Mike had a business trip to Germany just before our departure, so we agreed to meet in London and fly to the U.S. from there. I took the girls to England a day and a half early, hoping to give them a little taste of London before leaving. We stayed at the same bed-and-breakfast place that Mike and I had used that fall.
With so little time, I went for the highlights. We saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace—or perhaps just I saw it, as the kids were too little to see through the crowd. We went to the Tower of London, where the history went over the girls’ heads, but the crown jewels made quite an impression. “Let’s do it again!” Julie said after we completed the slow moving-sidewalk viewing of the jewels.
“What do you think this is, a carnival ride?” I asked, laughing, and we got back in line to do it again.
We had a fast-food dinner and went to a movie that night, and I was horrified by the prices. “It would be one thing if these prices were in dollars,” I fumed to the girls. “Seventeen dollars for a McDonald’s dinner for the three of us, okay. But seventeen pounds? That’s like $26! And the movie—twenty dollars for the three of us, okay, but twenty pounds?” Julie and Lisa let me rage but enjoyed the evening in spite of it.
Then there was the foray to Madame Tussaud’s. A good place for kids, I thought. And they both seemed to enjoy the likenesses of historical figures and celebrities on the main floor.
But when we started down the stairs to the section of murderers and monsters—well, the effects they’d mustered to create a scary atmosphere worked on Lisa in a big way. It was dark, there were ghostly noises and screams on the sound system, and she started crying immediately. “I don’t want to go,” she sobbed, clutching my leg.
“Honey, it’s not real, it’s just for fun,” I said. “I’ll hold your hand the whole time. I promise you’ll be okay.”
“No,” she said, even more terrified, “I can’t go in there!”
An alert guard immediately opened an exit for us. “Go along this way,” she said kindly, indicating a well-lit white-tiled hall. Lisa shot through the door, yanking my arm, and Julie slunk along behind me.
Now the noise started up on her end. “That’s no fair!” she said. “I really wanted to see that part! It looked so cool! Can’t I go by myself?”
I thought about it for a minute, but I was too afraid to let my ten-year-old do that alone. “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “We have to stay together. Maybe you can come back here another time.” She grumbled the rest of the day, and continued to do so every now and then for the next seven years.
We met Mike as planned at Heathrow. The airport was mobbed with travelers, but we were going business class, so we had a short check-in line and a quiet lounge to wait in. The weather was foggy as usual, but Heathrow supposedly had special equipment that permitted planes to take off and land in fog, since that was the natural state of the island, and we got out on time.
“Look at this, Mom!” Julie said, reading the instructions for the plane’s entertainment system. “Every seat has its own TV! You can choose your movies and watch as many as you want!” For the kids, that made this the best flight ever.
There was a long layover at TWA in New York, waiting for our connecting plane to Chicago, but we finally got there. With the kids, there was no possibility of napping before they got to see Grandma and Grandpa, so we made a quick visit before going to our hotel to crash.
It was a great vacation, with visits to family in Chicago and New Jersey and a stay at a hotel in Stamford so we could all see our friends there as well. I continually checked in with myself: Do I feel like this is home, or Spain? Do I miss the U.S.? Am I unhappy that this is just a short trip? I found that I was happy to be seeing everyone, but eager to return to Spain. And that felt good.
When I got back to Madrid, though, I got a letter from my dad complaining about my behavior while I was visiting. I hadn’t cleared the dates for my trip with them properly; I had told them when I was coming, not asked if I could come. I left the kids with him and Mom to go out shopping without asking properly about that. And I had failed to write a thank-you note for a book of photos he’d put together for me.
I was stunned. My dad was always such a big supporter of mine—I’d never been called on the carpet this way by him. I wanted to explain and defend everything I’d done—I hadn’t been perfect, certainly, but my intentions had been good. And yes, I had forgotten to write that note, because the photo book had arrived literally as I was checking out of my Stamford hotel to go to the airport for our return to Spain.
Amy Levine listened to me go on and on about this injustice, and she always offered sympathy and understanding. “I’ve got some issues like that with my mom,” she said, and she told me about her mother’s stubbornness regarding Amy’s sister’s ill health, the unwillingness of those two women to deal with a difficult situation. Amy gave me lots of telephone time and spent many lunches after Everett’s class sharing hurt feelings.
It was Betsy Pardo, the Scout leader who’d said that the first trip home makes it clear that the new country is home now, who dispensed a little wisdom about this situation as well. “It’s not uncommon for a big misunderstanding to happen after that first visit back,” she said. “I’ve seen it a thousand times. People are jealous, or people feel abandoned, or they just feel you’ve gone too far away from them and they try to pull you back.”
I was amazed to hear that this was some kind of phenomenon, because it felt so personal to me, but Betsy’s words helped. “Do these feelings simmer down after a while?” I asked.
“Yep,” she said with a smile. “They’ve got to.”
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
At Home, part 11
Hanukkah was not known or celebrated at all in Spain, but we had a couple of Hanukkah events before we left for the States. First was a party at Amy and Eric’s apartment in Madrid. We hadn’t seen their place before. Located just around the corner from Mike’s original “bachelor” apartment in the northern part of the city, it was a spacious modern flat in a building with a portero (doorman). There was only a tiny cadre of Jews at the American School, so our group was small—the Levine-Gronningsaters (Amy was Jewish, Eric was not, the girls hadn’t had any Jewish education) and an embassy family in which only the daughter was Jewish (her birth father was Jewish, but her mother and her stepfather, with whom she lived, were not). We had a fun afternoon, though, with a good lunch provided by Amy and a few Hanukkah songs and games.
Then, the last day of school before school vacation, Mike and I fulfilled our commitment to Mr. Tribe by showing Julie and her fifth-grade classmates how to make latkes (potato pancakes), a traditional Hanukkah dish. Mr. Tribe had a stove in his classroom and often invited parents in to demonstrate how to make their native dishes.
The making of latkes involved the shredding of several potatoes, a job that Mike and I were not prepared to do by hand, so we hauled in our Cuisinart. And that meant we had to haul in our 20-pound electrical converter so we could operate the thing. We shredded potatoes and put the kids to work cracking eggs, mixing in matzo meal, and heating up the oil for frying.
“Is this mixed okay?” Álvaro asked, and Mike went to inspect his work.
“Hey, let me crack an egg!” Frank insisted, trying to grab a bowl away from Cristina while I tried to mediate.
As tasty as the latkes were, the high point of the demonstration was when Mike set a glass dish on a burner he didn’t realize was hot. The dish made a deafening crack and split in two, mercifully not shattering. The kids ate their pancakes with applesauce, and we adjourned for vacation, sated.
Then, the last day of school before school vacation, Mike and I fulfilled our commitment to Mr. Tribe by showing Julie and her fifth-grade classmates how to make latkes (potato pancakes), a traditional Hanukkah dish. Mr. Tribe had a stove in his classroom and often invited parents in to demonstrate how to make their native dishes.
The making of latkes involved the shredding of several potatoes, a job that Mike and I were not prepared to do by hand, so we hauled in our Cuisinart. And that meant we had to haul in our 20-pound electrical converter so we could operate the thing. We shredded potatoes and put the kids to work cracking eggs, mixing in matzo meal, and heating up the oil for frying.
“Is this mixed okay?” Álvaro asked, and Mike went to inspect his work.
“Hey, let me crack an egg!” Frank insisted, trying to grab a bowl away from Cristina while I tried to mediate.
As tasty as the latkes were, the high point of the demonstration was when Mike set a glass dish on a burner he didn’t realize was hot. The dish made a deafening crack and split in two, mercifully not shattering. The kids ate their pancakes with applesauce, and we adjourned for vacation, sated.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
At Home, part 10
The first half of December passed quickly as we prepared for our visit home. Betsy Pardo, who was Julie’s Girl Scout leader at ASM, told me it was often helpful to make that first trip back. “It kind of confirms for you and the kids that you live here now, not there,” she said. So we did some Christmas shopping and began to feel excited about seeing family and friends in Connecticut, New Jersey and Chicago.
Christmas celebrations in Spain were different from what we were used to. Christmas itself was a fairly quiet family holiday, while gift-giving happened days later on the holiday of Los Reyes Magos, Three Kings Day. There were special foods associated with the holiday, such as turrón, a nougat candy, and polvorones, little powdered-sugar cakes.
To make Christmas a little more American, the school held two activities. The first was Holiday House, a shopping bazaar where the kids could buy small gifts for the family. Coffee mugs and pens, key chains and Lucite paperweights would be imported from the U.S., and the classes would get a chance to come and shop for low-priced gifts. And the second was Breakfast with Santa, where the Lower School kids could get a pancake breakfast and a photo with a red-suited Santa. Mike took Lisa to that, and she came home smiling, waving her picture. “Look at me!” she said. “I’m gonna put this in my scrapbook!”
The Girl Scouts helped us celebrate the season, too. They had a service project in which they annually sang traditional Spanish Christmas carols, called villancicos, at a nursing home in Majadahonda. There were rehearsals for several days beforehand, and then a trip out to the nursing home on a Saturday, accompanied by us parents.
All Spanish homes displayed belenes, or Nativity scenes, at Christmas time, but mostly indoors, not outside, as is often seen in the U.S. Many were family heirlooms, whether made of wood or clay or plaster. There was a large, beautiful one in the activity room of the nursing home. “That’s so pretty!” Lisa whispered to me. “The statues are so teeny!” This particular belén was made of pale wood, and it was well lit in the teak-paneled room.
The residents of the home loved the performance of the twenty or so girls, and we all got a lot of pleasure from seeing their enjoyment. But I couldn’t help giggling at one of the villancicos that puzzled me. On the way home I asked the girls about it.
“Do you know what “Los peces en el río” is about?” I asked.
“Well, peces are fish, right?” said Julie. “And a río is a river.”
“Yep, that’s right,” I said. “But what are the peces doing in the río?”
Julie thought for a minute. “What’s beben mean?” she asked.
“Pero mira como beben los peces en el río,” I said, reciting the words of the song. “'But look how the fish in the river drink.' Sounds kind of silly to me!”
“Do fish drink?” Lisa asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “And the next lines: ‘But look how the fish in the river drink so they can see God born. They drink, and they drink, and they drink some more, the fish in the river, to see God being born.’ I don’t get it!”
We all started laughing—maybe not the most respectful way to respond to a villancico, but it struck me as very funny.
Christmas celebrations in Spain were different from what we were used to. Christmas itself was a fairly quiet family holiday, while gift-giving happened days later on the holiday of Los Reyes Magos, Three Kings Day. There were special foods associated with the holiday, such as turrón, a nougat candy, and polvorones, little powdered-sugar cakes.
To make Christmas a little more American, the school held two activities. The first was Holiday House, a shopping bazaar where the kids could buy small gifts for the family. Coffee mugs and pens, key chains and Lucite paperweights would be imported from the U.S., and the classes would get a chance to come and shop for low-priced gifts. And the second was Breakfast with Santa, where the Lower School kids could get a pancake breakfast and a photo with a red-suited Santa. Mike took Lisa to that, and she came home smiling, waving her picture. “Look at me!” she said. “I’m gonna put this in my scrapbook!”
The Girl Scouts helped us celebrate the season, too. They had a service project in which they annually sang traditional Spanish Christmas carols, called villancicos, at a nursing home in Majadahonda. There were rehearsals for several days beforehand, and then a trip out to the nursing home on a Saturday, accompanied by us parents.
All Spanish homes displayed belenes, or Nativity scenes, at Christmas time, but mostly indoors, not outside, as is often seen in the U.S. Many were family heirlooms, whether made of wood or clay or plaster. There was a large, beautiful one in the activity room of the nursing home. “That’s so pretty!” Lisa whispered to me. “The statues are so teeny!” This particular belén was made of pale wood, and it was well lit in the teak-paneled room.
The residents of the home loved the performance of the twenty or so girls, and we all got a lot of pleasure from seeing their enjoyment. But I couldn’t help giggling at one of the villancicos that puzzled me. On the way home I asked the girls about it.
“Do you know what “Los peces en el río” is about?” I asked.
“Well, peces are fish, right?” said Julie. “And a río is a river.”
“Yep, that’s right,” I said. “But what are the peces doing in the río?”
Julie thought for a minute. “What’s beben mean?” she asked.
“Pero mira como beben los peces en el río,” I said, reciting the words of the song. “'But look how the fish in the river drink.' Sounds kind of silly to me!”
“Do fish drink?” Lisa asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “And the next lines: ‘But look how the fish in the river drink so they can see God born. They drink, and they drink, and they drink some more, the fish in the river, to see God being born.’ I don’t get it!”
We all started laughing—maybe not the most respectful way to respond to a villancico, but it struck me as very funny.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
At Home, part 9
Mike planned to work on Friday and take a plane to Barcelona that night, so the other five of us fit into the Mercedes. We set out early, because this was to be an eight-hour drive. And again the scenery was stunning. As we crossed from central to eastern Spain we passed through many different kinds of terrain—green, misty hills, dry red mountains, flat brown deserts. Howie and I shared the driving, and we learned what I hadn’t known about a long driving trip in Spain—there is always a handy gas station and a nice restaurant when you need to stop. Roads are reasonably maintained, and the signs are fine once you understand how to read them.
As we entered Catalunya (Catalonia), the region of which Barcelona was the capital, we saw the language on the signs change to Catalán, which looked like a hybrid of French and Spanish. Under Franco, national subgroups had been fiercely repressed, forbidden to speak their own dialects. But the Catalans had nurtured their culture in secret, and after Franco’s death they began a movement to revive and support their heritage. Now Catalán was taught to all schoolchildren in Catalunya, and there was a thriving literature in the language.
Dusk descended as we entered Barcelona, and as easy as the drive from Madrid had been, we were in a nightmare trying to find our hotel. We circled and backtracked in the confusing streets, taking turns trying to interpret the map. Again we landed on the kind of elegant solution only Howie and Gail seemed able to find: We hired a taxi driver to lead us to our hotel.
On the suggestion of my folks we stayed at the Hotel Colón, which they had liked so much. But we did it with Bancotel coupons, like the ones we had used in Badajoz, so we saved a ton of money over the high rates they had paid. And we never heard the cathedral bells that had kept them awake.
We met Mike at the hotel, cleaned up a bit, and went to see the cathedral, just across the square. It was beautifully lit at night—a different experience for us. We walked on Las Ramblas, a wide median that ran down the main avenue of the old part of the city, filled with lively pedestrian traffic and many vendors of flowers, birds, and books. Then we entered the small side streets, walking to the Praça del Pi, where we found a good restaurant for dinner and had fideua, a Catalan dish that is similar to paella but has thin noodles in place of rice.
Saturday we used the car to take a long drive past the famous apartment buildings designed by Antoni Gaudí, with their voluptuous stone facades, to see his Sagrada Familia church, still under construction. It was a spectacular sight, with sinuous carvings and nature-based ornamentation. We waited in line for the elevator trip to the highest point in the church, which gave us a great view of the city as well as of the still-bare bones of the cathedral itself.
Then, because we had kids whose patience was limited, we were delighted to see a KFC across the street and treat them to lunch there.
We visited Parc Güell, a city park boasting many structures designed by the flamboyant Gaudí, who favored rounded shapes and colorful ornamentation. There was a well-known terrace decorated with a tile mosaic that undulated along a plateau, and a famous multicolored lizard sculpture that delighted the kids. “Take my picture with the lizard!” Lisa demanded.
On the other side of town was another park, Montjuic, where we reluctantly skipped some fine museums in order to take the kids on a funicular ride up the cliff to see the remains of a fort. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said to Howie.
“Nah, I like the ride as much as I would have liked the museum, I’m sure,” he said. “And I know the girls like it better!” On the way back to the hotel we drove through the site of the 1992 Olympics.
After a rest we were ready for dinner, but as we left the hotel we were stunned by the sight in front of us. About a hundred people were out on the plaza between the hotel and the cathedral, doing a joyful yet decorous circle dance. I could hardly breathe. I saw the kids’ eyes open wide. And then I remembered that we had two great dance aficionados with us.
“What is it?” Howie whispered after a few minutes.
“I don’t know,” Mike said, eyes fixed on the dance. Many of the women wore full-skirted red-and-white-checked dresses. The dancers were all ages, from elderly men to teenage girls. Cheerful music with a folk sound played from a speaker somewhere as the smiling dancers turned and skipped in their circles all over the plaza.
We watched, rapt, for a good half hour before moving on to find the restaurant we’d chosen, and the magical feeling stayed with us. The dance, I learned, was the sardana, a Catalan folk dance that was done regularly all over the region. It was a part of the Catalan culture that Franco had tried to stamp out, but he had clearly failed.
We floated along to Los Caracoles, a restaurant my parents had recommended to us. There were a dozen spits full of roasting chickens outside the place, which excited the girls—chicken was their favorite restaurant meal, but it was hard to come by in Spanish restaurants, as it was considered to be home food, not fancy enough for eating out. The place was packed with locals and tourists alike, and the menus were translated into half a dozen languages. The kids especially liked the caracoles that gave the place its name—rolls in the shape of snail shells.
The next day our five intrepid car travelers made it back to Madrid, and Mike flew, since we knew the long drive would be miserable if we tried to squeeze all six of us into the little Mercedes. Howie and Gail left the next day by train for Sevilla, where they hoped to see some serious flamenco, and we returned to our routine.
As we entered Catalunya (Catalonia), the region of which Barcelona was the capital, we saw the language on the signs change to Catalán, which looked like a hybrid of French and Spanish. Under Franco, national subgroups had been fiercely repressed, forbidden to speak their own dialects. But the Catalans had nurtured their culture in secret, and after Franco’s death they began a movement to revive and support their heritage. Now Catalán was taught to all schoolchildren in Catalunya, and there was a thriving literature in the language.
Dusk descended as we entered Barcelona, and as easy as the drive from Madrid had been, we were in a nightmare trying to find our hotel. We circled and backtracked in the confusing streets, taking turns trying to interpret the map. Again we landed on the kind of elegant solution only Howie and Gail seemed able to find: We hired a taxi driver to lead us to our hotel.
On the suggestion of my folks we stayed at the Hotel Colón, which they had liked so much. But we did it with Bancotel coupons, like the ones we had used in Badajoz, so we saved a ton of money over the high rates they had paid. And we never heard the cathedral bells that had kept them awake.
