A Few Thoughts on China

I’ve never been to China and I don’t have any immediate plans to rectify this glaring hole in my first-hand knowledge of world geography. I do buy a lot of Chinese products so I feel myself to be a bit of an expert on Chinese manufacturing. After all, I live right across the street from a variety store that sells Chinese goods and is run by Chinese immigrants. What further qualifications do I need to hold forth on this subject? Why don’t you just sit back, listen, and learn.

I call these stores Chinese Wal-Marts because they are run by Chinese immigrants and they have an inventory equal to that of most Wal-Marts even though these places are not much bigger than a two bedroom apartment. If there is something that you need for your home I would say that there is about a 99% chance of finding it at one of these variety stores. I am not exaggerating. Garden products, patio furniture, clothing, shoes, kitchenware, tools, bedding, cleaning products, toys, and electronic gear can all be found in aisle one. OK, I may have been stretching the truth there but these places really are amazing in the breadth of their inventory. The crazy part is that absolutely everything they sell is manufactured in China.

Just about everything they sell in these stores is also inexpensive. I have been fairly happy with the quality of these products but I have also bought stuff that is of the lowest possible quality imaginable. I bought a sewing kit the other day that had a safety pin that was of such poor quality that it really couldn’t even be called a safety pin but rather a reasonable facsimile of a safety pin. I bought a bottle of something that you are supposed to use to clean your floors that smelled worse than the most polluted Yangtze River water which was probably what it was. At .75€, polluted Yangtze River water must be a big money-maker to some budding young capitalist in that country.

I bought a large beach towel that I will use for a tent the next time I go camping because this thing repels water better than gore-tex. I guess they don’t have beaches where this towel was made so they don’t realize that a beach towel is supposed to absorb water. I bought an ice cube tray which on the first use produced ice cubes laced with bits of plastic, as the tray seemed to dissolve when I put it in the freezer.

Overall I would say that I am very satisfied with the products I have purchased from China, and even the crappy stuff was outrageously inexpensive. After a while you sort of get a feel for what you can safely purchase at the Chinese Wal-Marts and what you should look for somewhere else. I went to a chain grocery store near my house to buy new ice cube trays. They were still made in China but they probably had to pass through some sort of quality control before making it on to the shelves of the local Mercadona, and I probably had to shell out an extra .75€ or so for that privilege.

What I don’t understand is how the United States, and the rest of the industrialized world, can completely relinquish almost all of our manufacturing to these new Chinese capitalists? Have all of the countries of the West reached this sublime service industry plateau where we no longer need to make a single thing? Surely we must have one river polluted enough to sell bottles of it as cleaning fluid for .75€ each.

Too Hot To Think

We are in the real dog days of summer. You can feel exactly when the wind stops at any time of day—even when you are sleeping—by the rise in temperature. I leave my house to go to the beach at four in the afternoon and sometimes I will stop to have a beer or a coffee at one of the cafes overlooking the sea just to put off facing the blazing sun. There is a strong offshore headwind on the bike ride to the beach. At least it is cool. On the way home the breeze shifts, coming from the west like the air in a convection oven.

It may sound like it but I’m not complaining; I am just moving a little slower these days. The Mediterranean is warm to the point of barely being a refuge from the heat. Everyone in the world is at the beaches so they are a little crowded. I don’t have the energy to ride the extra half hour to my private beach—at least not every day. I usually just stop at the new Pinedo beach. On a bike I can find a spot that is far enough from the parking lots to be too crowded.

I stand my bike up in the sand as close to the surf as I can. I dig a hole for both wheels and stand it up straight so I can hang my shirt and pack on it. Even in these hours of the late afternoon I try to limit myself to less than two hours in the oblique sun. Showering at the beach after a long swim is one of life’s great pleasures. Yesterday there was a kid with a guitar playing gypsy music on the beach path within earshot of where I was showering—just in case I had forgot that I was in Spain.

The earlier part of these days is best spent as idly as possible: reading at a shady café, preparing food in a cool kitchen, shopping in the grocery store that actually has air conditioning, or anything else that keeps you out of the sun. The days seem to begin more slowly and don’t really get up to speed until the sun has set at around 9:30 or so. Lunches in restaurants start later and later every day, reflecting the intense heat and the idleness of the population boom of vacationers. No one sits down in a restaurant for dinner until it is completely dark outside and for a lot of diners the meal doesn’t begin until after midnight, as if postponing the evening meal to the next day will offer some relief from the heat.

There are a lot of advantages to these scorching days of mid summer. I love it that I can take a shower without turning on the water heater. When I was freezing my ass off last winter I couldn’t imagine taking a shower with anything but the hottest water possible. It still is a bit of a shock when you first hit yourself pointblank with the stream of cold water. Other than this initial jolt I couldn’t imagine raising the water temperature a single degree. Cold beer becomes euphoric. You can thumb your nose at convention by chilling red wine. White wines have more appeal during summer. There are probably cold, nonalcoholic out there but I’m not going to sing their praise.

