I thought Tio Nadal meant Uncle Christmas because “tío” means “uncle” in Spanish. But, it turns out that “tió” means “log” in Catalán, which makes a lot more sense, since it is a log! A shitting log, if you remember from my prior blog post about this.
The children beat the log (which has a face and wears a traditional catalán red cap as well as a blanket to keep him warm) until he shits their presents. The log typically shits candy and treats. Of course.
I bought a stuffed log, instead of the typical wooden log. It seems more loveable. And I’m not going to beat him.
I went to the town’s tree-lighting ceremony last week. For a euro, I got a glass of champagne and a baggie with a chunk of angel food cake. There was a disc jockey playing mainly pop music, with a few Christmas songs thrown in, and a lot of the small children were dancing and having a grand time. There were lots of dogs there too (though not my ill-behaved ones).
I enjoyed feeling like a member of the community, and not a tourist.
Ham is more than a national obsession here. There are ham museums and countless shows, blogs, you name it, devoted to ham. I’m sure you all know about the Ibérico ham from free-range pigs who are pampered and fed acorns to give the meat a delicious fat composition and taste. The ham is graded to reflect the breed of pig, the percent of pure Ibérico genetics in the pig, and the quantity of acorns they eat…. The diet of the pig completely changes the flavour and characteristics of the meat.
The black label or Pata Negra is reserved for the finest of Iberico hams. It signifies that the Iberico ham has been produced from free-range, 100% pure-bred, acorn-fed Iberian pigs. The ham shoulders are hung and dry-cured for at least 24 months before they are ready to be eaten. This gives the ham an intense, rich taste.
A red color label identifies Ibérico ham that has been produced from Iberian black pigs that are not pure-bred, but at least 50% black Iberian. These pigs are only acorn fed and free to roam . Often these pigs are cross-bred with other more common pig breeds.
A green label signifies that the ham is made from pigs that are pastured and fed both acorns and grain. Like the red label, the pig breed must be at least 50% black Iberian and free-range.
White labelled ham is considered the lowest tier of Ibérico ham. While the breed of pig is exactly the same as the red and green labels, the animal’s diet only consists of grain. Unlike, the other labelled Spanish ham types, the white label is not free range.
Ham is especially important at Christmas time. In the market at Corte Inglés in Barcelona, you can see hams for sale from anywhere from 99 euros to 599 euros !!! There are probably some even more expensive hams available in specialty butcher shops!
I also learned about a cut of pork I’d never heard of – the “secreto.” I had it in a restaurant in Barcelona and I thought “what is this??” It was sooo good.
Iberico pork secreto is a wide, flat piece of meat hidden behind the shoulder and under the back fat of the Spanish Pata Negra pigs. Fantastically tender and highly prized, secreto has a long grain with what appears to be stripes from the fat marbling. It has the tender consistency of a ribeye with the look of a skirt steak. When cooked over high heat, it gets a crispy crust while the juiciness in the pig is intact.
The other night the wind was 56 mph. Yikes. It’s all fun and games until the furniture starts moving on the balcony! Sometimes, sitting on my couch, I feel like I’m in a dinghy on the North Sea! The windows and the front door rattle and everything shakes – the flue in the fireplace bangs, the vent over the stove whistles. I have to lock the front door to keep it from rattling loudy and I have to put the doggy doorstop in front of the kitchen door to keep it from repeatedly closing.
One day I was in the parking lot at an area grocery store, and I heard some loud noises. It sounded like bombs going off. I almost took cover. I looked around and there were a lot of small objects on the ground. Without my glasses on, they looked like avocadoes. I thought maybe an avocado delivery truck had driven through the parking lot and lost part of its load! At closer inspection, it was pine cones. Every one that landed sounded like a firecracker or a bomb. They were flying out of the trees.
My neighbor said he read this was the worst November we’ve had in years. I think 2018 was just as bad. At least this year (so far), I haven’t had to load the dogs into the car to drive them to a protected areato wal k them!
I’ve always been a good speller. I can’t think of a time when I misspelled something (until recently). And as some of you know, I’m a pretty good Scrabble player. So, I’m worried.
First it was marshmallow, which I spelled marshmellow – an easy mistake because that’s how it sounds, and also it’s not a word I use often. But BOER? There’s no excuse.
I have to confess that I ask Siri fairly often how to spell a word while I’m working on my daily NYT Spelling Bee – but that’s a secret.
I’ve always been forgetful.I can remember my mother telling me many times over the years that I had a terrible memory and it should be better because I was young. That actually makes me feel better now because I feel like I’m no more forgetful than I always have been! I remember returning to the US after a year at the University of Madrid in 1973 and blaming my inability to remember words on my confusion between English and Spanish. Hardly…it’s still happening. So, in other words, so far so good for cognitive abilities…except for this spelling problem.
