Saturday, September 25, 2010

C.C.'s Video of the Week

Fire Run

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 6


After a good night’s sleep, and a lazy morning, we were ready for more festivities.  After lunch we headed to the Parc de Montjuic, the castle specifically, because the La Mercè schedule listed lots of family activities that would take place throughout the day there.  It was a crystal clear, blue sky days, one of those days that sits on the cusp between summer and fall—hot in the sun, cool in the shade.  So it was beautiful up on the hill, but the activities were a bit of a bust—a nice carousel, but several tables where kids were to make things out of plastic bottles recycled from the sponsor company’s products.  How many butterflies made out of bleach bottles can you have in your home without it seeming a bit theme-ish?  I’m sure the sponsor company was looking for visibility and trying to associate itself with recycling.  But to me, it just reminded me how much plastic this firm—which makes cleaning products, shampoo, etc—makes and sends out into the planet.  Anyway, I’m not really interested in getting up on that soap box just now, so let’s move on to the main event.

The Correfoc, or fire run.  Everyone told us this was not to be missed.  Fireworks and fire in general are quite central to La Mercè.  The festival inclues two correfocs—one for children, which is held at 6:30 in the evening, and one for adults that happens later in the evening.  We were advised to dress ourselves and the children in long pants and long-sleeved shirts—cotton—and to cover their heads with hats.  We did.  As we gathered at the side of Via Laietana, where the procession would go, we saw parents tying bandanas around their little ones’ faces, covering their necks and putting hats on top of hoods.  We even saw one family decked out in swim goggles.   We wondered what we were in for. 

The parade starts with community groups of drummers proceeding west to east on Via Laeitana.  You can hear them from blocks away.  Each group is from a neighborhood and has its own beat.  After about a half hour of drumming, there is a pause and spectators spill into the streets, waiting for the fire.  And then suddenly, from the direction the drummers have gone, you begin to hear the pop popping of fireworks, and see the sparks in the sky.  They march closer, and you realize that they, too, are in groups—each group dressed as devils of one kind or another, each devil swinging a pole that’s rigged up with what appear to be giant sparklers that shoot their sparklers sideways into the crowd.  So it’s loud, and sparks are flying like crazy, and you begin to understand the swaddling that came before.  Some groups are accompanied by dragons or other fire beasts that are also adorned with wires equipped for holding several ginormous sparklers.  Before long the street is filled with an acrid haze.  And the devil groups just keep coming and coming, dancing with their fire while crazy spectators rush them—as though it might somehow be a good idea to go after a fire wielding devil.  Alec and C.C. were actually accosted by a family of devils, and it took him to realize it was the family we had swapped houses with last Christmas, and who had us to lunch last week (see Photos of the Day).

C.C. loved it, and had Alec take her to the front row so that she could take photos and videos.  Crouched there in the street with her camera, her baseball cap pulled low over her eyes, her face intense with concentration, she reminded me of Christiane Amanpour reporting from Baghdad.  Milo started out on my shoulders, but freaked out pretty quickly, and chose to watch from several rows back.

I can tell you one thing—this kind of parade would NEVER happen in the US, and for one reason.  Too much potential for lawsuits.  Swaddling or no swaddling, many were the five year olds getting showered by sparks in the middle of the street.  Watching it, I was reminded of the words C.C.’s horseback riding teacher in Brooklyn Ryka uttered when we told her we’d try to find a place for C.C. to ride in Spain:  “Ya gotta be careful over there,” she warned. “It’s not safe like it is here.  And there’s no 1-800-LAWYER in Spain, you know what I’m saying?”  She’s right.  In the few short months we’ve been here, I’ve swum in a few municipal pools—none of them guarded.  My kids have climbed on some really cool playground equipment, that probably wouldn’t fly in the US.  But all’s well that ends well, and no one got hurt as far as we could see.

As we wound our way through the Barri Gotic to get to Plaça Catalunya and our train home, we encountered two stages with groups playing rock music, and then a violinist playing classical.  The streets were full, the sky getting dark, the mood light.  The festival is still raging, I’m sure, but we are headed for sleep here in our house, the occasional boom of fireworks reminding us that it’s not over yet.

Photos of the Day


Friday, September 24, 2010

La Mercè

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 6


La Mercè is Barcelona’s biggest festival of the year, and today is its central day.  The schools are all closed, the shops are all closed, and no one works.  Last night there were fireworks at the beach, and today the festivities began at 8 am with a Pipers’ Morning Call (we missed that event).   Although the forecasts called for rain, the weather was beautiful and sunny—warm but not hot.  Cool in the shade.  Perfect for standing shoulder to smelly shoulder in a large crowd.