We met Mike at the hotel, cleaned up a bit, and went to see the cathedral, just across the square. It was beautifully lit at night—a different experience for us. We walked on Las Ramblas, a wide median that ran down the main avenue of the old part of the city, filled with lively pedestrian traffic and many vendors of flowers, birds, and books. Then we entered the small side streets, walking to the Praça del Pi, where we found a good restaurant for dinner and had fideua, a Catalan dish that is similar to paella but has thin noodles in place of rice.
Saturday we used the car to take a long drive past the famous apartment buildings designed by Antoni Gaudí, with their voluptuous stone facades, to see his Sagrada Familia church, still under construction. It was a spectacular sight, with sinuous carvings and nature-based ornamentation. We waited in line for the elevator trip to the highest point in the church, which gave us a great view of the city as well as of the still-bare bones of the cathedral itself.
Then, because we had kids whose patience was limited, we were delighted to see a KFC across the street and treat them to lunch there.
We visited Parc Güell, a city park boasting many structures designed by the flamboyant Gaudí, who favored rounded shapes and colorful ornamentation. There was a well-known terrace decorated with a tile mosaic that undulated along a plateau, and a famous multicolored lizard sculpture that delighted the kids. “Take my picture with the lizard!” Lisa demanded.
On the other side of town was another park, Montjuic, where we reluctantly skipped some fine museums in order to take the kids on a funicular ride up the cliff to see the remains of a fort. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said to Howie.
“Nah, I like the ride as much as I would have liked the museum, I’m sure,” he said. “And I know the girls like it better!” On the way back to the hotel we drove through the site of the 1992 Olympics.
After a rest we were ready for dinner, but as we left the hotel we were stunned by the sight in front of us. About a hundred people were out on the plaza between the hotel and the cathedral, doing a joyful yet decorous circle dance. I could hardly breathe. I saw the kids’ eyes open wide. And then I remembered that we had two great dance aficionados with us.
“What is it?” Howie whispered after a few minutes.
“I don’t know,” Mike said, eyes fixed on the dance. Many of the women wore full-skirted red-and-white-checked dresses. The dancers were all ages, from elderly men to teenage girls. Cheerful music with a folk sound played from a speaker somewhere as the smiling dancers turned and skipped in their circles all over the plaza.
We watched, rapt, for a good half hour before moving on to find the restaurant we’d chosen, and the magical feeling stayed with us. The dance, I learned, was the sardana, a Catalan folk dance that was done regularly all over the region. It was a part of the Catalan culture that Franco had tried to stamp out, but he had clearly failed.
We floated along to Los Caracoles, a restaurant my parents had recommended to us. There were a dozen spits full of roasting chickens outside the place, which excited the girls—chicken was their favorite restaurant meal, but it was hard to come by in Spanish restaurants, as it was considered to be home food, not fancy enough for eating out. The place was packed with locals and tourists alike, and the menus were translated into half a dozen languages. The kids especially liked the caracoles that gave the place its name—rolls in the shape of snail shells.
The next day our five intrepid car travelers made it back to Madrid, and Mike flew, since we knew the long drive would be miserable if we tried to squeeze all six of us into the little Mercedes. Howie and Gail left the next day by train for Sevilla, where they hoped to see some serious flamenco, and we returned to our routine.
Friday, March 27, 2009
At Home, part 8
We decided to take Howie and Gail to El Escorial and Ávila on Thursday before Thanksgiving dinner. Now that I knew my way around El Escorial, the tour went smoothly, and we drove on west to Ávila, the walled town of Santa Teresa, which we hadn’t seen before. “Ah-vee-lah,” Howie kept calling it, and I corrected him relentlessly--“Ah-vee-lah”—till we were laughing at each other.
The first thing I noticed as we pulled into the old part of the city was that there were plenty of empty parking spaces. “Ah, off-season tourism!” I sighed with pleasure. “This is incredible! The weather’s still great, the tourists are gone—we have the place to ourselves!” We entered a gate in the town’s walls and walked along the narrow streets.
There were churches to see, and we saw some of them, but the real attraction of Ávila was the wall that surrounded the town, still intact. Built around 1100, the wall had nine gates and 88 towers. And according to the guidebook, there was a man in a little booth who, for 100 pesetas, would let you climb a stairway to the top of the ramparts. There, if you were a kid, you could run around and have a great time, and if you were an adult, you could see some great views and even photograph them. So that was what we did.
It really was beautiful atop the wall. Buildings modern and ancient could be seen, as well as miles of farmland outside the city. We climbed small stairways to the tops of some of the towers. At one point Gail disappeared. Julie went down the stairs looking for her, and she popped out from the side of the tower, shouting “Boo!” Julie exploded into giggles, and suddenly we were all stalking one another, hiding and jumping out and laughing.
Then it was time to come down.
Somehow the stairs we had come up looked quite different to Lisa on the way down. Steep, certainly, and dark, and narrow. “I can’t do it,” Lisa said, miserable. “I think I’m going to fall down.”
She made some false starts, we coaxed her and offered to walk in front of her, and then Gail had an idea. “Do you think you could come down sitting?”
“What do you mean?” Lisa asked.
“Like this,” Gail demonstrated. “One step at a time, sit, go down, sit.”
Lisa tried it, gingerly. It took a while, but it worked.
When she reached the bottom, she was beaming and relieved. “I did it!” she shouted.
Back we went to the house, where we ate the militarily procured turkey, courtesy of Phil Douglas. It was a great Thanksgiving, and we retired sated and happy and full of excitement for our driving trip the next day to Barcelona.
The first thing I noticed as we pulled into the old part of the city was that there were plenty of empty parking spaces. “Ah, off-season tourism!” I sighed with pleasure. “This is incredible! The weather’s still great, the tourists are gone—we have the place to ourselves!” We entered a gate in the town’s walls and walked along the narrow streets.
There were churches to see, and we saw some of them, but the real attraction of Ávila was the wall that surrounded the town, still intact. Built around 1100, the wall had nine gates and 88 towers. And according to the guidebook, there was a man in a little booth who, for 100 pesetas, would let you climb a stairway to the top of the ramparts. There, if you were a kid, you could run around and have a great time, and if you were an adult, you could see some great views and even photograph them. So that was what we did.
It really was beautiful atop the wall. Buildings modern and ancient could be seen, as well as miles of farmland outside the city. We climbed small stairways to the tops of some of the towers. At one point Gail disappeared. Julie went down the stairs looking for her, and she popped out from the side of the tower, shouting “Boo!” Julie exploded into giggles, and suddenly we were all stalking one another, hiding and jumping out and laughing.
Then it was time to come down.
Somehow the stairs we had come up looked quite different to Lisa on the way down. Steep, certainly, and dark, and narrow. “I can’t do it,” Lisa said, miserable. “I think I’m going to fall down.”
She made some false starts, we coaxed her and offered to walk in front of her, and then Gail had an idea. “Do you think you could come down sitting?”
“What do you mean?” Lisa asked.
“Like this,” Gail demonstrated. “One step at a time, sit, go down, sit.”
Lisa tried it, gingerly. It took a while, but it worked.
When she reached the bottom, she was beaming and relieved. “I did it!” she shouted.
Back we went to the house, where we ate the militarily procured turkey, courtesy of Phil Douglas. It was a great Thanksgiving, and we retired sated and happy and full of excitement for our driving trip the next day to Barcelona.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
At Home, part 7
Our next new experience was Thanksgiving—a holiday for the American School, but not, of course, for anyone else in the country. For them it was just another Thursday.
My cousin Howie and his wife Gail came to visit us. Howie was about six years older than I was, and Gail was my age. They lived in Cleveland, where Howie worked for a consulting firm and Gail was a member of a dance company. They were great travelers, especially Howie, who in his youth had lived in an Indian ashram for several years, arriving there overland from Israel.
They came the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and we set them up in the basement guest room. Being such good travelers, they required little help from me during the beginning of the week—I told them how to get to and from the major sights in Madrid, and they happily took themselves around. We all spent our evenings together, and the girls quickly got to know and enjoy them.
Because of Gail’s interest in dance, we had decided to buy tickets for a folkloric dance show that toured the country every year. It was supposed to showcase most of the traditional types of Spanish dance, including the sevillana and flamenco.
It was our first theatrical outing in Spain, and I enjoyed it more for the adventure than for the show itself. The theater was in the old part of Madrid, and we met Mike for tapas at a nearby restaurant first.
“What’s good to eat here?” Howie asked the girls.
“Tortilla is okay,” Lisa said.
“How about meatballs?” Julie suggested.
We ordered a good selection of tapas, ate quickly, and walked to the theater. It was crowded, even though it was a weeknight, and looked like a Broadway theater inside, richly decorated. We had seats in the balcony.
I enjoyed the dances at first—there was much color and spectacle, with lavish costumes and dramatic lighting. But as number after number ticked by, I thought it was going awfully long.
“What do you think?” I asked Howie and Gail at intermission.
“Well, you can tell the dances are interesting, but the dancers just aren’t committed,” Howie said. He was more of a dance aficionado than I had realized.
“What do you mean?” Mike asked.
“Well, there’s no artistry here—they’re just doing steps they’ve done a million times,” Gail explained.
“Do you want to stay?” I asked, seeing that it was getting late.
“It would be okay if we left,” Howie said, and we all departed with relief.
My cousin Howie and his wife Gail came to visit us. Howie was about six years older than I was, and Gail was my age. They lived in Cleveland, where Howie worked for a consulting firm and Gail was a member of a dance company. They were great travelers, especially Howie, who in his youth had lived in an Indian ashram for several years, arriving there overland from Israel.
They came the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and we set them up in the basement guest room. Being such good travelers, they required little help from me during the beginning of the week—I told them how to get to and from the major sights in Madrid, and they happily took themselves around. We all spent our evenings together, and the girls quickly got to know and enjoy them.
Because of Gail’s interest in dance, we had decided to buy tickets for a folkloric dance show that toured the country every year. It was supposed to showcase most of the traditional types of Spanish dance, including the sevillana and flamenco.
It was our first theatrical outing in Spain, and I enjoyed it more for the adventure than for the show itself. The theater was in the old part of Madrid, and we met Mike for tapas at a nearby restaurant first.
“What’s good to eat here?” Howie asked the girls.
“Tortilla is okay,” Lisa said.
“How about meatballs?” Julie suggested.
We ordered a good selection of tapas, ate quickly, and walked to the theater. It was crowded, even though it was a weeknight, and looked like a Broadway theater inside, richly decorated. We had seats in the balcony.
I enjoyed the dances at first—there was much color and spectacle, with lavish costumes and dramatic lighting. But as number after number ticked by, I thought it was going awfully long.
“What do you think?” I asked Howie and Gail at intermission.
“Well, you can tell the dances are interesting, but the dancers just aren’t committed,” Howie said. He was more of a dance aficionado than I had realized.
“What do you mean?” Mike asked.
“Well, there’s no artistry here—they’re just doing steps they’ve done a million times,” Gail explained.
“Do you want to stay?” I asked, seeing that it was getting late.
“It would be okay if we left,” Howie said, and we all departed with relief.
At Home, part 6
Having solved the problem of how to get the kids cared for when I’d gone to Paris with Mike, I was excited to hear that he had an upcoming trip to London. “Do I get to go?” I asked.
“Absolutely, if you want to,” he said. And I didn’t even have to arrange the child care. “I’ve worked out a deal,” he said. “Remember Andy Dunn, the Price Waterhouse guy in London who helped us with Sky TV? He and his wife want to visit Spain, and they’re willing to watch Julie and Lisa in exchange for being able to stay in the house and use the car.” I knew Andy and Laurie Dunn had a baby girl, Hayley, so they were kid-friendly—and if they were willing, I was more than happy to let them take care of my kids.
I did some quick planning and found a bed-and-breakfast for us to stay in during the weekend. We’d fly to London together on Friday, spend the weekend seeing the sights, and on Sunday night Mike would move to a grander hotel where his meeting would take place, and I’d fly home to Madrid. I even planned to do a travel article on central London bed-and-breakfast places for the Stamford Advocate.
It was a gray and blustery English fall weekend, but we dashed around the city seeing plays, taking walking tours, and eating Indian food. I decided I needed a new raincoat, and this was definitely the place to buy one, so I got that task done. And I did some running around to check out hotels for my travel piece. We didn’t feel the need to revisit museums we’d seen years before, so on Saturday we took the train to Cambridge and did a walking tour there. The weather was better, and the campus looked beautiful with the leaves turning colors among the Gothic buildings.
When I got home I found the girls happy, and they said they’d had a great time with the Dunns. “But I’m afraid something went wrong with the car,” Andy said, looking sheepish.
“What happened?” I asked.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t really know,” Andy said. “I don’t know much about cars. I just tried to start it on Saturday, and it wouldn’t go. I didn’t really know what to do, so I asked your friend across the street for help.”
“Phil?” I asked.
“Yep,” Andy said. “He was great. We never did figure out what was wrong, but he spent a ton of time with me, checking everything out. I guess you’ll have to have it towed in for service or something.”
“Well, no problem, I’ll take care of that,” I said. “I just feel so bad that you didn’t have the use of the car! That was part of the deal!”
“It was okay, really,” Andy said. “Phil told us how to take the bus into Madrid, so we did that a couple times. And mostly we just walked over to the playground and let the three girls play there.”
“Well, I still feel guilty,” I said. “We had a wonderful weekend in your town! I can’t thank you enough for making it possible!”
“No, we had a great time, too,” he said. “Your girls are terrific, and Hayley had a ball with them.”
“Absolutely, if you want to,” he said. And I didn’t even have to arrange the child care. “I’ve worked out a deal,” he said. “Remember Andy Dunn, the Price Waterhouse guy in London who helped us with Sky TV? He and his wife want to visit Spain, and they’re willing to watch Julie and Lisa in exchange for being able to stay in the house and use the car.” I knew Andy and Laurie Dunn had a baby girl, Hayley, so they were kid-friendly—and if they were willing, I was more than happy to let them take care of my kids.
I did some quick planning and found a bed-and-breakfast for us to stay in during the weekend. We’d fly to London together on Friday, spend the weekend seeing the sights, and on Sunday night Mike would move to a grander hotel where his meeting would take place, and I’d fly home to Madrid. I even planned to do a travel article on central London bed-and-breakfast places for the Stamford Advocate.
It was a gray and blustery English fall weekend, but we dashed around the city seeing plays, taking walking tours, and eating Indian food. I decided I needed a new raincoat, and this was definitely the place to buy one, so I got that task done. And I did some running around to check out hotels for my travel piece. We didn’t feel the need to revisit museums we’d seen years before, so on Saturday we took the train to Cambridge and did a walking tour there. The weather was better, and the campus looked beautiful with the leaves turning colors among the Gothic buildings.
When I got home I found the girls happy, and they said they’d had a great time with the Dunns. “But I’m afraid something went wrong with the car,” Andy said, looking sheepish.
“What happened?” I asked.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t really know,” Andy said. “I don’t know much about cars. I just tried to start it on Saturday, and it wouldn’t go. I didn’t really know what to do, so I asked your friend across the street for help.”
“Phil?” I asked.
“Yep,” Andy said. “He was great. We never did figure out what was wrong, but he spent a ton of time with me, checking everything out. I guess you’ll have to have it towed in for service or something.”
“Well, no problem, I’ll take care of that,” I said. “I just feel so bad that you didn’t have the use of the car! That was part of the deal!”
“It was okay, really,” Andy said. “Phil told us how to take the bus into Madrid, so we did that a couple times. And mostly we just walked over to the playground and let the three girls play there.”
“Well, I still feel guilty,” I said. “We had a wonderful weekend in your town! I can’t thank you enough for making it possible!”
“No, we had a great time, too,” he said. “Your girls are terrific, and Hayley had a ball with them.”
At Home, part 5
So Sunday we followed the directions to the village where Marino had grown up. Pilar was from another village close by. We found the house and met Marino’s mother, a strong-looking, slender, gray-haired woman.
“Let’s go right out to the olives,” Marino said. We piled our two kids and their four into two cars and drove a short way out of the village.
Marino set us up with buckets and showed us which olives to pick—not the green ones, but the ones that had ripened to a dark maroon color. Pilar told me that they weren’t edible yet—they would have to go through a curing process first, or to be pressed for oil.
The kids had a great time picking from the low branches while we worked up as high as we could reach. The grove was a small one, but it provided olives and oil for the family’s use. Marino also pointed out the low clumps of asparagus that grew wild on the property. We took some pictures of the rosy-cheeked kids that cloudy, chilly morning.
Then it was back to the house, where Marino’s mother was already preparing baby lamb chops for us hungry workers. Marino sliced a cured lomo (pork loin) for us to snack on while we waited. Like all the best Spanish meals, the lamb was simple and perfectly prepared—just a little salt and a quick sauté in olive oil—and it was delicious.
Afterward the kids kicked a ball around on the rooftop while Pilar told me her latest news. Juan Pujadas, the Price Waterhouse partner who had engineered our move to Spain, was trying to get Marino to move to the States. There was some business Juan thought Marino could develop in Latin America, and Marino was trying to figure out if he wanted to be based in Miami or New York.
“Be sure to ask now for what you think you need for the move,” I advised her in Spanish. “If you think the kids need private school, say so. If you need English lessons, ask that they be paid for.” I couldn’t help thinking that it seemed wasteful to move us to Spain and them to the U.S.—as my grandmother would have said, why didn’t everybody just stay home?
After a while we all took a walk down to the neighborhood bar, where used napkins and olive pits littered the floor. Julie was getting along particularly well with Marino’s daughter Raquel, who was a year older than she. “I want to see her more,” Raquel told her father.
Marino stopped at a doorway to acquire for us some of the local specialty—mazapán, or marzipan, an almond-paste candy that was completely addictive. Different from the colored marzipan we usually saw in the States, this was a simple, lightly sweetened confection that I couldn’t resist.
Before we left we stood in the hallway of Marino’s mother’s house while he went to the cellar to get us some homemade madre de vinagre, the yeasty potion one added to wine to turn it into vinegar. We looked around us at the beautiful old furnishings, and Mike pointed out the heavy wrought-iron chandelier above us. “I have an uncle who makes those,” Marino said as he came up from the cellar.
