Maps, Newspapers, and Bridges
Some cities are fairly self-explanatory and getting around is easy. Most cities have streets set up on a grid system so all you have to do is take a quick look at a map to get oriented and that's that. Valencia isn’t one of those cities. Valencia is more like Amsterdam which is like a maze within a labyrinth defended by moats. Valencia is a confusing city to find your way around, with many boulevards running diagonally and many streets sometimes changing names in midstream. With lots of triangular blocks it probably helps to use trigonometry to find short cuts. During your first few days in cities like Valencia and Amsterdam, there is no getting around the fact that you are going to get lost a few times. You may even remain lost for your entire stay. You shouldn’t fight it, just try to enjoy yourself.

If you sit in a café in the old section of Valencia you will see throngs of tourists consulting maps in a desperate attempt to find their way around the maze of circular streets, dead ends, crooked walkways, and other man-made obstacles to navigation. If you sit long enough and take notice you will see people walking in circles—I know because I did the same thing during my first few weeks of living here. I have carried a compass on my key chain for many years and that helped me a lot more than the maps that are available everywhere. A compass is also easier to read and not as obvious as unfolding a map in the middle of the sidewalk.

I always feel a little self-conscious carrying a map around because I hate looking too much like a tourist. I would say the same about fanny packs and money belts. You can spot these kinds of tourists from satellite photos. I think that it is a natural human tendency to want to belong somewhere, to feel comfortable, and to be at home wherever you may be. It is hard to feel comfortable when you are carrying a map with you. Of course, I needed a map just like all of the other tourists but I would only consult mine furtively, under a café table or behind a dumpster. I was going to live here and I didn’t want to look like another lost tourist, even if I was lost and I was a tourist.

I gradually learned my way around the old quarter. I still consult a map occasionally, especially when I think that I know my way around a certain area but suspect that there is probably a quicker, more direct way of getting there than the way I have staked out. I am almost always correct in my suspicions. I often saved myself several blocks by consulting the map and looking at the big picture. Sometimes I found things on the map that were only a half block from places that I walked past every day. More often than not, I just found things by complete accident.

Even after I knew my way around town fairly well, I was still lost culturally and linguistically. It’s not like Spain is such a strange and foreign place, but they certainly do have their own way of doing almost everything, and I had to learn all of these from scratch. One of my reasons for writing this book was to provide a shortcut to anyone trying to decipher life in Spain. When I first arrived my Spanish wasn’t nearly good enough to understand much of what was on the television, I also didn’t know anyone here. This meant that I had to rely almost entirely on newspapers and books to learn about Valencia and Spain.

Newspapers were my map to the cultural and political side to life in Spain. It’s where I learned the ins and outs of the Spanish football league, the broad strokes of local and national politics, and just about everything else you need to know to be able to participate in the society around you. Where I felt self-conscious about looking at a map, I felt like reading a newspaper and carrying one under my arm made me stick out less. As much as people claim to be individuals and to be nonconformists, I think that most people really just want to be like everyone else—how many kids would get tattoos if no one else did it? I desperately wanted to fit in and nothing made me feel more at home than when I would be asked directions by a Spaniard who was fooled by my disguise of carrying the local paper in my hand. I was even more thrilled when I was actually able to steer them in the right direction.

During my first month I was entirely confounded by the Spanish holidays. Between the national and locals days off, there didn’t seem to be too many days left over to actually get anything done. I would be out trying to do a bit of shopping only to be caught off guard by a holiday and find everything closed for the day. It reminded me of a time a few years ago when I went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant in Seattle’s International District. All of the restaurant employees and most of the Chinese customers were carrying on as if this were just any other day of the year; and to them, people of a non-Christian heritage, it was just like any other day. My friends and I joked that no one had sent these people the memo that today was Christmas. Now I know exactly how they must feel. I usually wouldn’t learn what the holiday was until I read about it in the newspaper the next day. No one had sent me the email.

When I first arrived I was particularly bewildered by the holidays in December that seemed to last for days and days. Why was everything closed? It wasn't Christmas yet. I was lost and I couldn’t seem to find my bearings until I read a wonderful essay by Elvira Lindo in a Sunday edition of the Madrid newspaper, El País, that answered many of my questions about the holidays and matters relating to the Spanish attitude towards work and taking vacations.

The author lives in New York and the subject of her essay was the temporary inhabitants of her sleeper-sofa, Spaniards who had cobbled together a week’s vacation out of a couple of days off for holidays. They call it a “bridge” when a long weekend is built around a weekday holiday. Sometimes the bridge is a fairly solid affair, like when people take off the Monday before a holiday on a Tuesday to make a four day weekend. Sometimes the bridges can be as rickety and perilous (as least as far as some employers are probably concerned) as anything you might see in an Indiana Jones movie, like when people take the whole week off when the holiday falls on a Wednesday. To translate a “bridge” like this with the phrase “take a long weekend” hardly does it justice.

It turned out that the week I was wondering about contained the two holidays of Constitution Day and The Immaculate Conception. The author pointed out that even her fellow countrymen who believe in neither, and can agree on almost nothing, are of the same mind when it comes to “bridges.” Elvira joked that a Spaniard doesn’t emigrate, he goes on a bridge. Spanish people always find it amazing that we don't have a word in English for their concept of a vacation bridge.

I felt like I had been let in on a secret. Having the concept of bridges explained to me was the first insider thing that I remember learning in Spain. It seemed like I saw things a little clearer after that, like after you look at a map of where you are going and you say to yourself, “Oh yeah, now I get it.” A map or a newspaper can save you a lot of head scratching, a lot of time stumbling around lost, and they can also open places and things that would have taken you a lot longer to discover through experience. When you are in the middle of deciphering a new culture, there are going to be a lot of eureka moments—sometimes dozens in single day, if you are lucky. You have to look in as many places as possible for guidance.

I finally got to the point where I didn’t need a map, at least not very often. My compass went back to being just a decoration on my key chain. My dictionary will always get a lot of use and I still write down in a little notebook every word that I look up. I did the same thing back in college with English words whose meanings I didn’t know at the time. I remember years later coming across those words that I had written down on index cards. As I shuffled through the deck, I found it amusing to think that there was a time when all of those words were foreign to me but had moved on to become part of my everyday vocabulary. I couldn’t help but look a little condescendingly upon my former, less articulate self.

I remember back then how pleased I would be with myself when I came across a word that I had looked up recently or saw a reference for a book I had just finished. It was like I had been let in on a secret. I feel the same way now every time that I read almost anything in Spanish because I recently looked up just about every word that I know. Instead of looking up sesquipedalian words in English that I might find on a graduate school entrance exam, my new vocabulary lists are now more about survival. You can usually tell the contents by the container but it’s still a good idea to know the words for “bleach” and “mouthwash.” And I already knew the words for shampoo and cream rinse, but the bottles look exactly the same which is why I washed my hair with cream rinse for five straight days. Man was my hair ever soft. For many of the things that I have had to learn here I didn’t have the benefit of a map, or a dictionary, or a guide book. I just had to learn them through trial and error and imitating people around me.

It’s like my entire life is now about building a bridge between the place where I lived most of my life and this new place. It can be frustrating, entertaining, and hilarious at times, but always interesting. I still consider myself to be a young man, but I don’t think I have enough years left in this lifetime to ever get to know the language and culture of Spain the way I think that I know my own. As long as I’m here I’ll keep working at it. I think that it gets easier as you go along, although I haven’t found it to be any easier just yet—not that I’m complaining. I just think that my knowledge of the language and the culture will reach a point where it grows exponentially instead of one little word, one little cultural tidbit at a time.

In the Kitchen
I really appreciated the gas stove in my new kitchen as I immediately began doing a lot of cooking, picking my new roommates brain for Valencian recipes. He turned out to be quite a good cook and he walked me through the basics of the local cuisine. He had some great Valencian cookbooks which I read cover to cover. I used to mock my Valencian friends whenever they would be so incredibly rigid about how a dish was to be prepared. I soon realized that a person needs to be grounded in the basics. Without the foundational knowledge of the local cooking, the people here would lose a link with their past, something I didn't understand since I came from a culture that had little in the way of food traditions. Food was just something we ate; it wasn't a part of our identity as it is here in Valencia.

This first roommate I had was very grounded in the basics. He was from an agricultural village in the country which means he was probably more comfortable in Valenciano than Spanish. People from the outlying areas of the Valencia Community often feel like they are more Valenciano than the people here in the capital city where the language is hardly spoken in the street. The folks from the country and smaller towns also feel that they are more connected to the cooking traditions of Valencia. It's not as if there is a civil war about to break out between city dwellers and the rural population, but as Valencia becomes a city of immigrants—many of whom barely speak Spanish, let alone Valenciano—there is a greater sense of local identity among the country folk where Valenciano is much more prevalent.

Catalán, Valenciano, and Spanish
It is probably extremely premature for me to try to explain the ancient languages of Valenciano and Catalan after being here for such a short time. My understanding of Valenciano is definitely a work in progress but I think I can say a few things about the language with a bit of accuracy, if not authority. It is extremely similar to Catalan spoken in Barcelona and Catalonia. I still cannot distinguish between the two but I only recently have been able to identify different accents of spoken Spanish.

If a mixture of Spanish and English is Spanglish, then Catalan/Valenciano should be called Sprench: a mixture of Spanish and French. Valenciano is one of the official languages of the state of Valencia, along with Spanish. All official documents are in both languages. Most of the street signs here are in Valenciano, so instead of avenida and calle they say avinguda and carrer. Instead of calling the historic center of town the ciudad vieja becomes ciutat vella. At least much of the Valenciano I come across is recognizable to Spanish speakers, for the most part.

I have never been addressed in Valenciano while living here. I have never had anyone speak to me in Catalan while visiting Barcelona. If I am in a social setting with a group of people from Valencia, they immediately switch to Spanish if they were speaking Valenciano before I entered into the conversation. On television there are shows and news programs in Catalan and Valenciano. During news reports they will conduct interviews in Spanish and Catalan depending on whether or not the person being interviewed speaks that language or only Spanish. I have come across very few people who have learned Valenciano as adults. Spanish people from other parts of the country seem less willing to learn the language than other immigrants.

I knew an Italian who recently moved to Valencia and was learning Spanish. I interrupted him watching television one afternoon and I asked him why he was watching the Valenciano station. He didn't even realize that he wasn't watching Spanish. He told me that he understood Valenciano better than Spanish. I don't know if Italian is linguistically closer to Valenciano than Spanish or if my friend is totally nuts. I have also heard from many friends who speak Valenciano that it is easy for them to learn Italian. As I speak a bit of French I notice a heavy influence of that language in Catalan and Valenciano. I always tell my friends here that when I learn Spanish (a good subjunctive phrase in Spanish, by the way) I will start learning Valenciano.

A Guy's Gotta Eat
The Spanish have a completely different daily rhythm for eating than most other Europeans. It took me quite a while to fully understand what was going on and even longer to adapt my own eating habits to be in sync with everyone else around me. At first glance you might think that people here just eat all the time. You wouldn't be too far off with that assessment but you still need to know how meals are partitioned off during the course of the day.

Desayuno is breakfast and consists of coffee and perhaps a piece of some sort of bread-based product. I've never been much of a breakfast person so I just stick with coffee. I drink about twice as much coffee as the average Spanish person and would give my left (insert vulgar body part here) for a 20 ounce cup of American brewed coffee in the morning. I should just break down and buy an American coffee maker but it´s a little late now; I am quite sure that I would now find American coffee to be too weak for my tastes—even in the morning. When I order coffee in a bar or restaurant I order a “cafe americano con leche, which is an espresso with almost double the normal amount of water and milk.

After breakfast comes almuerzo which means “lunch” in Spanish but in Spain it means a mid-morning snack, usually a sandwich and a beer or soft drink. This meal is taken between 10:30 and 12:00, más o menos. When I first arrived I thought this was the mid-day meal as a lot of workers eat and drink quite a lot, especially younger guys in the construction trades. Guys would eat a huge sandwich of sausages and onions laid out on an entire loaf of bread. A bottle of wine or two is shared at the communal table. It seems like a lot of food but this is just the warm-up for the meal to come a couple hours later.

Lunch is called la comida here so don´t let anyone catch you calling it almuerzo, the word I learned for lunch. This is the biggest meal of the day. This is when normal Valencianos have their big rice dishes such as paella or baked rice. This is also the time when any self-respecting Spanish person would dine on a heavy dish like cocido. Make sure that you always wear loose-fitting pants to this meal which begins sometime around 2:00 in the afternoon. If you pass by a restaurant before 2:00, the only diners you will see are tourists. I have heard many Spanish people complain after they come back from a visit to France or Italy because in those countries the afternoon meal is usually over about when the Spanish are ready to sit down.

It's no wonder that the Spanish have clung so desperately to their beloved siesta. During the Franco era they made a sort of half-assed attempt to do away with it thinking that it would “modernize” the country and put it in sync with the rest of Europe's business hours which are more like the American nine-to-five routine. The Spanish just weren't having it. Old habits die hard and some live on. A very useful phrase to learn in Spanish is echar una cabezada which means “to take a nap.” A habit you may want to adopt when you regularly eat more than you can lift during the afternoon meal.

Then comes the merienda, or the afternoon snack. If you haven´t noticed already, the Spanish eat a lot, or at least they do in theory. We have already had four meals and it is not even six in the afternoon. The merienda isn´t too well defined and only serves as a designator for whatever you shove into your fat pie hole in the time between lunch ( la comida ) and whatever you wolf down during before-dinner drinks. I need to take a meal break in just the amount of time it takes me to describe what these people eat during the course of a day.

Tapas aren't a big part of the culture in this corner of Spain, but it´s not like Valencianos will say no when someone places a bit of food in front of them along side whatever it is that they have ordered to drink. I was actually quite disappointed when I learned when I first moved here that they don´t really have a big tapas culture here. After living here for a short period of time I can rarely even look at food during this time of day that is set aside for tapas in other parts of Spain. Eating four meals previously in the day tends to dampen my appetite.

Late in the afternoon comes la cena, or dinner. I say late in the afternoon but what I really mean is really late at night, at least as far as dinner is concerned, dinner for an American at least. The Spanish don´t stop calling this part of the day "afternoon," so en la tarde (in the afternoon) can mean twelve o´clock at night. They usually only say buenas noches when they are going to bed. The evening meal is usually of a lighter fare than in the afternoon, at least in their way of thinking. “¿Arroz en la noche?,” Valencianos will recoil in horror when you tell them that you ate rice for dinner, yet they will eat a loaf of bread with their "lighter meal" and think nothing of it. Their views on diet and nutrition are more ruled by tradition than science or logic so I wouldn't bother trying to tell them otherwise. Dinner usually begins at around 10:00 pm and on weekends as late as midnight. On a cooking show I saw a family sitting down at the table at almost 01:00 am.

Lock Down
Spanish people have a thing about doors, big heavy things capable of withstanding a siege. You first notice this in the historic sections of Spanish cities. It seems that most of Spain was built with some sort of defensive purpose in mind—even a lot of churches were built with security as a major concern. There are forts, castles, towers, and walls all over the country, giving testimony to a past rife with wars, invasions, and raids. Hannibal matched through this part of Spain, elephants and all, on his invasion of Italy. The Visigoths threw out the Vandals, the Moors defeated the Visigoths, the Moors were finally expelled by the Christians and through all of this violence, people needed good, solid doors. I mean, a door’s primary function is to keep people (and armies) out; if this wasn’t the case then castles wouldn’t even have doors, would they. They might have screen doors to keep the bugs out in the summer but not the heavy, steel reinforced entries found not only in castles but in modest Spanish farm homes. On the Iberian Peninsula, people are serious about their doors.

Spain hasn’t been invaded in a long time, unless you count the throngs of Scandinavian and British tourists who show up at the beaches each summer, or the present invasion of New Zealanders here for the America’s Cup, yet Spaniards insist on having tremendously sturdy doors. The door to my apartment has five hinges, each measuring about eight inches. The deadbolt locks in at the bottom, middle, and top. Each one with three bolts. The lock takes four key turns and pushes the bolts out more than an inch into the frame. It is steel reinforced all around. You could use one of those battering rams that they use on cop shows in the USA as a door knocker here. If someone on the inside doesn’t want you to get in, you aren’t coming in through the front door. Try a window or try again later.

This door fetish is part vestigial security concern formed by their bellicose past and part paranoia fueled by current myth and hyperbole. People here seem to have an almost irrational fear of thieves. This became apparent when I first bought my bicycle. I would guess that I have been warned about bike thieves at least 25 times; almost any time that bicycles are mentioned someone will comment on the rash of bike thefts plaguing the city. I was so freaked out at first that I would lock my bike when I left it on my balcony—and I live on the fifth floor! What was I afraid of? Ninja gypsies? People often chain their bikes with two, three, and even four different locks. Why not just booby-trap your parked bike with plastic explosives or build a moat around it?

I have heard so many horror stories about theft in Spain that the skill and audacity of thieves has taken on a mythical aspect. Thieves will cut out the bottom of your purse/ backpack/ gym bag/ pocket to steal your valuables. Thieves will pounce on your unattended bicycle like a pack of hyenas the moment you turn your back. Make sure you fully lock the door every time you leave the apartment. Pickpockets are everywhere. You think to yourself that it can’t all be true and then one day as you are walking through a crowded market, and just like that, you realize that someone has stolen your boxer shorts. Why didn’t you listen? You can bet that after the underwear-napping you, too, will be all about security.

I’m not suggesting that theft isn’t a problem but I hardly think that it warrants such eternal vigilance. Not only have I not been the victim of theft but I have had people go to extremes to return my property, like the time a guy ran me down because I didn’t take my money out of the ATM. I often leave my bike unlocked when I am able to keep an eye on it, just kind of fishing for bicycle thieves. I haven’t even had a nibble so far.

Travel guides for Spain almost always include warnings about theft. It’s like travelers all come from some idyllic wonderland where no one steals anything. It’s like people need to be warned that they need to use common sense. Why don’t they warn you to look both ways before crossing the street while you are on vacation? Remember, running with scissors can be dangerous in Spain! As for the Spanish and their doors, I think that they firmly believe sooner or later the invaders will return, whether they be pagan Vandals, Islamic Moors, or hoards of sun burnt British retirees. Make sure the door is locked before going to bed.

New Digs
All good things come to an end. That’s a really dumb statement that seems to have been around forever. You could say the same thing about bad things and average things. Everything comes to an end, at least everything observable. Someone probably got paid big bucks for coming up with that lightweight aphorism yet no one is going to pay me a dime to mock it. I just wanted my displeasure with this insipid phrase to be on the record before I say that I am going to miss living where I used to live. The landlord was going to use our apartment for an office so after nine months of security I was going to have to go out and find another place to live. I had three months to look.

I can’t imagine using classified ads to find an apartment to share in the U.S. It’s been many years since I have shared an apartment, and when I did, it was always with friends. Not only am I asking total strangers to take me into their homes, but I am doing it in a language I speak rather imperfectly. I finally got around to buying a cell phone which made things a lot easier. I bought a prepaid phone for 50€ like you see the little corner kid, drug dealers use in the movies. You just walk into a phone store, shell out the cash, and walk out with a number and a phone. No questions asked and none answered. I told the gal I bought it from that only drug dealers in the U.S.A. use prepaid phones, or “burners” as the kids call them on. In Europe they are very common and you can recharge them with extra minutes at just about every business in town. I’m sure that all of this talk about telephone technology will seem silly and quaint in only a year or so when everyone will have a phone implanted in their ears at birth.

Armed with my new cell phone and the internet, I started scouring the ads in earnest…again. There are probably at least 50 ads for apartments to share every day online here in Valencia. I was automatically excluded from many of them because they were looking for students or women. This still left a healthy crop to choose from and I started dialing and emailing in Spanish. It was a lot harder this time around even with the powerful tools of the internet (which I didn’t have at home last time), a cell phone, and much better language skills.

I came across an ad, complete with pictures, for a two bedroom apartment for rent for only 300€ so I sent an email in Spanish asking for details. In return I received a frantic email in fractured English from a man claiming that his wife had been transferred to Africa for a Christian mission and that he was living in Miami. They needed someone to watch their house who would take good care of it in their absence which was why they were asking well below the going rate. He asked me for some personal information. It wasn’t very personal nor compromising so I sent it along. I desperately needed a place to live and I needed it fast.

It was the next email when I was certain that it was a scam. He asked that I wire 900€, or rent for the first three months, via Western Union to Lagos, Nigeria and when he received the money he would send the keys and instructions. Instead of breaking off our new friendship at this point, I decided to play along. I was pretty much stuck to a computer most of the day looking for an apartment anyway. I may as well have some fun.

I told him that I would send the money directly and thanked him. I promised that his house would be in good hands and that I was even thinking of doing some improvements on it because I am sort of a handy guy like that. I also asked him if he wouldn’t mind if I just wired him an entire year’s rent at the beginning or 3,600€. At this point my Nigerian friend must have felt like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea and that he was about to land the biggest fish of his life. He probably went out and bought a new car using my email as collateral. He started getting a bit impatient with me in the emails when I still had not wired him the money. I asked him if he knew my brother who was the Minister of Finance in Nigeria, and that perhaps instead of sending him the money I could invest the money with my brother, the Nigerian Minister of Finance, and thus double, or perhaps triple his money. Evidently, he had not heard of that particular internet scam and promised that he would meet my brother, Minister of Finance for Nigeria, after I sent him the money, and could I send the damn money already. Isn’t it funny how money sometimes gets in the way of a friendship. I told him as much in our final email exchange.

And I kept looking. I probably looked at a dozen places this time around, all of which were either downright crappy or just dark and dreary dungeons. I couldn’t believe how many terrible apartment floor plans there are out there. Where I was living was incredibly light and airy. I looked at one new apartment that had only a single window to the outside while the others opened into a shaft running up the middle of the building. I checked out an apartment rented by two young guys that was under repairs and there was a heavy layer of dust on absolutely everything. It was 260€ a month with no additional charge for the black lung disease.

Sometimes I would talk to someone on the phone about a place and have them treat me like I was from another planet because of my accent. If people weren’t nice I didn’t let things go any further. I didn’t like the neighborhoods of many of the places I saw; they were all farther from the city center than where I was living. I became so discouraged that I considered moving to another city. I was looking at homelessness. In fact, I was beginning to get a good enough look at homelessness to be able to describe it to a police sketch artist.

I finally found a place to share with two younger Spanish women, neither of whom were Valenciano. I would miss the wonderful patio at my old flat but the new place was in a neighborhood that I didn't know very well before but would soon come to love. This place also had a great kitchen and we were a stone's throw from the local market. I had lucked out once again, both with the apartment and the roommates.

You Have to Know Your Place: Stereotyping the Illegal Immigrant Way (Me Included)
I was sitting in a café with three friends: a guy from Cameroon, a Romanian, and a gal from Central America. Across the street a group of Chinese workers were furiously working inside of a storefront. The renovations they were doing were fairly major as this site used to be an empty warehouse. They had installed huge windows and marble stairs with inset lights. Whatever they were building looked like it was going to be a pretty big affair.

I asked the others at the table if they knew what this new spot was going to be when they finished. My African friend said that it was going to be a “Buffet Libre or a Chinese buffet restaurant. I asked him how he knew this and he just shrugged his shoulders. He finally admitted that he didn’t know. “What else could it be? They’re Chinese,” was his follow up.

The Romanian guy said that it looked like it would be a variety store, or a chino as they are called here because almost all of these types of stores are run and owned by Chinese immigrants. It didn’t look like it was going to be a variety store. The windows and the marble stairs were a little too nice for a chino. I asked out loud if maybe it was going to be a fancy night club or a disco.

The girl from Central America immediately replied, “Oh no, the Chinese don’t run places like that.”

I guess that I was the only one at the table who hadn’t learned everyone’s place in contemporary Spanish society. After a few short months I was able to stereotype the different immigrant populations as well as my immigrant friends. I have been able to make a few observations so far. Valencia, like the rest of Spain, is quickly gaining a large immigrant population. My neighborhood of Ruzafa is home to a very large immigrant population and the businesses scream out the ethnic diversity. A Chinese clothing store stands next to a Moroccan halal butcher shop which is next to a Pakistani greengrocer next to a South American grocery store. There may even be a few Spanish-owned businesses in Ruzafa if you look around.

A Few Thoughts on China
I’ve never been to China and I don’t have any immediate plans to rectify this glaring hole in my first-hand knowledge of world geography. I do buy a lot of Chinese products so I feel myself to be a bit of an expert on Chinese manufacturing. After all, I live right across the street from a variety store that sells Chinese goods and is run by Chinese immigrants. What further qualifications do I need to hold forth on this subject? Why don’t you just sit back, listen, and learn.

I call these stores Chinese Wal-Marts because they are run by Chinese immigrants and they have an inventory equal to that of the American super-stores called Wal-Marts, even though these places are not much bigger than a two bedroom apartment. If there is something that you need for your home I would say that there is about a 99% chance of finding it at one of these variety stores. I am not exaggerating. Garden products, patio furniture, clothing, shoes, kitchenware, tools, bedding, cleaning products, toys, and electronic gear can all be found in aisle one. Need an adapter for your American appliance? Aisle two. How about a gasket for your stove top espresso maker? Aisle three. I am not exaggerating; these places really are amazing in the breadth of their inventory. The crazy part is that absolutely everything they sell is manufactured in China.

Just about everything they sell in these stores is also inexpensive. I have been fairly happy with the quality of these products but I have also bought stuff that is of the lowest possible quality imaginable. I bought a sewing kit the other day that had safety pins that were about as far from safe as you can get, they were the polar opposites of a safety pins; they were un-safety pins. I bought a bottle of something that you are supposed to use to clean your floors that smelled worse than the most polluted Yangtze River water which was probably what it was. At .75€, polluted Yangtze River water must be a big money-maker to some budding young capitalist in that country.

I bought a large beach towel that I will use for a tent the next time I go camping because the thing repels water better than gore-tex. I guess they don’t have beaches where this towel was made so they don’t realize that a beach towel is supposed to absorb water. I bought an ice cube tray which on the first use produced ice cubes laced with bits of plastic, as the tray seemed to dissolve when I put it in the freezer. There is a lot to be said for American product safety laws. If you don't agree with this I suggest you buy some “safety pins” manufactured in China.

Overall I would say that I am very satisfied with the products I have purchased from China, and even the crappy stuff was outrageously inexpensive. After a while you sort of get a feel for what you can safely purchase at the Chinese Wal-Marts and what you should look for somewhere else. I went to a chain grocery store near my house to buy new ice cube trays. They were still made in China but they probably had to pass through some sort of quality control before making it on to the shelves of the local Mercadona, and I probably had to shell out an extra .75€ or so for that privilege.

Logically, the Chinese own a lot of Chinese restaurants. They also seem to own quite a few bars and cafés around town as well as stores that sell inexpensive clothing for men and women. I was in one of these places the other day and I bought a couple of great bootleg national soccer jerseys (Argentina and Portugal) for 5€ each—they usually cost much more, at least in the U.S.

XXL, 100% Cotton Illiteracy: English T-Shirt Slogans
One thing that you notice when you travel outside the United States is that people almost everywhere wear t-shirts with something written in English. I’m way too lazy to look into this but I would guess that Americans invented the concept of turning humans into walking billboards by putting slogans and advertisement on t-shirts. The Hard Rock Café pretty much built their entire franchise on t-shirt sales. Their iconic logo was the T-shirt of choice for people all over the world. T-shirts are bumper stickers for people. T-shirts with some sort of slogan are a fact of life everywhere I have ever been.

The lingua franca of t-shirt slogans worldwide is definitely English. I don’t know why this is the case but I can offer up a few theories. English is probably studied as a second language more than any other language in the world. The Simpsons is dubbed into almost every language in the world but I think people just want to watch it in the original. There are probably other important reasons why people study English but none come to mind. So therefore, people who study English probably think that it’s cool to walk around with a t-shirt with something written in English splashed across the front, or back, or both. People who haven’t ever studied English also probably think it’s cool.

A lot of times I get the feeling that the people wearing these shirts haven’t the faintest idea of what they say, whether they have taken an English class or not. How else can you explain a 70 year old Greek woman with a t-shirt emblazoned with “Frankie Loves Hollywood?” I don’ think that there is a 15 year old kid on the planet who would be willing wear a t-shirt that says “True Love: Mom” if he knew what it meant, like the kid I saw last night. I wanted to punch him myself, or at least give him a wedgie. I once came across a little street urchin wearing a Harvard t-shirt and I thought, “That school needs to take better care of its alumni. A Harvard man shining shoes in Chihuahua, Mexico? That ain’t right."

You see lots of slogans that aren’t grammatical, don’t make any sense, or are just plain stupid. The first time that I noticed this phenomenon was in the mid 1980s when people in Europe wore t-shits that said “Relax” and “No Problem.” You would see dozens of these inane shirts every day if you were in a heavily touristed area. There doesn’t seem to be a presiding t-shirt slogan on the tourist trail these days, just lots of shirts with really dumb things written in English—always English. You almost never see t-shirts with something written in French, or Spanish, or Russian, or Arabic, or Chinese. I’m not sure that I can even tell the difference between Chinese or written Japanese but you don’t see either on a shirt.

I was shopping for clothes the other day in shop run by a Chinese family. All of the clothes they sell are manufactured in China (Valencia receives more cargo from China than any other port in Spain). I was looking at their selection of t-shirts when it dawned on me that all of the dumb t-shirts you see were probably manufactured in China. This would explain the sometimes fractured “Engrish” and the senseless slogans.

Lots of American kids get tattoos of Chinese characters without knowing a single thing about the language. For all they know, that Chinese character on their butt may say “Drink Coke.” They just get them because they think that they look cool. I don’t mean to sully the good name of tattoo artists—the most trusted professionals in body mutilations—but I don’t think that you can count on many of them in the United States to know the intricacies of Mandarin Chinese. One little extra line in that character for “Peace and Understanding” in Chinese will change it to “All Deliveries made in Rear.” You need to be careful, especially if you decide to travel to China with your new ink. I'm sure Chinese people laugh their asses off at the tattoos on American hipsters.

