Another Day in the Life

This is one New York winter I am happy to miss.  While we monitored the storm that’s blasting the east coast of the US today—friends our scheduled to fly out tonight—we enjoyed a beautiful, 60 degree, sunny day here in Barcelona.  If you live in the northeast, I don’t mean to rub it in.  But it’s felt like spring every day since we got back from Sicily.  We have our cold days here, too, but when they are interspersed with days like today, it’s hard to mind. 

After napping much of yesterday and a long night’s sleep, I dragged my sorry, congested self to Spanish this morning, thinking I might leave at the break.  But I stuck it out and persevered.  There is a test every Thursday to see if you make it to the next level.  It does not matter much to me—I care about learning the stuff more than the level, but I suppose passing a test is always good for one’s ego.

Before I got sick, I had planned to spend the afternoon and evening cooking up some good stuff in anticipation of our friends’ arrival.  I had to revise my plan.  Instead, I would come home from Spanish, lie down for an hour, go pick up the kids and make sure they got to their various afterschool activities, pick them up after said activities, and then go home to lie down again.  I asked Alec to get home by the time I arrived so that I could retire to the bed pronto. I made sure C.C. got to ArquiKids and went to Milo’s classroom to get him for soccer.  He came out of the classroom sniffling and teary. 

C.C. is a screecher—for better or worse, we always know EXACTLY what she is feeling. But Milo is a stoic.  In fact, if Milo knew I was writing this about him, he would be very upset.  The other evening, after a particularly low sibling rivalry moment in our living room, we tried to debrief at dinner.  C.C., unable to do this, started screeching.  Milo said, “You know, sometimes I feel like screeching, too, but I just keep it inside my body.”  That’s my boy.  I made a point to talk to him about it the next day, and to tell him how important it is to express our feelings (preferably not by screeching).  I told him that all feelings are okay, we just need to figure out how best to express them.  “Do you know what I mean?” I asked him.  “I don’t like this little chat very much,” he replied.  So I left it at that.

So when I saw that he was upset, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get a straight story out of him.   I knelt down to find out what was wrong and he crawled right up into my lap, curling his head onto his knees. 

“I’m tired,” he said.  “Let’s go.” 

“No soccer?” 

“No.”

If Milo does not want to play soccer, something is really wrong.  As soon as we got outside, he said, “I think I need to puke.”  And he did.  Then, “I need to pee.”  And he did.  He fell asleep sitting on my lap in the car while we waited for C.C. to finish ArquiKids, after which we all went home to lie down.

The Spanish Saga Continues

I made the big decision to switch Spanish schools and to do at least a few weeks of an intensive course—4 hours a day, 5 days a week.  Yesterday I showed up to start and had to take a diagnostic: 80 multiple choice questions plus an oral component.  The multiple choice got progressively harder.  In the beginning, I knew the answers and by the end of the middle, I began to answer by what sounded right, which I suppose is okay.  Then came the oral part.  Toni, the teacher who assessed me, started by asking me what I was doing in Barcelona. And off I went, chattering away.  After awhile he stopped me and asked some more questions.  After what seemed like a very short time, he stopped and gave me his assessment.   “Your comprehension and fluidity are up here,” he said, holding his hand up near eye level.  “Your grammar, down here,” he added, lowering his hand a foot or so.  I think this was a nice way of telling me that I speak like a four year old, but because I don’t realize it or don’t care too much what I sound like, I just keep the words coming.  Most people in my situation, I think, are too embarrassed by what they sound like to babble on.  Not me.  “This is a challenge,” Toni said, “because if we put you where your grammar is, you will be bored.  But if we put you where your speaking is, it will be too challenging.”  So I ended up in “Intermediate 3” whatever that means. 

Everyone in the school, except for the senior citizens class, is much younger than me, so I feel more middle-aged than I ever have.  My class has four people in it, including me.  Two Asian men, and a young Brazilian woman.  The Asian men have been studying for months and months.  They arrive with notebooks full of lists, index cards of vocabulary words, and know every single grammatical rule, but have a hard time stringing together a good sentence when they speak.  Meanwhile, I sound like I know what I’m talking about, even when I don’t, which is much of the time.

After my first session yesterday, I was beat.  I came home and napped.  I thought it was the Spanish that had done me in, until I spent the rest of the night honking and blowing and realized that the cold that had danced around me in Sicily had sunk its snotty claws into my head.  When I woke up today my head felt like a bowling ball.  So I stayed home from class, which means I’m already behind.  Pray for me.

