"Ooo, that one would be fun to watch burn!"
In mid March, the city of Valencia turns into a huge block party. Streets in the old center become pedestrian-only as neighborhood-based groups of artists and fundraisers finally mount the Fallas structures they have been working on throughout the year, paellas are cooked in the middle of the street, fire crackers snap left and right and light-bulb-lined churros trucks dot every major plaza and street corner. This is the celebration of San José, patron saint of carpenters, and perhaps of pyromaniacs too. At 14:00 every afternoon from the 15th to the 19th, hundreds of people cram into the square before town hall and overflow into the side streets to watch and hear the mascletá fireworks show…an awesome display of fireworks, moreso because it's in the center of the city than anything else. And at midnight, more fireworks. And then on the 20th, all but one of the cardboard and polystyrene neighborhood Fallas structures are burned right where they stand in plazas, intersections, street corners, and in tiny little alleys, as firefighters constantly spray the surrounding area and buildings with water.
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…and my mama's too. Together we recently road tripped from Toledo to Granada to the Puerto de Mazarrón. The courtyard of our high school This paella pan (una paellera) can make a paella to feed 1000 people. The day of Santo Tomás in late January is a celebration of high school students. Like the patron saint of high school students. (Apparently there's one for every level of formal education). So, our high school held a party on Friday and there were no classes on Monday. To finish the day of karaoke, pottery, cake testing, and a professor vs. student soccer game, we each received a heaping pile of rice, chicken, and peppers from this huge paella pan. As my boyfriend took photos of the steaming paellera, one of his students ran up to him and asked "Hey, have you never seen a paella before???" Well, yes, but one this big and tasty, no. For a filling, healthy picnic I need the right gear and the right food. The gear is as such: swiss army knife, table-cloth, and tupperware or containers for leftovers. The food is the more creative part. Eating a meal out in a new town is a chance to see more of a new neighborhood, speak the language, and learn new phrases from the menu. But there are only so many meals I can order out before I feel like cash is falling through a hole in the pocket of my shorts. Maybe I could save money by not traveling. A new place, however, does NOT need to mean eating my meals at a restaurant every day. I prefer to save money by having picnics. All the good fruits, veggies, cheeses, wines, and seafood listed on restaurant menus are also available somewhere to buy fresh. Finding where can be a challenge, but if I stick to buying food at the daily covered markets or the weekly open-air markets available in most Spanish cities I've visited, I can find all the goodies I need to nourish my body and satisfy my cravings. By ''callejeando'' (wandering the streets) and asking anyone where and when the markets are, you will find what you're looking for. In Granada I learned to do my food shopping before noon because many produce markets close in the afternoon. Some corner stores stay open throughout the day, but the selection is not as varied and the quality is limited. Larger grocery stores and meat delis, from what I saw, close for several hours in the middle of the day and reopen around 17:00 or 17:30. Moral is, if you're planning a lunch picnic don't expect to find good quality ingredients at the last minute.
Malaga, a much busier and larger city than Granada, has it's share of corner stores and an amazing covered market in the Huelin neighborhood. Being a larger city, there are also around-the-clock grocery stores. But as I expected, the freshest and most quality produce and meat options are bought from the market vendors. Even the Puerto de Mazarrón, where I've found myself finally renting an apartment this year, has all the picnic resources I need to eating cheaply and eating well. This past August I spent several warm, sweaty, beautiful weeks volunteering through WWOOF España on an orange farm named Cañada Mochuelos near the town of Gádor in Southern Spain. The weeks flew by thanks to the good company (people who soon became good friends) and the blast I had working with my body and hands every single day. Here are some snippets from my journal during my time there: August 7, 2012 The farm is in the dessert of the Almeria region - dry crickety canyons and green valleys between and very little water. We wake up in the dark between 6 and 7 in the morning, me and Beatrice (a WWOOFer from Martinique) from our cool cave in the hillside, to eat a tostada and have a cup of coffee with the others from the farm (Luis the owner and his friends Ana and David). We work outside until the sun makes itself unbearably present and I am sweaty and covered in dust, at which point we share the role of cooking up a lunch in the house. The hours after lunch are dedicated to siesta. I either sleep or read or study the new spanish words I am hearing, to later finish my hours of work in the evening when the temperature and the light of the setting sun are perfect. The work has so far consisted of collecting weeds and grasses to dry in order to use as mulching, spreading the mulching in the vegetable gardens, weeding, picking figs from the trees without breaking the stems, dividing iris plants into smaller portions to then plant along the edges of the gardens so that moles don´t enter (apparently irises are good for this), digging up and dividing the bigger aloe plants to then replant smaller ones throughout the entirety of the property, and re-forming the irrigation canals around the orange trees so that water can pass through them when it comes time to water the trees. The water comes from the Sierra Nevada and is kept in a huge reserve beneath the hillside on which the house sits. Ana wants to see aloe everywhere, and I have nothing against it. Aloe is not native to Spain, but it grows very well in this region. Aloe is used in for everything skin related - after sun for the skin, to calm bug bites. Oh the bug bites!! I have mosquito bites, flea bites from the dogs, and spider bites. 20 and counting on each limb. August 14, 2012 We are now 6 WWOOFers, and finding sleeping space is getting a bit tricky. We set up a tent yesterday for Jennifer from Scotland, arranged the caravana for Dimitri from Barcelona and Jens from Germany, while Marino from Almeria gets the little cabaña and Beatrice and I continue to share the cueva. Lots of people to share tasks and lots of people to cook for. I am learning a LOT here, of Castellano, of gardening, of cooking and collecting plants, of sharing. I feel very lucky to have landed on this farm because the owner and his friends are laid-back, communicative, and let the WOOFers share in their lives in and out of work. Luis really does feel that "mi case es su casa." Some of the Castellano I am learning: ¨Higo y queso, sabor de beso¨ - Fig and cheese, taste of a kiss. ¨Arrasas como el caballo de Hun¨ - You demolish (ie. your tasks) like the horse of Attila The Hun. ¨Podria comer un gitano cagando¨ - (I´m so hungry) I could eat a shitting gypsy. One of the owner´s friends, David, who lives on the farm is an albañil, a construction worker and mason, and he says that his profession has provided him more than a lifetime´s worth of dichos y piropos (sayings and catcalls). Too bad I can´t also show you the corresponding hand gestures. August 15, 2012 I have a day free today because the owner Luis, his girlfriend, some of his friends, and three other WOOFers worked together this past weekend renovating a boat in Cartagena, a port city about three hours north along the coast from Gádor. The boat belongs to a volunteer maritime ecology association to which Luis belongs to. My work on the barco consisted of sanding and polishing the rudder and some of the wood inside the boat. I was happy to see Cartagena because it is not far from Mazarrón, where I will be working this year come October. Playing in the kitchen hasnt seemed like work, so yesterday and today I experimented with the basil and arrugula from the garden and made pestos with toasted sunflower seeds and a salad with the figs from the trees. Yesterday we were more than 6 to make 6 loaves of bread, so that went very quickly. There are also many grapes to be picked as well as "higos chumbos" (chumbo figs). Chumbos are yellow/pink/orange fruit that grow on the prickly leaves of the cactus plants here. Collecting them is tricky because they are covered with tiny pricks that will give you nearly invisible blisters if they touch your skin. The fruit inside, however, is like the pearl of an oyster! We use it for juices and to eat plain. Just be careful when indulging in the fruit here - I was told the first day not to eat chumbos and grapes in the same day because it would make me constipated. The days being so long, however, I forgot one afternoon that earlier in the day I had eaten grapes and so then ate some chumbos in the afternoon. I learned the hard way NOT to do that again. The reason being that both chumbos and grapes have many small seeds, so by eating many of each fruit, you create a blockage within your bowels. The many lives of a chumbo... December 2012 UPDATE! |
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