Ghetto Blaster

Speaking of carrying a radio through town, I came across a surprising translation in my pocket English-Spanish dictionary: on the English side, I found the term "Ghetto Blaster." I'm not sure how that's necessary enough in the English language to beat out other missing words (HarperCollins considers it more important than seahorse, gargoyle, and woodchuck, for instance). So never fear, when you want to quickly reference the outdated and perhaps offensive term "ghetto blaster," just turn to page 386 and find its Spanish translation, "un cassette portatil de gran tamano."

Getting ready for Semana Santa: Part 3

Since our apartment is on the parade route, Patra and I have had the pleasure (?) of witnessing parade rehearsals. These occur on Thursday nights around 11 pm, due to the fact that a parade rehearsal means closing down the street entirely so that dozens of burly men can haul a gigantic unadorned platform downhill at the pace of snails. Perhaps this wouldn't be such a problem if the one-way street in front of our apartment wasn't the ONLY way to exit the town. Recently, we heard the approaching semana santa music emanating from a tinny little radio (which, actually, doesn't change the overall quality of the music) and rushed to the window to watch. Rushing, of course, was unnecessary as it took the men ten minutes just to turn a corner. We watched their slow progress, their feet moving a few centimeters with each step. They passed our window and we went back to what we were doing. A few minutes later we heard a car rumble downhill, apparently unaware of the street blockage. And then, a few minutes later: the same car backing uphill on our narrow street, moving about as quickly as the men had been going downhill. Traffic jams come in all varieties in this town.

Getting ready for Semana Santa: Part 2

And, in town, posters of Semana Santas past go up:




My favorite, from 1950, is right next to my apartment (on the left):


A monument in the middle of town of the scary penitents:

Getting ready for Semana Santa: Part 1

The most important week of the year requires a lot of preparation. In my school, the terrifying penitents are made to look slightly less scary by being made out of paper:

And children make their own mini-Jesus floats:

Playing the Jenna and Patra game

Emma, our yoga teacher, just let us know that the game of choice for her 2 children (aged 4 and 6), is "playing Jenna and Patra." Shocked and honored, Patra and I asked what the game consisted of. She said: if there are yoga mats in the house, the kids just strike a pose. But if there are no mats, they jump on the bed, strike a yoga pose, and try to make the other one fall over. Having each selected one of us as his or her avatar, they yell out "there's a point for Jenna!" "that's one for Patra!" Funny, that's how Patra and I DO spend all of our time--yoga fighting.

Spitting Image

This year, I've thought a lot about spitting. In my "about me" for this blog, I say something about "learning to spit like a Spaniard." Unfortunately, alliteration took precedence over reality in that instance. In truth I find the custom disgusting. In the United States I can forgive when a runner spits into the grass as they're passing by. I can understand when a tween spits in front of his friends to look cool. I don't find either situation particularly pleasant, but not horrible either.

Here's how it plays out in Spain: I'm walking to school. I near an old man. He's got a tickle in his throat, starts coughing vehemently. "What to do with this phlegmy gunk, now loosened?" he thinks. "Well, why not expectorate in the direction of that nice young woman coming closer? Better out than in, after all." He spits, nearly missing my shoes, wipes his chin, and smiles at me. "Buenos dias, guapa!" And a good day to you too, sir.

Putting the "blanco" back in the pueblo

Arcenses take the designation of their town very seriously: as the quintessential "pueblo blanco" of Andalucia (as some guidebooks describe Arcos), townspeople take great care in keeping up appearances. Spring cleaning for inhabitants of the old town means scraping off the last year's layer of whitewash and reapplying bright new coats of the calcium-based cover. And what better way to remove an entire wall of paint than with a butter knife? And why not reapply with a paintbrush best suited to fine detail work in small watercolors? These seem to be the tools of choice for my neighbors...