Explaining America

It’s an odd experience to be living in another country when your home country is acting up.  People want you to explain the inexplicable to them.  Like why shooting sprees are so common in the US, for example.  Yesterday, I met up with a Norwegian family in the park—their son Peter is Milo’s best friend, and they had invited Milo over to play.  Erik, the father, said he had read about the Giffords tragedy.  “Why does America have so many of these kinds of incidents?” he asked me.

A month or so ago, we had a local family over for Sunday lunch.  As the afternoon progressed and they became more comfortable, the conversation moved, as it often does, to politics.  Iu, a Catalan, was completely stymied by the debate over health care reform.  “Here,” he said, “it isn’t a matter of politics.  We just believe that everyone should be able to get medical care if they are sick. Can you explain it to me?”  We could not.  Spain, like the US, suffers from xenophobia, but even those who are resentful of the presence of immigrants have a different concept of basic human rights than do many of my countrymen.

And then there are the conversations about race, and religion.  Even though I do my best to read widely and understand the many sides of the issues facing the US and the world, the truth is that living in the precious bubble that is Park Slope, Brooklyn—doing my shift at the Park Slope Food Coop, working at one of the country’s more progessive universities, and belonging to the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture—means that I have had a more narrow, day in day out perspective than I’d like to admit.

Living in Barcelona this year has, at times, made me feel prouder of my country than I normally feel when I am in the US, lucky to have been born there.  Really, what it means that I was lucky to have been born to parents who could provide for me, encourage me to get educated and help pay for it.  To be born poor in the US is no picnic.  But this week, after Tucson, after reading about Palin’s crosshairs ads and the exhausting but totally predictable across-the-aisle finger-pointing, I mostly feel sad.

Back to Barca

Our flight out of Trapani left at 6:30 am which, aside from waking up at 3:30, was not as bad as I thought it would be.  We had given the kids a pep talk about teamwork the night before, and they were troopers—terrific travellers until we got into our car back in Spain, at which point they fell promptly asleep.  The flight arrived early, so even with a stop at Borg and Olga’s flower shop in Mataro and the hour drive to Barcelona, we were home by 11:30 am. 

We have been in Barcelona for five months now and it’s finally starting to feel like coming home when we return from travelling.  Alec was our hero, heading out to do a big shop at Carrefour because our cupboards were bare.  The kids played while I unpacked and began the laundry marathon.   I had to convince the kids to come out for a short errand to get peanut butter at the health food store a few blocks away (you can’t get it at Carrefour).  They wanted so badly not to leave the apartment that they asked me to leave them with another family in the building.  Unfortunately, we don’t really know that family so it wasn’t much of an option.

C.C. vowed that she would stay in her pajamas all day on Sunday, and she did (so did Alec), coloring and planning her birthday party.  Milo got a call for his friend Peter and jumped at the chance to go to Peter’s house.  Peter lives near the gym, so I dropped Milo there, worked out and sat in the steam room, and then picked him up on my way back.  It was gorgeous in Barcelona today—70 degrees and sunny.  I am not sorry to be skipping a New York City winter.

With the exception of my bracelets and Milo’s Palermo jersey, all of our Sicily souvenirs are edible, or were edible and got converted to carry-on luggage around our middles.  I think it will be a few days, at least, until we make a pasta meal, but I swear if I ever got kicked out of the US and had to choose one place to live, it would be Italy.  I could eat that food forever.

Photo of the Day

B

Kitchen booty from Sicily

The Last Cannoli

Although Maria Grammatica gets all the press among pasticcerias in Erice, Sergio had told us to buy our breakfast pastries at San Carlo Pasticceria.  In the morning, Alec braved the chill and set out on a pastry buying mission, while I stayed under the covers.  One of the things I love about bakeries in Spain and Italy wrap your goodies up in little packages even if you are just buying them for yourself.  They look like presents, and put me in a celebratory mood.  The specialty pastry of Erice is the Genovese, which looks like an oversized ravioli dusted with confectioner’s sugar.  Genovese are typically filled with pastry cream, but sometimes you can find them filled with nutella.  Our children ate two each for breakfast.   Alec and I split one of the pastry cream ones, which was still just a bit warm, and then tasted the rest of the booty he had brought home.  Like most Sicilian pastry, much of it is made with almond paste.  And there were also dry milk biscuits, perfect for dipping into coffee or tea, delicate, fan-like pastries filled with fig, and little round bocconcini.  I visited the shop later that morning—it is tiny and immaculate, and run by a very old woman with a steely hair tucked under a white baker’s cap, a sturdy body, and sensible shoes.

