Christmas is in the Air

Christmas is coming! Time for mantecados, turrones, tamales, mazapan, cookies, pies, polvorones, chocolates, roscos de vino, oh my...

Photo credit

Time to get back to the gym before that mountain of food arrives. This calls for some vigorous 80´s calesthenics!

Look at those pelvic thrusts!

Juan y Medio

Andalucía is blessed with a gem of a local TV network: Canalsur.

It's now in HD. Because that's what it needed.

It is the go-to network for flamenco contests, knock-off Karlos Arguiñán cooking shows, and, the gem of it's programming in my wise judgment humble opinion, Juan y Medio.

Trust in the 'stache.

If this man doesn't inspire confidence, I don't know who would.

Juan y Medio hosts several programs, but the best, again in my sage wisdom personal opinion, is La Tarde Aquí y Ahora. On this program, Juan y Medio takes on the noble task of senior dating. Each program, JYM interviews a couple of senior citizens, all of whom are characters and super difficult to understand through the accent and age. These senior citizens are single, and ready to mingle.

JYM, who has a special touch with getting the elderly to open up, interviews the dating candidates and then prospective partners call in and can chat with the lucky man or lady in the hot seat.

This. Program. Is. So. Good.

Never will you see little old pueblo ladies making discreet references to sexual activity, or older men explicitly stating they want a woman who can cook, clean, and the Spanish equivalent of "no fatties."Or who may be unsure of just how many children they do have around.

If you have the chance, I in my total and complete knowledge of everything suggest you catch an episode.

While it is a hoot to watch the program, JYM serves a really crucial social function. Elderly people still have a lot to offer, a lot to live. Rather than sweeping them under the rug or treating them as burdens, there should be a way for them to participate actively in society. Maybe we should export JYM.

John and a Half, anyone?

I nominate Geraldo Rivera.

I mean he's already got the 'stache requirement covered.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hey there 14-year-old girl!

So you are in 2º ESO and you don't want to learn English? It's just not for you, you say?



Well, I think you should.



Why's that you say?

Oh no they di'int!

Oh I dunno. Maybe because in 4 days Twilight's Breaking Dawn: Part 1 opens and all 1326 showings of the dubbed version in Plaza Mayor will be sold out.

The one that will have seats available?

Original Version Subtitled.

I suggest you start studying tonight.

Public Service Announcement

Attention tourist shops in Spain and the middle-aged man at my gym:

This shirt has never been and never will be funny, unique, or creative.

Please stop making it. Please stop selling it. Please stop buying it. Please stop wearing it to lift weights in the afternoon.

Please. Stop.

Not fair

Spanish accent in English: sexy, adorable, intriguing, intelligent...

Cool.

Anglo accent in Spanish: nails on chalkboard, ambulance sirens, kind of dumb, cats in heat, failboat....

Not cool.

Some people have all the luck.

A is for. . . .um. . . .uh . . .

My tiniest student, David, is going to be super good at English. Why? Because at the tender age of 3 his parents began a pretty hard-core English regimen with him: cartoons in English, dad speaks to/at him in English, and I walk on down twice a week to have classes with him.

A three year old is hard to have for private classes. Even though we only have a half hour, after about fifteen minutes he jumps up and starts running in circles or throwing Gormiti toys around. Once calmed down, we resume our song or dance or whatever.

This year I have spent part of the time teaching him the alphabet song. My seven year old, Claudia, knows how to say all the letters in English and it's really convenient when I have to spell new words for her. So with David, we sing that song about 10 times each class while making an alphabet book. You know, the kind with cute pictures of words that start with that letter.

A for apple:

B for ball. C for cat:

Standard alphabet stuff. The only problem is, with certain letters, my mind goes absolutely blank on any word in English appropriate for his level that starts with that letter. No simple nouns, no easily illustratable animals, nothing. So here, after flipping through his brother's learn to draw book full of animals, we find J for jaguar:

Not bad, nice recovery. Here's I for insect, also found after consulting the book:

Then there's S for um, snake:

At V, I totally failed. V for vendetta? Nope, not appropriate. V for vandalism? Tampoco. V for verrrrry stupid English teacher? Probable, but nope. I came up with V for

VIPER!

Trying to explain the subtle anatomical differences between snakes and vipers clearly did not go over well, as this one looks like an apartment building with a tail rather than a snake or a muscle car.

The bad news? I still haven't gotten to W, X, Y, or Z.

X for Xerox copies? Y for yoda? Help!

Notes on pasta

Why is it SO HARD to make an appropriate amount of pasta for one person for lunch?!

AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS THIS PROBLEM?!

Excuses

This weekend was ridiculously cold and rainy in Málaga. (Well, when I say ridiculous, I mean ridiculous for Southern Spain.)

