No, I don't fucking "vale" god damnit!!!

The Spanish have this word, "vale." It means, as far as I can tell, the following:

• ok?
• ok.
• alright.
• alright?
• got it.
• got it?
• understand?
• I understand.
• great!
• let's go
• go now!
• I'm finished with you.
• your time is up.
• get out of my sight.
• you're in the wrong line, asshole.
• what the fuck are you doing back here?
• what is your major malfunction?

The thing is, I don't "vale." And it's their fault. I have reasonably good Spanish. I don't have a lot of comprehension problems really. My productive language is a problem still, but it's not nonexistent. But here's the thing. I've been to and/or spent chunks of time in 10 Spanish speaking countries (11 if you count Miami which Ricardo does) and I don't have difficulty understanding people. OK, a little trouble in the Dominican Republic and Panama, but that is some advanced Spanish.

And put it this way, I nearly cried with joy (literally, tears welled up, and OK I was over tired and jet lagged, but fuck that) when I found myself ordering from the owner at the restaurant a 1/4 block from here. Why? Because she was from Havana and I understood her perfectly. Every. Motherfucking. Word. And she's Cuban.

Yes, that's right. I understand Cubans with little difficulty. But not Madrileños.

When we traveled south to Andalusia, I felt the tides of relief wash over me as I realized that there (perhaps due to the heat? maybe it cools them down?) people actually opened their mouths when they spoke and formed words. I could understand them! Don't get me wrong. Few other tourists could since they dropped every third syllable (not unlike Cubans, frankly). But for one glorious week, I felt like I had a chance to "vale."

But now I am back in Madrid. And once again, I do not "vale." People speak to me and it's like they are speaking a language I have never heard before. Between the bizarre th-like lisping, the fact that no one seems to open their mouths, and the fed-ex man speed of their speech I might as well have moved to Burma. I don't think I have a bat's prayer in hell of learning to speak Spanish well this year because I will be spending all my time just trying to fucking "vale."

Cause right now? Yeah. I don't.

tuna fish

Today I went to El Corte Inglés to go the grocery store. We've ordered a couple times from this French hypermart called Carrefour, and the prices are fine but they ding you on delivery and they substitute a lot. So today, despite the fact that I have this cold/stomach flu thingy, because we had no food other than rice, lentils, and some melon and milk (the lentils and rice were too complicated and the melon and milk too gross) Ricardo and I limped over the the store.

We don't have anything like El Corte Inglés in the US. Imagine Bloomingdales combined with a Harris Teeter level grocery store, a travel agency, car repair service and rentals, Best Buy, and Barnes and Noble. Add to that a Tower Records (now defunct), a decent restaurant, a full liquor store, and a West Elm and you've got El Corte Inglés.

We hadn't intended to shop there. But we couldn't make it to the cheaper Día grocery closer to The Kid's school. And actually it ended up being quite reasonable. I got about 10 packages of pasta (each about .58 E/90¢ each) which was what our stomachs can handle, ingredients for chicken noodle soup which i plan to make tomorrow when I am not sleeping all day, some figs for the Kid, lactose free milk for Ricardo, tea, lemons, eggs, cereal, bread, butter, a couple kinds of juice (including real tropicana because juice here is really odd), herbs, and more all for 51 E/ $70.

But this is rather a long prelude to a more interesting obsession/phenomenon here. And that my friends is... tuna fish.

A one point during the shopping trip Ricardo had to excuse himself to find the facilities (it was bound to be one of us with this bug and had it been me, I'd likely have been vomiting) and this left me alone in the aisle devoted to tinned fish.

Yes, that's right, an entire aisle of tinned fish.

One whole side of which is devoted solely to tuna.

You can't log into the supermarket part of the Corte Inglés website without a Madrid zipcode (go to google maps and get one if you're curious). But if you were to do this you would discover what I did in my nausea and hacking cough haze of horror.

There are more kinds of tuna for sale in this basement grocery store than I have ever seen in my life. It comes in cans, in glass jars and in what look like juice boxes. You can get it packed in water, olive oil, virgin olive oil, vegetable oil or pickled. Worse yet you can get it in sauces. Either tomato or "picante." It comes in chunks, flakes and filets. It comes as light, white or albacore. You can have it in three packs, large containers or small. I've never seen the variety or the array of tuna products. It was stunning. I was held in thrall as I dragged my little basket on wheels of lactose free milk and (hard to find) salted butter from jar to jar, can to can, juice box to juice box. Even without the stomach issues I think this would have made me throw up a little in my mouth. As it was I was too shocked to even move at one point as I stood before the flesh colored chunks floating in oil in their red and yellow labeled jars.

This was where all the salads in Spain began. In this aisle. Now I understood. I would not ever need a vegetable peeler (which btw, I still have not found). All I need, is a can opener.

Musings on bathrooms, restaurants and other odds and ends

I figure that if you want to know what we've done as tourists, you're better off reading Ricardo's blog. I don't do very well describing those kinds of things and I just end up writing some sort of litany. I feel that complaining and making fun of things is really my milieu. So I am here to do just that.

When we were in Venice, we were treated to a lot of squat toilets. I took this as being a part of the fact that when you are a sinking city and you have water issues that antiquated plumbing comes with the territory.

Here is what I did not expect: Spain has a lot of toilets simply missing toilet seats. This is not, strictly speaking, a squat toilet clearly, but it necessitates squatting. In addition, Spain, like much of Latin America, has a thing where you throw the paper that you've used into a trash can instead of into the commode. I can live with these two things. They are not uncommon when traveling, (although unexpected in the first world), but I can let that pass.

Here is what I don't care for one bit. About half of all bathrooms lack soap. It's not that they are out of soap. They don't have any. And they never have had. In one café/bar we were in, I went to use the restroom (and actually this one did have soap) and a guy came out of the men's room with his cigarette in his hand (the men and women frequently share a sink) and made no attempt whatsoever to even rinse his hands. Just moved on. Sometimes, people use toilet paper to dry their hands which just makes the whole thing worse (and it's not like they used soap to begin with).

So basically, it seems that hygiene is not of concern here.

Now I get that we are overly concerned with hygiene in the US and I know as a teacher I am really fastidious about it. But I can't help wondering if this is a problem, the fact that people here so infrequently wash their hands carefully or well. It seems like it would be.

Another thing that is kind of odd here in Spain is the café/bar/restaurant. This is a place where you can go for a cup of coffee or for a rum and coke while your friend has a coffee. Or you can sit down and eat a meal. Or you can stand and eat a tapas. At 10am you can have a beer. At 1am you can have a coffee. There is always food, drink, smoking (which I think is obligatory) and all of it is in the same place. Imagine a Starbucks where you can sit down to a steak and a glass of wine with a full bar. It's kind of like that. Also the prices are different if you're sitting, standing or perching. If you sit at a table, it's more than if you stand. If you perch on a stool it's more than if you stand, but less than if you sit. Weird huh?

Finally, some thoughts about driving in Spain. There are some truly bizarre road signs in Spain. The Spanish are much more creative when making traffic signs than we are. Of course this means that the signs are also much more open to interpretation than ours. Here are my two favorites.

I think this one means that speed is checked by radar. Or it means that the aliens will be sterilizing all of us as we enter town.

This one is also great. This one either means that the motorcycles that follow too closely to cars will be in trouble if they hit the seams in the bridge or that they cannot successfully mate with cars because they are another species.