Table of Contents

Preface
The First Step
Maybe Just One More Skillet?
Leaving
An Introduction
Why Valencia?
Shelter
Spanish Soccer 101
A Beginner's Guide to Las Fallas de Valencia
Summer
Bars and Restaurants
Vacations and Memories
The Spanish "Work Week"
Cooking, Eating, Shopping
La Corrida de Toros
Lifestyle a la Español
Learning Spanish

Preface

Preface

Although I had years to think about what would become my self-imposed exile, in the end I didn’t really put much planning into it. I would rate my preparation for the move somewhere between a panic-stricken escape from a burning building and the care most people put into making arrangements for a three day weekend. Packing and planning for an extended trip aren’t my strong points. Just what my strong points are have yet to be revealed to me, but I think that I’m pretty good at dropping everything and moving across the country or across an ocean. I think I’d make a great fugitive.

Who among us hasn’t flirted with the idea of uprooting yourself from the security of a comfortable life in a beautiful American city; moving to a country whose language you speak badly and where you don’t know a single person; plopping down at random in a city you visited only briefly long, long ago; moving into an apartment with total strangers who look at you as something along the lines of an exotic pet; changing absolutely as much about yourself, from your name to the food you eat so as to fit in better—you pray—in your new surroundings? Me neither, at least that’s not the way I looked at this move before I left. I was either too naïve, foolhardy, or ill-informed to give the possible downside of moving much in the way of consideration. I suppose that I had reached a time in my life when all of the risk of this move was completely outweighed by what I thought I would gain.

Of course, before leaving I had no way of knowing just what those gains would be, or even what sort of stuff I was going to learn, other than a new language. Even what language I would be required to speak was a matter up for a bit of discussion. One thing that I can say now is that if I were going to do this all over again from the start, this book would be one of the things I would put in my suitcase. Although this isn’t anything like a travel guide, you may be able to learn a few things about life in the corner of the Mediterranean where I chose to live, a place where trial and error were my constant escorts. As most of you already know, those two make lousy travel companions and I wish that I would have left them behind (preferably in a shallow grave). I’ll try to do that the next time I move 5,500 miles from home.

The First Step

The First Step
The story of most journeys starts off with something about taking the first step—which to me is a cliché within a cliché. Magellan was on a “journey,” I'd say the same about Columbus, ditto that for Lewis and Clark; most of us now just book our travel online which doesn't leave a lot of room for true adventure. No, I don't really like that word “journey.” For starters I can’t even tell you how long a “journey” is—either in miles or kilometers. Most of the time the journey being discussed is of metaphoric length; you can check for yourself—the self-help sections of bookstores are packed with this sort of memoir. There are countless recollections of journeys of self-discovery; journeys of drug or alcohol rehabilitation; there are journeys of discovery, weight loss, sexual orientation, spiritual awakening, personal salvation, moral enlightenment, and many other things that are probably a lot more important than what I was going to do. I just wanted to pack my bags and get on a plane. I was moving to Spain.

The truth is, I'm not even very good at traveling. I don't really like being a tourist, at least not nearly as much as a lot of people. I get tired just looking at a travel guide—too many hotels to book, too many restaurants to decide on, and humping around some museum pretending that I care about 17th century ceramics is pretty far from my idea of a perfect way to spend an afternoon. I'm not against museums. I've actually been to several, but don't ask me anything too specific because I was probably paying closer attention to the other museum goers than to the stuff hanging on the walls or crammed into glass cases. I'm certainly not anti-travel but I'm not the check-list variety of tourist that insists on seeing everything you are supposed to visit during your limited stay here on earth. I just like to go to a place and hang out and try to observe how the local people do things. Like Dian Fossey and her gorillas. Call it the chimpy-misty style of travel, although I’m sure that I am a lower form of primate than most of the people I have studied in my many moves. To do this sort of study correctly you need to spend a lot of time in one place. Hanging out in one place is something that I think that I do pretty well.

If I had to put a finger on when this trip began, if I had to retrace my steps and find the first step, I’d have to go way back. If I had to describe the moment, I would say that it wasn’t a step at all, or I would say that my first step was the act of sitting down in a French café.

My introduction to European café etiquette started when I was a 19 year old summer school student in France—my first time in Europe. I would go to a café for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, drink it, pay the check, and leave. I quickly noticed that everyone who was there when I arrived was still there when I stood up to go. I became self-conscious of my haste. I quickly began to see cafés as a sort of game, a waiting game.

I began to take note of the other patrons when I first took a seat in a café. I would nurse my coffee or beer to make it last while I waited for other people to call it quits. If I was alone I would write letters to pass the time, or read, or simply people watch. I quickly learned that there are worse ways to spend time than sitting on the terrace of a Parisian café. I have since come to believe that there are few better ways to spend an hour or two or three.

I got pretty good at the waiting game my first summer in Europe, but I never won. It didn’t matter how patient I was; I could have been in the middle of the best book I had ever read; I could have been engaged in the most interesting conversation of my young life (that wouldn’t have been saying much at 19); it didn’t matter. There would always be some grizzled old French guy in a beret and a seemingly bottomless glass of red wine who wasn’t about to be hurried out of his spot by some hyperactive American kid raised on too much sugar and way too much television. I would tip my imaginary beret to him as I left. “Today you win, but tomorrow is another day, yes monsieur?” I always said this to myself in an exaggerated, Pink Panther French accent. For all I know that old French guy never left that table, ever. Maybe they buried him at that table. All I know is that I liked his style.

Back in the United States this sort of behavior would be called loitering. Loiter: to spend time idly. In America we have equated loitering with not spending money, or not spending enough money, or not spending money fast enough, and we have actually made that illegal. After several years of living and traveling around the Mediterranean, the most café-influenced culture on the planet, I learned that if loitering were against the law there you’d have to build a pretty big fence to contain the guilty. In the Mediterranean they have a different word for what we would call loitering. The closest English equivalent to this word would be “living.”

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of the café in the quotidian life of many Europeans. Cafés are a meeting spot for friends, or a place where you won’t feel out of place sitting by yourself. You can read the morning paper, or write a letter. They are a place to be among people, or a refuge from the crowded street. A café is a good spot to begin an evening out with friends, or the last stop on the way home. A café terrace is like your living room with better coffee and a view.

I had been brought up to believe that consumption was the purpose of going to a bar or restaurant. I soon learned during that first summer in Europe that what you bought at the café was definitely not the main point of the whole exercise. That glass of wine was merely the rent you paid for the wonderful piece of café real estate that you had chosen or had chosen you. The food and drink aspect is a secondary concern; service—good or bad—hardly matters at all, at least in the grand scheme which in this world is the only scheme worth considering.

When I go to Europe the first thing I do is head for a café. When I come back home cafés are what I miss the most. The explosive growth of coffee shops in America is a response to this basic human need for community. Coffee shops aren’t quite the same thing, they aren’t as utilitarian, they are a lot more casual, but they are a good start.

The primary function of a café is to offer a shared public space. The spot you are sharing may be next to some movie star at an ultra-chic Parisian café, or next to a shepherd in a remote Greek mountain village, but the idea is still the same. It doesn’t matter what language you use to order—maybe all that you can manage are hand gestures—the same rules of the café apply. Sit back, slowly sip your wine, and try not to think of loitering as a bad thing.

The real beginning to this story was a few years after my first trip to Europe when I sat down in a restaurant on a small Greek island. It was already about two in the afternoon, a little late for lunch, especially if you only had a cup of coffee for breakfast.

I was living in Greece at the time and had been for almost two years during my brief career in the United States Air Force. I loved going to restaurants when I lived in Greece because every time that I did I felt like I was in the middle of an exotic vacation. That's a nice feeling to have every time you go out, for several years. I suppose the afternoon in question was a vacation within a vacation because I was traveling with a couple of good friends. We took a passenger ferry from where we lived in Athens to Paros—an island in the Kyklades archipelago. We set out on this trip as we always did: without plans, or expectations, or credit cards, definitely without guide books, and with very little money. Our backpacks were as light as our wallets back in that time when I wasn’t averse to sleeping on a bench in a train station or on the deck of a ship if it meant saving a couple dollars, or drachmas, or francs.

It was our second day on the island and we had already gone our separate ways but we had agreed to meet up and have lunch. I’ve always been an early riser so I spent the first part of the day snorkeling along a section of the shore. My friends, definitely not early risers, probably spent their time sleeping, but you’ll have to verify that with them.

We sat ourselves at a table in a taverna overlooking the public beach in Paros. The café was split by the main street. Half of the tables were in the restaurant itself and the others, where we sat, were across the street on a tree-shaded stone patio pressed against a sea wall. Like every taverna in every small village in Greece, the place had small tables with the tablecloths clothes-pinned down to keep them from being swept away when strong winds blow across the Mediterranean from Africa; the salt and pepper shakers were clogged from the wet, salty air; the chairs were made of wood with straw webbing on the seats; and it was also inevitable that you would have to wedge a matchbook under one of the table legs to keep it level. Fishermen’s nets were drying in the afternoon sun on the sidewalk adjacent to our table. I’m not making that part up; Greece is almost embarrassingly quaint that way, as if the entire country is a prop for tourist photos.

We were hungry but we didn't know what we wanted. I knew what was on the menu because almost every taverna in Greece offers the same wonderful fare with a few variations. I had studied Greek quite extensively before I even arrived in Greece, but my vocabulary had a few glaring holes in it as I was soon to discover upon arrival. On my first foray into the heart of Athens I stopped for lunch at a way out-of-the-way taverna. This was my first meal in a Greek restaurant and immediately upon taking the menu from the server I realized that I hadn’t learned any vocabulary for food. I had to go into the kitchen and point at what I wanted. I took a copy of the taverna’s menu home with me and quickly memorized every item. That was the most important vocabulary lesson I learned in Greece and it served me well for the rest of my stay.

Back on Paros the waiter walked across the street and asked us what we were having. We began the meal at the beginning, the way to start any meal on the Mediterranean, or any meal emulating life on that great sea that is the center of life, food, and culture for everything around it. Our beginning was a cold bottle of beer and a bowl of olives. Olives are the perfect appetizer, almost a pre-appetizer. They stimulate the appetite without filling you up in the least and they go well with beer or wine. Kind of like when people say that you shouldn’t go grocery shopping when you are hungry, olives provide just enough substance to let you think clearly about the next course.

We ordered a bottle of a Greek wine that we knew wasn't half bad and was fairly consistent from bottle to bottle. Greek wine making was extremely unsophisticated back then but has improved greatly in recent years. We drank a lot of bad wine when I lived there but our philosophy was as simple as it was hedonistic: drinking bad wine was better than the unthinkable alternative of doing without this essential. The wine came with a basket of bread. Greek bread, depending on a host of constantly varying factors, is either good or bad, which is why we always ordered tzatziki—a yogurt, garlic, and cucumber dip—which was always cool and delicious. We toasted to our health (Υ Γίεια Μάς) and enjoyed the view of the beach from our table in the shade.

The next logical, if not inevitable course when dining in a Greek taverna is a Greek salad. This is probably as good a time as any to set the record straight on this staple of Greek cuisine. It is called a horiatiki salad in Greece, a peasant or country salad. I had one the very first time I ate in a restaurant in Greece and it immediately became my favorite dish—and it still is. I never cared for salads before because I don't care for lettuce. In all of the time I lived in Greece I never saw a Greek salad that contained a single shred of lettuce, and that was fine with me. I suppose there is a little room for improvisation when it comes to this dish but not much. There's never room for lettuce. Here is my recipe:

Greek Salad (Ηοριάτικι Σαλάτα)
1 cucumber
1 onion
1 green bell pepper
2 tomatoes
several Greek olives
feta cheese
pepperoncini peppers (A classy option)
anchovies (A very classy option)
Olive Oil and Vinegar.

Chop the cucumber, onion, tomatoes, and green pepper into same-size bits. Most tavernas prefer a larger, rougher cut, but I think a smaller dice helps the vegetables absorb the dressing. Portion out the vegetables on plates along with a couple olives, pepperoncinis, and anchovies. Top the salad with a piece of feta and drizzle with oil and vinegar. That's it. I would use the lettuce to line the bottom of my bird cage but I don't have a bird.

As you finish up a horiatiki salad there is a nice pool of rich olive oil on the plate that is the Mediterranean culture's answer to butter. Often the simplest of dishes are the most flavorful. Try this one.

Mediterranean Oil
1 cup of good Greek olive oil
2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar
a couple cloves of minced garlic
salt and pepper
2 tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese (I know it’s not Greek but so what)
a pinch of red pepper flakes
a pinch of chopped parsley
a pinch of oregano

Mix these ingredients together and let steep. Serve with bread.

At about this point in the meal we began to realize that we were in the middle of something out of the ordinary. It is important that you are aware of such moments as they are happening. This was becoming the quintessential Greek lunch. The three of us had spent dozens of afternoons in tavernas at dozens of places in Greece but this was like a pitcher during the late innings of a perfect game. Everything was exactly as it should be: The food was excellent, it was a perfect summer day, we were just beginning a week of travels among these islands, and we didn't have another care in the world beyond what was happening at this small table.

The most difficult thing to explain about this afternoon is that we were exactly where we wanted to be. Our enjoyment of the moment wasn't clouded by anxiety about the future or regret of the past. Nothing could have made this time better for me. I used to read the French magazine Paris Match back then to practice my language skills. I remember sitting in a Greek cafe looking at pictures of French celebrities summering somewhere on the Riviera. I remember thinking that those glamorous people had nothing on my life. I was spending my summers in the most beautiful place in the world. The rich and famous would have envied my knowledge of and access to secluded Greek beaches and beautiful villages few tourists ever visited.

I had become used to sitting around in restaurants and cafes for hours and hours simply talking. We would bring someone into our group who hadn't reached this level of saturation in café life, a newcomer. They still hadn't accepted the pace of Greek living. These people would complain when a waiter didn't approach the table quickly enough. We knew that the waiter would get to us eventually, and we were there more for the companionship than whatever the restaurant had on the menu. The newcomers would want to plow through a meal with drive-thru-window speed. We wanted to stretch the meal out as long as possible. Invariably the new person would say something like, "Let's go do something." What they didn't realize, and perhaps never would if they didn't stay in Greece long enough, was that we were doing something.

Although that particular afternoon seemed to go on forever, it did eventually end, and I eventually had to get on an airplane and return to the United States where I have lived ever since—not counting vacations. As much as I missed living there, I gained consolation by bringing how I lived in Greece back home with me.

Maybe that day was just a false start, or a misstep, or a bit of a dead end, but I definitely remember that as that particular afternoon unfolded I knew that I was experiencing some sort of defining moment in my life. I had no idea exactly what was being defined, or for what purpose. That has never been entirely revealed to me and I doubt that it ever will, even after this book is finished. What I do understand is that I felt like I was learning something of incredible value through the simple act of living my life. These have always been the most exciting times for me, the times when I learn by living, and these times are not the result of just traveling, but of stopping to learn how to copy how the people around me are living, to take the best aspects of their lives and try to incorporate these into how I live.

Some of the places where I have lived had more to teach me than others, but I like to think that my present lifestyle is the sum total of everywhere I’ve been. There isn’t anywhere on earth where people have a perfect lifestyle. I’m sure that everyone, everywhere strives for perfection wherever they call home. I am equally certain that we all have a lot to learn about how to go about this pursuit.

I’m having a bit of a problem coming up with the right word to describe whatever it is I am beginning. Is it a journey, a pursuit, a mission, a quest, a life? These words all sound pompous or pretentious which completely undervalues the subject. I need to find the right word, or tip-toe around the subject, or find something a little more concrete to write about. The problem is that I don’t know enough about anything else to write about it—not that I’m any sort of authority on life, or living, or whatever this book is about, and you can forget about journeys. It seems unlikely that I’ll be able to pull off a book about such a serious concern if I can’t even find the right word for it. How about if I just say that I’m going away for a long time? As I said, I’m going to live in Valencia, Spain.

