Photo of the Day

Three C.C.'s!  She was learning about scale at her ArchiKids after school program, and had to build and draw structures for each of the figures--pretty cool!

Looking West

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 8!

After a few truly frigid days—down vests and flannel pajamas—it has warmed up again.  It’s Saturday noon and we need to get outside, all of us.  Swimming at our gym pool?  Or hiking up on the mountain?  I might want to figure out what I want to do before giving the kids a choice.  They’ll want to go swimming for sure.

More tales of the market.  It’s becoming clear to us that the markets here are publicly subsidized, and they are doing an awful lot to bring in younger customers.  As seems to be true throughout much of the world, many people are working longer hours and placing more of a premium on convenience, which means more prepared food, more mega-markets where you can get everything at the same place.  The markets have tried to meet this trend by building supermarkets that are attached right to the market.  So you can get your fish, cheese, produce, etc. at the market and your toilet paper, flour and sugar at the supermarket without having to make two stops.  Our market also delivers.  For three euros, we take a slip of paper around to each of the vendors (including the supermarket), which they fill out after we pay.  They keep the bags of our stuff, we return the slip to the desk, and someone goes around and collects all of our purchases and delivers them to our house at whatever time we want.  This is a godsend because, while there is an elevator at our metro stop near our house, the one near the market only has stairs.  Getting down the stairs from the street to the platform is almost impossible for me.  Also, the delivery service is done by mentally handicapped people who are working to be mainstreamed.  So it’s good to support that.

But the other thing about the markets is that they are not cheap.  Although it’s impossible to tell just by looking at people, I doubt there are too many low-income people shopping there.  The mix of people feels a bit like Whole Foods, or the farmer’s markets in New York City, which are actually quite expensive even though many of them now accept Food Stamps.  So there is still a challenge of how to get good food to low-income communities inexpensively. The Park Slope Food Coop, where we belong in Brooklyn (and where I hopefully will not be in too deep a black hole when I return because of missing too many shifts those last few months) does this pretty well.  You have to work in order to shop there, and every item is only marked up 20% (which makes you realize just how large the markup is at other stores).

The guy who delivered our groceries yesterday told us that there would be a celebration at the market today—cake and cava—to mark the 1 year anniversary of the renovation of the market.  I spent enough time there yesterday so won’t go, but it’s nice to know these things happen.

We had a friend for dinner last night—Karen Paget—who worked in the Carter Administration, was an elected official in Boulder, CO, and has spent the last 12 years writing a book about the CIA and the national student movement.  She is here for a couple of weeks with a friend from her hometown in Iowa to get to know the city and unwind.  Karen and Linda are smart and funny and we had a really lovely dinner.  Alec made a Spanish fisherman’s stew called suquet, which was delicious.  Apparently the recipe evolved from fisherman cooking it on their boats from fish they didn’t think they could sell.  You start with sofrito, which is the basic beginning of many a Spanish dish—onions and tomato sautéed in olive oil until it is totally broken down and browned.  Then you dredge the fish in flour put it in a pan with oil, add the sofrito, add some brandy and light it—very theatrical.  Then fish stock and lots of very thinly sliced potatos.  The recipe was supposed to serve 6 – 8 and the four of us polished it off nicely.  I made a frisee salad with pears and honeyed pork lardoons.  Can’t have a Spanish meal without a little pork.  And a lemon tart I’d bought at the patisserie.  I’m a lazy phase with respect to cooking just now, and very grateful for my husband’s cooking ability and willingness to put three squares in front of us.

And today, once we have our outing, I need to pack up!  Heading to the states for a whirlwind tour of Baltimore (1 day of research), Atlanta (2 days giving a talk at the Federal Reserve Bank of  Atlanta AND seeing my wonderful friend Elke), and Greensboro, NC (4 days—I get there just in time for my very first niece to be born and hang out with my sister, brother-in-law and Mom cooing over our new family member).  I will also buy chocolate chips, vitamins (very expensive here, and I haven’t found fish oil, which all of you should take), deodorant for Alec, and a few other random things.