The people who pen English sayings on Chinese-made t-shirts are just like those tattoo artists. There is probably some Chinese kid who studied English for three years and now works at some Orwellian Ministry of Annoying T-shirt Slogans. His job is to sit around all day and think up English slogans. Who knows, maybe the kid has a sense of humor and is writing these dumb slogans on purpose. How else can you explain some of these things I have seen people wearing in Valencia?
Too Brown Maybe You Clean Your Lenses
Breakfast • Lunch • Happy Hour
God Save Everyone from Basic Clothes
And this one.
Kykase Stop
Challence
The Victoria is worth only
EXTREMELY
Huh?
Or this one worn by some middle aged dork:
Young Free Cool

Imagine if these were tattoos? Giving an old t-shirt to Goodwill is a hell of a lot easier than getting an unwanted (and ungrammatical) tattoo removed with laser surgery.

Maybe I will sit in one of the popular tourist spots in Valencia with a red, felt-tipped marker and correct all of the grammatical and syntactical errors that I see on people’s t-shirts. I could put frowning face stickers on the really egregious examples of poor English. Maybe airports can put in scanners in the security queues that spell and grammar check all passengers' t-shirts. I’m sure that the technology already exists. I don’t think that there are freedom of speech laws in any country on earth that would defend a t-shirt that says “I Eat Your Skin.” Taking these shirts away from people is for their own good. Instead of correcting their shirts perhaps it would be better to translate the slogans people wear into the language of the owner.

The Chinese have a reputation as hard workers in Spain. “Trabajar como un chino” to “work like a Chinese” makes me cringe but it is meant as a compliment. For all its faults, there is a lot to be said for political correctness. If you don't believe this, just try living with an almost complete lack of it. Another virtue of the Chinese, as far as native Spanish people are concerned, is that it is rare that you hear about a Chinese immigrant who gets arrested or is caught doing anything even vaguely antisocial in Spain. But although native Spaniards admire much about the Chinese, there remains a wide cultural gulf between the Chinese immigrant community and the locals. For the most part these immigrants have been in Spain for less than 20 years so full integration can't really be expected until there is a generation of Spanish-born children of these immigrants who grow up with the language and the culture.

The folks from the Indian subcontinent seem to have cornered the market on corner fruit and vegetable markets. Mostly Pakistani, these immigrants also run a lot of small grocery stores around Valencia. These are just about the only places to buy food items late at night when the markets and supermarkets have closed for the day. They are also a great place to buy spices as they import a lot of stuff that you won't find anywhere else such as curries, hot peppers, cardamom, bulk cumin, and other exotic fare from their corner of the world. At least it is exotic for Spain; at least it is for now. I would imagine that after a generation or two, Far East food will work its way into the diet of all Spaniards much like Seattleites can't seem to go three days without a bowl of Vietnamese phô or a plate of sushi.

The Pakistanis seem to be the communication moguls here as they own most of the locutorios or internet and telephone cafés. A lot of immigrants from all over call home from these businesses. You can see the calling rates listed for more countries than you thought existed on this planet. I frequent a locutorio near my apartment. The owner speaks Spanish with a bit of an accent but he is very integrated into Spanish life. I remember when I was very new to this neighborhood and he said hello to me one day when we passed in the street—a very Spanish thing to do. He has had a loyal customer ever since.

The sub-Saharan Africans seem to have a monopoly on bootleg DVDs to the point that a word has been coined in their honor. A bootleg DVD or CD is said to be top manta which refers to the Africans’ salesroom. Manta means blanket and these immigrants lay out their illegal merchandise on blankets in the street. This makes it easy for them to fold up shop and make a run for it if the cops decide to take an anti-business stance to this type of commerce. Top is borrowed from English and refers to something like “Top of the charts” and means any kind of popular music or movie, so Top manta means “top of the blanket.” I don’t think they have a word for “Intellectual Property” in Spanish as of this writing.

The Africans will also go ambulatory with their wares and you see them hawking stacks of the latest DVDs in bars and restaurants all over Valencia. I was at a café one day reading a book when I saw an older woman next to me looking through a stack of movies. She ended up buying four DVDs, one of which was a porno that from her lack of embarrassment may as well have been a copy of The Little Mermaid for her granddaughter. I’m sure it was respectable filth and not midget porn or a snuff flick, but still. I guess that I need to loosen up, I’m in Europe.

Besides a few students here for a semester, I haven’t come across any other estadounidenses, which is the proper term for us. I wouldn't suggest ever using that word because few non-Spanish speakers will know what you are saying. For as much grief as people give us for saying it, telling folks you are an americano is the easiest way to say it. I mean, no one from any other country in North or South America will say they are American so why shouldn't we get to use it? Until then I’m just having fun trying to keep track of everyone else. I certainly don’t know what is expected of American immigrants here in Spain, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. As soon as I figure out what I’m supposed to be doing I’ll start doing it.

As it turned out, the place being built was a Chinese restaurant or buffet libre. It's going to take a while for Spain to get beyond this initial stage of immigrant waves. Stereotyping can't really be helped in this early era of newcomers. I remember watching a TV drama that had a handsome young Spanish kid of Chinese ancestry. The actor spoke flawless Spanish and was portrayed in a very favorable light with no demeaning or exaggerated characteristics thought by many in Spain to be inherent in all Chinese people. It was a real shock for Spanish friends and a great leap forward to dispelling certain assumptions about this cultural group.

Spanish Soccer 101

2008-10-04T08:50:00.000-07:00

Spanish Soccer 101

I was already a pretty big fan of soccer before I moved to Spain. A big reason I have followed the sport is because I was lucky enough to attend a Real Madrid match when I came to Spain for a visit a few years ago. The 2006 World Cup finals in Germany were extremely popular in Seattle where I was living at the time. I would go to a bar and watch the games as early as six in the morning among crowds as big, boisterous, and beer-fueled as anything you see on a Saturday night. I also knew that a little knowledge of the sport goes a long way as far as having something to talk about with strangers in a Spanish café or bar. More importantly, moving to Spain meant I had to give up being a baseball fan so I had to find something to fill the void in my life.

The Spanish first division, ominously referred to as "La Liga" here, contains 20 teams, with every large city in the country fielding at least one team in this competition. The second league is made up of 22 lesser clubs. Each year the bottom three squads in the first division are sent down to the second and the top three in the second are promoted. Valencia currently has two teams: Valencia CF and Levante. Valencia has been in the first division for most of its history while Levante bobs up and down.

The 20 First Division teams play each other two times, once at home and once away for a total of 40 games in the season. Teams are awarded three points for a win, one point for a tie, and nothing for a loss. The League champion is the team with the most points after the final game. If there is a tie at the end of the season the winner is decided on a goal differential. The odds against this are fairly staggering so it never happens, except my first season in Spain when Madrid was declared the winner on goals after the very last game of the year. Besides league play there is the internal league yearly competition called the Copa del Rey. Then there is the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Champions League tournament which pits the best European clubs against each other in an annual playoff.

The Spanish football season starts at the end August and ends sometime in May. There are usually international games in June, July and August, so I suppose that soccer is a yearlong sport. It’s kind of like our baseball, football, and basketball rolled into one super sport. It’s not that people here don’t take other sports seriously—basketball is very popular in Spain—it’s just that soccer has a special place in their hearts—probably where religion used to be before people here pretty much gave up on it. There aren’t many new cathedrals going up in Spain these days, now they build huge new sports stadiums. Teams in the Spanish Liga play one game a week, unless they play two games because of some other competition. Matches are on Sunday unless they are on Saturday. Extra games are on Tuesday or Thursdays, or any other day of the week. Football is as essential as oxygen for lots of people here so they need to breathe it in on a regular basis.

I remember on a visit to Spain some years ago I noticed that there was a soccer daily newspaper in Madrid devoted to Real Madrid, one of the most famous of the Spanish clubs. I thought that a daily paper dedicated to soccer was a bit excessive. How much news could there be if there are only one or two games a week for each team? I thought that a daily paper for soccer was excessive until I realized that there is a daily paper for soccer FOR EVERY TEAM! I’m sorry, was I shouting? Some teams have more than one newspaper devoted to them.

I like sports as much as the next slob but this just seemed a little crazy to me. At least it did at first. Now I realize that one daily newspaper for each club is just about enough, that is if you supplement this with the regular newspaper’s coverage of soccer. Some cities have two soccer dailies. Did I forget to mention that? Of course, you also have to watch the constant television broadcasts of soccer news. How else are you going to see a replay of that great goal last night? I guess that following scores and different European leagues on the internet just goes without saying. If you aren't doing this then you are living like an animal.

I am lucky enough to be living in a city that has a really good team. They have won the La Liga six times. They have won the Copa del Rey seven times. Valencia finished as the runners up in the Champions League in 2000 and 2001. After I arrived in Valencia they made it to the quarter finals of the Champions League in 2007 before finally bowing out to Chelsea. The following year Valencia was back in the Champions League playoffs along with three other Spanish teams: Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Sevilla. The next year Valencia was invited into the UEFA Cup (sort of a step below the Champions League) because they won the Spanish Copa del Rey. If this isn’t enough soccer worship for anyone’s taste you have to remember that every two years there is also the European Cup finals or the World Cup.

Just like in the United States, bars here are often heavily saturated with sports, if by sports you mean football, and if by saturated you mean that people just won’t shut up about it. Just like soccer in Spain takes on the roll of our three main sports of baseball, football and basketball, bars in Spain double as restaurants and coffee shops. Just like the Spanish football season lasts almost all year, people go to bars early in the morning until late at night. More than likely, the bar will have a television tuned to sports news or an actual game, if one is being played somewhere on the planet. The bar tops are littered with football newspapers and regular papers usually opened to the sports section.

I go to a bar at least once a day at the absolute minimum; I have to have one professional cup of coffee every afternoon. Quite often I go more than once a day depending on how much coffee, wine, beer, or food I decide to consume when I am out of the house. This is why I first decided to become fluent in Spanish football conversation. Talking about football is the great equalizer; it’s the great ice breaker, even if my Spanish language skills aren’t always up to the task. Talking about sports is sort of like the knucklehead’s version of Esperanto, the universal language. An offhand remark about football goes a long way in establishing my credentials as a local in the places I frequent. A casual reference to a player in the league who is currently tearing up the nets helps to gloss over any errors I make in grammar or diction.

It would be difficult to overstate just how seriously football is taken in Spain. I saw a halftime commercial during one game that showed a man in the shower. They showed his bare ass as he was washing up (It’s hard to believe Americans went ballistic over a woman’s breast). He gets out of the shower and slips, hitting his head really hard on the sink. They show him lifeless on the floor of the bathroom when suddenly his eyes open and he gets up. They cut to a caption that says, “This isn’t a good time to die,” and then you are reminded that there are only 14 days until the Barça-Real Madrid match was to be held. No one in the bar laughed at this commercial but me. Then I realized that maybe it wasn’t supposed to be funny and perhaps I should start taking my Spanish Professional League soccer a little more seriously. This same station was urged to pull another similar commercial that showed a man apparently dying in a traffic accident and then getting back on his feet as if nothing had happened. I remember they had television spots warning that the Real Madrid – Barcelona FC match was only 100 days away, 89 days away, and so on.

Europeans are almost always surprised to find an American interested in their sport. I tell them that things are changing in the U.S. And lots of people follow the sport. I read an account of a group of American fans behaving rather badly before one of the World Cup games in Germany back in 2006. A fan from another country said that was the way football fans are supposed to act and he had an increased respect for the Americans. I think we Americans can do hooliganism as good as the next country.

Som Campeons*
*(We are champions!) A text message I was sent in Valenciano after Spain defeated Germany to win the Eurocopa in June of 2008.

Pase lo Que Pase, España Siempre (Whatever happens, Spain Forever)
-From the start I thought that this motto for the Spanish national football team was rather defeatist.

By default I became a Spanish football fan the day I arrived here in Valencia a little over one and a half years ago. I adopted Valencia Club de Fútbol and the Spanish national team as my own, with all of the ups and downs that come with being a sports fan. While I have been satisfied with the modest success of Valencia CF, the Spanish national team had been on an absolute terror since I moved to Valencia. Spain won its qualifying group to enter the 2008 Eurocopa finals held in Switzerland and Austria. The Spanish team, known as La Selección, carries a heavy contingent of Valencia CF stars. Once in the tournament, held every four years between the World Cup, Spain managed to win easily all three of their games in the group stage, with Valencia CF forward, David Villa, scoring a hat trick in the first match against Russia. In the semi-final round Spain was paired with the current World Cup champions, Italy.

Spain had not defeated the Italian team in competitive international play in 88 years. The game ended in a 0-0 draw and neither team scored during the 30 minutes of extra time. It would go into penalty kicks in which the two teams alternate taking five kicks from the penalty mark. Whoever leads after five kicks wins, if it is still a draw, the first team to lead wins. Spain and Valencia CF have not had the best of luck when games end in penalties. In the 2000-2001 Champions League final, Valencia CF lost in penalty kicks to FC Bayern Munich, a bitter defeat still felt here. Spain lost to England on penalty kicks in the quarter-finals of the 1996 Eurocopa. In the 2002 World Cup, Spain lost to Korea on penalties in the quarter-finals (although they beat Ireland on penalties to get to that game). Italy, on the other hand, is known for coming out ahead in penalty shoot-outs and had beat France on penalties to win the 2006 World Cup title.

The Spanish have had many bitter defeats over the years and I don't think that any of my friends thought for a minute that Spain had a chance in the Eurocopa. I think they were too afraid to admit to any optimism, at least not out loud. When the game went into penalty kicks my Spanish friends became practically despondent. I reminded them that the Boston Red Sox baseball team finally won a World Series after 86 years.

Gianluigi Buffon, who plays for Juventus in the professional season, is considered by many to be the best in the world. Iker Casillas, the superstar goalkeeper for Real Madrid, is also thought to be one of the better players at this position. Buffon had blocked a penalty kick in Italy's game with Romania to keep their tournament hopes alive. If you were a betting type person the odds seemed stacked against Spain. In an earlier semi-final match the Croatian squad had come completely unraveled when it went into a penalty shoot-out with Turkey. You could see fear and resignation written all over the face of the first Croat player to make his attempt which he missed badly. David Villa was the first player to take a kick. He approached the ball with a confidence bordering on arrogance. He made his shot easily. In the end, Iker Casillas was able to save two goals to Buffon's one and Spain would move on to take on Russia in the semi-finals.

Spain had already trounced Russia 4-1 in the group stage but Russia looked like a completely different team coming off their victory over Holland, one of the heavy favorites to win it all. Not only did Spain beat Russia again but they gave them another hiding, 3-0. Now Spain had to play Germany in the final match to be held in Vienna. I had already mentioned that I was going to host the final at my place for all of the football hooligans in my circle. Sitting at a bar after Spain's victory over Russia, someone mentioned that we should drive to Madrid on Sunday to watch the final at the Plaza de Colón where tens of thousands of fans had been watching all the previous games. Big crowds aren't really my thing but I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see a bit Madrid again. Besides, I was just about the biggest Spanish supporter of all the people I have met here so far. I was also the most optimistic about their chances from the very beginning since I wasn't saddled with the years of heartbreak like the average Spanish fan.

Madrid Bound
The drive between Valencia and Madrid isn't the most spectacular three hours of driving, but the views seem to go on for thousands of square miles in some parts. There is the odd castle, the occasional village cathedral, and lots and lots of agriculture—mostly olive trees and vineyards, although it seems impossibly dry and hot for grapes. You definitely know that you are driving through Spain as this section of road looks like every travel poster you have ever seen for La Mancha. I got a big kick out of my friend's GPS system that talked to him in a rather sexy Spanish female voice. I wonder if they use the comforting voice of a woman so as not to offend the normal male's obdurate refusal to admit when we are lost. I wonder if she's single?

Through a friend's recommendation we stayed at Hostal Naranco on Calle de la Puebla 6, 2° near the Gran Vía metro. We paid 16€ each for two huge rooms with bathrooms. I have paid over 100€ for a similar room. I had never stayed in a hostel before and I just always thought that they were crappy and only patronized by junkies.

Evidently, this section of Madrid is a gay neighborhood. I didn't really notice. The night after the game, the comedy television news program Intermedio did interviews with gay dudes about who they thought was the best looking player on the Spanish team and one of the guys they spoke with was standing about a block from our hostel. “It's a small world, gay people are everywhere, get used to it,” I think is the message here.

But we weren't here for the room (or a tolerance workshop) so we ditched our stuff and started off towards the Plaza de Colón. We had been delayed by a horrific traffic jam just outside of Valencia so we arrived only about two and a half hours before the game. This meant that we only had time for a quick bite to eat while we jumped into the flow of people heading towards Plaza de Colón. The mob consisted of almost equal parts drunken boys screaming football chants and great-looking young women—and a few odd foreigners, one of whom was wearing his Spanish team jersey.

We got to the square an hour before the game and immediately decided that it would be a shitty spot to watch the match, that's if you could even get close enough to one of the big screens to see anything. The viewing spots were woefully inadequate to accommodate the huge crowds that had been showing up to watch all the games. There were no screens outside of the interior of the square where most of the fans were smashed together. We decided to fall back and find a bar nearby—easier said than done as this area is just about the least bar-friendly neighborhood I have ever seen in Spain. If you want to buy a Gucci bag or an Armani suit you are in luck, just don't try to buy a beer.

We finally found a place and it was more crowded, smoky, and suffocating that the Plaza. Two people in our group were steadfast in their desire to watch the game from the square so we headed back. Along the way we stopped into a completely overwhelmed convenience store that looked like it was being looted by people wearing Spanish national colors. The mob was actually well-behaved and the checkout lines were orderly and fast. The problem was there wasn't any cold beer. Nothing like a piss-warm beer on a hot summer evening, I always say. People weren't even waiting to get to the cash register before they consumed their purchases. I popped a warm beer and toasted the coming Spanish victory.

We muscled our way into the outer ring of the Square and I was able to see half of the screen from one direction and the other half on the opposite side. The game began with a huge roar from the crowd. It was on!

I got a kick out of everything people had brought to the square to eat and drink. Every sort of beer, wine, liquor combination was on hand. Lots of kids were drinking huge, one liter cups of sangria. The young guys standing right behind us had a bag of cheese doodles as big as a pillow. It looked like a comedy prop right out of Pee Wee's Playhouse. At one point they seemed to have tired of this snack option and when I turned around I saw that someone had stepped on it, ripping the bag open at the bottom. When I looked at it a bit later I noticed that a box of cheap sangria had turned over, mixing with the cheese doodles making a mess that would soon dwarf the Exxon Valdes oil spill. One of the guys in our group stepped in the goo and he looked every bit as pathetic as those poor, oil-drenched sea birds along the Alaska coast. The Brits call cheese doodles cheezy-what-its, which sounds pretty funny but not as funny as seeing a Brit's shoe completely covered in crappy sangria and cheezy-what-its.

From where we were standing our view of the screen was being blocked constantly by people waving flags or a girl getting up on someone's shoulders. This inspired improvisational chants from those whose views were being blocked. ¡Hijo de puta, que te caes por el culo! (Hey asshole, please fall on your ass). It was hilarious when the person on the receiving end of the chant finally realized they were the target. They would turn around and then meekly slide out of view. At one point two young guys climbed up on a hedge and completely blocked everyone's view in our section. They seemed resistant to the chants so I took it upon myself to wade on up and ask them to please get down.

I asked them very politely if they could move. They basically told me to fuck off and this was their spot. Without losing my temper I explained that they were blocking the view of about 100 people behind them yet they still held their ground, or perch, on the hedge. One of them began to raise his voice to me and I called him an asshole (gilipolla). I told them that I was going back to where I was standing and if I had to come back to tell them to get down, I wouldn't be talking any more, if they knew what I meant. I think they did. Sometimes people just need someone to remind them of their manners. I started heading back to my group and they got down after a short, face-saving interval. I was the hero of the mob. That is until Torres scored his brilliant, run-completely-around-your-defender-and beat-Lehman-to-the-ball goal.

The crowd reacted like no other crowd I have ever been a part of. Everyone who could shook up a beer and sprayed it into the air which I thought was really immature and inconsiderate until I did it myself, and then I thought it was pretty funny. Everyone was drenched and loving it. Torres, who had a marvelous year at Liverpool scoring 29 goals, had yet to really come alive in this Eurocopa. I had been telling everyone to watch out for him because he was going to bust loose in this final. Luckily, he didn't need to bust loose. Spain was able to keep Germany scoreless and his one goal was enough. In six games Spain had only been scored on twice. While Spain's Iker Casillas is now considered the best goalkeeper in the game, he could have sat in a lawn chair for most of the Eurocopa because the rest of the Spanish defense was absolutely stifling.

The after-game revelry was riotous spontaneity, pure and simple. If there was a fountain, people swan in it; if there was a statue, people climbed it; if there was a bar, people entered, used the bathroom, ordered a quick shot, and left (OK, at least we did that a couple of times). Our group had an informal competition to see who could instigate the most football chants among the mob. My deep tenor chant of EEEEEE-KEEER (Iker Casilllas) never failed to get people going. A popular chant in the mob was “Yo soy español, español, español (I am Spanish).” I didn't really feel comfortable with that one as my citizenship status is merely honorary at this point. Chanting that I am an illegal alien who happens to be a fanatic supporter of the Spanish national squad just doesn't have a nice ring to it in Spanish.

Madrid will probably never be this insane ever again, even when they win the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. What happened in Madrid was the release of several decades of pessimism, defeatism, and self-doubt. What brought Spain out of this funk was a team of players too young to have any doubt about their abilities. Spanish fans maintained a sense of very guarded optimism after the first victory in the Eurocopa. Spain had disappointed too many times in the past for people to get too carried away. The players were another story. From the start they displayed a sense of confidence and belief in the team that carried them all the way to the end, and perhaps further if you are looking at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Of Threats and Lessons Learned
People in Spain are very passionate about soccer. This seems like a rather cliché observation coming from an American who has spent so little time in this country. It seems like something someone would say who was seriously lacking in creativity and original thought. I’m saying it not because I lack creativity or original ideas; I’m saying it as a defense against charges that I threatened an 11 year old boy with violence while watching a football match on television. I have a few other remarks for the jury, or the judge, or whoever you speak to in a Spanish courtroom (I hope I never need to learn this the hard way).

I realize that it is perfectly acceptable in Spain to bring your children to a bar. The Spanish make little distinction between bars and restaurants; they are both places for everyone to enjoy. I realize that it is not unusual for young children to stay up to watch a soccer match on television that begins at 10:00 p.m. on a school night (At least I believe that it is a school night. You never know here with the hundreds of holidays on the calendar). I don’t mind if an 11 year old boy watching a match with his father expresses a lot of opinions about the players, even when most of these opinions are unfavorable and often insulting, at least to me. With all of this understood, there are still rules to follow when you watch a match in a public place and the sooner this little loudmouth learns these rules the better.

The game was between Real Madrid and Betis (a team from Sevilla). I have noticed that most people in Valencia are Real Madrid fans; at least they are when our own club isn’t playing. Tonight, in this bar, everyone seemed to be rooting for Madrid, including the opinionated juvenile delinquent up too late on a probable school night but who can tell in Spain where people take off work with some of the flimsiest excuses you are ever going to hear. The youth in question showed his support in a sort of New York manner: by criticizing every player on the Real Madrid squad: Guti is slow, Casillas is a lousy goalkeeper, Sergio Ramos can’t pass, and on and on. Everyone has a right to their own opinion. Spain is a free country, at least I think that it is. Is Spain a free country? We say it all the time in America but I’m not really sure exactly what that even means.

I do know that there are limits to freedom. I don’t think that it is acceptable behavior in any bar in Spain to insult one of the best players for the Spanish national team and the fulltime ace forward for Real Madrid, Raul. It’s just not done. You don’t scream “fire” in a crowded theater and you don’t talk trash about Raul. This is why I told the little punk next to me that he was going to get a serious beating if he ever got down to insulting Raul in his inventory of criticism for the Real Madrid team. His father seemed to agree with me as he threw his hands in the air in a gesture that means, “What are you gonna do?” This gesture translates into any language. I don’t know what you’re going to do, dad, but I’m going to give your kid a vicious beating if he starts in on Raul. I’d be doing it for his own good. I wouldn’t expect that a Canadian kid would have lived to see his first zit if he talked smack about Wayne Gretzky, Muslim kids don’t mock the Prophet, and this little runt needed to learn that in Spain, if you have anything bad to say about Raul, you keep it to yourself. Everyone at the bar seemed to agree with me on this.

I don’t think any Spanish court would convict me on this crime of threatening a minor, especially since Raul scored the first goal of the game on a penalty kick.

A Beginner's Guide to Las Fallas de Valencia

2008-10-03T01:28:00.000-07:00

A Beginner's Guide to Las Fallas de Valencia

Before you attend Les Falles de València (that isn’t a typo, it’s in Valenciano this time instead of Spanish) you need to ask yourself a few questions. Are you agoraphobic? Afraid of crowds? Bothered by loud explosions? Adverse to overeating? Reluctant to stay out until dawn wandering the streets from one huge block party (called verbenas) to the next? These are all legitimate excuses for avoiding Valencia during Las Fallas (pronounced fa-yas), the city’s most important festival of the year and the biggest celebration I have ever witnessed first-hand.

I usually mock lists about places you must see or things you have to do; as if life can be reduced to a check-list and when you cross off that last item you can throw yourself on a sword or something. I remember seeing an article in a men's magazine a few years back that had a list of 60 things every man must do in his life written compiled by famous people. About 50 of the things on the list you could scratch off with a credit card and about two weeks of vacation time. Silly, amusement park stuff like driving an Indy car, rafting the Grand Canyon, drinking an expensive wine, going to the Final Four (honestly, a basketball tournament?), having a threesome (This was from a best-selling writer. Thanks for your wisdom.), playing golf at the Old Course in Scotland (Play Golf? Over my dead body.) and many more fatuous entries.

There were a few things on the list that I thought were sensible and noble aspirations for any man or woman: Serve your country (Chuck Yeager—I knew there was a reason I liked him), learn a foreign language, learn a martial art, plant a tree (Ted Nugent’s selection—you surprise me sometimes, Ted. You freaking freak.), get in amazing shape, or simply give something back to your community (NBA player Dikembe Mutombo). For the most part the article amounted to little more than a shopping list. So I'm not about to tell anyone that Fallas is something they must see.

No, I have never really been a big fan of events of almost any sort, preferring to avoid the crowds and the exaggerated claims of the organizers and friends who insist that I simply must see this or that. I didn’t have much choice in this matter seeing how—in a fairly literal manner—I lived right in the middle of Las Fallas. I can safely say that Las Fallas is something that you simply have to see to believe, although I will stop short of saying that you must see it. However, if you have a friend who is still living in Valencia next year and you don’t get over here for Las Fallas, you are a truly world-class fool.

If you believe the popular myths here in Valencia, it all started back in the Middle Ages when carpenters used to hang up planks of wood called parots in the winter to support their candles when they were working. At the onset of spring these pieces of wood would be burned, as a way of celebrating the end of the dark winter working days and to welcome the spring equinox. After a while, they began to put clothing on these scraps of wood, and then people started to make parodies of well-known local personalities. These became the forerunners of what are now known as fallas, the enormous cardboard, wood, polyurethane, Styrofoam, cork, plaster and paper maché figures that identify the festival today. Somewhere back in time, the Catholic Church decided to get involved and pretty much kidnap the festival by making it coincide with the celebration of the festival of Saint Josep, the patron saint of the carpenters. I don't like to cite history because it's mostly unreliable and anecdotal and it makes me feel like a plagiarist.

Las Fallas is a huge event taking weeks and weeks to set up, and the official program marks the beginning with a very inauspicious crowning ceremony for the hostess of the festival. The real fun begins on March 15 and lasts until the 19th but there are many events leading up to the opening day. Just setting up the infrastructure around town to prepare for Fallas seems to put everyone in the mood for the crazy party to come. Of everyone that I know in who lives Valencia, whether they are locals, foreigners, or Spaniards transplanted from other parts of the country, people either seem to love Fallas of hate it. I'm still in the “love it” camp.

The Mascletà: A Celebration of Crowds and Noise
The craziest thing about Valencia’s Fallas festival, at least for this outsider, is the daily ritual of the Mascletà. This is a daytime percussion fireworks display that happens every afternoon during Fallas beginning precisely at 2 p.m. and lasting only a couple of minutes. They begin on March 1st. They are held at the Plaza del Ayuntamiento and every single day there are tens of thousands of people who show up to have their collective senses of hearing assaulted and they all do it with great pleasure. This is during the middle of the afternoon so there are few rockets lighting up the night sky; there’s just lots of really loud explosions. The louder the better as far as the locals are concerned. The craziest part about the Mascletà is that I have grown to love it as well. I make try to make it down to the plaza every single day for my dose of noise. You get sort of addicted to the crowds and noise like you get addicted to eating spicy foods; it hurts a little at first and then it's fun.

Valencianos joke that the Mascletà is the only thing in town that is always on time. Indeed, you can set your watch to the warning rocket that is sent up ten minutes prior to the main show. The square starts filling up more than an hour before the blast off as people jockey for the best places to hear the explosions. There is a big area in the middle of the square with a 20 foot fence around it where they set off all of the rockets. Anywhere close by is considered a valued piece of real-estate. On the most popular days there can be as many as 100,000 spectators on hand, all for a bunch of explosions that last less than ten minutes.

How loud is it? Newcomers are cautioned to keep their mouths open during the explosions as this is supposed to keep your ear canals open so that you won’t burst an eardrum. I’m no ear, nose, and throat specialist but I figure it’s better to be safe than deaf. I look up at the rockets in slack-jawed marvel. I do know for a fact that the explosions are so powerful that you can feel the sound waves vibrating your clothing. It’s almost like getting a massage if you are standing close enough to the action. At the end of each show there is a tremendous flourish and the noise is so devastating that I can’t help but to burst out in crazed laughter every time that I go. I can’t explain it but there is something joyous in being completely overwhelmed by the thunderous explosions. It's not uncommon to see people crying with tears of joy. Not me, mind you, but other people.

It all ends incredibly abruptly and there is a huge ovation from the mob. Everyone almost immediately thereafter does an about-face and goes on to do whatever it is they are going to do. For most Valencianos this is when they have their big, midday meal so getting a table in a restaurant is like being in a 100 meter dash with 100,000 hungry Spaniards.