I do not like crowds.  I am a New Yorker and, like most of my city brethren, would not be caught dead in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.  Soon after we arrived in Barcelona and I saw that the kids had a long weekend—on what is also my birthday weekend—I immediately rented a little house for us in Cadaques, on the Costa Brava.  The sea would still be perfect for swimming, I thought.  This was before I knew what La Merce was all about—I figured it was just one of many holidays that buy one an extra day of vacation.

And then, at a birthday party for one of Milo’s classmates, a woman told us about how wonderful the festival was—we should really be here for it, she said, especially if we were only here for one year.  She went on excitedly, asking: “Have you ever been to the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade?  It’s fabulous—it’s sort of like that.”  In fact, I have been to the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.  Sort of, and not by choice.  As it happens, my office in New York City is near the epicenter of that parade.  Inevitably, I have found myself in my office on Halloween and, even though I knew somewhere in my brain that it was Halloween, I would forget about the parade.  And then I would be trapped.  I’d step out from the quiet building into the chaos of the street and say, “Oh, shit!  It’s today!”  For the 10 years I lived on the upper west side this was a REAL problem, because my office is in 5th Avenue, the parade goes up 6th Avenue, and I would need to get to 7th Avenue to get to the subway that would take me home.  Walk the block from 5th to 6th and it is not only wall-to-wall people, but swarming with cops.  You have a better chance of crossing 6th avenue on Halloween night than winning the lottery.  So this woman’s argument did not make me want to change my plans; if anything, I felt relieved that I would be nowhere near this festival.

But then we spent some time with Catalans, people who had lived here for a long time.  And these conversations made me begin to wonder about whether we should, in fact, stick around.  We could go to Cadaques some other weekend, and the festival would be over by Sunday, my actual birthday, which would allow me time to recover and orchestrate a celebration that would be more in synch with my non-crowd loving self.  And then C.C.’s Spanish teacher taught her class one of the traditional Mercè songs, and had them coloring their own gegante puppets.  I knew Alec would be up for staying—he has no problem with crowds.  And so this is how I ended up deciding, of my own free will, to spend my birthday weekend jammed into various plazas like a circus clown in a Volkswagen.

A little history and context, courtesy of the official website of Barcelona (http://www.bcn.cat/merce/en/historia.shtml):  La Merce is the patron saint of Barcelona.  According to legend, on the night of 24 September 1218, the Virgin appeared simultaneously to King Jaume I, Saint Pere Nolasc and Saint Ramón de Penyafort. She asked all three to create an order of monks dedicated to saving Christians imprisoned by the Saracens. It was the time of the wars of religion.

Centuries later in 1687, Barcelona suffered a plague of locusts, and placed itself in the hands of the Virgin of La Mercè. Once the plague had been overcome, the Council of the City named her patron saint of Barcelona. The Pope did not ratify this decision until two centuries later, however, in 1868.

After Pope Pius IX declared the Virgin of La Mercè the patron saint of the city, Barcelona began to celebrate a festival in the month of September. La Mercè really took off in 1902, when under the impulse of Francesc Cambó, the festival became the model of those that are currently held all over Catalonia.

Myron and Raquel are here, and we had also arranged for a friend from C.C.’s class (Sylvia) and her parents to meet us at our place so that we could all travel to the Plaça Saint Jaume together.  I had braced myself for the worst, but the ride down in the train and the walk to the plaça were not terribly crowded.  As we approached, the crowd thickened but still seemed manageable.  The gegantes—enormous puppets the height of two or three people—lined the plaza.  Some are more than 100 years old, their faces frozen into a formal stiffness.  Music started from the stage, the mayor appeared, and soon the gegantes began to enter the plaza, in twos or fours, and dance to traditional music played by local bands.  Each set came from a particular neighborhood, accompanied by its own local band, and member of the crowd danced along, humming to the music.  The crowds had started to press in by this time, and the kids could see nothing.  So we each hoisted one on our shoulders.  Let me tell you, either these kids are getting too big for this, or I am getting too old.  I need a professional massage.

After a break, several groups of castelleras were introduced and marched into the plaça.  The castelleras are teams of people—also neighborhood based—who build human towers, sometimes seven high.  The largest, strongest people are on the bottom, and the towers are topped with small children who can’t be more than 4 years old.  Their costumes include a wide cloth wrapped around their waist like a cumberbund.  I assumed it was decorative until I watched them build the towers.  As a circle of men forms the wide base, the next highest level begins to climb up, digging their bare feet into the cumberbund thing to use as a sort of step.  As the castelleras go higher and higher, each person uses the other layers as stair steps, using the belt, then the shoulders as steps on one person before moving on to the person above.  We found ourselves in the middle of the plaza, with towers springing up on all sides.   Being that close enabled us to see the faces of the troops, especially those on the bottom, invariably burly men, who held up the entire column of people standing on their shoulders.  Their faces were a study in focus, teeth gritting, cheeks red.  As soon as the last child reached the top, she would immediately begin to climb down again, so as to relieve the burden of those beneath her.

