Visitors!

So deep on Jon’s resume, you’ll find a stint at Choate, a boarding school in Connecticut. That’s where he developed his skills as a math teacher and a friendship with Kristin and Adam Harder. Fast forward twenty years, and we find ourselves somewhat improbably living in Arlington MA, with our kids attending the same elementary school. Then last year, we heard through the Brackett grapevine that there’s another family heading to Spain for the year – and it was the Harders.

They are living in Zaragosa, but came down to visit Madrid yesterday. The major outing was to Bernabeu stadium, where Real Madrid plays. Here’s pictures of the kids in the stadium:

Although the Starhill kids have watched maybe an hour total of Real Madrid soccer in their lives, they apparently already have favorite players. Nora’s is the fairly tame-sounding Cristiano Ronaldo; Nathan’s is the dismally named “Kaka.” Seth gleefully translated this one for me: “That means POOP!”

After the soccer tour, the Harders came back to our casa in order to hang out and let the kids play Pollies/soccer/rollerblade/skateboard. It was a treat to have them in town, especially because we got to talk expatriate lifestyle – the things that amaze us about Spain. In addition to all the pleasures (see other posts) we were able to compare notes on a few of the minuses:

-- Very few organized girls’ soccer teams. Nora’s school doesn’t have one, nor does the Harder’s daughter’s school in Zaragosa. We occasionally see girls playing on the city-owned fields here, but they are vastly outnumbered by boys’ teams.

-- Spanish bureaucracy. Our friends’ experience with the immigration office has been much worse than ours. The upshot: as Jon has commented before, there’s a sense here that procedures are highly variable according to which street-level bureaucrat (as political scientists call them) happens to get your number and call you to her window. The problem is, when you make a return trip (these things can never be done in one trip) and get a different street-level bureaucrat, or when your street-level bureaucrat passes your application up to the second-floor bureaucrat, there’s not a lot of tolerance for the original decision. This variability in interpretations may explain why the immigration website has so few actual instructions – they would undoubtedly conflict with some bureaucrat’s understanding of the procedure.

-- Processes generally. One of the interesting things about living in Spain (and perhaps this would be true anywhere) is that there’s unwritten rules about how you do business in various settings. In the grocery store, for instance, one must get one’s vegetables weighed BEFORE showing up at the check-out stand. Spanish credit cards have different PIN numbers for ATM withdrawals vs. online purchases. And so on. Both families are of the feeling that now that we’ve learned how to live here, we need to figure out a way to get back and put this knowledge to use.

-- Dinnertime. The Harders put our 9:30 dinner seating (which we thought was shockingly late) to shame with not one but two stories of dinners served at 11 PM. Wild and crazy.