The best thing about the Mascletà is that it adds a lot of life to an already very vibrant city. There is an electricity generated by crowds of people. Crowds aren’t in any shortage during Fallas. The whole festival is more or less predicated on the assumption that there will be tremendous crowds everywhere in Valencia during these first few weeks of March. The Mascletà is sort of the daily christening of the festival but instead of breaking a bottle of champagne they set off a few thousand pounds of explosives.

Las Fallas
The festival revolves around the construction of large, cartoon-like satirical structures called fallas. The themes of the fallas are supposed to be critical in nature and often address issues like government corruption, waiting lists for hospital stays, local politicians, and a favorite my first year in Valencia, the money being spent to host the America’s Cup sailboat races. Each neighborhood builds its own falla which vary in size from modest little ones that are about the size of a mini-van, to enormous structures six stories high. The fallas are the center of each neighborhood’s celebration and the parties surrounding them also vary in size and intensity. The size of the falla does not dictate the size of the block party hosted by the neighborhood, however. My block had a modest falla depicting the female mayor of Valencia but the four nights of block parties were completely outrageous. This street, loaded with night clubs, has a reputation for heavy nightlife.

The fallas really do need to be seen because photographs do them no justice. It is impossible to get a sense of the scale of some of these creations from pictures because they are jammed into narrow streets or tiny plazas. Although they are all different, they all adhere to pastel colors and use the same materials; they are variations on a theme. By the evening of March 15th all of the structures must be finished and ready for judging. From this point on, hordes of people wander the streets admiring the works and taking pictures. I suggest you do this on a bicycle in order to cover more ground, at least if you start out early in the morning. By about noon it is impossible to get around in the city center on a bike as there are hoards of pedestrians. There are something like 800 fallas in all as each casal faller, or community, constructs a children's falla and a larger one.

The parodies brought out in the fallas are mostly inside jokes. I have looked at hundreds and hundreds of fallas and only once in a while do I truly understand their meaning. First of all, the inscriptions are written in a rather poetic Valenciano and they usually deal with local politics. It would probably takes years and years of residency to begin to understand the often subtle nature of the jokes built into the fallas, not that understanding them is essential to enjoying their beauty and creativity.

Els Castells
Things really start to heat up on the evening of the 15th. Each evening at 01:00 am (or is it 01:30?) for four nights there are fireworks displays set off from the center of the Turia Gardens, the main park which runs from one end of the city to the other. I have never been a big fan of fireworks but I have to say that these are very impressive. The most impressive thing is the huge crowds that fill the park for miles up and down the empty river bed that. Up to 1,000,000 spectators make their way towards the park to find a good vantage point to see the show.

These fireworks are called “castells” in Valenciano or “castles” in English. Valencianos will also use the Spanish “castillo” to refer to the fireworks, although other Spanish speakers call them “fuegos atificiales.” And Valencianos do like their fireworks. Both at the mascletà and at the castell Valencianos expect to be assaulted by light and noise

Verbenas: Block Parties
After the final flourish of the fireworks display (and it better be huge), the crowds descend upon their respective street parties which last (at least officially) until 4 a.m. These can range from modest affairs that look like a family cookout to DJ dance parties to enormous blow-outs with multiple sound stages for live music performances. Take your pick because there are hundreds of them going on simultaneously throughout the city and everyone is invited.

Part Bin Laden, Part Bart Simpson
There have been at least five processions (pasacalles) that have passed below my window in just the last half hour and more are coming. Each procession has its own band and is made up of Falleras, people dressed in traditional Valencia clothing of the Fallas. There have also been about a thousand explosions—both big and ear-shattering—in the last 30 minutes. One of my favorite things about Fallas is seeing all of the little kids dressed up for the event. Some are all decked out in colorful and elaborate traditional clothing that can cost hundreds and hundreds of Euros, others wear a traditional pañuelo, or handkerchief, and a smock. The kids are really cute but I can’t forget that they are also the enemy.

Yes, I am scared to death of the kids during Fallas because they are given carte blanche to blow the crap out of everything. Even the smallest of children are armed with little caps that explode when thrown. Rug rats in the 8-12 year range are outright terrorists during Fallas and should be avoided whenever possible. They are armed to the teeth with fireworks. If I see a group of little snot-nosed punks on a street corner during the festival, I will cross the street quicker than if I saw a group of Crips and Bloods having a shoot-out.

I was hanging out at one of my favorite bars in the neighborhood called La Flor de Ruzafa watching as they were constructing the Falla in the middle of the street. The Fallas are made of wood, Styrofoam, and beer, evidently. I had a great view of the whole process as I stood at the walk-up window. There was also a group of little kids lighting off firecrackers. I guess that is all part of the atmosphere. I felt like I was at a cross between the Carnival in Rio and the Green Line in Beirut.

The little terrorists must have run out of firecrackers because they stopped and I doubt it was because they got bored of blowing up shit, I know I wouldn't if I were their age. I wasn’t allowed to so much as light a match as a kid, let alone play with firecrackers. I don’t know if I am more annoyed by the noise or more consumed by jealously because these little kids get to do things I could have only dreamed about at their age. Firecrackers weren’t even legal where I lived so even if my parents weren’t worried about me blowing off a vital part of my body, I probably couldn’t have scored any explosives. The little, pre-adolescent al Qaeda kids were kicking around near the bar and the Falla construction site looking for something to do. This was at about 2 a.m., which during Fallas is a perfectly normal time for kids to be out, unsupervised, in the street.

I was talked into playing futbolín (foosball) with my sworn enemies. I got paired up with the leader of their little terrorist cell. It turned out the young Bin Laden and I dominated the table for quite some time until the others made us break up our winning team. The good news is that bars stay open really, really late during the festival so I didn’t have to choose between futbolín and last call.

Despertà The Wake Up
Getting in past four in the morning shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll just shut the blinds in my bedroom making it pitch black and get seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. Another tradition in Las Fallas is that no one is supposed to sleep…ever! At 7 a.m. Friday they do something called the despertà, or wake-up call in English, or assholes with fireworks is also an acceptable translation. People walk through the streets lighting off incredibly loud firecrackers. In fact, firecrackers are one of the overriding themes of the festival and you will be assaulted, day and night, by explosions both small and deafening during the entire festival. If you are lucky you will only have to sleep through firecrackers, if you aren't lucky a live brass band will make its way down your street bright and early.

Because of the noise, sleeping is all but impossible so you may as well just get up, go outside, and enjoy the fine weather. Every morning the city looks as if it was destroyed the night before. The little courtyard park outside my door was the setting for a party for hundreds of people the night before and is now filled with empty bottles, plastic cups, and every other item needed for an all-night bash. There is a wall around the Aragon Metro station that is about chest high, just the right height for a bar. The was a huge block party right across the street and the morning after the first party the wall was completely covered with the detritus from the thousands of people who came to see a rock group called Pato Daniel perform. The city looks as hung-over as you feel. You go out and get a cup of coffee or two while the cleaning crew army arrives to scour the neighborhood from top to bottom. By 11 am you are ready to start all over again and so is Valencia.

Everywhere at Once
Because Las Fallas is broken down very democratically into dozens and dozens of local celebrations, it is impossible to see everything that is worth seeing. Everywhere you go there are parades and processions, music and dancing, food and beverages, and crowds. I was standing in line at the Mercado de Algirós, minding my own business when a procession of men and women in traditional garb marched by accompanied by a brass band. Something you don’t see every day—except during Las Fallas.

You can make it to most of the main events if you hurry. You should probably make it to the flower procession in the Plaza de la Virgen in which women in traditional Valencian dress bring in wreaths of flowers that are used to create a five story depiction of the Madonna and child.

Don’t you people have homes?
Valencia’s population more than doubles in size during Las Fallas with the majority of the tourists coming from Japan, followed closely by Britain and Italy. The hotels are booked far in advance but from all of the people on the streets at all hours of the day you wonder if anyone actually spends any time in their hotel room. The headline in one of the local newspapers asked, “¿Nadie tiene casa?” This loosely translates as, “Don’t you people have homes?” For the last four days of the festival all automobile traffic is banned in the center historic district of town. Even without cars I had to walk my bicycle through the huge crowds flowing through the streets like a swift current.

The trains that service the surrounding areas of Valencia, called cercanías, are full to the point of bursting, causing breakdowns and delays. The same is true for the subway and bus systems. I had to take the metro at 6 a.m. one morning and I’ve never been on a train with more people before, and never with so many people drunk or hung-over—but to their credit they all seemed happy.

Eat, Drink, and then Drink Some More
The traditional thing to do in Valencia, and especially during Fallas, is to drink a glass of horchata, a smooth milkshake made from tiger nuts (I’ve never heard of them either). There are horchata stands everywhere and usually right next to a stand selling buñuelos and churros which are fried pastries covered with sugar. These stands all pop up like mushrooms during the festival and then promptly disappear, probably off to find another celebration in another city. I wish they were around all year. With their brilliant neon lights they look more like garish carnival rides than food stands.

Almost all of the block parties have their own concession stands which sell food and drink but at rather inflated prices. In spite of the high prices there never seem to be enough places selling drinks, especially the hour or so before the nightly fireworks. Everyone gets a cocktail and heads towards the park. One popular drink that I noticed was a big seller all over town was the cubalitro which is a play on words for Cuba libre which is a rum and coke but in the super-size liter variety. When you order the bartender will ask you when to stop pouring the rum. I wasn’t paying attention when I bought one and the gal put in so much rum that I didn’t know if she was being flirtatious or it was an assassination attempt.

Most of the younger kids just bring their own booze and mixers to the block parties. They set up little mini bars close to the action and avoid the high prices and waiting in line. For all of the alcohol that is consumed you don’t seem to notice many intoxicated people, at least not obnoxiously drunk, but I didn’t look in any mirrors when I was out. During the 2009 Fallas festival there were 72 arrests for drunk driving which seems incredibly few considering how the city is literally awash in alcohol. Maybe the police were busy in other matters and those 72 arrests were just the people who turned themselves in for driving while intoxicated.

La Cremà: Now that’s what I call an exit!
I have mocked the phrase, “All good things come to an end,” but I will say that some good things come to a better end than others. The last official act of Las Fallas is the burning of all of these beautiful creations that have been the object of admiration these past five days or so. This is called the Cremà in Valenciano. It seems almost tragic to commit these masterpieces to the torch. There was a picture in the paper of a group of young girls in their Fallas costumes all crying as their beloved falla went up in a tower of fire. It also seems like an incredibly fitting way to close this wild celebration. What a better way to mark the end of the festival than to reduce the objects of the celebration to ashes?

I was able to watch the demise of my neighborhood’s falla from the comfort of my apartment. It wasn’t until almost 1 a.m. on the final evening when it began with an impressive fireworks display made even more impressive by the fact that my street is a claustrophobic narrow canyon. The falla is doused with lighter fluid and a string of fireworks is then lit which acts as a fuse. Soon the depiction of the mayor of Valencia was engulfed in flames and a huge billow of smoke made the clear night completely black. I was thankful that I was watching from a closed window in my back bedroom.

You’ll have to speak up, I live in Valencia
The locals go way overboard when it comes to firecrackers during the Fallas festival. There are explosions, big and small, all day and all night. They recently changed the law, under European Union pressure, to limit the sale of firecrackers to kids over 12 years old—not that anyone cares what the law says. You see kids of all ages setting off firecrackers and other explosive devices on every street corner. It’s probably a little like living in Baghdad. I’m thinking about buying an AK47 to shoot off in what I call a Gaza salute. I think that you have to be at least 15 to shoot off an AK47.

Perhaps I will hold out for a rocket propelled grenade launcher as I don’t want to be out-done by any of the little brats, some of whom are packing some pretty serious explosives. My motto has always been, “Fight fire with fire...and then some.” Although I can find no moral reasons against it, there are probably some legal restrictions against actually shooting the little terrorists who set off fireworks all day long in the courtyard under my balcony starting at about 9 a.m. after I’ve been out practically all night. It’s not like I’d be shooting to kill; I just want to shoot the firecrackers out of their little, elfin hands.

It just seems like a recipe for disaster to allow young kids to shoot off explosives with no adult supervision. I wasn’t even allowed to light a match as a kid, let alone play with something perfectly capable of blowing something else up. It just isn’t fair. I suppose that I should be grateful because I was crazy enough as a child that if I had the license to kill like these little punks, I’m sure that I’d be short a finger or a major appendage or two. Perhaps this loss of little fingers explains why the Spanish type slower and buy fewer rings than all other Europeans. It’s true.

I half expect to see infants in strollers throwing firecrackers as they do tend to start young here. I’m rather gun-shy of these little half-pint hoodlums. It’s not like I’m afraid of a single kid but there are thousands of them out in the streets during Fallas. I wisely keep my mouth shut but I just want to scream out from my balcony, “Yo, al Qaeda. Go watch cartoons and give the illegal immigrants a break." Don’t they have video games in Spain? Firecrackers have even usurped soccer for the attention of the rug rats. I have seen kids throwing firecrackers while kicking a ball around but I haven’t seen anyone playing soccer without an explosive accompaniment since Fallas began.

I guess the lack of sleep and the constant bombardment have made me a little grumpy. I tried wearing earplugs which didn’t help. I started listening to loud rock music through my headphones. Self-induced deafness is one way to combat the noise but I will probably just tough this out and deal with being shell-shocked.

The Hangover
It is absolutely amazing to me that there isn’t a complete breakdown in the social order with massive crowds intersecting with a seemingly endless supply of alcohol. In fact, there were only 124 arrests during the celebrations in 2009. There are virtually no restrictions on drinking in public and about the only problem you may notice is that there aren’t nearly enough public restrooms to go around. The city only provided 350 port-o-pots with individual street parties supplying another 250—not very many considering that a million visitors come very year, not to mention the other million residents of Valencia.

One small example of the anti-establishment mayhem that goes on during Fallas happened on the last night when we were waiting for one of the big Fallas to burn in the Ruzafa neighborhood. We arrived a bit early to stake out our place and there were already quite a few people waiting. There was a fire ladder truck on hand as there are at all of the larger Fallas. There weren’t any firemen in sight and a crowd had descended on the truck and was using is as a viewing stand. There were empty beer and wine bottles covering the truck and little kids were climbing all over it. I found this to be hilarious but the Spaniards didn’t think anything of it. When the firemen were ready to take back control of their vehicle they weren’t even jerks about it. They just politely asked everyone to get down and they pulled the truck into position in front of the burning structure.

The whole point of the level of intensity with which Valencianos celebrate Fallas is that when it is finally finished everyone is completely relieved that it is over. It is almost impossible to have any regrets, at least if you were going along with the program over overindulgence. The day after the final night of festivities you wake up to a completely changed city. No more fireworks, no more all-night parties, goodbye rivers of booze, adios stuffing yourself on buñuelos, it’s back to the real world again and you have never been so glad to return. One more day of Fallas just may have killed you. It was fun while it lasted but one more day of fun would be way too much.

The cleanup begins even as the last embers of the Fallas have been extinguished. During the entire length of the festival there is an army of city workers cleaning up after each night of revelry. Some 1,300 workers scour the streets day in, day out picking up something like 7,500 tons of trash. It takes a few days to clean everything up and take down all of the lights and other infrastructure. This is about the same amount of time it will take you to recover and finally feel rested after a couple weeks of anarchy.

Summer

2008-10-02T01:40:00.000-07:00

Veraneando - Summering

There are plenty of reasons to visit the Mediterranean during the other months of the year but absolutely no excuses for missing summer. The mix of great weather, spectacular views, diverse cultures, amazing food, endless beaches (The beaches are topless? Really? I never noticed.), laid-back lifestyle, and the beautiful sea itself make it a paradise for tourists and residents. Summer is usually a full five months of the year, from May to the end of September, at least. My summers in Greece spoiled this season for me ever since. I have had lots of great summers everywhere that I have lived but the Mediterranean has always been the standard to judge all of the others.

Holgazanear (intransitive verb) to idle, to laze about/around, to loaf
The infinitive form of Spanish verbs end in er, ar, or ir. I recently learned that you can use an infinitive in Spanish to answer a question. So if someone were to ask me what I've been doing this month of July I could reply with:
-Holgazanear.
What else am I supposed to do? It's July in Spain and not just Spain but the endless beaches part of Spain, the part of Spain where other people in Spain go to goof off. Along this entire coast you can't spit without hitting a topless beauty…or a fat, naked, 60 year old foreign tourist. Of course I'm screwing off, there is nothing else to do. I'm no history expert but I'll bet every battle the Spanish have ever lost took place in July when at least half of their army was taking a trip to the beach with their families and the other half was working in the family café trying to keep enough beer cold and sardines on the grill to serve the summer hordes.

One of the coolest things about Valencia is that you can take the subway to the beautiful city beach called La Malvarrosa. There aren't many cities in the world that you can say that about. I live on the line that serves the beach so I see a lot of people either going or coming. My favorite sight is the stuff that parents pack to entertain their little kids when they spend the day on the water. Pails, shovels, watering cans, sailboats, and, of course, balls are part of what the beach caravans have in tow on the Valencia metro. This is one aspect of Spanish life that is exactly the same as it is in America: kids all use the same paraphernalia when they play at the beach. The kids in America and Spain are even in agreement about the soccer balls as more American children now play this sport than play football or baseball.

Many Valencianos drive to the beaches south of town and for this ten minute expedition families bring more baggage than a Spice Route camel caravan. Chairs, tables, umbrellas, blankets, volleyball nets, rackets, and all of the kid junk listed earlier. It's hard to imagine that all of this stuff fits into the little cars people drive—maybe they make two or three trips. Goofing off requires a lot of equipment if you are doing it right.

If you can find a restaurant that is actually open in July it will be filled to capacity, at least during the hours when Spanish people eat, which seem to get later and later as the summer moves along its trajectory. Lunch is still going strong at an hour when many American early bird specialists are already packing up their leftovers in doggie bags. The crowds wash in and out of the beach cafés like the tides. If you were to take a water sample of those tides, the results would come back as coffee, Coca Cola, red wine, and beer. It probably takes at least one nuclear reactor just to power all of the espresso machines working furiously along the coast. I would rather suffer the consequences of a dozen reactor core meltdowns than risk having a few million Spanish people go without coffee for a single afternoon.

I'm pretty sure that they still print newspapers in July, and there is probably news on television, but maybe if we just ignore it the real world will go away—it can at least wait until September. I'm too caught up in the trashy Spanish novel I'm reading to bother with the newspapers, except to read the Calvin and Hobbes comic in the local paper, Levante. Even soccer takes a break in July so there's no reason to read the sports.

Thank God that in the middle of all of this hustle and bustle I have time to take a nap. These aren't my usual little power naps of ten to fifteen minutes, these are howling one hour affairs so intense that I don't know what day it is when I wake up (not that I really knew what day it was when I first laid down, but still). I wake up semi-paralyzed and semi-conscious and I check to make sure I didn't lose anything to some international group of organ thieves—not that anyone who knew any better would want anything coming out of this burnt-out old carcass. I use the slobber on my chin to fix my bed-head hair and then head down to the café for a coffee.

The café is full again and I am beginning to wonder if all of these customers have been evicted. It's hard to imagine they have homes when they spend 10 hours a day at this joint. I'm sure they think the same about me and I don't even bother changing clothes from day to day. I stick with flip-flops, surf trunks, and the soccer jersey du jour—I speak Spanish like Tarzan so I may as well look the part. I haven't worn shoes in months and can someone please explain to me again the purpose of socks? I don't know how much longer I can keep going at this frantic pace. Something has got to give and I hope it isn't the seam in the butt of my surf trunks from all of the fried squid I've been putting away.

I have to be honest; I'm exhausted. Sometimes at 8:30 a.m. I'm ready to go back to bed for an hour, maybe two, three at the very most. I don't know if I should be worried but my blood pressure is so low that the readings begin with decimal points. I'd call a doctor but they are all out of the office in July. For medical emergencies you are supposed to rent one of those sound trucks and try to page a doctor at the beach. I tried that but all the little kids mobbed me because they thought I was the ice cream man. It was pretty funny but things got ugly once the little animals found out I didn't have any ice cream. I was able to take out a few of them but in the end I got stomped something fierce. Ice cream sounds good right now, even if it is 8:31 a.m. In July, 8:31 a.m. is like four in the afternoon.

Summer Menu Changes
By the time it is officially summer it is officially very hot, especially if you are standing directly in the sun. My place has air conditioning but like most Spaniards, I don't bother turning it on—not yet, anyway. The air heats up and life slows down; instead of being a cold shock to the system, a dive in the Mediterranean is a welcome relief from the heat; tomatoes are riper and fatter than ever; cold beer tastes better; bike rides are shorter and sweatier; and the summer menu is now in full swing.

Forget about using the oven. Even cooking on top of the stove is to be avoided at all costs, at least during the day. I don't even turn it on to make coffee in the afternoon, switching instead to a favorite beverage that is the national summertime drink in Greece but unknown here in Spain: the frappé. Spaniards will mix ice with their coffee during the summer months but that is a very imperfect substitute for an ice-cold frappé.

Frappé
In a cocktail shaker add ½ cup of milk to a cup of water. Add ice, Nescafe instant coffee and sugar. Shake vigorously and pour into a tall glass. Drink it with a straw.

A frappé is foamy and sweet and perfect on a summer afternoon. Unfortunately, they don't drink them in Spain so I had to import them myself by making them at home. When I lived in Greece I would have to say that drinking a frappé at some little café on an island was about as close as I have ever come to perfection in this life. Now that the afternoon temperatures are soaring I try to get to that same place whenever I am at home by making a frappé for myself. In Greece I always had to ask, “Just a bit of sugar,” because the normal version must have about half a cup of it. After introducing this Greek import, my Spanish friends are now completely addicted to frappés as well.

Gazpacho
I made gazpacho for the first time in my life my first summer here. Now that I have lived in Spain, and I made it once, I guess you could say that I’m kind of an expert on the subject of this cold, tomato soup. I have heard it described as a liquid salad which sounds more accurate than calling it soup. What I can say with authority is that it’s really good and it’s almost impossible to screw up. What more do you want out of a menu item?

Since I have adopted a Castilian accent to my Spanish I now pronounce this simple yet wonderful dish gath pacho. gath pacho.

Gazpacho
4 tomatoes (peeled and chopped)
1 onion (chopped)
1 cucumber (peeled and chopped)
1 garlic clove (diced)
1 red pepper (seeded and chopped)
Bread (I used three slices of the 5 seed whole grain stuff. Soak it in water briefly and then squeeze out the water)
I had a zucchini lying around so I peeled it and cooked it in boiling water for a few minutes.
Salt, pepper, a dash of cumin, a tablespoon or two of olive oil, and a few dashes of red wine vinegar (No, not balsamic).

I like to chill all of the ingredients beforehand so that as soon as you process everything in a food mixer it will be ready to eat. Most recipes call for you to strain the soup in a food mill after mixing after processing but my blender is powerful enough to liquefy everything. Garnish with a bit of avocado.

I prefer to drink gazpacho out of a glass instead of treating it like a soup and trying to use a spoon. So you kids out there fighting over whether gazpacho is a beverage or a soup just break it up. It’s both.

I rarely drink any sort of alcohol before evening, and in these months it's much too hot to drink wine in the afternoon, but it's hard to turn down a glass of sangría. Sangria is something rather unique to Spain. I have never come across anything similar in Greece, Italy, or France, and lord knows that it wasn't for lack of trying on my part, but I may be wrong. There are as many different recipes for sangria as there are people making it. The important thing is that it be served cold and that some sort of red wine makes it into your glass accompanied by fruit. The rest is up to personal interpretation.

Sangría
Preferably in a ceramic pitcher, add red wine, a bit of Spanish brandy, lemon and orange juice along with slices of both fruits, any other sliced fruit that sounds good to you, sugar, cinnamon stick, and top off with something like lemon-lime or club soda. Serve very chilled.

The Little Malarial Mosquito That Could (Almost)
Most inspiring tales have humble beginnings, and what could be more humble than a mud puddle in equatorial Africa? Even in the lowly world of larva, your mud puddle was nasty and nothing to write home about. Almost the moment you got airborne out of that pestilential backwater, a fierce wind carried you north across the great Sahara desert where another wind, the sirocco, swept you farther north and out over the Mediterranean Sea. During the flight, other mosquitoes in your swarm told stories of older siblings who had the fortune of landing on cruise ships in the Mediterranean, ships full of fat, thin-skinned tourists who provided an eating orgy for the half-starved mosquitoes on this same pilgrimage. All your party can muster up en route is a garbage scow registered in Liberia with a crew so scraggly and diseased that you decide to hold out for better prospects.

It has been over a week since you said goodbye to your little mud puddle, a week of adventure and little blood. Just when you think that you can't hold out any longer and are about to do a belly flop in the sea, you see lights on the horizon. Someone in the swarm who has made this trip says that it is Rome up ahead. Ah Rome, the Eternal City. You have always wanted to see Rome. Maybe you will stick it to the Pope, so to speak. The Coliseum would be a good spot to hunt…oops. A strong easterly sweeps you back out to sea. Goodbye Rome, hello Valencia, Spain.

You would have liked to check out the beach as there is less in the way of clothes to get to bare skin. Instead you finally come down in the heart of the city. It is something like 3 a.m. and there is no one in the street. Almost crazed with hunger you fly up, and up. Somewhere in one of these endless apartment buildings there awaits your first meal in over seven days. You fly into an apartment on the sixth floor. No pesky screens in this country. The kitchen and living rooms are empty. As you attempt to enter the bedroom you are repulsed by a chemical being emitted from a socket on the wall. The anti-mosquito device is just too powerful.

Is this to be the end, not only for you but also for the malaria protozoan parasite that rode as a stowaway all the way from the steamy jungles of Africa? What a cruel evolutionary demise for the both of you. “Adiós, protozoan parasite. Adiós, little mosquito.” You land on this strange plastic thing that hums quietly. Death is near.

But then someone enters the room, and get this, HE ISN'T WEARING A SHIRT! You are almost delirious from hunger and it is difficult to see in the darkness. The great shirtless one sits down and touches the strange plastic thing that hums quietly. Miraculously the strange plastic thing lights up. It is like seeing a lighthouse in a storm. You point your needle and fly as fast as you can, sticking it into the hilt in his chest. You take out so much blood that you almost faint. What happened to protozoan parasite? I guess this is where he gets off. He didn't even thank you for the ride. You don't want to, but you pull out your needle and flap your wings. You are so full that it is going to take extra effort to get off the ground again. You flap your wings furiously and start to move just as you see something coming your way. It is a long limb with five digits at the end. What could it be?
SPLAT!
Note to self: buy a can of aerosol bug spray for when I can't sleep at night and want to do some writing at my desk which is outside the range of the bug zapper I have in the bedroom.

Closed for Vacation
August is the month when everyone who is anyone closes up shop and heads out of town. There are signs posted on businesses all over town explaining that they are taking the month off and will be back in September. The signs are an interesting mix of apology, exasperation, and things that look like counterfeit absentee excuses written by delinquent children. Some of the notes read like messages found in bottles which vaguely explain the whereabouts of the owners and contain an even more unclear explanation as to when they plan to reappear. Many of the signs I have read say that the closure is so that the employees can rest—as if they are all off to some tuberculosis sanitarium to take the healing waters.

The café that shares the courtyard with my building is run by the three brothers. They are rarely open at any time of year. If there is a big football match they will be open. If someone has booked the place for a first communion they may condescend to come in to work. They have been closed for all of August and they didn't even bother to post a sign. A written notice of their vacation plans would have constituted too much work for them. If they did have a sign it would read something like this:

Are you kidding? We are closed about 50% of the year and you come by here in this month and you think we will be open? We would all laugh at you except it is too pathetic to think that someone actually thought they could get a cup of coffee or a beer at our place IN AUGUST! Go away! We'll be back when we're back unless the day we're supposed to be back falls on a holiday in which case it will be the following day. Don't hold your breath.

August is the month when people make major renovations to their apartments because they are gone all month. It's the time when businesses overhaul themselves. Two apartments in my building have been gutted and are being transformed. The bakery in my building is getting a major face lift. There is a new bar going in around the corner. If you left town this month you won't recognize the place when you return.

I was down in the Plaza de la Virgin last night—one of the more popular sights in Valencia—and it was completely filled with tourists. Even the people speaking Spanish were out-of-towners. The waiters and waitresses all seem to be on loan from other countries. It's like the locals just handed over the keys to the city and left everything to the Visigoth hordes who have invaded.

I never thought that I would say this after living through the Fallas festival but it is really quiet here in Valencia. It is 8 o'clock in the morning and it is eerily silent. I haven't heard a car horn yet today and even the dog across the street who howls like a coyote every morning at this time is conspicuous by his absence—or at least his bark is. I am straining my ears but I can't hear a single jackhammer or any sort of power tool. The people doing all of the renovations in town don't seem to have bosses looking over their shoulders so they start work at a reasonable hour, usually after noon. There is no doubt about it; things are rather quiet around here. Why would I want to leave now?

Lots of Valencianos have second homes, mostly along the shore somewhere. The quiet little Mediterranean beach towns that I rode my bike past all winter are now filled to the brim with people, cars, dogs, and everything else that people from the city take with them when the exodus begins. I think that if I were now in one of those little beach towns I would be listening to the morning cacophony of car horns, jackhammers, howling dogs, and squawking parrots. It's a good thing that a lot of these places have bike paths because the traffic there in August is atrocious. The major beaches all look like U.N. refugee camps. Anything providing a bit of shade in these places is swarmed by older Spaniards with card tables and chairs where domino games and impromptu picnics are held. If the shade happens to fall on the bike path then you'll just have to ride around them; it's called “summer rules.”

With the sun and the heat my bike rides aren't as ambitious these days as they were back in the winter and spring. When it is almost 40° a little goes a long way as far as bike rides are concerned. I head to the beach at 4 or 5 in the afternoon and return as late as 9. Even then the sun is strong enough to dry me out before I have completely left the beach behind me as I ride the bike path back into town to the north.

It's not like I really need a vacation since I really don't have a job to need a vacation from—if I can even write a sentence like that one without getting beaten up by an old high school English teacher. Besides not needing a vacation, I like it here in Valencia more than ever. I seem to have the whole neighborhood to myself as well as this three bedroom apartment. If you're planning to visit me, now is the time.

