In Spain the collection of neighbours in a flat block is called a ‘comunidad’? But I wander what that means?

In our case it means saying hello to everyone, chatting to the occasional neighbour, feeling safe about the other people in the building. But there isn’t much ‘popping round for tea’, or ‘could you look after the kids for a minute while I nip out for (fill in the emergency)’.

Part of that is our fault. If our lovely English neighbour at the end of the corridor is reading this, then a million apologies for not having you all round for that cake yet – we will soon, as soon as a weekend looks like a weekend!

But I suspect that in big cities people don’t just pop in and out of each other’s houses any more for a cup of tea, or look after each others’ kids at the drop of a hat – like they did in the old days, didn’t they?

Do you live in that kind of real, close-knit, sociable community? Does it exist any more? Can it exist in big cities? We’d love to live it better, but wonder if that world still exists these days, or if people just don’t have time any more…

I’d love to hear your thoughts, whether you live in Spain, Ireland, Australia, or Timbuktu!

If they are going to enjoy 3 hour lunches, I am going to enjoy 3 hour lunches. If they are going to invite me out for a two hour coffee, I am going to go and enjoy the amazing flavors, the conversation and getting to know my new friends. By the way, I LOVE the fact that I never feel rushed in a restaurant. Contrast that with NYC and the pressure to “turn” the tables and as a customer, you will pick the Spanish way every time. Also, here you are able to get away with leaving “cheap” tips (the norm). Try that in NYC and see what kind of service you get.

I also love not being turned off a table once the meal is finished, even an hour after the meal has finsihed! Though I have to confess that it still makes the Brit in me nervous deep inside (“I’ve finished, I better go, they might want the table for someone else!”)

Meanwhile, some cool Spain links worth checking out:

- Anton’s blog about life in Catalonia – check out the post on Calçotada – Yum yum!

- Check out the lovely old photos of Madrid’s Gran Via in this post at A View Of Madrid, where Richard is fast becoming Madrid’s most eminent ex-pat historian!

- There’s a dark discussion going on in the forum about Spain’s worsening economic situation… including interesting links, such as “Spain’s intelligence services are investigating the role of British and American media in fomenting financial turmoil“

…which says a lot more about the Brits (who aren’t aware of strange out-of-the-way places like, say Madrid) than Spain, obviously.

I love this line about a recent survey on British holiday choices:

The survey showed that the US was the most popular destination measured by the growth of bookings, with some British tourists attracted by the prospect of “meeting a celebrity”.

[Head falls into hands in desperation...]

Argentinian guy: That’s why this country is in such a mess.

Me: It drives you a bit mad. The other day I went to the bank, it was meant to open at 9.30, didn’t open til 9.45! A bank!

Argentinian: See what I mean?

Me: In the end you get accustomed to it.

Argentian: No, In the end you resign yourself to it…

I wanted to tell him to lighten up. There is a big difference between getting accustomed to something, and resigning yourself to it, and I think I prefer the former.

In fact I think I’ll redo my Expat manifesto, to add the following:

7. When living somewhere you don’t originally come from, don’t resign yourself to the differences, just smile and get accustomed to them.

[Note: Please don't use this post as an excuse to leave negative comments about Spain - they will be deleted! I've had enough trouble with that in the past!]

… when you get up to coax baby back to sleep at 5.30 am, and the last of the guests at the party opposite are just leaving…

…when you finally start your day at 7am and the hosts in the flat opposite are just going to bed!

Then again, when I lived in London we used to extinguish our house parties at 7 am too, the only difference being that ours started 2 hours earlier at 8.30 pm, proving perhaps, that the Brits party harder than the Spanish

Thoughts:

I wonder what happened to the Mediterranean diet? I was out eating some delicious Spanish tapas with friends recently – huevos rotos (fried eggs on fried potatoes), albondigas (meatballs), and chorizo, when one of us pointed out, “this food isn’t healthy, look at it! It’s pure meat and grease!” I suppose the glass of red wine counted for something…

I have no facts and figures, but there is a lot of embutido (cured pig products, jamon etc) and meat eaten in restaurants here in Spain these days, and not always a lot of attention paid to vegetables.

Still, I’m not sure it’s a huge problem yet. Good food still flourishes in good homes. But look at this report from 2008:

In Spain nearly two children out of every ten are obese which is nearly double the number compared to 20 years ago. This places Spain in third place after the US and the United Kingdom in terms of child obesity according to the International Association for Obesity.

That was two years ago, but a quick search on Google News shows the problem isn’t going away.

Like everywhere else in the modern world, life in Spain is speeding up. There is more to do, and less time to do it in. Less time for boring incoveniences like cooking good food.

I love the way the Spanish can talk for hours about food during a meal. It drove me mad for the first few years of meals with the in-laws, but now I relish the passion behind conversations about where, for example, to eat the best gambas in Madrid, or why everyone ate so many garbanzos in the 50’s and 60’s, and just how good they were.

But you only have to go into a supermarket, or walk down the high street, to see the same packaged foods, and the same fast-food outlets, that you find everywhere else in the world these days.

I hope there is still a chance for the future of real, home-cooked food in Spain. The increase in obesity in kids here makes it easy to presume that things don’t look good for the Mediterranean diet. I wonder what’s going on?

As I said above it’s moving to see so much passion from jamie Oliver, and his fight against obesity, his dream to bring real food back into our lives, but I think it’s more than just about food. Food is just one aspect of a better life we are losing.

We don’t just need to eat better, we need to slooooooooooow down, stop rushing rushing rushing, striving striving striving, and enjoy the good things – like good healthy food – in life again.

And Spain still has all the traditional values deeply ingrained enough to spearhead a return to that good life.

Let’s forget the Mediteranean diet.

How about going deeper still, and championing an entire Mediterranean Lifestyle again, before it too is lost forever in the running-running, rushing-rushing, hustling, bustling reality of our consumer-driven, TV-iPad-iPod-BMW-loving, fast-city-living, world.

What do you think? Do you see any chance for the concept of a ‘Mediterranean Lifestyle’ that includes that famous diet everyone is so fond of talking about?

Actually it’s part of my new mission to break through a total creative/prductivity breakdown I had earlier this year (well, last month), by doing more creative stuff. Like learning to draw.

I’ll still be posting regularly here.

I just popped out to a favourite local bar, where my favourite barman, super-friendly, 50-ish, thick white hair and humour as dry as a brick, brings in his home-made tortilla every day.

‘Un pincho de tortilla’, I said, ‘but don’t heat it up, I’ll have it just as it is’.

I’m not fond of microwaved tortilla, so usually add this specific request.

‘Si si,’ he replied, followed by some incomprehensible mumbles, and two minutes later, I was presented with an enormous slab of steaming microwaved Tortilla.

Damn. At this point it dawns on me that the mumbles I’d missed in his earlier reply must have been something like ‘Si si,…but you can’t eat it cold, it’s much better heated up.’ Subtext: you don’t know what’s good for you, I’ll bring you your tortilla how you really want it, piping reheated-hot!

Now, if I was Spanish enough, I would a) have complained at this point and demanded what I’d asked for, namely cold tortilla, and I suppose b) understood what he’d mumbled in the first place! I like to convince myself that after 11 years I’m pretty much 99% bilingual in terms of understanding spoken Spanish, but this guy’s mumbles cause me no end of trouble!

The real issue here though, is the incredibly well-intentioned ‘you don’t know what’s good for you’ subtext that led to the hot tortilla (which was very nice in the end, of course). It happened earlier in the year when I was in the same bar with my father.

Dad wanted a ham and cheese bocata (roll). ‘Una bocata de jamon iberico con queso manchego’, I asked my white-haired mumbling barman friend.

‘Ha, yeah, right!’ he answered, with a look of wry disbelief on his face, ‘Jamon iberico and cheese in the same peice of bread? Are you mad? Jamon York and cheese yes, but certainly not Iberico! There are some things you just don’t do!’

‘Errr, a jamon iberico bocata and a seperate plate of manchego cheese then?’ I ventured nervously…

‘Asi es, now you’re talking,’ he smiled, and that, of course, is what we ended up with.

The universe could rest in peace, things had been restored to how they should be. Iberian ham and manchego cheese together, yet separate, como Dios manda.

If I was just a little bit more Spanish after all these years of concerted effort, I would have know that in the first place!

Oh well, maybe after another 11 years…

I was poking around on Twitter (me here) recently, and found a link to Stuck in Customs, which has some amazing HDR photos on… which rekindled my interest in photography. Wonderful how the web can do that. Above is a first new HDR experiment (bigger here). Great fun!

One thing I was protected from for all those years before I became a parent in Spain, was the world of the ‘Cantajuegos’.

The Cantajuegos are kids songs, performed by a very jolly group of people in blue dungarees (see if you can last til the 15 second mark, to see said people):

Now, every single 0 to 6 year old in Spain knows just about every one of the 50+ Cantajuego songs (and usually the moves that go with them), off by heart! Every parent of this age group possesses a copy of the Cantajuegos songs, though as far as I can tell, not many have paid for any of them!

The most common phrase overheard amongst the 30-something parents of this generation when talking about the Cantajuegos music is, “Ah si, yo lo baje del emule”, ‘Oh yes, I downloaded that via emule’, leaving the Blue-Dungaree crew to make money, I imagine, off their live tours for totts.

Many Spanish people don’t feel any moral remorse about downloading films, music etc, as the government taxes us on every single kind of recording and reproduction media, passing the money back to the SGAE (General Association of Authors and Publishers), to redistribute amongst poor, royalty-denied writers, muscians etc.

For example, every time we buy a blank CD, we pay an extra 17 centimos that goes straight to the SGAE, because obviously we are bound to use it to do something illegal with!

You can see a full list of just what gets taxed here, but I was amazed that I was even SGAE-taxed on a new internal hard drive for my Macbook recently! The logic goes with many Spanish media-consumers then, that if we are taxed as thieves before the act, we might as well steal, or in this case, download, guilt-free.

The tax, know here as the hated “Canon por copia privada”, has far-reaching consequences – apparently Catalan hairdressers are up in arms this week, refusing to pay another SGAE-tax to play radio in their salons, asking clients to bring in their own iPods instead!

Back to the Cantajuegos… as much as it drove me mad to begin with, after 7 million repetitions on our living room stereo, I’m now rather fond of the Blue-Dungaree crew’s tunes, I’ll leave you with my favourite: