Photocopiers and Snow at La Tiñosa

I was sitting alone in the office when two of my fifth-graders entered saying they needed some photocopies. They were sent to me by Lourdes, the secretary, music and art teacher. She was currently in their class for an art lesson and needed some copies. The photocopier had been acting weird all day: it was only accepting paper loaded on the side of the machine. The students needed copies made onto size A3 paper (more square than legal sized paper, but about the same length).

María Jesús, who is one of the smartest students in 5A, kept trying to help me by miming what the machine said. I knew it was jamming; I had been fighting with the photocopier all day. She was surprised I could figure it out. She then asked me if we had photocopiers in “my country.” I told her yes, and that they functioned about the same way as this one (constantly jamming, etc.). She was shocked, and then quite amazed/pleased I was able to fix the problem and give her the copies.





Later Tuesday afternoon, David and one of his friends picked my roommates and I up and drove us to La Tiñosa, which is the tallest mountain in the Córdoba province. It’s located about 15 minutes from Priego, by way of a twisty, windy dirt road. The guys wanted to go see it covered in snow. From where we parked the car, I don’t think it would actually take that long to get up to the top of the mountain. The problem is that it’s pretty steep. We walked partway up but it was really muddy and icy in some spots. There was really only an inch or two of snow on the ground, but my feet got really cold. (I was thankful for my hiking shoes, which kept me dry.) The snow was really light and powdery; it actually looked like styrofoam at times. La Tiñosa looked really pretty covered with snow and I can’t wait to climb it in the spring. The light on the mountain was really pretty. We also had a great view of neighboring villages and the surrounding mountains.




David and his friend really enjoyed the snow!

The guys think it’s going to be a cold/snowy winter because it started snowing in the mountains in November. It actually snowed in Priego the other night. It was only a dusting, and it only stuck to the cars, but it was still there in the morning.

Night out for David’s bday and Ana’s lunch

Saturday night we went out for David’s birthday, which had been Thursday. We met and went to two bars. We had a lot of fun. I went home at 2:15 because I was tired, but David, Ana, Cecilia and Erin stayed out until almost 5 because that's what you do in Spain.



Ana invited us to her apartment for lunch on Sunday. She put out a bunch of really good appetizers including caramelized onions (which she put around some goat cheese), sliced beets, smoked salmon, and a scramble of eggs and mushrooms. Everything was delicious, except the goat cheese which I really didn’t like. For the main course she made ink pasta (pasta prepared in squid ink before it’s purchased) with shrimp and these little eel-like fish called angula. The little fish don’t actually taste like anything (except rubber). I really liked the meal. For dessert, her mom had made rice pudding with lemon and orange rind, which was good, but I only had a little of it (because of the milk content).

After lunch, we played Scattagories in Spanish and English. Then we had tea and some pastries (which we had brought) while Ana showed us pictures of the other schools she has worked in. We had a really nice day, especially because Ana’s living room was really warm. Our apartment has been really cold lately; it’s 52 degrees in my room. I’m okay inside my sleeping bag, but my nose and head are freezing. We spend most of our time sitting around our table/heater. Almost all apartments in Priego have a round table in the living room which has a space heater built into it. Called a brasero, the table has a velvet tablecloth which goes all the way to the floor. You turn the heater on and put your legs underneath the table or put the tablecloth on your lap so the heat goes up to the rest of your body. The heater gets really really hot, and it’s a dry heat so my skin gets dried out and after a while it’s not even comfortable anymore. Our water heater isn’t working properly either. Yesterday, Cecilia tried to take a shower and it went out completely. The pilot light stayed lit all afternoon while we were gone (so we’re not out of oil), but the shower water won’t get warm. We thought the wind might have been blowing the thing out, but really we’re not sure what’s going on. The wind could enter through the exhaust pipe. Really, we’re not sure and I’ll just take a shower at the gym (which is what we’ve been doing).

Rute: a Foodie’s Museum Heaven

Saturday we met Lourdes, David and Ana and went on a mini-road trip. First we went to see some really large tree called an encina. Apparently it’s the second-largest of its kind in Andalucía. I was in the car with Ana (the others were in David’s car). Lourdes was acting as the guide because she had been there before (her dad used to take his students there). The problem was that she was talking so much that she kept forgetting where we should turn. So we kept turning off the road and winding up on dirt roads where it was really difficult to turn around. We finally found the tree (it was big, but not that impressive). It was also freezing because we were up high in the hills. It had been cold and rainy in Priego, but this was much worse. We snapped a couple of pictures and then rushed back to the car.