I almost forgot to add one thing: none of the summer rules seem to apply to the immigrant community. The Chinese mini Wal-Marts are all open for business, the döner kebab places run by the Turks and Indian subcontinent guests are on their usual schedule, and the Africans still roam the plazas hawking electronic gadgets and other trinkets. Once again, no one sent them the memo about the vacation hours.

Too Hot to Think
We are in the real dog days of summer. You can feel exactly when the wind stops at any time of day—even when you are sleeping—by the rise in temperature. I leave my house to go to the beach at four in the afternoon and sometimes I will stop to have a beer or a coffee at one of the cafés overlooking the sea just to put off facing the blazing sun. There is a strong offshore headwind on the bike ride to the beach. At least it is cool. On the way home the breeze shifts, coming from the west like the air in a convection oven.

It may sound like it but I'm not complaining; I am just moving a little slower these days. The Mediterranean is warm to the point of barely being a refuge from the heat. Everyone in the world is at the beaches so they are a little crowded. I don't have the energy to ride the extra half hour to my private beach—at least not every day. I usually just stop at the newly refurbished beach at Pinedo just south of Valencia. On a bike I can find an empty spot that is too far from the parking lots to attract crowds.

I stand my bike up in the sand as close to the surf as I can. I dig a hole for both wheels and stand it up straight so I can hang my shirt and pack on it. Even in these hours of the late afternoon I try to limit myself to less than two hours in the oblique sun. Showering at the beach after a long swim is one of life's great pleasures. Yesterday there was a kid with a guitar playing flamenco music on the beach path within earshot of where I was showering—just in case I had forgotten that I was in Spain.

The earlier part of these days is best spent as idly as possible: reading at a shady café, preparing food in a cool kitchen, shopping in the grocery store that actually has air conditioning, or anything else that keeps you out of the sun. The days seem to begin more slowly and don't really get up to speed until the sun has set at around 9:30 or so. Lunches in restaurants start later and later every day, reflecting the intense heat and the idleness of the population boom of vacationers. No one sits down in a restaurant for dinner until it is completely dark outside and for a lot of diners the meal doesn't begin until after midnight, as if postponing the evening meal to the next day will offer some relief from the heat.

There are a lot of advantages to these scorching days of midsummer. I love it that I can take a shower without turning on the water heater. When I was freezing my tail off last winter I couldn't imagine taking a shower with anything but the hottest water possible. It still is a bit of a shock when you first hit yourself pointblank with the stream of cold water. Other than this initial jolt I couldn't imagine raising the water temperature a single degree. Cold beer becomes euphoric. White wines have more appeal during summer and you can thumb your nose at convention by chilling red wine. There are probably cold, nonalcoholic out there but I'm not going to sing their praise.

It is also the season to discover some of the lovely Spanish rosé wines. Most of these are from Rioja and almost all of them are modestly priced. I ran across the street from my building to the Mercadona to take a peek at their rosés. The big grocery retailer also has air conditioning. I asked them if I could live there for the next couple of weeks, preferably near the ice cream or in the wine aisle. A quick glance of their rosés:
Rioja Region:
San Asenio 2.55€
Romeral 2.65€
Comportillo 1.69€
Marqués de Cáceres 4.50€
Valencia:
Baron de Turis 1.09€
Castillo de Lliria 1,30€

I would have sprung for the Cáceres but in these trying economic times I didn't want to come off as a bourgeois pig at the cash register. I opted instead for the Romeral. These rosés are all fairly dry and shouldn't be confused with those horrible white zinfandels which no adult should be caught drinking. They go great with a salad, which is about all you'll feel like eating. The good news is that the tomatoes are looking great.

Just One
How many old, fat, and naked foreign tourists does it take to completely ruin about 500 meters of pristine Spanish beach? If I had written that last sentence in Spanish the declensions for gender would indicate that I am talking about the male of this particularly grotesque species. How do I know that he is foreign? I don't know for sure but past experience on Mediterranean beaches tells me that I probably guessed correctly. Northern European would be my first pick if I had to guess where he's from; that's just the way those dudes roll.

This inquiry is not some sort of riddle or the opening line of a bad joke; it's a simple rhetorical question to which we all know the answer. How many dead mice on your plate are enough to make you lose your appetite? For those of you who think that last sentence was in bad taste let me remind you that nothing is more tasteless than an old, fat, and naked foreign tourist.

So I'm riding down the beach bike path on a glorious day when I look up and on the sand dune in front of me stands the old, fat, and naked foreign tourist in all of his glory. All that I can do is shout out, “¿Porqué, porqué, porqué?” as I pedal by. Why, why, why old, fat, and naked foreign tourist? How could you possibly think that there is even one person on this earth who would want to look at your frightful human form? There is really no upside to being exposed to an old, fat, and naked foreign tourist but at least his gut was big enough to cover most of the truly horrifying parts of his misshapen and hairy carcass.

There you stand on the crest of a sand dune, like a hirsute scarecrow. If I ever wanted to have 500 meters of pristine Spanish beach all to myself I would hire an old, fat, and naked foreign tourist (OFNFT) to stand atop a dune. I guarantee that no one else will want to share this space with you.

I quickly ride past OFNFT but I will have to look at a lot of topless Spanish beauties to scour that image from my mind. You are like a visual Exxon Valdes, OFNFT. Who is going to rescue the sea birds that have been traumatized by this toxic spill of hair and bald spot and grease and flab and suntan oil? Green Peace says that their people won't move in until someone makes OFNFT at least put on some shorts and preferably a burka.

I consider myself to be a pretty tough guy but how do you defend yourself against an OFNFT if you are attacked? I have read that you should try to stuff something in his blow hole but I have the feeling that is exactly what OFNFT is looking for as he ambushes unsuspecting bicyclists on this stretch of pristine Spanish beach. Harpoons are awfully heavy to take on my bike rides but I don't know of any other way I can go by this stretch of beach and feel safe. I didn't want it to be this way but OFNFT has turned me into a two-wheeled Ahab.

Perfect Zeros: Doing Nothing with Style
You would have never thought that being a lazy slob was such hard work until you spend a summer in Valencia. Idleness is an absolutely relentless task around here. It starts the minute you get out of bed in the morning, or at least when you decide to open the persianas, the blinds on the windows here that block out every last ray of skin-scorching, house-plant-wrecking, and furnace-like sunshine that beats down on the little corner of the Mediterranean that I call home, or at least it's where I have been keeping my suitcases and doing my laundry. The word “lazy” in Spanish seems to be more of a challenge than an insult, so don't worry about offending me.

Yes, summer can be a real chore, a full-time job, and there is still a long way to go before it's over so you just have to dig in and battle it out like everyone else around here—or leave on vacation for the month. My whole life here is pretty much a vacation so I'm staying put for August. Besides that, it's too hot to move.

Wake up late, have a coffee and listen to people in the café bitch about the heat, maybe do a little shopping and stand behind women at the supermarket cooling themselves with hand fans, and then it's back home for a nap. Wake up an hour later in a stupor from which you are only partially revived by an ice coffee, lather up with 50 factor sunscreen, drink a few liters of water, and go out for something remotely resembling a bike ride. Bike rides in the summer are shorter and sweatier than during the other seasons. The dress code changes radically. Instead of cycling clothing, it's flip-flops, surf trunks, and a shirt that goes into my pack as soon as I clear the city limits. I wouldn't actually call my summer bike rides “exercise,” I just sort of go through the pantomime of a bike workout. It's too hot to think about where to go on my rides so I just go to the beach every day on the bike path. 30 minutes after pushing off in front of my building and I am carrying my bike across the sand at the beach at El Saler. I go for a swim, if you can call it that. Some days I just dive in and then head directly to the beach shower.

Showering outdoors is one of the biggest treats of summer. In my old bungalow in Florida I had a great outdoor shower that I used when I got home from the beach. I have often thought that outdoor showers could be a lucrative sort of business if everyone knew just how great it feels. I just wish that you could make the water colder at the beach showers.

One of the hardest jobs this time of year is choosing an outdoor café for coffee or a beer. The good thing is that you have lots of occasions to stop for a beer or a coffee. The even better news is that there are countless places to do it. Just about every bar and restaurant has what is called a terraza de verano, or summer terrace. Tables and chairs are placed on the sidewalks and often in the street. If anyone is bothered by this no one seems to have the energy to complain. In summer it seems that no one can make it the two blocks to the supermarket without stopping on the way there for something to drink, and maybe on the way home as well. What the hell else do you have to do?

A lot of people complain about the slow service in cafés during the summer. Have you ever tried to wait on tables while you are in a very deep sleep? And look at how peaceful he looks sacked out in a chair behind the bar. He looks like a little angel, even with his hand stuffed in his pants and a wisp of slobber on his chin. I don't have the heart to wake him up to order a coffee so I just sit at a table on the terrace and try not to disturb him as I read. The bar owner will wake up eventually and it's not like I'm in any sort of hurry. If there is something that can be defined as the exact opposite of being in a hurry then it comes pretty close to describing this place in summer.

Doing nothing becomes something along the lines of an Olympic event during summer in the Mediterranean. Judges give points for style and give lower scores for difficulty. It's not impossible but judges rarely award anyone a score of perfect zeros.

Plazas and Terraces
Because of Valencia's fine weather, people like to sit outside at cafés throughout the year. There are very few days when you won't see at least a few brave souls sitting at tables on the sidewalk or on park benches. The big plazas in the center of town are filled to the brim with cafés and are a natural place for people to gather and just hang out. I think it is an innate human instinct to group together with family, friends, and total strangers in a public place. In the summer months here in Valencia there are so many people lying around in cafés that you almost feel like you should have called ahead for reservations.

Every neighborhood has its own little park or plaza where people come and go throughout the day and each one of these spots seems to have its own personality. If the park happens to have a fútsal court (a small concrete soccer pitch), sport will dominate the theme of the place. Perhaps the ethnic make-up of the area will influence what goes on in the cafés. If there are a lot of Latin American immigrants, you will hear salsa music coming from portable CD players or car stereos. If you grow up under the influence of the rhythms of the Caribbean, music is one of those non-negotiable items in your carry-on baggage when you emigrate. Age groups often vary from one plaza to the next. Where one place seems to be reserved for older folks, another is full of young parents with strollers, and another may look like a nightclub for teenagers. The bars and cafés surrounding a park or square also tend to dictate the clientele. Any place in the center of town will be the realm of tourists, especially during summer.

Right outside of my building you will find a plaza as pleasant as any in the entire city. The Plaza Doctor Lambrete lies on the north end of the Ruzafa market. The 15th century church of San Valero is at one end of the small plaza. The square is more of a pedestrian shortcut for the neighborhood than a plaza. People flow through here all day on their way to the market or towards downtown a few blocks away in the opposite direction. There are two cafés in the square, which along with the half a dozen park benches all seem to invite pedestrians to stop and sit for a few minutes on their way to where ever they are going. Consolat de Mar, the only street adjacent to the plaza, is choked down to a single lane thanks to double parking. Cars can barely be heard—a big advantage for any hangout location. Get rid of automobiles and people will flow in. There is a modest fountain that is just big enough for kids to float their toy boats.

A few elms, a few orange trees, and three big date palms keep the plaza in the shade even at midday in August. The breeze that is funneled between the church and the adjacent apartment block is almost always welcome. At just about any time of day, when you walk past the square, excuses for stopping for something to drink disappear. Since this beautiful little plaza lies directly below my apartment, it has become my de facto living room. If someone is planning to come to visit me I can sit at one of the cafés downstairs and head them off as they approach the front door of my building. I find it easier and more pleasant to read in a café than at home, and this time of year it is cooler in the square than in my place so I spend a lot of time at one of the tables.

In the Blink of an Eye
It’s all over so quickly. I often think that it’s a shame that summer doesn't last forever. At least I think about this whenever I live in a place where summer doesn't last forever. I lament seeing the first signs that summer is waning—a harvested field, the retreat of sunlight in the late evenings—but there is still plenty of summer left at this point. Here in Valencia I would say that we are just at the half-way point. Even with so much summer still in front of me I like to take time to appreciate everything this means. I like to take stock of all of the things that I love about this season so as not to forget about anything important that I may be missing—not that anything that I enjoy about summer is in any way important.

As far as food is concerned, the summer months are a bit paradoxical. It is almost too hot to cook and even eating becomes a tiresome task at times. Even thinking about what to cook gets to be a little tedious. Thinking, in general, seems almost hazardous when you are baking in the sun. Still, you have to eat. The good news is that you have friends who have barbecue grills on their rooftop terraces. If I had a wood-fired grill I doubt that I would cook food any other way—at least until I got tired of it. I suppose that keeping the grill clean is a natural impediment to over-using it. Here in Spain you can buy real wood coals instead of those charcoal briquette things that seem to have been hatched in a chemist's lab. They take a while to get going but waiting for the fire to get up to speed is why they invented cold beer—or at least one of the reason (note to self: write essay on all of the uses for beer).

Beer tastes a lot better in the summer than in other months. I love riding my bike to the beach in the early evening and the finishing up by stopping by for a cold beer at a bar near my apartment. There is nothing like that first, ice-cold swallow of beer after you have been out in the hot sun. The next five beers don't quite have that same zing to them but what are you going to do, quit after one mouthful of beer?

The next best thing to a cold beer after a good bike ride is a cold shower. As I said before, I don't even bother turning the hot water on in the summer except to wash dishes. In fact, the water never gets cold enough for me. Showering at the beach is one of the true joys of summer.

*I love how the streets are totally deserted on Sunday mornings in the old quarter of town. I ride my bike down all the very narrow roads and I can actually feel the vibrations of the church bells because there is no other noise.

I could go on all day about what I like about Valencia in the summer, but it's already too hot to be in the house and it's only 09:00. Too hot to write, too sunny to be exposed this leaves sitting under a canopy at a café or finding some shade at the park to read.

Sol y Sombra: The Beginning of the End
August ended just a few hours ago. There are still a few weeks of official summer as far as the calendar is concerned, and here in Valencia we probably have a few months of shirt sleeve weather. It is every bit as bright and sunny this morning as yesterday morning but I can't help but feel that summer has somehow slipped past. Yesterday was the last Sunday of August and probably the last really busy day at the beach this season. I remember growing up in America's Midwest when right about now you were just waiting for that first cold day when the temperature dropped to around freezing—a real sign that summer had ended. The climate here isn't nearly as drastic and summer slowly slides into fall like a hot bath gradually cooling after you turn off the spigot.

If the spigot here wasn't turned off about two weeks ago, someone definitely turned it down to a slow dribble. Just when you thought the heat was unbearable, summer hit its apex and, almost overnight, it is just warm outside instead of sweltering. Instead of leaving for a bike ride to the beach at 5:30 in the afternoon, lathered in 50 spf sunscreen, I find it safe to leave at 3:30 with 30 spf. Instead of diving into the sea that is practically at body temperature, I find that first dive to be a bit refreshing. Hot coffee in the morning has edged out the ice frappés that I preferred during the hottest couple of weeks of August. I don't have to run throughout the day to find shade, fearing the sun like some celestial bully.

Today most people in Valencia will go back to their businesses, take down the signs they had put up bragging about their month-long absence, and get back to work; appetites start returning for food that hasn't come directly out of the refrigerator; turning on an oven doesn't seem like suicide; and you begin to think that, sooner or later, you may have to return to wearing socks. Fall is a great time of year in Valencia; it's like summer in Seattle. As pleasant as autumn may be, I can't help but cling to summer like a shipwreck victim holding on to a bit of driftwood.

I still have to close all of the curtains and blinds in my apartment to keep out the heat, but this pitched battle with the sun has lost the desperation of only a few weeks ago when I had threatened to turn on the air conditioning almost daily. As it turns out, I only bothered with the AC on about three occasions this summer, following instead the example of the Spanish who use resources like electricity a lot more judiciously than we Americans. This was about how many times I was forced to turn on the heat last winter. Last night I actually groped for a top sheet to pull over me.

I can't recall the first day I opted to wear shorts this year. You see many people switching to shorts as early as mid March. I'll try to keep a record of when I return to long pants. I don't know how my feet will take to being shod again after at least three months of going in flip-flops. I can't believe that soon I'll have to start wearing a shirt around the house. I love summer here in Valencia and I want to wring it out for all it's worth. I am going to celebrate summer today by christening my new 46 centimeter paella pan that covers almost the entire top of my stove. My 40 centimeter pan just left me feeling like half a man. It also really wasn't big enough for a paella that contained half of a rabbit and half of a chicken, so it wasn't all male overcompensation issues that made me buy the new pan.

It isn't nearly as hot as it was only a week ago and I can actually hear the summer starting to wane just a bit every evening. There is a Mercadona grocery store across the street from my apartment and I can hear them close the shutters on the windows every evening promptly at 9:15. As we move into the middle of August it is almost completely dark at this hour when last month there was still almost an hour of daylight after they closed. These are the cues that the modern day urban naturalist picks up on to gauge the seasons of the year.

You can tell that it is summer by the faint amount of laundry that cycles through my washing machine. I think that I may have done one load in the last three weeks or so. The summer dress code in Valencia—at least for me—is decidedly casual: flip-flops, surf trunks, and soccer jerseys which usually follow me into a cold shower when I get back from a bike ride to the beach. There's a bit of a water shortage so I'm just doing my part by killing two birds with one stone.

The few neighborhood cafés that have remained open in August get pretty full in the evenings as not everyone has left town. It seems that everyone that has stayed now has more idle time than usual so café card games flourish, dominoes take on an added seriousness, and the extra chairs that are usually stacked against the wall are all in use.

Bars and Restaurants

2008-10-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

Making the Rounds: Bars and Restaurants

There is one on every corner of every block. Often there can be two or three in the middle of the block. They are everywhere, these places to stop in for a quick glass of wine, or a not-so-quick glass of wine if there is anything even remotely interesting going on inside—and there usually is. There must be at least 1,000 of these small places in Valencia whether they call themselves a bodega, a cervecería, a sidrería, a bocatería, a cafetería, a taberna a tasca, a café, a bar, or a restaurant.

Spain has more bars per capita than any other country in the world, with something like six bars per thousand inhabitants—three times more than the United Kingdom and four times more than Germany. If you have walked more than a half a block without encountering a bar, check the map because you probably aren’t in Spain. Bars are one of the most popular of the privately owned businesses in the country and everybody seems to be in the business. Six bars for every thousand Spaniards seems like an underestimate, at least in my neighborhood where the ratio seems closer to one bar for every five people, including children.

Speaking of children, the drinking age in Spain is 18, unless the bar has a sign that says it won’t serve anyone under 16, in which case the legal age there is 16. I’m not sure but I don’t think that they have an official age at which people can drink in a bar; it is up to the bar owner and the young people to decide for themselves. Absolutely anyone can buy alcohol in stores. I have seen ten year old kids buying wine at the grocery store, presumably for the folks. You will never see anyone checking identification and you also won’t see kids getting drunk in a bar. At least I never have, and I have spent quite a bit of time in these Spanish institutions. Kids aren’t about to screw up too badly in bars because there is a good chance that their parents or neighbors will be hanging out in the same place. Kids here learn how to behave when they go out by direct example. In America we keep kids away from bars and booze until they become of age and then we expect them to know how to act in and around these new influences.

This isn’t to say that there are no problems with kids drinking in Spain, but it isn’t something you hear a lot about unless it involves a traffic accident. It seems that they give kids the benefit of the doubt and let them make their own decisions about alcohol. As big a role as alcohol plays in the lives of the Spanish, you don't notice a lot of abuse in any age group. I think this is true in all Mediterranean cultures. We make this tremendous fuss about young kids and drinking. In Seattle the police and liquor board were doing sting operation in which they would send an underage person into a bar and if they got served they would haul away the bartender in handcuffs. For me bartenders have always been the good guys. They used kids who were 20 years old. In a year, sometimes less, they would be of legal age to drink. It's not even like Seattle has this huge crisis of underage kids drinking in bars, but the police just thought they would clean up the city. It's completely absurd.

Seattle also has this ridiculous law which states that if a restaurant has a bar then the bar must be physically separated from the rest of the establishment. The physical barrier may be a wall or just a length of rope but it must be present. I never could understand the purpose of this law. I'm sure that the people who wrote this law thought that they were protecting someone from something. It is just another example how we try to make alcohol out to be some sort of great and mysterious evil for our children. We should just accept the fact that alcohol is a part of life. Instead of wasting so much time and energy shielding our children from the evils of drink, we should try to set better examples for our children while enjoying this important aspect of human existence.

For the Spanish, bars are a part of everyday life. Bars aren't off-limits to children. For the most part there isn't much of a difference between bars, restaurants, and coffee shops in Spain. Bars have much the same place in Spanish society as supermarkets, vegetable markets, hardware stores, and just about every business you can think of.

Just as with cafés in France, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of bars in the quotidian life of the Spanish. The purpose a bar serves here in Spain is a pretty tall order, something that might explain all of the different names they use. You see a lot of bars in Spain that can’t decide on just one of these name designations so they use two or three of them on their displays.

Starting at the beginning of the day they function as a coffee shop. People stop in for a quick jolt of caffeine before they start work. You see many cafés that open at 7 am, at least that's what they advertise. I'll have to take their word on that as I'm never out in the street at that hour. The breakfast crowd is usually happy with a coffee and a roll of some sort.

At mid-morning they host the coffee break of the office workers, then comes the before-lunch coffee or beer, followed by the lunch crowd, followed by after-lunch coffee or cocktail, after-work meetings with friends, before-dinner drinks, dinner, after-dinner coffee and cognac, and then some places even morph into something of a night club.

There is a rather comforting sameness to bars in Spain; most of them look pretty much like all of the others. If you think there are a lot of Starbucks in American cities, multiple that by about 500 and you'll get an idea of how many corner bars there are in Spain. People here just think that a bar should probably look a certain way. Tradition tends to win out over innovation as far as how bars look. Elegant ceramic tiles cover the floors and walls, and the bar top is usually stainless steel, marble, or zinc. There is a glass covered cooler on top of the bar which displays the food selections. In many parts of Spain a small appetizer, or tapa is served with every drink that you order. This custom isn’t very common in the Valencia Community or in Catalonia; not that bars in these two regions lack a variety of good things to eat.

I think that just about everyone in America knows that beer in Spanish is cerveza (pronounced with the double lisp ther bay tha in Castilian Spanish). Just asking for a beer will certainly work when traveling in Spain but it's good to be armed with a few more useful words and phrases for ordering. Coming in at first place as the most ordered beverage is the caña, of a small draft beer. Cañas usually hold about six ounces. A doble, or double caña, is just that. Beers are also served in bottles, either in a 1/3 liter bottle or a 1/5 referred to as a tercio and quinto, respectively—at least in Valencia. Wine is also a popular beverage, more so in Castilla and Andalusia than in Valencia where I live. Vino tinto, or red wine is often served chilled during the hot summer months. This practice is also common in southern France where the summer days are scorching and where they don’t produce a lot of white wine. If it has to do with wine, and they do it in France, I think that it is an acceptable practice.

Almost every bar has a slot machine, at least one. I sometimes hear the cartoonish noises from the slot machines when I am lying in bed at night, or I’ll have one of the catchy tunes stuck in my head as I walk around town. The slot machine music doesn’t quite have the chart-topper quality as say, the theme song to Ms Pac Man, but they can be excruciatingly annoying in their own way. I’ve never been a gambler and have never invested a single coin in one of these things, although I have often thought about paying other people not to play them when I am trying to read. The slot machine sound effects are almost as bothersome as the unmuffled whine of a moped or the constant yapping of a small dog—two other noise hazards ever-present in Spain. I suppose that if I started playing the slots I’d stop complaining about them. Then I’d just have to figure out what to do with the yappy dogs and the mopeds.

When you come to a city not knowing a single person and with a fairly weak grasp of the language, you have to take your conversation practice wherever you can find it. Standing at a bar is about the best place I've ever found to ambush some poor Spaniard into having a chat. It’s nice to know that you can file “going out to a bar” as an educational experience. It's tough when you don't know a single person and you barely speak the language. It is also tiring for a Spanish person to have to try and talk with someone who speaks their language so poorly. I apologize to all of the people I bothered during all that time when I was suffering through the basics of learning Spanish.

When I first arrived I absolutely refused to speak English. I avoided English speakers and the likeliest places to find them like they had the plague. I was determined to learn Spanish as quickly as possible. After I had been in Spain for a while and my Spanish improved, I happened upon a bar run by two English expatriates. I kept going back because I found that the locals who hung out there were more inclined to speak Spanish with me than the people I met in other places. I think that Americans and Brits are generally a bit more open when it comes to talking to strangers than the Spanish. The Spaniards who hung out in this pub seemed to have adopted the American and British openness.

There are educational advantages of bars and cafés other than bothering the locals for conversation practice. Besides talking with the staff and customers, you can read one of the newspapers lying around on top of the bar. When I first arrived in the country I remember looking up every unfamiliar word in the newspaper headlines. I thought that if a word was in a headline, this means that it must be important. Why bother putting a word in large, bold print if it isn’t worth knowing? I don’t know if this makes any sense but you have to start somewhere when learning a new language. No matter where you look, there are going to be a lot of words you don’t know, so you may as well start somewhere. I suppose that there are better ways to gain useful vocabulary than gleaning newspaper headlines but I can't think of any.

I stop in almost every day at a bar or café to spend an hour reading something in Spanish. I am fairly picky about where I go for these study breaks. I like places that aren't too popular so as to avoid distractions. Outdoor seating is essential during the months when it is comfortable to sit on a terrace. I like a bit of seclusion, not only to concentrate but I also don't want anyone to think I'm crazy when I read out loud to sharpen my accent.

For football matches I will venture out of my little neighborhood and make my way to other side of the stadium to the Plaza del Valencia CF where there are four bars next to each other. They each have big screen televisions facing out into the small square. One of my favorites is called Manolo el del Bombo named after the owner who you can see with his trademark drum at every game of the Spanish national team. For important matches the square is packed with rowdy fans and is the next best thing to being at game itself, if for some reason you can't go. When the games are held at Mestalla, home of Valencia Club de Fútbol, the roar from the stadium adds a lot of excitement to the game on TV. Sometimes I think the people inside the stadium can hear the noise the fans are making across the street in these bars.

Wine and Democracy
In one of local free newspapers that are always lying around the metro stations there was a column lamenting the fact that wine consumption has dropped in Spain. In many European countries that is considered a bad thing and I would agree. People should drink wine, and plenty of it. The author put most of the blame on the fact that restaurants charge too much for wine which has led to a reduction in restaurant wine sales of 9%. Restaurants here generally charge double the retail price for a bottle of wine and sometimes as much as three times. The author seems to be saying that wine is in danger of losing its democratic and populist standing if it is priced out of reach of consumers, any consumers.

I think that American restaurants begin with three times the retail price and up to four times as much. It isn’t unusual to pay $9-11 for a glass of wine in some places. I was at a restaurant in the Chicago area before I came to Spain and I asked the bartender pick a modestly-priced glass of wine for me. She charged me $14. I guess I looked like I had either fallen off the turnip truck that morning or that I was made of money. This was in a decent restaurant but nothing top tier.

In almost every James Bond movie there seems to be the obligatory scene showing Bond as being some sort of incredible wine snob. “Yes, I’ll have the 1962 Chateau Trou du Cul.” Fetishistic wine knowledge is generally portrayed as the height of sophistication and breeding, whatever breeding is. I don’t think you would ever find Bond buying wine at the bargain rack at Trader Joe’s.

Somewhere between the Bond-esque wine snob and the slob who gargles with his vino there is room for the way wine is supposed to be consumed. I suppose that it’s a huge understatement to say that wine is becoming increasingly popular in the United States. We produce some of the best wine in the world but there doesn’t seem to be the same effort by producers to reach the entire American market. We still see wine as a luxury and a status symbol. It is up to consumers in America to force producers to supply good wines at a modest price. If there is a market for this sort of product someone will fill the niche.

Wine in Mediterranean countries is seen as more of a basic right—like free speech—than a luxury enjoyed only by the elite. The prices that I would pay at the wine bargain bins back home seem almost extravagant to me here in Spain. The grocery store across the street from my apartment has a fairly large selection of Spanish wines and I don’t think that any are over $10, most are under $5, and there are many for as little as 1€. I wonder which wine Bond would choose.

People sometimes buy an expensive bottle of wine with the intention of keeping it for a special occasion. The wine is supposed to improve with age; at least that’s what the books say. I’ve never been able to keep a good bottle around for very long. The good ones get knocked off right along with the cheaper bottles when you have friends over. I used to try to build a little fortress of inexpensive bottles of wine and put my more expensive bottles inside of it for protection. If you have enough thirsty friends over, they will eventually lay siege to the wine castle and sack the good stuff right along with the swill.

The attitude here in Spain seems to be. “Today is a pretty good day to drink wine, so why wait?” As far as that fancy bottle you were planning to save, drink it today. You can always go out and buy the same thing when you have something big to celebrate. The point is that you should celebrate every day, or at least every good meal. Any meal that you have taken the trouble to prepare deserves to be honored with wine.

Excuses for Stopping in at the Bodega for a Glass of Wine
No matter what you call it, whether it’s a bar or a restaurant or a bodega, they are everywhere in Spain. If there are 1,000 places to grab a glass of wine or a beer then you’ll need at least 1,000 excuses to visit. I’m the cautious type so I have more excuses than are legally required in Spain.

-The bar is right next to the bin where you drop off your recyclable plastics. I drop off my bag of recyclables and I stop in for a glass of wine; it’s called multi-tasking. I also recycle glass and paper separately. The bar is also near the trash bin so this excuse counts as four (plastic, paper, glass, garbage) which is really multi-tasking. I could take all of my trash out at once but where’s the fun in that?

-Football also encompasses at least a dozen or more excuses. The bodega is the place to watch a game, watch the highlights of a game, see highlights from games played 20 years ago, watch a funny segment on football bloopers; I think you are getting the point. I can also read one of the several football daily newspapers lying on the bar. Football accounts for at least 90% of the business in most of these joints. There are those agonizing weeks of summer without football. We are only talking about a week or so, but still. Spain without football? Everyone goes to the bodega for a glass of wine to moan about there being no football.

-I was cooking and I needed to go down to the store to pick up something I needed. This is a great excuse to go to the bodega. I turned the heat on the stove down low so I won’t burn down the apartment. Besides, I think that my kitchen has an automatic sprinkler system. I’ll have one more glass, please.

-I run out of wine at home so I stop in for a quick one before I go to the supermarket to buy another bottle of wine. This may sound redundant to you but I see things differently since I moved here.

-My cable TV is out in the apartment. This probably means that it isn’t working at the bodega either but that’s a chance I’m willing to take.

-The bodega is an integral part in the quotidian life of the Spanish people and I need to be there to experience it. While I’m there I need to drink a glass of wine or two or I’ll look like an idiot.

-The bodega recently installed air conditioning. I can stop in to beat the heat. It’s actually kind of chilly this evening so I’ll wear a sweater. I’m saying that I’m using this excuse today what about in July when it’s really hot? You need to plan your reason well in advance.

-The bodega is right on the corner so at least I won’t drink and drive. I don’t have a car but still. There are other consequences of drinking far from home. What if I got tipsy somewhere across town and then used the wrong metro card on the way home? I could waste a three-zone fare card on a one-zone ride. Also, friends don’t let friends take cabs drunk. Trying to explain to a cab driver where I live in my labyrinthine neighborhood would be a chore for someone who is both sober and completely fluent in Spanish—two things I will probably never be at the same time—not any time soon at least. Every time that I order a glass of wine at my bodega I feel like I am dodging a bullet.

-I don’t want to bore you with a lot of details concerning balance of payments, international currency fluctuations, and other macroeconomic insights that you wouldn’t understand anyway, but just trust me on this one: America and Spain are both counting on me to prop up our mutual reliance on free trade. Excuse me; I have to get back to work now.

-I hate to use the excuse that the bodega is between the metro stop and my front door because there is a bar between everything and my front door. I’m surprised that there isn’t a café in the lobby of my building or on the elevator. I live on the fifth floor, how long am I supposed to go without a glass of wine? I promise that I will only use this excuse as a last resort.

-The bodega is a good place to practice Spanish. I can also speak Spanish at the market, or the library, or museums, or at home with friends, or just about anywhere. This is Spain and they speak Spanish here (at least when they aren't speaking Valenciano, or Catalan, or Basque, or Gallego). I think there is something that you aren't fully grasping here and it's kind of important. I can get a glass of wine at the bodega. Seeing that this is Spain, they probably serve wine at the library; I just don't know where to ask.

Walk-up Culture: All the World's a Bar
A lot of restaurants in Valencia have a little walk-up window that connects the street directly with the bar which obviates the need to even walk into a place to get your cortado or your quinto (a small 1/5 liter bottle of beer). So not only are there more bars per capita in Spain than any other place in the world, they make it even easier for you to get your shot of coffee or whatever suits your mood.

When I lived in south Florida I thought that the walk-up coffee window in restaurants was a Cuban thing. There was a place called La Habana Restaurant just down the road from my apartment with great food and the little coffee window that opened to the sidewalk on the side of the place. People would step up and order their little Cuban coffees, a cortado or a café con leche, and either knock them back immediately or take them to go, this was in America, after all, even though you couldn’t tell from the very Latin aspect of the neighborhood. I loved this place because it made me feel like I was living in some exotic locale.

At the time I thought it was a Cuban thing—which it is but its origin is Spanish. I had been to Spain a couple of times before I moved to South Florida but I didn't notice this feature in Spanish bars. I have never seen one of these walk-up windows in Mexico, Peru, or Puerto Rico, and I've been to a lot of bars in Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico—the only other Spanish-speaking countries I have visited. Perhaps this aspect of Spanish life immigrated to other Latin American countries besides Cuba. If it has, I haven’t seen it.

The whole notion of knocking back a quick shot of coffee at a walk-up window almost seems antithetical to the unhurried pace of life here, unhurried at least until people get behind the wheel of an automobile. If I were forced to explain the phenomena of the walk-up window, I would say that the services provided by bars are so important in the quotidian life of Spanish people that direct access to the street if sometimes necessary. It's like removing a buffer zone between citizens and espresso. I'm surprised that they don't have waiters with trays of espresso patrolling the sidewalks so people don't even have to stop walking to have a shot. They actually do have waiters serving coffee in the street in my neighborhood on Monday market day.

Depending on the weather, I usually prefer to sit at a table outside at a café or stand at the bar inside. This is an important part of every single day for me. If I am alone I use the time to read a book, a football paper, or a newspaper. I sometimes study my vocabulary lists or I study what is going on around me. If you are a tourist, bars provide the best place to connect with Spanish people, something that is true even if you aren't just passing through. If you are out to literally “rub elbows” with the locals, the walk-up window is the place to do it. Whenever I stop for a drink at one of these widows I always feel like I couldn't be more Spanish if I were wearing a matador's costume. I would love to have a picture of a matador at a walk-up window (to digress a bit, I saw a little boy the other day wearing a matador costume and it was so cute that you just wanted to squeeze him). The walk-up is also handy if you are on your bike and don't feel like locking it up to go inside.

Not every bar in Spain has a walk-up window. In fact, when I went out looking specifically for bars with this attribute I found a lot fewer of them than I thought I would. However, it seems like the bars that don´t have a window were just built wrong, with the bar being against a back wall away from the street instead of along the side of the place moving up to the sidewalk. If I ask an older person here about this I'm sure they will tell me that back in the good-old-days every bar had a walk-up. I actually had someone tell me the other day that there used to be a lot more bars in Spain than there are today. I can't see how that is even possible unless there used to be bars inside of other bars.

I'll probably never find out why the Spanish feel these windows are necessary and other people of other nations don't. Spanish people probably just feel that it is too much of a chore sometimes to walk inside of a bar to get a coffee. I mean, if you have to actually walk through a door you might as well cover the place in barbed wire or build a damn moat around the place. When you are walking the block and a half home from the market who needs the hassle of opening a stupid door just to get a beer?

It's not like there aren't millions of cars in Spain but walking is still a big part of city life. I have yet to see a drive-up window here and I hope that this never catches on—anything that keeps people inside their cars is a bad thing in my book. I'm sure that a walk-up bar window would be breaking about nine million laws in the U.S. but anything that caters to pedestrians is OK by me. I suppose it just depends on what kind of culture are you looking for, walk-up or drive-thru.

Cork You!
Dear Makers of Lenorio del los Llanos Wine,

Right now I am calmly sipping a glass of your wine and enjoying a plate of olives, I am the picture of serenity and sophistication. This was not the case only a few short minutes ago as I was struggling violently to remove the cork from a bottle of your wine. From the effort I was exerting you would have guessed that I was trying to free my only child from beneath a huge boulder. If I had been trying to free my only child, I can only hope that the little angel was already dead so as not to hear the polyglot aria of obscenities I was singing as I yanked for all that I was worth, and then some, on the stubborn bit of cork that was dangerously positioned between me and my wine, like a clueless hiker separating a mother grizzly and her cubs.

I really like your wine. It is a fine product and very reasonably priced. I would like to offer a little advice on how to make your product a little more accessible to the general public. MAKE THE CORK EASIER TO EXTRACT! I am an adult male in decent physical shape yet I almost pulled my back out trying to get the cork out of your bottle. No kidding. Perhaps you could suggest some other upper body exercises that would aid me in opening your bottles. Either that or you should have a list of chiropractors on the back of the label.

If this is your subtle way of trying to get me to drink less, let me assure you that this is a failed strategy. I already thought out a back-up plan if I couldn’t open the bottle using conventional methods. I was planning to break the top off the bottle and then pour the wine through a coffee filter. Brute strength won out in the end but I was going to get at the wine one way or another.
Sincerely, a Loyal Customer

Coffee
Coffee is recognized all over the world as one of the greatest gifts to mankind. Spain isn’t too different from the United States in many respects but just like every other aspect of their daily lives, the Spanish bring a host of idiosyncrasies to the way that they choose to celebrate coffee. As a fairly heavy coffee drinker myself, I couldn’t help noticing the differences.

Coffee usually takes one of three forms in Spain, the most popular being a cortado, a shot of espresso served in a small glass with a bit of hot milk poured on top. Café con leche is an espresso served in a coffee cup filled with hot milk. A café solo is an espresso. That’s about it, no flavors, no variations in size like the bewildering polyglot nature of American coffee shop sizes with their grandes, ventis, mediums, and talls (mustn’t say “small”).

Spaniards don’t usually sit around and savor a big cup of coffee; they prefer to take their caffeine in small, short doses. Most people take their coffee standing up at the bar or out in the street. In fact, in Madrid it’s almost impossible to find a café where you can sit down as is more the custom in France. Madrid was recently rated as being at near the top of the list of cities where people walk the fastest. Stopping in for a coffee doesn’t slow them down much and sometimes it seems that they barely miss a step.

Valencia is a little less frantic than Madrid but most people still choose to take their coffee standing up. They are usually pretty quick about it unless they are in a larger group, which is usually the case during the mid-morning coffee break, or almuerzo. In my particular neighborhood the cafés are completely full at about 10:30 every weekday morning, weather permitting (and permit it does most days of the year).

This interruption in the mid-morning is a lot more social than a coffee break and would better be described as a mid-morning happy hour. This is also when a lot of people have their first glass of wine or beer of the day, just enough to hold them over until it’s time for lunch, usually after 2 p.m. and as late as 5 p.m. I can tell a distinct difference in the noise and chatter of the café crowds during the mid-morning breaks than the gatherings at other times in the day.

Coffee is every bit as important in the lives of many Americans but there are significant differences. Spain hasn’t taken to the idea of coffee to go. It’s possible but a fairly rare occurrence. People will sometimes order a coffee to go to take back to work with them but this is a fairly rare occurrence. More often than not they will just take the porcelain cups with them and bring them back the next time they go to the café.

Sage Advice
“Never pass up a chance to take a leak.”
-Anonymous

Actually, it wasn’t anonymous who coined that sage bit of advice. Anonymous gets credit for a lot of stuff he didn’t come up with himself, the thieving Greek pirate. Anyone who knows me will recognize that wise counsel as something that I often attribute to my grandfather. My grandfather didn’t come up with it either. I just attributed it to him so as to give the words a bit more weight. I was the one who came up with what could possibly be the best advice you’re ever going to get in this life.

There is an episode of Seinfeld in which George shows off his encyclopedic knowledge of good public restrooms in Manhattan. I don’t know Manhattan very well but the rest of America has a pretty good reservoir of acceptable public bathrooms. I think that George’s proclivity for finding good bathrooms in Europe would be a more valuable talent as toilets are fairly rare over here.

This isn’t such a big problem for me for several reasons. First of all, and I don’t know whether or not I have revealed this little secret to you, but I am a boy, and boys have decidedly greater options when you are talking about good public bathrooms. We have a different definition of “good” than that of most women. We also have a much different definition of “public” which at times means just that, public, as in “exposed to general view” as opposed to “accessible to or shared by all members of the community.” I’m not an animal; I don’t pee in public in the city, but let’s just say that when I am out in the country, finding a bathroom never seems to be a problem. The Spanish countryside: The world’s biggest toilet. It’s not a slogan that you are likely to read in one of those stuffy travel publications, but it is the truth. When I am out bike riding I am forced to ignore my own advice of never passing up a chance to take a leak. If I didn’t, I would never get anywhere.

As far as locating a good public bathroom, downtown Valencia provides a much bigger challenge than the great outdoors. Of course, every bar and café has a restroom, but they expect them to be used only by paying customers. Buying a coffee or beer just to use the restroom seems like bailing out your boat instead of fixing the leak, if you will pardon the pun. When I speak about public restrooms, I mean those where you can just walk in without being expected to buy anything or in a place that is big enough that no one will notice that you are not an actual customer. The second reason that this issue isn’t such a big deal with me is that I seem to have an extra large bladder. It probably fills up the area in my body where decorum and taste are usually found. I suppose that you are able to tell from this essay that I was born without those two human essentials.

At times I am utterly dumbfounded by the lack of public facilities. At large, outdoor public events there seems to be no nod towards this consideration. I have boarded trains at the Valencia Estación del Norte many times and only when I was returning from my last trip did I discover the whereabouts of the restrooms there (on the north side). The good news is that there are bathrooms on the trains. I can only think of one public restroom in all of Valencia: downstairs at the Mercado Colon (and the recently uncovered facilities at the station). That’s it. There are probably more. Where is George Costanza when you need him?

So my advice to you is to never pass up a chance to take a leak. It could be a long time before you have another opportunity.

Vacations and Memories

2008-09-30T22:36:00.000-07:00

Vacations and Memories
Existimos mientras alguien nos recuerda.(We are alive as long as we are remembered)
La Sombra del Viento -Carlos Ruíz Zafón

I was wasting some time in a downtown bookstore one day when I noticed a small section of books in French. Among the modest collection I came across a memoir written by my great-uncle, Marc Bernard, recipient of the 1934 Prix Interalié for his novel Anny, and also the recipient of the more prestigious Prix Goncourt for his novel Pareils à des enfants in 1942.

The book I discovered is called Vacances and was published in 1953. I have read a few of his books, none of which have been translated into English but most are still in print 25 years after his death. I was never able to meet my uncle although I made a half-hearted attempt to look him up during my first trip to France in 1979. I didn’t have much to go on at the time. I simply traveled to Nîmes where my family had lived. As I later learned, Marc Bernard had actually returned to this southern French city to live after spending most of his adult life in Paris and other places. We never got a chance to meet but I’m sure he would have been pleased to know that his nephew has become a great admirer of his work.

Vacances begins with a wonderful introduction by the French author, Roger Grenier, which describes the career of Marc Bernard from orphan at age 11, to the factory worker and self-taught intellectual who wrote his first novel during a bout of unemployment. He was holed up in a hotel and a maid noticed that he seemed to work night and day. She asked him whether or not he ever stopped writing to eat. “It’s just that I don’t have much to eat.” She made sure from then on that he ate with the others in the hotel.

He had a friend present his manuscript for his first novel, Zig-zag to a Paris publisher who immediately accepted it. Marc Bernard soon went to the office of his publisher, Jean Paulhan, to thank him. There in the office Paulhan asked my uncle if he had read anything by André Gide. Marc Bernard said that he had and that he liked his work. Paulhan then introduced him to Gide who happened to be sitting directly across from them in the office at the time. Paulhan presented my uncle to Gide saying that he was a factory worker who wrote and who had also read Gide’s work. Gide asked him if any other workers at the factory read his stuff. "Non. Je suis le seul." I’m sure that Gide was disappointed to learn that he wasn’t popular among the factory workers of France in the 1920s. They became friends after that and Gide remained an admirer and promoter of Bernard’s work.

He starts out the memoir by declaring that he is a man of vacations and that he wishes that the world were nothing more than a vacation spot, that factories and offices be closed for months throughout the year while their workers and staff enjoy the pleasures of time off. He wished that man could return to the wisdom of our primitive forefathers who dedicated themselves to nothing more than fishing, hunting, and love; activities particularly suitable for vacations.

In Vacances Marc Bernard tells stories about his life of travel, war, idleness, work, and vacations. What a cool and full life he led. He seemed to be particularly fond of Spain as he dedicated three chapters in this book to my newly adopted country. He writes about two trips he makes to the Spanish Balearic islands. His father, Juan Bernat (my namesake), was born in Soller, Majorca. I haven’t been to Majorca but I plan on making a visit to see from whence I came. I hope to be speaking a bit of Valenciano/Catalan/Majorquino (They are all very similar) dialect before I get there.

He tells a story in the book about a trip he took to Majorca in 1937. He was passing through Barcelona on his way there. He was walking along the beach, smoking a cigar that he describes as being a big as a walking stick (a fondness for puros, or Cuban cigars is another similarity between the two of us) when he was approached by an armed soldier. This was during the Spanish Civil War and my uncle, being a worker, a unionist, a communist, was obviously a Republican (they were the good guys). He was taken in for questioning on the suspicion of being a German spy for the fascist nationalists. He was asked about the stamp he had on his passport (French) for Majorca two years previous when he took another trip there to explore his roots. He was put in a car with an armed escort and driven into the countryside. After a while he realized that he probably wasn’t going to be executed because they would not have wasted so much gasoline if that was their intention. He was released when someone who spoke French verified that his accent was indeed French. He was then driven back to Barcelona’s Ramblas and bid farewell in the Spanish custom of effusive hugs and handshakes.

The most remarkable coincidence in all of this was discovering a chapter dedicated to Valencia in his book, a book that I discovered while living in Valencia. He was here in 1952 for La Feria, a week of bulls, which I assume was the Fallas festival which takes place every year in March. It was during this festival when I saw my first bullfight. As I mentioned, he was from Nîmes, in the southern French province of Languedoc which has bullfighting festivals in the Arènes, a first century a.d. Roman amphitheater. Marc Bernard was obviously a huge aficionado of la corrida and this chapter is one of the most eloquent descriptions of the art of bullfighting that I have read in any language. I would have loved to have attended a corrida with my uncle with the two of us smoking the biggest cigars that money can buy. I wonder if I also inherited my love of fermented grapes from this side of my family.

My detour into French came at the expense of my Spanish. I had lunch in the home of a friend of a friend while I was plowing through this book in French. I felt like my Spanish had never been worse. I was mis-conjugating verbs, speaking with an atrociously bad accent (I thought), and just thoroughly mangling the Spanish language. After lunch, when the adults went out to the patio for a cocktail and to enjoy the late afternoon sun, I chose to stay inside and improve my Spanish by watching a Sesame Street (Barrio Sésamo) video with my newest Spanish amigo, Quino (age 5). In the video a woman walks up to a group of people on the street and starts speaking French. I pointed out to Quino (short for Joaquín) that she was speaking French. He looked at me with a bit of surprise and asked, “Tu tienes ésta péli?” (you have this video?). Probably the most humorous moment thus far for me in Spain. Gracias, Quino.

The Spanish "Work Week"

2008-09-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

The Spanish “Work Week”
“A life uninterrupted by festivals is like undertaking a long journey without stops along the way.”
-Democritus (circa 460 - 370 b.c.)

First of all, to say that this is about the Spanish work week is a bit misleading. A work week implies an agreed upon amount of days set aside for work for every calendar period consisting of seven, 24 hour time periods. This also assumes that the Spanish work week is something that can be measured, but can you quantify the pleasure of that first cup of coffee in the morning when you told the boss you needed to go out to buy a printer cartridge? Can you count the collective smiles of a city shut down because of a transit strike? How do you calculate the joy of ditching work after sharing two bottles of wine with friends at lunch?

No, “work week” is an inadequate way to describe the average Spaniard’s time card for any given seven day period. I’m not even sure that they have time cards in Spain. If they do I’m sure that they are some sort of wacky, cubist things designed by Pablo Picasso which serve more as an allegory about keeping track of hours worked. The time clock itself probably doubles as an espresso maker. All that I’m saying is that when you are talking about work in Spain you can take your preconceived, American notion about a Monday to Friday work week and throw it out like a losing lottery ticket. What a second, let me just check that number one more time before you toss it. That ticket could be my way out of this forced-labor camp.

Assuming that you have yet to win the national lottery—and everyone here assumes that they will win it eventually—you probably do have to go to work at some point in the week. I’ll try to walk you through this as best I can but much of it is still unclear to me.

On Sundays and holidays practically everything is closed. Quite a few things aren’t open on Saturdays. Many things that are open on Sundays are closed on Mondays. So this gives you Tuesday, but Tuesdays are like Mondays in America, so don’t expect anyone to be too excited about work, even if they did condescend to show up. Only a fool would buy a car made in Spain on a Tuesday. It's easy to tell which cars were made on Tuesday because the ashtrays are full and the radio will be tuned to the soccer talk station.

Wednesdays are solid, everything is open, but it’s Wednesday so what do you expect? Wednesdays are más o menos at best. Most people at least show up for work on Wednesday but you won’t get a smile and if you want a coffee delivered in less than 45 minutes you had better go inside and ask at the bar. The waiter is probably busy making plans for the weekend. If this is “hump” day in the U.S., or the halfway point in the work week, in Spain it is like being stranded in the middle of a vast and inhospitable desert. Sort of like the post-apocalyptic wasteland like in The Road Warrior but with frequent breaks for coffee and cigarettes.

Thursdays are definitely on. It’s full steam ahead. Throw more coals on the fire in the engine room. Scotty, we need more power! Take no prisoners. Always be closing. Coffee is for closers. Oh yeah, Thursdays are definitely huge in Spain. There is no stopping the Spanish economic juggernaut at this point in the week. On this day the Spanish economy buzzes along on all cylinders, or at least three of them with one in reserve just in case. Just in case of a national emergency or if your soccer league has a big game in the evening and you wanted to take the day off and hang out with your teammates.

And then comes Friday. It’s a good, solid work day, but for many it’s the last day of the week, even if they started on Tuesday. No one is out to pull a muscle or anything. Just take it easy, pal. Are you trying to make the rest of us look bad? There are plans for the weekend to be discussed, calls to be made, and text messages to write. What do you want to do, work yourself to death? Whatever it is can wait until next week.

The average work day in Spain is equally as complicated. Lots of cafes open at 7 a.m.—at least they say they do, I’ve never been up that early to verify. It’s still dark out at 7 a.m. so why would I be awake? I’ll just take their word on it. So at least apocryphally speaking, someone is up early minding the store. Or at least a store because I’m sure that something in this country has to be open at 7 a.m. I have yet to see a cop but I’m sure a few of them are working the early day shift.

The majority of people don’t get moving until between ten and eleven in the morning. Things are really bustling by eleven. By bustling I mean workers are dressed and at least on their way to work. Before work they stop off at a café and have a coffee or maybe a beer if they had a rough night or don’t have a busy day ahead of them. They might opt for a tocado, or a coffee with a little brandy. Just one, mind you, and never more than two. Then it is off to work, time to grease the wheels of Spanish commerce and industry. It’s time to scratch and claw your way to the top. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get some serious work done.

At least until 1:30 or 2 p.m., then it’s time for siesta. It’s time to put everything on hold and hit the cafes for a beer or a glass of wine. Then you make your way back home for a big lunch. And why not have a little wine with your meal? You earned it. It’s not like you’re an airline pilot, and even if you are, you can fly a 747 with a couple of nice glasses of Rioja under your belt—it relaxes you. After lunch you kick your shoes off and have a nap. You may as well because there is nothing good on television, except Los Simpsons. After that you can sack out for a bit.

At around 5 o’clock the hellish rat race begins all over again, although for some it doesn’t start until 6. A lot of people just say “Screw it” and blow off the rest of the day completely. Between 8 and 9 everything starts to shut down and the cafes fill up yet again.

No one works at night except bartenders in the clubs that stay open until 4 a.m. but don’t feel too sorry for these guys; the discos are usually only open three days a week. There must be police and ambulance workers on call during the night. I’m sure that if you find yourself in an emergency you will get through to someone if you just let the phone ring about 30 times; I mentioned how the shades in people’s houses make them very dark and quiet and facilitate a really deep sleep.

Your rescue crew will be on the way right after they make a little pot of espresso and have a cigarette, perhaps two. And please give them a few minutes to turn on the television to check the football scores that they may have missed from last night. If Raul or Messi made some sort of spectacular goal the rescue crew may have to wait until they get a chance to see the replay a couple of times. A round of high fives and the ambulance crew will be speeding to your location. Remember, apply direct pressure.

To say that Spanish business hours are not set in stone is putting it mildly. It is more accurate to say that business hours are written in a secret code. There is a café in the courtyard near the front door of my building. I really like the place but I never know when it’s open, and it’s almost never open. The operating hours are on a strictly need-to-know basis, and although I am on a first name basis with the owner, I evidently don’t have a need to know. Perhaps his place is invitation only?

It is common to see notes posted on locked doors apologizing for why they are closed. I saw a very solemn, almost tearful message on the window of a restaurant explaining that they would be closed on a Monday so the workers could rest. It was worded like an obituary. I guess that having the previous day off must have just worn the staff out. In lieu of flowers the bereaved request that you buy them a bottle of wine at the bar next door where they will be recovering.

People goof off everywhere but the Spanish have taken it to new levels that slackers in other countries cannot even imagine. As if there aren’t enough holidays already, Spaniards have created something called puentes, or bridges. These are days that they will tack on to other, legitimate holidays which tie them to the weekend thus making a rather comfortable vacation out of a single day off. If the holiday falls on a Tuesday people will take off Monday and have a four day weekend.

Most Americans probably don’t have a problem with that. Taking a personal day on a Monday before a paid day off on Tuesday probably seems like staying on pretty firm ground to most Americans. That’s a pretty solid “bridge” and one that probably won’t get you canned. Unfortunately, our government cut us off at the pass by assigning all of our national holidays to Mondays.

Where the Spanish really get creative is when a holiday falls on a Wednesday and they have to take two days to bridge it to the weekend, or they may just take the whole week off. This is fairly common practice in Spain but to Americans this has crossed over from being a nice, solid bridge to some sort of rickety affair made with vines across a bottomless abyss of unemployment and no heath insurance that would scare the daylights out of Indian Jones. This “bridge” concept has gone from a fairly harmless holiday supplement to more time off than most U.S. companies grant workers recovering from the loss of a limb.

I don’t know about you but just thinking about all of those tiny little paroxysms of work has left me completely exhausted. Just let me sit down and catch my breath. How long can this go on? How many vacation days do I have left this year?

Just like in America, immigrants do all of the heavy lifting in Spain so none of this applies to them. Immigrants here are like the Denny’s of Spain: They’re always open. A lot of immigrant business owner here don’t seem to have much of a grasp on the idea of siesta and many haven’t even learned the word for “closed.” One of the cafes I frequent is owned by a Chinese couple who work every day. They closed two hours early one evening to celebrate Chinese New Year. Most Spanish people took off three days to celebrate Chinese New Year.

Nice Doggy
Where do I begin
To tell the story
Of how great a love can be?
The sweet love story
That is older than the sea
That sings the truth about the love she/he/Rex/Lassie/Fido brings to me
Where do I start?
- Lyrics by Carl Sigman (and me), Music by Francis Lai

Where do I begin, where do I begin to tell the story of the Spanish and their love of dogs, big and small? Mostly small because almost everyone lives in an apartment and who's got room for a Saint Bernard? Just as most people here choose to drive smaller cars, they also prefer smaller dogs, and for the same reason: better fuel economy and easier to park.

Whether they are bigger than wolves or smaller than hamsters, the dogs here are almost always well behaved. If they have such things as leash laws here most people are in violation, yet their loose mutts never seem to stray very far or get into mischief. You see dogs waiting patiently—or not so patiently—outside of grocery stores while their masters are inside buying all of the strange things Spanish people buy in grocery stores. People take their pets with them practically every where they go. The main cathedral in Valencia actually has a special pew set aside in the back just for dogs. That's probably not true but it should be. That would be hilarious. If dogs aren’t allowed in churches this might explain why nobody in Spain goes any more. I guess the Catholic god is more of the cat-loving type of superior being.

Just walk down a sidewalk here and it is immediately evident that dogs have a privileged place in Spanish society. Dogs in Spain have the same sort of status as movie stars have in American society, except without the drug rehab and DUI arrests. For the most part, dogs don't have any issues that can't be remedied with a rolled up magazine. Celebrities in America usually need a little firmer punishment than a rolled up magazine. What usually works best in their case is a good swat with a board with a nail sticking out of it. Spanish dogs are a lot better behaved than American celebrities even considering all of the poop and yapping—I'll let the reader wonder if I am referring to Spanish dogs or famous actors. The subjects of American tabloid newspapers leave a bigger mess in their wake than any Spanish Chihuahua. If you don't believe me just try cleaning up the latest social dump you read about in The National Inquirer with nothing but a plastic shopping bag wrapped around your hand.

In the time I have lived in Valencia I have noticed a dramatic increase in people cleaning up after their pets. It’s still a problem but I would say that the problem is half of what it was only two years ago. I didn’t see any sort of education program about dog clean up until 2009. Barcelona, Valencia’s bigger and hipper relative to the north seems to have this problem well under control. I think that using Valencia’s inferiority complex towards Barcelona would make for an effective advertising campaign to convince pet owners here to scoop up after their animals. It would surely be better than some of the plans I have seen in Valencia so far. One promotion had people decorating dog poop found on the sidewalks with Christmas glitter and other things to “raise awareness” about the issue. In another proposed plan used in a city in Israel, DNA samples of poop would be matched with pets as a deterrent. I didn’t make that up. I don’t see how anyone could think this plan is sane except those with minds deranged from having seen too many crime lab television shows. I would just suggest yelling at people to clean up, but I’ve never been the passive-aggressive type.

I think just a bit of education would go a long way to get people to get onboard with the clean up. I don’t think that people’s attitudes are against the idea; there is no obstacle of folks thinking that picking up pet waste is undignified. An adult male walking a dog that could easily fit inside a coffee cup is hardly a strong argument for human dignity. If I were in charge of the dog poop education in Valencia I would let people know that in Barcelona this isn’t a problem as just about everyone cleans up after their pets. Valencia has a slight inferiority complex with regards to her larger neighbor a couple hours to the north and makes a considerable effort to top the capital of Catalonia in any way she can.

What you will never be able to scoop up and throw in the trash is the love Spaniards have for their mutts, big and small, well-behaved and yappy-snappy.

Cooking, Eating, Shopping

2008-09-24T03:58:00.000-07:00

Shopping, Cooking, Eating

Either lead, follow, or sit down and have a glass of wine with one of these dates wrapped in bacon. They’re delicious.
Eat or Die
I am what you would call an eater. I eat things. I eat bite-sized plants and animals whole. I cut larger plants and animals into smaller, more manageable parts before eating. I eat cute little animals, and I eat ugly fruits and vegetables, and vice versa. If humans have been known ever to have eaten something, I will eat it. I will eat things which no man has eaten before. Raw, blanched, blended, steamed, boiled, stir-fried, poached, scrambled, stewed, simmered, tossed, frozen, thawed, and Buffalo-style are just a few of the ways I will devour a plant or animal. Sometimes I will mix two or three of these techniques together to stuff my face. Variety is the spice of life, as they say. Variety is good but this soup needs more salt. Spice is also the spice of life.