“Really?” Mike said. “I think they’re gorgeous.”
“You like it? I’ll have to take you to his workshop,” Marino said. We thanked them for a wonderful day and got on the road back to Madrid.
“Let’s go right out to the olives,” Marino said. We piled our two kids and their four into two cars and drove a short way out of the village.
Marino set us up with buckets and showed us which olives to pick—not the green ones, but the ones that had ripened to a dark maroon color. Pilar told me that they weren’t edible yet—they would have to go through a curing process first, or to be pressed for oil.
The kids had a great time picking from the low branches while we worked up as high as we could reach. The grove was a small one, but it provided olives and oil for the family’s use. Marino also pointed out the low clumps of asparagus that grew wild on the property. We took some pictures of the rosy-cheeked kids that cloudy, chilly morning.
Then it was back to the house, where Marino’s mother was already preparing baby lamb chops for us hungry workers. Marino sliced a cured lomo (pork loin) for us to snack on while we waited. Like all the best Spanish meals, the lamb was simple and perfectly prepared—just a little salt and a quick sauté in olive oil—and it was delicious.
Afterward the kids kicked a ball around on the rooftop while Pilar told me her latest news. Juan Pujadas, the Price Waterhouse partner who had engineered our move to Spain, was trying to get Marino to move to the States. There was some business Juan thought Marino could develop in Latin America, and Marino was trying to figure out if he wanted to be based in Miami or New York.
“Be sure to ask now for what you think you need for the move,” I advised her in Spanish. “If you think the kids need private school, say so. If you need English lessons, ask that they be paid for.” I couldn’t help thinking that it seemed wasteful to move us to Spain and them to the U.S.—as my grandmother would have said, why didn’t everybody just stay home?
After a while we all took a walk down to the neighborhood bar, where used napkins and olive pits littered the floor. Julie was getting along particularly well with Marino’s daughter Raquel, who was a year older than she. “I want to see her more,” Raquel told her father.
Marino stopped at a doorway to acquire for us some of the local specialty—mazapán, or marzipan, an almond-paste candy that was completely addictive. Different from the colored marzipan we usually saw in the States, this was a simple, lightly sweetened confection that I couldn’t resist.
Before we left we stood in the hallway of Marino’s mother’s house while he went to the cellar to get us some homemade madre de vinagre, the yeasty potion one added to wine to turn it into vinegar. We looked around us at the beautiful old furnishings, and Mike pointed out the heavy wrought-iron chandelier above us. “I have an uncle who makes those,” Marino said as he came up from the cellar.
“Really?” Mike said. “I think they’re gorgeous.”
“You like it? I’ll have to take you to his workshop,” Marino said. We thanked them for a wonderful day and got on the road back to Madrid.
At Home, part 4
We needed to reciprocate some of the hospitality we’d been shown by Mike’s Spanish colleagues, so we arranged a dinner party for a Saturday night. “They’re dying to see the house anyway,” Mike said. “They all live in apartments in the city. They wouldn’t even think of moving to the suburbs, but they’re really curious about what we have here.” We invited Pedro and Marga, who’d had us to their dinner party; Marino and Pilar, who had had us over before we’d even moved to Spain; and Rafa and Maricarmen, who had taken us to their country club. I asked Ana and Phil to join us, because I thought they’d fit in well, and I could get Ana’s opinion of everyone afterward.
We considered ourselves accomplished cooks, so we weren’t afraid to use our Spanish cookbook to make a fairly elaborate meal: salpicón de mariscos, a seafood salad; pollo en pepitoria, chicken in almond sauce; and arroz con leche, rice pudding. Mike had been learning a lot about Spanish wines, so he chose a good red (preferred by all to white) for our guests. Sangría was not even considered—it was a regional specialty in Andalucía, in the south, not worthy of consumption by serious Castilian wine connoisseurs.
Everyone arrived in good time except for Rafa and Maricarmen, who failed to appear as the time got later and later. The group got along well, and Mike and I were hanging in there with our Spanish, which made us feel pretty good. I had fun watching Ana watch Pedro, appraising his suave manner, while our guests looked over our house and pool, which apparently seemed quite grand to them. And we talked about our recent trip to Paris.
“Oh, I hate the French food,” Pedro said dismissively as we discussed the restaurants we’d been to.
“You hate it?” Mike said, incredulous. “But why?”
“Well, they put all those sauces on everything!” Pedro answered. “You can’t taste the food!”
I was happy talking to Pilar and demonstrating how far I’d come in my Spanish. “Te echo de menos a tu familia?” she asked me.
“No,” I answered, not even knowing what the question had been. That was a horrible habit I’d developed—I often pretended I’d understood when I hadn’t, thinking I might get the meaning a split second later.
Pilar peered at me. “Entiendes qué quiere decir ‘echo de menos’?” she said—do you understand what “echo de menos” means?
“No,” I admitted, embarrassed. It was an idiom that sounded familiar, but I couldn’t pull the meaning out of my memory.
“It means do you miss, like do you miss your family,” Marino explained in English.
“O, no,” I continued, right back in the conversation, “tengo muchos amigos nuevos aquí, y voy a ver a mi familia en diciembre”—I have a lot of new friends here, and I’m going to see my family in December.
The food was accepted appreciatively, and the wine and conversation continued to flow, though Rafa and Maricarmen never came. We found out later that they were in the midst of a divorce.
Before they left, Marino issued an invitation to us. “Come and bring the kids to my mother’s place near Toledo next Sunday,” he said. “We’ll be down there for the weekend. I’ll give you the directions. Come early, and we’ll go pick olives in the family grove. You’ll stay for lunch.”
“That would be great!” Mike said. “We’ll be there.”
We considered ourselves accomplished cooks, so we weren’t afraid to use our Spanish cookbook to make a fairly elaborate meal: salpicón de mariscos, a seafood salad; pollo en pepitoria, chicken in almond sauce; and arroz con leche, rice pudding. Mike had been learning a lot about Spanish wines, so he chose a good red (preferred by all to white) for our guests. Sangría was not even considered—it was a regional specialty in Andalucía, in the south, not worthy of consumption by serious Castilian wine connoisseurs.
Everyone arrived in good time except for Rafa and Maricarmen, who failed to appear as the time got later and later. The group got along well, and Mike and I were hanging in there with our Spanish, which made us feel pretty good. I had fun watching Ana watch Pedro, appraising his suave manner, while our guests looked over our house and pool, which apparently seemed quite grand to them. And we talked about our recent trip to Paris.
“Oh, I hate the French food,” Pedro said dismissively as we discussed the restaurants we’d been to.
“You hate it?” Mike said, incredulous. “But why?”
“Well, they put all those sauces on everything!” Pedro answered. “You can’t taste the food!”
I was happy talking to Pilar and demonstrating how far I’d come in my Spanish. “Te echo de menos a tu familia?” she asked me.
“No,” I answered, not even knowing what the question had been. That was a horrible habit I’d developed—I often pretended I’d understood when I hadn’t, thinking I might get the meaning a split second later.
Pilar peered at me. “Entiendes qué quiere decir ‘echo de menos’?” she said—do you understand what “echo de menos” means?
“No,” I admitted, embarrassed. It was an idiom that sounded familiar, but I couldn’t pull the meaning out of my memory.
“It means do you miss, like do you miss your family,” Marino explained in English.
“O, no,” I continued, right back in the conversation, “tengo muchos amigos nuevos aquí, y voy a ver a mi familia en diciembre”—I have a lot of new friends here, and I’m going to see my family in December.
The food was accepted appreciatively, and the wine and conversation continued to flow, though Rafa and Maricarmen never came. We found out later that they were in the midst of a divorce.
Before they left, Marino issued an invitation to us. “Come and bring the kids to my mother’s place near Toledo next Sunday,” he said. “We’ll be down there for the weekend. I’ll give you the directions. Come early, and we’ll go pick olives in the family grove. You’ll stay for lunch.”
“That would be great!” Mike said. “We’ll be there.”
At Home, part 3
On Saturday we drove to Mérida, where the Roman ruins were, as well as a fine museum of Roman art. But we had unwittingly come to the town on its saint’s day, so the museum was closed. “We’ll have to make another trip here sometime,” I told Mike, disappointed. “Everett says this place has a fantastic collection!”
Fortunately, all the outdoor sites were open. The most impressive of the Roman ruins was the theater, which was well preserved and still had many columns adorning its stage. Lisa loved running back and forth onstage. “Can I do a play for you?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. We headed down into the audience area and watched her sing and dance for a while.
The nearby amphitheater was more rubble-filled, and we watched an English-speaking family searching for pottery shards.
“Do you ever find anything?” I asked them.
“Oh, sure!” said the father. “We do this wherever we go, and we have a pretty good collection of Roman shards.” We chatted for a while, and I learned that he was an AT&T executive working in Madrid. They lived in La Moraleja, a fancy suburb north of the city, and the children attended the international school there.
We walked along quiet streets and bumped into the occasional empty lot that turned out to be another small ruin—a temple here, a bath there. There was a long, beautiful, many-arched Roman bridge over the river—only for pedestrians now—and an alcazaba (fortress) that had been built by Romans and later used by Visigoths and Moors.
We went on to Cáceres, which the guidebook said was “one of the best-preserved old quarters in Spain.” And indeed it was an astonishingly beautiful medieval enclave, free of shops and restaurants, empty of cars. All was quiet, seemingly timeless, with a consistent look because of the old gray-brown stone used for every palace and church along the tiny streets. We tiptoed around this amazing place, catching a glimpse of a white-clad bride entering an ancient torch-lit church for her wedding. “Look at that!” Julie whispered. The bride was lovely, and the moment was magical.
We left the old quarter, but not the mood it had created, to have a wonderful lunch at a restaurant a few steps away. I had a traditional dish, stewed partridge in a rich gravy with huge white beans, bigger than lima beans.
On Sunday, on the way back to Madrid, we took another bit of advice from the guidebook and made a long detour to see Guadelupe. The town is famous for the discovery there, around 1300, of a statue of the Virgin supposed to have been carved by St. Luke. King Alfonso XI built a church to house the statue, and later he added a monastery to commemorate his defeat of the Moors in 1340.
The town became a center of religious inspiration for Latin America. Documents authorizing Columbus’s first voyage were signed there, and the first American Indian converts to Christianity were taken there for baptism.
We drove through beautiful mountain scenery for many miles to get to Guadelupe. The uninhabited land seemed to go on forever, covered with brush and grasses. The rolling hills provided a new vista with every rise and fall, every turn of the road. Blue sky met dusty green fields at the horizon. Though it wasn’t the bright green of a rainier climate, it had its own kind of beauty. We watched it, silent, as the car sped along.
Entering the town, we found the church atop the highest hill and parked a way downhill. We walked up, stood near the base of the long staircase that led to the church’s entrance, and were fascinated by the show that was just getting underway. Dozens of dancers were chanting and dancing up the steps, reenacting the pilgrimages of the new converts in the 15th and 16th centuries. They wore spectacular costumes decorated with feathers, brightly colored in white, blue and orange-red.
“What is this?” Lisa asked, awestruck. We’d never seen anything like it, in Spain or elsewhere. We explained a little about the history that was being recreated, and we stayed to watch for half an hour.
After the ceremony Mike said, “Let’s go see the paintings inside.”
“No, I don’t want to,” Julie said. “I’m tired.”
“I’ve seen enough,” Lisa agreed. Frustrated again, I decided there was no point fighting this.
“Go on in and see what there is,” I told Mike, “but don’t take too long.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yep, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get them some ice cream.” He sped through the church while we walked around its side and sat on a bench for a while. It was a sunny day, in the 60s, and I decided that even without the inside tour, the experience of being in Guadelupe was much more than I had hoped for.
Fortunately, all the outdoor sites were open. The most impressive of the Roman ruins was the theater, which was well preserved and still had many columns adorning its stage. Lisa loved running back and forth onstage. “Can I do a play for you?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. We headed down into the audience area and watched her sing and dance for a while.
The nearby amphitheater was more rubble-filled, and we watched an English-speaking family searching for pottery shards.
“Do you ever find anything?” I asked them.
“Oh, sure!” said the father. “We do this wherever we go, and we have a pretty good collection of Roman shards.” We chatted for a while, and I learned that he was an AT&T executive working in Madrid. They lived in La Moraleja, a fancy suburb north of the city, and the children attended the international school there.
We walked along quiet streets and bumped into the occasional empty lot that turned out to be another small ruin—a temple here, a bath there. There was a long, beautiful, many-arched Roman bridge over the river—only for pedestrians now—and an alcazaba (fortress) that had been built by Romans and later used by Visigoths and Moors.
We went on to Cáceres, which the guidebook said was “one of the best-preserved old quarters in Spain.” And indeed it was an astonishingly beautiful medieval enclave, free of shops and restaurants, empty of cars. All was quiet, seemingly timeless, with a consistent look because of the old gray-brown stone used for every palace and church along the tiny streets. We tiptoed around this amazing place, catching a glimpse of a white-clad bride entering an ancient torch-lit church for her wedding. “Look at that!” Julie whispered. The bride was lovely, and the moment was magical.
We left the old quarter, but not the mood it had created, to have a wonderful lunch at a restaurant a few steps away. I had a traditional dish, stewed partridge in a rich gravy with huge white beans, bigger than lima beans.
On Sunday, on the way back to Madrid, we took another bit of advice from the guidebook and made a long detour to see Guadelupe. The town is famous for the discovery there, around 1300, of a statue of the Virgin supposed to have been carved by St. Luke. King Alfonso XI built a church to house the statue, and later he added a monastery to commemorate his defeat of the Moors in 1340.
The town became a center of religious inspiration for Latin America. Documents authorizing Columbus’s first voyage were signed there, and the first American Indian converts to Christianity were taken there for baptism.
We drove through beautiful mountain scenery for many miles to get to Guadelupe. The uninhabited land seemed to go on forever, covered with brush and grasses. The rolling hills provided a new vista with every rise and fall, every turn of the road. Blue sky met dusty green fields at the horizon. Though it wasn’t the bright green of a rainier climate, it had its own kind of beauty. We watched it, silent, as the car sped along.
Entering the town, we found the church atop the highest hill and parked a way downhill. We walked up, stood near the base of the long staircase that led to the church’s entrance, and were fascinated by the show that was just getting underway. Dozens of dancers were chanting and dancing up the steps, reenacting the pilgrimages of the new converts in the 15th and 16th centuries. They wore spectacular costumes decorated with feathers, brightly colored in white, blue and orange-red.
“What is this?” Lisa asked, awestruck. We’d never seen anything like it, in Spain or elsewhere. We explained a little about the history that was being recreated, and we stayed to watch for half an hour.
After the ceremony Mike said, “Let’s go see the paintings inside.”
“No, I don’t want to,” Julie said. “I’m tired.”
“I’ve seen enough,” Lisa agreed. Frustrated again, I decided there was no point fighting this.
“Go on in and see what there is,” I told Mike, “but don’t take too long.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yep, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get them some ice cream.” He sped through the church while we walked around its side and sat on a bench for a while. It was a sunny day, in the 60s, and I decided that even without the inside tour, the experience of being in Guadelupe was much more than I had hoped for.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
At Home, part 2
Everett Rice’s Spanish art history class continued to be one of the highlights of each week for me. By the beginning of November we’d completed the study of Roman art and architecture in Spain, and there had been plenty to view. So when I started to plan a trip for the kids’ first long weekend break from school, I decided we should go see some of it.
When there was a holiday in Spain on, say, a Thursday, many people would make a puente—a bridge—and take off Friday, too. That’s the kind of weekend we were planning. And once in a while you had a week where there was a holiday on Tuesday, and another on Thursday, and many people would take off both Wednesday and Friday so they could have some real fun. That was called an acueducto—a humorous reference to a really long bridge.
The place to go for lots of Roman ruins in one geographical area, I knew from Everett, was Extremadura. This western section of Spain was known for its harsh living conditions and for the bold souls who had left the region to seek their fortunes in the New World—that is, most of the famed Spanish explorers.
Using guidance from Everett and Fodor’s, I planned a four-day driving trip that took us first to Trujillo, about 200 miles west of Madrid. This had been a small, poor town, but when Pizarro and other local conquistadors returned from Latin America laden with gold, it became an enclave of heavily ornamented palaces. Julie loved the equestrian statue of Pizarro in the Plaza Mayor, and we all enjoyed climbing around the ruins of the town’s castle.
We went from there to the undistinguished town of Badajoz, where our hotel was. I knew of an English-speaking travel agent in Madrid, Gregorio, who was going to make my hotel reservations for me, but Amy Levine told me about a bargain plan she’d gotten from her neighborhood travel agency. With the Bancotel plan you purchased coupons for 6,500 pesetas each (about $50). Each coupon was good for a night in a room at a member hotel. These were mostly business-type hotels, not especially elegant but of good quality, and the price was a real bargain.
The hotel in Badajoz was typical—not a five-star place, but clean and comfortable. In fact, it was nice enough to have been booked for three noisy weddings while we were there—which made sleeping extremely difficult.
Badajoz was interesting from a food perspective. It was getting late when we checked in on Thursday night, so we asked the desk clerk for a nearby restaurant, and he directed us to one. We walked over and sat down, and the waiter promptly brought over a small dish of pre-appetizers—a treat you got in most restaurants, always something different. I was really hungry, so I reached over and forked something out of the brown-gravied clump.
“I wouldn’t do that so fast if I were you,” Mike said, looking at the plate dubiously.
“Oh, it’ll be fine,” I said, putting the stuff in my mouth—and panicking as my teeth made contact with the unpleasant texture of cartilage. I spit it out into my napkin.
Mike waved the waiter over. “Qué es eso?” he asked—“What is that?”
“Oreja de cerdo,” the waiter replied amiably—pig’s ear.
I blanched. Mike translated for the kids. “Mom, you had a pig’s ear in your mouth!” Lisa laughed.
“Pig’s ear! Pig’s ear!” Julie chanted. They wouldn’t let me forget it.
Another food worthy of note in Badajoz was the tostada. This is probably the simplest kind of breakfast a person could eat—buttered grilled bread. We found it at a little fast-food restaurant near the hotel on Friday morning. They had a breakfast special, for just a few pesetas, of tostada, orange juice and coffee, which we ordered. And those tostadas were the perfect breakfast food—hot and buttery and satisfying.
The third food story of interest in Badajoz was our discovery of where all the Tab went. There had been many years in my youth when Tab was the diet cola of choice, and I suppose I had been sorry to see it replaced by Diet Coke. But in Badajoz, if you wanted a diet cola, the only one they had was Tab. I hadn’t seen that familiar pink can in years, but there it was, at every restaurant in the town.
Badajoz was just a couple of kilometers from the Portuguese border, so we had planned to cross into Portugal for a day and see what we could see without driving too far. We had an ulterior motive—I wanted to get the kids’ and my passports stamped.
We were living in Spain under not-quite-legal conditions. Because of his work, Mike had been assisted in applying for a residencia, a residence permit. This entailed a huge amount of red tape and the presentation of such items as a report from the Stamford Police Department saying that they were not aware of Mike’s having committed any crimes. He carried with him a document that proved he had applied for the residencia, but he had no idea if or when one would be issued to him.
Meanwhile, the kids and I were there on tourist visas, which theoretically lasted for four months. Christine Lotto had told me that it would be a good idea to leave the country and come back every four months in order to get a new tourist visa stamped into your passport, so that was one thing we hoped to accomplish in our border crossing.
We went to two little walled towns that we found in our Campsa maps, Elvas and Estremoz. Both had fortresses—fun for climbing—and they looked different from walled Spanish towns because all the buildings were whitewashed. I threaded the Mercedes through the narrow streets till at one trying point I gave up, got out of the car, and made Mike take over the driving, because I couldn’t see how we could negotiate the tiny alleyway.
We had lunch at an upstairs restaurant, a place with no ambience but pretty good food. Our cartilage-free pre-appetizer was a plateful of tiny tins of various patés that one could spread on bread. This, it turned out, was a regular thing in Portugal, but we’d never seen such an item in Spain. Julie and Lisa ordered soup—“the best ever,” they said—and Lisa managed to leave her jacket behind when we left, which we didn’t realize till hours later.
As we approached the border to re-enter Spain I pulled out the passports. Mike lined the car up for the one of the booths we could see ahead. But as we rolled into the booth, we saw it was empty.
We scanned the other booths, saw they were all empty, too, and exchanged a look of alarm.
“Well, I guess this isn’t going to work,” Mike said. We’d have to find some other way to look legal.
Much later we learned that member countries of the European Union really didn’t maintain guarded borders, so there were no barriers to travel between Spain and Portugal.
When there was a holiday in Spain on, say, a Thursday, many people would make a puente—a bridge—and take off Friday, too. That’s the kind of weekend we were planning. And once in a while you had a week where there was a holiday on Tuesday, and another on Thursday, and many people would take off both Wednesday and Friday so they could have some real fun. That was called an acueducto—a humorous reference to a really long bridge.
The place to go for lots of Roman ruins in one geographical area, I knew from Everett, was Extremadura. This western section of Spain was known for its harsh living conditions and for the bold souls who had left the region to seek their fortunes in the New World—that is, most of the famed Spanish explorers.
Using guidance from Everett and Fodor’s, I planned a four-day driving trip that took us first to Trujillo, about 200 miles west of Madrid. This had been a small, poor town, but when Pizarro and other local conquistadors returned from Latin America laden with gold, it became an enclave of heavily ornamented palaces. Julie loved the equestrian statue of Pizarro in the Plaza Mayor, and we all enjoyed climbing around the ruins of the town’s castle.
We went from there to the undistinguished town of Badajoz, where our hotel was. I knew of an English-speaking travel agent in Madrid, Gregorio, who was going to make my hotel reservations for me, but Amy Levine told me about a bargain plan she’d gotten from her neighborhood travel agency. With the Bancotel plan you purchased coupons for 6,500 pesetas each (about $50). Each coupon was good for a night in a room at a member hotel. These were mostly business-type hotels, not especially elegant but of good quality, and the price was a real bargain.
The hotel in Badajoz was typical—not a five-star place, but clean and comfortable. In fact, it was nice enough to have been booked for three noisy weddings while we were there—which made sleeping extremely difficult.
Badajoz was interesting from a food perspective. It was getting late when we checked in on Thursday night, so we asked the desk clerk for a nearby restaurant, and he directed us to one. We walked over and sat down, and the waiter promptly brought over a small dish of pre-appetizers—a treat you got in most restaurants, always something different. I was really hungry, so I reached over and forked something out of the brown-gravied clump.
“I wouldn’t do that so fast if I were you,” Mike said, looking at the plate dubiously.
“Oh, it’ll be fine,” I said, putting the stuff in my mouth—and panicking as my teeth made contact with the unpleasant texture of cartilage. I spit it out into my napkin.
Mike waved the waiter over. “Qué es eso?” he asked—“What is that?”
“Oreja de cerdo,” the waiter replied amiably—pig’s ear.
I blanched. Mike translated for the kids. “Mom, you had a pig’s ear in your mouth!” Lisa laughed.
“Pig’s ear! Pig’s ear!” Julie chanted. They wouldn’t let me forget it.
Another food worthy of note in Badajoz was the tostada. This is probably the simplest kind of breakfast a person could eat—buttered grilled bread. We found it at a little fast-food restaurant near the hotel on Friday morning. They had a breakfast special, for just a few pesetas, of tostada, orange juice and coffee, which we ordered. And those tostadas were the perfect breakfast food—hot and buttery and satisfying.
The third food story of interest in Badajoz was our discovery of where all the Tab went. There had been many years in my youth when Tab was the diet cola of choice, and I suppose I had been sorry to see it replaced by Diet Coke. But in Badajoz, if you wanted a diet cola, the only one they had was Tab. I hadn’t seen that familiar pink can in years, but there it was, at every restaurant in the town.
Badajoz was just a couple of kilometers from the Portuguese border, so we had planned to cross into Portugal for a day and see what we could see without driving too far. We had an ulterior motive—I wanted to get the kids’ and my passports stamped.
We were living in Spain under not-quite-legal conditions. Because of his work, Mike had been assisted in applying for a residencia, a residence permit. This entailed a huge amount of red tape and the presentation of such items as a report from the Stamford Police Department saying that they were not aware of Mike’s having committed any crimes. He carried with him a document that proved he had applied for the residencia, but he had no idea if or when one would be issued to him.
Meanwhile, the kids and I were there on tourist visas, which theoretically lasted for four months. Christine Lotto had told me that it would be a good idea to leave the country and come back every four months in order to get a new tourist visa stamped into your passport, so that was one thing we hoped to accomplish in our border crossing.
We went to two little walled towns that we found in our Campsa maps, Elvas and Estremoz. Both had fortresses—fun for climbing—and they looked different from walled Spanish towns because all the buildings were whitewashed. I threaded the Mercedes through the narrow streets till at one trying point I gave up, got out of the car, and made Mike take over the driving, because I couldn’t see how we could negotiate the tiny alleyway.
We had lunch at an upstairs restaurant, a place with no ambience but pretty good food. Our cartilage-free pre-appetizer was a plateful of tiny tins of various patés that one could spread on bread. This, it turned out, was a regular thing in Portugal, but we’d never seen such an item in Spain. Julie and Lisa ordered soup—“the best ever,” they said—and Lisa managed to leave her jacket behind when we left, which we didn’t realize till hours later.
As we approached the border to re-enter Spain I pulled out the passports. Mike lined the car up for the one of the booths we could see ahead. But as we rolled into the booth, we saw it was empty.
We scanned the other booths, saw they were all empty, too, and exchanged a look of alarm.
“Well, I guess this isn’t going to work,” Mike said. We’d have to find some other way to look legal.
Much later we learned that member countries of the European Union really didn’t maintain guarded borders, so there were no barriers to travel between Spain and Portugal.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
At Home
I was really beginning to appreciate my good fortune. My heart would fill suddenly with absolute joy at the situation in which I found myself. The black cloud of fear was moving away, and I started to see the beauty around me.
One morning, driving down the hill from the American School toward my house, I noticed the stunning view ahead of me: the jagged profile of the Guadarrama Mountains, already snow-capped, against the impossibly clear blue sky. It wasn’t visible from everywhere in the neighborhood—only from that steep hill where I was driving—but I drove down that hill often, and that beauty was available to me many times each week. “I can’t believe it,” I thought. “It’s like living close to the Rocky Mountains, but with Madrid twenty minutes away.” I had a cassette tape that I often played in the car, with a mix of songs I liked, and there was a Van Morrison song that became the soundtrack for that view: “When it’s not always raining, there’ll be days like this/When there’s no one complaining, there’ll be days like this/Everything falls into place like the flick of the switch/Yeah, my mama told me there’ll be days like this.”
Coming home from the gym, too, I could catch a view of the mountains. I had started driving into the city for the 2:30 aerobics class, because there was no inbound traffic at that time—if anything, people were leaving for lunch. I’d park in the garage under the gym, take my class, shower fast, and drive home around 3:45, before the traffic started back up. And as I headed northwest out of Madrid there was another stunning glimpse of those peaks. As a Midwesterner, I was floored every time I got a look, and somehow I never got jaded about it. I just continued to gape at the wonderful view. “You’d better appreciate this,” I warned myself. “This is more beauty than most people ever get to live with.”
I gained an appreciation of another phenomenon on those gym days. After class I was always in a huge rush to get out of the locker room and home before my kids got back from school, so I’d slam through a shower, throw on my clothes and run. But over time I noticed that the Spanish women around me weren’t doing that. “They’re taking a leisurely shower, toweling off without hurry, and spending a good ten or fifteen minutes rubbing lotion into every square centimeter of their skin,” I observed to myself. Once I became aware of this, I was in awe. “Tu piel está muy seca,” I’d been told one day when I went for a manicure—“Your skin is very dry.”
The women of Madrid knew they were living in a dry climate, and they absolutely made the time to moisturize their skin. I still lived a life in which getting on to the next activity was supremely important, but all around me were people who were doing what was necessary to care for themselves beautifully, not rushing at all. I had begun to notice.
One morning, driving down the hill from the American School toward my house, I noticed the stunning view ahead of me: the jagged profile of the Guadarrama Mountains, already snow-capped, against the impossibly clear blue sky. It wasn’t visible from everywhere in the neighborhood—only from that steep hill where I was driving—but I drove down that hill often, and that beauty was available to me many times each week. “I can’t believe it,” I thought. “It’s like living close to the Rocky Mountains, but with Madrid twenty minutes away.” I had a cassette tape that I often played in the car, with a mix of songs I liked, and there was a Van Morrison song that became the soundtrack for that view: “When it’s not always raining, there’ll be days like this/When there’s no one complaining, there’ll be days like this/Everything falls into place like the flick of the switch/Yeah, my mama told me there’ll be days like this.”
Coming home from the gym, too, I could catch a view of the mountains. I had started driving into the city for the 2:30 aerobics class, because there was no inbound traffic at that time—if anything, people were leaving for lunch. I’d park in the garage under the gym, take my class, shower fast, and drive home around 3:45, before the traffic started back up. And as I headed northwest out of Madrid there was another stunning glimpse of those peaks. As a Midwesterner, I was floored every time I got a look, and somehow I never got jaded about it. I just continued to gape at the wonderful view. “You’d better appreciate this,” I warned myself. “This is more beauty than most people ever get to live with.”
I gained an appreciation of another phenomenon on those gym days. After class I was always in a huge rush to get out of the locker room and home before my kids got back from school, so I’d slam through a shower, throw on my clothes and run. But over time I noticed that the Spanish women around me weren’t doing that. “They’re taking a leisurely shower, toweling off without hurry, and spending a good ten or fifteen minutes rubbing lotion into every square centimeter of their skin,” I observed to myself. Once I became aware of this, I was in awe. “Tu piel está muy seca,” I’d been told one day when I went for a manicure—“Your skin is very dry.”
The women of Madrid knew they were living in a dry climate, and they absolutely made the time to moisturize their skin. I still lived a life in which getting on to the next activity was supremely important, but all around me were people who were doing what was necessary to care for themselves beautifully, not rushing at all. I had begun to notice.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Settling In, part 24
Now, in early November, it was time for us to host the fifth grade parents’ get-together that Christine Lotto had booked me for. It wasn’t any trouble—I made sure the house was tidy, and we put out some cheese and ham and olives and wine and soft drinks. I was delighted to see some of the people I already knew a little—the Scarritts were there, and Amy Levine and Eric Gronningsater, and Huibrecht Kruger and her husband Piet. I moved among the guests, feeling comfortable as the hostess, trying to make others feel welcome. There was no shortage of interesting people to chat with—several U.S. Embassy families, who always had stories to tell of previous postings in exotic places; executives from international companies, many of whom had also lived in other countries; and Spanish people who were much more outgoing and friendly than the norm. Just by having chosen the American School for their children, these Spaniards had demonstrated their openness to what most of their countrymen would regard as a progressive approach to education. “Spanish education relies a lot on memorization and doesn’t really foster creativity,” my friend Sandra had told me. She had her children in the very progressive Waldorf School, but she had an appreciation of the Spanish system as well. “They truly know history, which we Americans don’t,” she said, “and now I know why Spaniards can quote poetry for any occasion—they’re made to memorize a ton of it!”
The evening’s conversation was lively, taking in U.S. and Spanish politics, the kids, their teachers, and the ever-present topic of the Spanish language and how difficult it was for us English speakers. I moved from group to group, happier and happier as the evening went on, till we said good night to the last guests and started to clean up. “I feel great!” I said to Mike, beaming. “I’m going to be able to find good friends, I can tell! I know I’m going to be okay here!”
The evening’s conversation was lively, taking in U.S. and Spanish politics, the kids, their teachers, and the ever-present topic of the Spanish language and how difficult it was for us English speakers. I moved from group to group, happier and happier as the evening went on, till we said good night to the last guests and started to clean up. “I feel great!” I said to Mike, beaming. “I’m going to be able to find good friends, I can tell! I know I’m going to be okay here!”
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Settling In, part 23
Clarice had mentioned that she was the hostess for the next Newcomers Club coffee, which was on a Wednesday, so it conflicted with Everett Rice’s Spanish art history class. “I’ll try to come after class,” I said. “I don’t know if you’ll still be going that late, though.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Come anytime.”
So I stopped at Marks & Spencer before the class and picked up a dozen pre-packaged sandwiches in the grocery department, figuring anyone who was still at Clarice’s by 12:30 would be happy for a little lunch.
There were just four or five women at Clarice’s beautiful house when I arrived, and they were clearing away the remaining cups and plates. “Come on in and join us,” Clarice said, smiling.
I gave her the sandwiches. “I thought you guys might like something to eat,” I said.
“That’s perfect!” Clarice said with a smile. “I’m just ready for some real food—not those tea cakes.”
I’d met a couple of the other women before at Newcomers events, though I didn’t know them well. One was Vicki, an American whose husband worked for the U.S. Embassy. She was from Tennessee, warm and friendly, with a daughter in Lisa’s class. Another was Sylvie, a Swiss woman married to a Turk. She had lived in Istanbul for many years and missed it terribly.
With them were two sisters, Americans, both married to Spaniards, who had lived in Spain for many years. One was tall and blond, the other average height with dark hair; I would never have guessed they were sisters. They sent their kids to a German school but worked hard to make sure the children learned good English as well. “Do you have any children’s books I could borrow?” asked the blond sister. “I’m always looking for reading material in English for my kids.”
I promised to look among Julie’s and Lisa’s books for something to lend.
We brought dirty dishes into Clarice’s kitchen, which consisted of a breakfast room, a separate food preparation area, and then a laundry, all white-tiled and sparkling. As we walked back and forth to the living room and dining room to pick up more used china, I saw in the daylight how lovely the house was—a sort of high-ceilinged hacienda with sisal mats on the floor and lovingly collected furniture and tchotchkes everywhere. And the yard visible through the large windows was spectacular—beautifully landscaped, with a large lawn sloping downhill to a sparkling swimming pool.
We finished the clearing up and turned to the sandwiches, perching on the counters in Clarice’s kitchen. As we ate and talked, the conversation slowly turned from trivia to spiritual matters.
“I don’t know what I believe,” Vicki was saying. “I was brought up a Bible-thumping Baptist, but that didn’t really work for me. But I think there’s something out there. I just don’t know what.”
“I was raised a Catholic, which really messed me up,” Clarice said with a laugh. “As I got older, I became interested in other kinds of spirituality. When I was in Hong Kong I studied a lot of Asian disciplines—tai chi, feng shui, Chinese medicine. I learned reiki, and I studied Indian medicine and the chakras.”
“I don’t know anything about those things,” I said. “I was an atheist my whole life until recently. I found out that I’d better form some kind of spiritual connection in my life, and I’m working on it, but I haven’t gotten very far.”
We had reached an intense level of intimacy in no time, and it felt great to me. Nobody seemed to need to go anywhere; time stood still for a while as we spoke about our most personal feelings. It was wonderful to be able to talk and talk about these questions, and at the end of several hours I felt close to everyone in that kitchen.
I wasted no time inviting the Scarritts to dinner. As a parent I had always looked for other families that would be a perfect match—with the same number of kids of the same age and sex as mine, so everyone had a chance of getting along and no one would be left out—and I had only found it once. But that one family had moved out of Stamford after only two years, so I had had little chance to enjoy the good fit. I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to recreate that kind of a setup.
I called Clarice and asked her to bring the family over on a Sunday night, and she happily agreed. Everyone got along from the start. Julie and Natalie were already good friends, and Lisa and Gaby knew each other fairly well, although Gaby was in a different second grade class. Natalie was a porcelain doll of a girl, with a beautiful face and long brown hair. Gaby was a little sprite with Clarice’s dark coloring and stunning thick, black hair.
The dinner conversation was easy and lively. John told us a story about the family’s move from Brazil to Hong Kong. “The kids were brought up speaking Portuguese,” he explained.
“John’s Portuguese is excellent,” Clarice interjected.
“We have videos of them speaking fluently,” he continued. “But when we moved to Hong Kong, the only real alternative for them was a British school, so we had to switch them over to English fast.”
“How old were they?” I asked.
“They were about six and three,” John said. “We started speaking English all the time, at home, everywhere. They learned really quickly—it was a relief. But now the Portuguese is completely gone.”
“You’re kidding!” Mike said.
“No, it’s absolutely gone,” John said sadly. “When we go to visit Clarice’s family, I think they can understand a little bit, but they can’t speak at all. It’s ‘the American cousins are coming to visit.’ They can’t communicate.”
“That’s amazing,” I said.
I told them the story I told to anyone who would stand still for five minutes—the one about my miserable Spanish washer/dryer. I was still struggling and suffering with it.
Clarice looked at John. “Well, we have a washer and dryer that we brought from Hong Kong,” she said. “They’re 220 volts, and they’re GE—really big American machines. They’ve just been sitting out in the garage. When we moved here, we didn’t have a house yet, so we didn’t know if we’d need them or not. But our house already had a washer and dryer, so actually we don’t need them at all.”
My heart leapt. Who would have thought that laundry machines could have caused me such joy? “Would you be willing to sell them?”
John thought for a minute. “Sure. They’re just taking up space.”
“But how will we get them over here?” Mike asked.
“That’s no problem. I have a handyman who belongs to my landlord. He’s always doing something around the house for me. He’ll bring them over in his truck, and I’m sure he can install them for you, too,” Clarice said.
“Oh, my God, I’m so glad I asked you to dinner!” I gushed.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Come anytime.”
So I stopped at Marks & Spencer before the class and picked up a dozen pre-packaged sandwiches in the grocery department, figuring anyone who was still at Clarice’s by 12:30 would be happy for a little lunch.
There were just four or five women at Clarice’s beautiful house when I arrived, and they were clearing away the remaining cups and plates. “Come on in and join us,” Clarice said, smiling.
I gave her the sandwiches. “I thought you guys might like something to eat,” I said.
“That’s perfect!” Clarice said with a smile. “I’m just ready for some real food—not those tea cakes.”
I’d met a couple of the other women before at Newcomers events, though I didn’t know them well. One was Vicki, an American whose husband worked for the U.S. Embassy. She was from Tennessee, warm and friendly, with a daughter in Lisa’s class. Another was Sylvie, a Swiss woman married to a Turk. She had lived in Istanbul for many years and missed it terribly.
With them were two sisters, Americans, both married to Spaniards, who had lived in Spain for many years. One was tall and blond, the other average height with dark hair; I would never have guessed they were sisters. They sent their kids to a German school but worked hard to make sure the children learned good English as well. “Do you have any children’s books I could borrow?” asked the blond sister. “I’m always looking for reading material in English for my kids.”
I promised to look among Julie’s and Lisa’s books for something to lend.
We brought dirty dishes into Clarice’s kitchen, which consisted of a breakfast room, a separate food preparation area, and then a laundry, all white-tiled and sparkling. As we walked back and forth to the living room and dining room to pick up more used china, I saw in the daylight how lovely the house was—a sort of high-ceilinged hacienda with sisal mats on the floor and lovingly collected furniture and tchotchkes everywhere. And the yard visible through the large windows was spectacular—beautifully landscaped, with a large lawn sloping downhill to a sparkling swimming pool.
We finished the clearing up and turned to the sandwiches, perching on the counters in Clarice’s kitchen. As we ate and talked, the conversation slowly turned from trivia to spiritual matters.
“I don’t know what I believe,” Vicki was saying. “I was brought up a Bible-thumping Baptist, but that didn’t really work for me. But I think there’s something out there. I just don’t know what.”
“I was raised a Catholic, which really messed me up,” Clarice said with a laugh. “As I got older, I became interested in other kinds of spirituality. When I was in Hong Kong I studied a lot of Asian disciplines—tai chi, feng shui, Chinese medicine. I learned reiki, and I studied Indian medicine and the chakras.”
“I don’t know anything about those things,” I said. “I was an atheist my whole life until recently. I found out that I’d better form some kind of spiritual connection in my life, and I’m working on it, but I haven’t gotten very far.”
We had reached an intense level of intimacy in no time, and it felt great to me. Nobody seemed to need to go anywhere; time stood still for a while as we spoke about our most personal feelings. It was wonderful to be able to talk and talk about these questions, and at the end of several hours I felt close to everyone in that kitchen.
I wasted no time inviting the Scarritts to dinner. As a parent I had always looked for other families that would be a perfect match—with the same number of kids of the same age and sex as mine, so everyone had a chance of getting along and no one would be left out—and I had only found it once. But that one family had moved out of Stamford after only two years, so I had had little chance to enjoy the good fit. I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to recreate that kind of a setup.
I called Clarice and asked her to bring the family over on a Sunday night, and she happily agreed. Everyone got along from the start. Julie and Natalie were already good friends, and Lisa and Gaby knew each other fairly well, although Gaby was in a different second grade class. Natalie was a porcelain doll of a girl, with a beautiful face and long brown hair. Gaby was a little sprite with Clarice’s dark coloring and stunning thick, black hair.
The dinner conversation was easy and lively. John told us a story about the family’s move from Brazil to Hong Kong. “The kids were brought up speaking Portuguese,” he explained.
“John’s Portuguese is excellent,” Clarice interjected.
“We have videos of them speaking fluently,” he continued. “But when we moved to Hong Kong, the only real alternative for them was a British school, so we had to switch them over to English fast.”
“How old were they?” I asked.
“They were about six and three,” John said. “We started speaking English all the time, at home, everywhere. They learned really quickly—it was a relief. But now the Portuguese is completely gone.”
“You’re kidding!” Mike said.
“No, it’s absolutely gone,” John said sadly. “When we go to visit Clarice’s family, I think they can understand a little bit, but they can’t speak at all. It’s ‘the American cousins are coming to visit.’ They can’t communicate.”
“That’s amazing,” I said.
I told them the story I told to anyone who would stand still for five minutes—the one about my miserable Spanish washer/dryer. I was still struggling and suffering with it.
Clarice looked at John. “Well, we have a washer and dryer that we brought from Hong Kong,” she said. “They’re 220 volts, and they’re GE—really big American machines. They’ve just been sitting out in the garage. When we moved here, we didn’t have a house yet, so we didn’t know if we’d need them or not. But our house already had a washer and dryer, so actually we don’t need them at all.”
My heart leapt. Who would have thought that laundry machines could have caused me such joy? “Would you be willing to sell them?”
John thought for a minute. “Sure. They’re just taking up space.”
“But how will we get them over here?” Mike asked.
“That’s no problem. I have a handyman who belongs to my landlord. He’s always doing something around the house for me. He’ll bring them over in his truck, and I’m sure he can install them for you, too,” Clarice said.
“Oh, my God, I’m so glad I asked you to dinner!” I gushed.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Settling In, part 22
I had heard some buzz around the American School about Halloween. Halloween isn’t a holiday in Spain, but our little Americans could not be left without a trick-or-treating opportunity. So, the buzz went, if you could get yourself a map indicating the houses involved, you could take your kid trick-or-treating in Húmera.
The fancy neighborhood I’d seen when house-hunting had enough Americans in it to make a critical mass for Halloween. And I had an in: Huibrecht Kruger lived in Húmera.
“How’s this thing work?” I asked her one day in Spanish class.
“Well, you bring a couple bags of American candy over to one of the people on the map,” she said, “and you get a copy of the map, and you take your children around between about four o’clock and six o’clock.”
“But how do you find out who’s on the map?” I asked.
She sighed. “I’m on the map. I’m South African, but I’m on the map.”
American candy was hard to come by in Spain, but it was the undisputed favorite of American kids, who didn’t like the unfamiliar Spanish candy nearly as much. So I had placed an order with my parents before their visit, and they had brought me several bags of Milky Ways and Snickers. Julie and Lisa and I cobbled together some costumes—Julie was a pirate and Lisa a ballerina—and we drove over to Huibrecht’s house at 4 p.m. in broad daylight.
We buzzed at the gate and were let into the yard of the big villa, white stucco with a red tile roof. Huibrecht opened the door, holding a huge basket full of candy. “Here’s my contribution,” I said, handing over my bags.
Julie had already taken off with Huibrecht’s daughter Rosanne, and I had no idea how I would ever find her again, so I was anxious. Huibrecht handed me a photocopy of a hand-drawn map with about twenty house numbers marked on it. These were the houses that would have candy for the kids.
Just as I was about to set out with Lisa, Clarice Scarritt walked up with her second-grader, Gaby. “Natalie’s already gone with Rosanne and Julie,” she said, and at this moment it dawned on me that we both had two daughters and they were the same ages. I have to get to know these people better, I told myself immediately.
The four of us walked along the pleasant, sunny streets together, and we stopped at the designated houses. The kids rang the bells and got the candy pretty much the same way they would have done at home, except that every house had a wall around it and there was often a long hike from the front gate to the front door. Lisa and Gaby were getting along well and seemed happy to be together, and Clarice and I were having fun watching them.
Eventually we came to a house that Clarice said was the Fishers’. This was the family of Amy Fisher, the friend who had come to sleep over with Lisa and had made fun of the older girls’ Spanish. Lisa and Gaby went up to the door, and Amy gave them candy and asked them to wait. A moment later she came flying out of the house, dressed as Belle from Beauty and the Beast—she had on a long yellow dress and matching plastic high heels. “My mom said I can go trick-or-treating with you guys!” she said, tapping her way down the driveway on the sandals.
Clarice and I took one look at those shoes and exchanged a knowing glance. “That kid’s not going to last twenty minutes on those things,” I said.
“Well, maybe John will come along with the car,” Clarice replied. “He said he would try to get home early.”
We walked along with the girls to a couple of houses, and sure enough, the bellyaching began. “My feet hurt,” Amy started to whine.
“Those shoes are not good for walking,” Clarice said. “Do you want to go home and get something more comfortable?”
“No! It’s part of my costume! I have to have them!” Amy protested.
She limped along to another house, but by the time the kids had come back with their candy, our chauffeur had arrived. John pulled up in his spiffy silver Jaguar. “You ladies need a ride?” he asked.
We were all extremely grateful for this luxury. “Sure!” Clarice said. “We’ll squeeze in somehow.” And the five of us did jam ourselves into the car, so we had a posh ride around the neighborhood with only occasional pauses for candy acquisition. When we’d hit all the houses on the map, John dropped Lisa and me back at the Krugers’, ending the most elegant Halloween ever. Julie was there on the front porch waiting for us, happy and with a bag full of candy.
The fancy neighborhood I’d seen when house-hunting had enough Americans in it to make a critical mass for Halloween. And I had an in: Huibrecht Kruger lived in Húmera.
“How’s this thing work?” I asked her one day in Spanish class.
“Well, you bring a couple bags of American candy over to one of the people on the map,” she said, “and you get a copy of the map, and you take your children around between about four o’clock and six o’clock.”
“But how do you find out who’s on the map?” I asked.
She sighed. “I’m on the map. I’m South African, but I’m on the map.”
American candy was hard to come by in Spain, but it was the undisputed favorite of American kids, who didn’t like the unfamiliar Spanish candy nearly as much. So I had placed an order with my parents before their visit, and they had brought me several bags of Milky Ways and Snickers. Julie and Lisa and I cobbled together some costumes—Julie was a pirate and Lisa a ballerina—and we drove over to Huibrecht’s house at 4 p.m. in broad daylight.
We buzzed at the gate and were let into the yard of the big villa, white stucco with a red tile roof. Huibrecht opened the door, holding a huge basket full of candy. “Here’s my contribution,” I said, handing over my bags.
Julie had already taken off with Huibrecht’s daughter Rosanne, and I had no idea how I would ever find her again, so I was anxious. Huibrecht handed me a photocopy of a hand-drawn map with about twenty house numbers marked on it. These were the houses that would have candy for the kids.
Just as I was about to set out with Lisa, Clarice Scarritt walked up with her second-grader, Gaby. “Natalie’s already gone with Rosanne and Julie,” she said, and at this moment it dawned on me that we both had two daughters and they were the same ages. I have to get to know these people better, I told myself immediately.
The four of us walked along the pleasant, sunny streets together, and we stopped at the designated houses. The kids rang the bells and got the candy pretty much the same way they would have done at home, except that every house had a wall around it and there was often a long hike from the front gate to the front door. Lisa and Gaby were getting along well and seemed happy to be together, and Clarice and I were having fun watching them.
Eventually we came to a house that Clarice said was the Fishers’. This was the family of Amy Fisher, the friend who had come to sleep over with Lisa and had made fun of the older girls’ Spanish. Lisa and Gaby went up to the door, and Amy gave them candy and asked them to wait. A moment later she came flying out of the house, dressed as Belle from Beauty and the Beast—she had on a long yellow dress and matching plastic high heels. “My mom said I can go trick-or-treating with you guys!” she said, tapping her way down the driveway on the sandals.
Clarice and I took one look at those shoes and exchanged a knowing glance. “That kid’s not going to last twenty minutes on those things,” I said.
“Well, maybe John will come along with the car,” Clarice replied. “He said he would try to get home early.”
We walked along with the girls to a couple of houses, and sure enough, the bellyaching began. “My feet hurt,” Amy started to whine.
“Those shoes are not good for walking,” Clarice said. “Do you want to go home and get something more comfortable?”
“No! It’s part of my costume! I have to have them!” Amy protested.
She limped along to another house, but by the time the kids had come back with their candy, our chauffeur had arrived. John pulled up in his spiffy silver Jaguar. “You ladies need a ride?” he asked.
We were all extremely grateful for this luxury. “Sure!” Clarice said. “We’ll squeeze in somehow.” And the five of us did jam ourselves into the car, so we had a posh ride around the neighborhood with only occasional pauses for candy acquisition. When we’d hit all the houses on the map, John dropped Lisa and me back at the Krugers’, ending the most elegant Halloween ever. Julie was there on the front porch waiting for us, happy and with a bag full of candy.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Settling In, part 21
I was starting to feel more at home by now. I had a routine going during the week—I would walk with Ana, I’d go to Spanish class three mornings a week, I’d go to Hipercor for groceries or what have you two or three times. I’d take a bus into the city and go to the gym two or three weekdays, and maybe on Saturday or Sunday morning, too. I’d go to my 12-step meeting on Thursday and Saturday nights, and Mike and I would go to a movie or something after the Saturday meeting. I bought El País, the best-selling newspaper, almost every day. I especially enjoyed the Friday paper, which had a terrific weekend section, Tentaciones, that covered all the entertainment in town. There was a little magazine I bought, too, Guía del ocio—Leisure Guide—that had all the play and movie times, all the concerts, and suggestions for weekend outings. It was a little tricky to get the right Guía del ocio, because the one that came out on Friday covered events beginning the next Monday. If you needed information on this weekend, then you had to have last week’s Guía. Good kiosk operators kept a supply of the old Guía around for people who hadn’t gotten theirs. Bad kiosk operators forgot to ask me if I wanted this week’s (la semana que viene) or last week’s (la semana pasada) issue, and I had to learn that lesson the hard way.
It was an old pleasure of mine to sometimes take a weekend day and just chill out, lie on the couch watching TV, doing nothing. In my first months in Madrid that had seemed too scary—I had to keep busy all the time so I wouldn’t be able to ponder my loneliness and fear. But by mid-October I thought a day of nothing would be okay.
I planted myself on the couch in the TV room and started watching old movies, music videos—whatever popped up on Sky TV. But it didn’t go too well. It was a gray day, and I got into a gray mood fast. Everything made me homesick. There was a Sting video in particular, a mournful song with a futuristic visual—big windmills and tall people—that seemed to sum up my misery. And an awful video of the song “Black Hole Sun”—it had freaky-looking characters whose faces were stretched digitally into horrifying shapes. Not safe, not safe, my brain was screaming—I wasn’t ready to sit down and have a quiet day yet. Better to keep moving. I had a good cry.
“What’s the matter, Mom?” Julie asked, disturbed to see me upset.
“I guess I’m just a little homesick,” I said. “I miss Grandma and Grandpa, too.”
“I know what you mean,” Julie said. “Sometimes I miss stuff at home, or my friends.” She gave me a hug.
It was an old pleasure of mine to sometimes take a weekend day and just chill out, lie on the couch watching TV, doing nothing. In my first months in Madrid that had seemed too scary—I had to keep busy all the time so I wouldn’t be able to ponder my loneliness and fear. But by mid-October I thought a day of nothing would be okay.
I planted myself on the couch in the TV room and started watching old movies, music videos—whatever popped up on Sky TV. But it didn’t go too well. It was a gray day, and I got into a gray mood fast. Everything made me homesick. There was a Sting video in particular, a mournful song with a futuristic visual—big windmills and tall people—that seemed to sum up my misery. And an awful video of the song “Black Hole Sun”—it had freaky-looking characters whose faces were stretched digitally into horrifying shapes. Not safe, not safe, my brain was screaming—I wasn’t ready to sit down and have a quiet day yet. Better to keep moving. I had a good cry.
“What’s the matter, Mom?” Julie asked, disturbed to see me upset.
“I guess I’m just a little homesick,” I said. “I miss Grandma and Grandpa, too.”
“I know what you mean,” Julie said. “Sometimes I miss stuff at home, or my friends.” She gave me a hug.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Settling In, part 20
Early in October Julie was invited to a sleepover for her classmate Natalie Scarritt’s birthday. She took the bus over to Natalie’s house after school, and Mike picked her up the next day, so I didn’t register the fact that Natalie was the daughter of Clarice Scarritt, the Brazilian woman I had met at the International Newcomers Club coffee. And a couple weeks later, when Mike and I attended the get-together for parents of second graders at the Scarritts’ house in Somosaguas, I failed to realize that Clarice had daughters in both my daughters’ grades.
The get-together was an eye-opening evening for me. It was too dark when we arrived for me to see the beautiful yard of Clarice’s house, but the living room furnishings definitely caught my attention—there was a huge old leather couch, some big comfy velvet chairs, heavy wooden chests from Hong Kong. There were antique glass display cases full of every kind of interesting knickknack—geodes, crystals, brass knives, glass objects, tiny figurines in metal and porcelain. Here was a collector, I thought.
A fire was burning, and the lights were low. I had seldom felt so comfortable in another person’s house. Clarice, with her long, thick black hair and her soft Brazilian accent, was a welcoming hostess. Her husband John, an American with salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, saw to everyone’s beverage graciously.
Mike and I chatted with the other parents there, enjoying ourselves, till a new arrival came in. Her name was Loretta Simpson, and she sounded miserable. “I just found out we’re being transferred to London,” she said.
We learned that she’d been in Madrid for nine years because of her husband’s job with an American bank, and she’d come to regard it as her home. “I don’t want to go!” she wailed. “London is awful! It’s so unfriendly, and the weather is horrible!”
I couldn’t imagine why she would be so unhappy about the move. London sounded great to me. But I hadn’t previously been aware of the fact that many people made this kind of foreign assignment a way of life. As I listened to the discussion, I heard Loretta and John Scarritt realize that as children they’d both attended the American School in Caracas, Venezuela at the same time. “My dad was with the U.S. State Department,” John said. “We lived in Caracas for four years, but we lived in Brussels for quite a while, too.” John had eventually decided that he wanted an international career, but not in government service. After going to college in the U.S. he went to work at an American school in Brazil, and that was where he had met Clarice.
John worked at the school for several years and then joined R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which sent him to North Carolina and Hong Kong. He, Clarice and their two daughters had come to Madrid about nine months earlier.
When we left the party I pondered what I’d heard. “Somehow I assumed everyone here would be on a temporary tour of duty like we are,” I said to Mike. “But clearly some of these people go from one international assignment to another and never go back to the U.S.”
“Yeah, I never really thought about it,” Mike said. “But I remember one of the partners at Price Waterhouse in New York telling me that some people fall in love with these overseas assignments and sort of ‘go native.’”
The get-together was an eye-opening evening for me. It was too dark when we arrived for me to see the beautiful yard of Clarice’s house, but the living room furnishings definitely caught my attention—there was a huge old leather couch, some big comfy velvet chairs, heavy wooden chests from Hong Kong. There were antique glass display cases full of every kind of interesting knickknack—geodes, crystals, brass knives, glass objects, tiny figurines in metal and porcelain. Here was a collector, I thought.
A fire was burning, and the lights were low. I had seldom felt so comfortable in another person’s house. Clarice, with her long, thick black hair and her soft Brazilian accent, was a welcoming hostess. Her husband John, an American with salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, saw to everyone’s beverage graciously.
Mike and I chatted with the other parents there, enjoying ourselves, till a new arrival came in. Her name was Loretta Simpson, and she sounded miserable. “I just found out we’re being transferred to London,” she said.
We learned that she’d been in Madrid for nine years because of her husband’s job with an American bank, and she’d come to regard it as her home. “I don’t want to go!” she wailed. “London is awful! It’s so unfriendly, and the weather is horrible!”
I couldn’t imagine why she would be so unhappy about the move. London sounded great to me. But I hadn’t previously been aware of the fact that many people made this kind of foreign assignment a way of life. As I listened to the discussion, I heard Loretta and John Scarritt realize that as children they’d both attended the American School in Caracas, Venezuela at the same time. “My dad was with the U.S. State Department,” John said. “We lived in Caracas for four years, but we lived in Brussels for quite a while, too.” John had eventually decided that he wanted an international career, but not in government service. After going to college in the U.S. he went to work at an American school in Brazil, and that was where he had met Clarice.
John worked at the school for several years and then joined R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which sent him to North Carolina and Hong Kong. He, Clarice and their two daughters had come to Madrid about nine months earlier.
When we left the party I pondered what I’d heard. “Somehow I assumed everyone here would be on a temporary tour of duty like we are,” I said to Mike. “But clearly some of these people go from one international assignment to another and never go back to the U.S.”
“Yeah, I never really thought about it,” Mike said. “But I remember one of the partners at Price Waterhouse in New York telling me that some people fall in love with these overseas assignments and sort of ‘go native.’”
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Settling In, part 19
My folks went along on their planned itinerary, flying to Barcelona to spend a few days there and then taking a train to Granada. There had been a last-minute flurry of rearranging the Granada accommodations—their travel agent had been able to book them into the highly touted parador there, located in a former Franciscan monastery. (The paradores of Spain are government-owned hotels housed in beautiful historic buildings.) But somewhere along the line someone had scared my dad off of it. “He said he was sleeping there, and his window was open, and he woke up with a cat sitting on his face,” Dad said. So calls went back and forth to the travel agent, and they got the reservation changed to some less threatening establishment.
But when I flew down alone to meet them at the Málaga airport a few days later, they were bemoaning their choice. “We went to the parador for lunch one day, and there wasn’t a cat in sight,” Dad complained. “I’m really sorry we didn’t stay there.”
We picked up our little red rental car and set off for Marbella, a short distance away on the coast. Mom and Dad were bubbling over about their trip. “We loved Madrid,” Mom said, “but oh—Barcelona! It’s so beautiful—Las Ramblas, the waterfront. And our hotel was great—you’ve got to stay there when you go! The Hotel Colón, right across from the cathedral. But make sure you stay on the other side of the hotel, because the church bells ring all night long!”
I was doing the driving, slightly miffed that the car had an automatic transmission. “I’m more used to the standard now,” I said. I was a little miffed, too, that they had preferred Barcelona to Madrid, because I felt great loyalty to my adopted city already.
“But we’re going to drive up into the mountains to see Ronda,” Mom said. “You’ll be glad you don’t have to shift gears all the time.”
“This is great!” Dad gushed. “I love it when you get out on the road in a new place, a new country. Remember when we did this in Italy, Jackie? It’s the serendipity of the road—you get lost sometimes, but you find something better than what you were looking for!”
We descended into the seaside town of Marbella, with palm trees all around and the blue Mediterranean on the horizon. White villas and huge condo blocks lined the waterfront. My parents had reservations at the Atalaya Park, which was recommended in my guidebook, but I hadn’t been able to get a reservation there. I was going to stay at Guadalmina Golf, a nearby resort. We decided to go to their hotel first.
The Atalaya Park was a big place, almost like a Catskills hotel. I took Mom and Dad in to register them, and the clerk gave them their key and directions to their room. We started off down the hall, took a left, went up some stairs . . . and it became clear that Dad was not going to be able to do this walk several times a day.
“He’s been doing so much better,” Mom said. “All the walking we’ve done the past week, he’s just gotten stronger and stronger.”
“Yeah, but this is nuts,” he said. “Let’s see if they have anything closer.”
We went back to the front desk, but they had nothing else available. “I knew they were full, because I couldn’t get a room,” I said. “Let’s see if we can get you something at my place.” So we gave back the key and got into the car again.
The road to Guadalmina Golf led through a residential neighborhood. There were pretty pastel houses with lush tropical gardens along the way. Finally we came to a collection of low pink buildings. I went in to see what was available.
“Yes, we have a large double room available,” the clerk said in good English. The resorts in Marbella catered to all kinds of Northern Europeans, and there were thousands of British retirees in the area.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
Mom and Dad were delighted with their room, and with the place in general, which was attractive and relaxed. There was a restaurant with a wide terrace overlooking the water. “We have a Sunday brunch there with music,” the desk clerk had told me, and we put that into our plans.
My room, however, was a disaster. It looked as nice as the double, but there was a terrible stench in it—it seemed like triple-strength ammonia, and it was impossible to ignore. I called the desk to complain, but there were no other rooms available, and I figured we’d had enough moving around for one day, so I decided to put up with it. We went into town for dinner.
October was off-season for the Costa del Sol, but my mother was excited just to be in a place where jet-setters came. We walked through some of the shopping streets of the town, and I, at least, enjoyed the quiet. I was sure I’d hate this place during the high season. We picked a little outdoor place for dinner and had a simple but satisfying meal.
The plan for the next day was to go to Ronda, about forty miles north of Marbella in the mountains. Before I moved to Spain, more than one person had told me this was the best town to visit, perhaps the best they’d ever visited anywhere, so I was looking forward to it. The road up was incredibly winding and precarious, and I took the wrong turnoff once. My folks were panicked—“I’ll check the map! No, turn here! That’s the wrong way! We’ll miss it!” So much for the serendipity of the road, I thought.
Ronda was a big disappointment. It was set on top of a rock with a deep ravine dividing the town, with the old Moorish part, La Ciudad, on one side and the newer town (well, new as of 1485), El Mercadillo, on the other. We took a stroll over to the 18th century Puente Nuevo (New Bridge) and looked into the gorge, which was interesting enough, and we had coffee in the town’s attractive parador, but somehow the enchantment of the place escaped us. The guidebook suggested we walk down the road that led into the ravine, but with Dad’s problems I decided it would be better to try to drive down. Thus I embarked on a harrowing effort to thread the car between buildings that were built long before cars were even thought of, so that their architects had unkindly put them way too close together. My depth perception was nonexistent, so I relied on the screaming of my parents to guide me as I tried mightily to avoid scraping the rented car. The steepness of the ravine’s sides was almost too much for me, a Midwesterner, comfortable only on flat surfaces. We passed the Arab baths, the minaret, the cathedral, and the Alcazaba, but we didn’t look at them much in our panic. Maybe that was why Ronda just didn’t work for us.
Having finally reached the bottom of the hill, we took a residential street that led us into a commercial area. “Hey, how about getting some bread and cheese and stuff for a picnic?” Dad said. I knew this was something I could handle, so I parked near a small supermarket, and we trooped on in.
We picked up a baguette, some Coca-Cola Lite (the Spanish version of Diet Coke), and some potato chips, and I went over to the deli counter to get some sliced cheese. “Medio kilo de queso planchado, por favor,” I said to the clerk. She gave me a funny look. I thought I had asked for a pound of sliced cheese.
“En lonchas?” she asked me—sliced?
I turned beet red. “Si, en lonchas,” I said, embarrassed. I had asked her for ironed cheese.
We paid and drove out of town till we found a small pull-off next to the road where we could lean against the car, feel the breeze, see the view, and have our lunch. I explained my gaffe to my folks, and we laughed till the tears ran down our faces. “Iron the cheese! Iron the cheese!” Dad roared.
Back in Marbella, we decided to go to a fancy restaurant recommended in the guidebook. It was difficult to find the place, in a beautiful old house behind a hotel, but we did have a fine meal there. It was quiet, though, and again we had a strong sense of being out-of-season visitors to a summer resort.
The next day, Sunday, we took advantage of the hotel’s brunch. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and breezy, and the maître d’ gave us a table on the edge of the terrace looking over the water. “It couldn’t be more beautiful,” Mom said. A guitarist strolled among the tables playing Spanish music. “This is the life,” said Dad.
For the afternoon we took ourselves to nearby Gibraltar. I knew there were long-standing disputes between Spain and the U.K. over this British territory, but I didn’t know much more than that. It was only a short drive west along the coast, but when we pulled up to the border crossing it was clear that we were entering a different world. Cars were backed up, waiting to cross into the colony, and guards were checking trunks and passports.
The first thing we saw once we got through the border was a wide expanse of concrete. This, it turned out, was an airplane runway; cars had to cross a military base to get to the town.
Suddenly we found ourselves in England. The steep, hilly streets of the town were lined with gray stone buildings full of shops selling watches, pipes, clothing, scones—and Union Jacks were everywhere, in neon. It looked nothing like Spain.
We navigated the narrow streets for a while, looking for the cable car that was supposed to take you up the rock, past the dens of the Barbary apes. When we found the bottom station, though, we realized they were running on a Sunday schedule, and we’d have to wait a couple of hours to take the ride. “Not worth it,” Mom pronounced, so we cut the visit short and went back to Marbella.
The next day all three of us drove back to Málaga and flew to Madrid. My folks’ travel agent had booked them into a different hotel, the Meliá, for these last couple of days, just to try a different part of town. It was near my gym, so I had no trouble finding it to drop them off. “It was a great trip, honey,” Dad said. “Thanks for being our tour guide!”
The verdict on the Meliá was a thumbs down, especially after the luxury of the Palace, but the Argüelles neighborhood in which it was located was a good one. I had started to get to know it during my trips to the gym. It was an elegant area near the university, with pleasant cafés and great leather goods shops. A branch of El Corte Inglés, the big department store, was right across the street from the hotel, and it was a short walk down Calle de la Princesa to the Plaza de España, a pleasant park. Underneath the park, my friend Sandra had told me, was an arcade of small shops, and one of them carried Chinese cooking ingredients, which you couldn’t easily find in regular grocery stores. I took advantage of the opportunity to stock up on soy sauce and sesame oil.
Finally it was time for Mom and Dad to go. “We’ll see you soon,” I said. “We’ll be there for Christmas.”
“You guys were the best hosts ever,” Dad said. “We can’t thank you enough.”
“It’s a wonderful place to live, I can see that,” Mom said. “But I’ll miss you!”
But when I flew down alone to meet them at the Málaga airport a few days later, they were bemoaning their choice. “We went to the parador for lunch one day, and there wasn’t a cat in sight,” Dad complained. “I’m really sorry we didn’t stay there.”
We picked up our little red rental car and set off for Marbella, a short distance away on the coast. Mom and Dad were bubbling over about their trip. “We loved Madrid,” Mom said, “but oh—Barcelona! It’s so beautiful—Las Ramblas, the waterfront. And our hotel was great—you’ve got to stay there when you go! The Hotel Colón, right across from the cathedral. But make sure you stay on the other side of the hotel, because the church bells ring all night long!”
I was doing the driving, slightly miffed that the car had an automatic transmission. “I’m more used to the standard now,” I said. I was a little miffed, too, that they had preferred Barcelona to Madrid, because I felt great loyalty to my adopted city already.
“But we’re going to drive up into the mountains to see Ronda,” Mom said. “You’ll be glad you don’t have to shift gears all the time.”
“This is great!” Dad gushed. “I love it when you get out on the road in a new place, a new country. Remember when we did this in Italy, Jackie? It’s the serendipity of the road—you get lost sometimes, but you find something better than what you were looking for!”
We descended into the seaside town of Marbella, with palm trees all around and the blue Mediterranean on the horizon. White villas and huge condo blocks lined the waterfront. My parents had reservations at the Atalaya Park, which was recommended in my guidebook, but I hadn’t been able to get a reservation there. I was going to stay at Guadalmina Golf, a nearby resort. We decided to go to their hotel first.
The Atalaya Park was a big place, almost like a Catskills hotel. I took Mom and Dad in to register them, and the clerk gave them their key and directions to their room. We started off down the hall, took a left, went up some stairs . . . and it became clear that Dad was not going to be able to do this walk several times a day.
“He’s been doing so much better,” Mom said. “All the walking we’ve done the past week, he’s just gotten stronger and stronger.”
“Yeah, but this is nuts,” he said. “Let’s see if they have anything closer.”
We went back to the front desk, but they had nothing else available. “I knew they were full, because I couldn’t get a room,” I said. “Let’s see if we can get you something at my place.” So we gave back the key and got into the car again.
The road to Guadalmina Golf led through a residential neighborhood. There were pretty pastel houses with lush tropical gardens along the way. Finally we came to a collection of low pink buildings. I went in to see what was available.
“Yes, we have a large double room available,” the clerk said in good English. The resorts in Marbella catered to all kinds of Northern Europeans, and there were thousands of British retirees in the area.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
Mom and Dad were delighted with their room, and with the place in general, which was attractive and relaxed. There was a restaurant with a wide terrace overlooking the water. “We have a Sunday brunch there with music,” the desk clerk had told me, and we put that into our plans.
My room, however, was a disaster. It looked as nice as the double, but there was a terrible stench in it—it seemed like triple-strength ammonia, and it was impossible to ignore. I called the desk to complain, but there were no other rooms available, and I figured we’d had enough moving around for one day, so I decided to put up with it. We went into town for dinner.
October was off-season for the Costa del Sol, but my mother was excited just to be in a place where jet-setters came. We walked through some of the shopping streets of the town, and I, at least, enjoyed the quiet. I was sure I’d hate this place during the high season. We picked a little outdoor place for dinner and had a simple but satisfying meal.
The plan for the next day was to go to Ronda, about forty miles north of Marbella in the mountains. Before I moved to Spain, more than one person had told me this was the best town to visit, perhaps the best they’d ever visited anywhere, so I was looking forward to it. The road up was incredibly winding and precarious, and I took the wrong turnoff once. My folks were panicked—“I’ll check the map! No, turn here! That’s the wrong way! We’ll miss it!” So much for the serendipity of the road, I thought.
Ronda was a big disappointment. It was set on top of a rock with a deep ravine dividing the town, with the old Moorish part, La Ciudad, on one side and the newer town (well, new as of 1485), El Mercadillo, on the other. We took a stroll over to the 18th century Puente Nuevo (New Bridge) and looked into the gorge, which was interesting enough, and we had coffee in the town’s attractive parador, but somehow the enchantment of the place escaped us. The guidebook suggested we walk down the road that led into the ravine, but with Dad’s problems I decided it would be better to try to drive down. Thus I embarked on a harrowing effort to thread the car between buildings that were built long before cars were even thought of, so that their architects had unkindly put them way too close together. My depth perception was nonexistent, so I relied on the screaming of my parents to guide me as I tried mightily to avoid scraping the rented car. The steepness of the ravine’s sides was almost too much for me, a Midwesterner, comfortable only on flat surfaces. We passed the Arab baths, the minaret, the cathedral, and the Alcazaba, but we didn’t look at them much in our panic. Maybe that was why Ronda just didn’t work for us.
Having finally reached the bottom of the hill, we took a residential street that led us into a commercial area. “Hey, how about getting some bread and cheese and stuff for a picnic?” Dad said. I knew this was something I could handle, so I parked near a small supermarket, and we trooped on in.
We picked up a baguette, some Coca-Cola Lite (the Spanish version of Diet Coke), and some potato chips, and I went over to the deli counter to get some sliced cheese. “Medio kilo de queso planchado, por favor,” I said to the clerk. She gave me a funny look. I thought I had asked for a pound of sliced cheese.
“En lonchas?” she asked me—sliced?
I turned beet red. “Si, en lonchas,” I said, embarrassed. I had asked her for ironed cheese.
We paid and drove out of town till we found a small pull-off next to the road where we could lean against the car, feel the breeze, see the view, and have our lunch. I explained my gaffe to my folks, and we laughed till the tears ran down our faces. “Iron the cheese! Iron the cheese!” Dad roared.
Back in Marbella, we decided to go to a fancy restaurant recommended in the guidebook. It was difficult to find the place, in a beautiful old house behind a hotel, but we did have a fine meal there. It was quiet, though, and again we had a strong sense of being out-of-season visitors to a summer resort.
