La Vie Quotidienne

La Vie Quotidienne

If you think that my other essays are stupor-inducingly boring, wait until you read this one about day-to-day concerns of life for an American in a Spanish city.

Adiós, Bloodsuckers

I can’t speak for all of Europe, but I know that apartments on the Mediterranean don’t have screens in the windows. This was the case in my beautiful apartment in Greece where I lived a long time ago. About this time of year the mosquitoes come looking for you while you are sleeping. It is remarkable how they happen to find me up here on the fifth floor, and how they crawl underneath my blinds which are pulled down to only a couple of inches off the floor, but they do. They aren’t a problem during the day or when I am up and awake at night. They wait until about 3 in the morning before they fly in and attack my arms and buzz in my ears.

I also remembered from all those years ago in Greece that there is an easy and inexpensive remedy. Back in Greece I had this tiny electric gizmo that plugs into a socket and slowly burns a tablet of insecticide. I found the same thing at my local supermarket for something like 3€. This one uses either the little tablets or burns a little reservoir bottle of fluid. I used it last night for the first time and it was a resounding success. I am using the reservoir bottle which claims to last 45 days. I’m good until July. This may not sound like such a big deal to anyone who has screens on their windows and who doesn’t have mosquitoes buzzing in their ears at 4 a.m.

Feast or Famine

I love to cook but I despise cooking for one person. I kid my Spanish roommate that whenever I prepare a meal I do it for my entire extended family, none of whom are living in Spain at the time. I would love to cook for ten people every day, but cooking for only me is not very interesting. I end up cooking such huge portions that I am forced to eat the leftovers for two or three days, or I just throw them out.

You can’t even order paella in a restaurant for only one person so cooking a single portion is out of the question. A pan for making paella is called a paella and not a paellera as my Valencian friends have pointed out. A paellera is the person making the dish and not the pan itself. This is a mistake non-Valencian Spaniards make that pisses off the locals. Anyway, my paella pan is big enough to serve five or six people. They make smaller pans but paella is so much trouble to make that it seems stupid not to make a lot of it.

I cook enough beans that I could eat them morning, noon, and night. Once again, beans take a while to cook and it seems silly to make a small portion. This means that I almost always have a bunch of lentils, black beans, pintos, kidneys, or habadas in the fridge at any given time.

I hate shopping except when it comes to food. I buy compulsively; I stock up on kilos of tomatoes if they look good; I buy meat in bulk from my butcher; I load up on olives like they are going to stop making them sometime soon; I have stuff in my freezer I can’t even remember buying just because I must have thought that it looked cool. I can’t help myself.

I am forced into eating things against my will because I have ticking time bombs about to go off in the form of over-ripe tomatoes, yogurt expiration dates, and Tupperware containers full of two day old paella. I feel like a little kid who is being punished for pelting someone with a tomato by being forced to eat a kilo of tomatoes. I feel like a contestant in the State Fair lentil eating contest, and all of this while I am trying to get lean for the beach. I know that the header to this section was “Feast or Famine,” but I’m no good at the famine part.

The solution is to get my stateside friends to come over for a visit to help me eat all of this damn food that I can’t keep from buying and cooking, either that or marry a Spanish widow with about eight kids. I would consider that option if she had a cool dog.

It’s funny but I don’t seem to need any help consuming all of the booze that I buy—also enough for a family of ten.

My Two Cents (Currently 1.47 euro pennies and falling)

Or
Is There Any Good News from the Bush Administration?

I read in a Spanish economic journal an opinion that the dollar will make a 20% gain against the euro. The dollar has been sliding against the euro for the past several years and has been tanking pretty good since I arrived over six months ago. I certainly would not expect a 20% gain any time soon. The U.S. economy is being crippled by the Iraq War and Bush is digging a hole that we won’t escape from any time soon. This is worse than Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts (some of which he was smart enough to repeal, unlike Bush’s tax giveaway for the richest Americans) coupled with a heavy increase in defense spending. The Reagan crisis wasn’t rectified until Bill Clinton took office and was able to balance the budget almost ten years after Reagan left the White House.

I don’t think that America has even begun to see the ill effects of George W, Bush’s completely irresponsible fiscal policy, irresponsible for everyone except those profiting from the war and, of course, the oil industry. Business is always good for the oil industry, especially when administration after administration refuses to acknowledge that we even have an energy problem in the U.S. and citizens don’t even bat an eye when gas prices spike upwards of a dollar or more over a couple of months. According to Republican thinking, people are supposed to scream bloody murder when taxes are raised to provide more government services for citizens, yet when gas prices gouge a family’s budget so that Exxon can reap $36.2 billion in profits last year, we are supposed to sit back and admire the marvelous ways of the free market.

I think that $4 a gallon would be the best thing imaginable for the American economy. Higher fuel prices would more accurately show the true cost of petroleum which would steer our economy towards fuel efficiency. This has been the case in Europe for years as you can quickly see by the efficient cars they are forced to drive and the mass transit systems already in place. Higher taxes on gas would channel our economy towards efficiency and we could use the revenue to speed along the process. The tax now is being collected by the oil companies. They use their gains to buy second and third homes around the world, private jets, and for propaganda to poison the minds of Americans against alternative energy and the ills of pollution. Show me a “scientist” who opposes the consensus view on global warming, and I’ll show you someone who receives regular checks for the oil industry. They use the profits they gain from us to pollute not only our environment, but our minds if we allow them.

I made a bet with a friend a few months ago. He said that gasoline would drop to $1.50 a gallon before it inched back up to $3 a gallon. He lost that bet. Higher gas prices have an effect on just about every aspect of the American economy because we have done absolutely nothing in the last 30 years to do anything that would change our complete dependence on oil, imported or otherwise. Higher fuel prices coupled with our growing national debt due to the war probably means that the dollar won’t soon be making any gains against the euro.

I would like nothing better than to be wrong about my predictions for a continued weak dollar, I have a lot at stake in the matter as an American living in Europe on American currency. I would say that the dollar has fallen about as far as it can for now against the euro, but this doesn’t mean that it has to go up. I predict a less than 5% adjustment, either up or down, for the next year. I hope that I am wrong.

Dogs and Cats Living in Sin

Dogs and Cats Living in Sin

I pass by some sort of abandoned house on one of my bike rides down along the beach. I usually just speed by it but today I rolled into the driveway to check it out. I was immediately surrounded by four or five small dogs all yapping away like their territory depended on it. There were also lots of straggly stray cats living there. You know what dogs say about screwing a cat, “It’s fun until your friends catch you doing it.” They didn’t stop barking until I started peeing over everything and then they just sort of slinked away in shame.

Now maybe this inter-species orgy doesn’t go against the teachings of whatever church you signed on with, but steamy dog-on-cat action certainly violates everything that I hold sacred in evolutionary biology. Cat-on-dog action is just unspeakably unwholesome—even on the internet. There’s a new sheriff in town, fellas. No more unnatural acts. I’ll be checking in from time to time.

La Ciudad y Los Perros

I would be neglecting my duties in the chronicling of Spanish life if I didn’t write something about how much people here love their pooches. I happen to like dogs a lot so I don’t mind all of the negative aspects of sharing a dense urban environment with man’s best friends. Some of you may be asking, “Dogs have a down side?” I’m trying to keep this upbeat and positive so I’ll limit my answer to one word: sometimes.

I realize that “sometimes” is a little vague but it usually means early in the morning, when I’m sleeping, or at least I was sleeping, you yapping little dust mop, wherever you are. Lucky for you I’m too hung over to get out of bed and come looking for you. Lucky for you firearms are not as readily available as they are in my homeland. I try to return to my dream where I was hitting a very small dog with a very large board with a nail sticking out of it. Nice doggy, now hold still. While I’m fantasizing I may as well use the same length of board to hit the workmen below who begin drilling promptly at 7:30 a.m. and then go for morning beers at 7:55 and don’t get back until noon. Maybe when I’m finished hitting them (I suggest getting comfortable, this could take a while) they can build me a nice bookshelf out of my weapon.

True story: Today I walked by the little café that shares the same courtyard as my building. It was 10:25 in the morning and already there was a table with an empty bottle of wine and several beer bottles. But today we are talking about dogs, not eager-beaver workmen who begin work in earnest at 7:30 a.m., complete with plenty of extremely loud power tools along with their own repertoire of vulgar throat-clearing noises, only to work long enough to wake me up completely, and then they head off to get their morning drink on. They deserve their own essay—or shooting spree.

I would guess that at least one quarter of the households in Valencia include a dog among their occupants. Most of the people with dogs have smaller ones, the kind that you probably can’t rely upon to go for help if you are ever trapped in an abandoned mine. In fact, most of the dogs here have more in common with hamsters than they do with Lassie or Old Yeller. Just as most people here choose to drive small cars, they also prefer smaller dogs, and for the same reason: better fuel economy.

Unfortunately, I live in a Spanish household with no dog, big or small. As much as I love the pooches, I’ve never had one of my own. Dogs take up too much of my baggage allowance when I travel. Most of the people I have met so far in Valencia are also dog-less. If I ever take out a personal ad on a Spanish dating site mine will explain that my most stringent requirement for a woman is that she own a cool dog. Dating a woman with a cool dog always sucks, too. When you break up you end up missing the dog as much as the owner. I have never missed an ex’s cat.

