…and my mama's too. Together we recently road tripped from Toledo to Granada to the Puerto de Mazarrón.
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M, A, R and J are my Thursday afternoon English "conversation" class participants. They are 9 years old, all cousins (two of them twins) and wonderful. Being cousins they know each other well and by the end of our time together they are often wrestling on top of each other on the couch in the living room. There is a lot of energy in the room, and early on I decided to avoid sitting in the chairs around the table unless they wanted the hard surface to write or draw on. We sit on the floor or on the couches. A couple of weeks ago we finished our topic of body parts. This was review for what they've already learned in school, but some new words came up (like thigh and belly button), and in order to let THEM take their learning in whatever direction they pleased, I asked if, in pairs, they would like to create songs with body part vocabulary. Within 30 seconds they were spitting and laughing out suggestions. Within 20 minutes they had choreographed dances and invented lyrics. We invited Abuela (Grandma) in to watch their performances. Here are the lyrics of R and A's song called "I'm Horrible!" 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. Why is The Big Rock Candy Mountains a great song to sing with a class of Spanish 12 year olds? 1. This song has a ton of new awesome words and phrases (words even I had to look up before class). 2. It's about a paradise land full of free food and napping. 3. This song, first recorded in the 1920's by Harry McClintock, is said to come from one man's account of hobo traveling of the US in the late 1800's or early 1900's. In class my co-teacher could note on some US history that varies from today's pop-culture. "Railway bulls," for example, were those who policed trains to kick off ticketless riders into the Great Depression. 4. The song is a break from recognizable English song choices that students often know, such as hits from Bob Marley and the Beatles (which are fun choices, but they are not from the US, and as part of my role this year to share US-specific culture with the students I'd like to share US artists and songs when possible).
You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. I'm borrowing that. I have had no regrettable experiences thus far in the past three months of living in the Puerto de Mazarrón and I am really looking forward to spending many more weeks in a local high school motivating students to speak in English with confidence. In order to feel at home and motivated in my new environment, however, I am breaking some eggs (i.e. letting go, saying "yes") to make some omelets (i.e. change apartments, jobs, pass the Spanish driving tests (still in process)). I've also had to break some real eggs to make some real omelets…or, como se dice aquí, tortilla. Learning how to make tortilla with our friend Sarah, visiting while on her tour of Europe. She brought the recipe down from her friend in Barcelona. This recipe is similar to how I learned it with Sarah, we just added MORE olive oil and garlic. The chickens on the farm near Gádor lay beautiful, fresh eggs. Here is our friend David frying up more than the recommended number of eggs for one skillet. While this isn't a tortilla, cooking a huevo frito is fast and the result is delicious. The first time I cooked a huevo frito, which was for David's son, his face dropped with a look of confusion as I brought him the plate. Apparently my egg was not "frito" enough. For your huevo frito to be truly Spanish, use a bath of olive oil to fry the egg(s). Store the oil that is left in a glass jar for future frying until no longer appetizing. At that point, you could venture to make soap with the oil, as the farm friends do, but I have yet to learn that.
The population of the Puerto de Mazarrón, the port town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain which I am happily calling home this year, changes drastically from the summer months to the winter months. With about 10,000 or so year-round residents, the center of the port remains lively enough regardless of the time of year. Walk several blocks away from the hub of town, however, and you'll be greeted with nearly empty streets. “To rent” signs dot apartment building faces and bougainvillea plants fragrantly engulf the front gates of homes. Cats trot alone along sidewalks and squeeze through holes in crumbling rock walls. Seeing a car parked on these empty roads seems inconsistent with the “ghost town” feel. The same goes for the occasional child peddling into sight on his tricycle, coming from around a corner and just as quickly zipping back, out of sight. But make your way back toward the main streets of the port and very soon there are more children playing, scooters zooming, bakeries tempting you with olores de pan, women going to work in the greenhouses, TVs outside of cafés streaming today's soccer game, fishing boats making their way into and out of the port past the lighthouse, waiters serving marinera tapas with cañas, and all the good signs of a living community. I know the Puerto de Mazarrón is far from a ghost town because of the constant buzz of life below my apartment window can attest to that, but the empty summer houses along the coast attest to something more, something quieter. The economy isn't booming in this town, nor is it in this country where just this past Wednesday, November 14th another General Strike (“Huelga General”) took place during which thousands of people sacrificed their daily wages to go to the streets in demand for more equitable government spending and cutting. Maybe these homes are a sign of a falling economy. Or maybe they're a sign of the port town's fading heyday as a place to live. Or maybe they are just waiting for summer. I don't know if the homes are just temporarily empty or forever abandoned, but I like it that way. This unknown is eery and magical and I love it.
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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