So I may not be posting as much over the next week—stay tuned!

The End of an Era

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 7

Milo’s favorite color is pink.  Always has been, at least since he’s had a favorite color.  He has had a powder pink backpack and lunch box for the past two years.  He loves pink shirts, and pink socks that go over his knees.  Last year I had to order girls’ knee socks for him.  We have always wondered when he might get self-conscious about his favorite color, when other kids might start teasing him about it.  It seems the time has come.

Last Friday the C.C. had a play date with a boy in her class, and Milo came along.  We were going out to the park across the street from our friends’ house, and the kids wanted to bring scooters.  Three kids, three scooters, the smallest one of which was pink.  C.C. and David grabbed the big ones and I said, “Hey Milo, check it out.  This one is pink—your favorite color!”  Well, Mr. Milo gave me the stink eye, big time.  I got the message. 

Last night I was snuggling with him before he went to sleep and decided to ask him about it.

“Hey Milo, how come you didn’t want me to say anything the other day about your favorite color being pink.”

“Because it’s a girl color.”

“Really? How can a color belong to girls or boys.  Colors are just colors, and anyone can like any color.  You still like pink, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but…”

“But what? Pink is a great color!”

“I don’t like it when the kids tease me about it.”

“Kids tease you?  What do they say?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Are they in your class?  Are they the same laughy-heads that say things when your hair sticks up?”

“Bigger kids.  I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay, well, I think pink is a terrific color.  Grandpa Joe liked to wear pink.”

“I know that.  And so does the goalie from Valencia.  And you know what?”

“What?”

“Roger Federer has a pink tennis shirt.”

“Well, those are some pretty tough guys that wear pink.”

“I know that.”

And then C.C. and Alec came in, and Milo put his hand over my mouth because he didn’t want to talk any more in front of them.

So I’m a little bit sad about this moment of gender consciousness in my son.  Not that there are not a million subtle signals that get sent to him every day.  But the color thing is so arbitrary.  And so broadly assumed, even at a progressive international school.  One day when I was walking into the schoolyard with the kids, another mom said, “Oh, you must have mixed up their backpacks this morning.”  “Nope,” I replied.  “Those are their favorite colors.”

Hablo Castellano

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 7

Some encouraging experiences on the language front.  You have to be careful here to say “I speak Castellano” instead of “I speak Spanish.”  People here in Catalonia speak Catalan, and they are Spanish, so it’s kind of an insult to say you speak Spanish.  Castellano is more PC, and I am constantly struggling to remember that.

I have never felt that my Spanish was good enough to use it in professional situations.  When I’ve done research in the US involving Spanish speaking subjects, I’ve always hired graduate students to do the interviews.  And meetings?  I figure I must sound like a 5 year old, so why bother.  The big news is that, without really planning to… I’m doing it!  I’ve had several meetings with Important People and they’ve just gone on in Spanish.  Yesterday, for example, I met with an architect that someone at the university put me in touch with and, after a few minutes of introductions he said, “Well, your Spanish is definitely better than my English, so let’s speak in Spanish if that’s okay with you.”  I’m not saying that I understand everything, but I can hold my own.  And it’s only by being in these situations that I get better.

We are reading a novel in my Spanish class (don’t get excited—it’s a pretty easy novel) and I had to look up the word nuca.  It means “nape” as in nape of the neck.   The very next day in pilates class the instructor told us to put our hands on our nucas—and I knew what the hell she was talking about!

Thanks to my initial training in Guatemala, and to seven years of living with Blanca, everyone still says I speak like a Mexican. Fine by me.

10 down, 11 to go...

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 7

Boxes, that is.  What came out first?  My box of books, the kids’ box of toys, and the three wardrobe boxes—the latter because they are very easy to unpack and because they are very big.   So getting the boxes themselves out freed up some key some space.  And then the box that had some toiletries in which one thing sprung a leak.  We had to take care of that one.  We’ve begun digging into several of the remaining ones, and I try to make a bit of progress every day.

