Drama and Waterworks

Last night we were jolted out of bed by a sound like an angry bull gorging our front door or maybe the upstairs neighbor pushing her sofa down five flights of stairs.

As it turns out, our piece-of-shit water-heater, formally plastered on the wall in the bathroom, decided to unhook itself and come crashing down. Water squirting everywhere, broken tiles, broken wall. It was 3AM.

Normally, I would have been irritated, but this water-heater has been the bane of our existence here in Spain.

Heated by electricity because our batty landlord is afraid of people dying from gas leaks, the tank allows for exactly 3.23 minutes of luke-warm water before it spews an ice-cold waterfall on your head. In the dead of winter, when we had no heater, this was the simple reason we took no showers for many days and thus realized the true meaning of "dirty Europeans."

In February, Ted let it slip that he joined a gym just so he could take a decent shower and dry himself with a dry towel.

 Sucker! I would never sink to such a level (but I did quit shaving for a very long time).

Now it's Semana Santa, the most precious week of the whole year, and no plumber is going to leave his fiesta to fix our shower. We will be smelly grease-balls until Tuesday, at the earliest. No biggie.

Normally, one could ask a neighbor to borrow a shower, but in Lleo 9, we already know how that will go down.

Water, in our building, is like fine wine. Nobody lets a drop go free.

Case in point: Thursday is stair-cleaning day and each door must put out 1 liter of water so we all share the cost of a bucket of water (which must be like 0.0001E). I guess Spain really is in a "creeee-sis". 

The lady below refuses to do even this. Every Thursday, she marches down to the city fountain and fills up her bucket with the obligatory one liter.

I may seem like I am complaining, but I'm not. I love the drama. All afternoon, I've been hibernating inside our apartment listening to the neighbors chatter about that horrendous noise of last night and build theories about what happened. "Did So-and-So have that large man spend the night?" "I bet So-And-So quit taking her medicine, had an accident..."

I could easily explain the situation, but the neighbors will find out soon enough. The plumbers, when they come, will surely drag in dust and dirt, cause a ruckus and require more water from the cleaning lady who might have to come twice in one week! Heaven forbid! And the drama will continue...

The Ladies of Catalonia

The first Lady of Catalonia I want to introduce, though technically a foreigner (a fellow Texan no less!), is the outrageously funny comedian, Rachel Arieff, who performs a one-woman stand-up show, Planeta Catalunya. She made us laugh for an entire hour sharing her observations of the idiosyncrasies of Catalan culture. 

If you're in Spain, I highly recommend her show, and if you're not, here's a Youtube clip.

If I were funny, I would be her.

In her show, she reminded me of something I've been wanting to write about for a while: the real (old) Ladies of Catalonia. I bet a television show about these women would be far more interesting than lives of  New Jersey housewives. Check out this rockin' grandma with her push-cart and shades:

She's probably headed to the market to buy her groceries. If there's one thing Ted fears most in Barcelona, it's being in the way of a Catalan Lady and her produce at the market. These women are feisty, not in the least amused by a confused American, and absolutely unafraid to drive a push-cart directly into your ankles if you're standing in the way of her dinner.

Often you see them in pairs, always arm and arm, slowly strolling around town. It always makes me smile to see those locked-together ladies (though you don't want be stuck behind them if you're trying to get somewhere quickly):

Better yet, a trio:

And this four-banger made my day:  

The truth is, I love these ladies: fearless, united, and unconcerned with the hustle and bustle of the rest of the world. How nice would it be to take an afternoon stroll like this with a pack good friends?  I'm dying to know some of these ladies, so I can figure out where exactly they're going.

In the meantime, my camera is locked and loaded, just in case I spot five-pack. 

The Story of El Balcon

Meet Dani.

He's the charming guy who owns the bar next-door to our apartment.  It is, or was, called the Balcon de Aquiles.  But more on that later.

It took us almost an entire month to venture inside the Balcon for this graphic image graced the front window.  Would you want to see this photo every time you opened your front door?

But finally, we decided to give our neighbors a chance and then never looked back.  Ted or myself or both visited the Balcon every single day of October and November.  Sometimes just to say "Hola" but other times to stay all night.

Dani and his friends - Pedro, Fernando, Jano and Marcial - were very welcoming to us and especially patient with our broken Spanish. This is Marcial, probably telling a funny story.

Later we found out that the graphic image in the window was of a bearded man drinking water sideways.  Ha!  Silly of us for being so square.

Since the season of giving thanks was upon us, either Ted or I had the idea of throwing a grand Thanksgiving feast for all our new Spanish pals at the Balcon. But then we realized there were many people who had shown us kindness when we first arrived.  

So, we asked Dani if we could invite twenty people to a Dia de Gracia event at the Balcon since all those people definitely would not fit in our tiny apartment.

Dani, being the gem that he is, agreed to our plan, but his response was bittersweet:

He was being forced to close the Balcon the very same day we wanted to have a the feast.  A malcontent neighbor had called the police one too many times for noise issues on the bar. We were devastated.  