It is also the season to discover some of the lovely Spanish rosé wines. Most of these are from Rioja and almost all of them are modestly priced. I ran across the street from my building to the Mercadona to take a peek at their rosés and because they have air conditioning. I asked them if I could live there for the next couple of weeks, preferably near the ice cream or in the wine aisle. A quick glance of their rosés:

Rioja Region:
San Asenio 2.55€
Romeral 2.65€
Comportillo 1.69€
Marqués de Cáceres 4.50

Valencia:
Baron de Turis 1.09€
Castillo de Lliria 1,30€

I would have sprung for the Cáceres but I didn’t want to come off as a bourgeois pig at the cash register so I opted for the Romeral. These rosés are all fairly dry shouldn’t be confused with a white zinfandel which no adult should be caught drinking. They go great with a salad, which is about all you’ll feel like eating. The good news is that the tomatoes are looking great.

Nothing Special Summer Salad

(Sort of like a Greek salad but I don’t think that I put enough energy into it to do justice to that fine dish)

Tomatoes
Onions
Cucumber (peeled)
Red and Green Pepper (peeled and seeded)
Fresh Basil leaves (chopped)
Feta Cheese
Olives

Dressing:

Cumin seeds
Salt
Pepper
Garlic clove
Red pepper
Small can of anchovies
Olive Oil
Red Wine Vinegar

Crush first 5 ingredients together with a mortar and pestle with a bit of olive oil to make a paste. Cut the anchovy filets into small pieces with kitchen shears and ad to paste. To this I add more olive oil, red wine vinegar, a pinch of oregano, and pepper.

Toss together the dressing and vegetables and refrigerate. Add feta and olives when serving. The rosé should be well chilled and when I say well chilled I mean about as cold as it can get and still qualify as a liquid.

The Toilet Whisperer

Or
The Dumbest 300 Words Ever Written

As much as I hate the ever-widening socio-economic gap in modern society, as much as I inveigh against our culture of the haves and the have nots, I still want to rub your noses in the fact that my bathroom has a toilet that flushes correctly. All you have to do is pull up on the handle and release it. The toilet will then flush and refill itself, almost like magic if you’ve been used to living months with a toilet that doesn’t do this simple task very well. You don’t have to jiggle the handle until you think that it has returned to the proper position and then come back into the bathroom after a few minutes because you can hear that the valve in the tank has not sealed so you have to jiggle the handle again. Please don’t hate me for living in this new state of luxury. Remember, thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s toilet that doesn’t need to be fiddled with every fucking time you take a leak.

I used to be just like you with your busted toilet. I used to have to finesse the handle on my toilet like someone bowing a Stradivarius, furiously working towards the finale of a movement (Pardon the musical-intestinal pun—the worst sort of pun). It took out-of-town visitors to motivate me to finally fix the thing once and for all. It finally took someone to actually tell me, “Dude, your toilet is broken. Do something.” Sometimes it takes an impartial observer to put your life into perspective. I was living like an animal but I didn’t know it. Hell, even a cat will complain when its litter box needs work.

All that it took was one of those plastic handcuff thingies that plumbers and cops use. They are sort of like the half brother of duct tape as far as their ability to fix almost anything. It has only taken me 8 months to do it and in this time I have probably wasted enough water to irrigate every golf course in Phoenix, Arizona for a summer.

Racial Profiling the Illegal Immigrant Way

I was sitting in a café the other day with three friends: a guy from Cameroon, a Romanian, and a gal from Central America. Across the street a group of Chinese workers were furiously working inside of a storefront. The renovations they were doing were fairly major as this site used to be an empty warehouse. They had installed huge windows and marble stairs with inset lights. Whatever they were building looked like it was going to be a pretty big affair.

I asked the others at the table if they knew what this new spot was going to be when they finished. My African friend said that it was going to be a “Buffet Libre or a Chinese buffet restaurant. I asked him how he knew this and he just shrugged his shoulders. He finally admitted that he didn’t know. “What else could it be? They’re Chinese,” was his follow up.

The Romanian guy said that it looked like it would be a variety store, or a chino as they are called here because almost all of these types of stores are run and owned by Chinese immigrants. It didn’t look like it was going to be a variety store. The windows and the marble stairs were a little too nice for a chino. I asked out loud if maybe it was going to be a fancy night club or a disco.

The girl from Central America immediately replied, “Oh no, Chinese don’t run places like that.”

I guess that I was the only one at the table who hasn’t learned everyone’s place in contemporary Spanish society. I have been able to make a few observations so far. I have noticed that the Chinese do run most of the chinos and they do own a lot of buffet libres. They also seem to own quite a few bars and cafes around town as well as stores that sell inexpensive clothing for men and women. I was in one of these places the other day and I bought a couple of great bootleg national soccer jerseys (Argentina and Portugal) for 5€ each—they usually cost about $65.