It’s depressing. None of us wants to lose our functionality. So I’m adding French lessons with a tutor to my mind-expanding activities. I’m trying!!
My neighbor informed me that the boars start foraging in the winter. Last year, the apartment complex upgraded the fence around the property so that they couldn’t get in again and destroy the grass. But the driveway is an engraved invitation, so every night I need to close the gate. This is what they did in 2019:
And these are fresh tracks by the side of the road. You don’t have to be a forensic scientist to see the telltale evidence!
This is my FIFTH flat tire in Spain. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can blame it on the tires. All have been my fault, except the one in Barcelona when a guy on a motorcylce slit my tire with a knife – that one was not.
I think maybe it’s that the streets are narrower, so the curbs are just closer and easier to hit. Makes sense, right?
This time was very innocent. I was taking my friend a poinsettia as a gift for hosting Thanksgiving. On the way, the plant fell over and I reached to put it upright, and boom, I hit the curb. It didn’t go flat until the next day when I was on my way to yoga. But it went super flat! Luckily no damage to the wheel and my expensive insurance covered everything, even the taxi ride to pick it up from the shop.
Post script for two new menu items seen: because I love rabbits as creatures, not as food, I won’t be trying either of these, but I thought they were curious – rabbit ribs and rabbit shoulder with prawns. I’m trying to picture these and it’s just not right!!
I can’t speak to the rest of Spain, or even to the rest of Catalunya, but here in Begur, cats are well looked after. Although not revered as in ancient Egypt, they seem to have a special place. I have never seen a stray dog anywhere around here, but there are feral cats. Calling them “feral” may be a bit harsh because they seem perfectly tame, they’re just homeless. My first clue was a cat stand I saw in Begur where food and water is left for them perched on a pedestal they can get to without having to worry about pesky land-bound animals. I’ve also seen dishes of food and water placed randomly about town on walls and in nooks of walls. Up the hill from where I live, a woman feeds the neighborhood cats. She wrote me an email last week asking me to drive slower by her house because of the cats. I can do that.
My yoga studio is cat heaven. There are four indoor/outdoor cats and 11 outdoor cats. The yoga maven is a very zen-like woman and kind and a cat lover, obviously. I asked what happens to the cats in the winter and she told me that she opens the basement and has boxes with blankets for them. They are beautiful cats and appear to be well fed and tended. I think she has as many or more cats at her home.
My dogs are born cat killers, or at least attempted cat killers. They’ve never captured one, though there have been close calls when we have visited friends with cats. When I go out of town, my American friend watches my dogs. He has six dogs, two cats, and a dove. The dogs are fine with these cats. I can’t understand it, except that his cats are large and seem to have a “go ahead, make my day…” attitude. Thank goodness they get along so I have a happy place to leave them when I go out of town! Here are the six dogs, plus my two, after a walk to the top of the tallest hill in town!!
We spent a lovely Thanksgiving together – a Catalán Thanksgiving – with paella and roast chickens (plus my sweet potatoes with marshmellows that were hard to find, and green bean casserole from scratch) and the dogs were absolutely loving the cats! And the day ended with another double rainbow! Living right, I guess.
Why in the world do they have Black Friday here? They don’t have Thanksgiving! And it’s not a holiday day, everyone is at work as usual. But sure enough, they do and everything is on sale. They call it “Black Friday,” not “Viernes Negro.” They also sort of have Halloween, which I haven’t totally figured out. They have costumes, but I don’t think they trick or treat. It’s weird and as far as I can tell totally commercially motivated, based on not local, but American custom.
There are some things I can’t find in the grocery store, and I have a huge, pretty sophisticated grocery store nearby. They don’t have pickle relish, or baking soda, or sour cream, or corn starch, and now I’ve just discovered they don’t have peppermints. I can find a few other types of hard candies, but not many, and not peppermints. Because of Amazon, I can find some of these things, but it seems silly to have peppermints delivered to my house! Plus, there are none on Spanish Amazon, a $45 bag on French Amazon, and the reasonably priced one on UK Amazon will charge double because of the shipping (damn Brexit!). Oh well. There’s also no cream of mushroom soup. Too bad! I’m going to make a “modern” green bean casserole anyway.
If I knew how to do photoshop, I’d crop out my neck, but I do love this picture of me and my neighbor’s dog, Janis, watching Succession together. My favorite dog after mine, of course. The flowers are on the table, not coming out of my hair, and yes, I’m drinking WHITE!
I just saw a HUGE pod of dolphins swimming south, I suppose migrating or following prey. They weren’t close in enough to video. They were barely breaking the surface, as if they were really booking it!