The Balcon had already become a special place where we saw friends, spoke Spanish and laughed a lot.  When everything seemed wrong and out of place in Spain, we looked forward to dropping in on the Balcon to hear the latest.

Fast forward to the Dia de Gracia. Here is Ted tweezing out the feathers of the 18-pound bird, later nicknamed "Flor."

And here is Pau and Xavi trying to imagine what it's like to be "Thanksgiving Full":

The obligatory photo of the table pre-meal:

 Our Spanish friends were thrilled to get up close and personal with the holiday they had seen so many times depicted in American Film.

"Wow, what skill he has carving," they said.  

Post turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, pear salad (cranberries don't exist in Spain) and sweet potato pie, everyone was in excellent spirits:

It was an incredible day and felt a whole lot like a traditional Thanksgiving at home, even though we've only known these people a couple of months. 

There was no time for tryptophan sluggishness as the festivities quickly turned into a raucous party lasting well into the wee hours of the morning. The neighborhood came to pay their respects to Dani and the Balcon (and make as much noise as possible for the very last time).

El Balcon was fantastic while it lasted, and maybe it's for the better since, well, one probably shouldn't spend quite so much time in bars. Anyway, the best part of it was meeting really great people we'd otherwise never have met. And to have learned how nice it is to experience the kindness of strangers in a strange land.

Chinos and Pakis

What is a "Chino" you ask?

I wondered that too when I first arrived in Barcelona and asked someone where to buy a hair dryer (secador de pelo). 

They directed me to a “Chino” down the street. 

Surely, I thought, this was just one person's backwards way of identifying a store owned by persons of Asian descent. But, no. It's what everyone calls the dollar-stores that occupy most blocks (including the people who work there).

A Chino, however, as my Spanish language-exchange partner pointed out, is distinctly different from a "Paki," which is a store that features all same products but is owned by persons of South Asian descent.

Are you kidding me?!  In the year 2010, in Europe, there are still people who think it's acceptable to call a store by the ethnicity of the owner, and moreover, to lump all persons of a very broad ethnic descent into one terribly inappropriate term?!?

Since being here in Spain, I have found myself in several cringe-worthy situations where people of Spanish descent crossed my acceptability boundary.

Perhaps I’ve been overly sensitized from living in California, but

the Spaniards, it seems, don't get P.C.

Here's another example when the National Basketball Team posed before playing the Chinese Team in 2008 in Beijing:

José Calderón, point-guard for the team, told cnn, "We thought it was something appropriate and that it would always be interpreted as somewhat loving. Nevertheless, some of the European media did not see it this way." 

That about sums it up. The Spanish can say and act in extremely racist ways and not realize why anyone would find it offensive. (My language partner defended himself by saying, “If someone called me an "Espani" I wouldn’t care!”)

Compare these illustrations with our experience living in the Raval. Within a 20 meter radius of our flat, you have your pick of a Philipino, Turkish, Indian, Chinese, Romanian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani restaurants. It's a place where cultures from all over the world intermix peacefully to create a fascinating urban fabric. There are Spainards who live and work here too, but you are more likely to hear Urdu or Vietnamese spoken on the streets than Castellano or Catalan.

In the Spaniards defense, I haven’t witnessed any overtly hostile racist behavior since being here. Spain has also experienced an incredible influx of immigration since the late 1970's, the end of the Franco era, and before that it was not easy for foreigners to immigrate. For the old-guard, people like my friend Joro, it has probably been  somewhat shocking to go through the dramatic changes of the last 30 years. 

Maybe they don't know what to make of it all and haven't had much experience dealing with other cultures.

I definitely do not know what to make of it. My Spanish teacher says, in general, Spaniards don't travel outside of Spain often. But I don’t think the undertones of racism that persist within Spanish culture can be explained away that easily.

On a similar note, here is an outrageous video - The Name Game - which came to me via the always witty, Sang Lee.  It is worth a watch.

Meet Joro

Joro lives next-door to us. I see him all the time and it makes me so happy.  Despite his age and his walker, Joro walks the streets of our neighborhood all day. I pass him on my way to school and again on my way home, on my way to the market and again coming home with produce.

You can't imagine how slowly Joro walks.  His steps are measured in terms of inches and sometimes he is still on the same street after I've returned from my errands.

There happened to be nobody else around when Ted took this photo of "me", but imagine whizzing motos, screaming children with flying balls, large trucks sweeping the streets and groups hipsters chatting on their way to a bar.  Joro keeps it steady through all of this.

He reminds me of my Opa, my grandfather from Texas - proud, strong, determined, patient - but also of a part of Spain that I find wonderful.  There's a place in Spain for the old - old people, old architecture, old customs and traditions.  It's refreshing to see the old ways of life preserved amongst the modern reality of hustle-and-bustle, colorful and plastic.

I have a feeling Joro will be a character in more of my stories.