Cultural exchanges

So there’s no big news to report this week – kids in school, nobody sick, Mom (and even Dad) working, holiday letter completed for another year. Instead, we can report on a smaller series of exchanges we’ve had in Spain.

1) Jon needed shirts and ties for his upcoming trips, so we headed (sans children) to the mall last Friday. Our first impression is how little of the mall is actually geared toward anyone in our age group – or perhaps, how we’ve squarely grown out of the twenty-to-thirty-five age category (you’ll see this theme reappear below). After puttering around for awhile, we located the Spanish equivalent of Brooks Brothers and there, tending to the ship of enterprise, was the Spanish equivalent of the devastatingly handsome, 40-something, extremely knowledgeable male clothier. I guess this kind of salesperson transcends culture; I can only hope that the position pays well. Thirty minutes advice on texture/color matches later, we were on the road with three shirts and ties (for those of you into discrete mathematics, nine combinations!). We also managed to understand a little Spanish humor – explaining Jon’s loss of a shirt size, the salesman joked “In Spain the weather is better, the food is not.”

2) After complaining that other kids wouldn’t let him play soccer “because I’m not good enough,” Nathan has started bringing a soccer ball to school. While this apparently does not afford him choice over the type of game they’re playing (the second graders decide that) because it’s his ball, he can decide whom to include and exclude. Nathan’s also become very interested in slide-tackling the ball, even in the face of evidence that doing so allows even someone as slow as Mommie to steal the ball while he’s down. I assume the latter is cultural (even our three-year old tries to do this while yelling “GOAL!”); the soccer ball politics, I’m betting, is universal.

3) Jon and I went out to dinner Saturday night with our friends from Aranjuez. They took us to Javier Bardem’s family restaurant, which turned out to be a little like the Border Café in Cambridge (only with tapas rather than fajitas). We selected the first seating (again, being on the wrong side of 40), which even for us aged early birds was still at 9:30. Other restaurants in the area were almost completely empty at 9. I’d really love to see the anthropological analysis of why Spain’s daily clock is spread out over 18 hours, while the U.S. clock is spread out over only 14. The Spanish don’t seem to get up any later, as far as we can tell, and actually napping during siesta doesn’t seem terribly popular either. Perhaps some secret energy source?

In any case, still being on the wrong side of 40 after dinner, we went and found the quietest, most unpopulated coffee shop we could. This was no mean feat in this neighborhood (Chueca): the place had more people wandering around than Fenway after a game. Also, many bars put out folks to entice you to come in for a drink; we dodged those offers by saying “we’re old, and going home.”

4) More on the bread store: because my Spanish is a bit better, I can now somewhat understand the arguments the customers have with the proprietors. The most recent seemed caused by the same problem I have: there’s a wide variety of baguette-like bread whose names I can never remember. This is how it went:

Patron: I’d like to order some bread for Monday pickup.

Owner: OK. [Taking out pad of paper]. What would you like?

Patron: I’d like a [name of bread] with [name of ingredient] inside.

Owner, looking puzzled: What?

Patron: I’d like a [name of bread] with [ingredient] inside. Like over there [points].

Owner: That bread over there doesn’t have any [ingredient]!

Patron, becoming heated: Then give me the one that does have the [ingredient].

Owner: Listen to me [Escuchame!]. We don’t have any bread with [ingredient]. It doesn’t exist.

Patron: Yes it does. It’s [describes bread].

Owner: Oh, you mean the [name of bread.] OK.

Next up: Parenting three kids without Jon (or Sara Warren). Trying to decide what the most difficult part of the days will be:

a) We walk in the door from school at 5:05. Three kids all desperately have to use the potty.

b) We walk in the door from school at 5:05. Three kids are all starving (despite eating a school-supplied snack at 4:30) and a meal must be prepared in 30 seconds.

c) We walk in the door from school at 5:05. Three kids have to all show Mommie what they made at school at exactly the same time.

d) We walk in the door from school at 5:05. Two kids must be cajoled into doing their homework, one must be prevented from toppling the bookcase.

e) All of the above.