Going away for a long time means giving up my apartment and almost everything that is contained within its walls, only one of which I got around to painting a color other than the battle ship gray, standard-issue in my building. The entire time that I lived in Seattle I was fairly conscious that I would be moving at some point, so I tried to keep down on the accumulation of stuff, but stuff, like an unwanted house guest, has a habit of moving in, inviting friends over, and never leaving.

Everything material in this world is fleeting. Even the pyramids will be gone some day. A moving truck was parked in front of an apartment building near mine a few weeks before I was scheduled to leave. I watched as the movers hauled off a house-full of stuff. Someone’s life was being boxed up and placed on the truck. It made me stop and think of everything that I have left behind in my many, many moves. I seem to become less and less sentimental about my belongings every time I move to another time zone or another hemisphere. I learned the hard way that being sentimental can get really expensive.

There isn’t anything among my possessions that I can’t live without. For the most part, anything that can be bought can be replaced. Is there anything I am leaving behind that I will miss? Not really. For the most part it is a relief handing stuff off to the new owners. It makes me feel lighter, more mobile.

There is a wonderful freedom in not being burdened by stuff. I suppose that this is mostly true if you are by nature a traveler. When I go away anywhere, whether it’s a short trip or a journey, I pack a single, medium-sized backpack that fits in the airline overhead. What I leave behind in the way of creature comforts I more than make up for in ease of movement. Once, on a trip leaving Los Angeles, the cab dropped me off at the wrong terminal at LAX and I had to run about a half a mile to make my flight. Had I been encumbered with luggage I would have missed it. I think about that modest little metaphor just about every time I buy something that isn’t made for instant consumption. I consider that someday I may have to either carry it with me or give it away. More often than not, this sobering thought sabotages the sale and I leave the item on the shelf.

I understand people who don’t feel the need to get up and move every so often—I’m just not one of those people. Seattle is as beautiful a place as you’ll ever see, I certainly can understand why people feel no urge to leave. But I was just visiting. I always knew that sooner or later I would move on to visit some other city. That time had come. Seattle will be one of the few places I have lived in my life that I will desperately miss. I hoped that where I was going would measure up to Seattle’s high standards.

Back in the days of the ancient Egyptians I guess that they didn't have yard sales or internet bulletin boards so they stuffed all of their junk into a pyramid. They also didn't have the option of giving most of their stuff away to their Haitian immigrant neighbors like I did when I left south Florida a few years ago. That was when I moved from the lower right hand corner to the upper left hand corner of the United States—try making that move while hanging on to a collection of thousands of books. The best thing is to resist accumulating so much junk in the first place. Having less stuff means not needing such a big pyramid. I picked up so much junk since I’ve lived in Seattle that it was either time to find a bigger pyramid or pull up stakes and move again. I chose plan B.

As the day of my departure grew near, I was frantically trying to part with most of the material world I had accumulated while living in Seattle: three bicycles, a car, furniture, appliances, and books—lots of books. With every bookshelf and table that people hauled out of my apartment I felt like someone in a hot air balloon dropping ballast before takeoff.

I felt absolutely no regrets in leaving behind a city I had loved at first sight, and I certainly didn’t feel any sadness as I jettisoned almost eight years’ worth of material accumulation. In fact, instead of a sense of loss I felt rejuvenated, I felt like those people must feel in the “after” photos in “before and after” weight loss pictures. And as those dieters vow to keep the weight off, I vowed to keep down the clutter in my next life because I’m certain that moving day will come once again. Moving day will come again because I am not searching for one thing, I’m not looking for the perfect place. If I had I would have stayed in Seattle.

Maybe Just One More Skillet?

Maybe Just One More Skillet?

The first leg of my trip to Spain begins with a flight from Seattle to Chicago where I’ll be spending some time with my brother and his family. I had already shipped a few vital things to Chicago. For the flight I would be limited by the airline baggage constraints: two checked bags, a carry-on, and another smaller personal bag. I’m planning on this being a rather lengthy trip so I’d have to push the boundaries of these restrictions. Unfortunately, the boundaries are rather strict. Who would have thought that baggage weight limits would be enforced with a scale?

I spent the last couple months that I lived in Seattle sorting through what I owned and making decisions on what to keep, what to sell, what to give away, what to throw away, and what to flush. As the date of my departure neared, when push came to shove, I pushed and shoved most of what I used to own into hands of friends and strangers and the rest into the dumpster of my apartment building.

A day before I was scheduled to leave I was in a panic to clear out my apartment and get everything I now owned to fit into the bags I would carry on to the plane. I was frantically packing, cleaning, and taking stuff out of my apartment and throwing it into the dumpster. The analogy of sand pouring out of the top bulb of an hour glass suited my lack of time and my possessions flowing out of my apartment.

At one point in this chaos I lost track of where I had put my passport. I did a cursory search of places where it should have been and came up empty-handed. I had already packed the two huge bags that I was going to check at the airport. I didn’t think that my passport was in either of them but I tore them apart and searched them anyway. Nothing. Now I was beginning to worry. If there was one thing that I would definitely need in a move to Spain it would be my passport.

I looked through everything as I repacked the bags. When I had finished I was in a full blown panic. The only thing that I could think of is that I had thrown it out along with one of the many loads I had delivered to the dumpster. I had no choice but to climb inside and root through everything. What added insult to injury was the group of Hispanic kitchen workers from the restaurant below my apartment who witnessed my dumpster diving while they took a cigarette break in the alley. The good news was that they ended up taking a lot of the stuff I had thrown out as I sifted through it in another futile search for my goddamn passport. I finally found my passport inside of my computer bag, but at least the hour I wasted looking for it meant that a lot of what I had tossed out went on to another life with the kitchen workers. Recycle, reuse, and reduce as they say in the environmental pamphlets.

I have always been fascinated with the quantity and quality of stuff that we Americans simply boot to the curb. I have something bordering on a fetish for thrift stores. I visit thrift stores like some people cruise seedy bars and night clubs. They are looking for Mr. Goodbar while I am looking for…well, I can’t really say but I always know it when I see it. I find books, clothes, sports gear, furniture, rugs, pots, and pans. It was this last item that pushed me over the airline baggage guidelines.

I plan on doing a lot of cooking in Spain so I wanted to take some of my favorite pieces of cookware along for the ride. Unfortunately, one of my favorite items is a really heavy, cast iron skillet with a lid almost as heavy. Hauling this thing to another continent probably doesn’t make a lot of sense but I’ve really grown fond of the thing over the years. I knew that my two bags to be checked were heavy but I didn’t have a scale and I didn’t bother to find out the airline’s exact weight limit.

When I got to the airport my friend suggested that I use the curb-side check in with the hope that perhaps they wouldn’t be such sticklers on this whole weight issue. As soon as I saw how they strained to lift my bags I knew that I was busted. Both bags were well over the 50 pound limit. They told me that I could transfer contents from one bag into the other so I would only have to pay the fine on one bag no matter how much it was over the limit. I left one bag on the scale and started taking stuff out of it to bring it down to 50 pounds. The two Punjabi bag handlers watched in bemused amazement as I took the huge, cast iron skillet out of the bag and packed it into the other. I’m sure that they have witnessed a lot of weird baggage in their day but they probably haven’t seen anyone dumb enough to travel with a cast iron skillet.
I was within about five pounds of the bag being legal and was searching for anything inside that might put me under when one of the handlers said in his sing-song accent, “Maybe just one more skillet?”

Maybe it had to do with the fact that I was completely stressed out and exhausted from the move but I thought this was the funniest thing I had heard all week—and it was only Thursday.

Leaving

Leaving

My entire life now fits into four checked bags weighing 50 pounds each (exactly 50 lbs.), a carry-on bag, and another small shoulder pack. As I recite the list of my material possessions I realize how much stuff I still have after breaking down my apartment in Seattle a little over one month ago. As it turns out, the heavy cast iron skillet will have to wait until someone comes to visit and can haul this over for me. The skillet would probably have been difficult to explain to perplexed border officials. As it is it will be a huge relief to clear customs with all of this swag.

Although it is sunny and warm here in Chicago, I will be wearing a lot of clothes when I board my flight at O’Hare. A heavy shirt, a leather sport jacket, and a really heavy winter coat will weigh me down so that I can spare some extra weight in my checked baggage. This was a very complicated and technical packing job. I am leaving with everything I planned on taking. I have left behind a few boxes of books that I hope people will bring over for me. Tops among the books that I will miss is my very dog-eared Cambridge Complete Shakespeare that I’ve had since my university days.

By this time tomorrow I will be in a cab in Valencia, Spain looking for the apartment I have rented for the first couple of weeks. After dropping the bags off, the first stop will probably be for a café con leche. That will mark the starting point for my life in Spain.

An Introduction

An Introduction

What am I trying to accomplish in what I write about Spain? I am not trying to over-romanticize the country or paint it like some Photo-Shopped post card you find in tourist trap rip-off joints. At the same time, there is just way too much to love about having the wonderful opportunity to live in Spain for me to spend much time on anything negative. I’ll let the citizens of Spain handle all of the criticism, Most of the time I stick to highlighting all of the things I love and admire about life here. Sort of the flip side to the aphorism, “No one is a prophet in his own country,” is the one that says you should only be a critic of your own homeland—no matter where you live; you probably have your hands full critiquing your birthplace, or at least the place you know best. It is especially annoying to read travel writers who bitch about the places they visit without understanding them in any meaningful way. I always find it more insightful for a writer to explain something to me than to blindly criticize. Isn't travel supposed to be joyous and fun? No one said travel is always going to be easy. Even if I were on the verge of freezing to death in Antarctica I could probably appreciate the view.

It's not like I'm some sort of starry-eyed Pollyanna who can't see any of the ills in modern Spanish life, but I think it is more important to convey to American readers how Spain deals successfully with the some of the challenges inherent in creating a modern, urban society. I must highlight the urban part. Spain's urban nature is one of my favorite characteristics of the peninsula. Spain is incredibly urban, even many of the smallest hamlets are set up like major urban centers with people living in apartment buildings of 4-6 stories. Valencia has a population of over a million yet I can walk practically anywhere in a matter of 30 minutes. There is great public transportation here but it hardly seems worth it when you can just walk to about 90 percent of your destinations. I can get anywhere in town on my bike in less than 20 minutes. Seattle is very similar to Valencia in size and in the robust nature of its urban center. I walked or rode my bike almost everywhere in Seattle. I have been singing the praises of city life for quite a while; I am positively evangelical on the subject. I'm a fanatic, an urban extremist. Even if there were no ecological benefits to be derived from city living, I would still preach its quality of life merits.

I can barely remember back when I needed to drive a car every day, I only know that it irritated the living shit out of me and I felt cars were stealing my life. Even if you forget about how much they cost and how dangerous driving is, to me just being inside a car is a soul-deadening experience—and double down on that if you are in stuck in traffic. I would have to sit down and think long and hard to remember the last time I was even in a car. I consider this sort of forgetfulness a huge luxury, much more so than driving around in an expensive sedan. There isn't a sports car invented that has more appeal to me than a seat on a comfortable train. In my opinion too much of American society is built around the automobile. I consider this bit of urban/suburban architecture to be one of the greatest mistakes of the 20th century, a mistake we will have to rectify in the next 25 years if we want to continue improving human life on the planet (not to mention saving the lives of countless other species). I know that we can't simply do away with cars, but we can marginalize them to a certain degree.

I see automobiles as much more of a convenience than a necessity here in Spain. For anyone living in Valencia, you can get around just fine without one. Cars provide a bit of convenience, especially to people with families. I suppose getting the whole family on the train for a trip out of town could prove a bit of a challenge, although it is certainly within the realm of possibility. Getting around Valencia in a car seems more of a nuisance than a convenience, with or without the family. Like almost every other urban center, Valencia suffers the ills of traffic congestion and lack of parking. One of the most exciting urban developments is going on in many European cities in which they are simultaneously removing parking and narrowing roads in urban centers. I think that this is about the only way to effectively deal with parking and traffic. The more you try to give in to congestion and parking, the worse they get. Widen the roads and you’ll induce even more traffic. Offer even more free parking and the problem only gets worse.

I'm not trying to paint some idyllic water color of Spanish life, but I do think that it is useful to detail the aspects of this society which I feel are worthy of emulation. In a lot of the travel writing that I read, not only do I get the feeling that the writers don't really understand the culture of the place they are describing, but I think many don't really care enough to insinuate themselves fully in the host country. In the case of those writers who just seem to be slumming it long enough to crank out an article or a book, I find this attitude to be incredibly condescending. A lot of other writers just seem to take their preconceived notions about where they are going and stow it into their fanny packs with the rest of their travel gear. I never learn anything from these authors as I have my own preconceived notions about the places they are talking about: Tuscany is sunny and people drink wine, Provence is choked full of quaint villages and olive trees, or whatever boilerplate travel magazine view of the world they are regurgitating. I remember thinking that I sort of wanted to be a travel writer in that sense. Who wouldn't want to get paid for traveling? Then after I read about three travel magazine articles I realized that I could never hope to bend my writing style to fit that model. Most travel writing seems to have sort of a one-size-fits-all formula. Start off with some little historical tidbit, throw in something about how you, too, can be an “insider,” and then top it off with descriptions of expensive meals and even more expensive hotels. I've never been a big fan of guidebooks when I travel and I certainly have no interest in writing one.

So just what is it that I am trying to communicate in what I have written about Spain? More than anything I would like to make people laugh with the stories I tell about my life in Spain. Humor is about the only way I can make my writing the least bit entertaining, and usually the joke is on me. I don't think that I have the skill to simply write entertaining descriptions of life here, at least not yet. I am hoping my writing can improve to the point that I don't have to be a fool to have people read my stuff. There are worse things than being foolish. Right off the top of my head I can come up with “boring.” I also try to explain how to go about daily life here in Spain without stumbling every step of the way, as I did when I first arrived. I would have loved to read essays like some of mine to help me decipher the simplest aspects of life here that seem anything but simple to the outsider.

What I like most about reading travel writing is when I feel I have learned something about where the author has been. I have tried to write something that I wish I could have read before I got here, something to walk me through the ways and enigmas of everyday Spanish life. I had to learn everything through trial and error, sort of on-the-job training. There were many times when I felt like the whole process was like trying to put together a complicated piece of furniture without a set of instructions. I want what I have written to be the instruction manual for anyone who cares to know more about how people live in Spain. I write quite a bit about Spanish food and cooking so consider this to be a recipe book about how to...how not to make all of the same mistakes I did upon arriving in Spain.

Why Valencia

Why Valencia?

As far as where I chose to live when I moved to Spain I have to say that my selection process was a bit on the random side. I knew for a long time that I wanted to live in Europe again, somewhere, anywhere. I was deciding between Paris and Madrid when a trip I took with my younger brother to Spain ultimately influenced my decision. We visited Madrid, Sevilla, and Toledo on what was one of the best vacations I've ever had, thanks mostly to some friends who live in Madrid who shaped our travel plans. When the time had finally arrived for me to move to Europe, I knew I was going to Spain. However, as much as I loved Madrid and the other places we visited on that trip, my past experience of living in Greece tipped the scales towards living somewhere on the Spanish Mediterranean coast.

I knew that I wanted to live in a fairly large city as I was comfortable living in a city the size of Seattle and anything smaller would have been like wearing a too-small shoe. I must admit that I never considered Málaga, another rather large Spanish Mediterranean city. I considered Barcelona but I was a bit reluctant to move there because of the heavy Catalan influence—I was moving to Spain to learn Spanish, after all. The truth is that before I started looking seriously into moving to Spain, I wasn't even aware that people spoke Valenciano in this part of the country. I didn’t know Valenciano was a language (it is very similar to Catalan). I would say that it is merely a dialect of Catalan but I might get beat up by some of the more chauvinistic locals for saying that. My knowledge of Valenciano/Catalan is fairly scant, but I am still unable to tell them apart whether spoken or written. I apologize for that.

With a little research into the matter I determined that Valencianos were more apt to speak Spanish—at least in the street—than their counterparts in Catalonia. I had traveled to Barcelona twice before and I loved the city, as almost everyone does. The language issue bothered me a bit and also its size, as I figured that a big city like Barcelona would be more expensive and perhaps less user-friendly for a recent immigrant. I had also traveled to Valencia once before and stayed there for only a day or two on my first trip to Europe. I couldn't remember anything about the city from that trip except the beautiful train station and the huge central market.

I wish that I could say that I spent hours and hours doing painstaking research into my choice for where I was going to move in Europe. I mean, I didn't exactly throw a dart at a map of Spain and then move there with nearly all my remaining worldly possessions. In truth, this would be an insult to dart throwers as there is a bit of skill in that game. No, my selection of my new home was more like a behind the back, over the shoulder toss. I'm not a lucky person by any means—I don't even believe in luck—but in hindsight I would have to say that by choosing Valencia, I hit a bull’s-eye with my throw. I wouldn't change my choice for anything. Once I arrived I thought about perhaps moving to another Spanish city to get a fresh perspective on the country, but I could never bring myself to leave Valencia. It's my home. I chose rather well as it turned out. As random as my selection process may seem, I suppose that if I examine it more thoroughly there is quite a bit of logic involved.

I think that I would be very comfortable living just about anywhere on the Mediterranean, my life in Greece taught me that much. I could have moved to Marseilles, or Genoa, or Tunis for that matter, and I would have found much to love about living in those places. The Mediterranean has its own climate with which I was familiar. The weather is far from perfect but there are many months of perfection throughout the year. Time had not erased those cold, wet winters in Greece from my memory, but I could never forget the wonderfully sunny summers. And of course there was the food.

There is an indelible stamp on Mediterranean cooking that can be found in every corner and cove on this inland sea. In our era of global trade, it's possible to get just about any food product you want anywhere on the planet but there were many things I had missed about Mediterranean food. It wasn't just the basic ingredients, things you can probably buy in any good, upscale supermarket in the United States, what was missing were all of the little things that when taken together make up the essence of the Mediterranean diet. Things like the wonderfully odd-shaped tomatoes that are impossible to beat when the season is right. The different types of beans that are native to the basin. Olives of every character, shape, and flavor, along with olive oils to match any dish. But it wasn't so much the flavor of foods that I missed, it was something else. A grilled sardine, some fried squid, roasted lamb or pork probably taste the same anywhere they are prepared, to say otherwise would be dishonest or verging on the overly-romantic. The element that was missing from Mediterranean cooking when I lived in America was their reverence for food. It's difficult to overstate the importance of food in the lives of the people who inhabit the shores of this sea that has been called the “middle of the earth” by many of the cultures that border it.

On a clearly anecdotal basis, I have to say that everyone I have met from Spain, France, Greece, and Italy all seem to have a much greater appreciation for food than most of the Americans and Brits that I know, unless those Americans or Brits have learned to revere food while living on the Mediterranean. This isn't to say that Mediterranean people are superior to us, they just take their food more seriously than we do. We all have different priorities and values. The importance that these people place upon food is something that perhaps we reserve for other things. I wouldn't care to say what these other things might be, but I will say that I find American and British humor to be far superior to the Spanish or French version. They have paella, coq au vin, and risotto. We have Seinfeld and Monty Python's Flying Circus. The good news is that we can share.

I have met Italians, Greeks, French and Spanish people who admit that they can't cook but who can will whip up veritable miracles of simplicity in the kitchen using ingredients common throughout the region. I've never met an Italian who couldn't make some sort of memorable dish with only a bit of pasta, some olive oil, and a vegetable or two—I've also never met an Italian who doesn't eat pasta every day, if not with every meal. It never ceases to amaze me how the Spanish will raise the lowliest of food items to an exalted level. A slice of tomato and a single anchovy will be shaped into an elegant tapa to accompany a beer or a glass of wine; a plate of olives will prime a first course at dinner; even a bag of store-bought potato chips will be decanted into a dish before being served. They have a great respect for food because it is their inheritance, their birthright handed down over centuries.

What I first found to be close-mindedness on the part of Valencianos when it came to modifying—in any way—their local dishes, I soon found was just a respect for their own traditions. There are just certain dishes in their culture that they feel cannot be improved. I feel the same way about a handful of things that I prepare. Change just one ingredient every couple of years, or even every generation and before long you will have lost sight of the original dish entirely. Some of my first impressions of Valencianos regarding their cuisine were of a people hog-tied and impaired by their own traditions. I quickly realized how foolish I was for thinking this; it would be like mocking a person for caring for the foundation of his house. Without embracing their culinary past, every day in the kitchen would be like reinventing the wheel. It took me a while to come around to their way of thinking. I was a decent cook when I arrived in Spain, and inspired amateur at least. As my cooking experience with Valencian food expanded, I came to base my own recipes firmly on the basics. I gradually learned that to know your way around you have to know where you started.

Where Are You From?
I have had a sort of unwritten rule that I have adhered to in a life of many moves. I rarely ask people where they are from. Besides the awkwardness of trying to end that question on anything but a preposition (at least in English), I just don’t think that it is a very interesting thing to ask of someone you have only recently met. A person’s birthplace will usually become apparent after a bit of conversation without having to inquire about it directly, if you will only bother to listen to what they are saying.

I think I came to this conclusion back when I was living in the dormitory at Indiana University. Back then most of the dorms weren’t coed so we would arrange mixer parties in the lounge of our floor and invite one of the female floors in the same residence hall. At these parties you could hear the same questions being asked over and over: “Where are you from?” and “What’s your major?” My joke back then was that we should have made name tags for everyone that gave your hometown and major and we could have eliminated about 90% of the bothersome conversation going on. Students could just go around and read the tags which would free up energy for drinking whatever hellish punch had been prepared by the guy on the floor with the best fake ID (In this case that would have been me. I had my old Hawaii driver’s license which was like a credit card with raised numbers and letters. All I had to do was shave off a number and move it over to my birth date.).

This being the third time in my life that I have lived outside the U.S. for a good length of time, I don’t get that question nearly as often as you would think. Most people I talk to immediately realize that I am not Spanish and a guiri (foreigner) is a guiri is a guiri to most folks. It is also easy for me to tell where someone is from by their accent in Spanish, whether they speak it as a second language or with a Latin American accent. As I said before, I also don’t find a person’s nationality to be interesting in and of itself.

When people do ask me where I am from I have gotten into the habit of answering, “Seattle” (mispronounced carefully as Sea-ahh-tell to help non-English speaking people understand). Most Spanish people I have talked to have heard of Seattle and have a very favorable opinion of that great American city. Young kids here all associate Seattle with Grunge and Frasier, not the worst things to be linked to if you are a large American city, as opposed to, say, crime and violence. I think that saying that I am from Seattle defines me more accurately than simply saying that I am American. I actually chose to live in Seattle; it wasn’t just an accident of birth.

Despite what is portrayed in America’s far-right media, I have never had a negative reaction from anyone when I tell them I am from the U.S.A. I have never experienced any incident that was even remotely anti-American. People who do claim to have suffered insults for being American are probably misinterpreting the event. What they are experiencing is most likely an anti-asshole incident brought on by their own behavior. In fact, I would say that the exact opposite is true; people have an extremely high opinion of America and Americans. Europeans also seem delighted to meet an American who doesn't fit the usual stereotype, whatever that may be. Believe it or not, the fact is that most Europeans have never actually met an American. I'd like to think that I am not a bad ambassador for my country, a position I feel honored to fill.

All the History You Need to Know About Valencia
People had been living in this area of the Mediterranean since before recorded history. A city was founded here by the Romans in 138 B.C. which they called Valentia Edetanorum. In the 6th century A.D., after centuries of Roman decline, the city was taken over by the Visigoths. This is a part of their history that locals here rarely discuss. Most Valencianos sort of see the Visigoths are their hillbilly ancestors who ran things for a while until more civilized folks moved in. In arguments at home when the insults are flying, the Visigoths are always on the other side of family.

Valencia was under Muslim rule for centuries beginning in 714 A.D. They brought with them oranges, olives, silk, rice and ceramics which were to remain integral to the local economy for centuries afterward, some are still vital today. They also introduced irrigation to the area and because of this the region is one of the most productive agricultural regions in Spain. Other than these things, and the great architecture they introduced, and their relatively tolerant view of other religions, the Moors didn’t do much for Valencia and the rest of Spain, at least not if you believe the history written by the eventual victors.

In 1094 Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid from the Arabic meaning “The Man” or “The Boss,” took back Valencia from the Moors. El Cid converted nine mosques into Christian churches which went a long way in assuring his popularity with the clergy which was the only literate class in this era. He was rewarded for his deeds with the Lay of El Cid, the oldest preserved tale of heroic deeds in all of Spain. He died five years later in 1099 and the city was recaptured by the Moorish dynasty of the Almoravids in 1102. Writing a heroic tale of El Cid’s very short-lived conquest of Valencia would be like someone writing a song praising a bad car repair job. I would say that El Cid’s conquering and Moor-evicting feats were way over-rated.

The single most celebrated event and date in Valencia is October 9, 1238 when Jaume I, king of the Crown of Aragon, entered Valencia and freed it, once and for all, of Moorish occupation. You will notice that bats are everywhere in Valencia, at least pictures of the little beasts. The Valencia Football Club has a bat on their logo as does the Valencia coat of arms. The bat obsession comes from a legend that on the eve of when Jaume I was to reconquer Valencia from the Moors, he found a bat in his helmet. A bat was supposed to be a bad omen. In order not to break the morale of his troops he quickly adopted the bat as a favorable omen and led his men to victory on the following day. Now you see likenesses of bats everywhere in Valencia.

The people here are Spanish which means that they have a love for holidays, but October 9th is the most important of the dozens of holidays throughout the year. On second thought, the spring Fallas festival is a huge affair. They take their holidays here pretty seriously so trying to rate them in terms of importance is a dangerous business. Perhaps it would be safer if I were to simply say that October 9th is an important day for Valencianos. I don't think I am stepping on any toes when I put it that way.

This date in history marks the beginning of Valencia as an independent kingdom and has shaped the way Valencianos have thought about themselves from that day to the present. Part of the national character of Spain involves the ways in which the different regions of the country either try to emphasize how different they are from the rest of Spain or how their region epitomizes the true essence of what it means to be Spanish.

Shelter

Shelter

Finding a place to live in Spain was relatively painless. I used an internet classifieds site much like the one I used to sell all of the stuff in my apartment in Seattle. At first I had to rent a place short-term for my first few weeks in Valencia for my brother and me. He came over to help Sherpa some of my belongings and give me a hand with getting settled in my new city. Once I arrived I looked for rooms to rent as I wanted to live with Spanish people to force me to speak the language all day, every day. My Spanish was a little rough when I first arrived and I wondered if I would be able to jump through all of the hoops necessary to convince someone to let me share their apartment. I’m not as swarthy as Borat but his English skills certainly were better than my command of Spanish.

As with apartment shopping any place I have ever lived, I usually try to look at no less than 15-20 places to make comparisons and find the best deal. I didn’t have internet access in my holiday rental apartment but every neighborhood on Valencia has dozens of locutorios which are businesses that specialize in communication of every sort. They have computers for internet use as well as telephone booths for making call to anywhere in the world. To this day I still haven’t figured out how to use the pay phones you find on the street in Spain. The locutorios are a tremendous resource and I often wished we had something similar in the U.S. I am amazed at how much the price of international telephone calls have dropped over the years. In the three years I lived in Greece many years ago I think that I called the States only about three or four times because the cost was so prohibitive. I have made international calls from the locutorios that have cost less than a pay phone call in the U.S.

Most of my communication with prospective roommates was done via email where my heavy accent wasn’t an issue but the ruse was up the moment I rang the buzzer on the apartment door. I was willing to live just about anywhere as I was willing to write off any apartment situation as a learning experience. Luckily, I found a great place to share with a university professor. Usually my good fortune in finding great apartments is because of the hard work I put into the search but this place just fell in my lap. I can’t imagine how I would have done all of this without the internet.

Once I got moved in to my new place I was able to dedicate myself entirely to the task of learning Spanish. I began watching television and I quickly became addicted to a couple of morning cooking shows. In the two programs I liked how they get ordinary people to participate. They either teach them a dish to cook or let them whip up their own favorite meal. Not only do they show the cooking process but they also film the people as they go to the market to do the shopping. Daily shopping is such a big part of people’s lives here that it would seem disingenuous to leave out this essential element to dining.

After the shopping and cooking is completed, they show the ordinary person’s ordinary friends who show up to share the meal. I immediately noticed the difference in protocol between American and Spanish dinner guests. In America when you are invited to a friend's house for dinner it is unthinkable that you would give any sort of criticism about what is served. After watching a few episodes of Hoy Cocinas Tú (Today You Cook) I saw how Spanish dinner guests were fairly quick to offer suggestions as to how a dish could have been better prepared. This turned out to be a valuable bit of information and prepared me for when I would cook for Spanish friends. I now prefer an honest assessment of my cooking to an insincere compliment.

Graffiti and Dog Poop and Art and Vandalism
Culturally speaking, Spain is a nation of icons, whether they are vanished, fading, or continue to exert influence on modern Spanish society. The sword, once a symbol for Spanish conquest, is now found only in museums and tourist shops. The corrida, or bullfighting, although still present on the Iberian Peninsula, no longer instills the passion it once did in the hearts and minds of the Spanish people, at least not in the younger generation. The soccer ball has usurped the corrida as the dominant icon in modern Spanish society. It even beats out the Catholic Church; if you don’t believe this then compare attendance figures at cathedrals with the huge crowds at football stadiums. The spray paint can is also a dominant cultural icon in Spain although most people here wouldn’t acknowledge it or even understand what I mean by this.

I am talking about the graffiti that is everywhere in Spain, like some modern architectural curse. I have never felt that graffiti is much of an art form. In fact, I hate it, at least in most of its varieties. It is to visual art what rap music is to poetry, or what Keanu Reeves is to acting. It is puerile at best and mostly just petty larceny—sometimes not so petty (Think of Keanu in Much Ado About Nothing).

There are almost no sacred cows when a vandal teen intersects with a can of paint. There is very little real public art in Valencia that hasn’t been tagged. Even La Lonja de la Seda, the silk exchange built in 1492, Valencia’s gothic architectural masterpiece and UNESCO World Heritage site, became a billboard for graffitists who scrawled “Copamericanos terroristas” in red letters on an exterior wall. Valencia was hosting the upcoming America’s Cup race and I imagine that La Lonja was easier to spray paint than a 12 meter racing sloop. This trenchant message reflects the world view of someone who probably painted the words while balancing on a skateboard and is too stupid to see that defacing of a cultural icon is sort of like terrorism. The Lonja had recently undergone a major restoration and the architect who oversaw the work said that anti-graffiti paint was not applied to the exterior walls of the Lonja because it gives the stone façade an improperly bright appearance. The blemish was quickly removed but not without leaving the stone slightly damaged. Damn those Americans sail boaters.

About 99.99% of the graffiti is just vandalism with not the slightest nod to artistic expression. Most of it isn't even communication; it is the urban teen's answer to a dog peeing on its territory. When graffiti does try to communicate something it often seems even more pathetic.