The folks from the Indian subcontinent seem to have cornered the market on corner fruit and vegetable markets. They also seem to be the communication moguls here as they own most of the locutorios or internet and telephone cafes. A lot of immigrants from all over call home from these businesses. You can see the rates listed for more countries than you thought existed on this planet. I guess no one calls the United States because I never see rates posted.

The sub-Saharan Africans seem to have a monopoly on bootleg DVDs to the point that a word has been coined in their honor. A bootleg DVD or CD is said to be top manta which refers to the Africans’ salesroom. Manta means blanket and these immigrants lay out their illegal merchandise on blankets in the street. This makes it easy for them to fold up shop and make a run for it if the cops decide to take an anti-business stance to this type of commerce. Top is borrowed from English and refers to something like “Top of the charts” and means any kind of popular music or movie, so Top manta means “top of the blanket.” I don’t think they have a word for “Intellectual Property” in Spanish as of this writing.

The Africans will also go ambulatory with their wares and you see them hawking stacks of the latest DVDs in bars and restaurants all over Valencia. I was at a café one day reading a book when I saw an older woman next to me looking through a stack of movies. She ended up buying four DVDs, one of which was a porno that from her lack of embarrassment may as well have been a copy of The Little Mermaid for her granddaughter. I’m sure it was respectable filth and not midget porn or a snuff flick, but still. I guess that I need to loosen up, I’m in Europe.

I certainly don’t know what is expected of American immigrants here in Spain, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. Besides a few students here for a semester, I haven’t come across any other estadounidenses, which is the proper term for us. As soon as I figure out what I’m supposed to be doing I’ll start doing it. Until then I’m just having fun trying to keep track of everyone else.

Refrán of the Day:
Más vale perder un amigo, que perder una tripa. (Said when you have gas)
It's better to lose a friend than blow a bowel.

Mi Disco Duro Es Tu Disco Duro

“My Hard drive is your hard drive,” is sort of my modern take on the wonderful Spanish saying, “Mi casa es tu casa..” I envy my Spanish friends who are trying to learn English because they have so many wonderful learning aids in the form of English music and movies. My hard drive is home to much of this media in English and I try to share it with everyone.

I think that a great tool for language learning is to watch a movie in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. I don’t really need this crutch for most movies that I watch in Spanish now but I still use this technique for French movies. I have been finding subtitles for all of my favorite movies in English for my Spanish friends who are students of my native language. I’m not sure if Super Troopers will make any sense to a non-American, even if they understand every word, but they still need to watch this movie if they want to continue being my friend. It’s required and don’t think that you are off the hook just because you read the book.

I don’t know how I could have avoided this movie for so long seeing that it came out in 2003, but I just got around to seeing Love Actually. I am turning on my friends to this, at times brilliant little film about the intertwining love lives of what seems to be about half of the population of London. Some of the stories work better than others but the movie gets five stars in my book just for working so hard to make people smile.

There is a musical sequence about two thirds of the way through the film that highlights one of the major conflicts in the story. Emma Thompson has just come to the realization that her husband is cheating on her and in a little over two minutes we see her plunge into incredible sadness and pain only to see her bounce back—for the sake of her family—in a feat of remarkable courage. I can’t imagine many film actresses could have pulled off this incredible scene.

Were Joni Mitchell not referenced twice before in the movie, once directly as this sequence begins, I would have never even considered that it was her singing her old classic, Both Sides Now. It’s one of those amazing remakes that lead you to believe that the song was fresh out of the head of the artist. I, like everyone else, grew up with this song first recorded by Mitchell in her folksy, girlish voice back in 1969. The original is beautifully produced with only an acoustic guitar as accompaniment. I was 11 back then so I didn’t have the chance to hear Mitchell perform this song in a NYC coffee shop. This recording is the next best thing, but to say this song is the next best thing to anything hardly does it justice.

I haven’t heard her sing this song in a long time; I couldn’t even say how many years it has been. It seems like a lifetime but of course I recognized the song immediately in the film. It’s like recognizing a familiar voice on the phone, even if it’s been a while. But I didn’t recognize this voice. I had to wait to make sure when I read the credits at the end. Mitchell has matured into a crooner of the first caliber. The new production is as bare as the original; it’s almost as if there is no music at all. There is a shimmering orchestral background that serves, more than anything, as a platform for her to stand on, a musical stage. It’s like a vast roiling ocean beneath her voice that breaks only occasionally to carry her into a bridge. You can hear her breathing over the orchestra although you will be left breathless. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could coax, squeeze, cajole, or persuade more emotion out of one song like Joni Mitchell does in this remake of Both Side Now.

Words and music and heart and soul by Joni Mitchell

Both Sides Now

Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and they snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way that you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I’ve looked at love that way

But now it’s just another show
And you leave ‘em (them) laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away

I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions that I recall
I really don’t know love, I really don’t know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say I love you right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I’ve looked at life that way

But now old friends they’re acting strange
And they shake their heads and they tell me that I’ve changed
Well something’s lost, but something’s gained
In living every day

I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all

It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life, I really don’t know life at all

Send me an email if you want to listen.