Dinner Last Night

My friend Sam considers all foods that are not white to be "creepy". So I know she will really appreciate this. 

Ingredients:

Boiled potatoes
Hard boiled eggs
Green olives
Artichoke hearts
Pickled asparagus
Canned pepper
Tuna fish

Put that all in a bowl and drown with 2-3 cups of mayonnaise.

Que bueno!

P.S. I was exaggerating a little bit, Sam also eats hamburgers

Flamenco

I went to a Flamenco dancing performance with some of the other au pairs. It was very fun, they did a little ballet and it was similar to river dancing and tap. Most of the male dancers were the Patrick Swayze type but there was one, who both Rebecca and I thought looked like McLovin, who stole the show. He was smaller than everyone else but he made up for it by making every twirl and kick extra spicy. He also wiggled his eyebrows, winked and puckered his lips at the audience through the whole show. Unfortunately I had to sneak pictures and could not get our Latin McLovin from a good angle :(

100 MONTADITOS

100 Montaditos is a restaurant that offers a menu of 100 different sandwiches. This sounds great except that I think they ran out of ideas somewhere in the high seventies. This is the chocolate sandwich. If you can call it that. It is a Hershey bar in a mini loaf of French bread. On Wednesdays they have a deal where if you buy a sangria for a euro you can get any sandwich for a euro. Naturally it is chaos so they have a bouncer mind the door. It is very difficult to get tables so once you have one you don't leave it, no matter what. Today we arrived early 12:30 pm and stayed until almost 6:00. We took turns walking around the block to get leg circulation.

My Bus Ride to Motril

I forgot to write about this, I took the bus to Motril last week. Two seats up and one seat over there was a couple who made out aggressively for the whole 6 hours. Not an exaggeration either, I knew they were still going at it because I herd them the whole way. Very loud kissers. I felt so bad for the poor fellows who picked the seats directly behind them. Had I been even a seat closer I would have more seriously considered if I could translate "get a room" properly.

Luckily, the man I sat next to was very interesting. His name was Alberto, he grew up all over the world, he has lived in Buenos Aries, Cairo, Boston, Madrid and a few others I cannot remember. He took a road trip from Boston Massachusetts to Peru in a VW van. Right now he is a film maker. He is working on a documentary about a Sikh Indian population trying to immigrate to Spain but are somehow now living in a forest in North Africa. As you can tell I struggled to follow all of the details. The picture I took looks quite miserable but the drive was actually quite pretty through the Sierra Nevada mountains.

El Sur

I spent this past week in the province of Granada on the coast with my family. We stayed in their summer home with Leticia, Gustavo, Alejandro, Leticia's parents, her older brother Francisco (Tito Paco) the P.E. teacher/discoteca bouncer, her younger brother (Tito Luis) and his very pregnant wife Sylvia. We visited a different beach everyday and spent time with her mother's five siblings, their children, and their children's children. Alex preferred to play with his cousins; I hate to admit it but it is a bit hard on your self esteem when a six year does not want to play with you, so I just read my book on the beach. I had a lovely time. I very much like the south of Spain. People are terribly nice. However they are completely impossible to understand. They basically slur the last half of every word. Especially if it ends in "s". "Adios" become "adiyo-" and "vamonos" becomes "vamoneh.." To me it sounds like Spanish with a swollen tongue and a lisp.

Alejandro's second cousin once removed, Daniela and me at a restaurant in Cabria Beach

“"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best -- " and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called”

-Winnie the Pooh

Accents

When I first arrived here my family told me I spoke Spanish with partially an American accent and partially with a Mexican accent. Which is very amusing to me :) Since, I have been working on my Castilian lisp. It is not on every "s" sound. Only the "c" and the "z". "Gracias" is pronounced  GRAH-thee-ahs. I have the tendency to lisp every "s" sound anyways. The Spanish are fairly arrogant about their accent as well. When I pronounce c's and z's the way I was taught in school, I am told I am speaking incorrectly. Which always suprises me a little bit. I do not consider different accents wrong. No one would ever tell someone they pronouced something wrong in English just because they used a British accent.

A favorite dinner game with the family and all aunts and uncles is called Kate says something really fast in English and everyone else guesses what it is. If no one can get it, the game turns into Kate says something really fast with a British accent and everyone else guesses what it is. Just as I have learned Spanish from the Americas they have learned European English. It is sometimes easier for them to understand me with an English accent. Fortunately, my Spanish family can't tell how bad my accent is, but in restaurants and other public places I always look around first to make sure there are no English speakers because I know I sound ridiculous. One time we tried to play Everybody say something really fast in Spanish and Kate guesses what it is, but it was not really that fun.

Hacer Cookies

The difficult part about converting an English recipe into metric units is that we measure in volume and everyone else measures by weight. And the destiny of sugar is not common knowledge.