I remember seeing a slogan painted on a wall in Lima, Peru many years ago. It was some rather long-winded sermon about the communist party being the only political group that looked to the future. The vandal had begun the slogan in huge red letters, five feet high. He quickly realized that he was quickly running out of wall so he started making the letters smaller, and smaller, and smaller until the letters in the last word weren’t much bigger than this type font. So much for the foresight of the Peruvian communist party. If I had a picture of that work I would file it under "Ironic Metaphors."

Almost none of the graffiti here in Valencia is political. I can almost understand political graffiti but the tagging variety popular here and in most large American cities is a mystery to me. About the only thing being communicated to me is ugliness. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t care to get inside the head of graffiti vandals although I would like to see the outside of their heads connecting with an aluminum baseball bat, you know, for art’s sake.

I have read about the ways to prevent graffiti besides the anti-graffiti paint but one thing that I have noticed here in Valencia is that vandals usually won’t mark over someone else’s work. About the only thing little vandals with paint cans seem to respect are other little paint can-wielding vandals. If you are a business owner and you don’t want the little shits defacing your storefront, the best thing to do is have someone with at least a hint of artistic ability paint you walls first.

I don’t think that painting graffiti murals over every square inch of exposed exterior surface is the answer—I don’t think the human eye could handle that much vulgarity. That would be like having rap music on every radio station, or watching a Keanu Reeves film festival.

Besides graffiti, the other thing that detracts from the beauty of Valencia, call it another steaming cultural icon, is that which is left in the wake of man’s best friend. Lots of people have little dogs here and lots of little dogs means lots of little dog poop which most often is left on the sidewalk, or in tree wells, or in the grass at parks, but usually finds its way to the bottom of your shoes. Dog poop is little Barfy’s answer to graffiti. You quickly become adept at playing a kind of dog shit hopscotch as you walk down the sidewalk. France seems to have the same laissez-faire attitude when it comes to cleaning up after pets, but they also have legions of professional dog poop cleaners who scour the streets on motorcycles equipped with dog poop vacuums (I'm not making this up). Barcelona, among other Spanish cities, has done a better job than Valencia of educating pet owners to obey scoop laws.

Once again, a psychologist could probably explain these issues, graffiti and dog poop, with the same discussion of anti-authoritarian, post-Franco mentality of the Spanish people. It’s as if someone will be labeled as a fascist if they tell anyone to pick up after their dog or to stop defacing a public monument with a can of spray paint. Perhaps the Spanish do not view either of these issues as a problem, or not a problem big enough to warrant much of a response. There is a fairly aggressive anti-graffiti campaign but it seems that the average citizen here has become somewhat immune to the ubiquity of spray paint vandalism. Most of the dialogue you read about graffiti in the newspapers concerns the more benign, artistic forms.

In my status as a casual observer and recent immigrant I can’t offer much insight as to how they feel about these two matters which to me are rather obnoxious. I suppose that if and when they feel that they are worth addressing they will do something about it. Until then, watch your step. In the time I have lived in Valencia I have noticed a marked improvement regarding pet owners cleaning up. The graffiti problem still seems epidemic.

The Road Warriors
I want to like motor scooters, I really do. They get about a million miles to the gallon and take up very little room on the street. You can park about ten of them in the same space needed for one economy car. I should love motor scooters. I do love motor scooters, but I really hate the mindless bags of protoplasm that act as their guidance mechanism, sometimes referred to as riders. Motor scooters are the tequila of internally combusted transport vehicles; they bring out the absolute worst in people.

Here in Europe scooters are without a doubt the most lawless of all licensed vehicles. The single biggest transportation menace is people on bicycles in Amsterdam but that is another story. Car drivers have become progressively more comfortable with the idea of pedestrian traffic while the relationship between people on foot and mopeds is slightly more violent than what went on during the three Punic Wars. From the way I see things in Spain, it seems that they are using the movie The Road Warrior as a driver’s training film. I half expect people on motor scooters to be shooting cross bows at other drivers and hurling poisonous snakes at one another.

From the way the young hoodlums drive mopeds over here I am pretty sure that they don’t have accelerators, they simply have an on/off switch for the gas. They are either stopped at a traffic light, snarling angrily, or they are barreling full-tilt down the street. When you watch mopeds it appears that the riders have no control over their speed. Their necks whip back and forth violently every time they hit the gas or brake. I have seen bronco bull riders more in control.

AND SCOOTERS ARE SO LOUD. I’m sorry, was I screaming? My hearing has become slightly impaired lately. It is a common ailment in Mediterranean countries which all have more than their fair share of mopeds. Instead of mufflers I think scooters have a bullhorn they attach to the tail pipe to amplify their noise emissions. I can't imagine that anyone would actually build a machine this noisy so owners must remove any noise-reducing baffles so that their scooters are as loud as a prepubescent 747s. And this is just the engine noise. They have horns.

There must be some law in European Union countries that states that the smaller your vehicle, the louder the horn you are required to honk almost constantly, and never for any purpose. Yesterday I walked past a guy sitting on a scooter in front of an apartment building. Just as I walked past he blared his horn, I suppose to summon someone living in the building. From the volume of his horn he could have awakened someone from the dead on the 110th floor. I am still unable to react quickly or instinctively in Spanish. In this case I screamed a startled obscenity at him in English. The guy on the scooter just looked at me timidly like he didn’t know what I was upset about. He obviously doesn’t see anything wrong with inducing a 20% hearing loss in a complete stranger.

I have always thought that horns should come equipped with a meter that registers every time you use them. People should be required to pay 5€ every time they honk. When I first got here I thought that moped riders honked their horns for no reason but I soon began to understand their method. You honk your horn when someone pulls in front of you, when someone is about to pull in front of you, when turning left, when you are approaching a pedestrian crossing, when driving up on the sidewalk…I think you get the picture I’m trying to paint. If someone is riding a scooter alone in the forest, he will honk his horn. If a tree falls in the forest and lands on a guy on a scooter, how long will he honk his horn before he realizes that no one is coming to save him?

Researchers at the University of Valencia recently conducted a study to determine whether riding a moped turns people into assholes or if it is only assholes who buy mopeds in the first place. After months of interviews and study, the answer they came up with was “Yes.”

I get my revenge on motor scooters when I ride my bicycle. I can accelerate as quickly as most scooters and around town I can keep up with them pretty well. There is nothing a snot-nosed moped rider hates worse than being out-done by someone on a bike. When a scooter is behind me on a narrow street I keep to the middle so they can’t pass. I can hear their little two-stroke engines furiously red-lining behind me and I chalk one up for the home team. Scooters are kind of like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz; just one of them isn’t very intimidating but there are always hundreds, thousands of them. Sometimes it is nice to separate one from the herd and put them in their place.

Another thing that I do to thoroughly annoy scooterists when I am on my bicycle is to draft behind them in traffic. They really hate that for some reason. I can see them looking at me in their rearview mirrors, desperately trying to find more power to pull away. You can almost see their little brains working to conjure up every cliché about getting more speed: A ship captain screaming down to the boiler room to throw more coal on the fire, a Roman cracking the whip on a slave galley, Captain Kirk bitch-slapping the snot out of Scotty to go faster and screw it if the Enterprise breaks up in the process. If I am drafting I can keep up with most of the smaller scooters for as long as I want. I am like a tick on their butt that they can’t reach to pull off. You have to learn to enjoy the simple things in life.

I promise that I will stop picking on motor scooters as soon as they all lose their acute case of Napoleon complex. Guys, you have little bitty engines, just deal with it. I’m sure there are women that love guys with little bitty engines. I personally don’t see how it’s possible to please a woman with such little bitty engines but I may be wrong. I am probably not wrong but don’t give up hope, and keeping honking those horns. I'm pretty sure that women love that.

Etiquette
Living in an apartment building means taking the elevator regularly. I immediately noticed that Spanish people greet you when you are sharing an elevator. A simple, polite “Buenas Tardes” when they get on and then a “Hasta luego” when they get off. It is such a simple thing but it seems to fly in the face of the stoic American custom of ignoring other passengers. It seems rather ridiculous to pretend like others don’t exist when you are confined to such a small space. As when you enter and leave an elevator, people also offer a greeting when they enter and leave a business of any kind. What I found curious and charming is that other customers, most of the time complete strangers, will also bid you farewell after you finish your cup of coffee. This will be a tough habit to break when I live in the States again. Greeting total strangers will surely paint me as some sort of weirdo. Perhaps I will try to single-handedly impose a bit of civility on our culture.

I was so relieved to finally find a place to live, any place at all, that I didn't really give the place much of a look before I moved in. As it turned out the place was great. It had plenty of sunlight throughout the whole day. Many Spanish apartments can be pretty gloomy as only certain rooms have windows that open on to the street. They call these exterior and interior rooms with the interior rooms having windows that open on to sort of an open elevator shaft in the middle of the building, or they have no windows at all. I remember that after visiting a prospective apartment I looked up the word for dungeon: Calabozo. My new apartment was 100 percent exterior and had open windows in three different directions—something you really appreciate during the cold, damp winter months. And yes, it does get cold on the Spanish Mediterranean.

Brother, can you spare some long underwear?
or
It’s not the cold; it’s the humidity.
Without meaning to offend the friends and family of anyone who may have actually frozen to death, I am going to describe the weather here as bitter cold. Now, if you look at the actual forecasts for Valencia you will see that it has been in the 60s almost every day, with the lows in the low 50s. That’s pretty warm, but that’s if where you live you have any sort of insulation in your home. The beautiful parquet floors, which are like a solid slab of marble and which keep these places cool during the hot summers, actually conduct the chill right up into your bones. It’s like the opposite of insulation, it’s like anti-insulation.

I have a theory—a theory I hope to never prove—that the floors are so cold in my apartment that my tongue would stick to them. I have a little electric space heater in the living room but that thing is about as effective at keeping me warm as someone trying to fend off frostbite with a cigarette lighter during a Mount Everest blizzard. Nanook of the North, Scott of the Antarctic, make room in the igloo for John of Valencia. God, an igloo sounds so warm and cozy right now with a nice whale blubber fire burning in the hearth, or whatever the hell igloos have instead of a hearth.

Instead of sissy shit like insulation and central heat, I have the Spanish equivalent: brandy. Some people here will get a little brandy in their morning coffee, called a café tocado, or “touched” coffee. If the temperature keeps falling I may start the day with a brandy touched with coffee. Without meaning to offend the friends and family of anyone crippled by alcoholism, I am going to make a coffee and brandy right now.

It is a little after five in the afternoon and although it is still light for another hour or so, the sun has cowardly set behind the buildings to the south of mine, like a geeky kid with glasses hiding from the neighborhood bully. Who would have thought that the powerful Spanish sun that attracts so many visitors to the beaches here in the summer would now quiver in its boots at the sight of a 98 pound weakling? It is so cold that I am actually calling the celestial body that makes possible all life on this planet, the sun, a sissy.

Either the sun needs to butch up a little bit or I have to, and that ain’t happening, not when it comes to being cold. I can take a lot of pain. Without meaning to offend anyone tortured at Abu Gharib, I just don’t see what’s so bad about water boarding. I love water, bring it on. Isn’t it a bit like bogey boarding? Being menaced by guard dogs? I love dogs. Just turn on the heat already, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.

Right now I am trying to conjure up the hottest day that I have ever experienced. I am doggedly attempting to recapture how uncomfortable I was on that day, sitting in the blistering sun. Perhaps it was in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, or in the Amazon basin. That memory is as fond to me now as a child’s first Christmas. I would take away the memory of the first Christmas of every kid on the planet if it would raise the temperature in my apartment ten degrees. Sorry kids, and I’ll take that blanket, too. For you it’s just a security thing, I’m freezing to death over here. Grow up already! While we’re at it I’ll also take those cute slippers that look like rabbits.

It is summer in Argentina right now. They speak Spanish there, right? Before I book this flight let me just check the weather forecast for the weekend. It is supposed to get up to 69 degrees on Sunday. I can’t wait. I have been as cold as a stone for over a week. The only time I am warm is when I am in bed, in a hot shower, or at this kebab place around the corner where the ovens heat the place up nice and cozy. Beers are cheap there so it kind of works out on several levels.

Maybe they will let me shower over at the kebab joint, because although my shower is good and hot, once I turn off the water the real agony begins. I actually screamed it was so painful this morning. It’s not like I need to shower. It is so cold that my body doesn’t secrete anything. Nope, all my pores are slammed shut like the front door when a Jehovah’s Witness walks up to the house.

So if you come by my apartment and I’m not home, go over to the kebab place. I’ll be standing as close as I possibly can to the oven that roasts the meat, waiting for spring.

The Price of Conservation
The Spanish are frugal when it comes to energy consumption. It’s not because they are a country of eco-hippies; it’s because most energy here is rather expensive and they would rather spend their money on ham and wine than put it into their gas tanks or send it off to the electric company. Maybe instead of spending their money on energy they choose to take another day off and not even earn the money in the first place. What is more important in life: A couple of tanks of gas or a holiday with family and friends? Assuming that you don’t work for the oil industry I think most people would choose to have another day of vacation.

One of the first things that you notice as an American when you visit Spain is that they all drive small cars, some of them are really small, comically small. Some look more like children’s toys, like something that could run on a couple of D cell batteries. If you wonder why they drive these cars, your questions will be answered the first time you go to fill up. Gasoline in Spain costs about three times what most people in the United States pay. I just glad that wine in Spain isn't as expensive as gasoline.

As good as public transportation is here, I’m surprised that so many people choose to even own a car in the first place. Besides high fuel prices, there is no place to park and traffic is nightmarish during most of the peaks hours. I think it must be a sort of a status thing where people feel like they deserve to drive around town because they make enough to own a car. I have never been able to understand people’s fascination with the automobile. The idea that everyone should own a car for personal transportation was a terrible mistake of the 20th century and one we will be forced to correct in this century. Even if automobiles ran on water they would still represent a significant drain on natural resources when you consider their production and maintenance demands.

Hot water is a bit of a precious commodity here as well. When I lived in Greece many years ago I used to follow the Greek custom of only turning on my water heater before I was going to take a shower or do the dishes and then turning it off promptly when I had finished. Most people here have a gas hot water heater that heats the water directly when you turn on the spigot instead of storing hot water in a huge reservoir. These hot water heaters are also about the size of a small suitcase, an important consideration when you live in an apartment and space is valuable.

Clothes dryers are almost unheard of here. Valencia has nice weather with something like 300 days of sunshine a year so hang drying clothes is almost never a problem. During the summer and the months attached to it on either side of the calendar year, clothes are dry in a few hours when left on a line either on your roof or the balcony. If I have the choice I will never use a dryer again, not unless they make one as energy efficient as the sun. This also adds a lot to the lifespan of your clothes.

People also use electricity pretty sparingly. Air conditioning is not nearly as common here but it is becoming more so because it gets really, really hot in the dogs days of summer. I lived without it my first summer here and I made it through without much complaint. I used a fan for sleeping but during the day I really don’t mind the heat. The apartments all have wonderfully cool marble or parquet floors that are the next best thing to air conditioning. My apartment didn’t have heat which meant that I had to suffer for about five weeks during the chilliest part of the winter. Heat in homes is used extremely sparingly as most people just wear a lot of clothes at home. It really isn't too uncomfortable as Valencia is blessed with rather mild winter temperatures. Those marble floors that are so wonderfully cool during the hot summer months are incredibly cold when the temperature drops. I have found that most homes on the Mediterranean are built as if there were no winter when in fact there are several months of cold weather.

There are lots of lights on timers which shut off after a set time. You find these in the hallways of apartment buildings and in some public restrooms. Some of the timers are so comically short that I wonder whether or not I may be playing a part in some sort of funny home video pranks. Like the timers in these incredibly small bathrooms that go off after you are nowhere near ready for them to go off. You don’t know whether to stay the course or try to turn around and grope around for the switch. No matter what, it gets about as messy as a Stevie Wonder doing a drive-by shooting. They say that when you lose one of your senses your other senses become more acute. In this case, it’s usually your sense of embarrassment. In our quest to save the planet I don’t think that we need to limit restroom light use to less than 20 seconds.

At first glance, many Americans would view the lifestyle of the average Spaniard as rather austere: living spaces are small compared to those of Americans who own single-family homes; energy use is stingy in the extreme; most Spanish people live in dense, urban environments; people use public transportation, bicycles, or walk to effect most of their daily obligations; and Spain hasn't reached anywhere near America's obsession for material possessions. After quickly adapting to the Spanish lifestyle I have to say that life here is not any harder or less convenient than in America.

Granted, I already lived in a manner quite close to that of Spanish city dwellers back when I was a resident of Seattle. I lived in a dense urban city, in a small apartment, drove a small car, etc. I have become quite accustomed to life here and living any other way now would seem odd. I can't imagine ever using a clothes dryer again, at least not when there is anything like a strong sun shining. If at all possible I prefer to ride a bike to get around, my next choice is walking, followed by mass transit. Cars aren't even on my list.

With sharp increases in the cost of fuel, Americans are going to have to accept drastic changes in the lifestyle people have taken for granted since the end of WWII when the automobile lead people out of the cities and into the suburbs. After only a few months of record prices for gasoline, housing prices in the suburbs are falling and city apartments are gaining in value as more and more people are choosing to live closer to work and other amenities. People are beginning to realize that a ten mile drive—one way—just to rent a video is an absurdity that fewer and fewer Americans can afford.

The problem is that there are many areas in America that don't offer any sort of dense urban center toward which people can migrate. Cities like Dallas, Phoenix, Indianapolis, and Atlanta—to name just a few—have been built around the model of sprawl and suburbia. Most people in these areas live in single family homes and even the apartment complexes there are spread out over many acres. This makes it almost impossible to develop a mass transit system which requires a population density of something like seven housing units per acre.

The first thing that people complain about whenever I mention the advantages to urban living is how inappropriate city life is for raising children. This is a pretty ridiculous argument and assumes that no one in the city has children. Valencia is about as family-friendly a city as you are ever going to experience. This argument against cities also assumes that the mere idea of having a family is somehow at odds with living a remotely sustainable lifestyle. No one is telling you where to raise your family, you can live in a houseboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean for all I care. I just think that gasoline prices in America are finally starting to reflect the true value of oil and many Americans who bought into the suburban lifestyle are finding it difficult to make ends meet. The once unthinkable idea of living in the city is becoming more and more attractive to Americans with families.

What I find odd about Valencia, and the same is probably true of other large Spanish cities, is that as the city grows outward, they are starting to adopt some of the characteristics of American suburbia: Shopping malls with huge parking areas, big box stores, and homes with yards. Not only are these newer residential areas less environmentally friendly than the urban centers, but they are boring and lacking in anything remotely resembling character. I have noticed that the new apartment blocks on the edge of the city are being separated by wider and wider boulevards that can accommodate many lanes of traffic in each direction. The problem is that building more lanes of traffic never reduces traffic but actually spurs even more congestion in something traffic planners call “induced traffic.” I find these newer areas of Valencia to be completely awful on a number of different levels and I can't believe anyone would voluntarily live in these there when they have so many more agreeable choices.

The funny thing about Spain is that even in the smaller towns people live much like people do here in the big cities. Most people in small towns live in apartment buildings which have businesses on the mezzanine floor. About as close as people get to single family homes are city townhouses which are mostly two story affairs, although some have three or more stories with a business on the first floor.

Instead of trying to accommodate the insatiable needs of the automobile, planners should be making roads narrower with broader sidewalks and bike paths. This has been the model in Amsterdam for over a decade. Fewer roads force people to abandon cars in what becomes the opposite of induced traffic which is “induced transit.” When Amsterdam first proposed the plan of restricting automobile traffic in its historic center, many local businessmen objected saying it would ruin commerce and turn the city into a museum, like Venice. In fact, the exact opposite occurred. Pedestrians flocked to the more peaceful center. The thing happened in Paris when they adopted their quartiers tranquilles or “quiet areas” which also restricted and consequently saw huge increases in pedestrian traffic. Get rid of the cars and the people will come.

My own energy consumption dwindled down to nothing as I took my cues from my new Spanish roommate. When his father retired he bought an orange orchard so I became very conscious of my water use as this is a tremendously valuable resource in Spanish agriculture. He even instructed me to turn off the pilot light for the hot water heater when I wasn't using it. That seemed a bit extreme but when in Rome...and when in Valencia, turn thedamn water tap off when you aren’t using it!

I suffered a bit with the cold those first few months but I liked the apartment. I was used to city living from my years in downtown Seattle but Valencia was even more compact. I was surprised to learn that everything I needed to survive was less than one block away. This was a very dense urban living environment. The kitchen had a huge window that looked over the street eight floors below. It also looked across the narrow street to a block of adjacent apartment buildings.

The Real World, Valencia, Spain
I don’t need to turn on the television where I live to get a glimpse into the private lives of complete strangers; I just have to look out the window. In the narrow canyon of buildings separated by a strip of asphalt barely wide enough for a Mini Cooper to squeeze through, I can practically reach out and shake hands with people living on the other side of the street. I sometimes feel like I’m living in a fish bowl, but everyone else lives in one, too, so it all works out. Before I open the shades in my room in the morning I just have to make sure that I am decent. Opening the shutters is like raising the curtain on a stage. I try diligently to mind my own business but not becoming a peeping Tom is almost a full-time vocation.

Most of the time it is pretty easy to avoid looking into the apartments facing mine; I’ve got a lot of other distractions—we are in the middle of a very heated football season here in Valencia. This becomes a little more of a problem when I am at my kitchen sink because it looks directly towards the neighbors across the street, and what the hell else am I supposed to do when I’m washing the dishes? I can’t think of a stronger term than "captive audience" but that’s what I feel like. Unfortunately, what I see is as boring as the view the neighbors get of the illegal immigrant, that’s me, washing his dishes.

I should be more discreet when it comes to my neighbor’s privacy but the following is a brief inventory of what goes on across the street. A couple of floors below me on the other side I see an old guy with his back to me reading a newspaper. It doesn’t matter when I look over, he’ll be there reading. I can’t make out the date on the paper he is reading but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is April 23, 1979. I have considered calling emergency services to kick in the door and make sure that he isn’t decomposing. I’m sure the neighbors probably say the same thing about me sitting here at my desk on my computer so I make an effort to wave an arm every so often to prove that I’m alive. Give me a sign, old man!

One thing that I have noticed from peeking into other people’s lives is that Spanish people seem to eat a lot, although if anyone is looking into my apartment they must think that I never stop eating. I’ll spend the entire night making one dish at a time, eating it, and then moving on to the next course. Sometimes I'll use up to four pans for a single menu item. I sometimes don’t call it quits until one in the morning. I usually sample so much of a dish as I’m cooking that when I finish I immediately throw it in the refrigerator for leftovers. This was the case last night with the mashed yucca that I made. Besides being the world’s densest starch, I made this dish even heavier by adding about three heart attacks of butter. Remember that in the metric system one heart attack equals ten blocked arteries. Wasn’t that easy?

Seeing so many strangers going about their daily tasks I could say something about people living lives of quiet desperation but “quiet” and “Spain” go together like “President Bush” and “statesman.” When my neighbors aren’t making noise themselves they have probably exiled the dog to the balcony where little barfo will try to imitate the howls of a trapped coyote. No, the Spanish lead lives that are anything but quiet and desperate. I can practically hear their hand gestures as they talk to each other across the street.

It isn’t summer yet so people don’t spend much time on their balconies except to hang clothes out to dry or to smoke a cigarette. Most of my neighbors have balconies that are too small to do much else besides that. Mine, on the other hand, is big enough to live on when the weather changes for the better. I can hang laundry, smoke cigars, drink, eat, host an orgy, broker a huge drug deal, perform a human sacrifice, and play badminton on my balcony, but I don’t play badminton anymore so I’ll keep to the other vices.

On the fourth floor directly across from me live two beautiful young women. I think that they are twins, actually, and they must be models or something because they are always trying on stuff from Victoria’s Secret or whatever they call it here in Spain. From the looks of things, they don’t seem to get along very well together because they are always wrestling around on the bed. I realize that Spain is very liberal and way ahead of the U.S. on social matters, but what these two do to each other can’t possibly be legal between blood relatives.

OK, this last thing isn’t true. I’m sure that someone, somewhere in this world lives across the street from incestuous twins who are incredibly immodest lingerie, but it isn’t me.

Just thinking about those hypothetical twins really wore me out. I’ll just have a cigarette, or do whatever it is that people who don't smoke do after they haven't had sex. After I figure that out I'll go to bed. Sorry neighbors, the show’s over. I’m closing the shutters.

Maps, Newspapers, and Bridges
Some cities are fairly self-explanatory and getting around is easy. Most cities have streets set up on a grid system so all you have to do is take a quick look at a map to get oriented and that's that. Valencia isn’t one of those cities. Valencia is more like Amsterdam which is like a maze within a labyrinth defended by moats. Valencia is a confusing city to find your way around, with many boulevards running diagonally and many streets sometimes changing names in midstream. With lots of triangular blocks it probably helps to use trigonometry to find short cuts. During your first few days in cities like Valencia and Amsterdam, there is no getting around the fact that you are going to get lost a few times. You may even remain lost for your entire stay. You shouldn’t fight it, just try to enjoy yourself.

If you sit in a café in the old section of Valencia you will see throngs of tourists consulting maps in a desperate attempt to find their way around the maze of circular streets, dead ends, crooked walkways, and other man-made obstacles to navigation. If you sit long enough and take notice you will see people walking in circles—I know because I did the same thing during my first few weeks of living here. I have carried a compass on my key chain for many years and that helped me a lot more than the maps that are available everywhere. A compass is also easier to read and not as obvious as unfolding a map in the middle of the sidewalk.

I always feel a little self-conscious carrying a map around because I hate looking too much like a tourist. I would say the same about fanny packs and money belts. You can spot these kinds of tourists from satellite photos. I think that it is a natural human tendency to want to belong somewhere, to feel comfortable, and to be at home wherever you may be. It is hard to feel comfortable when you are carrying a map with you. Of course, I needed a map just like all of the other tourists but I would only consult mine furtively, under a café table or behind a dumpster. I was going to live here and I didn’t want to look like another lost tourist, even if I was lost and I was a tourist.

I gradually learned my way around the old quarter. I still consult a map occasionally, especially when I think that I know my way around a certain area but suspect that there is probably a quicker, more direct way of getting there than the way I have staked out. I am almost always correct in my suspicions. I often saved myself several blocks by consulting the map and looking at the big picture. Sometimes I found things on the map that were only a half block from places that I walked past every day. More often than not, I just found things by complete accident.

Even after I knew my way around town fairly well, I was still lost culturally and linguistically. It’s not like Spain is such a strange and foreign place, but they certainly do have their own way of doing almost everything, and I had to learn all of these from scratch. One of my reasons for writing this book was to provide a shortcut to anyone trying to decipher life in Spain. When I first arrived my Spanish wasn’t nearly good enough to understand much of what was on the television, I also didn’t know anyone here. This meant that I had to rely almost entirely on newspapers and books to learn about Valencia and Spain.

Newspapers were my map to the cultural and political side to life in Spain. It’s where I learned the ins and outs of the Spanish football league, the broad strokes of local and national politics, and just about everything else you need to know to be able to participate in the society around you. Where I felt self-conscious about looking at a map, I felt like reading a newspaper and carrying one under my arm made me stick out less. As much as people claim to be individuals and to be nonconformists, I think that most people really just want to be like everyone else—how many kids would get tattoos if no one else did it? I desperately wanted to fit in and nothing made me feel more at home than when I would be asked directions by a Spaniard who was fooled by my disguise of carrying the local paper in my hand. I was even more thrilled when I was actually able to steer them in the right direction.

During my first month I was entirely confounded by the Spanish holidays. Between the national and locals days off, there didn’t seem to be too many days left over to actually get anything done. I would be out trying to do a bit of shopping only to be caught off guard by a holiday and find everything closed for the day. It reminded me of a time a few years ago when I went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant in Seattle’s International District. All of the restaurant employees and most of the Chinese customers were carrying on as if this were just any other day of the year; and to them, people of a non-Christian heritage, it was just like any other day. My friends and I joked that no one had sent these people the memo that today was Christmas. Now I know exactly how they must feel. I usually wouldn’t learn what the holiday was until I read about it in the newspaper the next day. No one had sent me the email.

When I first arrived I was particularly bewildered by the holidays in December that seemed to last for days and days. Why was everything closed? It wasn't Christmas yet. I was lost and I couldn’t seem to find my bearings until I read a wonderful essay by Elvira Lindo in a Sunday edition of the Madrid newspaper, El País, that answered many of my questions about the holidays and matters relating to the Spanish attitude towards work and taking vacations.

The author lives in New York and the subject of her essay was the temporary inhabitants of her sleeper-sofa, Spaniards who had cobbled together a week’s vacation out of a couple of days off for holidays. They call it a “bridge” when a long weekend is built around a weekday holiday. Sometimes the bridge is a fairly solid affair, like when people take off the Monday before a holiday on a Tuesday to make a four day weekend. Sometimes the bridges can be as rickety and perilous (as least as far as some employers are probably concerned) as anything you might see in an Indiana Jones movie, like when people take the whole week off when the holiday falls on a Wednesday. To translate a “bridge” like this with the phrase “take a long weekend” hardly does it justice.

It turned out that the week I was wondering about contained the two holidays of Constitution Day and The Immaculate Conception. The author pointed out that even her fellow countrymen who believe in neither, and can agree on almost nothing, are of the same mind when it comes to “bridges.” Elvira joked that a Spaniard doesn’t emigrate, he goes on a bridge. Spanish people always find it amazing that we don't have a word in English for their concept of a vacation bridge.

I felt like I had been let in on a secret. Having the concept of bridges explained to me was the first insider thing that I remember learning in Spain. It seemed like I saw things a little clearer after that, like after you look at a map of where you are going and you say to yourself, “Oh yeah, now I get it.” A map or a newspaper can save you a lot of head scratching, a lot of time stumbling around lost, and they can also open places and things that would have taken you a lot longer to discover through experience. When you are in the middle of deciphering a new culture, there are going to be a lot of eureka moments—sometimes dozens in single day, if you are lucky. You have to look in as many places as possible for guidance.

I finally got to the point where I didn’t need a map, at least not very often. My compass went back to being just a decoration on my key chain. My dictionary will always get a lot of use and I still write down in a little notebook every word that I look up. I did the same thing back in college with English words whose meanings I didn’t know at the time. I remember years later coming across those words that I had written down on index cards. As I shuffled through the deck, I found it amusing to think that there was a time when all of those words were foreign to me but had moved on to become part of my everyday vocabulary. I couldn’t help but look a little condescendingly upon my former, less articulate self.

I remember back then how pleased I would be with myself when I came across a word that I had looked up recently or saw a reference for a book I had just finished. It was like I had been let in on a secret. I feel the same way now every time that I read almost anything in Spanish because I recently looked up just about every word that I know. Instead of looking up sesquipedalian words in English that I might find on a graduate school entrance exam, my new vocabulary lists are now more about survival. You can usually tell the contents by the container but it’s still a good idea to know the words for “bleach” and “mouthwash.” And I already knew the words for shampoo and cream rinse, but the bottles look exactly the same which is why I washed my hair with cream rinse for five straight days. Man was my hair ever soft. For many of the things that I have had to learn here I didn’t have the benefit of a map, or a dictionary, or a guide book. I just had to learn them through trial and error and imitating people around me.

It’s like my entire life is now about building a bridge between the place where I lived most of my life and this new place. It can be frustrating, entertaining, and hilarious at times, but always interesting. I still consider myself to be a young man, but I don’t think I have enough years left in this lifetime to ever get to know the language and culture of Spain the way I think that I know my own. As long as I’m here I’ll keep working at it. I think that it gets easier as you go along, although I haven’t found it to be any easier just yet—not that I’m complaining. I just think that my knowledge of the language and the culture will reach a point where it grows exponentially instead of one little word, one little cultural tidbit at a time.

In the Kitchen
I really appreciated the gas stove in my new kitchen as I immediately began doing a lot of cooking, picking my new roommates brain for Valencian recipes. He turned out to be quite a good cook and he walked me through the basics of the local cuisine. He had some great Valencian cookbooks which I read cover to cover. I used to mock my Valencian friends whenever they would be so incredibly rigid about how a dish was to be prepared. I soon realized that a person needs to be grounded in the basics. Without the foundational knowledge of the local cooking, the people here would lose a link with their past, something I didn't understand since I came from a culture that had little in the way of food traditions. Food was just something we ate; it wasn't a part of our identity as it is here in Valencia.

This first roommate I had was very grounded in the basics. He was from an agricultural village in the country which means he was probably more comfortable in Valenciano than Spanish. People from the outlying areas of the Valencia Community often feel like they are more Valenciano than the people here in the capital city where the language is hardly spoken in the street. The folks from the country and smaller towns also feel that they are more connected to the cooking traditions of Valencia. It's not as if there is a civil war about to break out between city dwellers and the rural population, but as Valencia becomes a city of immigrants—many of whom barely speak Spanish, let alone Valenciano—there is a greater sense of local identity among the country folk where Valenciano is much more prevalent.

Catalán, Valenciano, and Spanish
It is probably extremely premature for me to try to explain the ancient languages of Valenciano and Catalan after being here for such a short time. My understanding of Valenciano is definitely a work in progress but I think I can say a few things about the language with a bit of accuracy, if not authority. It is extremely similar to Catalan spoken in Barcelona and Catalonia. I still cannot distinguish between the two but I only recently have been able to identify different accents of spoken Spanish.

If a mixture of Spanish and English is Spanglish, then Catalan/Valenciano should be called Sprench: a mixture of Spanish and French. Valenciano is one of the official languages of the state of Valencia, along with Spanish. All official documents are in both languages. Most of the street signs here are in Valenciano, so instead of avenida and calle they say avinguda and carrer. Instead of calling the historic center of town the ciudad vieja becomes ciutat vella. At least much of the Valenciano I come across is recognizable to Spanish speakers, for the most part.

I have never been addressed in Valenciano while living here. I have never had anyone speak to me in Catalan while visiting Barcelona. If I am in a social setting with a group of people from Valencia, they immediately switch to Spanish if they were speaking Valenciano before I entered into the conversation. On television there are shows and news programs in Catalan and Valenciano. During news reports they will conduct interviews in Spanish and Catalan depending on whether or not the person being interviewed speaks that language or only Spanish. I have come across very few people who have learned Valenciano as adults. Spanish people from other parts of the country seem less willing to learn the language than other immigrants.

I knew an Italian who recently moved to Valencia and was learning Spanish. I interrupted him watching television one afternoon and I asked him why he was watching the Valenciano station. He didn't even realize that he wasn't watching Spanish. He told me that he understood Valenciano better than Spanish. I don't know if Italian is linguistically closer to Valenciano than Spanish or if my friend is totally nuts. I have also heard from many friends who speak Valenciano that it is easy for them to learn Italian. As I speak a bit of French I notice a heavy influence of that language in Catalan and Valenciano. I always tell my friends here that when I learn Spanish (a good subjunctive phrase in Spanish, by the way) I will start learning Valenciano.

A Guy's Gotta Eat
The Spanish have a completely different daily rhythm for eating than most other Europeans. It took me quite a while to fully understand what was going on and even longer to adapt my own eating habits to be in sync with everyone else around me. At first glance you might think that people here just eat all the time. You wouldn't be too far off with that assessment but you still need to know how meals are partitioned off during the course of the day.

Desayuno is breakfast and consists of coffee and perhaps a piece of some sort of bread-based product. I've never been much of a breakfast person so I just stick with coffee. I drink about twice as much coffee as the average Spanish person and would give my left (insert vulgar body part here) for a 20 ounce cup of American brewed coffee in the morning. I should just break down and buy an American coffee maker but it´s a little late now; I am quite sure that I would now find American coffee to be too weak for my tastes—even in the morning. When I order coffee in a bar or restaurant I order a “cafe americano con leche, which is an espresso with almost double the normal amount of water and milk.

After breakfast comes almuerzo which means “lunch” in Spanish but in Spain it means a mid-morning snack, usually a sandwich and a beer or soft drink. This meal is taken between 10:30 and 12:00, más o menos. When I first arrived I thought this was the mid-day meal as a lot of workers eat and drink quite a lot, especially younger guys in the construction trades. Guys would eat a huge sandwich of sausages and onions laid out on an entire loaf of bread. A bottle of wine or two is shared at the communal table. It seems like a lot of food but this is just the warm-up for the meal to come a couple hours later.

Lunch is called la comida here so don´t let anyone catch you calling it almuerzo, the word I learned for lunch. This is the biggest meal of the day. This is when normal Valencianos have their big rice dishes such as paella or baked rice. This is also the time when any self-respecting Spanish person would dine on a heavy dish like cocido. Make sure that you always wear loose-fitting pants to this meal which begins sometime around 2:00 in the afternoon. If you pass by a restaurant before 2:00, the only diners you will see are tourists. I have heard many Spanish people complain after they come back from a visit to France or Italy because in those countries the afternoon meal is usually over about when the Spanish are ready to sit down.

It's no wonder that the Spanish have clung so desperately to their beloved siesta. During the Franco era they made a sort of half-assed attempt to do away with it thinking that it would “modernize” the country and put it in sync with the rest of Europe's business hours which are more like the American nine-to-five routine. The Spanish just weren't having it. Old habits die hard and some live on. A very useful phrase to learn in Spanish is echar una cabezada which means “to take a nap.” A habit you may want to adopt when you regularly eat more than you can lift during the afternoon meal.

Then comes the merienda, or the afternoon snack. If you haven´t noticed already, the Spanish eat a lot, or at least they do in theory. We have already had four meals and it is not even six in the afternoon. The merienda isn´t too well defined and only serves as a designator for whatever you shove into your fat pie hole in the time between lunch ( la comida ) and whatever you wolf down during before-dinner drinks. I need to take a meal break in just the amount of time it takes me to describe what these people eat during the course of a day.

Tapas aren't a big part of the culture in this corner of Spain, but it´s not like Valencianos will say no when someone places a bit of food in front of them along side whatever it is that they have ordered to drink. I was actually quite disappointed when I learned when I first moved here that they don´t really have a big tapas culture here. After living here for a short period of time I can rarely even look at food during this time of day that is set aside for tapas in other parts of Spain. Eating four meals previously in the day tends to dampen my appetite.

Late in the afternoon comes la cena, or dinner. I say late in the afternoon but what I really mean is really late at night, at least as far as dinner is concerned, dinner for an American at least. The Spanish don´t stop calling this part of the day "afternoon," so en la tarde (in the afternoon) can mean twelve o´clock at night. They usually only say buenas noches when they are going to bed. The evening meal is usually of a lighter fare than in the afternoon, at least in their way of thinking. “¿Arroz en la noche?,” Valencianos will recoil in horror when you tell them that you ate rice for dinner, yet they will eat a loaf of bread with their "lighter meal" and think nothing of it. Their views on diet and nutrition are more ruled by tradition than science or logic so I wouldn't bother trying to tell them otherwise. Dinner usually begins at around 10:00 pm and on weekends as late as midnight. On a cooking show I saw a family sitting down at the table at almost 01:00 am.

Lock Down
Spanish people have a thing about doors, big heavy things capable of withstanding a siege. You first notice this in the historic sections of Spanish cities. It seems that most of Spain was built with some sort of defensive purpose in mind—even a lot of churches were built with security as a major concern. There are forts, castles, towers, and walls all over the country, giving testimony to a past rife with wars, invasions, and raids. Hannibal matched through this part of Spain, elephants and all, on his invasion of Italy. The Visigoths threw out the Vandals, the Moors defeated the Visigoths, the Moors were finally expelled by the Christians and through all of this violence, people needed good, solid doors. I mean, a door’s primary function is to keep people (and armies) out; if this wasn’t the case then castles wouldn’t even have doors, would they. They might have screen doors to keep the bugs out in the summer but not the heavy, steel reinforced entries found not only in castles but in modest Spanish farm homes. On the Iberian Peninsula, people are serious about their doors.

Spain hasn’t been invaded in a long time, unless you count the throngs of Scandinavian and British tourists who show up at the beaches each summer, or the present invasion of New Zealanders here for the America’s Cup, yet Spaniards insist on having tremendously sturdy doors. The door to my apartment has five hinges, each measuring about eight inches. The deadbolt locks in at the bottom, middle, and top. Each one with three bolts. The lock takes four key turns and pushes the bolts out more than an inch into the frame. It is steel reinforced all around. You could use one of those battering rams that they use on cop shows in the USA as a door knocker here. If someone on the inside doesn’t want you to get in, you aren’t coming in through the front door. Try a window or try again later.

This door fetish is part vestigial security concern formed by their bellicose past and part paranoia fueled by current myth and hyperbole. People here seem to have an almost irrational fear of thieves. This became apparent when I first bought my bicycle. I would guess that I have been warned about bike thieves at least 25 times; almost any time that bicycles are mentioned someone will comment on the rash of bike thefts plaguing the city. I was so freaked out at first that I would lock my bike when I left it on my balcony—and I live on the fifth floor! What was I afraid of? Ninja gypsies? People often chain their bikes with two, three, and even four different locks. Why not just booby-trap your parked bike with plastic explosives or build a moat around it?

I have heard so many horror stories about theft in Spain that the skill and audacity of thieves has taken on a mythical aspect. Thieves will cut out the bottom of your purse/ backpack/ gym bag/ pocket to steal your valuables. Thieves will pounce on your unattended bicycle like a pack of hyenas the moment you turn your back. Make sure you fully lock the door every time you leave the apartment. Pickpockets are everywhere. You think to yourself that it can’t all be true and then one day as you are walking through a crowded market, and just like that, you realize that someone has stolen your boxer shorts. Why didn’t you listen? You can bet that after the underwear-napping you, too, will be all about security.

I’m not suggesting that theft isn’t a problem but I hardly think that it warrants such eternal vigilance. Not only have I not been the victim of theft but I have had people go to extremes to return my property, like the time a guy ran me down because I didn’t take my money out of the ATM. I often leave my bike unlocked when I am able to keep an eye on it, just kind of fishing for bicycle thieves. I haven’t even had a nibble so far.

Travel guides for Spain almost always include warnings about theft. It’s like travelers all come from some idyllic wonderland where no one steals anything. It’s like people need to be warned that they need to use common sense. Why don’t they warn you to look both ways before crossing the street while you are on vacation? Remember, running with scissors can be dangerous in Spain! As for the Spanish and their doors, I think that they firmly believe sooner or later the invaders will return, whether they be pagan Vandals, Islamic Moors, or hoards of sun burnt British retirees. Make sure the door is locked before going to bed.

New Digs
All good things come to an end. That’s a really dumb statement that seems to have been around forever. You could say the same thing about bad things and average things. Everything comes to an end, at least everything observable. Someone probably got paid big bucks for coming up with that lightweight aphorism yet no one is going to pay me a dime to mock it. I just wanted my displeasure with this insipid phrase to be on the record before I say that I am going to miss living where I used to live. The landlord was going to use our apartment for an office so after nine months of security I was going to have to go out and find another place to live. I had three months to look.

I can’t imagine using classified ads to find an apartment to share in the U.S. It’s been many years since I have shared an apartment, and when I did, it was always with friends. Not only am I asking total strangers to take me into their homes, but I am doing it in a language I speak rather imperfectly. I finally got around to buying a cell phone which made things a lot easier. I bought a prepaid phone for 50€ like you see the little corner kid, drug dealers use in the brilliant HBO series The Wire. You just walk into a phone store, shell out the cash, and walk out with a number and a phone. No questions asked and none answered. I told the gal I bought it from that only drug dealers in the U.S.A. use prepaid phones, or “burners” as the kids call them on The Wire. In Europe they are very common and you can recharge them with extra minutes at just about every business in town. I’m sure that all of this talk about telephone technology will seem silly and quaint in only a year or so when everyone will have a phone implanted in their ears at birth.

Armed with my new cell phone and the internet, I started scouring the ads in earnest…again. There are probably at least 50 ads for apartments to share every day online here in Valencia. I was automatically excluded from many of them because they were looking for students or women. This still left a healthy crop to choose from and I started dialing and emailing in Spanish. It was a lot harder this time around even with the powerful tools of the internet (which I didn’t have at home last time), a cell phone, and much better language skills.

I came across an ad, complete with pictures, for a two bedroom apartment for rent for only 300€ so I sent an email in Spanish asking for details. In return I received a frantic email in fractured English from a man claiming that his wife had been transferred to Africa for a Christian mission and that he was living in Miami. They needed someone to watch their house who would take good care of it in their absence which was why they were asking well below the going rate. He asked me for some personal information. It wasn’t very personal nor compromising so I sent it along. I desperately needed a place to live and I needed it fast.

It was the next email when I was certain that it was a scam. He asked that I wire 900€, or rent for the first three months, via Western Union to Lagos, Nigeria and when he received the money he would send the keys and instructions. Instead of breaking off our new friendship at this point, I decided to play along. I was pretty much stuck to a computer most of the day looking for an apartment anyway. I may as well have some fun.

I told him that I would send the money directly and thanked him. I promised that his house would be in good hands and that I was even thinking of doing some improvements on it because I am sort of a handy guy like that. I also asked him if he wouldn’t mind if I just wired him an entire year’s rent at the beginning or 3,600€. At this point my Nigerian friend must have felt like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea and that he was about to land the biggest fish of his life. He probably went out and bought a new car using my email as collateral. He started getting a bit impatient with me in the emails when I still had not wired him the money. I asked him if he knew my brother who was the Minister of Finance in Nigeria, and that perhaps instead of sending him the money I could invest the money with my brother, the Nigerian Minister of Finance, and thus double, or perhaps triple his money. Evidently, he had not heard of that particular internet scam and promised that he would meet my brother, Minister of Finance for Nigeria, after I sent him the money, and could I send the damn money already. Isn’t it funny how money sometimes gets in the way of a friendship. I told him as much in our final email exchange.

And I kept looking. I probably looked at a dozen places this time around, all of which were either downright crappy or just dark and dreary dungeons. I couldn’t believe how many terrible apartment floor plans there are out there. Where I was living was incredibly light and airy. I looked at one new apartment that had only a single window to the outside while the others opened into a shaft running up the middle of the building. I checked out an apartment rented by two young guys that was under repairs and there was a heavy layer of dust on absolutely everything. It was 260€ a month with no additional charge for the black lung disease.

Sometimes I would talk to someone on the phone about a place and have them treat me like I was from another planet because of my accent. If people weren’t nice I didn’t let things go any further. I didn’t like the neighborhoods of many of the places I saw; they were all farther from the city center than where I was living. I became so discouraged that I considered moving to another city. I was looking at homelessness. In fact, I was beginning to get a good enough look at homelessness to be able to describe it to a police sketch artist.

I finally found a place to share with two younger Spanish women, neither of whom were Valenciano. I would miss the wonderful patio at my old flat but the new place was in a neighborhood that I didn't know very well before but would soon come to love. This place also had a great kitchen and we were a stone's throw from the local market. I had lucked out once again, both with the apartment and the roommates.

You Have to Know Your Place: Stereotyping the Illegal Immigrant Way (Me Included)
I was sitting in a café with three friends: a guy from Cameroon, a Romanian, and a gal from Central America. Across the street a group of Chinese workers were furiously working inside of a storefront. The renovations they were doing were fairly major as this site used to be an empty warehouse. They had installed huge windows and marble stairs with inset lights. Whatever they were building looked like it was going to be a pretty big affair.

I asked the others at the table if they knew what this new spot was going to be when they finished. My African friend said that it was going to be a “Buffet Libre or a Chinese buffet restaurant. I asked him how he knew this and he just shrugged his shoulders. He finally admitted that he didn’t know. “What else could it be? They’re Chinese,” was his follow up.

The Romanian guy said that it looked like it would be a variety store, or a chino as they are called here because almost all of these types of stores are run and owned by Chinese immigrants. It didn’t look like it was going to be a variety store. The windows and the marble stairs were a little too nice for a chino. I asked out loud if maybe it was going to be a fancy night club or a disco.

The girl from Central America immediately replied, “Oh no, the Chinese don’t run places like that.”

I guess that I was the only one at the table who hadn’t learned everyone’s place in contemporary Spanish society. After a few short months I was able to stereotype the different immigrant populations as well as my immigrant friends. I have been able to make a few observations so far. Valencia, like the rest of Spain, is quickly gaining a large immigrant population. My neighborhood of Ruzafa is home to a very large immigrant population and the businesses scream out the ethnic diversity. A Chinese clothing store stands next to a Moroccan halal butcher shop which is next to a Pakistani greengrocer next to a South American grocery store. There may even be a few Spanish-owned businesses in Ruzafa if you look around.

A Few Thoughts on China
I’ve never been to China and I don’t have any immediate plans to rectify this glaring hole in my first-hand knowledge of world geography. I do buy a lot of Chinese products so I feel myself to be a bit of an expert on Chinese manufacturing. After all, I live right across the street from a variety store that sells Chinese goods and is run by Chinese immigrants. What further qualifications do I need to hold forth on this subject? Why don’t you just sit back, listen, and learn.

I call these stores Chinese Wal-Marts because they are run by Chinese immigrants and they have an inventory equal to that of the American super-stores called Wal-Marts, even though these places are not much bigger than a two bedroom apartment. If there is something that you need for your home I would say that there is about a 99% chance of finding it at one of these variety stores. I am not exaggerating. Garden products, patio furniture, clothing, shoes, kitchenware, tools, bedding, cleaning products, toys, and electronic gear can all be found in aisle one. Need an adapter for your American appliance? Aisle two. How about a gasket for your stove top espresso maker? Aisle three. I am not exaggerating; these places really are amazing in the breadth of their inventory. The crazy part is that absolutely everything they sell is manufactured in China.

Just about everything they sell in these stores is also inexpensive. I have been fairly happy with the quality of these products but I have also bought stuff that is of the lowest possible quality imaginable. I bought a sewing kit the other day that had safety pins that were about as far from safe as you can get, they were the polar opposites of a safety pins; they were un-safety pins. I bought a bottle of something that you are supposed to use to clean your floors that smelled worse than the most polluted Yangtze River water which was probably what it was. At .75€, polluted Yangtze River water must be a big money-maker to some budding young capitalist in that country.

I bought a large beach towel that I will use for a tent the next time I go camping because the thing repels water better than gore-tex. I guess they don’t have beaches where this towel was made so they don’t realize that a beach towel is supposed to absorb water. I bought an ice cube tray which on the first use produced ice cubes laced with bits of plastic, as the tray seemed to dissolve when I put it in the freezer. There is a lot to be said for American product safety laws. If you don't agree with this I suggest you buy some “safety pins” manufactured in China.

Overall I would say that I am very satisfied with the products I have purchased from China, and even the crappy stuff was outrageously inexpensive. After a while you sort of get a feel for what you can safely purchase at the Chinese Wal-Marts and what you should look for somewhere else. I went to a chain grocery store near my house to buy new ice cube trays. They were still made in China but they probably had to pass through some sort of quality control before making it on to the shelves of the local Mercadona, and I probably had to shell out an extra .75€ or so for that privilege.

Logically, the Chinese own a lot of Chinese restaurants. They also seem to own quite a few bars and cafés around town as well as stores that sell inexpensive clothing for men and women. I was in one of these places the other day and I bought a couple of great bootleg national soccer jerseys (Argentina and Portugal) for 5€ each—they usually cost much more, at least in the U.S.

XXL, 100% Cotton Illiteracy: English T-Shirt Slogans
One thing that you notice when you travel outside the United States is that people almost everywhere wear t-shirts with something written in English. I’m way too lazy to look into this but I would guess that Americans invented the concept of turning humans into walking billboards by putting slogans and advertisement on t-shirts. The Hard Rock Café pretty much built their entire franchise on t-shirt sales. Their iconic logo was the T-shirt of choice for people all over the world. T-shirts are bumper stickers for people. T-shirts with some sort of slogan are a fact of life everywhere I have ever been.

The lingua franca of t-shirt slogans worldwide is definitely English. I don’t know why this is the case but I can offer up a few theories. English is probably studied as a second language more than any other language in the world. The Simpsons is dubbed into almost every language in the world but I think people just want to watch it in the original. There are probably other important reasons why people study English but none come to mind. So therefore, people who study English probably think that it’s cool to walk around with a t-shirt with something written in English splashed across the front, or back, or both. People who haven’t ever studied English also probably think it’s cool.

A lot of times I get the feeling that the people wearing these shirts haven’t the faintest idea of what they say, whether they have taken an English class or not. How else can you explain a 70 year old Greek woman with a t-shirt emblazoned with “Frankie Loves Hollywood?” I don’ think that there is a 15 year old kid on the planet who would be willing wear a t-shirt that says “True Love: Mom” if he knew what it meant, like the kid I saw last night. I wanted to punch him myself, or at least give him a wedgie. I once came across a little street urchin wearing a Harvard t-shirt and I thought, “That school needs to take better care of its alumni. A Harvard man shining shoes in Chihuahua, Mexico? That ain’t right."

You see lots of slogans that aren’t grammatical, don’t make any sense, or are just plain stupid. The first time that I noticed this phenomenon was in the mid 1980s when people in Europe wore t-shits that said “Relax” and “No Problem.” You would see dozens of these inane shirts every day if you were in a heavily touristed area. There doesn’t seem to be a presiding t-shirt slogan on the tourist trail these days, just lots of shirts with really dumb things written in English—always English. You almost never see t-shirts with something written in French, or Spanish, or Russian, or Arabic, or Chinese. I’m not sure that I can even tell the difference between Chinese or written Japanese but you don’t see either on a shirt.

I was shopping for clothes the other day in shop run by a Chinese family. All of the clothes they sell are manufactured in China (Valencia receives more cargo from China than any other port in Spain). I was looking at their selection of t-shirts when it dawned on me that all of the dumb t-shirts you see were probably manufactured in China. This would explain the sometimes fractured “Engrish” and the senseless slogans.

Lots of American kids get tattoos of Chinese characters without knowing a single thing about the language. For all they know, that Chinese character on their butt may say “Drink Coke.” They just get them because they think that they look cool. I don’t mean to sully the good name of tattoo artists—the most trusted professionals in body mutilations—but I don’t think that you can count on many of them in the United States to know the intricacies of Mandarin Chinese. One little extra line in that character for “Peace and Understanding” in Chinese will change it to “All Deliveries made in Rear.” You need to be careful, especially if you decide to travel to China with your new ink. I'm sure Chinese people laugh their asses off at the tattoos on American hipsters.

The people who pen English sayings on Chinese-made t-shirts are just like those tattoo artists. There is probably some Chinese kid who studied English for three years and now works at some Orwellian Ministry of Annoying T-shirt Slogans. His job is to sit around all day and think up English slogans. Who knows, maybe the kid has a sense of humor and is writing these dumb slogans on purpose. How else can you explain some of these things I have seen people wearing in Valencia?
Too Brown Maybe You Clean Your Lenses
Breakfast • Lunch • Happy Hour
God Save Everyone from Basic Clothes
And this one.
Kykase Stop
Challence
The Victoria is worth only
EXTREMELY
Huh?
Or this one worn by some middle aged dork:
Young Free Cool

Imagine if these were tattoos? Giving an old t-shirt to Goodwill is a hell of a lot easier than getting an unwanted (and ungrammatical) tattoo removed with laser surgery.

Maybe I will sit in one of the popular tourist spots in Valencia with a red, felt-tipped marker and correct all of the grammatical and syntactical errors that I see on people’s t-shirts. I could put frowning face stickers on the really egregious examples of poor English. Maybe airports can put in scanners in the security queues that spell and grammar check all passengers' t-shirts. I’m sure that the technology already exists. I don’t think that there are freedom of speech laws in any country on earth that would defend a t-shirt that says “I Eat Your Skin.” Taking these shirts away from people is for their own good. Instead of correcting their shirts perhaps it would be better to translate the slogans people wear into the language of the owner.

The Chinese have a reputation as hard workers in Spain. “Trabajar como un chino” to “work like a Chinese” makes me cringe but it is meant as a compliment. For all its faults, there is a lot to be said for political correctness. If you don't believe this, just try living with an almost complete lack of it. Another virtue of the Chinese, as far as native Spanish people are concerned, is that it is rare that you hear about a Chinese immigrant who gets arrested or is caught doing anything even vaguely antisocial in Spain. But although native Spaniards admire much about the Chinese, there remains a wide cultural gulf between the Chinese immigrant community and the locals. For the most part these immigrants have been in Spain for less than 20 years so full integration can't really be expected until there is a generation of Spanish-born children of these immigrants who grow up with the language and the culture.

The folks from the Indian subcontinent seem to have cornered the market on corner fruit and vegetable markets. Mostly Pakistani, these immigrants also run a lot of small grocery stores around Valencia. These are just about the only places to buy food items late at night when the markets and supermarkets have closed for the day. They are also a great place to buy spices as they import a lot of stuff that you won't find anywhere else such as curries, hot peppers, cardamom, bulk cumin, and other exotic fare from their corner of the world. At least it is exotic for Spain; at least it is for now. I would imagine that after a generation or two, Far East food will work its way into the diet of all Spaniards much like Seattleites can't seem to go three days without a bowl of Vietnamese phô or a plate of sushi.

The Pakistanis seem to be the communication moguls here as they own most of the locutorios or internet and telephone cafés. A lot of immigrants from all over call home from these businesses. You can see the calling rates listed for more countries than you thought existed on this planet. I frequent a locutorio near my apartment. The owner speaks Spanish with a bit of an accent but he is very integrated into Spanish life. I remember when I was very new to this neighborhood and he said hello to me one day when we passed in the street—a very Spanish thing to do. He has had a loyal customer ever since.

The sub-Saharan Africans seem to have a monopoly on bootleg DVDs to the point that a word has been coined in their honor. A bootleg DVD or CD is said to be top manta which refers to the Africans’ salesroom. Manta means blanket and these immigrants lay out their illegal merchandise on blankets in the street. This makes it easy for them to fold up shop and make a run for it if the cops decide to take an anti-business stance to this type of commerce. Top is borrowed from English and refers to something like “Top of the charts” and means any kind of popular music or movie, so Top manta means “top of the blanket.” I don’t think they have a word for “Intellectual Property” in Spanish as of this writing.

The Africans will also go ambulatory with their wares and you see them hawking stacks of the latest DVDs in bars and restaurants all over Valencia. I was at a café one day reading a book when I saw an older woman next to me looking through a stack of movies. She ended up buying four DVDs, one of which was a porno that from her lack of embarrassment may as well have been a copy of The Little Mermaid for her granddaughter. I’m sure it was respectable filth and not midget porn or a snuff flick, but still. I guess that I need to loosen up, I’m in Europe.

Besides a few students here for a semester, I haven’t come across any other estadounidenses, which is the proper term for us. I wouldn't suggest ever using that word because few non-Spanish speakers will know what you are saying. For as much grief as people give us for saying it, telling folks you are an americano is the easiest way to say it. I mean, no one from any other country in North or South America will say they are American so why shouldn't we get to use it? Until then I’m just having fun trying to keep track of everyone else. I certainly don’t know what is expected of American immigrants here in Spain, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. As soon as I figure out what I’m supposed to be doing I’ll start doing it.

As it turned out, the place being built was a Chinese restaurant or buffet libre. It's going to take a while for Spain to get beyond this initial stage of immigrant waves. Stereotyping can't really be helped in this early era of newcomers. I remember watching a TV drama that had a handsome young Spanish kid of Chinese ancestry. The actor spoke flawless Spanish and was portrayed in a very favorable light with no demeaning or exaggerated characteristics thought by many in Spain to be inherent in all Chinese people. It was a real shock for Spanish friends and a great leap forward to dispelling certain assumptions about this cultural group.

Spanish Soccer 101

Spanish Soccer 101

I was already a pretty big fan of soccer before I moved to Spain. A big reason I have followed the sport is because I was lucky enough to attend a Real Madrid match when I came to Spain for a visit a few years ago. The 2006 World Cup finals in Germany were extremely popular in Seattle where I was living at the time. I would go to a bar and watch the games as early as six in the morning among crowds as big, boisterous, and beer-fueled as anything you see on a Saturday night. I also knew that a little knowledge of the sport goes a long way as far as having something to talk about with strangers in a Spanish café or bar. More importantly, moving to Spain meant I had to give up being a baseball fan so I had to find something to fill the void in my life.

The Spanish first division, ominously referred to as "La Liga" here, contains 20 teams, with every large city in the country fielding at least one team in this competition. The second league is made up of 22 lesser clubs. Each year the bottom three squads in the first division are sent down to the second and the top three in the second are promoted. Valencia currently has two teams: Valencia CF and Levante. Valencia has been in the first division for most of its history while Levante bobs up and down.

The 20 First Division teams play each other two times, once at home and once away for a total of 40 games in the season. Teams are awarded three points for a win, one point for a tie, and nothing for a loss. The League champion is the team with the most points after the final game. If there is a tie at the end of the season the winner is decided on a goal differential. The odds against this are fairly staggering so it never happens, except my first season in Spain when Madrid was declared the winner on goals after the very last game of the year. Besides league play there is the internal league yearly competition called the Copa del Rey. Then there is the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Champions League tournament which pits the best European clubs against each other in an annual playoff.

The Spanish football season starts at the end August and ends sometime in May. There are usually international games in June, July and August, so I suppose that soccer is a yearlong sport. It’s kind of like our baseball, football, and basketball rolled into one super sport. It’s not that people here don’t take other sports seriously—basketball is very popular in Spain—it’s just that soccer has a special place in their hearts—probably where religion used to be before people here pretty much gave up on it. There aren’t many new cathedrals going up in Spain these days, now they build huge new sports stadiums. Teams in the Spanish Liga play one game a week, unless they play two games because of some other competition. Matches are on Sunday unless they are on Saturday. Extra games are on Tuesday or Thursdays, or any other day of the week. Football is as essential as oxygen for lots of people here so they need to breathe it in on a regular basis.

I remember on a visit to Spain some years ago I noticed that there was a soccer daily newspaper in Madrid devoted to Real Madrid, one of the most famous of the Spanish clubs. I thought that a daily paper dedicated to soccer was a bit excessive. How much news could there be if there are only one or two games a week for each team? I thought that a daily paper for soccer was excessive until I realized that there is a daily paper for soccer FOR EVERY TEAM! I’m sorry, was I shouting? Some teams have more than one newspaper devoted to them.