If you don't eat you will die. Try not eating. You will die. Life will throw out your scrawny carcass when you starve to death but death will eat you right up, bones and all. Death has an incredible appetite. I don't want to die so I eat. Death is often only a bagel with cream cheese away from where I am sitting in this coffee shop. Death circles like a vulture…waiting…waiting for me to miss a meal, waiting for me to screw up and starve to death. Death is patient. Death asks to borrow my newspaper. Death reads the sports page. Death sees that my team is in last place. Death smells death and leaves me to finish my bagel. Death instead goes to circle the clubhouse. I sigh with relief but cut it short because I remember that sighing with your mouth full of food is impolite. A near-death experience is no reason to lose your manners.

Death is relentless and so I eat relentlessly. Death never sleeps. It is difficult to eat while you sleep which is why people die in their sleep. My solution is to dream about eating. I'm not dead yet so maybe I'm on to something. Death does not play fair; nod off for a second and death will be all over you like a sweaty undershirt. I nap with a ham sandwich in my hand, an over-sized bag of generic cheese doodles resting on my stomach, a cooking show glowing in front of me. You can't be too careful. Actually you can be too careful, like the time I tried to go to sleep using a chicken drumstick as a pacifier. I woke up choking and had to give myself the Heimlich maneuver by throwing myself against the pizza delivery boy who just happened to be at the door. $10.50 for two sausage and pepperoni pizzas. I gave him $15 and told him to keep the change for knocking the wind out of him.

They say that eating too much can kill you. Lord knows I have tried to kill myself by eating too much, but so far all I have to show for my trouble are a few pairs of pants I can't wear any more. I keep them hanging in the closet just in case, just in case I lose a few pounds. You never know when a cholera epidemic will break out. When it does at least I'll have something nice to wear. Not eating will kill you faster than eating too much. Besides, while you are killing yourself by eating too much you can watch TV. There are worse ways to go—unless you don't have cable in which case I would rather be eaten by sharks.

Sharks gotta eat too. And what about worms? If we don't die what are they supposed to eat? We are trapped in a seriously vicious circle. Just thinking about it makes me hungry. I am hungry all the time so I guess you could say that everything makes me hungry. Go ahead and laugh but I would suggest that my survival instinct is just stronger than yours. About the only thing that doesn't make me hungry is eating. Eating keeps my mind off hunger. At least it does unless I am planning another meal as I eat. Thinking about bacon makes me hungry, even if I'm eating a cheeseburger.

They say that you should never shop when you are hungry but my grocery store has a strict “no outside food” policy. They have also forbidden me to try the free samples of food products they are promoting. They say that I didn't respect the “one sample per customer” rule on the free stuff. They told me not to bother wearing disguises to get free samples. I can't believe they saw through my one-armed Mexican revolutionary costume and the pregnant nun get up. Now I get my groceries delivered. I make my order during lunch. I ask if the delivery person can stop by the Chinese carry-out joint on the way over. I need a little something to tide me over until dinner.

The Way the Spanish Eat
Just about the first thing you notice in Spain is that the people put a lot of time and effort into eating. To the untrained eye it appears as if Spanish people are always eating. Of course this isn't true but it is close. It is difficult for me to think of a single activity that they do here that isn't interrupted by food and drink. I can imagine someone being taken to the hospital in an ambulance and asking the driver to make a stop along the way for a little glass of wine and a few olives with bread. The important task on arriving is learning the rhythms of the Spanish diet.

Something everyone learns when living and eating in Spain are the names and very approximate times for the different meals throughout the day. Desayuno is breakfast and consists of coffee and perhaps a piece of some sort of bread-based product. All of the meals throughout the day have their own verb that matches the noun so for desayuno the verb is desayunar.

After breakfast comes almuerzo which I first learned to mean “lunch” in Latin American Spanish but in Spain it means a mid-morning snack, usually a sandwich and a beer or soft drink. This meal is taken between 10:30 and 12:00, más o menos. This mid-morning snack is a big favorite of people in the building trades and you will see guys eating huge sandwiches at this time of day. The verb for the almuerzo is almorzar but you really don't hear this too much.

Lunch is called la comida here so please don´t let anyone catch you calling it almuerzo, or lunch. I remember everyone constantly correcting me when I called this meal lunch. Don't show up to a restaurant before 2:00 pm for this meal unless you want to brand yourself as a tourist. As the summer wear one, hotter and hotter, this midday meal can begin as late as 4:00 pm, maybe 6:00. Spanish people always complain that when they visit France and other European countries, they always show up at restaurants to late for the afternoon meal. In France most folks are done by the time the Spaniards show up. This meal has defined the entire Spanish work day, setting it—at times—sharply at odds with other countries in the European Union. Because it is such a big meal it has made necessary that most unique and idiosyncratic of Spanish habits, the siesta.

It is exclusively at la comida when Valencianos have their big rice dishes such as paella or baked rice. Make sure that you always wear loose-fitting pants to this meal. The verb the Spanish use is comer which any first year Spanish student knows means “to eat.” After this meal a useful phrase for you might be echar una cabezada which means “To take a nap.”

Then comes the merienda, or the afternoon snack. If you haven´t noticed already, the Spanish eat a lot, or at least they do in theory. We have already had four meals and it is not even six in the afternoon. The merienda isn´t too well defined and only serves as a designator for whatever you shove into your fat pie hole in the time between lunch ( la comida ) and whatever you wolf down during before-dinner drinks. I need to take a meal break in just the amount of time it takes me to describe what these people eat during the course of a day. The verb they use for this vaguely-defined meal is merendar or “to snack.”

Tapas, as I've mentioned before, aren't a big part of the culture in this corner of Spain but it´s not like Valencianos will say no when someone places a bit of food in front of them along side whatever it is that they have ordered to drink. I was actually quite disappointed when I learned when I first moved here that they don´t really have tapas here. After living here for a year I can rarely even look at food during this time of day that is set aside for tapas in other parts of Spain. Eating four meals previously in the day tends to weaken my appetite.

Late in the afternoon comes la cena, or dinner. I say late in the afternoon but what I really mean is really late at night, at least as far as dinner is concerned, dinner for an American. The Spanish don´t stop calling this part of the day "afternoon," so en la tarde (in the afternoon) can mean twelve o´clock at night. They usually only say buenas noches when they are going to bed. The evening meal is usually of a lighter fare than in the afternoon, at least in their way of thinking. “¿Arroz en la noche?,” Valecianos will recoil in horror when you tell them that you ate rice for dinner, yet they will eat a loaf of bread with their "lighter meal" and think nothing of it. Their views on diet and nutrition are more ruled by tradition than science or logic so I wouldn't bother trying to tell them otherwise.

Valencia, Where You Really Are What You Eat

I have mentioned before that I live next door to the Ruzafa Market, one of the city’s biggest. I awake six days a week to the comings and goings there as trucks begin arriving before the sun rises and things don’t calm down until about 3 pm. It would be impossible for me to ignore food from the vantage point I have a couple of floors above all of this commotion. The whole of life on this Iberian peninsula is somewhat analogous to living next to this vast marketplace for vegetables, meat, seafood, and everything else you need to make just about any sort of Spanish meal you could imagine. Everyone must eat so to say that food is important to Spaniards doesn’t begin to define their attitude about cooking. It would be like saying that water is important to fish. There is a very strong bond that the Spanish have with cooking and it is something that I adopted very early in my residency here in Valencia.

One of the biggest tourist attractions here is the Central Market downtown. It is a big attraction not because there aren’t other noteworthy sites around town but because the Mercado Central is truly something to behold. Its magnificence speaks volumes about the relationship Valencianos have with food. Some cities have a big mosque or a lavish cathedral; Valencia has the Central Market. Its worshippers are devout and extremely loyal bordering at times on the fanatical—if you don’t believe me just try to get between some Valencian granny and her seafood purchase. I’m not saying that violence is common in the markets here but you just need to learn to avoid certain situations, usually those involving an octogenarian, her shopping pushcart, and your rightful place in line. Not only do you have to keep your eye on the golden girls but quite often they have a Yorkshire terrier tied up at one of the exits which are ready to rip your throat out at their command. Survival in this environment requires working knowledge of the law of the jungle mixed with the samurai code.

Something that is difficult for Americans to understand, or at least something that is completely different from our own way of life, is just how much food defines Valencianos, even more so than people from other parts of Spain. I have talking about this with a lot of people lately and at first everyone tells me that in Andalucía food is ridiculously important in day-to-day life, or that in Asturias they have a traditional cuisine second to none, and what about Granada which practically invented tapas? In reply I simply say “paella.” The response I get is either silence or, “Oh yeah, paella. Got me there.”

We Americans have our national flag and Valencianos have paella. Last year when Valencia Club de Fútbol was in the final of the Copa del Rey their fans laid siege to the area around the stadium in Madrid by making paellas during the tailgating parties, or whatever the hell you call them in Spanish. Paella became the battle standard of the contingent from Valencia. I don’t think any other region of Spain has a dish that is quite as iconoclastic as paella Valenciana. As far as the local identity is concerned, food plays almost as big a role as the language, whether that is Spanish or Valenciano.

Once you realize this you may forgive the people here for guarding their recipes for jealously. Change one single ingredient in paella or baked rice and you’ll never hear the end of it from your local friends. You can improvise all you want, just don’t call it by the name they use for that dish. This doesn’t mean that I don’t tease my Valencian friends half to death whenever I cook something. I like to invent enormously elaborate names for the dishes I cook if they detour from the local recipes that are written in stone. “I call this ‘dish rice made in a style remarkably similar to paella but I wouldn’t dare call it paella for fear that some old Valencian grandmother would drop dead if she even got a hint that some immigrant was calling a dish paella when he profaned this venerable recipe by adding a bit of sausage.’” I usually keep going on and on until someone tells me to shut up, and that the point is taken.

Improvisation and variation in cooking are fine but you need to know the basics which provide you with the true north on your gourmet compass. I take great pains when I first learn to make one of the local dishes so that I am as close to the traditional recipe as possible. You will find a certain amount of variation from one person’s version to the next here but they are usually fairly similar. When I set out to make a local dish I compare several recipes and boil my version down from all of them assuring that what I make is pure, 100% Valencia.

La Paella Valenciana
As good as any place to begin on the subject of food in Valencia is with the region's—and perhaps Spain's—most iconoclastic dish, paella. When I first arrived I thought paella was basically just a rice dish. I have come to learn that aside from being the signature dish of Valencia, it represents for them so much more than food. It defines Valencianos, it keeps them tied to their past, it unites families and friends, and once you realize this you will want to take the time and effort to learn to prepare it well.

Almost everyone who knows a single thing about Spain knows that paella is one of the signature dishes of this country. Most foreigners probably even know enough about paella to give a fairly complete recipe: rice, green beans, garrofón (butter beans), chicken, rabbit, a bit of garlic, tomato, and saffron. At least this is the recipe for Paella Valenciana, give or take an ingredient or two. What most people don't know is that for people who live in Valencia, paella is not just what you call the dish, it is the event of sharing a paella with friends or family. I was going to a paella at the country home of friends who just recently moved from my Valencia neighborhood of Ruzafa.

I met another friend of mine, who also lives in Ruzafa, at our favorite bar. Not only is Adrian (Adrià in Valenciano) from Ruzafa but—except for brief excursions like the one today—you couldn't get him to leave this neighborhood of Valencia under the threat of violence. Like me, he feels that Ruzafa is the center of the universe. When we left the center of the known universe (after a quick beer) we had to take the #1 metro line going south from the Plaza de España station.

In just a few stops the metro rises out of the tunnels and glides out of the city, past agricultural communities with mostly Arabic names which stand as witnesses to Valencia's centuries of Muslim rule. Most words beginning with “Al” stem from Arabic. This prefix represents the definite article in Arabic and besides a lot of local place names, you find many Spanish words derived similarly. Here in the countryside of Valencia, riding through the orange trees which were first brought here by the Moors, you see strange names like Font Almaguer, Alginet, Alfafar, L'Alcúdia, Al Farp, Albal, and today's destination of Catadau.

In the countryside, the language of Valenciano is much more widely spoken. You notice this sharp contrast the moment you leave the city limits of Valencia. We are met at the tiny metro stop by our hosts, a Frenchman and a native Valenciana. This means that two out of the four of us are local. It only seems natural that the language changes from Spanish to Valenciano. Just when I get to the point where I am almost completely comfortable with Spanish, it's time to start learning another language.

I watch a lot of television in Valenciano. There is one show in particular that I try to see as often as possible that is about bicycle touring in the Valencia Community. I can understand the language rather well if I make a big effort but I rarely hear it spoken in the city. Between my knowledge of French and my growing fluency in Spanish, Valenciano shouldn't be too difficult to pick up if I can just find a good grammar book. As I slowly but surely master Spanish, doors are continually opening for me—like this weekend in the countryside. I can only imagine that learning Valenciano will open even more doors—not only in Valencia but in Catalonia to the north and the Balearic Islands where the language is also spoken.

The first thing you need to know about paella is that it is best cooked on an open fire. It is hard to find stove tops big enough to accommodate some paella pans which can be as big as several meters in diameter. The one we will be using on this evening is perhaps one half meter in diameter which would present a challenge to most kitchen burners. A wood fire provides an even heat for the entire pan at an intensity capable of keeping the rice at a boil.

If you ask a 100 people from Valencia for advice on how to cook paella, you will get 1,000 different recipes and you may have to officiate a few fistfights. If there is a Spaniard not from the Valencia region involved in the argument, you may be officiating a civil war. You won't find a dish more traditional to the culture and history of Valencia and yet everyone has their own set of variations. For true Valencianos, the ingredients won't be too different from those I mentioned; you may see red pepper strips added or snails, but the basic ingredients I gave are written in stone...somewhere. Every paellera, or paella cook, will have his or her own tricks to the process.

Our host's trick is to first brown the rabbit and chicken in the hot pan and then remove it. Very unorthodox. Next, he added a can of tomato puree with a bit of garlic. Next come the green beans and the butter beans. When these have all cooked he adds a bit of water and returns the meat to the fire. More water is added and when this comes to a boil the rice is added along with the saffron. He also added a couple of small branches of dried rosemary. Once the ingredients are thoroughly mixed you don't stir the pan. It simply boils down until the rice is cooked. A paella cooked on a wood fire is truly a thing of beauty, not to mention the aroma.

So besides the dish itself, the word “paella” can be used to describe the act of eating paella together with friends. I have been to paellas with 50 people or more, huge affairs staged by the neighborhood committees, called casals. During Fallas in Valencia, these casals will have paella cook-offs right in the street. Wood fires are lit in the road and several paellas will be cooked at once. A true paella is more of an event than a dish or a simple meal.

I would say that four people is the minimum crowd for a true paella. You can order an individual serving of this rice dish in almost any restaurant in town, but a true paella should be served among friends who share from the same pan. Sharing large family-size portions is more the rule than the exception in most Spanish cooking. This fits in well with my own philosophy as I rarely cook anything except in huge batches sufficient for feeding ten people at a time.

I doubt there is a better place to share a paella with friends than on a patio in the Valencian countryside, in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean, although I will probably keep looking. After a few brutally hot days we were blessed with a perfect evening. I even briefly considered putting on a sweater until I thought about how silly that would be after surviving temperatures reaching almost 40 degrees only two days ago. Instead of a sweater I opted for another glass of red wine.

An Ode to Eggs, Potatoes, and Olive Oil (and salt, don’t be stingy with the salt.)
“Every family has its own method for making tortillas, their own secret.”
-3,000 Años de la Cocina Española by Rosa Tovar and Monique Fuller

The first thing we Americans learn upon visiting Spain is that a Spanish tortilla is completely different than the Mexican variety. A Spanish tortilla is a sort of omelet made with eggs and some other kind of filler. The Mexican variety of tortillas, either made with corn or flour, are hard to come by in Spain. We are lucky to have Mexico as our neighbor. Their food has permeated our culture on many different levels. Spanish food is less well-known to Americans and the tortilla is a good place to begin.

The Spanish tortilla is probably my favorite dish here in Spain. I get a craving for it on a regular basis. It is a perfect food in my opinion, a wonderful balance of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Eggs are a fantastic source of protein, potatoes are as good a place to get carbohydrates as you can find, and olive oil is a fat made in heaven. And don’t forget about the salt. I thought I already told you about this?

Tortillas are sold in almost every bar in Spain. Tortillas are served as a tapa, alone like a slice of pie, or you can get a tortilla sandwich. You can get tortillas made with zucchini, artichokes, spinach, mushrooms, cheese, and just about anything else you can imagine. The most popular and what probably defines the tortilla in Spain is the tortilla de patatas made with potatoes. This is my personal favorite.

After returning from a few weeks in Spain a few years back I saw a sign for “Tortilla Española” in a Seattle restaurant I frequented. I was with a friend who had spent a lot of time in Spain so we were both anxious to get a fix of this great combination of simple ingredients. I was served scrambled eggs with potatoes—not the same thing as a tortilla. I didn’t complain because I really like the restaurant but I realized that no one who worked there, from the cooks and dishwashers, to the waiters and bartenders, had ever been to Spain to allow this dish to be called a tortilla.

This was when I started trying to make tortillas at home (notice the use of the verb “to try”). I am a fairly good cook and I can usually nail just about any recipe after a couple of attempts but my forays into tortillas generally ended in something considerably less than a success. I will give a basic recipe so that you can see how easy it looks on paper.

Tortilla de Patatas
6 eggs
3 pounds of potatoes
1 Onion
Olive Oil
Salt

Peel and slice the potatoes very thinly. Slice the onion the same way. Sauté the potato slices in a generous amount of olive oil being careful not to brown them. When the potatoes are about half cooked add the onion. When the potatoes are cooked, drain off the excess olive oil. Beat the eggs in a bowl and add the cooked potatoes and salt. Transfer this to a sauté pan. Cook on one side being careful not to brown the mixture. Cover the pan with a plate and flip the tortilla and return it to the pan so the other side cooks. Reshape the tortilla with a spatula as the other side cooks. Repeat this again.

This sounds pretty simple and straightforward and it may be for some people. I had my share of disasters. I was becoming a bit discouraged until I watched a Spanish movie I rented about some street kids living in Madrid. One of the kids offers to make a tortilla for everyone. As they begin to eat it everyone spits it out because he didn’t even cook the potatoes ahead of the egg mixture, he just threw everything into a pan. This scene made me think that perhaps I wasn’t a complete klutz in the kitchen and there was more to this deceptively simple dish than what the recipe explains.

I have learned to cook this dish fairly well since I moved to Spain. I bought a special non-stick pan especially for tortillas. I have experimented a great deal with how I cook the potatoes. I used to bake the potatoes ahead of time if I was using the oven for something else. I found that this required that I use a lot less oil than is normally the case—not that I am really out to use less olive oil, I practically drink the stuff right out of the bottle. I thought that this method was a nice shortcut because sautéing the potatoes in oil takes forever. I have returned to the sauté method just because I am trying to be more authentic and they cook it this way for a reason. It tastes better.

Just what “authentic” means when talking about this icon of Spanish cuisine is difficult to define. Absolutely every Spanish person I have interviewed concerning this dish has their own truco, or trick. People’s recipes for tortillas are as individual and defining as fingerprints here in Spain, so be careful not to leave a half-eaten tortilla at a crime scene or they might track it back to you. My own recipe has been distilled from dozens of others and is still in the developmental stage. It may never leave that stage of constant improvement and improvisation. I may never have a recipe that is anything approaching permanence—it’s like the jazz solos of recipes.

While rummaging through the kitchen at my first apartment in Valencia, I came across an odd plastic thing that looked like a lid for something. My roommate back then told me it was for flipping tortillas. He never used it and instead preferred to use a plate. It was purchased by a former roommate who also never used it. In the spirit of integration, I never used it either but I took it with me when I moved to a new place. I began using it and I found it vastly superior to the plate method of flipping. The plastic flipper has a knob handle on one side which makes it easier to hold than a plate. I anoint it with a bit of olive oil before using (the Spanish use the verb untar, to anoint, whenever they splash olive oil on anything). They make a special pan for making tortillas called a vuelvetortillas, or tortilla flipper, but I don't know anyone who has admitted to using one. It's kind of like cheating in my book. Some people cook one side in the pan and then they transfer the dish to the oven to cook the top part. This seems wimpy to me.

I have a few trucos of my own when it comes to making this dish. For example, I prefer a ridiculously high potato-to-egg ratio. I credit this discovery to the woman at the vegetable stand in the Ruzafa Market near my apartment. I told her I was going to make a six egg tortilla and she suggested I purchase two kilograms of potatoes. This seemed like a laughably large quantity of spuds but I loved the way it turned out. Instead of a potato omelet, it is more like potatoes with a thin veneer of egg. And I think that this bears repeating: Don’t be shy with the salt—that’s why they keep it in a big bowl by the stove instead of some wimpy shaker.

Tortillas are great because you can eat them any time of day. I eat them for breakfast sometimes, although you’d never find a Spaniard doing this. While having a beer or a glass of wine, a small portion on a toothpick makes a great tapa. Stuffed in a loaf of bread they make a hearty sandwich. A slice of tortilla makes an elegant side dish for a meal.

Spain seems to have wonderfully fresh eggs; even those you find in the big supermarket chains are quite good. I buy mine from one of the stalls at the market and they are always very fresh. The abundance of nice, fresh eggs probably explains a lot about why this dish is so popular here.

¿Algo Más?
¿Algo Más?, or “anything else?,” is what you hear every time after your order has been filled at the market. My Spanish has improved by leaps and bounds since I arrived here some ten months ago. Just the other day I explained to a Spanish friend in great detail about the mortgage crisis in America and how this is playing havoc on the exchange rate here in Europe (If I had known before I left just how poorly the dollar was going to fare, I would have converted all of my savings into half-off pizza coupons). My Spanish is pretty good these days but I still don’t know how to say “no” when someone asks me, “¿Algo más?”

I just want to fit in; I just want to be anonymous. How can I do this when I go to the market and buy such puny amounts of food? I don’t even have one of those cool market baskets on wheels than any self-respecting Spanish shopper takes with them when they go to buy groceries. I sometimes feel like I am the only person in this country who cooks only for himself.

I very rarely just order the exact amount that I need for whatever I have planned to cook for that day. Today, for example, I had everything that I needed and I was on my way out the door of the market when I noticed a type of chorizo that I hadn’t seen before in one of the butcher stalls. I bought two big links, “just to try,” as I told the woman working there. When she asked me if I wanted anything else I felt like I wasn’t even in control of myself any more. I ordered four hamburger patties. Just when I plan on getting around to eating these wasn’t clear to me then and is even more of a mystery now that I have had time to inventory the contents of my bursting-at-the-seams refrigerator.

I now live with two Spanish women who don’t give me much help in consuming the vast amount of food I buy and cook regularly. I think that more food falls off of my plate on to the floor than both of them eat, combined, during the same meal. I have even started using the marker board in our kitchen, like the restaurant chalkboards you see all over Europe that announce the daily specials, to advertise what I have cooked and that I need help eating it. If they don’t get on board my cooking gravy train I may end up as the “before” picture in some weight loss program.

I buy big pans, really big. My paella pan is big enough to roast a whole pig, something I plan on doing some day when I can catch one of those slippery little fellas. Spanish people cook a lot with these cool clay baking dishes. When I went out to buy one I measured my oven so that I could buy the biggest one that it could hold. Back in Seattle I had a pot for making stock that was as big as those cauldrons the cannibals in the cartoons used to try to cook Bugs Bunny. I could have used it as a sort of low-rent hot tub. I think my quest for size in cooking is not some sort of over-compensation for my diminished sense of masculinity. The only part of my body that isn’t big enough for my liking is probably my liver, but that’s only because of the amount or red wine I drink over here. My fetish for bigness in cookware is probably because I have never got over the fact that although I come from a large family, I have remained single and childless.

Shopping and cooking have become two of my favorite pastimes here in Spain. I like them both more than eating, but I like eating a lot, a lot. Some men restore old motorcycles or build model train sets. I go to the market and pester anyone there who will talk to me. The gorgeous woman who sells me my eggs told me a story today about how her mother used to make her a treat to take to school that was bread soaked in red wine with sugar on top. You can’t make that stuff up. My butcher gave me his recipe for pork stock. The woman at the vegetable stand told me how many potatoes to put in my tortilla de patatas (it seems like an awful lot of potatoes but I’m going to trust her on this). I used to have to walk six or seven blocks to get to my old neighborhood market. Now I can practically trip from my front door step and fall into the Ruzafa Market. I think that I will be there almost daily.

I take shortcuts through the market when I am on the other side coming home. This could prove to be dangerous as I already have toxic levels of pork in my system and it wouldn’t kill me to walk the extra steps around the outside of the market. But the market is fun, the market is exciting, it’s where everyone goes. It’s like a disco during the daylight hours. There is no cover charge but if you’re like me, you’ll always spend more than you planned.

Pumped up - Deflated
I had to pick up a couple of things at the market this morning in preparation for the fiesta this afternoon so I asked if there was anything else we needed. I was told no and headed out the door. Before I made it to the stairway in the hall our door opened and I was asked to pick up five loaves of bread. I got so excited I almost skipped to the market. Let me explain.

Whenever I go to the bakery I usually only buy one loaf of bread and I can never even finish this by myself before it goes stale. The bakers always ask me when I order my single, lousy little loaf of bread if I would like thing else. I never do want anything else but I almost want to order more just to fit in. I see older Spanish women at the bakery ordering prodigious amounts of bread. Do they work in an orphanage? Perhaps they run a soup kitchen which requires them to buy so much bread every day? These are the kind of thoughts that go through my mind as I walk out of the bakery with my one, little, shitty, loaf of bread.

But today I was going to buy five loaves! I felt like a Spanish Pinocchio. “Today I am a real boy!” Since I was buying such a very Spanish quantity of bread on this day I didn’t feel like such a dummy bothering the baker to explain to me the different loaves they had for sale. There are certain privileges that come with being such a big spender (total price for five loaves: 3.45€).

Some guys enjoy the status of wearing an Armani suit or driving a Porsche. With women, who knows what their idea of status entails? A Prada bag? Gucci shoes? For me, right now, it’s walking around carrying five loaves of bread. Cancel that shipment of Viagra; I don’t need it anymore, not today, thank you. I didn’t want to walk straight back home; I felt that I needed to show off a bit. I decided that I’d go have a coffee at the bar in the market, and not my usual, touristy café americano, I ordered an espresso, or a café solo as they call them here. God, I really wanted someone I knew to see me right now. Just when I was at the height of my status high, an older Spanish guy elbowed up to the bar to get a REFILL on his red wine. It was 09:44, that’s a.m., like “in the morning” for you civilians. So much for me being a big shot. I just got punked by some 80 year old stud. I felt like half a sissy. If he had one of those cartoon thought balloons over his head it would say something like, "Out of my way, coffee boy. Maybe you should go fix your makeup."

I laid the money for the coffee on the bar and slouched out the door.”

Arroz al Horno
Baked rice is probably my favorite Valencian recipe, if not my favorite Spanish dish, if not one of my all-time favorite meals. It is also the second most iconic dish in the category of Valencian food, first being paella, of course. I prefer it to paella if for no other reason than that I don't really have the stove needed to cook a huge pan of paella, a dish that requires a constant heat to the whole pan—at least to do it well. Traditional paella is usually cooked over a wood fire for this reason. Arroz al Horno, as the name states, is cooked in the oven. An oven I got. People used to cook this in their big neighborhood ovens back when that wasn't a common item in everyone's home.

I have made this dish more than just about any other dish in my repertoire—almost every Sunday during the winter months. I have developed my own tricks for it and my Arroz al Horno is pretty good, just ask anyone who has tried it, and all my friends have tried it. I think that this says more about just how good this dish is when prepared competently than anything about my own cooking ability. It is an easy dish to make if you have someone—let's say your Spanish grandmother—walk you through it once or twice. For all of you out there, allow me to be the Spanish grandmother we never had.

My recipe detours a bit from the traditional method on just a couple points. I love potatoes so I use more potatoes than you will find in traditional recipes. I cover almost the entire top of the baking dish with potatoes. The potatoes act like a heat shield—just like on the space shuttle. The spuds protect the other, more delicate ingredients. I don't use bacon. I love bacon but it's really not necessary in this dish. Other than that mine is your typical Spanish grandmother’s Arroz al Horno.

Arroz al Horno
2 cups rice (I use Fallera Valencian rice)
5 cups stock (chicken, beef, or pork will do)
2-3 Chorizo sausages
2-3 Morcilla sausages (I sometimes substitute blanquet sausages)
Pork ribs cut into cubes
4 tomatoes
1 ½ cup cooked garbanzo beans (I use a 400g. jar)
1 bulb of garlic
3 large potatoes
Saffron, salt

Begin by peeling the potatoes (or don't peel them) I boil them until they are just a bit tender. Most Valencian recipes call for you to slice the potatoes and cook them in a generous amount of olive oil. I think the potatoes come out better if you parboil them first and then slice them

Heat the stock to a boil. Add the pre-cooked garbanzos and when stock returns to a boil take it off the heat and add the saffron. You want everything to be hot that goes into the baking dish.

Slice the chorizo into bite-size bits and cook them. Add the chorizo to the baking dish and wipe the fat from the pan with a paper towel.

Cook the lightly salted ribs in olive oil until they are browned but not over-cooked. Remove and put the meat in the baking dish.

Finely dice and onion and a garlic clove for the rice sofrito. Sauté the rice in the rib fat with olive oil, tomato, and garlic as you would with risotto. Stir constantly. When it has cooked a bit and coated thoroughly with the sofrito, add it to the baking dish.

Trim the tomatoes. I use an apple corer to completely remove the middle. Slice the tomatoes in half along their width. Season the cut ends with salt and a bit of oregano.

Pour the stock with the garbanzos into the baking dish. Stir the contents of the dish so everything is mixed well.

Add the tomato slices and morcilla around the dish. Place the garlic bulb in the center.

Slice the potatoes at about ¼ inch thickness and lay them on top of everything else in the baking dish except the tomatoes. Salt the top of the potatoes.