The sun came out for a minute for this picture. This is a reduced form of
puddle of death that forms outside my door, aka Lake Teatinos.

It's not usually cold and rainy here, so people don't really do much when it is. It is an awesome understanding that the whole city is in on: I don't go out, you don't go out, we don't go out, nobody gives anybody shit for it.

I had a weekend plan of going to the Oktoberfest downtown, drinking beer out of a huge jar, and hopefully adding to my drunken hat collection, now 3 hats strong! But, it rained. So I stayed in at José's house and we watched soccer.

Do I feel bad for not going out?

Nope. Because I'm pretty sure nobody else was there either.

This is why it's awkward

Yet another round of waiting in line for hours on end in the relentless pursuit of this year's foreigners card.

• Oficina de Extranjeros: 3ish hours of useless waiting. They told me since I already had a number I just had to go to the Police Station.
  
• Day One at the Police Station: 1 hour of semi-useless waiting. I did get a complete list of documents and photocopies I had to provide as well as the form I needed to pay the tax.
  
• Day Two at Police Station: 10 minutes of useless waiting. I arrived with all documents and was trying to enter when, at 1:40, before their schedule 2 p.m. closing time, that they wouldn't let anyone else in. It was a new, highly unpleasant security guard who, when I notified him that the office indeed hadn't closed yet, looked at me with his eyebrows raised, shrugged angrily, and said "That's it, no more, what more can we do?" What can you do? Well if you work Monday to Friday 9 - 2, actually work until 2. Boy those 25 hour weeks get long.
  
• Day Three at Police Station: 2 hours of useless waiting. Normally the line in the police station isn't as long, but when I arrived there was a line of about 50 people outside and probably another 20 inside. After waiting and watching the new security guard utterly fail to attend to the needs of the public in a timely and pleasant manner, he brusquely picked up the signs for the foreigners line, slammed the door shut, and informed us that the office was closed. Nevermind the line hadn't moved for like 30 minutes, telling us before that we wouldn't be able to get in would be too easy.
  
• Day Four at Police Station: 1 hour and success! I arrived before school and breezed inside, noting that my favorite doorman must be on some sort of break. The woman at the desk thumbed through my papers, they banged out a few fingerprints, I'm on my merry way.

What I did have time to put my finger on is why exactly waiting at the foriegner's office is worse than waiting at the numerous other bureaucratic institutions that we have to deal with here in the land of Catholic holidays and cigarette breaks: personal space.

The average line at these foreigner's offices is composed of Central and South Americans, Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners, old men, young families, working professionals, super awesome and ridiculously good looking blonde auxiliars, babies, etc. etc. Every single one of these groups has a different understanding of the etiquette of waiting in line.

For example, young Moroccan man with the scar from his lip to his face, I see you trying to cut in front of me. You keep inching forward, but I, in fact, have peripheral vision.

Family from Africa with two adolescents, a toddler, and a baby: spread on out, there's room for all in the hallway, no need to maintain any semblance of a line.

Woman from South America: Please, keep moving forward behind me, get in here right close like. I love being three inches away from strangers.

An equivalent feel for this awkwardness:

Until (hopefully) next year, foreigner's office!

Eurotrash!!

It's I ever wanted in music: repetitive, catchy, featuring saxophone solos.

 Molester 'staches.

The perfect mix of kinda awkward Eastern European English lyrics. Tighty whiteys.

I love to hate on it. But the truth is if you stick me in a spinning class on a stationary bike or in a discoteca with a drink in hand and put on eurotrash really loud, I will rock that shit.

Did I mention the saxophone?

Fusion food

If I have a Spanish-American baby in like 5 years or so, when I'm 28, it would be weaned solely on this.

It's cool dude, we get it, we're hip, we're with it

Another orientation done. Check.

Thursday was the open bar orientation for auxiliars working in Malaga province. Every year they haul us all out to a vocational high school in the city and talk at us for three hours about health insurance and the foreigner's office and how to get a bank account and what is the bilingual initiative. A bit dry.

But, then they TOTALLY redeem themselves.

That vocational high school has a school of hospitality where kids who want to work as chefs, waiters, or in tourism learn how to pour a good glass of sherry, serve up paella to hungry guiris, and make sure that my hand always has a full glass of something in it. So, we file into their adjoining restaurant space where the free drinks and tapa massacre takes place. Also, there's an 80's cover band. Whoever plans orientation sure knows their audience.

Totally unrelated photo of Portimao, Portugal.

The Gonskis and I, knowing how it went down last year, canceled our evening plans and got to it. We started conversing with a lovely older gentleman who was one of the organizers. Over tiny plates of paella he was telling us about his recent retirement from working in the school system, his neighborhood, Mercadona, etc.