The dogs here all seem to be very 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 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. I’m not sure if that is true or not but it should be. If dogs aren’t allowed in churches this might explain why nobody here goes any more. I guess the Catholic god is more of the cat-loving type of superior being.

I guess that you could say that dogs have a privileged place in Spanish society, sort of like movie stars have in American society except without the drug rehab and DUI arrests. Dogs don't have any issues that can't be remedied with a rolled up magazine. Even considering all of the crap and barking, I think Spanish dogs are a lot better behaved than American celebrities. The subjects of American tabloids leave a bigger mess in their wake than any Spanish chihuahua, and just try cleaning up Paris Hilton's latest social dump with nothing but a plastic shopping bag wrapped around your hand.

As much as I love dogs, even I have to say that they tend to get a little messy here in Valencia where not everyone feels obliged to pick up after their little one. This wouldn’t be so bad except they don’t have the dog poop clean-up brigades like they do in Paris where squadrons of motorcycles patrol the city vacuuming up dog crap. No kidding. There are cleaning crews that scour each neighborhood but they can’t keep up with the prolific output of so many canines. More and more people are taking it upon themselves to clean up after their dogs but I think the education process could use a little push from the government.

For this I have volunteered my services as a writer. I will donate my creative talents to make Valencia completely free of dog poop through a series of public services announcements on television. In one ad a very small woman walks her very small dog down the street. The dog stops to do his business and while the woman is distracted while talking to someone on the street, a very large man does his business on her very small dog. In another ad a group of children are joyously playing on the sidewalk when one of them steps in a fresh pile. In slow motion the child runs in horror down the street. We freeze-frame to show the child’s anguish, copying the famous Viet Nam War photograph of the child hit with napalm. I have many more ideas but this would be a good start.

Books and Movies

I have been a big fan of Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa for a long time. He has always been my favorite Latin American writer and now that my Spanish is a lot better he may top the list of all-time favorite contemporary writers. He has been fairly prolific and I sort of got too far behind in my reading to keep up with him. I plan on catching up while I am living in Spain. While I'm at it I will probably reread the books I have already read.

I am currently reading his latest novel published in 2006. He was born in 1936 so he is getting up there. I have breezed through the first 90 pages of Travesuras de la Niña Mala and I think that, so far, it is one of his best novels. The story parallels the author’s own life from his youth and early adulthood in Lima, Peru and then on to Paris where he worked as a translator. It is great to see that one of my literary heroes has improved with age. His descriptions of life in Lima during his childhood are sharper and more revealing than those of his earlier novels.

I have set a goal of reading at least 40 pages a day in Spanish, not including newspapers and magazines. Reading is the best way for me to learn new vocabulary and reinforce words I have already learned. I get a special sort of pleasure out of looking up a word I don’t know and then coming across the same word in a different context the next day. When that happens I usually have that word locked into my memory.

Just about everything I do inside the confines of the Spanish language I am able to write off as “educational.” I can watch a movie that may be a complete piece of shit and feel good about it because it is helping my aural comprehension. I think that I mentioned before how I was reading translations of a couple of spy novels that I had read in English years and years ago. I picked up a lot of great vocabulary from them.

I don’t learn many new words from watching movies in Spanish; I just reinforce words that I already know as well as strengthen my listening skills. Most of the television is pretty crappy here so I stick mostly to movies for this exercise. I have seen a lot of Spanish movies as well as some American films dubbed into Spanish (with Spanish rather than Latin American accents). I haven’t been able to find any Spanish books on tape. I think this would be a great way to learn. I have found a few podcasts in Spanish but tracking them down takes too much time.

Something that I need to do more of is reading out loud. It is tiresome and boring but it is the best way to work on pronunciation. I sometimes talk to myself out loud in Spanish when I am bike riding which gets some weird looks from people when I am caught doing it.

I often think about how easy it would be to learn English as a second language. First of all, there are tons of movies in English, as well as television shows, all of which are readily available in most corners of the world. It is also easy to find books in English as well as periodicals. If English had not been my native language I’m quite sure I would have learned it by now.

Learning Spanish is like conducting a war on several different fronts. I sort of doubt I’ll ever be standing on a ship with a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” unfurled behind me. There is no finishing this task. Luckily, there are many rewards along the way, like this wonderful novel by a favorite writer. With every day that goes by, with every book that I read and every movie that I watch, I only hope that I am getting less Borat and more rico-suave.