Place the dish into a pre-heated oven at about º190. When the tops of the potatoes begin to brown remove the dish, flip the potatoes, season the tops, and return the dish to the oven. When the tops of the other side of the potatoes are browned a bit, cover the dish. Remove the dish when the stock has evaporated.

Celebrating Food
Sometimes I think that I probably spend too much time writing and thinking about food, not to mention the time I spend actually cooking and eating. I could understand how other people probably think that I am a bit obsessed about the subject. I guess that you could say that cooking is sort of a hobby for me, but it's not like building model railroads or collecting stamps. You have to eat every day. Unless you live at home and your mom cooks for you then you are going to have to make a lot of that food yourself. You can either eat well or not.

Sometimes eating can be a chore but it should often be a celebration. From what I have learned of Spanish, French, Italian, and Greek cultures, they choose to celebrate food much more than we do in America. I don't mean this as a criticism of Americans, it's just that these cultures put a higher value on food than Americans or the British do. I would say that Americans and British people put a higher value on comedy than these Mediterranean cultures I mentioned. They could definitely learn from us on this particular subject. At least for me, laughter is as essential as eating, but for now I am talking about cooking and the role food plays and should play in our lives.

Spanish food is fairly simple, for the most part. Most people here aren't particularly sophisticated about the food they eat or how they cook it. I think that the French are much more savvy about cooking techniques and food preparation than the Spanish. This doesn't mean that the people in Spain don't have a reverence for food. A casual walk through the lovely Mercado de Ruzafa will demonstrate just how highly Valencianos value what they put on their tables. It's not just a matter of the quality of the food people buy, it is the very way that they choose their food. Supermarkets are popular in Spain but most people buy a good portion of their staples at their local market.

In the market people have a closer bond with the food they purchase. In the stalls of the market you deal directly with people who know their products intimately. There is a degree of customer service in the market that you would only expect in a fine jewelry store or a pampering health spa. I go regularly to the same stalls at my market and have developed a pretty firm relationship with all of the merchants. I have a level of rapport with my butcher that Dick Cheney probably has with his heart surgeon. Considering how much pork I buy from my butcher, I should probably ask for the phone number of Dick's surgeon.

You can enjoy food without parting with a lot of money. It is up to all of us to savor the simplest things: a ripe tomato, a perfectly hardboiled egg, a glass of modest wine, a mug of great beer, a loaf of freshly baked bread, or an olive. I think that one of the things I admire so much about the Spanish is that they really make an effort to stop their lives every day to sit down to the table for their afternoon meal. Even after all this time here I still have trouble adopting this daily ritual, and I really like to eat. It's just difficult for me to stop whatever it is I am doing and sit down at the table. This simple act is what elevates the status of food for the Spanish. It doesn't really matter what it is they are eating, the respect they give the meal is what is important.

You can show a lot of respect for just about any sort of food or drink just by presenting it well.
For example, it's rare to see people here eating potato chips out of the bag. They decant the chips into a bowl before serving. That doesn't sound like much but it all adds up. A meal without a glass of wine is almost unthinkable in these Mediterranean countries. I think that the wine is almost as valuable for its symbolism as it is for the taste it contributes. Wine is like a secular prayer that we enjoy at the table. Since we don't really have an English equivalent (how odd), I will say it in French and Spanish, “Bon appétit and Buen provecho!”

An Ode to Tomatoes
You can have your fancy auto-mo-biles and your shiny jewelry, during the summer months I am happy with little more than tomatoes. Valencia has their own variety that are about as good as tomatoes get. July and August are the best months for these Valencia tomatoes and I buy them compulsively from just about every vegetable stand that I pass during the day—and I pass quite a few. It's too hot to cook (although I still cook a lot) so something as simple as a sliced tomato is about all you need. Maybe a pinch of salt, a couple drops of oil if you must, a leaf or two of basil if you have it, and vinegar once in a while just for a change.

These aren't the hothouse variety of tomatoes that you find all year long in most U.S. super markets, or the uninspired tomatoes you find here in the winter. These are right off the vine and still ripening as you bring them home from the market. I had a hothouse tomato lying around a couple of weeks ago, a remnant from those harsher times when the good ones are still in the ground. I had it sitting in my kitchen for a few weeks and it just sat their patiently, not changing color and not getting a bit riper with age. I finally put it out of its misery by chopping it up and throwing it into a soup.

These summer Valenciano tomatoes are very impatient. You only have a window of about three days to eat them before they ripen into mush. They are so good that I don't like to use them for anything but serving uncooked and unprepared. It's almost a waste to make gazpacho out of such beautiful pieces of fruit. I eat them alone or in a Greek salad with cucumber, onion, and green peppers. I serve tomatoes as the base with pasta salads. Basically, I use any excuse that I can find.

My favorites are called raf tomatoes and they are odd-shaped things with the meat separated into different lobes. I have my own little trick for serving tomatoes which is especially helpful with this raf variety. I use an apple corer to remove the stem base and I push the corer all the way through the tomato. This whole center of the raf is kind of difficult to deal with so using an apple corer works really well. Next I cut it in half from the top. After this you can sit the half on its side and slice the lobes individually.

Valencia Oranges
I finally got the opportunity to do something that is as embedded in the culture of Valencia as anything; I was able to go to an orchard and pick oranges. Oranges are as synonymous to Valencia as paella, something a short drive in the countryside here will quickly confirm. The entire coastal plain in this corner of the Mediterranean is packed with orange trees. I have been bike riding through these orchards all year, smelling the hypnotic blossoms and almost tasting the sweetness of the fruit in the air. In December the trees are almost breaking with the weight of the harvest and anyone with an orchard is screaming for pickers.

We drove south of Valencia, past Xátiva to the village of Chella. The family of an acquaintance has a small orchard with a few dozen orange trees near their home in the village. The older parents of my friend live in the village and they are a bit beyond doing their own harvesting, but the trees are still producing an absolutely prodigious amount of oranges and persimmons. Someone needs to go out and pull them off the trees. When I was asked to volunteer I fairly jumped at the chance.

Just seeing the countryside out this way is enough reason to take me away from the city for a day, or the rest of my life. The valley is dotted with lonely village church steeples and defensive towers built by the Arab occupants a thousand years ago, but mostly there are orange trees—another product left behind by the Moors. The mild, frost-free winters assure a strong yield, year after year. It was sunny and warm on this late December day, perfect for picking oranges.

We arrived a bit later than scheduled and I was ready to head out to the orchard and start filling bags with fruit. I quickly remembered that I was in Spain and that there would have to be a bit of eating before anything else could be attempted. Not only was this Spain, but a Spanish country home, so I walked into the middle of something resembling an American Thanksgiving dinner. After introductions I was seated at the table and force-fed dish after dish. All I could think about was the futility of someone trying to go on a hunger strike while seated at a Spanish grandmother’s dining room table. I’m sure that I would be able to resist whatever cruel tortures the CIA could dream up at Guantánamo much better than I can refuse to accept anything in the way of food offered by a Spanish host.

There were three kids at the table, ages 3, 4, and 8. The 8 year old girl could barely contain her disappointment in me when I admitted that I didn’t know anyone from High School Musical, and she would have been completely devastated to know that I don’t even know what that is. I’m never too shy about eating and I was only too happy to be stuffed like a Christmas goose with shrimp, rice soup, and cocido. I ate at least twice as much as anyone else at the table. I was just being polite.

I don’t know if it is just because I like kids or that my Spanish skills are more suited to conversing with the little guys, but I always seem to gravitate to the playground when I am in these sort of mixed-generation, social settings here in Spain. I was quickly recruited to go outside and play pilla-pilla which seems to be a sort of hellish Spanish version of tag where I was cursed with being “it” no matter how many times I caught one of the kids. I think that Spanish kids take advantage of me in games because of my status as a foreigner. Just the other evening I was trying to teach my 5 year old friend to play chess when he invented his own rather Machiavellian version of the game in which all of his pieces on the board seemed to have super powers enabling them to take out my players at will. I didn’t stand a chance.

The late afternoon sun was threatening to slide behind the mountains to the west when we finally drove about a half kilometer out to the orchard. This area is a collective of the village with each family having their own trees, some of which were already completely stripped of fruit, others in desperate need of harvesting. When we began picking I was immediately astounded by the output of every tree. It is common for a single orange tree to yield 100 kilos of fruit. The trees are pruned every year so they don't grow too tall which makes picking a lot easier. After less than a half hour of picking we had more oranges than 50 people could consume in a week—now I just need to find about 45 more people, either that or set up my own stall in the Ruzafa market.

I think that I would really like to have my own bit of land here in Valencia. I would like to have a few fruit trees and enough olive trees to keep me in oil and olives for the year. The odd-shaped raf tomatoes that are grown here would also be a lot of fun to grow on my own. I also need to grow my own basil as this is my favorite herb and difficult to come by in the winter. I’ll have to find a garden that I can commute to on my bicycle from downtown Valencia. Perhaps I’ll just get my own country estate with free pilla-pilla games for the kids. Cheating encouraged!

I Ham What I Am: A Pork Lover’s Paradise, a Vegetarian’s Worst Nightmare
I have a pig’s rear leg sitting on the counter in my kitchen, its little hoof pointing daintily upwards as if it’s trying to get a perfect ten in a diving competition. In almost every other country in the world that would be a little strange but in Spain it’s as natural as a paper towel rack is in an American household. These pig legs are called jamón serrano or jamón ibérico and you see them hanging from the rafters in bars and restaurants in every corner of Spain. Cured ham is one of the most popular delicacies in Iberia and for good reason: ham is good. It is dry cured here and then sliced paper towel thin. It’s a bit like ham jerky for lack of a better description. Jerky is good, and ham is even better, so what could possibly be better than ham jerky? While you are thinking in vain I’ll just cut myself a few thin slices—this pig leg isn’t going to eat itself.

Jamón is more established in some parts of the country than others but you can find it everywhere. In most parts of Castilla and Andalucia it is positively ubiquitous. In Madrid I once took a cab that served jamón. I just made that up but it sounds like a money-making idea to me. Here in Valencia it isn’t quite so popular but people still eat it whenever they get the chance. You can buy jamón in every supermarket and meat store in town.

One of the bars in my neighborhood specializes in jamón as the owner is from another, more jamón-friendly province. There is always a ham mounted in a slicing rack where someone is almost always slicing away, trying to keep up with the customer demands. Next to the carving station there are a dozen or so hams hanging on the wall like players waiting to go into a game. All of these benchwarmer hams have a little upside down umbrella underneath them to catch any fat that still may be draining out of the salt cured and dried legs. I eat so much ham that I probably need one of these drip cups. I’m not going to say where it should go.

It’s not like the only part of the pig that gets eaten here is the hind legs. Just look in my refrigerator and you can probably find the rest of the carcass. In the butcher shop meat case you’ll find the feet, ears, belly, ribs, and heads. Nothing goes to waste because that’s why they invented sausage. As much as I like Spanish hams, I’m an even bigger fan of the wide variety of sausages they make here. They have become my drug of choice, not that I have abandoned my other drugs of choice. A sausage wouldn’t be much fun without wine to go with it.

Villages all over Spain showcase their products by holding Bacchanalian celebrations of wine and pork products. Spanish people take their meat very seriously and they are too preoccupied at these events with the food and wine—and they are probably too well-adjusted and mature—to stop and think of the humor potential of being, literally, in the middle of a sausage fest. My own puerile mind can’t help wanting to scream out, “Don’t you get it? It’s a sausage fest!” Evidently they don’t.

You may want to ask me, “Don’t you think that you eat too much pork?” All that I can say is that it’s a complicated matter and a very difficult question for me to answer if I want the answer to be “no.” I love pig. I eat a lot of it. I eat so much that the other day I burped and it sounded a little like an oink. It’s just that it is difficult to avoid pork in Spain. Pork finds its way into so many of the national dishes that it is conspicuous by its absence in those few recipes that call for some other animal. And yes, there are recipes in Spain that do not call for pork; you’ll find them at the bottom of page 1,113 in the All the Recipes of Spain cookbook, right after the dessert section (all of which use at least a tea spoon or two of pig meat sprinkles).

You can’t get many of these wonderful Spanish pork products in America because of U.S.D.A regulations or whatever. I have decided that an easy way to get rich is to start an international smuggling cartel. I tried to start my jamón traficante business last week by smuggling a ham into the country disguised as a pregnant nun. By the time I got to Kennedy Airport in New York all I had was bone. I shared with everyone around me on the flight so at least I made some new friends. If you are an importer of illegal goods, never use your own product. I think I saw that in a movie once. I don’t like drugs very much so if I were a cocaine dealer this wouldn’t be a problem, but Spanish ham is just so good.

Some Spanish hams are almost as expensive as cocaine so it is fairly common to see overweight men in hot pants and halter tops standing on corners in the shady areas of town doing whatever they have to do to feed their habit. I have not yet reached this level of depravity although I sometimes will buy ham instead of other basic household necessities. I mean, how often do you really need to wash your hair? If it were possible I would buy cheaper wine to give me more money to buy pork. The wine I buy now arrives at the supermarket in one of those cement mixer trucks. I guess I could quit drinking to afford more ham. Ouch! My liver just kicked me like an 8 ½ month old fetus. White Slavery: Too high a price to pay for Spanish ham? That is a question only you can answer. Now where did I put that mini skirt and boa?

Yes, We Have No Horse Meat
I guess that I should wait to write this post until after I have actually tried some horse. Horse meat that is, they eat it over here. There is a store that threatens to sell horse meat (in the picture) across the street from my building but it is never open, or at least I’ve never seen it open, so I presume that horse meat isn’t too popular. They don’t sell it in the supermarkets, and you won’t find caballo on any restaurant menus that I’ve seen, but they do eat it. I asked around.

There is a stall at the Mercado de Algirós that sells horse meat. I checked it out the last time I was there. I mean I took a look, I didn’t eat any. They weren’t giving out free samples, or maybe they did but by the time I go there it was all gobbled up. Horse meat is a really dark red and the piece the woman was cutting looked pretty fatty. I would have thought horse meat to be very lean. I guess that I have a lot to learn about horse meat, or maybe I won’t learn more about it. I haven’t decided yet.

It is funny to think that I come from a culture where there is a significant taboo about eating horses. I have eaten some weird stuff in my life so it’s not like I’m easily frightened by what some people think of as food. I’ll try almost anything once. Most people eat some pretty horrible looking sea creatures. I have even eaten guinea pig before, a critter some people keep as pets. There is something about eating horses that goes even beyond our taboos about eating cats and dogs. I’m not saying that I would eat a cat or a dog before a horse. Let’s just say that when my brain receives and interprets signals from the body about hunger, the first impulse it sends out isn’t, “Hey, I have an idea: Let’s go with horse meat tonight.”

Am I alone in thinking this? For all that I know you people are all just dying to sink your teeth into some rare horse flesh. You are really starting to gross me the fuck out. There is no way that I am going to kiss you now until you have flossed and brushed. If there is anything worse than horse meat it’s the horse meat that’s been stuck in your teeth for three days.

See, now I’m just being culturally insensitive, so just put down your horse burger and come over here and give me a big fat kiss. Holy Jesus! A horse meat burp? You’re a real class act, young lady. You’ll never get a husband with manners like that. On second thought, I just don’t think this is working out between us, Little Miss Horse Meat Breath. Don’t take it too personally; I’m not attracted to vegetarians either. It’s not you, it’s me. I think that I probably just watched too many cowboy movies as a kid to eat a mode of transportation.

Chicken and Garbanzos
The words for “boredom” and “hunger” are the same in Spanish. OK, that is not true. It is true that my own body cannot distinguish between boredom and hunger so I usually eat or cook if I am bored. This dish is just another excuse to use my big clay baking dish.

4 chicken leg quarters
16 oz can of whole Italian tomatoes
2 cups cooked garbanzos
3-4 garlic cloves
1 onion
Sal, pepper, saffron

Clean the chicken and season with salt and pepper. I shredded a couple of cloves of garlic and rubbed the paste on the chicken. In the clay baking dish (mine is about 18” in diameter) add the can of tomatoes. Squish the whole tomatoes with your hands so it makes a sort of rough sauce. Add a chopped onion to this mixture along with the saffron. I used a pre-packaged saffron and seasoning mix that they sell here in Spain. Place the chicken pieces on top of the sauce and place in a pre-heated oven (approximately 370° but I still just guess with the centigrade oven I work with). When the top side of the chicken has browned take the dish out of the oven. Add the cooked garbanzos to the tomato mixture in the bottom of the dish as you turn over each piece of chicken. When the other side of chicken has browned you can take it out of the oven. Serve with bread or rice.

Hurry Up And Wait
The Spanish have their own system for waiting in lines; something that is required a lot here. When you walk up to the crowd waiting in the post office or at the butcher you ask, “¿El ultimo?” The last person in line will let you know who he or she is and then you are the new último, or the last one.

I have found that the most aggressive line jumpers are female senior citizens. These golden girls will make every attempt to wiggle around your rightful place in the queue and then act like they didn’t notice you when you call them on it. It certainly doesn’t pay to be shy when you are standing in line although there’s no point in losing your manners. I make a point of being firm yet polite, and I always take my large pocket knife out of my backpack and clean my fingernails while still keeping a watchful eye on my place in line.

I have never been forced to toss a Spanish grandmother to the ground with a violent judo throw, not yet. I like to keep the threat of a couple of my more effective martial arts techniques out there on the table, just to keep things honest. I would probably feel bad about slamming an old woman to the ground in front of the market vegetable stall and crushing her like a bag of dried and rotten sticks, but I didn’t write the rules to defending one’s place in line. I also don’t want to be taken advantage of just because I have an accent.

I was waiting to buy olives the other day and had already spent about ten minutes behind a guy who was buying some sort of dried fish thing. Had I been less tired or in a better humor I would have asked him what the hell he was buying and if it was intended for human consumption. Instead I waited as patiently as I could. All I wanted was a small bag of cracked olives. The olives at this stall are well worth even a ridiculously long wait. Another guy came up and asked me if I was “the last.” A minute later an old woman shuffled up pushing her grocery cart and asked who was last. The guy behind me answered and she immediately started in on a story about how she was in a hurry and if she could please move in front of him in line. He quickly and deftly passed the buck to me, directing her to ask me for my place in line. What a coward! I could see that my turn was coming up because the guy in front of me was paying.

I am as polite and gentlemanly as the next guy and I was almost going to let her go in front of me until I realized the archetype I was up against in this battle. I have had the misfortune of being behind women like her and watched as they take more time to order a couple of pork chops as it would take me to remodel a large kitchen. I hesitated a moment and then turned to the merchant and ordered my bag of olives. I wanted to tell granny that I didn’t fall off the turnip truck this morning, but instead I just let out a non-apologetic, “Hasta luego,” as I laid down the exact change for my olives and got the hell out of there.

I realize this isn’t exactly the most harrowing tale you will ever come across but you didn’t see the look of complete evil in this octogenarian’s eyes as I did—the devil in sensible shoes and support stockings. Dogs aren’t allowed inside the market but you never know if one of these golden girls has a West Highland terrier stuffed in her cart ready at a moment’s notice to rip your throat out on her orders. I was victorious on this occasion but how long can my luck hold out? Every day I avoid death is a gift.

La Corrida de Toros

2008-09-23T02:08:00.000-07:00

La Corrida de Toros

My knowledge of bullfighting started with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun also Rises which I read when I was about 17 or 18. That was a long time ago and since then I have read countless other descriptions of La Corrida de Toros, literally “the running of the bulls” in Spanish. Most recently I reread travel writer Paul Theroux’s juvenile criticism of the spectacle in his book The Pillars of Hercules in which he cheered for the bull to gore the torero. I would say that my own views on the subject lie somewhere between Hemingway and Theroux but closer to Papa. I have traveled quite a bit I countries that celebrate La Corrida de Toros, I had never felt obliged to attend one myself.
I was downtown one day during Fallas checking on how to get a bus to the airport when I rode past the ticket windows in front of the Plaza de Toros next to Valencia’s train station. In conjunction with the Fallas celebration, the bull fighting season opens earlier here than other parts of Spain. After all these years of reading about it and avoiding the spectacle, I decided that it was time to see for myself what goes on inside the ring.

It had been raining all day after more than a solid week of sunshine so I was prepared to sit in the rain for my first Corrida. The rain finally stopped about two hours before it was to start. I had a glass of wine in a bar across the street. It looked like something out of a Hemingway short story and may very well be. There were black and white photographs of matadors on the wall and old carteles, or posters, of bullfights held long ago. When I came outside again there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Bullfights are very popular with tourists in Spain but as I entered the Plaza it seemed like it was almost all locals on this particular afternoon.

For 1€ you can rent a pad to give you a bit of comfort as the seats as just a slab of concrete. The rows are very narrow and we were lucky enough that there was no one sitting in front of us. We were instructed that tradition dictates that you bring your own sandwiches to eat during the breaks. I was also told that a lot of the men smoke puros, or Cuban cigars. Any excuse to smoke a great cigar is fine with me. I have to say, if there is a better place to smoke a cigar than a corrida in Spain on a sunny day, I haven’t found it yet.

I went to my tobacco shop and picked up a couple of smaller cigars called panatelas. I like these because there aren’t as toxic as the bigger ones that I used to smoke. They generally last about 20 minutes to a half an hour and they don’t leave your mouth feeling as if someone took a dump in it while you weren’t looking. When I walked into the stadium I immediately began to suffer from cigar envy. A bunch of guys sitting next to me were all smoking Cohiba’s that looked almost long enough to double as walking sticks. If I go to another corrida I will bring a bigger cigar.

I wasn’t sure what I would think about bullfighting. I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to be violently opposed to it as was Paul Theroux who saw it as incredibly cruel and barbaric. I understand that not every culture on earth is exactly like the one in which I was brought up. Theroux’s criticism of the Corrida just seemed to be coming from someone who knows nothing of Spanish culture and has no desire to do anything to alleviate that ignorance. This is an odd attitude for someone who writes about travel. I don't know why anyone would attend a corrida if they find them to be objectionable. I have heard people complaining while they are watching the spectacle and I have asked them what did they think was going to happen. It's as if these people think they are going to a movie or a play and a bullfight breaks out unexpectedly.

Although this was my first corrida, I have read enough about it that I did know what was going on, step-by-step. I knew what sort of thing represented a good corrida. I knew that each corrida is divided into three parts, or tercios: The picadors on horseback, the banderilleros who put the banderillas into the bull’s neck, and the matador who perform a series of maneuvers with his cape and then kills the bull with his sword.

Even I could see that the fourth corrida on this day was rather exceptional. The bull was strong and fierce and everyone did their job well. When it came to the kill the matador plunge his sword deep and the bull dropped immediately. People waved white handkerchiefs and seat cushions to signal for a trophy for the matador. He was awarded an ear for his efforts, the only prize awarded at this corrida.

The following day I picked up the newspaper to read the account of what had transpired at my first bullfight. As with anything else, this world has its own vocabulary, some of which I already knew. I will leave you with a few vocabulary words that you may find useful if you ever decide to go.

Bullfighting terms

• Corrida.........A Bullfighting show
• Tauromaquia.....Bullfighting
• Plaza de Toros….Bullring
• Lidiar..........To fight
• Puerta grande...The main door to the arena
• Gradas...Seats at the back of the ring (cheapest seats)
• Barreras........Front seats
• Sol/Sombra......Sun/Shade - the choice as to where you sit
• Muleta..........A small red cloth stretched over a stick (Palo)
• Capote..........The red cape
• Paseillo........The parade of fighters at the beginning
• Ruedo.........The ring
• Estoque.........Sword
• Espada..........The matador's sword also called the ESTOQUE
• Matador/Diestro.The top bullfighter, the one who kills the bull
• Novilladas......Beginners fights held separately
• Rejoneador......Horse-mounted fighter
• Toril...........Enclosure for the bulls
• Picador.........Fighter to weaken the bull
• Banderillas.....Barbed darts on colored shafts placed into the bull's shoulders
• Puntilla........A dagger that is stabbed into the base of the bull's skull
• Puerta grande...The main door to the arena

I live only about three blocks from Valencia's plaza de toros, a wonderful neoclassical structure built between 1850 and 1860 and designed by Sebastian Monleon based on the Roman amphitheater of Flavio Marcel. It is every bit as interesting on the inside as on the outside, and the outside is spectacular. I have been to several corrida de toros (bullfight is the atrocious translation which I won't use here) while living in Spain. I have also seen a few dozen others on television, back when they were broadcast on regular TV. Now the corrida is only carried on the pay channels. I have also witnessed a few bull festivals in local villages in the community of Valencia.

I hadn't really made up my mind on the event until I went this past week and witnessed one of the more thrilling displays you'll ever see. It wasn't just what was going on in the ring that impressed me, but everything going on inside the plaza de toros. Let's just say that it was one of those nights when everything went perfectly. I love to smoke a big, fat cigar and walk all around the entire structure, from top to bottom. I love the view of the city from the outer galleries. I like to watch as the bulls are removed from the ring and taken directly to the butchers. It's funny to watch as very young kids—boys and girls—watch in complete fascination as the bulls are cut up. “Look, Alejandra, that's where meat comes from!” they all seem to be thinking.

I love how they will let you bring in whatever you want. None of this, “No outside food” business at the corrida. People bring in coolers of beer, sandwiches, wine bags, and bottles of champagne to celebrate the evening.

Some people in Spain say that the days of the corrida are numbered, that it will slide into the past. When and if that happens Spain will become a bit more like every other country in the world and a little less idiosyncratic. I wouldn't like to see that happen. I never try to defend the corrida when I discuss it with Spanish people, and I feel as an outsider I shouldn't criticize it either (not that I would). I just think that it is something that Spaniards will work out for themselves. I will enjoy the corrida while it lasts.

San Fermín
A San Fermín pedimos
por ser nuestro patrón
nos guía en el encierro
dándonos su bendición

(San Fermin, as our patron, guide us in the run, giving us your blessing.)
-Prayer recited three times before the running of the bulls (encierro) in Pamplona. Sung to the tune of “Caesar, those who are about to die salute you!”

A firework is rocketed into the air on July 7th to mark the opening of the Festival of San Fermín, a yearly icon in Pamplona, Spain heavily romanticized by Hemingway. I have visited the lovely city of Pamplona but haven't attended the festival. I can't really say one way or the other how I feel about bullfighting. I've been a few times to see bullfights but I don't plan on going to San Fermín. Maybe I'm too old although even as a young man I possessed an abundance of survival instinct and common sense. I do enjoy watching it on television every morning when they broadcast the daily encierro. This is when the bulls, accompanied by the calming effect of an equal amount of steers (also with long horns), run through the streets of Pamplona among a bunch of people (somewhere between 1,500-4,000) dressed in traditional white shirts with red handkerchiefs around their necks. The idea is to outrun the bulls, some weighing close to 700 kilos, as they make their way through the narrow streets to the Plaza de Toros. The six bulls come from a different breeder every day and will be featured later in the day in the afternoon bullfights. In a Spanish dictionary I found this definition for the verb encerrar from which encierro is derived: to put a person or an animal in a place where it cannot get out. San Fermín covers both of those. The only defense runners have is a rolled-up newspaper and their own swiftness. Sound like fun to you? Me neither.

The encierro begins every morning promptly at 08:00 during the eight days of the festival and is over in a matter of a few minutes. Just about every day at least one person requires the skill of trained medical people. Deaths are not unheard of during the encierro and there have been 14 since they began keeping records in 1924. I have seen many, many serious injuries in the past two years of watching it on television. In an accident unrelated to the encierro, an Irish tourist died at Pamplona this year falling off a high wall (in 2007 two people fell to their deaths at the same spot on the Redín Wall). It's a little like spring break with bulls. Pamplona seems like a dangerous place to be during San Fermín so for now I don't mind being a TV spectator...or I may take a train up there this week. Anyone feel like going with me?

From my Spanish friends I have heard nothing but bad things about the festival at Pamplona. There is nothing but drunk, belligerent tourists; there is no place to stay; everything is overcrowded; and bulls have sharp horns are just a few of the complaints from those who have survived. Most of the people I have talked to admitted to going to the festival when they were teenagers and wrote it all off as foolish disregard for their own safety.

Spanish television broadcasts the encierro every morning and they treat it like a major sporting event. They go over every meter the bulls traverse and show instant replays and slow motion clips of exciting moments. They actually time how long it takes for the bulls to run from the corrals to the bullring. On the coverage one morning they showed doctors and nurses in a Pamplona hospital emergency room watching the broadcast, anticipating the injuries they would soon be treating. If I were a taxpayer here in Spain, I would be a little upset about government health care paying to have some drunk's butt stitched up after a goring.

In 2007 there was a big brouhaha over a man who took his ten year old son to the encierro. They showed the kid running down the street ahead of the bulls. He looked like he was having a blast, something the authorities should consider when the father is sentenced. They have since changed the rules at the festival. This year on the last day of San Fermin, kids under 10 get in free! People do a lot of dumber things at San Fermín than bring under-age children to run with the bulls. In fact, from my view from the couch in my living room, just about everything people do at San Fermín looks pretty stupid.

How many times were you told as a kid not to play in traffic? How many times were you warned of the dangers of alcohol? To me, San Fermín looks like a few thousand people completely ignoring these two bits of sage advice. After the encierro, if you are not already one of those laid out on a stretcher speeding towards the emergency room, they have an even more dangerous game for you to play. People feeling suicidal and those who have always wondered what it feels like to take a horn in the ass, file into the ring of the Plaza de Toros and get chased around by a young bull that always looks thoroughly pissed off. There might not be any ambulances available after the initial wave of casualties during the encierro so remember to apply direct pressure until help arrives. Keep saying that prayer to San Fermín and see if that helps.

I would never run in the encierro for a lot of reasons—physical cowardice being somewhere near the top of that list. An even greater fear for me than getting gored in the stomach is the total embarrassment of being injured, because you just know that they will show it over and over again on TV. I'm not looking to be the day's entertainment, not like that. I completely understand why other people do it, as stupid as it may seem to me to risk your life in some drunken festival in a remote corner of Spain.

