with the shopkeeper at the bookstore in my barrio (I went to buy 100 años de soledad today):
Do you live here?
Yes, near avenida de la albufera
You don´t live in Andalucia or somewhere outside of Madrid?
No, I live here. But I´m sad because I´m leaving soon, at the end of December.
Where are you going?
United States. (note: at this point it should be obvious that I´m a foreigner)
Are you going there to learn english?
(haha)...yes.
Well, you appreciate things more once you´ve left. Do you think you know enough english to get by there?
yeah, I think so. Enough to order a beer at least.
Great!
28 November 2007
22 November 2007
Tortilla-fest 2007
A true account of a conversation between Belén (my señora) and I:
So this is like our family dinner for Thanksgiving, right? You have to tell me the story behind this holiday. What is it that you´re celebrating? Independence?
No, not independence. Basically we´re celebrating the arrival of the pilgrims to the United States and the story goes that they shared a big dinner with the natives to celebrate the harvest.
(Pause.) Before they killed them all? Didn´t they fight them off later?
...Yes. We just celebrate the eating part, though.
------------
Tortilla Española
Manera de hacerla: Slice potatoes and put in a frying pan with about two fingers worth of oil and fry. While potatoes cook, cut onion. After five minutes of potato-cooking, add onion. While potato and onion fry, beat eggs well. Very well. Make music, muy fuerte. After ten minutes more minutes in pan, remove potatoes and onions and add to egg. Do not add oil. Clean pan, mix up egg, potatoes, and onion. Put mixture in fying pan on low heat and cook. When the liquid becomes solid-ish, flip entire tortilla using either a plate or the lid of the pan. Do so fearlessly so as to not spill tortilla everywhere. Finish cooking other side. Refill wine glass.
Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
So this is like our family dinner for Thanksgiving, right? You have to tell me the story behind this holiday. What is it that you´re celebrating? Independence?
No, not independence. Basically we´re celebrating the arrival of the pilgrims to the United States and the story goes that they shared a big dinner with the natives to celebrate the harvest.
(Pause.) Before they killed them all? Didn´t they fight them off later?
...Yes. We just celebrate the eating part, though.
------------
Thanksgiving.
Sopa Tortilla Mexicana
Manera de hacerla: Here is the tricky part--find the ingredients. Be sure to specify that when you say ¨frozen corn¨you mean corn off the cob and then when you say ¨cumin¨you specify that you need the powder, not the whole grain. Find a bodega somewhere to buy the tortillas, which will be rediculously over-priced, becuase they´re kind of an import. Boil roasted chicken to make stock. Drink a glass of wine. When the glass is empty, the chicken stock should be done. Remove bones, fat, add all other ingredients (put in a Spanish-sized amount of chile powder--which means go easy on the spice). While soup simmers, turn your attention to the lesson in Spanish tortilla making.Tortilla Española
Manera de hacerla: Slice potatoes and put in a frying pan with about two fingers worth of oil and fry. While potatoes cook, cut onion. After five minutes of potato-cooking, add onion. While potato and onion fry, beat eggs well. Very well. Make music, muy fuerte. After ten minutes more minutes in pan, remove potatoes and onions and add to egg. Do not add oil. Clean pan, mix up egg, potatoes, and onion. Put mixture in fying pan on low heat and cook. When the liquid becomes solid-ish, flip entire tortilla using either a plate or the lid of the pan. Do so fearlessly so as to not spill tortilla everywhere. Finish cooking other side. Refill wine glass.
Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
20 November 2007
A crash course in socialized medicine
I rode in the back of a police car! I´ll explain.
A group of us went out Friday night, and on one of our walks from place to place, we encountered a sculpture of a tree that was absolutely begging for a group picture. So we climbed all over it (this is not the part where the police show up) and gathered around for a few shots and then were on our merry way. Merry kind of. As one of my friends was jumping down from the thing, her ring caught on the sculpture...and you can imagine what happened to her finger. Amazing, how an emergency situation was a better test of Spanish than anything we´ve had in school so far...
The emergency response was really good. I flagged down some Spaniards nearby who called the emergency number and helped us talked to the (four cars of) police that arrived quickly, then waited around until they got her in an ambulance. Since they wouldn't let me ride in the ambulance with her, I got to ride in the back of a cop car for the first time in my life. (A side note on cop cars--the back seats are hard, hard plastic and really uncomfortable. You do not want to ride in one.) They took us to the nearest public hospital.
Lesson number one: real doctors do not work on the weekends in Spain. That is rest time, not surgery time. There are nurses, interns, care aids, on duty, but no doctors.
So at this first hospital they put a temporary fix on the finger while they called around to find (a) a hospital with a specialist and (b) a hospital with a specialist on duty. Also, about 10 extra people came in and out of the room to glance at this rare injury that my friend had. I translated back and forth, mostly cuss words. They also kept telling us that we should have been at the hospital near where Joanna lives, which was on the other side of the city, but that they didn´t know if there was a specialist there. Eventually, they found a hospital that could help us.
Lesson number two: find your own way to the hospital.
They handed me the paperwork work and said ¨ok, go to Hospital de la Paz.¨ Right, and where is that? How do I get there? They looked at me like I was an idiot. ¨Take a taxi.¨ And if she faints in the taxi? If she starts bleeding again? My lifeguard certification is expired, people, I don´t remember what to do in this situation!!
Finally, we took a taxi to the other Hospital (with no medical emergencies), where they were waiting for us and we had no problem getting in. I hung around, translating, calling parents, making sure everything was ok, until 6 when the metros opened and I could go home and rest a bit. They told me they´d have to wait until morning (and by morning, they meant before 3 PM--Spanish morning) to do any surgery (see lesson number one).
Lesson number three: hospital visits. Only two at a time and they mean it.
First, we had to procure our visitors cards, which have barcodes on them. The barcodes are for scanning at the entrance to the wards, where you pass through a turnstyle, very much like riding the metro except that it´s to visit your loved one in the hospital. It counts how many times the code has been scanned and there are guards. You have to scan the card again to get back out so that someone else can use the code to get in.
Lesson number four: When they say floor 1, keep in mind that there are six floor 1´s.
But, once you figure it out, there is a very easy system of colored arrows directing you to the correct ward, so that you can get to the correct floor. On our first try, Andy and I ended up in cardiology in a room full of old men. Wrong first floor.
All that said, the system is complicated but the care is pretty good (except for that whole doctors really not working on weekends thing), according to most of the people that I've talked to. And it´s free for everyone in Spain. There are private hospitals here, for people who want to pay for them, but the public hospitals do just fine.
And one more thing...the siesta still reigns. According to my friend, they observe the rest time in the afternoon better than they do 2 AM.
A group of us went out Friday night, and on one of our walks from place to place, we encountered a sculpture of a tree that was absolutely begging for a group picture. So we climbed all over it (this is not the part where the police show up) and gathered around for a few shots and then were on our merry way. Merry kind of. As one of my friends was jumping down from the thing, her ring caught on the sculpture...and you can imagine what happened to her finger. Amazing, how an emergency situation was a better test of Spanish than anything we´ve had in school so far...
The emergency response was really good. I flagged down some Spaniards nearby who called the emergency number and helped us talked to the (four cars of) police that arrived quickly, then waited around until they got her in an ambulance. Since they wouldn't let me ride in the ambulance with her, I got to ride in the back of a cop car for the first time in my life. (A side note on cop cars--the back seats are hard, hard plastic and really uncomfortable. You do not want to ride in one.) They took us to the nearest public hospital.
Lesson number one: real doctors do not work on the weekends in Spain. That is rest time, not surgery time. There are nurses, interns, care aids, on duty, but no doctors.
So at this first hospital they put a temporary fix on the finger while they called around to find (a) a hospital with a specialist and (b) a hospital with a specialist on duty. Also, about 10 extra people came in and out of the room to glance at this rare injury that my friend had. I translated back and forth, mostly cuss words. They also kept telling us that we should have been at the hospital near where Joanna lives, which was on the other side of the city, but that they didn´t know if there was a specialist there. Eventually, they found a hospital that could help us.
Lesson number two: find your own way to the hospital.
They handed me the paperwork work and said ¨ok, go to Hospital de la Paz.¨ Right, and where is that? How do I get there? They looked at me like I was an idiot. ¨Take a taxi.¨ And if she faints in the taxi? If she starts bleeding again? My lifeguard certification is expired, people, I don´t remember what to do in this situation!!
Finally, we took a taxi to the other Hospital (with no medical emergencies), where they were waiting for us and we had no problem getting in. I hung around, translating, calling parents, making sure everything was ok, until 6 when the metros opened and I could go home and rest a bit. They told me they´d have to wait until morning (and by morning, they meant before 3 PM--Spanish morning) to do any surgery (see lesson number one).
Lesson number three: hospital visits. Only two at a time and they mean it.
First, we had to procure our visitors cards, which have barcodes on them. The barcodes are for scanning at the entrance to the wards, where you pass through a turnstyle, very much like riding the metro except that it´s to visit your loved one in the hospital. It counts how many times the code has been scanned and there are guards. You have to scan the card again to get back out so that someone else can use the code to get in.
Lesson number four: When they say floor 1, keep in mind that there are six floor 1´s.
But, once you figure it out, there is a very easy system of colored arrows directing you to the correct ward, so that you can get to the correct floor. On our first try, Andy and I ended up in cardiology in a room full of old men. Wrong first floor.
All that said, the system is complicated but the care is pretty good (except for that whole doctors really not working on weekends thing), according to most of the people that I've talked to. And it´s free for everyone in Spain. There are private hospitals here, for people who want to pay for them, but the public hospitals do just fine.
And one more thing...the siesta still reigns. According to my friend, they observe the rest time in the afternoon better than they do 2 AM.
16 November 2007
Yes, the Parisians do walk around with baguettes in hand.
Paris was wonderful, better than anyone could have planned it. Beautiful in its late-1800s leaf-covered streets. Even the cemeteries were gorgeous.
We arrived Friday night and walked the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triumph, then walked back to our hostel (about an hour when you factor in getting lost and taking picture time). Saturday was the the Louvre, lunch on the Seine (and by lunch I mean bread and cheese and apples), a look at the Eiffel tower, Notre Dame, an amazing dinner at this tiny restaurant at the bottom of some stairs by our hostel, and coffee and crepes at the Place de Clichy, which Van Gogh painted when it wasn´t all neon lights and traffic. Sunday was the Pere Lachaise Cemetery (for Jim Morrison´s grave), and long walk to Luxembourg park, hot chocolate while we let the rain die down a little, another long walk to the Eiffel tower, and then a climb to the top to look at the lights of Paris. We made dinner at the hostel. All in all, by doing the free breakfast at the hostel, bread and cheese lunches, and walking instead of riding the metro, we probably spent 70€ each in Paris. Hooray budget student travel!
Apparently, though, Paris was too perfect. Monday was a fiasco. Ryan Air, our airline, has an airport outside of the city, which means we had to take a bus to the place before we could check in. We arrived at the bus station two hours before our flight, which would have given us just enough time to check in, get through security, etc. Thanks to the bus not leaving the station until thirty minutes later, we missed our check in time by fifteen minutes, leaving us stranded in the airport unable to get on our plane, which hadn´t boarded yet and was sitting right outside the window where we could all see it. Ryanair, you weasel. So we pay to change our flight to Barcelona (hey, at least we´d be in Spain by then). We arrive in Barcelona and buy bus tickets online to Madrid (we used the computers at ISA, who also has programs in Barcelona). We pick the tickets for 4:30, I swear I watch Teresa press the button for 4:30. After we get to the station, get our tickets printed, and are waiting for the bus, Teresa looks at her ticket and says ¨mine says 3:30. Why does mine say 3:30? It´s 4:15.¨ We panic and I go upstairs to argue with the people at the ticket window about how they printed us the wrong tickets and then handed them to us without mentioning that we´d already missed the bus. We end up buying more tickets for the one we already bought tickets for, then running on to that bus as it was almost done boarding by the time we bought our replacement tickets.
Seven and half hours later, we were home in Madrid, only 14 hours later than our planned arrival. ¡Que horror! as Belén said when I recounted the story to her.
But when you look at it a different way, maybe missing our flight only added to the cosmopolitan nature of the trip. So, yeah, all the money we saved by being cheap students went towards getting home on Monday. But we woke up in Paris, ate lunch in Barcelona, and slept in Madrid. Can you beat that?
We arrived Friday night and walked the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triumph, then walked back to our hostel (about an hour when you factor in getting lost and taking picture time). Saturday was the the Louvre, lunch on the Seine (and by lunch I mean bread and cheese and apples), a look at the Eiffel tower, Notre Dame, an amazing dinner at this tiny restaurant at the bottom of some stairs by our hostel, and coffee and crepes at the Place de Clichy, which Van Gogh painted when it wasn´t all neon lights and traffic. Sunday was the Pere Lachaise Cemetery (for Jim Morrison´s grave), and long walk to Luxembourg park, hot chocolate while we let the rain die down a little, another long walk to the Eiffel tower, and then a climb to the top to look at the lights of Paris. We made dinner at the hostel. All in all, by doing the free breakfast at the hostel, bread and cheese lunches, and walking instead of riding the metro, we probably spent 70€ each in Paris. Hooray budget student travel!
Apparently, though, Paris was too perfect. Monday was a fiasco. Ryan Air, our airline, has an airport outside of the city, which means we had to take a bus to the place before we could check in. We arrived at the bus station two hours before our flight, which would have given us just enough time to check in, get through security, etc. Thanks to the bus not leaving the station until thirty minutes later, we missed our check in time by fifteen minutes, leaving us stranded in the airport unable to get on our plane, which hadn´t boarded yet and was sitting right outside the window where we could all see it. Ryanair, you weasel. So we pay to change our flight to Barcelona (hey, at least we´d be in Spain by then). We arrive in Barcelona and buy bus tickets online to Madrid (we used the computers at ISA, who also has programs in Barcelona). We pick the tickets for 4:30, I swear I watch Teresa press the button for 4:30. After we get to the station, get our tickets printed, and are waiting for the bus, Teresa looks at her ticket and says ¨mine says 3:30. Why does mine say 3:30? It´s 4:15.¨ We panic and I go upstairs to argue with the people at the ticket window about how they printed us the wrong tickets and then handed them to us without mentioning that we´d already missed the bus. We end up buying more tickets for the one we already bought tickets for, then running on to that bus as it was almost done boarding by the time we bought our replacement tickets.
Seven and half hours later, we were home in Madrid, only 14 hours later than our planned arrival. ¡Que horror! as Belén said when I recounted the story to her.
But when you look at it a different way, maybe missing our flight only added to the cosmopolitan nature of the trip. So, yeah, all the money we saved by being cheap students went towards getting home on Monday. But we woke up in Paris, ate lunch in Barcelona, and slept in Madrid. Can you beat that?
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