The crowd roared and clapped.  Groups got eliminated and those remaining built more towers in order to stay in the competition.  At this point we had been in the plaza for several hours, and it was time to get the kids some food and our own shoulders a break.  We got some gelato, and then opted out of more festivities in order to recover at home.  Sylvia came with us and the kids made paper monsters, and played hide and seek.  It's late, and we are all tired now, and there will be more festivities tomorrow.

Photo of the Day #1




Wednesday, September 22, 2010

To Kiss or Not to Kiss

Human Highlighter Suit Tally:  6


When greeting each other, or parting, Spaniards kiss each other on both cheeks.  This holds for men, women and children.  And they are real kisses—not the air kisses New Yorkers bestow on each other in order not to muss their lipstick.  However, they are also not the sloppy, saliva-heavy kisses of my Polish grandmother.  I find it a pleasant, warm way to start a conversation.

I am a kisser and a hugger by nature, but in the US such behaviour is not always welcome, so I often find myself turning it on and off depending on how I think it will be received.  I find that I can usually guess with relatively good accuracy whether the person I am meeting is a kisser or not.  In the US, this kissing business is a bit like sharing food at restaurants—some pass plates around liberally, assuming everything on the table is fair game, while others are appalled at the notion of a fellow diner, no matter how deep the connection, reaching across the table with a fork poised to….  I am in the former camp, and find that I prefer the company of plate-sharers at table and elsewhere.

So you would think that I would be made for Spanish kissing culture.  But it´s trickier than that.  First off, I sometimes forget where I am, and that it’s the custom here to kiss.  Twice.  And second, I think sometimes that the Spaniard I am meeting knows that Americans are not kissers, and is waiting for me to make the first move.  So we both end up hesitating, and then it gets a bit awkward.

My children are completely unaccustomed to being swooped in on and smooched by people they´ve never met.  They look surprised when newcomers embrace them like long lost cousins.  Poor things—there’s just too much adjusting going on.

Photo of the Day

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The Inner Circle

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 6


When we traveled to Barcelona last December/January during our holiday break to check out neighborhoods and schools, we swapped houses with a Barcelona family.  In setting up the exchange, we corresponded by email and once talked by phone but had never met them.  About a week ago, an email message popped in to my inbox from Nerea.  “Have you arrived in Barcelona?, “she inquired. “Is there anything we can help you with? Our boys would love to meet Carmen and Milo—will you come for a meal to our home?” So on Sunday, we went for lunch to their home—which was a little strange only because we had cooked in their kitchen, slept in their beds, bathed in their tub.  The kids knew where all of the toys were and went straight for them, making themselves at home.

Nerea, who is Basque, and Iu, who is Catalan, served up a fabulous Catalan meal, starting with white asparagus, and a salad of mache, figs and fresh cheese.  Iu cooked an “arroz”—a rice.  We would probably call it a paella, but here there is a whole range of cooked rice dishes.  This was a seafood arroz, beginning, as many dishes here do, with a sofrito—a mix of onion, tomato and garlic finely diced and cooked slowly in oil until it becomes a thick, brownish sauce.  The sofrito was simmering on the stove when we arrived and it smelled heavenly.  When it’s done, the ingredients have melded to such a great extent that you can’t distinguish what’s in it by looking at it.  You have to use your taste buds, and your nose.  The rice is added to the sofrito and then cooked almost like a risotto, with cups of seafood stock (homemade of course) added and cooked until the rice absorbs the liquid.  The shrimp, clams and mussels are added and kept on the heat until just cooked.  The result is a dense, rich dish redolent of the sea.  Comfort food.  We had cake, and then chocolates, and then coffee.  And more cava.

We sat and ate for hours, talking about politics, food, places we need to visit during our year here.  They invited us to use their country home in Basque country.  People describe the Catalan culture as one that is difficult to penetrate.  It´s difficult to get to know someone well, but once you are in, you are in for life.  In contrast, Americans are seen as very easy to get to know superficially, but it often ends there.  We felt extraordinarily welcomed by Iu and Nerea—perhaps because they had lived in our home and vice versa.  It seems as though our home exchange experience got us entry into the inner circle.