I think the encierro is no different than doing tricks on a skateboard or any of the other “extreme” sports. I think that humans have evolved to such a degree and we have eliminated just about all of the risks faced by our ancestors where now just about everyone can expect to live to a ripe old age. In the past simply surviving the birthing process was a fight against the odds. In an era of seat belts, knee pads, guard rails, non-slip shower mats, child-proof medicine bottles, and life jackets, people sometimes need to feel a little bit of risk in their lives. Everyone rebels against the certainty of life in different ways. Instead of running down a narrow street being chased by crazed cows, I'll stick to ignoring other safety advice, like not closing the lid before striking a match when I smoke a cigar, or leaving my bike helmet at home on occasion. That's about as extreme as it gets for me these days.

Bous al Carrer (Valenciano for “Bulls in the street.”)
After watching the encierro every morning for almost a week on television, and unsuccessful in my attempts to talk anyone into going to Pamplona for the final days of the San Fermín Festival, I opted for the next best and closest thing. There is another week-long festival in the small town of Picassent just a few kilometers south of Valencia. Every day during the Picassent festival there are bulls running around in the streets in one section of the town, religious processions, and lots of food and drink—this is Spain, after all. It wouldn't be quite the same thing as San Fermín, something of a much lesser magnitude, but Picassent is only a twenty minutes from Valencia. Instead of buying a plane ticket for Pamplona I just needed to pull my metro card out of my wallet.

There are dozens and dozens of these bull festivals in villages throughout Spain during the months of summer. Most are not really geared to stimulate tourism, something we noticed immediately in the almost-empty Saturday night train to Picassent. Once we stepped off the train the festival seemed to be in full swing with bar patron spilling out into the street. Most of the festival revelers were soaking wet from being hosed down in the square a few minutes before we had arrived and no one seemed to notice a few tourists who seemed to have got off the train in Picassent by accident. As far as I could tell, we were the only out-of-towners at the festival on this evening. In Valencia I feel that although I may not exactly fit in, I also don't stand out like a sore thumb. Here in Picassent I felt as if I had lost all of my camouflage.

It only took us two beers in two bars to find our way to the section of town where they let the bulls loose. One quadrangle of the town is enclosed in heavy iron gates to keep the bulls in and allow people to escape. The festival had not begun because there were very young children walking around inside the closed area, as well as old folks sitting out on lawn chairs. Still, I was a bit hesitant to climb through the bars and walk around. I kept an eye on all of my escape routes should I happen upon a mad bull or any other sort of threatening livestock.

There are bars and restaurants inside the enclosed area with iron gates and wooden barriers protecting the customers. It's like this entire part of the village is one big shark cage. If I remember correctly, in the movie Jaws the shark bit through the cage like an impatient kid unwrapping a Christmas gift. Not only did I want heavy bars between me and any crazy bull, I also wanted to be on the second floor looking down. There are elevated grandstand areas where people can sit and watch the events which fell right in line with my safety demands. Unfortunately, I didn't see any place to buy a high-powered rifle so I felt like my security was still a bit incomplete.

They let the bulls out into the street one at a time. The bull would run around the square while a few of the braver (or more foolish) of the participants dodged the animal as it galloped past. After a while they would bring a steer out into the street to calm down the bull and then lead it back into the corral. I had brought a cigar along with me, and like at the corrida, this seemed like an ideal place to light up. I am always self-conscious about blowing smoke around so I left the safety of the second story bleachers and climbed down to street-level to light up. At first I stayed inside the barriers but the bull only came by once in a while so I stepped outside into the street. I know that smoking the occasional cigar has its risks but I would have never thought that two of those risks might be the horns attached to a 1,000 pound bull. There were lots of people outside the gates after the bull passed but then I could see the crowd splitting in two as the bull made its way back toward this area. I tried to make may way back inside the bars with as much dignity as possible but that is a bit difficult when you are screeching like a teenage girl in a slasher movie. Smoking can be hazardous to your health.

Back in Valencia later in the evening, I was talking with some Spanish friends about the festival. I stole a joke from Caddy Shack when someone asked me if I had run out in the streets with the bulls. I said that I had wanted to run with the bulls, as I pointed to my knee and winced as if in pain from an injury, but that I couldn't because I was a big coward. I don't think these people had seen the movie so this got a good laugh.

Lifestyle a la Español

2008-09-21T03:13:00.000-07:00

Lifestyle a la Español

A Walk Around The Block
To examine the lives of people in Spain, you need to take a look at the street where they live. The word for a city block here is a homonym of the word for apple—for reasons that don't seem to be entirely clear to anyone (other Spanish speaking countries use the less colorful word “cuadra” which means “square”). So a block is an apple? My anemic powers of description were practically swooning (wheezing?) with the possibilities. Unfortunately, a bit of investigation into these words proved fatal to my poetic aspirations. The two meanings for the word apple (manzana) in Spanish probably derived from different roots, with “apple” coming directly from Latin for apple (mattiana), and “city block” a derivation of the French word for house (maison). This rather prosaic explanation immediately extinguished any hope I had for a more flowery introduction to city life in Spain. I had to toss out all of the metaphors relating to fruit to describe urban architecture and start all over from scratch.

If a city block is an island surrounded by streets, my own little Spanish island has just about everything you need to survive. I realize that the block I live on is an exception—even for Spain—but I could probably live on my block for years without crossing the street. Since there happens to be a 15th century church next door, in theory I could be baptized, have my first communion, get married, and have my funeral service without having to look both ways for oncoming traffic. I suppose that would greatly reduce the risk of having an automobile accident be the cause of my eventual demise. There is enough in the way of entertainment so that I probably wouldn’t die of boredom. I certainly could never starve to death. There are enough bars, pastry shops, ice cream parlors, and other indulgences that the safe money would put the cause of death on some form of gout. Let’s leave that for the coroner and instead take a walk around my block to give you a little insight into the urban density that is common in every Spanish city.

I was going to individually list every business on my block, but that would be a little long-winded. As it turns out, there are a total of 36 separate outlets including three banks, three cafés, a hair salon, two pharmacies, three florists, a couple of little clothing stores, three bakeries, a pet supply store, a shoe repair shop, a photo developing place, a lottery booth, and a butcher. All these places and we haven't even stepped inside the Ruzafa Market where there are several dozen food vendors as well as another café. That's what I call a full-service island. The Ruzafa Market is the nucleus of the neighborhood in which I live. It is open Monday to Saturday from something like 7 a.m. (I don't know for sure, I'm never up and outside that early) until about 2:30 in the afternoon. It is a huge indoor market with dozens and dozens of individual vendors selling everything you can imagine eating. There is a separate seafood section as well. The market is an absolute marvel and it is twenty paces from the door of my building. As I said, my block is an exception but it happens to be where I live.

People in this sort of dense urban environment are able to effect most, if not all, of their daily outings on foot. As far as running most errands, the distances are too short to even bother with a bicycle. Most city blocks here are quite large and many are triangular in shape. Most buildings form kind of a wall around the outer edge of the block and there is an open area in the middle between the buildings. This open area in the middle—sometimes a couple of acres—is often used for businesses that require a lot of floor space such as car dealerships or supermarkets.

Back in the late 1990s Seattle changed its downtown zoning laws to mimic the European model of having the first floor of apartment buildings reserved for businesses. Like many Americans cities, many people worked in the Seattle downtown and left at the end of the day for the suburbs. I moved to the lower Queen Anne, or the Uptown neighborhood of Seattle in 1998. I saw firsthand how the downtown area went from being practically deserted to the thriving and lively place that it is today. Housing soared in the downtown while most suburban areas had negative growth. Evidently, many people like the idea of living where they work and play.

Most of Valencia is zoned for buildings of nine stories: the bottom floor for businesses and the other eight for apartments. There are almost no single family homes in this city of 800,000 inhabitants, there's just no room for houses. There is also almost no sprawl to Valencia. The whole city is bordered either by agricultural land, the Mediterranean, or smaller towns that are architecturally similar to Valencia. If you feel cooped up with city life, the country is only fifteen minutes away by bicycle. It would take me thirty minutes by car to get to the country from the center of Seattle, and Seattle suffers less from sprawl than most large U.S. cities.

What I find odd about Valencia, and the same is probably true of other large Spanish cities, is that as the city grows outward, in some areas they are adopting some of the characteristics of American suburbia. Shopping malls with huge parking areas, big box stores, and homes with yards are sprouting up—at least in a section to the west of Valencia. Some of the new apartment blocks on the edge of the city are being separated by wider and wider boulevards that can accommodate many lanes of traffic in each direction. The problem is that building more lanes of traffic never reduces traffic but actually spurs even more congestion in something traffic planners call “induced traffic.” I find these newer areas of Valencia to be completely awful on a number of different levels and I can't believe anyone would voluntarily live in there when they have so many more agreeable choices available to them. The wide streets that are sprouting up in these new semi-suburban parts of town mean that traffic flows faster—good for cars, bad for pedestrians. The lack of corner bars in these new neighborhoods seems like it would make them a total disaster for the average Spaniard who requires at least two on every block.

These newer neighborhoods are spread out too much to run daily errands on foot which drastically changes the nature of life for most Spaniards. I am confident that this new trend in urban planning isn't going to catch on. In Valencia, the new suburbia represents probably less than .05% of the total population of the city, if that. A home in the country is a dream of many Spaniards but I don't think many people are willing to give up the convenience of city life just to have a bit of a garden attached to their single family home. A lot of things are changing in modern Spain and as people become more affluent perhaps they will choose to drive everywhere instead of walking. More and more people are doing the majority of their shopping in the big chain grocery stores instead of at the local markets. The latest figures from 2005 show that Spaniards do 45.4% of their food buying at the big stores, 16.7% in smaller grocery stores and only 28.8% at traditional stores and markets. Convenience and speed are winning out over quality and service.

Although the new suburban-style subdivisions are populated by relatively affluent Valencianos, a lot of the newer, more moderately-priced developments on the edges of town also reflect a move away from the dense urban architecture found in the rest of the city. The buildings are taller. There are fewer, if any, businesses on the ground floors. The streets between apartment buildings are wider. All this translates into less of a community feel to these areas. They seem all but deserted. It's hard to believe that that people are willing to sacrifice a lively neighborhood for a few extra feet of living space in their private dwellings. To each his own. I have friends who live in very modern sections of Valencia but as much as they love their beautiful apartments, with convenient parking and other modern amenities, when it comes time to hang out, most of them migrate to my little neighborhood of older buildings, narrow streets, and dozens and dozens of bars and restaurants.
I think it is a little too early to say whether or not the newer, suburbia-style developments will catch on in Spain. I certainly hope not as they are a lot less friendly to the environment, among other things. But I don't want to talk about the fringes of Valencia, I want to talk about the center of the universe: my neighborhood of Ruzafa and, more specifically, my block. The center of my block is the 15th century church of San Valero. There are two landmarks on my block that serve as the nucleus for the entire neighborhood of Ruzafa (Russafa in Valenciano): the Ruzafa Market and the church of San Valero. Some 54% of Spanish people report that they hardly ever or never go to church and a full 18% consider themselves to be atheist. Quite a healthy disregard for the church when you consider that Spain not too long ago had Catholicism as the state religion, to the point where the government paid the salary of priests in the Franco era and beyond. However, the religion of food is thriving in Spain as is evident Monday through Friday in the Ruzafa Market.

The market is indoor but the 20 meter ceiling gives it an outdoor air. I like the feel of the market so much that I walk through it every time I pass by, and I pass by every day. I use the market as a short-cut through the neighborhood. It's a haven on rainy days and the air conditioning is a respite from summer's hottest afternoons. Most of the time the weather is just perfect in Valencia, but I still duck inside just to see what things look good on that particular day. Knowing what is in season is one of the keys to good cooking, especially in Valencia where farming isn't very dependent on hothouse fruits and vegetables. The growing season spans all twelve months of the year in the vast agricultural area that makes up the Valencia Community. Most of the produce that you find in the market has only traveled a few miles from the adjacent country side.

The fruit and vegetables here often lack the sort of perfection you see in American supermarkets. This simply provides shoppers with the challenge of finding the best products at any given point on the calendar. In the fall the weather favors the harvest of mushrooms. Not the little button mushrooms wrapped in plastic, but lovely wild things that are bigger than your hand. The more mountainous regions of the country have a richer culture of collecting and preparing mushrooms than the coastal area of Valencia. Valencia has its favorite called revollon mushroom (Lactarius deliciosus) which are in season in November. There are days as you pass through the market when you can't resist buying a half a kilo of these beautiful things. It doesn't take much imagination to find a dozen or so ways to prepare them. I lean toward the French tradition of using butter, cream, and wine as the base. I rely on the Italian starches of gnocchi or thick egg noodles for an accompaniment. You have to enjoy revollones while they last because they will be off the menu as abruptly as they arrived.

In other months of the year there are other harvests to exploit. In the spring we are pelted with cherries; tomatoes are at their best in summer, and in the winter you just have to take the best of what you can find. Planning a meal should begin when you arrive at the market. It's always best to enter with an open mind. You can see shoppers struggling to come up with a menu from the available ingredients on that particular day. The good news is that the poultry and pork products are always in season. Seafood is also pretty reliable throughout the year, in one form or another. Valencian rice is another dependable staple. I will drop in and out of the market in this volume about as often as I go there myself; for now I want to talk about my block.

The parish of San Valero is at the center of Ruzafa. I have found very scant traces of the history of the church and the two lines pertaining to its origin offered here I found in Ruzafa: La Bien Plantada by Luis Corbin Ferrer. The original church on this site burned to the ground on September 9, 1415. Construction on the present structure began on June 25, 1636. The main door to the church opens into the Plaça/Plaza Doctor Landete. I use both spellings for the plaza because the street sign is also in Valenciano and Spanish. There are three quiet cafés to choose from in the little open area of the plaza which fill up and empty out with the tides flowing in and out of the market. A small fountain adorns this quiet little piece of Ruzafa along with some orange trees, a row of birch trees for shade, and a few stately date palms just to remind you that the Mediterranean is nearby.

There is at least one wedding every Saturday afternoon at San Valero which bring added crowds to the square, not to mention the dozen or so religious holidays that insure a decent turn-out for mass. Just about everything that is goes on in the church is celebrated by a pealing of the bells in the tower. There is a special ringing of a smaller bell for the call to mass throughout the day. The first one is weekdays at 07:30. When I first moved to the neighborhood I was a bit annoyed by the early mass bells but I soon became charmed by all of the different varieties of ringing. There is the hourly and half-hourly ringing of the big bell. After the twelve bells have rung out for noon there is a louder pealing. The bells can be heard throughout the neighborhood. I always say that if you are too far away from the church to hear the bells, you are too far from Ruzafa and you'd better start getting back.

I either notice the bells ringing or I don't; they are like the beating of your heart, or the watch on your wrist, or the constantly moving celestial bodies. If you are walking through the streets on a deserted Sunday morning you can actually feel the vibrations for the bells after they have finished ringing, or maybe I just think that I can feel them. For weddings and religious celebrations all hell breaks loose in the tower when they ring all of the bells at once. It's the most joyous sound I have ever heard outside of a great piece of music. If you happen to be sitting at a café in the little square, the noise just about knocks you out of your chair. You are tempted to clap when it has all finished.

Cars and Bikes
It's been a bit over two years since I have driven an automobile. I rarely even ride in a car. About 99% of my personal transportation is effected on my bicycle—one of the greatest inventions in human history (although under-utilized in many societies). The personal automobile certainly has a place in modern transportation models but to base our entire scheme on cars seems completely insane. Even if we could make cars that run on air, we would still be strapped with all of the other massive failings of the automobile such as the high cost of building roads, safety issues, and parking, to name only three. Airplanes are another highly flawed means of transportation but they are still the best means to travel great distances. America almost completely gave up on trains many years ago and it may be too late to create the infrastructure necessary for this to be a major player in the country's future. But the cheapest, safest, and easiest solution for many of society’s transportation demands is still the bicycle.

Just about the entire infrastructure necessary to include bicycles in urban transportation models is already in place. Sometimes the only thing required to make a bike line is a line of paint in the street. If a city wishes to be a bit more aggressive in incorporating the use of bikes, they could remove an automobile lane or on-street parking and hand this over to cyclists. If cities are looking to go way overboard on the inclusion of bikes, they can look to Amsterdam as their model. Starting in 1992 Amsterdam has been working to minimize car traffic in its historic center. Over the years the city has drastically reduced parking in the center while continually widening bike lanes and sidewalks. This certainly makes sense when you consider that the historic center of Amsterdam was designed before cars were around.

Valencia has to rate somewhere near the top of the list for bike-friendly cities—at least as far as I am concerned. For its population, Valencia is very small in area, at least compared to an American city of the same size. You can bike from one end of Valencia to the other in about a half an hour—I doubt there are many American cities where you could make that claim driving. The network of bike paths in and around Valencia is a dream come true for cyclists. The fine weather here also helps to encourage cycling. Another advantage for cycling in Valencia is that the city is very flat. In Eduardo Mendoza's hilarious farce, Sin Noticias de Gurb, the space alien visiting the very hilly Barcelona proposes a bike exchange program where citizens of that city can grab a bike at the top of the hill, coast down to the city's center, and then leave the bike. Trucks would then come along and drive the bikes back up the hill. People would have to make their own arrangements for getting back up the hill. As it turns out, Barcelona has a bicycle exchange program called Bicing and they do in fact find an inordinate amount of bikes at the bottom of the city and must transport them back to the top of the hill every day. I thought about the same thing in Seattle which has many heart-shatteringly steep hills. Valencia, as I said, is as flat as a tortilla (Mexican or Spanish versions both work for this simile).

There is almost nothing in the way of urban sprawl in Valencia; the apartment buildings of the city abruptly end where the agricultural fields begin. There are neighboring towns but they all look pretty much like Valencia: apartment buildings that are between four and six floors. I have never heard or seen any traffic reports here. Although Valencia doesn't have the nightmarish gridlock of American cities it has its own share of problems with the automobile. Traffic in the city itself is pretty much a nightmare, at least on weekdays. You won't run into huge delays. More than anything it is just annoying to drive around town. As I write this I look down on the street in front of the Ruzafa Market which, during working hours, is backed up for several blocks.

It amazes me that so many people here still choose to rely heavily on the automobile to get around day-to-day. I could understand this if it were all families choking up the streets in their cars, but most of the traffic is the same sort you see in just about every city in America: single drivers. I don't even take cabs in Valencia because the traffic is maddeningly slow. Once you arrive at your destination, parking is even more horrendous than the drive to get there. I can't see how driving in this environment can be any sort of convenience.

Automobiles in Valencia seem to be more of a status thing than a necessity. People drive because they have cars and can afford the gas. Public transportation is inexpensive and very efficient yet many people opt out of it and drive. I'm sure that many have practical reasons for making this decision but I am equally sure that many other people drive for reasons other than necessity. I would guess that a great majority of the people who now drive cars in Valencia could easily choose to ride the bus or bike to their destinations. I am surprised that the city hasn't made a greater effort to convince these people to make the change. Instead, Valencia keeps building wider roads on the outer ends of the city and erecting public parking garages at different points around town, all with the purpose of encouraging automobile traffic. It seems this money would be better spent on mass transit projects.

It's remarkable the degree to which societies subsidize the automobile while practically ignoring other means of transportation. In the United States people scream bloody murder when public funds go to fund mass transportation projects like Amtrak (America's passenger rail system) but nothing is said when tax dollars pay for airports and the incredible infrastructure necessary for automobiles. Even a city that is purported to be as “bike friendly” as Seattle seems to only grudgingly add bike lanes to the urban transportation model—and in Seattle this usually means merely slapping down a line of paint in the street to designate the bike lane (which works rather well, I might add).

What I can't understand about bike transportation is why it isn't more popular. Why aren't as many people riding bikes in Seattle or Valencia as in Amsterdam? How can we get more people out of their cars and on bikes? I have an idea, try asking. I have seen a couple of posters around Valencia on the metro routes encouraging citizens to ride bikes but I think the movement needs a little more of a push. How about a few television commercials of attractive people choosing to ride their bikes instead of dealing with the hassles inherent in automobiles?

Two Wheeled Anti-Depressant
On some days there seems to be a conspiracy to lower my spirits. The dollar drops another couple of points; my computer’s hard drive fails and wipes out more stuff than I care to even think about right now; a couple of other bad things happened, but it’s all too depressing to chronicle here. The good news is that it is sunny and warm on this November morning, like it is almost every morning here in Valencia. My head is throbbing because of my problems as I prepare for my daily bike ride.

I get dressed in my cycling get-up of mountain bike shorts, clip-in shoes, and jersey-du-jour (today it’s a Portugal national team soccer jersey). I fill my backpack water bottle, double-check that I have my house keys before I close the door behind me, take the elevator to street level, and push off for the ride. I am still fairly overwhelmed with the problems that I will have to confront eventually, but for now I have to deal with the sometimes-annoying task of picking my way through the traffic and out of Valencia on a bicycle. During this first leg of the trip, the bike trail has a lot of intersections with automobiles and pedestrians that keep me from getting up enough speed for my bicycle therapy to take its full effect.

On the first length of trail that is uninterrupted by people or cars I am able to finally stretch my legs and work into a good sprint. It isn’t long at all before my body has other more serious problems to deal with besides my quotidian worries and not-very-interesting problems that have sprung up out of nowhere. Now my body has to deal with real issues like trying to send enough oxygen to all of the vital areas and fighting massive lactic acid build-up. If my mind persists in focusing on the boring, practical problems from earlier in the morning, I just hammer down harder on the pedals until the pain forces these thoughts from my head.

Besides the physical exertion, the natural beauty of the Albufera nature area acts as a distraction from whatever the hell it was that was getting on my nerves only a half hour ago. Although we are creeping inexorably towards winter, it is sunny and warm on this afternoon and there are actually people sunbathing on the beaches along my route. I am wearing a long sleeve shirt under my jersey that I am tempted to remove except that I don’t want to slow down. It feels good to actually feel hot for a change so I leave it on.

Besides the distraction of my cardio-vascular crisis, I am also looking for food for my pet turtle. He has recently been turning his nose up at the fish that he used to eat so now I am looking for other things to add to his diet. It is really hard to think about problems you are having with your bank or your computer as you pedal along at 20 something miles per hour all the while scanning the trail for insects and other possible fodder for a pet turtle. I think to myself that this is what a seagull must be viewing as it sweeps along the shore. I catch three grasshoppers and a snail on this excursion and store them in an empty water bottle I root out of a beach trash barrel.

The turtle belongs to the other occupants of my house, but since we don’t have a dog, I have adopted him as my own. I call him El Conde de Monte Cristo because his overriding passion seems to be to escape from his plastic pan where he lives in my living room. I have made it really nice for him with lots of cool rocks to swim around and fresh plants changed regularly. One time I took him out and put him on the coffee table just so that he could see that the world outside of his pail isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. He immediately darted for the side of the table and jumped off. I can’t believe that he didn’t hurt himself. Back in the pail he went.

I don’t know if this breed of turtle eats snails but I put the one I found in his tank. I figured that if he didn’t eat it then perhaps they could be pals. The snail didn’t live more than a couple of hours. I don’t know if he drowned or the turtle attacked him but the score is now: Turtle 1, Snails 0. The turtle seemed to be scared shitless of the live grasshopper I dangled in front of him. I left one of them in there just in case he changes his mind and wants to try a few bites. El Conde doesn’t seem very excited about the bottled turtle food he gets either. He does appear to be growing so I guess that he must be eating something. I think the cooler weather has just slowed his metabolism; I know that it has slowed me down.

After I have sprinkled the day’s catch around the rocks that make up the little turtle’s Chateau d”If, I take a shower, get dressed, and walk downstairs to the café in the little plaza in front of my apartment. There isn’t a cloud in the sky and not a hint of a breeze on this afternoon, which makes it perfect for sitting at an outside table. I order a café con leche and read at least 40 pages of my book. Right now I am finishing up a translation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises which is called Fiesta in Spanish (A much more appropriate title in my opinion.). I haven’t read this book since I first read it when I was 16 or 17. It’s not a little ironic that I am rereading it all these years later in Spanish while living in Spain. I think that is what I had in mind when I read it the first time around.

The coming darkness and the church bells of San Valero tell me that it is six o’clock. The little plaza has been gradually filling up as it does every day at this time. It turns into a playpen for the little kids, a football pitch for their older siblings, and a meeting spot for the parents who fill up the rest of the tables around me. My body will feel the glow of the afternoon bike ride until I fall asleep in the evening. This euphoria seems to be my system thanking me for ending the punishment I inflicted on it while riding. If I tried I could probably remember what it was that was bothering me earlier in the day but I have some cooking to do and some friends to meet later tonight.

Train Travel
One of the biggest news items here in Spain is the opening this month of the high speed rail link between Madrid and Barcelona, Spain’s two largest cities with 10 million inhabitants between them. The cities will be served by Spain’s AVE (Alta Velocidad Española, Spanish High Speed with the acronym being a play on words as “ave” means bird in Spanish) train system that will cut the travel time on this 391 mile route to just two hours and 38 minutes, slicing two hours off the previous rail time.

I have taken the Madrid-Sevilla AVE line and I have to say that it is an absolute marvel. The train covers about 538 kilometers (334 miles) in two hours and 20 minutes with one stop in Cordoba; that is a 230-kph average speed. The train is so smooth that there are no ripples in your coffee when you let it sit on the bar.

These fast trains are in direct competition with air service between cities. They are not a lot slower than commuter flights. The difference is passenger comfort and the quality of travel. Airline travel is mostly just a necessary annoyance. The incivility between passengers is barely contained on airline flights and the mere mention of a short delay often brings out the very worst in people. Train travel, to me, is the height of sophistication and civility. I love traveling by train and the journey is almost always enjoyable. I would take a train trip just for the ride. You can also work, read, sleep, and socialize on a train. On an airplane I am afraid to death to even talk to the person crammed in next to me for fear they will turn out to be a huge bore and never shut up. If you are stuck next to a dud on a train you can just walk away.

Back when I was 19 years old I traveled around Europe on a Eurail Pass and I have loved train travel ever since. I have only taken a handful of trains in the U.S. but I have enjoyed those trips as well. I have always said that if every American were forced to take a train trip, they would demand that our country improve its rail network. I’m afraid that it is a little late in the game for America to develop the sort of sophisticated rail system that Spain enjoys. We’ve let our infrastructure deteriorate for too long. We have listened to the conservative dogma that our rail system must pay for itself. Of course, no one says the same for our highways or airports which are heavily subsidized by the government.

The fact is that Spain’s AVE network is set to be profitable by 2010—something to consider the next time the U.S. government bails out a private airline or you hear about a new Interstate bridge that is going to cost a billion dollars. Trains also produce four times less carbon dioxide emission per mile than planes if anyone cares about stuff like that.

In an effort to keep up with what the future will bring, most countries in Western Europe are falling all over themselves to build high-speed rail networks. The new Madrid-Barcelona corridor will eventually lead further north to the French border near Perpignan and on to Paris.

The final 45.5km (28 mile) link to the French border is another challenge because an 8.1km (5 mile) tunnel is needed through the Pyrenees and the cost, up to €900m, will be recouped over 50 years through Spain's first-ever private franchise operation. Almost every country in Europe has state-sponsored railways to one degree or another. They view efficient mass transit as an asset and an aid to economic growth instead of a tax payer’s burden like we do in the United States. Every time Amtrak (America’s passenger rail service) needs a boost from the federal government, the conservatives are ready to pull the plug on the whole thing citing inefficiency and high costs. No one says the same for road building projects. Below are just a couple of the astronomically expensive road construction projects that Seattle faces:

The Alaskan Way Viaduct—$3.5-11.6 billion
The #520 bridge between Seattle and Bellevue—$5.9 billion
I-405 widening—$10.9 billion

All of these projects put together only involve about six miles worth or roadway. If you ask me, there doesn’t seem to be much future in the automobile.

Ways to Save the Planet I Learned While Living in Spain
Don't get me wrong, I hate hippies as much as the next guy. It's just that living a little more frugally isn't going to kill anyone. I thoroughly despise the attitude of certain people in America who ridicule anyone who even mentions conservation, as if it is positively un-American to use less energy. How can anyone defend unbridled consumption as some sort of virtue?

This sort of falls under the category about how learning to live with less doesn't mean a diminished standard of living. Spanish people don't do all of these things because they are incredibly environmentally-conscious citizens, they do it because it saves them money, money they could better spend on wine and ham. There's a catchy slogan somewhere in that last sentence.

1) Use a pressure cooker to speed up cooking times. My pressure cooker was broken and I finally realized that it could be fixed. I went to a cooking supply store a whole half block from my house and they repaired it in five minutes. The 15€ price tag seemed a bit steep but it was well worth it. I just cooked garbanzo beans in a matter of 30 minutes. They usually take four freaking hours. My pressure cooker story leads me to the next thing.

2) Repair old items, if possible, instead of simply adding their carcasses to the landfill.

3) Hang dry clothes instead of using a dryer. I realize this isn't always convenient but it is always possible. We use a clothes drying rack that we put in front of a window. In the summer stuff dries in a matter of an hour or two. If you are already heating your house in the winter hang drying clothes indoors makes complete sense.

4) Public Transportation. You should use it once in a while if for no other reason than to see what it’s like for people who do use it.

5) Bikes. I've been a bike fanatic all my life so it's exciting to see Valencia really get behind bicycles as a mode of transportation. I swear I notice more bikes on the road here every day. The climate in most of Spain is ideal for bikes but people in Belgium and the Netherlands are much more enthusiastic in the use of bikes and their weather is lousy. I rode all winter in Seattle. Riding in the rain still beats driving a car in my book.

6) Use heat and air conditioning sparingly. Try putting on a sweater in the winter.

7) Drive a fuel-efficient car. People here drive small cars, comically puny at times.

8) City living is infinitely greener than suburban life. 54% of New Yorkers take public transportation to work, by far the highest percentage in the country. The logic of city living was something else that I realized long before arriving in Spain. My life in downtown Seattle wasn't too different than how I live here. I have already talked about this exhaustively.

9) Our hot water heater heats the water as it flows through the pipe so there isn't a huge tank that has to be heated up. I don't know what the savings are with these heaters but I'm sure it's considerable.

10) Wear clothes more than one day. Something most Spanish people do is change clothes when they are at home. When you are home you wear sweats or whatever which keeps your street clothes neater and cleaner so that you don't have to wash them after wearing them out a single day. Someone told me that they do the same thing in Hungary and they call them “house clothes.”