Next stop was a candy store and museum in Rute. They had a cheesy display of plastic figures making the candy. The smiles on these figures were absolutely hilarious and cartoonish.



The back room of the shop/museum had sculptures made entirely out of sugar. They were mostly replicas of buildings from different parts of Andalucía (some of which we had seen on our previous day trips). They were really impressive to look at because of the amount of details that had gone into putting them together.

After the candy store we went to the center of Rute, which was decked out for Christmas (and filled with tour buses). We went first to a candy store and tried some sweets. Next we walked through the plaza and went to the Museo de Anís (anis is anise in English; it’s a spice kind of like licorice. The museum was all about anis alcohol. We saw really old bottles and got to try tons of different types of liquors (both alcoholic and non). Our favorite was the blackberry-flavored non-alcoholic liquor.

Next stop was the Museo/Casa de Jamón (the ham museum) where we saw different tools used in the process of slaughtering pigs and preparing ham. We tasted some kinds of chorizo (like sausage), which were pretty gross. I tried them because I try to keep an open mind about foods and I do like to try different things. However, I don’t think I could make myself like ham no matter how long I live in Spain. It’s probably more of a national food than paella, but I still think it’s disgusting.



After this, I went back to the candy/sweets store and bought some anis cookies (I needed to get the ham taste out of my mouth). Then, we drove outside the city to go for lunch at a barbeque place that was recommended by the people who work at the Casa de Jamón. Everyone else had a mixed meat parrilla (aka grilled meat…brought me right back to my days in Argentina). I had grilled calamari which was delicious.

After eating a huge lunch, we returned to Rute to see the Bélen de Chocolate, the world’s largest chocolate nativity scene. Chocolate artisans took four months and 3,000 pounds of chocolate to construct a small nativity in the middle of a large Middle Eastern market. It was almost all made of dark chocolate and smelled excellent. We also saw some life-size chocolate statues of people and we got to see into the factory.





There were tons of tourists in all of these museums: they had arrived on big tour buses from all parts of Andalucía. It’s like an equivalent of going to see the tree in Rockefeller center…

The Spanish News (amazingly this is the first time I’m ranting about it)

The other day on the Andalucía news (the closest thing to local news we have), the top story was the lighting of Christmas decorations in Málaga. When I changed the channel to the national news, the top story was about how much the lights in Madrid were costing the government (their lighting was the same day). This was all on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which made me feel right at home – all the Christmas stuff starts right after Thanksgiving…whether they realize it or not. However, this was also right after a huge terrorist attack in Mumbai, which is what I wanted to hear about….not Christmas lights.

The news comes on in the afternoon and at dinner time (6-9 p.m. or so). We have Andalucía news and Spain national news. I have yet to figure out when international news is on. We definitely don’t have BBC, CNN International or any other international news service. At this point, I would even settle for Fox’s international channel…I would get angry at it, but at least it would give me some stimulation.

I’m already sick of the television news here. Actually, that’s not true. It’s more of a love-hate relationship. Half the time when I try to watch the news there is something cultural on (like flamenco or a visit to a museum). I’ve seen the Christmas markets in Sevilla, twice, and several different flamenco groups/performers warming up before a show in Granada or Sevilla. I’ve also seen an accessories store in Córdoba where everything costs 2€. Yes, this was a story about fashion accessories and it lasted a full four-minutes. I like the cultural stories because they give me some insight into Andalucían things like flamenco, however, I miss hard-news stories.

We only get nine channels on our television: that’s when the weather is good. Today we don’t have all nine. I think we have seven because it’s been rainy and windy. At any given time there is at least one show (usually three) dubbed from English into Spanish. The voices are usually the same across the different shows meaning Buffy and Lisa Simpson project the same sound.

We’ve discovered a few television shows we like. One of them is called Pekin Express and is basically the Spanish version of the Amazing Race (which none of us had watched in the US). Teams of two are racing from Moscow, across Russia, Mongolia and China until they get to Peking (next week is the finale). It’s entertaining and easy to follow and it was easy to start watching in the middle of the series.

We also have been watching Ponme una Nube, a telenovela (soap opera), for a few weeks now, but really I’m not that interested in it. We still can’t figure out if the kids living with one woman are her children or not (they call her by first name instead of mom and she’s not married and looks too young to have kids). The show is about two women who run a café. (A nube is a cappuccino, but the term is not widely used in Spain, or in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world for that matter.) For a weekly show, the writers have managed to follow the daily-show format of using the most ridiculous story lines ever. In one show, a character can go from meeting a man, to making out with him in his car so her friends don’t see, to engaged to him, to finding out he has several girlfriends (and he’s fooling around with both her best friend and her cousin), to getting angry with him and finally breaking off the engagement (and crying about it, of course). It makes Desperate Housewives look like non-fiction.

My favorite television show is called Andaluces por el Mundo. Each episode takes place in a different country (sometimes just a city) and documents the lives of people who are originally from Andalucía, but now live in that place. We’ve seen the Czech Republic, Israel, Hong Kong, Costa Rica, Buenos Aires and Moscow. I like it because it’s the closest thing to the travel channel and it shows real people who take the audience to their offices, homes and a few tourist sites. The Israel episode went through the shuk (market), visited the kottel (Western Wall), and the Dead Sea. Cecilia and I watched the Buenos Aires episode and saw tons of familiar places. The Costa Rica episode was the funniest because one of the people featured talked about how life in Costa Rica is much more relaxing than life in Spain. We couldn’t understand this because life in Spain is pretty damn relaxing…work five hours, eat a huge meal, take a nap for three hours, work a few more (if your job actually requires it, most don’t). Half of Priego only works in the morning. The other half opens their stores late and shuts them early. I’ve worked in retail and I know how tempting it is to do this, but here it’s the norm: closing at 8:30 can mean closing at 8:20 and no one cares. Some shopkeepers are honest about it. I’ve been told by store-owners that they will be open until 8 or 8:30 depending on their mood that day.

Another thing we have found is a cooking show on Saturday and Sunday mornings where people go cook with a chef, then go home and recreate the two-course meal for their friends. It’s an entertaining show, but the food isn’t always that appealing. One episode tried to pass a veggie (sautéed in oil) and egg tartlet (in tons of pastry dough) off as a quiche AND something healthy all at the same time. Course number two was a fig and cream parfait. Some times the stuff is ridiculously hard to make like braised date reduction sauce and sometimes is really easy like horchata cream (horchata is almond milk) – aka, horchata in a sauce pan, heated, stirred up and then cooled.

Our bad TV wouldn’t be such an issue if we had internet…but I’m not opening up that can of worms (see previous blog entries).

Thanksgiving Dinner 2

On Tuesday, I took 4 tiny bags of dried cranberries and soaked them in cranberry juice overnight. Then, on Wednesday, I put them into a saucepan (with some of the juice) and cooked them for a while. After that, I added orange marmalade, cinnamon and a pinch of ginger and let it simmer and then gel. I think all together it cost 6,50 euros (probably about 8 dollars)....which is quite a bit more than the $2.50 for a bag of cranberries at stop and shop (yes I checked peapod´s website)....but it was well worth it because one of the teachers at the dinner said she had never before tried the cranberries and that she really liked it.

The other thing we prepared ahead of time was dessert. Instead of making whole pies, we made apple and pumpkin turnovers. The pumpkin was actually a roasted squash which did resemble a pumpkin that you would see in the US. Our turnovers turned out to be more like apple and pumpkin empanadas, but they were pretty tasty.

We made and seasoned the filling Wednesday night, which is when we also ripped up some baguettes to have stale bread for stuffing. The other preparation was to move a table out of Cecilia’s room because it was the biggest one in our apartment. I knew we couldn’t move it work because I had already measured the whole thing, but we tried anyway. We wound up having our Moroccan neighbors help us take the hallway door off its hinges and then some legs of the table. The table is now going to stay in the living room and the smaller one is going to Cecilia’s room.

Thursday, Cecilia and Erin bought the turkey while I was at school. When we all got home, we immediately started frying onions to go on top of the green bean casserole they were making. Cecilia dipped onions into milk and then batter and Erin fried them. I watched and took pictures. Then we pealed potatoes and yams to get those ready to be cooked.