How to make chocolate chip cookies in Spain:

Preheat oven to 176.6 degrees celsius. (tip. Remove pans and dishes from oven before hand, remember you are in a very small European kitchen, the oven doubles as storage.)

240g butter, softened
100g granulated sugar
260g brown sugar
2 eggs
12.5 mL vanilla extract

300 g flour
A little less than a small spoonful of salt
A small spoonful of baking powder
A small spoonful of baking soda

Chocolate chips

Brown sugar here has the consistency of kosher salt. So I suggest grinding it for about 20 seconds in your awesome multiple purpose European food-processor-blender-machine. Mix wet ingredients and sugar. If you do not have a bowl big enough sauce pans work fine. Mix dry ingredients in separate bowl. Note that here baking soda is sold in a box with two different packets inside. One is sodium bicarbonate what we think of as normal baking soda and the other is very acidic and I think comparable to cream of tartar. DO NOT put the acidic one it your cookies. They will taste awful and you will be forced to throw them out (which I did yesterday).

Place on cookie sheet and bake for about 9 min.

Thank goodness we all use the same units for time right?! What a nightmare.

McSpain

There are telephone booths on the sidewalks in Madrid that advertise McDonalds. Arrows point in the direction of the closest location with the amount of time it takes to walk there. My friends Sasha has been convinced for two months that the main function of these telephones is to preorder your food from a block away, and then walk to pick it up. She has been telling her parents in Toronto all about them. Also the McPollo is a very popular menu item. No one else thinks these direct translations are as funny as I do. McPollo... Get out of here! That's hilarious!

Donni Q

My host family took me to the town Valladolid, we watched a Catholic procession and saw one of the oldest universities in Spain, it was established some time within the 13th century. The village was also home to Miguel de Cervantes, author of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. In the picture above I am sitting in front of La Casa de Cervantes with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the two main characters. This author was the first to use such phrases as "a wild-goose chase" and "the sky's the limit." I am really hoping to read a book in Spanish this summer. Reading One hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish along side the English version was overly ambitious on my part. What I really need is the Spanish equivalent of a Magic Tree House book.

Ella es mi novia

Last weekend I met up with about a dozen other au pairs living in Madrid. There were some from the U.S., England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Poland, France, and Slovakia. We all went to the Madrid Gay Pride Festival, there were outdoor concerts and people dancing in the streets all night. In the picture we are sitting at the edge of the fountain in Plaza de España. Sasha my Canadian friend and I held hands all night hoping we could convince people we were girlfriends. None of the girls seemed to believe we were really lesbians but we were convincing enough that we did not get attention from the strait guys, which was a nice break. Men in Spain are not shy and do not lack self confidence. If they ask you if you want to dance or if you would like a drink and you say no they immediately demand to know why. "Am I not handsome enough? ...Tell me I am handsome". Maybe this is just me, but the moments following rejection seem a little early to be fishing for compliments.

Take a left at the pineapple

On Wednesday my Scottish au pair friend Beth and I ventured to Buitrago del Lozoya to find the closest natural water feature in the greater Madrid area. Beth discovered the river by typing "water near Madrid" into Google and found information on yahoo answers. It said there was a river about an hour and a half North of the city... swimming in the river was not exactly encouraged but the local government did not care, however they did advise avoiding run ins with the Gaurdia Civil. As temperatures crept into the hundreds Beth and I decided to take our chances. We asked around town for directions to get down to the river to swim. People were not very helpful and usually directed us to the town pool. One man was very nice and did give us very specific directions to the river. He said to go strait down this road and then take a left at the pineapple (Beth heard "handstand" so clearly we both need to work on our Spanish a little more). We eventually snuck through someones backyard and traversed our way down to the river. We got to swim under a 14th century castle. When we got back to shore we found that we must have dropped our bags and lunches somewhere near an ant hill. I was mostly disappointed that they had got into my bacon-queso flavored bugles (my new favorite Spanish food). The ant infestation had somewhat spoiled our picnic plans so we headed back into town for some sangria. As we were leaving it started to hail mento sized chunks of ice. The temperatures dropped to 50 degrees and within moments we were soaking wet and freezing. We found refuge under a bus shelter. And no worries neither of us were seriously injured by the hail, though there were several that hit me in the eye. On the way home it was coming down so hard all the cars had to pull to the side of the road because you could not see through the windshield. After a full day of swimming, ants, and highly unusual precipitation we returned to an unbearably hot Madrid.

Forest Fruits

The Spanish word for berry is frutas del bosque. This translates directly as fruits of the forest. The other night we enjoyed some delicious forest fruit ice cream. I have no idea why it is so funny to me but I laugh uncontrollably every time I see the carton.