All was fine, but something was off. He was speaking slowly, clearly. Each R and every S was enunciated. No cutting out of D's. "He must be slowing himself down for us," I thought. "I hope it is clear at this point in the conversation that we've been here a while, we can fend for ourselves in Andaluz."

The slow, even rhythm continued.

"How odd, none of the other presenters slowed down at all for us when they were speaking. I mean, us Andalucian people are going to have to get used to the accent really quick anyways, might as well get started now." 

At this point the man, midway through a glass of wine, informed us that he had been in Malaga for 16 years. His origin: Basque. Nope, not talking at us like we didn't understand, just a northerner.

Bilbao.

At this point of the evening I thought it best to return to the wine. No misunderstandings there.

That time I gave a toddler a violent children's book

At the grocery store in Florida this summer I snagged a sweet set of children's books. They are perfect for ESL.

This one, for example.

A bunch of animals putting on hats of assorted shades. Then, oops! there is a turkey who has a bit of a problem.

He just can't get it right!


I should have known, however, that this book was not culturally appropriate. No, it's not because there is a topless elephant, but rather a difference in the native flora and fauna of Spain. Here, they don't have delicious, succulent, beautiful turkey. A New World, specifically Mexican, animal, neither the turkey nor Thanksgiving are on Spanish children's radars.

I should have known this, as last year when we made a ballin' turkey at my school with feathers where the kids wrote what they were thankful for and all that jazz, the kids kept calling it the big chicken, much to my dismay.

It´s a TURKEY

So it was not surprising when my 3.5 year old student finished the story and was a slightly puzzled.

"Seño, why is the chicken bleeding?"

Good question, small one, good question.

Yo no ti entendo a tu: The Language Barrier

The other night I was trying to tell José something funny that happened over the phone. You know when you first wake up in the morning and someone is trying to get some really complicated information out of you before you've had a cup of coffee? Yeah, it was like that.

My Spanish has Bombed over the summer. Capital B.

All of July at an English camp surrounded by fellow compatriots and all of August and half of September at home. The only sprinkling of Spanish has been a week I came back to Malaga before heading home and talking with José via internet. I had grand plans of studying and practicing and all of that, but ya know.....Eh. Willpower has never been my forte.

Does this look like a group that practices their Spanish conversation? No sir.
This is a group that practices their right to bitch over cold beers in 'merican.

Now that I'm back I've got to get back on the bandwagon and practice. I want to take the C2 exam in May so I need to get my formal Spanish in particular up to speed. Which means I am resurrecting my little notebooks.

That's right, coven of witches was somewhere in a
newspaper. Maybe they were talking about The View.

My first year I would obsessively read newspapers and underline the words I didn't know. Then I'd look them up and write them in these little red notebooks. Through this method you learn great words like superávit (surplus), cebada (barley), or séquito (retinue, a King's entourage), which are obviously crucial. I also translated newspapers and old copies of Newsweek my mom sent me. I was on a mission.

I <3 vocab.

Another, much better, reason to take up studying more aggressively is to further erase the language barrier between José and I.

Mi José, back when he was an extra in Casablanca.

The person I am in one language, more talkative or secure in English or more reserved and sometimes downright shy in Spanish, changes. Even the hand gestures and facial expressions, the tics and tones, shift. Case in point: look at Mediterranean gestures when talking about an annoying neighbor/cousin/coworker versus an American.

It makes you wonder what your relationship would be like if we didn't come from where we do or speak what we speak. We speak mostly in Spanish, but I love to hear him in English. The words and the order offer more of an insight into what he's thinking. You often can learn lots about another language by listening to a native speaker talk in English. Plus I love talking to him period, I love his voice in any language.

Mostly, I just want to talk with José and be completely sure that it's me coming through. If that isn't motivation to learn then I don't know what is.

In which the protagonist grows. Literally.

I am finally back in Málaga! Flying into Málaga is beautiful. You fly close over the olive and oxide colored mountains that surround the city and then make a dramatic touch down in front of the sea. Then you get off the plane and José is there waiting for you and it is the best feeling ever.

Now that I'm back I am working on getting things set up, cleaning, organizing private classes and volunteering and the Teacher Mentoring Program. And removing the pounds packed on by the evil combination of Gredos camp food, mom's delicious food, car travel rather than foot travel, and the ability of American food companies to sneak high-fructose corn syrup into every food product (Oops, I guess it's "corn sugar" now. Sorry about that Corn Refiners Association.) Mostly, however, it was my own fault.

At least in the US we have a variety of products to cover up with.

Wizard in the corner?

In Spain I don't have these options. Mostly because I haven't given up on life to the point where wearing pajamas all day sounds fine. Guess I'll just do this the old way.

Guess this whole "walking" thing is more complicated than I remember. These Europeans seem to be good at it though.

So you're apartment hunting in Malaga...

Mazel Tov. You are one of the lucky people who will be auxiliaring in Malaga this year.

Out of a pure desire for blog traffic to help others I made a map of the neighborhoods of Malaga where auxiliares might want to apartment hunt. I hope this map increases the number of people who follow my blog helps future auxiliars in their search for a place to stay. You're welcome from the bottom of my cold, black heart.

Malaga Map

Note: I am not an expert at Malaga. This map is based on my own brilliant humble take on where are some good places to live. I welcome any suggestions in the comment section and will gladly call you an idiot who doesn't know anything take them into account.

Tamales: A Visual Journey

Last weekend tamale stocks at the Conrad cabana were replenished and we hope they last until Christmas. This holiday is also known as when Claire comes home to make tamales again. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

On Sunday, I cracked out the tamale recipe and got going.

Ye olde chile-stained recipe book.

I am indeed aware I am caucasian, but my dad is from New Mexico and has a need for tamales and chile that approaches addiction. Yes, it is lame that I still refer to the recipe, but I only do them twice a year and don't have the extended family with me to ease the manual labor of them. Earns me the right to consult the lard-to-masa levels, says I.

Step one: boil pork butt for one million hours until it gives up the will to live and dissolves. Add a whole bunch of chile and garlic.

Mana from heaven.

Step two: Go buy lard, act like you're not a fat ass buying lard and avoid direct eye contact with the checkout kid. Mix that up with some tamale flour mix stuff, add hot water, and get in their with your fingers.

Masa harina.

Get some dried corn leaves and steep 'em, steep em good so they're all nice and soft like.

Corn leaves.

Then, smash some of that dough onto them corn leaves. Add the maximum amount of pork you can shove in there, as really, tamales are just vectors to get chile-spiced pork down your gullet.

Roll that up like a big, fat, pungent, sweet smelling....legal cigarette.

Tie it down with some string or some pieces of corn husk.

Then lather...

Everyone in the sauna!

Rinse...

Stack it up.

Repeat...

Mt. Tamal.

Love me some tamales.

Ef

After 2 years of extreme commuting (TLC show anyone?), this piece of news pops out.

Linkity Link Link

I raise a big fat martini toast to all the times I have hauled ass with my coffee cup and school stuff down from the number 20 bus stop in front of the Corte Ingles, past the huge never-ending metro construction pit, hordes of calmly commuting, smoking Spanish employees, old men in old man bars cracking their 8 am beers, down the 1738 flights of stairs to cram money in the RENFE machine for a ticket just to hear the beeps of death and the rush of wind as the train pulls away down the coast.

So, so punctual when I am so, so tardy.

On a positive note, my commute got significantly shorter this year, which is directly proportional to the amount of nap time I get between school and private classes. Victory is mine, RENFE, victory is mine.

Day turned around by phone calls

Feeling better. Love these people:

Solitary

Going to camp and then returning home for summer to see family is great, but rounding month two away from José, friends and any social interaction with people my own age is brutal.

An ending

This weekend my family and I went to Michigan to bury my grandfather. Grandpa Jim died at age 85 a few weeks ago and this past weekend was the burial of his ashes. It was both sad to say goodbye to him and wonderful to see family that I have not seen for many, many years.

My grandpa wasn't religious. This complicates matters. When my maternal grandma passed away, the Lutheran Church in Durango that she helped found, named, and participated stepped in immediately, taking over during a time of pain and grieving for my mother and her siblings. My paternal grandpa was religious in his upbringing and only occassionally went to the Unitarian church in Albuquerque with my dad and family to hear the beautiful music and teach the philosophically and ethical based Sunday school they offered. This only on Sundays where the powder in Santa Fe or Taos did not beckon them out skiing.

The ceremony, therefore, was a collection of people gathered in the beautiful cemetery by a slow-flowing river, telling stories, listening to his favorite classical music, reading poems and short stories he loved, and telling his off-color jokes. We cried and laughed.

Grandpa Jim.

When packing for the funeral, I frantically came out to tell my mom I had nothing black to wear and we should get something before I go.

My dad, reading the newspaper in the big, overstuffed chair in our living room, glass of fine Spanish Rioja next to him, suddenly piped up from deep between the sighing pieces of newsprint: "You don't need anything black. It's grandpa's burial and he doesn't want everyone wearing black. We're not mourning, we're going to be celebrating his life." He returned to the news.

My mom and I were silent for a second and then looked at each other. I sat down, mom turned back to the local news on the TV, spewing something about Hurricane Irene.

It was Grandpa Jim, summed up perfectly.