I swear, the first few days I was incapable of wearing anything besides the clothes I already had.  I felt like an animal who has been in a cage for a year and, once the door is opened, cannot leave.  I’ve gotten over it.  I’ve worn my flannel pajamas, my anorak, by black boots.

So I am grateful to have our stuff here, mostly.  However, I am at the same time struck by just how much we have, especially given that we brought only a fraction of our belongings.  The other day an American woman I know told me about a friend who has just returned to the States after having spent a year here.  She sent an email back to her friends here in which she detailed all of the things that she saw with fresh eyes when she got back.  One of them?  Stuff. 

I get it.  I could live with a lot less.  I should live with a lot less.  And I did live with a lot less the past three months. Happily.  I am almost ready to take a public vow not to buy a single new item of clothing over the next year.  Almost ready, but not quite.  When I am, I’ll let you know and perhaps you will join me.

Barcelona is not an inexpensive city, and Alec and I have remarked on how people manage to get by, particularly given the dire economic crisis folks are facing here.  One reason?  They buy less stuff.  On average, people have fewer clothes, fewer cars, fewer gadgets, less space in their homes.  Quality of life has much more to do with how you spend your time than with how you spend your money.

The fact that we have to do something with everything we buy here—either ship it back or give it away-- provides us with a healthy incentive to ask ourselves if we really need whatever it is that catches our eye.

Given the demise of cheap credit wrought be the crisis, it seems as though there will need to be a move away from an economy based on consumption.  Such a shift would certainly help preserve the environment as well.  Manuel and I have been talking about this quite a bit, and it might be a new direction for my work.  We’ll see.  In the meantime, I’m grateful for what I have.

Drawing of the Day

C.C. entered a dinosaur drawing contest.  Vote for her entry at http://www.tododinosaurios.com/es/dibujos-de-dinosaurios

R and R

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 7

We’ve had a pretty relaxed weekend following our dinner party.  After slowly finishing the rest of the cleanup yesterday morning, Alec took the kids for haircuts, and we hung out at home until the late afternoon when we went to meet some friends at the Miro museum.  We went back to the Pipilotti Rist exhibit, because the kids loved it and so did we.  Given that none of us was too energetic, it was the perfect place to absorb a little culture.  The main part of the show consisted of three large rooms with video projections on all four walls.  The floors were strewn with large pillows, so you could just lie back and chill.  The kids danced around and did somersaults—see photo below.  One installation had video projected onto the floor, which they thought was terrific.  All of the adults stayed outside looking in, while the kids marched right in.  They got scolded by a guard for being a bit too rambunctious, but I’d bet the artist would have been delighted to have seen the way they enjoyed the work.  We ate leftover wild mushrooms on top of pasta—super yummy.

Today we all stayed in our pajamas until about 3 pm.  I did my Spanish homework, and we worked on the kids’ Halloween costumes.  C.C. is going to be a wolf and Milo a bat.  I found the patterns on the Martha Stewart website—you start with a hoodie and make a face with felt and glue it on.  Really easy and super cute.  Now all we need are some pipe cleaners to make the ears stand up.  I have no idea how to say “pipe cleaner” in Spanish and I’ve been into a few stores asking for long skinny metal things that are fuzzy and come in lots of colors.  You should see some of the looks I get.

The day was gorgeous and we decided we couldn’t stay in all day.  I had a hankering to walk, so C.C. and I headed up to the Carretera de las Aigues in the car, while Alec and Milo went to the park behind our house to play basketball.  On our hike, C.C. and I saw three wild pigs snuffling and snorting in the underbrush.  She thought it was “awesome” and so did I.

Photos of the Day

The kids in the Pipilotti Rist exhibition (top) and C.C.'s drawing of the wild pig we saw on our walk today.