We learned this first when, shortly after we arrived in Barcelona, we got together with Alec’s stepmother’s cousin (Olga) and her husband (Borge).  You may be familiar with them from other posts.  During this first meeting, we mentioned that we were looking to buy a used car and asked Borge if he had any advice.  He immediately offered us one of his cars.  For the year.  For free.  And all because, it seems, we are family.  It does not matter whether we know each other.  We are connected, and that’s that.  We did end up buying our own car, but given how long it took between plunking down the deposit and turning the key, it was a good thing we were able to borrow Borge’s car for the year.  So it’s beginning to feel like we have some people here, and it feels good.

Photo of the Day

Monday, September 20, 2010

Our house is surrounded by cats!

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 6


Beware the vagaries of online translation services.  These websites—Google Translate, freetranslation.com, babblefish…--are invaluable when you are reading the newspaper and need the meaning of one key word in order to unlock the meaning of an entire paragraph.

But watch out if you are tempted to cut and paste an entire passage into one of these translation programs.  It’s become quite obvious to me that many Spanish businesses, in pursuit of an English-speaking market—have done just this.  The result—well, you can typically get the gist of what the site is trying to communicate, but not without some confusion and humor en route.

Take what happened to me today.  In the past few years, we have become avid Homeexchange.com users.  Well, I am avid, and Alec is generally grateful for my efforts.  You can spend a lot of time on homeexchange.com.  Anyway, I have been trying to arrange an exchange in Provence for early December, when the kids have a few days off from school.  Montpellier is only a 3 hour drive, and seems like a good place to go.  So I sent several proposals to folks with homes in Montpellier, and was delighted today to receive a response from an interested exchanger.  In an effort to be helpful, the sender of the following email clearly put it through a translation system:

Hello

Thank you to your proposal that we accept with pleasure.
This project we like, even if an exchange of longer duration (in Barcelona or New York ...) we'd also interested.
Start this exchange on 3 suits us.
We arrive on time that would suit you (but not early!) If you want to welcome us in your apartment before your departure.
Or conversely, if you come to us for our departure.
Swap key on the road as possible.
Or another form ....
End of exchange on 8 suits us.
At this time we do not know if we have two or if our 9 year old daughter will be with us.
Our house is surrounded by cats. To avoid allergic to ...

We expect you to read.
Cordially


A recent Op-Ed piece by David Bellos in the New York Times (“I, Translator” March 20, 2010) takes a close look at this problem.  Apparently, these translation tools do not simply translate text literally, word by word, but go out and search for passages to see how particular words and phrases are used in context.  The more examples the tool can find, the more accurate the translation is likely to be (kind of like the face recognition feature of iPhoto).  At least in theory.  So it would seem to make sense that more widely used languages, like English and Chinese and Spanish, would result in better translations than, say, Catalan, which is only spoken by 11 million people.  However the above example shows that even a simple French-English translation can go awry.  When I read the message from the Provence homeowners, I was sitting at my desk, within earshot of the office administrator.  I snorted and started laughing so hard I am sure she thought I was nuts.  And my Spanish is not nearly good enough for me to have explained what was so funny.  The author of the Times article argues that it will be a long time before human translators will be rendered obsolete by mere software.  I agree. 

I should mention that Alec is allergic to cats, so although the house in Provence looks pretty nice, I need to find out if it is, truly, surrounded by cats.

Photo of the Day

Sunday, September 19, 2010

You Say Tomato...

Human Highlighter Suit Tally:  6!


Growing up in New Jersey, tomatoes were a major food group during the summer.  Some years, we would grow a few plants on our back porch.  Practically everyone else we knew did the same thing, and when they came to visit us at Midway Beach, our friends would arrive bearing grocery bags full of tomatoes, zucchini, and other products of New Jersey’s sandy soil.  My father, whose Polish parents kept a kitchen garden and weaned him on local produce, ate tomato sandwiches all summer long.  Thick slices of Polish seeded rye bread slathered with mayo and filled with ripe, red tomatoes.  Lots of salt and pepper.  No lettuce, no meat, no cheese.  My sisters and I grew up on the stuff, too.  I have sharp memories of coming home from the beach for lunch, and eating my tomato sandwich in my bathing suit, standing over the sink to catch the drips.  Sometimes we ate the tomatoes like apples.  Tomato in one hand, salt shaker in the other, we would take a bit, sprinkle with salt, take another bite, sprinkle again.

The tomato is a symbol of our state.  Anyone who ridicules New Jersey for its “garden state” moniker has never ventured off of the Turnpike or Parkway.  Several years ago, when I was pregnant with C.C., I had a gathering of women friends and invited a henna tattoo artist to come and embellish us.  I got a mandala on my swollen belly, while my cousin Tracy had the artist draw a Jersey tomato on her forearm.