Painting with a mini-paintbrush:

Because chipping paint off with a butter knife requires supervision:

Arcos' Darwin Awards

To catch the bus to Sevilla on Valentine's Day, I woke up at 6 am and traveled downhill through my quiet, darkened town. Though I've been up that early before to catch other buses and have never felt anything but safe, I felt uneasy this time. To add to my unease, or perhaps justifying it, I passed a glasses shop and saw broken glass on the sidewalk. Then, a large rock. And a hole in the window just in front of a display case, the Prada glasses missing. I felt unnerved enough (the crime had obviously happened in the past few hours) to quicken my pace, start to look over my shoulder and make my way to the lighted part of the street.

A week later, the criminals were apprehended. They were attempting to break into the OTHER glasses shop in Arcos, just across the street from the first, on a Friday at the same time as the first burglary. I can only imagine they did it with the same rock.

I sat down with a friend earlier today who said this wasn't the first time a burglar showed a lack of savviness in Arcos. Last summer an Arcense robbed a bank, made off with several thousand Euros, and then...hung around in Arcos. Now, Arcos is a small town. It wasn't hard to figure out who'd committed the theft. But he wasn't eager to skip town. In fact, his first crime had gone so well he decided to try it again. He held up a restaurant in the old town, using only white face paint as a disguise. He was caught soon afterward.

The friend who was telling me this story said his own house had been broken into at one point. He got off lucky, he said. Ignoring a plasma-screen TV, several pieces of very expensive furniture (this friend is in the business of remodeling homes, included interior decorations), and other items with acknowledgable value, the thieves took:
1) 2 plastic deck chairs
2) a large skillet
3) a bread-maker

You can tell these thieves weren't in it for black market resell value...they were just in the mood for a back-porch bread-filled barbecue.

Down on the [organic] farm

Since October, Patra and I have been enjoying organic vegetables, hand-pressed olive oil, and the most beautifully-yoked eggs this side of the Atlantic (and perhaps the other side as well), all produced on a nearby farm. Our first delivery in October, courtesy of our yoga teacher, amounted to pretty much a forest of fennel and Swiss chard, and included proof of its organic pedigree: a snail as big as my thumb left its slow, slimy trail up one of the chard stalks. Yum! If only we were escargot enthusiasts.

Today we got the pleasure of finally visiting our organic farm, run by farmer Ian and farmer Sue. As on any good small farm (it seems) everything they showed us was about to be moved somewhere else, except perhaps for the Muscovy ducks who supply our eggs (I let them know we were their biggest fans; they simply nodded their heads and kept eating lettuce). Ian showed us where the carrots would go, the beets, the herb garden, the potatoes, the onions and garlic, the dates and tomatoes. On the other side of the farmhouse he showed us the koi which would be soon moved out of the pool and into a Japanese garden complete with bonsai. He let us pick mint and the flowers off cactus, and explained how onions grow (I'm still a little confused). And finally he showed us where they grow waterlilies, grapes to make their own wine, and papyrus. To make their own paper? Perhaps someday.

We'd been collecting vegetables and eggs along the way; for a box brimming over with green, they charged us only 5 Euro. We would have felt even guiltier if it wasn't for Sue's gorgeous little red Porsche sitting next to Ian's tractor. An eclectic farm, to be sure.

Dani the Saint

On Thursday, I had my after-school group of thirteen-year-olds discuss what they would do in certain situations to practice conditionals. First, I gave them an article about an American man who deposited a fake check for $95,000 on a whim and, to his surprise, the bank credited him with the money (a true story: you can check it out at http://www.goodthink.com/writing/view_stories.cfm?id=11&page_id=2). Would my students keep the money? There was near-consensus: six of the seven kids there said yes, they would, no question.

We got around the table to Dani, a tall, skinny kid whose hair is the only thing that's out-of-control about him. Whereas the other kids run around, lock each other in and out of places (including the balcony outside our classroom and a nearby refrigerator) and generally go crazy during our breaktimes, Dani always stays seated at the table with hands folded, looking at me with an expression of "Kids, what can you do about 'em?" He's well-behaved, but also well-liked; all the girls wanted Dani on their team last week when we were creating rules for new sports.

When it came to the question of keeping the money, Dani was appalled. "No, I would not keep the money because it does not belong to me! I would not want to be a robber." I told him that technically the money was not the man's, but the bank had made the error in his favor. Dani was immutable in his opinions. He would keep the money under no conditions. I applauded him and moved on to the next question. What would the kids do with this extra money? Their answers showed their confusion about what $95,000 can buy these days.

"I would buy many houses and nice cars!" said Javi, whose sentiments were echoed by Alba and Pedro: nice houses, nice cars, maybe a few islands in the mix (Pedro also thought he might be able to buy his way to the presidency of the United States--"I'm the second Barack Obama!" he assured me). At the other end of the spectrum, Maria asserted, "I would buy a dog;" Nieves agreed. She too would buy a dog for just under 100 grand. Meanwhile, Jose Maria contemplated the question, then said, "I would buy Spiderman." I raised my eyebrows. "No wait, I would buy Spiderman and Superman. And then I would conquer the world."

Again to Dani. "Dani, if you legally had $95,000, what would you buy?" He looked very serious as he replied, "I would study at Oxford." None of this materialist stuff.

We moved on to a game where one person leaves the room and everyone has to come up with a solution to a problem. The person re-enters the room, listens to all the solutions, and then tries to guess what the original problem was. I gave them the problem of being on the sinking Titanic. Dani's response: "I would jump off, then swim behind the rescue boats."

"Why wouldn't you get in a rescue boat, Dani?" I asked.

"Because they would be full of women and children. It's okay, I would get used to the cold water."

To which I pretty much slammed my hand on the table in shock and shouted, "My God, this kid's a saint!" Dani turned bright red, making him look only more like the cherub he is.

Watch how baller my flamenco teacher is:

Okay, so I only took one class from this guy, but check it out:

Antonio "El Pipa" enters around 1:34 and starts rocking it out hardcore around 2:37
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VkJY-D5b54&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCMeVhVDYXI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKtkxloDD2A&feature=related
(All 3 are part of the same performance)

Picnic with the Brits

On Sunday, Patra and I trekked out to the mountainside with about twenty British expats. The expedition had been postponed from February 8th, aka "International Yoga Day" to March 8th, "International Womens' Day." Just as fitting, I suppose. While the men barbecued, a good dozen of us ladies brought out the yoga mats and stretched in the gorgeous Andalusian sun. Though there were a few stares from picnicking Spaniards, we were lucky to escape much notice.

Emma leads us in the triangle pose

Patra and I do the tree pose together

And while we stretch, the men busy themselves with meat

Maggie, on the left in the red sunblock facepaint: my favorite little Brit ever

You say potato

One of the difficulties of teaching British English is that, well, I don't speak it. Sometimes I try to affect a British accent so the kids will understand me better (especially with the letter t in the middle of a word: thirty, Peter, etc), but it often comes off as a ridiculous mockery. For instance, I tried to fancy up the word "computer" and said something akin to "com-PUH-taah!!!" which is recognizable to none (for some reason, I feel the need to say everything more exuberantly when I speak "British"). The English teacher, Lola, was quick to assure me I could use my own accent and tried to copy me, coming out with the sound "com-puh-rur."

I had some difficulty pronouncing foods for my third-graders today. I tried "WAH-tuh!!!" then my own accent--"WAH-der"--and then just had to show them the flash-card for the kids to understand I was talking about water. I thought I was so clever to preempt confusion and say toh-MAH-toh instead of toh-MAY-doh. Then I tried poh-TAH-toh. Ubiquitous confusion. Can you believe it? Potatoes and tomatoes don't rhyme in the UK. Guess that song is lying.