The next day, Sunday, we took advantage of the hotel’s brunch. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and breezy, and the maître d’ gave us a table on the edge of the terrace looking over the water. “It couldn’t be more beautiful,” Mom said. A guitarist strolled among the tables playing Spanish music. “This is the life,” said Dad.
For the afternoon we took ourselves to nearby Gibraltar. I knew there were long-standing disputes between Spain and the U.K. over this British territory, but I didn’t know much more than that. It was only a short drive west along the coast, but when we pulled up to the border crossing it was clear that we were entering a different world. Cars were backed up, waiting to cross into the colony, and guards were checking trunks and passports.
The first thing we saw once we got through the border was a wide expanse of concrete. This, it turned out, was an airplane runway; cars had to cross a military base to get to the town.
Suddenly we found ourselves in England. The steep, hilly streets of the town were lined with gray stone buildings full of shops selling watches, pipes, clothing, scones—and Union Jacks were everywhere, in neon. It looked nothing like Spain.
We navigated the narrow streets for a while, looking for the cable car that was supposed to take you up the rock, past the dens of the Barbary apes. When we found the bottom station, though, we realized they were running on a Sunday schedule, and we’d have to wait a couple of hours to take the ride. “Not worth it,” Mom pronounced, so we cut the visit short and went back to Marbella.
The next day all three of us drove back to Málaga and flew to Madrid. My folks’ travel agent had booked them into a different hotel, the Meliá, for these last couple of days, just to try a different part of town. It was near my gym, so I had no trouble finding it to drop them off. “It was a great trip, honey,” Dad said. “Thanks for being our tour guide!”
The verdict on the Meliá was a thumbs down, especially after the luxury of the Palace, but the Argüelles neighborhood in which it was located was a good one. I had started to get to know it during my trips to the gym. It was an elegant area near the university, with pleasant cafés and great leather goods shops. A branch of El Corte Inglés, the big department store, was right across the street from the hotel, and it was a short walk down Calle de la Princesa to the Plaza de España, a pleasant park. Underneath the park, my friend Sandra had told me, was an arcade of small shops, and one of them carried Chinese cooking ingredients, which you couldn’t easily find in regular grocery stores. I took advantage of the opportunity to stock up on soy sauce and sesame oil.
Finally it was time for Mom and Dad to go. “We’ll see you soon,” I said. “We’ll be there for Christmas.”
“You guys were the best hosts ever,” Dad said. “We can’t thank you enough.”
“It’s a wonderful place to live, I can see that,” Mom said. “But I’ll miss you!”
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Settling In, part 18
Our next foray was to El Escorial, one of Spain’s most famous structures. Constructed in the 1500s for King Felipe II of Spain, it was a massive monastery that housed the Royal Pantheon, the resting place of most of Spain’s monarchs. Built on a massive scale, the monastery was designed in the rectangular pattern of the grill on which San Lorenzo was martyred.
I lived just forty minutes from El Escorial, but I hadn’t been there yet. Mike had pointed it out to me in April when we’d taken the train to Segovia. Huge as it was, it was easy to see even from a great distance. I collected my maps and my parents and headed northwest.
There were stunning views of the tremendous building as we drove over the foothills of the Guadarrama Mountains. We wound our way up to the adjacent streets, where we were amazed by the scale of the austere, squared-off structure as we rolled slowly by it. There were boys playing soccer on the broad pavement outside and cars parked up and down all the streets. I let Mom and Dad off at the entrance, parked, and returned to meet them.
It was cold inside the stone building. I bought our tickets, and we passed through an airport-style security setup before entering. The guidebook had said there were tours available in English. The guard I checked with said there were none that day, but that the route for visitors was clearly marked.
“That’s okay,” Dad said. “It will be more fun to go by ourselves.”
The visit started in the basement, where some rooms had been set up as an art gallery. A large El Greco painting was well displayed in the first room.
Next came a section the guidebook said was fairly new—a museum of the building of El Escorial. The curators had assembled some of the giant tools used to cut and place the massive stone blocks that made up the walls. There were original plans and models and some visuals detailing the building process over the twenty-one years it took. My dad, a handy person and a dedicated do-it-yourselfer, was impressed by the scale of the undertaking.
I should have been more alert by this time, but I had failed again to notice that those who walk down are eventually going to have to walk back up. We were confronted by a steep flight of stone stairs that led to the next part of the tour. Dad looked at it and blanched. “Let me ask if there’s another way,” I said weakly.
I walked back to the previous room and found a guard. “Mi padre no camina muy bien,” I said—my father doesn’t walk too well. “Hay otra vía para llegar a la planta baja?” Is there another way to get to the main floor?
“No,” she said.
“Es posible ir directamente al Patio de los Reyes?” Can you go directly to the Pantheon?
“No,” she said again, sympathetically. There was nothing like handicapped access yet in Spain.
I went back to where Mom and Dad were waiting and looked again at that big, dark staircase. “There’s no other way,” I said, sighing.
“That’s okay,” Dad said, sounding determined. “I’ll go up. I’ll just take my time.”
He did fine, stopping only once to rest for a minute. He looked pretty pleased when he reached the top. My mother’s face mirrored my own relief.
Up there we walked through a long gallery of antique maps. Tall windows looked out onto the gardens, formal and rectangular like the building itself. There was a beautiful wood floor with narrow planks set in a herringbone pattern. The next several rooms were filled with period furnishings, set up to recreate the simple bedrooms of Felipe’s time. It was no accident that he had chosen to live in a monastery. He had an austere nature and cherished this retreat from the pomp of the royal court.
From there we followed signs to the stairs leading down to the Pantheon. At last we were all tuned into the stairway problem, so we conferred before going down. “What do you think?” I asked Dad.
“It’s fine, I can do it,” he said good-naturedly. So we went down and down, lower than we’d been before. It was cold and silent, even with a few other visitors there, as we entered the Pantheon.
The octagonal room was all marble and gold, well lit by a chandelier. Niches were built into several of the walls, filled with huge bronze sarcophagi holding the remains of kings. There were queens, too, according to the guidebook, but only those who had borne sons that later became kings. Three sarcophagi remained vacant for future use.
After a few minutes we moved along to the Pantheon of the Infantes, several rooms of marble tombs for the princes and princesses, and for those queens who did not bear kings. These rooms were dimmer, and the heavily carved marble seemed to me a little frothy for funereal monuments.
There was just a short set of stairs at the end, and Dad took those without trouble. We walked through some elaborately decorated assembly rooms and then out into the courtyard. We made a brief visit to the basilica, which had a gigantic altarpiece, and decided not to try to visit the library, which was up yet more stairs.
We found a place for lunch and studied the guidebook a bit. “It says that Franco’s tomb is near here. Can we go there?” Dad asked.
I winced. I’d seen the tomb from the car other times when I’d driven north. The huge white cross was easy to spot from the highway. I’d only lived in Spain a little while, but I’d caught a tremendous distaste for anything related to Franco. Ana had said only a little about living under his regime—“My mother always told us to be very careful about what we said outside the house”—but I related well to the present socialist atmosphere of the country and automatically hated the dictator. “I don’t know,” I said. “It says it looks like the Wizard of Oz’s palace.”
“Come on, let’s go see it,” Dad said. Why not, I figured.
Not everybody in Spain hated Franco. In the Serrano neighborhood, where my art history class was, there were always tables set up on the sidewalk where Franquista memorabilia was for sale. Little old men worked behind the tables. I’d been told that there were many people in that neighborhood who had fared well under Franco and had lost their privileges when he died.
We drove a short way north to the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), where Franco and his fellow Falangist, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, were buried. The dictator had forced Republican prisoners to build the monument after the civil war, and many had died during the process. It was ostensibly a memorial to all the civil war dead, but surely Republicans got little comfort from it.
A winding road led up the mountain to the monument. We parked and saw the large white building with the gigantic cross behind it. We entered the huge, dimly lit hall—it really did remind me of the dark, threatening interior of the palace in Oz—and walked to the bronze disks on the floor that marked the tombs. The place was cold and damp, with occasional leaks in the ceiling. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“Let’s drive around and see the cross,” Mom said when we got back outside. I was fed up with the place by now, but my mother wanted to see what there was to see, so we drove up to the base of the cross, which I found truly repellent.
“Sure is big,” she said, and we agreed, and then we went home.
I lived just forty minutes from El Escorial, but I hadn’t been there yet. Mike had pointed it out to me in April when we’d taken the train to Segovia. Huge as it was, it was easy to see even from a great distance. I collected my maps and my parents and headed northwest.
There were stunning views of the tremendous building as we drove over the foothills of the Guadarrama Mountains. We wound our way up to the adjacent streets, where we were amazed by the scale of the austere, squared-off structure as we rolled slowly by it. There were boys playing soccer on the broad pavement outside and cars parked up and down all the streets. I let Mom and Dad off at the entrance, parked, and returned to meet them.
It was cold inside the stone building. I bought our tickets, and we passed through an airport-style security setup before entering. The guidebook had said there were tours available in English. The guard I checked with said there were none that day, but that the route for visitors was clearly marked.
“That’s okay,” Dad said. “It will be more fun to go by ourselves.”
The visit started in the basement, where some rooms had been set up as an art gallery. A large El Greco painting was well displayed in the first room.
Next came a section the guidebook said was fairly new—a museum of the building of El Escorial. The curators had assembled some of the giant tools used to cut and place the massive stone blocks that made up the walls. There were original plans and models and some visuals detailing the building process over the twenty-one years it took. My dad, a handy person and a dedicated do-it-yourselfer, was impressed by the scale of the undertaking.
I should have been more alert by this time, but I had failed again to notice that those who walk down are eventually going to have to walk back up. We were confronted by a steep flight of stone stairs that led to the next part of the tour. Dad looked at it and blanched. “Let me ask if there’s another way,” I said weakly.
I walked back to the previous room and found a guard. “Mi padre no camina muy bien,” I said—my father doesn’t walk too well. “Hay otra vía para llegar a la planta baja?” Is there another way to get to the main floor?
“No,” she said.
“Es posible ir directamente al Patio de los Reyes?” Can you go directly to the Pantheon?
“No,” she said again, sympathetically. There was nothing like handicapped access yet in Spain.
I went back to where Mom and Dad were waiting and looked again at that big, dark staircase. “There’s no other way,” I said, sighing.
“That’s okay,” Dad said, sounding determined. “I’ll go up. I’ll just take my time.”
He did fine, stopping only once to rest for a minute. He looked pretty pleased when he reached the top. My mother’s face mirrored my own relief.
Up there we walked through a long gallery of antique maps. Tall windows looked out onto the gardens, formal and rectangular like the building itself. There was a beautiful wood floor with narrow planks set in a herringbone pattern. The next several rooms were filled with period furnishings, set up to recreate the simple bedrooms of Felipe’s time. It was no accident that he had chosen to live in a monastery. He had an austere nature and cherished this retreat from the pomp of the royal court.
From there we followed signs to the stairs leading down to the Pantheon. At last we were all tuned into the stairway problem, so we conferred before going down. “What do you think?” I asked Dad.
“It’s fine, I can do it,” he said good-naturedly. So we went down and down, lower than we’d been before. It was cold and silent, even with a few other visitors there, as we entered the Pantheon.
The octagonal room was all marble and gold, well lit by a chandelier. Niches were built into several of the walls, filled with huge bronze sarcophagi holding the remains of kings. There were queens, too, according to the guidebook, but only those who had borne sons that later became kings. Three sarcophagi remained vacant for future use.
After a few minutes we moved along to the Pantheon of the Infantes, several rooms of marble tombs for the princes and princesses, and for those queens who did not bear kings. These rooms were dimmer, and the heavily carved marble seemed to me a little frothy for funereal monuments.
There was just a short set of stairs at the end, and Dad took those without trouble. We walked through some elaborately decorated assembly rooms and then out into the courtyard. We made a brief visit to the basilica, which had a gigantic altarpiece, and decided not to try to visit the library, which was up yet more stairs.
We found a place for lunch and studied the guidebook a bit. “It says that Franco’s tomb is near here. Can we go there?” Dad asked.
I winced. I’d seen the tomb from the car other times when I’d driven north. The huge white cross was easy to spot from the highway. I’d only lived in Spain a little while, but I’d caught a tremendous distaste for anything related to Franco. Ana had said only a little about living under his regime—“My mother always told us to be very careful about what we said outside the house”—but I related well to the present socialist atmosphere of the country and automatically hated the dictator. “I don’t know,” I said. “It says it looks like the Wizard of Oz’s palace.”
“Come on, let’s go see it,” Dad said. Why not, I figured.
Not everybody in Spain hated Franco. In the Serrano neighborhood, where my art history class was, there were always tables set up on the sidewalk where Franquista memorabilia was for sale. Little old men worked behind the tables. I’d been told that there were many people in that neighborhood who had fared well under Franco and had lost their privileges when he died.
We drove a short way north to the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), where Franco and his fellow Falangist, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, were buried. The dictator had forced Republican prisoners to build the monument after the civil war, and many had died during the process. It was ostensibly a memorial to all the civil war dead, but surely Republicans got little comfort from it.
A winding road led up the mountain to the monument. We parked and saw the large white building with the gigantic cross behind it. We entered the huge, dimly lit hall—it really did remind me of the dark, threatening interior of the palace in Oz—and walked to the bronze disks on the floor that marked the tombs. The place was cold and damp, with occasional leaks in the ceiling. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“Let’s drive around and see the cross,” Mom said when we got back outside. I was fed up with the place by now, but my mother wanted to see what there was to see, so we drove up to the base of the cross, which I found truly repellent.
“Sure is big,” she said, and we agreed, and then we went home.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Settling In, part 17
We had worked out a plan for their visit. They would spend a few days letting me show them around Madrid, then they’d fly to Barcelona on their own and poke around there. They’d travel to Granada, and then to Málaga a few days later, and I’d arrive there by plane at the same time. We’d rent a car, stay in Marbella, on the south coast, and look around the Costa del Sol, and we’d return by plane to Madrid for a couple more days. I had chosen to fly rather than drive to Málaga for the usual fear-generated reasons: What did one do on a seven-hour solo drive in Spain? Where would you eat? Would there be lots of gas stations on the way, or would you have to be very careful about fuel? These questions turned out to be really silly—a seven-hour drive in Spain is pretty much like a seven-hour drive in upstate New York—but I still didn’t understand how such things worked.
In any case, we spent a few adventurous days together in Madrid. The next day, Sunday, Mike and the girls and I went into Madrid together to have brunch with my folks at that beautiful restaurant in the Palace Hotel. My mother was gushing.
“This is what a hotel should be!” she said. “It’s the most elegant place ever! The room is huge—even the hallways are gigantic! The service is perfect!” She was also in ecstasy over the free shower cap—much bigger than the chintzy motel kind, which squashed her hair.
We had an extra-good brunch because there were lots of American-style choices on the menu, which made the kids happy. And then we decided to take advantage of our excellent location and visit the Thyssen-Bournemisza art museum, right across the street.
It was gray and rainy, but we had just a short walk around to the Thyssen’s front door. It was a new museum housed in a spectacular palacio—a small palace (or gigantic mansion) right on the Paseo de la Castellana, the main boulevard of Madrid.
The museum existed because its namesake, a still-active German industrialist and art collector, had married a former Miss Spain, and she had persuaded him to give his collection to her country. I had heard that there was a good bit of deal-making involved with this—that he offered to donate the collection only if the Spanish government provided an appropriate building for it. The collection itself was reputed to be first-rate art by second-rate artists and second-rate art by first-rate artists, but in the restored interior the government had provided it showed beautifully, with perfect lighting and soothing pink tones on the walls. The arrangement was sensible, too—you took an elevator to the top floor and worked your way down, starting with the medieval works and ending in the modern period. The basement housed special exhibits that changed every six months or so.
We made a fairly quick pass through the museum, mostly because of the kids, though they did pretty well—there wasn’t too much religious art for them, and they were glad to be with their grandparents.
When we left the museum it had stopped raining. “Are you up for a walk through the old part of the city?” I asked.
“Sure, let’s try it!” Dad said. The hotel was just a few blocks from some of the tiny streets of old Madrid. All the stores were closed, but there was some fine window-shopping to do. We passed a well-known store that sold only capes and saw many antiques shops. Bars and restaurants were doing a brisk business in the area—“Retail stores keep limited hours here,” Mike said, “but you can always buy a drink!”
Now and then Dad took a pause and waited for his leg pain to subside. “Do you want to go back?” I kept asking.
“No, I’ll be okay,” he replied. “I’ll let you know when I want to go.”
“We can always catch a taxi to the hotel, too,” I said.
“That’ll be fine,” he said.
The Madrid taxis were wonderful—small white cars, each with a wide red diagonal stripe on its side. They cruised the city in great numbers. Placards hung on the inside of the windshield to let pedestrians know if a cab was available. Taxi drivers were almost always honest and friendly. You heard about the occasional airport scam—overcharging newly arrived tourists who had no idea what a trip into the city should cost. But you also heard about the great services the taxistas performed, like picking up medicine from the all-night pharmacy and delivering it to your door when you had a sick child, or reliably transporting kids to school on a regular basis.
Mike had a British colleague who had once carelessly left his wallet in a taxi. The wallet contained hundreds of dollars in two or three different currencies. He assumed he’d never see it again, but the next day the Spaniards in his office offered to call the taxi association for him. They learned that someone at the association had heard there was a taxista who had found a wallet, but the man was out sick. Still skeptical, the Brit figured the driver was off on a vacation with his money. But a day later the association delivered the wallet—and all its cash—to the Price Waterhouse office.
We made it as far as Plaza Santa Ana before Dad finally got tired. “I’m ready for that taxi now,” he said. We hailed a cab, and he and Mom returned to the hotel for a rest while the four of us retrieved our car and went home.
The next day, with the kids in school, I thought I’d try to take my folks down to Toledo, about 45 minutes south of Madrid. I’d gone by train in April, so this would be my first try at driving there. I waited till the rush-hour traffic into Madrid was over and easily scooped Mom and Dad up from their hotel.