The turkey bags were assembled and put into the oven. Next, the yams were cooked and I added maple syrup (from a previous grocery shopping trip in a larger city), sugar and cinnamon. They were put into a pan to go into the oven. We also assembled the stuffing: sautéed onions, celery, bread cubes and chicken broth. That went into a pan to go into the oven. The green bean casserole took a little longer because we had to make the mushroom soup from a packet and we made it way to thin at first. Erin added a bunch of flour to thicken it up (it worked). Cecilia heated cans of corn, added butter, salt and Parmesan cheese to it before baking it in the oven. She also manned the mash potatoes, adding mozzarella cheese to them (I did not eat these). After noticing that the turkey on the top rack was done, we got it out and the side dishes went into the oven. My sautéed broccoli was basically left unattended and somehow (magically) cooked itself. I started carving turkey as guests were arriving. Neither of the other girls knew how to carve a turkey, so I wound up carving the entire thing.



Dad, I finally appreciate all of your hard work and I know understand why it takes an entire roll of paper towels to carve a turkey. We had a really shitty knife, which later came apart (blade from handle) when I was washing it. Erin managed to get enough drippings from our bagged turkey to make gravy. The flavors of the lemon and garlic we had put into the bags meant it was really delicious.


Somehow, even with our lack of experience, all of the dishes managed to make it out to the table at about the same time. We sat down to dinner a little after 9:30 and the food was really good. Our guests agreed that their favorites were the gravy and the yams (my concoction!).



We had nine people at our dinner: four teachers from my school, one from Cecilia’s who brought a friend, and the three of us. For the six Spanish people, it was their first Thanksgiving and they really seemed to like it. I gave a history lesson on the meaning behind the holiday (which most of them had already heard me tell their students). My aunt had mailed me a postcard (which I got the day before) of Plymouth, Mass. which had a picture of the Mayflower and a map of Cape Cod on it. We went around the table saying what we were thankful for. I had also printed some turkey trivia facts and we played a guessing game with those.



For dessert, we had the turnovers and Ana (English teacher) made a “cake” for David’s birthday. Really the thing was like a gigantic lemon flan. It had milk, cream and lemon gel and tasted like lemon candies (the flavor was not at all subtle). It never really solidified in the fridge, so we scooped it out of the pan. Afterwards, Cecilia, Erin and I agreed that it was a flop, but everyone told Ana it was delicious. We sent the guests home with tons of leftovers and then cleaned the apartment.

Everything at our dinner was delicious, but it tasted even better because we had made it all ourselves. Everything was made from scratch using unfamiliar ingredients (ie: random squash) and nothing was measured because we didn’t have any measuring cups and all of our recipes were in “cups” and here everything is measured in “grams.” Even if we had purchased measuring cups, we would have had to have done a huge math conversion to make the whole thing work out anyway. We also used an oven with no temperature gage and made a turkey for the first time. The only dishes that had ever been made before (by any of us at least) were cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, corn, sautéed broccoli and green bean casserole. Thanksgiving staples like stuffing, yams and gravy had always been done by our parents and grandparents. We were really proud of our dinner, especially when Erin’s boyfriend called and said their gravy came out of a can (they had an entire turkey, and thus, drippings) and their stuffing was Stove Top.

Thanksgiving Dinner

Thanksgiving dinner!
Erin, Cecilia and I planned a huge dinner for our teachers. We bought way too much turkey (three breasts and three leg/thigh combinations), which we put into oven roasting bags with onion, carrots, garlic, lemon and some chicken broth. These then went into the oven for about two hours. The problem was that our oven does not have temperatures…only numbers on a scale of 1-10. So, we had no idea how long the turkey would need. We also have a really small oven which made it difficult to fit the entire turkey inside.

Each of us was responsible for certain side dishes. We divided it up to make it easier. Erin had stuffing and gravy. Cecilia had corn, mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. I had cranberry sauce, candied yams, and sautéed broccoli. We were all responsible for the turkey and the dessert.

[I'll add more info and pictures on Monday!]


Frying onions for green bean casserole.



We had a disastrous mess in our kitchen!



My yams!



The turkey, ready for the oven.



Dinner time!

Thanksgiving at School!

Erin and I spent days photocopying leaves for our students to hang on their Thanksgiving tree. David, the bilingual coordinator, drew and cut out two floor-to-ceiling trees for us to use. Each student got a leaf (we had a bunch of different colors and shapes) and they had to write (in English) what they were thankful for. The second through sixth graders wrote about their families, houses, teachers, teddy bears, etc. The first graders (who don’t know how to write) drew pictures instead. The trees looked really good in the hallway and the principals were very pleased with the work.



The kids colored pictures of the different vocabulary words.



5th graders work on their leaves.



The first graders got to hang their own leaves.



Some first graders in front of the tree.



The final product.