We strolled through the nearly empty town for a few hours, browsing in shops and exploring the gardens around the castle; although the chill had remained, the sun was war and felt good on our faces.  The castle affords an amazing view of Trapani below, the salt flats, and the sea.  It’s easy to understand why this piece of high ground was so important to so many groups over many hundreds of years.

Although we had heeded Sergio’s advice in the morning, I had read enough about Maria Grammatica’s cannolis to need to try one.  And besides, she seemed to be the only one in town who made them.  Grammatica grew up in a convent in Erice where she learned how to make the cookies and cakes she sells in her shop; the book Bitter Almonds: Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood tells her story.  And when it comes to cannolis, she knows what she’s doing.  Grammatica’s, like the one I had at Sant’Andrea, is a bit creamier than the ones I’d had in Syracuse, and it also had small pieces of dark chocolate mixed into the fresh ricotta filling.  I thought long and hard about which of the four cannoli I had eaten would get my vote for best cannoli of the trip, but I had trouble deciding.  Maybe that one on the street at the market in Syracuse.  Or Grammatica’s.  Hell, they were all terrific.

After our sugar stop, we retreated to the room to rest awhile—we all got under the covers and watched Free Willy.  Then it was time to make our big last supper decision.  The night before we had asked Sergio where we could get some good pizza.  “Well,” he said, “if you want the best pizza in Sicily, you have to go to Trapani.”  Alec and I looked at each other.  “Calvino’s?” I asked.  “Of course!  But you may have to wait, and they don’t take reservations.”

Going to Calvino’s meant driving all the way back down the mountain, and then up again.  They didn’t open until 7 pm.  And we had a 6:30 am flight the next morning.  So pizza meant an hour or two less sleep (and maybe some puking on the part of our kids), given the drive time and wait time.

But really, it wasn’t much of a decision—of course we went!  We parked near the water and arrived at the restaurant just after 7, relieved to see the lights blazing and people streaming in the door.  The building that houses the restaurant was a brothel before it became a pizzeria, and the dining area still consists of a maze of small rooms.  There is a large, brightly lit front room where folks place to go orders.  A counter is stacked high with cardboard pizza boxes, and you can see into the kitchen where racks and racks of dough rounds rest on long pizza stones that can each hold 5 or 6 pies.  It didn’t seem too crowded yet, and we walked through the front room to the dining room and asked for a table for four.  The gatekeeper shook his head.  “No,” he said.  “Riservado.”   So much for not taking reservations. Not again, I thought.  “But we’re flying home tomorrow,” I pleaded, flapping my arms in case he didn’t understand English.  “No.”  He was nice about it, but firm.  There didn’t seem to be a single chink in his armor.   The smell of melting cheese, and the sharp aroma of singed crust from the wood-fired oven was almost too much to take.

“What do we do now?” I asked Alec. 

“We get it to go, and we eat it on the street,” he replied.

“Of course!” I didn’t care about where I ate the pizza, as long as I was eating that pizza before the end of the night.  We ordered two small and two medium sized pizzas—a margarita for the kids, one with mushrooms and one with artichokes, for us, and one with salami for Alec.  It’s a good thing we asked what acciughe were, almost as an afterthought, when we ordered, or we would have had a whole lot of anchovies on our hands.

By this point the front room was jammed, and I tried to surreptitiously take some pictures, but the guy at the register saw me.   I thought he was about to scold me, but instead he invited me into the kitchen where the guys posed and mugged for the camera. 

We ended up piling our pizza boxes on the narrow counter in the front room, and sharing the space with a middle-aged man and his mother, and another family of four.  I guess they hadn’t gotten the memo about reservations either.  We were all in it together.

The pizza came out hot and bubbling and delicious.  A slightly chewy crust, fresh tomato sauce, strong black olives, fresh oregano.  It completely hit the spot.  I can’t tell you how many pieces I ate because I simply lost count.  But I have to tell you—and I may get tarred and feathered for this by the Sicilians—I like New York City pizza better.  Either the high end pies at Franny’s in Brooklyn, or a good, solid slice like Ben’s in the Village.  And then there’s the ultra thin crust pizza at Pete and Elda’s in Neptune, NJ.  Don’t get me started.

The family we shared the counter with told us where to go for our last gelato, but it was closed, so we went to the next place down the road, where we saw the middle-aged man and his mom.  And with that, we had our last Sicilian meal.  An excellent trip overall, food wise and otherwise.

Photos of the Day

Our breakfast pastry package; inside San Carlo pasticceria; C.C. and Milo saying "om" on the castle wall; Calvino's