I finally got the ROKU to work on the TV. I like to have the captions on all the time. I got used to them when watching with my mother and I find it helps me fill in the blanks if I miss what someone says. BUT, the caption choices on my ROKU (I hope I can figure out how to fix this) are: Swedish, Norweigen, Danish, Finnish, or Spanish! Did I buy the Scandanavian ROKU version?? I’m going to use Spanish. Although it’s fine when the words are in Spanish, it’s confusing with the words in English. It’s always something!
I really think I could launch a new career as a menu translator. I think that most restaurants rely on Google Translate and it’s not a good result. When I go to a restaurant here they sometimes ask what language menu I would like. I always say English and Spanish because while I know a lot of Spanish foods, I don’t know all. But if I get only the English menu, I’m really lost.
Recently, I looked up the menu of a restaurant recommended by a friend. Here are a few of the specialties (as listed on the English version of the menu):
OLD COW RIB
OLD COW SIRLOIN STEAK
ENTRECOT OLD COW IN THE TERRACOTA OVEN
I think maybe they would like to say “aged beef.” Old cow is not a terribly appetizing menu item. I’m also not sure what they mean by another item, “LOBSTER TO THE SIRLOIN.”
Many restaurants calls the menu “the letter” in English. I guess people can figure it out, but wouldn’t it just be clearer to put “the menu”? Many of the mis-translations can be figured out, but they’re so funny. I don’t understand why they don’t go the extra mile to have a native speaker give it a once-over. Other examples: tuny fish (I’ve seen this one a lot), mixed fish frying, fried laminated artichokes, mushroom bikini (a bikini is a grilled sandwich, why not say sandwich?), egg poché of farmers. Some are just spelling errors: triple coocked potatoes. There are so many more. I’m going to start a list.
Random stuff from this week:
The mean old woman who works at the bookstore where they oddly take in laundry and alterations, was actually nice to me and fixed the zipper on my heavy coat, saving me time and money. I’d taken it there to have it sent off, but she repaired it for me with some needle-nosed pliers while I waited.
The wind is pretty constant, but not terrible. There have only been a few flying-nun days so far when the furniture moved across the balcony. One day, I was wearing some dangly earrings while I walked the dogs and it honestly felt like the wind was going to blow them out of my ears!
Last week, I got my Foreigner Identification Card without having to drive to a small town in the mountains! I kept checking the official website for appointments, and a town near to me finally popped up. The first time I got my residency card in 2018, it took me three trips to get it right, but this time, voila. I’m legal.
I wondered if any new potato chip varieties had come out since my last taste test and I found a few. I need to have another American here to help me judge. Maybe in the future.
All of a sudden, the wind swept in and the temperature dropped and we’re knee deep in winter. I’m cold. The dogs are cold. There’s no central heat, just electric radiators and they don’t do a very good job. I’ve ordered an electric blanket and I plan to buy another electric radiator. I’m worried about the cost. The landlords pay all bills, so I may have to supplement if I crank it up to Texas toast temperature!
I was thinking recently about how I now feel at home enough to break traffic rules – small ones like turning left when there’s no left turn (but when no one is looking), or illegal u-turns. Today, I parked in a spot that requires payment. I didn’t realize it (really), but I was just running in and out of a store, so I probably wouldn’t have paid regardless. When I got back to my car moments later, there she was, the meter maid. I told her I didn’t know I was supposed to pay. Is that what the blue lines mean? Of course. She told me that blue lines mean the same thing in Spain as in France. Funny that people assume that I’m French, sometimes even without seeing my car with French plates. France has a program for long-term car rental that is very easy and appealing to me – no fuss, for a fee everything is covered. You hit the wall in a parking garage (twice!) – they just shrug their shoulders. Perfect. Once, at the car wash in 2019, the owner asked me how I felt about the fire at Notre Dame. I told him I thought it was very sad, but “I’m not French! Just the car!”
I explained to the meter lady that I wasn’t French, I was American. She said they must have blue lines in America, but I said that we do not. Thankfully, she let me go with a warning. Two years ago, I received four speeding tickets in the mail. Surprise! They actually went to my daughter’s house in NYC because that was my address of record at the time. Originally 100 euros each (!), they were reduced by half, for some unknown reason, so I only had to pay 200 euros total. I’ve never seen a cop with anyone pulled over here. I think it’s all done by radar and mail. I wasn’t sure how to pay the tickets, but a friend clued me in — at the bank! You can pay for traffic tickets and a lot of administrative things like property taxes at the ATM. Wow!
My car is super cool.
The weather has been somewhat shitty recently – extremely windy and overcast. the coming week looks to be more of the same, but with rain. Yeah. But then again, the end of the day brought this…
Susie's Senior Year Abroad 