Having my dad as a navigator made the trip easy, and we reached Toledo in less than an hour. I had no idea where to park the car, so I just followed my nose through a gate in the walls of the old city and drove up a hill until I saw a big blue sign with a white P on it—that meant “parking,” though the actual Spanish word is estacionamiento. Another Spanish mystery. We left the car in a two-level parking garage and began walking down the hill to find the cathedral. Dad was walking well. “I am better on the downhill than the uphill,” he said.
We walked through the cathedral and took a look at the famous El Greco painting, Burial of Count Orgaz, at the tiny church of San Tomé. There was a crowd trying to see the painting, so we didn’t get a great view of it. We continued downhill, walking past shops and houses in the narrow streets. We stopped in to see two synagogues—Santa María la Blanca, which had obviously been converted to a church at one time, and the Sinagoga del Tránsito, which had recently been refurbished and reopened as a museum. Santa María la Blanca was small and empty, but its pure white walls were beautiful in the light that came in through narrow windows. And the Tránsito’s restoration was impressive—the sanctuary was decorated with colorful, intricate designs originally created by the Moorish artisans who had built the building.
I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the overall direction of our walk, which had been uniformly downhill. The parking garage had been at the very peak of the city, the cathedral well below it, and the synagogues still lower. As we left the Tránsito I realized with horror that there was no way Dad could walk back up that steep hill. He came to the same awareness a moment after I did.
“How do we get back up?” he asked me. “Can we catch a taxi here?”
I knew that this was not a big enough city to have taxis cruising the streets for passengers. There would be a taxi stand at the Plaza de Zocodover, which was the town’s main square, but that was far uphill from where we were. “I don’t know,” I said, my stomach sinking. “Let’s walk a little further down and see what we find.”
We continued downhill for a while, walking into quieter residential streets away from the tourist areas. I looked around in panic for some way back up, but there was nothing. Then we reached a wide road that appeared to circle the town, and in a flash I saw a taxi and stuck out my hand. The car stopped in front of us.
“Podrías llevarnos al garaje al colmo de la collina?” I asked the driver—can you take us to the garage at the top of the hill?
“Sí, por supuesto,” he said—yes, of course. So we got in. I was giddy with relief.
“No es lo normal conseguir un taxi en la calle aquí,” the driver cheerfully volunteered—It’s not the usual thing to get a taxi in the street here.
“Lo sé, lo sé—eres un milagro para nosotros,” I said, laughing—I know, I know, you’re a miracle for us.
In any case, we spent a few adventurous days together in Madrid. The next day, Sunday, Mike and the girls and I went into Madrid together to have brunch with my folks at that beautiful restaurant in the Palace Hotel. My mother was gushing.
“This is what a hotel should be!” she said. “It’s the most elegant place ever! The room is huge—even the hallways are gigantic! The service is perfect!” She was also in ecstasy over the free shower cap—much bigger than the chintzy motel kind, which squashed her hair.
We had an extra-good brunch because there were lots of American-style choices on the menu, which made the kids happy. And then we decided to take advantage of our excellent location and visit the Thyssen-Bournemisza art museum, right across the street.
It was gray and rainy, but we had just a short walk around to the Thyssen’s front door. It was a new museum housed in a spectacular palacio—a small palace (or gigantic mansion) right on the Paseo de la Castellana, the main boulevard of Madrid.
The museum existed because its namesake, a still-active German industrialist and art collector, had married a former Miss Spain, and she had persuaded him to give his collection to her country. I had heard that there was a good bit of deal-making involved with this—that he offered to donate the collection only if the Spanish government provided an appropriate building for it. The collection itself was reputed to be first-rate art by second-rate artists and second-rate art by first-rate artists, but in the restored interior the government had provided it showed beautifully, with perfect lighting and soothing pink tones on the walls. The arrangement was sensible, too—you took an elevator to the top floor and worked your way down, starting with the medieval works and ending in the modern period. The basement housed special exhibits that changed every six months or so.
We made a fairly quick pass through the museum, mostly because of the kids, though they did pretty well—there wasn’t too much religious art for them, and they were glad to be with their grandparents.
When we left the museum it had stopped raining. “Are you up for a walk through the old part of the city?” I asked.
“Sure, let’s try it!” Dad said. The hotel was just a few blocks from some of the tiny streets of old Madrid. All the stores were closed, but there was some fine window-shopping to do. We passed a well-known store that sold only capes and saw many antiques shops. Bars and restaurants were doing a brisk business in the area—“Retail stores keep limited hours here,” Mike said, “but you can always buy a drink!”
Now and then Dad took a pause and waited for his leg pain to subside. “Do you want to go back?” I kept asking.
“No, I’ll be okay,” he replied. “I’ll let you know when I want to go.”
“We can always catch a taxi to the hotel, too,” I said.
“That’ll be fine,” he said.
The Madrid taxis were wonderful—small white cars, each with a wide red diagonal stripe on its side. They cruised the city in great numbers. Placards hung on the inside of the windshield to let pedestrians know if a cab was available. Taxi drivers were almost always honest and friendly. You heard about the occasional airport scam—overcharging newly arrived tourists who had no idea what a trip into the city should cost. But you also heard about the great services the taxistas performed, like picking up medicine from the all-night pharmacy and delivering it to your door when you had a sick child, or reliably transporting kids to school on a regular basis.
Mike had a British colleague who had once carelessly left his wallet in a taxi. The wallet contained hundreds of dollars in two or three different currencies. He assumed he’d never see it again, but the next day the Spaniards in his office offered to call the taxi association for him. They learned that someone at the association had heard there was a taxista who had found a wallet, but the man was out sick. Still skeptical, the Brit figured the driver was off on a vacation with his money. But a day later the association delivered the wallet—and all its cash—to the Price Waterhouse office.
We made it as far as Plaza Santa Ana before Dad finally got tired. “I’m ready for that taxi now,” he said. We hailed a cab, and he and Mom returned to the hotel for a rest while the four of us retrieved our car and went home.
The next day, with the kids in school, I thought I’d try to take my folks down to Toledo, about 45 minutes south of Madrid. I’d gone by train in April, so this would be my first try at driving there. I waited till the rush-hour traffic into Madrid was over and easily scooped Mom and Dad up from their hotel.
Having my dad as a navigator made the trip easy, and we reached Toledo in less than an hour. I had no idea where to park the car, so I just followed my nose through a gate in the walls of the old city and drove up a hill until I saw a big blue sign with a white P on it—that meant “parking,” though the actual Spanish word is estacionamiento. Another Spanish mystery. We left the car in a two-level parking garage and began walking down the hill to find the cathedral. Dad was walking well. “I am better on the downhill than the uphill,” he said.
We walked through the cathedral and took a look at the famous El Greco painting, Burial of Count Orgaz, at the tiny church of San Tomé. There was a crowd trying to see the painting, so we didn’t get a great view of it. We continued downhill, walking past shops and houses in the narrow streets. We stopped in to see two synagogues—Santa María la Blanca, which had obviously been converted to a church at one time, and the Sinagoga del Tránsito, which had recently been refurbished and reopened as a museum. Santa María la Blanca was small and empty, but its pure white walls were beautiful in the light that came in through narrow windows. And the Tránsito’s restoration was impressive—the sanctuary was decorated with colorful, intricate designs originally created by the Moorish artisans who had built the building.
I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the overall direction of our walk, which had been uniformly downhill. The parking garage had been at the very peak of the city, the cathedral well below it, and the synagogues still lower. As we left the Tránsito I realized with horror that there was no way Dad could walk back up that steep hill. He came to the same awareness a moment after I did.
“How do we get back up?” he asked me. “Can we catch a taxi here?”
I knew that this was not a big enough city to have taxis cruising the streets for passengers. There would be a taxi stand at the Plaza de Zocodover, which was the town’s main square, but that was far uphill from where we were. “I don’t know,” I said, my stomach sinking. “Let’s walk a little further down and see what we find.”
We continued downhill for a while, walking into quieter residential streets away from the tourist areas. I looked around in panic for some way back up, but there was nothing. Then we reached a wide road that appeared to circle the town, and in a flash I saw a taxi and stuck out my hand. The car stopped in front of us.
“Podrías llevarnos al garaje al colmo de la collina?” I asked the driver—can you take us to the garage at the top of the hill?
“Sí, por supuesto,” he said—yes, of course. So we got in. I was giddy with relief.
“No es lo normal conseguir un taxi en la calle aquí,” the driver cheerfully volunteered—It’s not the usual thing to get a taxi in the street here.
“Lo sé, lo sé—eres un milagro para nosotros,” I said, laughing—I know, I know, you’re a miracle for us.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Settling In, part 16
At last it was time for my parents to visit. I had been looking forward to this all along. My folks, who were not big travelers, had in recent years begun to take some European trips, and they loved to go in October. “The weather’s still great, but the crowds are gone,” my dad said.
“But will that be too soon for us to come and see you?” Mom asked. “You’ll only have been there about seven weeks.”
“I don’t care!” I said. “Please just come!” I was afraid that if I didn’t get them over right away, they might never visit.
I had always been close with my parents. They were young, they were crazy about each other, they were great fun to be with. I never laughed as much with any other group of people as I did when I went home to see my family, which included my younger sister Sally, my mom’s sister Jill and her family, and my mom’s mother. We had all lived in Highland Park, Illinois, and we had spent a lot of time together because we enjoyed one another.
My dad, who was 68, had some health problems that made traveling a bit difficult for him. The main issue was his narrowed leg arteries, which caused him pain when he walked a lot. It wasn’t serious—he could pause for a few minutes and the pain would subside—but there was a lot of walking to be done on the typical European trip, so we would have to be prepared to go slowly wherever we went.
I requested a care package of bagels and Flintstones vitamins, and I was thrilled on the Saturday when I picked them up at the airport. It was 6 a.m., the arrival time of all the planes from the U.S., and when Mom and Dad came out of customs they looked pretty bedraggled, but I grabbed them with joy.
“I’m so glad you’re here!” I said. “Thank you for coming!” We wheeled their luggage out to my car. They were booked at the Palace Hotel, one of the finest in Madrid, chosen for them by their trusted travel agent. They never, ever stayed with me. They were always worried about bothering somebody—maybe by waking up early and making coffee in the kitchen. This had always made me nuts, but I accepted it and had even started to see some wisdom in it. At this point, though, it was so early, I was sure their hotel room wouldn’t be ready yet, so we decided to go to the house.
“The kids’ll die if they can’t see you right away anyway,” I said.
“Oh, we’re dying to see them, too!” Mom replied.
We drove to Pozuelo, and I showed them the few points of interest on the way. My dad asked lots of questions about things that looked unusual to him—the way the traffic signals worked, what signs meant, the dry landscape. We arrived at the house, and the kids launched themselves at Mom and Dad, full of glee.
“Are you hungry, thirsty?” I asked. “Do you want to see the house, to take a rest—what?”
“Oh, let’s see the house!” Dad said, and the kids took them on the big tour. Then they sat in the living room to relax a bit and have some coffee while we talked about our plans.
“Look at your father,” Mom said after about ten minutes. He was asleep sitting up.
I laughed. “It’s best if you try to stay up through lunch,” I said, “and then take a nap, but not too long—an hour or two at the most. I was thinking we’d try to take a drive around here and look at things, and then there’s a restaurant in the neighborhood where we can go for lunch, and then I’ll take you in to your hotel.”
So we did that, five of us in the Mercedes, driving past the interesting neighborhoods in Pozuelo. Mike stayed home because there was no room in the car for him, but he said he’d meet us at the little restaurant in the village’s Plaza de España. It was a glassed-in, gazebo-like place set in a park, with an outdoor playground where kids could go if they got tired of sitting.
The restaurant served a typical menú del día—appetizer, main course and dessert for 1,000 pesetas, or about $8. The menu was small but filled with Spanish classics. Entradas (appetizers) included ensaladilla rusa, a mayonnaise-laden potato and vegetable salad; setas (sauteed wild mushrooms); and ensalada mixta, a salad of iceberg lettuce, green peppers, tomatoes, onions, and olives with a big pile of good-quality canned tuna on top. For a main course you could get chuleta de cordero (lamb chop), filete de ternera (veal scallop), or trucha a la plancha (grilled trout). The desserts included the usual creamy flan and natillas, or you could have a fresh apple or pear (which you were expected to eat with a special fruit knife and fork).
Poor Mom and Dad were heavy-lidded and quiet by now, but the food perked them up a bit. The waiter was friendly and helpful, and as he and I chatted, my folks’ eyes grew wide.
“You can really speak Spanish!” Mom said admiringly.
I laughed. “I know it looks that way to someone who doesn’t speak it, but I’m still bumbling,” I said.
“No, you’ve got to be kidding. You look totally fluent to me,” Dad said.
Finally I allowed the weary visitors to get some rest. I was a little worried about finding the hotel, but I had checked my directions and found a pretty easy route. I pulled right up to the corner entrance of the grand building, and the doorman took care of the luggage and agreed to watch my car while I helped with the check-in. Of course, the hotel clerk spoke beautiful English, but I wanted to make sure everything went well, which it did—including my folks’ reaction to the spectacular interior.
“Wow,” Mom breathed. The wide, high-ceilinged lobby was classically beautiful, full of carved stone and brass. Above was a huge stained-glass skylight, and ahead was a restaurant ringed with potted palms. Along with the Ritz Hotel across the boulevard, the Palace was a prime location for society weddings in Madrid.
I let the bellman take them up to their room. “Bye, honey,” Mom said. “We’ll call you in a couple hours.”
“Thanks tons for coming to get us and taking us around,” Dad added. I left them and drove home.
“But will that be too soon for us to come and see you?” Mom asked. “You’ll only have been there about seven weeks.”
“I don’t care!” I said. “Please just come!” I was afraid that if I didn’t get them over right away, they might never visit.
I had always been close with my parents. They were young, they were crazy about each other, they were great fun to be with. I never laughed as much with any other group of people as I did when I went home to see my family, which included my younger sister Sally, my mom’s sister Jill and her family, and my mom’s mother. We had all lived in Highland Park, Illinois, and we had spent a lot of time together because we enjoyed one another.
My dad, who was 68, had some health problems that made traveling a bit difficult for him. The main issue was his narrowed leg arteries, which caused him pain when he walked a lot. It wasn’t serious—he could pause for a few minutes and the pain would subside—but there was a lot of walking to be done on the typical European trip, so we would have to be prepared to go slowly wherever we went.
I requested a care package of bagels and Flintstones vitamins, and I was thrilled on the Saturday when I picked them up at the airport. It was 6 a.m., the arrival time of all the planes from the U.S., and when Mom and Dad came out of customs they looked pretty bedraggled, but I grabbed them with joy.
“I’m so glad you’re here!” I said. “Thank you for coming!” We wheeled their luggage out to my car. They were booked at the Palace Hotel, one of the finest in Madrid, chosen for them by their trusted travel agent. They never, ever stayed with me. They were always worried about bothering somebody—maybe by waking up early and making coffee in the kitchen. This had always made me nuts, but I accepted it and had even started to see some wisdom in it. At this point, though, it was so early, I was sure their hotel room wouldn’t be ready yet, so we decided to go to the house.
“The kids’ll die if they can’t see you right away anyway,” I said.
“Oh, we’re dying to see them, too!” Mom replied.
We drove to Pozuelo, and I showed them the few points of interest on the way. My dad asked lots of questions about things that looked unusual to him—the way the traffic signals worked, what signs meant, the dry landscape. We arrived at the house, and the kids launched themselves at Mom and Dad, full of glee.
“Are you hungry, thirsty?” I asked. “Do you want to see the house, to take a rest—what?”
“Oh, let’s see the house!” Dad said, and the kids took them on the big tour. Then they sat in the living room to relax a bit and have some coffee while we talked about our plans.
“Look at your father,” Mom said after about ten minutes. He was asleep sitting up.
I laughed. “It’s best if you try to stay up through lunch,” I said, “and then take a nap, but not too long—an hour or two at the most. I was thinking we’d try to take a drive around here and look at things, and then there’s a restaurant in the neighborhood where we can go for lunch, and then I’ll take you in to your hotel.”
So we did that, five of us in the Mercedes, driving past the interesting neighborhoods in Pozuelo. Mike stayed home because there was no room in the car for him, but he said he’d meet us at the little restaurant in the village’s Plaza de España. It was a glassed-in, gazebo-like place set in a park, with an outdoor playground where kids could go if they got tired of sitting.
The restaurant served a typical menú del día—appetizer, main course and dessert for 1,000 pesetas, or about $8. The menu was small but filled with Spanish classics. Entradas (appetizers) included ensaladilla rusa, a mayonnaise-laden potato and vegetable salad; setas (sauteed wild mushrooms); and ensalada mixta, a salad of iceberg lettuce, green peppers, tomatoes, onions, and olives with a big pile of good-quality canned tuna on top. For a main course you could get chuleta de cordero (lamb chop), filete de ternera (veal scallop), or trucha a la plancha (grilled trout). The desserts included the usual creamy flan and natillas, or you could have a fresh apple or pear (which you were expected to eat with a special fruit knife and fork).
Poor Mom and Dad were heavy-lidded and quiet by now, but the food perked them up a bit. The waiter was friendly and helpful, and as he and I chatted, my folks’ eyes grew wide.
“You can really speak Spanish!” Mom said admiringly.
I laughed. “I know it looks that way to someone who doesn’t speak it, but I’m still bumbling,” I said.
“No, you’ve got to be kidding. You look totally fluent to me,” Dad said.
Finally I allowed the weary visitors to get some rest. I was a little worried about finding the hotel, but I had checked my directions and found a pretty easy route. I pulled right up to the corner entrance of the grand building, and the doorman took care of the luggage and agreed to watch my car while I helped with the check-in. Of course, the hotel clerk spoke beautiful English, but I wanted to make sure everything went well, which it did—including my folks’ reaction to the spectacular interior.
“Wow,” Mom breathed. The wide, high-ceilinged lobby was classically beautiful, full of carved stone and brass. Above was a huge stained-glass skylight, and ahead was a restaurant ringed with potted palms. Along with the Ritz Hotel across the boulevard, the Palace was a prime location for society weddings in Madrid.
I let the bellman take them up to their room. “Bye, honey,” Mom said. “We’ll call you in a couple hours.”
“Thanks tons for coming to get us and taking us around,” Dad added. I left them and drove home.
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