The Catalans have their own version of the tomato sandwich, and it is ubiquitous.  Here it is practically unthinkable to begin a meal without pan amb tomaquet, or bread with tomato.  Like the Jersey tomato sandwich, it is the simplest of food pleasures, and these simple pleasures are often the best.  They capitalize on what the Catalans call materia prima—best quality ingredients.  Ripe tomatoes, good bread, garlic, flaky sea salt.  So to make pan amb tomaquet, you have a baguette and toast it lightly.  Divide a garlic glove and rub it on the cut side of the bread; cut a ripe tomato in half and do the same.  Eat.  It doesn’t get much easier, or simpler, or more delicious, than that.

The first Sunday we were here, Borg (Alec’s stepmother’s cousin’s husband…) showed up with a bag full of his home-grown tomatoes, and I was momentarily transported back to Midway Beach.  In the ensuing days, I made tomato sandwiches, ratatouille, rising up to the challenge of consuming the beauties before a single one spoiled.  Somehow, more than with grocery store produce, I feel the need to honor the effort and care that had gone into producing these tomatoes.

When we returned from our Pyrenees vacation, our trunk half-filled with bottles and cans of a spectrum of olive oil varietals, I developed a strong hankering for bruschetta.  One evening, to satisfy my craving, I sent Alec out for some tomatoes.  He went for the reddest, ripest ones he could find from the several bins at the produce market.  “Hombre,” the grocer said as he began to pay, “these are only good for pan amb tomaquet—nothing else.”  His words were issued as a friendly warning, should Alec be thinking to use them in a salad or some other dish.  We did not make pan amb tomaquet, but bruschetta is not so far off.  It seems that every country that produces good tomatoes has come up with its version of a tomato sandwich. 

Even Ferran Adria, famous chef of the Catalan molecular gastronomy restaurant Il Bulli, has devised is own version of deconstructed pan amb tomaquet.

I spent an hour this afternoon cooking up a tomato compote to use in a tumbet—which is Spain’s more labor intensive version of ratatouille.  We’ll eat it tomorrow and I promise a full report.  For now, I’ll share with you the recipe for Tomato and Bread Soup with Fresh Figs—it’s fig season, too…

So as shocking as it might sound, I don’t really miss the Jersey tomato.  I have found no substitute, however, for Jersey corn.

Sopa de Tomate con Higos
(from The New Spanish Table, by Anya Von Bremzen)

¼ c. fragrant, extra version olive oil, plus more for serving
1 medium size onion, finely chopped
1 medium size green bell pepper, seeded and dice
4 large garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 pounds ripe, fleshy tomatoes
1 tsp. smoked sweet Spanish paprika
2 to 2 ½ cups chicken or vegetable stock
1 medium size pinch or sugar, or more if needed
1 dash red wine vinegar, or more if needed
1 Tbsp. chopped fresh oregano
¾ tsp. cumin seeds
6 black peppercorns
1 large pinch coarse salt
3 slices dense country bread
4 green or purple figs, cut in half vertically and sliced

1.     Place the olive oil in a heavy 4 quart saucepan, and heat over medium heat.  Add the onion and cook, stirring, until softened, 2 – 3 minutes.  Add the green pepper, cover the pan, and reduce the heat to low.  Cook the vegetables until soft, about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Stir in half the garlic and cook for another minute.
2.     Stir the tomatoes into the vetetable mixture, increase the heat to medium-high, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes reduce to a thick puree, 25 – 30 minutes, adjusting the heat so that the tomatoes don’t stick to the bottom of the pan.  Add the paprika and 2 cups of the chicken stock, stir to mix, then let come just to a simmer; don’t let the soup boil.  Add the sugar and vinegar and simmer for 6 – 8 minutes, skimming if necessary.  If the soup seems a little too thick, add the remaining ½ cup stock.
3.     While the soup is cooking, place the remaining garlic and the oregano, cumin seeds, peppercorns, and salt in a mortar and, using a pestle, mash them into a paste. Add a little liquid from the soup to the mortar to rinse it out, then stir the contents into the soup. Let the soup cook until the flavors blend, 2 – 3 minutes, then taste for seasoning, adding more sugar, vinegar, and salt as necessary.  Turn the heat off and let the soup cool for about 10 minutes.
4.     To serve, cut the slices of bread in half.  Place each half bread slice in a soup bowl and ladle the soup over it.  Top each serving of soup with a few fig slices and drizzle a little olive oil over them.

Recipe says it will serve 4, but two of us polished off the whole pot for dinner.







Photo of the Day #1

Photo of the Day #2

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: