Spain is Strange!

Now that my first semester is coming to a close, I feel I've been here long enough to provide a few credible remarks on some of the stranger aspects of Spain and its inhabitants.

-First of all, dipping cookies in coffee/milk/hot chocolate isn't weird... it's quite delicious, in fact. And it's not just done in Spain. Lots of Americans do it, too. The difference is that Spaniards are much more dependent on dipping-morsels. They simply DO NOT drink these beverages without dipping something in them. Never, since I've been here, have I seen a Spaniard just pick up a cup of coffee and drink it, without a hunk of carbohydrates to go with it. And if they don't happen to have a cookie at hand, a piece of bread, or even a sandwich, appears to do the trick. I'm not kidding. I've seen my roommate break off a piece of her baguette (with pate on it!) and dunk it straight into her hot chocolate for breakfast. I've seen an old man at a cafe let part of his ham sandwich go swimming in his coffee. (Yes, go swimming in his coffee. Not only do people dunk baked goods into beverages, they often completely let them go--they submerge them entirely, allowing disintegration to occur so the beverages take on a disturbingly lumpy texture).

-When finished with one's coffee or tapa or whatever at a cafe/restaurant, it is customary to throw one's napkin on the floor. Maybe this is just an Extremaduran thing because I never noticed it in Granada. But on my first day in Cáceres, my friend Javi suggested going to a restaurant called el Aljibe. When I looked in and saw that paper napkins littered the floor like large, dirty snowflakes, I asked if maybe we could go somewhere else. He assured me that all restaurants have napkins covering the floors--we'd find nowhere better. Sure enough, I soon found out that all restaurants do indeed sport charming memorabilia of former customers... honestly, it's as if they neglect sweeping in order to show off how many customers they've had that day. Although at this point I'm pretty much used to the look of the napkin-covered floors, I still haven't allowed myself to take part in it. I've had too many years of being told littering is wrong to allow my hand to release a used napkin right onto the floor. Besides, it's just as easy to simply leave it on the table...

-Spain is a very uniform country. In terms of food and religion, this is particularly evident. Over 70% of Spaniards are Catholic (although few are actually observant). Everyone eats Spanish food, which is basically just ham cooked in different ways and some seafood thrown in occasionally (and this isn't a problem for Jews and Muslims, since there are none). Besides the occasional Chinese restaurant, there is no variety here--it's all Spanish food. Being a Jew and a vegetarian, I'm quite a rarity (although at this point I can't really call myself a vegetarian since I've not really had a choice but to be lax with my eating habits).  In fact, I don't think many Spaniards even know what Jews or vegetarians are. When I did a presentation on Hanukkah at one of my schools, the teacher explained to the students that Judaism is another sect of Christianity in which you celebrate Hanukkah rather than Christmas. And when I've asked for vegetarian tapas at restaurants, I've been given tapas that just have little bits of ham in them, as if being a vegetarian simply means you eat LESS meat...that little bits of ham here and there don't count.

-Spain is so uniform in its eating habits that even the small details are consistent across families. I've eaten in a fair number of houses, now, and at each one, fruit and yogurt are offered after lunch and dinner. If you have fruit, you cut off the skin using a knife (peeling oranges using your fingers or eating apples without removing the skin warrants very confused looks). For breakfast, nearly everyone eats toast, and many people have it with jam. Jam is always spread with a spoon, never a knife. Eating a meal at around 7pm is not done. Lunch is always served between 2pm and 4pm, and dinner is served between 9pm and 11pm. If you're going to eat between 4pm and 9pm, it should just be a light snack. I normally just eat when I'm hungry, and since I had a small lunch yesterday, I decided to make myself an omelet for dinner at 7pm. My roommates couldn't conceive of what I was doing and asked why I was eating lunch so late. When I told them it was dinner, they looked at me pityingly, the way you look at someone who you believe is insane.

-Maybe if I were from a large Italian family living in New York City this wouldn't strike me as much, but being from a relatively chill Massachusetts family, I'm consistently amazed by how much Spaniards shout and interrupt each other in conversation. "Fatal" (which means just what you think it means) seems to be used every few sentences in typical conversation, making it that much more dramatic still. If you didn't understand what people were saying, you'd think travesties and tragedies were occurring right and left, but in reality, they're often talking about what they plan on buying at the grocery store or about a great aunt who has a cold.

-Handwriting here takes a little getting used to. I have to remind myself that m's often look like w's, p's often look like h's, and 1's (the number) look like upside-down v's. Due to these differences in penmanship, I've marked students down on their writing when really they were correct, and I've incorrectly written down my own residence card number on forms. It's probably for the best that writing by hand is becoming less and less common as technology takes over, because otherwise, handwriting in various countries would soon enough become so different that people wouldn't understand the penmanship of anyone from a country other than their own.

-In stores and restaurants, it is very common for employees to call customers pet names like "guapo/guapa" ("handsome/pretty"), "reina" ("queen"), "cielo" ("heaven"), and "cariño" ("love"). Even in stores, customers might call each other these names. (When waiting on line, for instance, someone might say to someone else, "guapa, it's your turn"). Yet on the streets, a Spaniard will act like he/she is the only one who exists. I can't think of one instance when someone smiled at me on the street--they look everywhere but at me. (I'm excluding instances of annoying men shouting, as these wonderful humans fall into their own, special category). Being from America, where calling strangers affectionate names can be seen as harassment and where people do often acknowledge each other on streets, at least with a smile (depending on the region), the contrast in Spain between behavior in stores and attitudes on streets strikes me as quite odd.

-Apart from these silly pet names, the names themselves here are sometimes quite...interesting, as well. A virgin is associated with each region of Spain, so girls will often have their patron virgin's name. They'll go around with names like "Mountain" ("Montaña") and "High Grace" ("Alta Gracia"). What's stranger still is that a very common boys' name is "José María,' and a very common girls' name is "María José." (They always go by both names together). Aside from how bizarre it is for guys to sport names with "María" in them and for girls to have "José" in their names, in English, this would be "Joseph Mary" and "Mary Joseph." Can you imagine how much a kid would be picked on if he/she had both of Jesus' parents' names? Here, it's perfectly normal, though. Also perfectly normal is naming your child Jesus. We have many of Christ's parents as well as Christ himself walking around here in Spain!

-In Spain, they seem to think it's OK  to have to unlock doors in order to LEAVE. I understand needing to unlock doors to get INTO places, but WHAT is the point of needing to unlock your way OUT of an apartment? The other day, I forgot my keys. I don't need to unlock my way out of my apartment itself, but to get out of my building, I need to use a key. None of my roommates were home, so I was trapped for a good while in the hallway, resulting in me arriving half an hour late to my private class. That was annoying, but if there were a fire it would just be dangerous. No fire alarm would go off (did I mention fire alarms don't exist in Spain?) so by the time I'd notice flames, I'd definitely not have time to locate my keys in order to free myself from the building...not to mention that there are a huge number of smokers in Spain so house fires are a legitimate concern.

Those are my main findings thus far...in ten days I'll be back in America, an EXTREMELY normal country. But once I return to Spain next semester, I'll keep my eyes open for more oddities and hopefully will make a part 2 to this post. My mom is already in Madrid, and I'm meeting her in two days and traveling with her around Madrid and to Barcelona...then we'll head home together, and this strange life I'm living, with these crazy people who throw napkins on floors and use spoons instead of knives, will be temporarily over.

I squeezed in one last mini trip with Caroline over the weekend. We ventured to Salamanca, where we experienced the famous nightlife and saw the famous architecture...but my favorite part of all, I admit, was sleeping in our beautiful, glistening, four-star hotel, which, for some unknown reason, was extremely cheap (cheaper, in fact, than all the hostels). I'd been lacking on sleep all week, and there's nothing like passing out in a pleasant hotel room. That's all for now!

Caroline and me (when we finally made it out of the hotel) with Salamanca's bridge and cathedral in the background!

Pastries and Painful Palaces

I'm back from another little trip...this time to Lisbon! In theory, it's not very far from Cáceres, but since Extremadurans don't seem very interested in having buses that run on a somewhat frequent basis, I spent all day Saturday traveling there. (OK, I'll stop being snobby--I know Spain is in a crisis, and Extremadura is the poorest place in Spain on top of that, so I'll stop complaining that I had to spend slightly longer traveling than I'd want to). I had a four-hour bus layover in Badajoz, which, as I said, isn't ideal, but at least it gave me some time to work on a story I'm writing.

Anyhow, when I finally made it it Lisbon, I met up with Jacob and his friend, Nick (who is now my friend, too, I suppose!) at Goodnight Hostel, which has been rated as 3rd best, 5th best, and 10th best hostel in the world! It's beautifully decorated, always has cheerful music playing, everyone there is super friendly (I made tons of lifetime friends in an instant...well, I probably won't keep in touch with them, but they were nice!) and they make lots of free/cheap food and drinks. I sound like an advertisement right now, but seriously, if you go to Lisbon (which you should--it was rated #1 city to visit in 2013 on tripadvisor, and tripadvisor always knows best!) you should definitely stay there. Jacob and Nick had gotten a lengthy tour earlier that day, so they gave me the abbreviated version ("A lot of history happened here" -Nick) while we roamed around the beautiful but not-so-ancient city (I say "not-so-ancient" because in 1755, as Jacob informed me, an earthquake almost completely destroyed Lisbon and surrounding areas). But at this point, you'd never know the city underwent such trauma or that it's in the midst of a horrible financial crisis. When walking around, all you feel is the energy from swarms of passersby and the swooping, artfully-sculpted Christmas lights that dangle from buildings and make streets glow in every color. The energy continues well into the night. We went on a "pub crawl," accompanied mainly by fellow Goodnight Hostelers. I won't go into it much, but I'll just say that Lisbon is quite a party-city.

No one in America ever seems to talk about Portuguese food, and I'd never been to or even seen a Portuguese restaurant before, but I don't know why that is because the food is superb. The seafood is obviously very fresh, so that's what I always ordered. I think my favorite dish might have been rice with seafood (a slightly soupier version of paella) that I had for lunch on Sunday, but that's followed closely by cod mixed with potato chips and olives made at the hostel Sunday night! Besides eating, Sunday's highlights included visiting the San Jorge Palacio; peering out over the city from various miradores; and going to Belém, where we saw a monastery with magnificent stone carvings, a 16th century formidable tower on the water, and, best of all, ate famous Portuguese Pastéis, which are cream pastries (I know that brings me back to food again, but these were so phenomenal I had to mention them...I can't even begin to describe them, though. Best to just go and see for yourself).

Two Delicious Cream Pastries Lie in Wait!

On Monday, we went to Sintra with two of Jacob's roommates. We drove endlessly up a very steep hill until we made it to the top, where we explored a very colorful, 19th century Candyland/Guadí-esque palace called Palacio de la Pena, which means "Palace of Pain." Luckily, none of the pain rubbed off on me...it was quite a pleasant experience roaming around the many little towers and passageways, in fact. The four of them departed shortly after, leaving me to kill time in a wonderful aquarium until my bus arrived. There I had the joy of being surrounded by swirling invertebrates, hermaphroditic sharks, sharks who eat their siblings in the womb, lounging sea otters, fish that disguise themselves to look like sand, and swarms of pimply Portuguese boys who enjoy pestering girls who are eight years their elder.

Palacio de la Pena

Now I'm back to Cáceres life, hanging out with my lovely, British Caroline and her swell roommates (who I talk to much more than my own roommates); desperately trying to find food that doesn't contain preservatives at the grocery stores (Spaniards don't seem to be very health-conscious); trying (probably unsuccessfully) to explain the difference between "a" and "an" to unruly first graders; and in my private classes acting out skits about going to the beach and eating tiger meat.