I like sports as much as the next slob but this just seemed a little crazy to me. At least it did at first. Now I realize that one daily newspaper for each club is just about enough, that is if you supplement this with the regular newspaper’s coverage of soccer. Some cities have two soccer dailies. Did I forget to mention that? Of course, you also have to watch the constant television broadcasts of soccer news. How else are you going to see a replay of that great goal last night? I guess that following scores and different European leagues on the internet just goes without saying. If you aren't doing this then you are living like an animal.

I am lucky enough to be living in a city that has a really good team. They have won the La Liga six times. They have won the Copa del Rey seven times. Valencia finished as the runners up in the Champions League in 2000 and 2001. After I arrived in Valencia they made it to the quarter finals of the Champions League in 2007 before finally bowing out to Chelsea. The following year Valencia was back in the Champions League playoffs along with three other Spanish teams: Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Sevilla. The next year Valencia was invited into the UEFA Cup (sort of a step below the Champions League) because they won the Spanish Copa del Rey. If this isn’t enough soccer worship for anyone’s taste you have to remember that every two years there is also the European Cup finals or the World Cup.

Just like in the United States, bars here are often heavily saturated with sports, if by sports you mean football, and if by saturated you mean that people just won’t shut up about it. Just like soccer in Spain takes on the roll of our three main sports of baseball, football and basketball, bars in Spain double as restaurants and coffee shops. Just like the Spanish football season lasts almost all year, people go to bars early in the morning until late at night. More than likely, the bar will have a television tuned to sports news or an actual game, if one is being played somewhere on the planet. The bar tops are littered with football newspapers and regular papers usually opened to the sports section.

I go to a bar at least once a day at the absolute minimum; I have to have one professional cup of coffee every afternoon. Quite often I go more than once a day depending on how much coffee, wine, beer, or food I decide to consume when I am out of the house. This is why I first decided to become fluent in Spanish football conversation. Talking about football is the great equalizer; it’s the great ice breaker, even if my Spanish language skills aren’t always up to the task. Talking about sports is sort of like the knucklehead’s version of Esperanto, the universal language. An offhand remark about football goes a long way in establishing my credentials as a local in the places I frequent. A casual reference to a player in the league who is currently tearing up the nets helps to gloss over any errors I make in grammar or diction.

It would be difficult to overstate just how seriously football is taken in Spain. I saw a halftime commercial during one game that showed a man in the shower. They showed his bare ass as he was washing up (It’s hard to believe Americans went ballistic over a woman’s breast). He gets out of the shower and slips, hitting his head really hard on the sink. They show him lifeless on the floor of the bathroom when suddenly his eyes open and he gets up. They cut to a caption that says, “This isn’t a good time to die,” and then you are reminded that there are only 14 days until the Barça-Real Madrid match was to be held. No one in the bar laughed at this commercial but me. Then I realized that maybe it wasn’t supposed to be funny and perhaps I should start taking my Spanish Professional League soccer a little more seriously. This same station was urged to pull another similar commercial that showed a man apparently dying in a traffic accident and then getting back on his feet as if nothing had happened. I remember they had television spots warning that the Real Madrid – Barcelona FC match was only 100 days away, 89 days away, and so on.

Europeans are almost always surprised to find an American interested in their sport. I tell them that things are changing in the U.S. And lots of people follow the sport. I read an account of a group of American fans behaving rather badly before one of the World Cup games in Germany back in 2006. A fan from another country said that was the way football fans are supposed to act and he had an increased respect for the Americans. I think we Americans can do hooliganism as good as the next country.

Som Campeons*
*(We are champions!) A text message I was sent in Valenciano after Spain defeated Germany to win the Eurocopa in June of 2008.

Pase lo Que Pase, España Siempre (Whatever happens, Spain Forever)
-From the start I thought that this motto for the Spanish national football team was rather defeatist.

By default I became a Spanish football fan the day I arrived here in Valencia a little over one and a half years ago. I adopted Valencia Club de Fútbol and the Spanish national team as my own, with all of the ups and downs that come with being a sports fan. While I have been satisfied with the modest success of Valencia CF, the Spanish national team had been on an absolute terror since I moved to Valencia. Spain won its qualifying group to enter the 2008 Eurocopa finals held in Switzerland and Austria. The Spanish team, known as La Selección, carries a heavy contingent of Valencia CF stars. Once in the tournament, held every four years between the World Cup, Spain managed to win easily all three of their games in the group stage, with Valencia CF forward, David Villa, scoring a hat trick in the first match against Russia. In the semi-final round Spain was paired with the current World Cup champions, Italy.

Spain had not defeated the Italian team in competitive international play in 88 years. The game ended in a 0-0 draw and neither team scored during the 30 minutes of extra time. It would go into penalty kicks in which the two teams alternate taking five kicks from the penalty mark. Whoever leads after five kicks wins, if it is still a draw, the first team to lead wins. Spain and Valencia CF have not had the best of luck when games end in penalties. In the 2000-2001 Champions League final, Valencia CF lost in penalty kicks to FC Bayern Munich, a bitter defeat still felt here. Spain lost to England on penalty kicks in the quarter-finals of the 1996 Eurocopa. In the 2002 World Cup, Spain lost to Korea on penalties in the quarter-finals (although they beat Ireland on penalties to get to that game). Italy, on the other hand, is known for coming out ahead in penalty shoot-outs and had beat France on penalties to win the 2006 World Cup title.

The Spanish have had many bitter defeats over the years and I don't think that any of my friends thought for a minute that Spain had a chance in the Eurocopa. I think they were too afraid to admit to any optimism, at least not out loud. When the game went into penalty kicks my Spanish friends became practically despondent. I reminded them that the Boston Red Sox baseball team finally won a World Series after 86 years.

Gianluigi Buffon, who plays for Juventus in the professional season, is considered by many to be the best in the world. Iker Casillas, the superstar goalkeeper for Real Madrid, is also thought to be one of the better players at this position. Buffon had blocked a penalty kick in Italy's game with Romania to keep their tournament hopes alive. If you were a betting type person the odds seemed stacked against Spain. In an earlier semi-final match the Croatian squad had come completely unraveled when it went into a penalty shoot-out with Turkey. You could see fear and resignation written all over the face of the first Croat player to make his attempt which he missed badly. David Villa was the first player to take a kick. He approached the ball with a confidence bordering on arrogance. He made his shot easily. In the end, Iker Casillas was able to save two goals to Buffon's one and Spain would move on to take on Russia in the semi-finals.

Spain had already trounced Russia 4-1 in the group stage but Russia looked like a completely different team coming off their victory over Holland, one of the heavy favorites to win it all. Not only did Spain beat Russia again but they gave them another hiding, 3-0. Now Spain had to play Germany in the final match to be held in Vienna. I had already mentioned that I was going to host the final at my place for all of the football hooligans in my circle. Sitting at a bar after Spain's victory over Russia, someone mentioned that we should drive to Madrid on Sunday to watch the final at the Plaza de Colón where tens of thousands of fans had been watching all the previous games. Big crowds aren't really my thing but I couldn't pass up an opportunity to see a bit Madrid again. Besides, I was just about the biggest Spanish supporter of all the people I have met here so far. I was also the most optimistic about their chances from the very beginning since I wasn't saddled with the years of heartbreak like the average Spanish fan.

Madrid Bound
The drive between Valencia and Madrid isn't the most spectacular three hours of driving, but the views seem to go on for thousands of square miles in some parts. There is the odd castle, the occasional village cathedral, and lots and lots of agriculture—mostly olive trees and vineyards, although it seems impossibly dry and hot for grapes. You definitely know that you are driving through Spain as this section of road looks like every travel poster you have ever seen for La Mancha. I got a big kick out of my friend's GPS system that talked to him in a rather sexy Spanish female voice. I wonder if they use the comforting voice of a woman so as not to offend the normal male's obdurate refusal to admit when we are lost. I wonder if she's single?

Through a friend's recommendation we stayed at Hostal Naranco on Calle de la Puebla 6, 2° near the Gran Vía metro. We paid 16€ each for two huge rooms with bathrooms. I have paid over 100€ for a similar room. I had never stayed in a hostel before and I just always thought that they were crappy and only patronized by junkies.

Evidently, this section of Madrid is a gay neighborhood. I didn't really notice. The night after the game, the comedy television news program Intermedio did interviews with gay dudes about who they thought was the best looking player on the Spanish team and one of the guys they spoke with was standing about a block from our hostel. “It's a small world, gay people are everywhere, get used to it,” I think is the message here.

But we weren't here for the room (or a tolerance workshop) so we ditched our stuff and started off towards the Plaza de Colón. We had been delayed by a horrific traffic jam just outside of Valencia so we arrived only about two and a half hours before the game. This meant that we only had time for a quick bite to eat while we jumped into the flow of people heading towards Plaza de Colón. The mob consisted of almost equal parts drunken boys screaming football chants and great-looking young women—and a few odd foreigners, one of whom was wearing his Spanish team jersey.

We got to the square an hour before the game and immediately decided that it would be a shitty spot to watch the match, that's if you could even get close enough to one of the big screens to see anything. The viewing spots were woefully inadequate to accommodate the huge crowds that had been showing up to watch all the games. There were no screens outside of the interior of the square where most of the fans were smashed together. We decided to fall back and find a bar nearby—easier said than done as this area is just about the least bar-friendly neighborhood I have ever seen in Spain. If you want to buy a Gucci bag or an Armani suit you are in luck, just don't try to buy a beer.

We finally found a place and it was more crowded, smoky, and suffocating that the Plaza. Two people in our group were steadfast in their desire to watch the game from the square so we headed back. Along the way we stopped into a completely overwhelmed convenience store that looked like it was being looted by people wearing Spanish national colors. The mob was actually well-behaved and the checkout lines were orderly and fast. The problem was there wasn't any cold beer. Nothing like a piss-warm beer on a hot summer evening, I always say. People weren't even waiting to get to the cash register before they consumed their purchases. I popped a warm beer and toasted the coming Spanish victory.

We muscled our way into the outer ring of the Square and I was able to see half of the screen from one direction and the other half on the opposite side. The game began with a huge roar from the crowd. It was on!

I got a kick out of everything people had brought to the square to eat and drink. Every sort of beer, wine, liquor combination was on hand. Lots of kids were drinking huge, one liter cups of sangria. The young guys standing right behind us had a bag of cheese doodles as big as a pillow. It looked like a comedy prop right out of Pee Wee's Playhouse. At one point they seemed to have tired of this snack option and when I turned around I saw that someone had stepped on it, ripping the bag open at the bottom. When I looked at it a bit later I noticed that a box of cheap sangria had turned over, mixing with the cheese doodles making a mess that would soon dwarf the Exxon Valdes oil spill. One of the guys in our group stepped in the goo and he looked every bit as pathetic as those poor, oil-drenched sea birds along the Alaska coast. The Brits call cheese doodles cheezy-what-its, which sounds pretty funny but not as funny as seeing a Brit's shoe completely covered in crappy sangria and cheezy-what-its.

From where we were standing our view of the screen was being blocked constantly by people waving flags or a girl getting up on someone's shoulders. This inspired improvisational chants from those whose views were being blocked. ¡Hijo de puta, que te caes por el culo! (Hey asshole, please fall on your ass). It was hilarious when the person on the receiving end of the chant finally realized they were the target. They would turn around and then meekly slide out of view. At one point two young guys climbed up on a hedge and completely blocked everyone's view in our section. They seemed resistant to the chants so I took it upon myself to wade on up and ask them to please get down.

I asked them very politely if they could move. They basically told me to fuck off and this was their spot. Without losing my temper I explained that they were blocking the view of about 100 people behind them yet they still held their ground, or perch, on the hedge. One of them began to raise his voice to me and I called him an asshole (gilipolla). I told them that I was going back to where I was standing and if I had to come back to tell them to get down, I wouldn't be talking any more, if they knew what I meant. I think they did. Sometimes people just need someone to remind them of their manners. I started heading back to my group and they got down after a short, face-saving interval. I was the hero of the mob. That is until Torres scored his brilliant, run-completely-around-your-defender-and beat-Lehman-to-the-ball goal.

The crowd reacted like no other crowd I have ever been a part of. Everyone who could shook up a beer and sprayed it into the air which I thought was really immature and inconsiderate until I did it myself, and then I thought it was pretty funny. Everyone was drenched and loving it. Torres, who had a marvelous year at Liverpool scoring 29 goals, had yet to really come alive in this Eurocopa. I had been telling everyone to watch out for him because he was going to bust loose in this final. Luckily, he didn't need to bust loose. Spain was able to keep Germany scoreless and his one goal was enough. In six games Spain had only been scored on twice. While Spain's Iker Casillas is now considered the best goalkeeper in the game, he could have sat in a lawn chair for most of the Eurocopa because the rest of the Spanish defense was absolutely stifling.

The after-game revelry was riotous spontaneity, pure and simple. If there was a fountain, people swan in it; if there was a statue, people climbed it; if there was a bar, people entered, used the bathroom, ordered a quick shot, and left (OK, at least we did that a couple of times). Our group had an informal competition to see who could instigate the most football chants among the mob. My deep tenor chant of EEEEEE-KEEER (Iker Casilllas) never failed to get people going. A popular chant in the mob was “Yo soy español, español, español (I am Spanish).” I didn't really feel comfortable with that one as my citizenship status is merely honorary at this point. Chanting that I am an illegal alien who happens to be a fanatic supporter of the Spanish national squad just doesn't have a nice ring to it in Spanish.

Madrid will probably never be this insane ever again, even when they win the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. What happened in Madrid was the release of several decades of pessimism, defeatism, and self-doubt. What brought Spain out of this funk was a team of players too young to have any doubt about their abilities. Spanish fans maintained a sense of very guarded optimism after the first victory in the Eurocopa. Spain had disappointed too many times in the past for people to get too carried away. The players were another story. From the start they displayed a sense of confidence and belief in the team that carried them all the way to the end, and perhaps further if you are looking at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Of Threats and Lessons Learned
People in Spain are very passionate about soccer. This seems like a rather cliché observation coming from an American who has spent so little time in this country. It seems like something someone would say who was seriously lacking in creativity and original thought. I’m saying it not because I lack creativity or original ideas; I’m saying it as a defense against charges that I threatened an 11 year old boy with violence while watching a football match on television. I have a few other remarks for the jury, or the judge, or whoever you speak to in a Spanish courtroom (I hope I never need to learn this the hard way).

I realize that it is perfectly acceptable in Spain to bring your children to a bar. The Spanish make little distinction between bars and restaurants; they are both places for everyone to enjoy. I realize that it is not unusual for young children to stay up to watch a soccer match on television that begins at 10:00 p.m. on a school night (At least I believe that it is a school night. You never know here with the hundreds of holidays on the calendar). I don’t mind if an 11 year old boy watching a match with his father expresses a lot of opinions about the players, even when most of these opinions are unfavorable and often insulting, at least to me. With all of this understood, there are still rules to follow when you watch a match in a public place and the sooner this little loudmouth learns these rules the better.

The game was between Real Madrid and Betis (a team from Sevilla). I have noticed that most people in Valencia are Real Madrid fans; at least they are when our own club isn’t playing. Tonight, in this bar, everyone seemed to be rooting for Madrid, including the opinionated juvenile delinquent up too late on a probable school night but who can tell in Spain where people take off work with some of the flimsiest excuses you are ever going to hear. The youth in question showed his support in a sort of New York manner: by criticizing every player on the Real Madrid squad: Guti is slow, Casillas is a lousy goalkeeper, Sergio Ramos can’t pass, and on and on. Everyone has a right to their own opinion. Spain is a free country, at least I think that it is. Is Spain a free country? We say it all the time in America but I’m not really sure exactly what that even means.

I do know that there are limits to freedom. I don’t think that it is acceptable behavior in any bar in Spain to insult one of the best players for the Spanish national team and the fulltime ace forward for Real Madrid, Raul. It’s just not done. You don’t scream “fire” in a crowded theater and you don’t talk trash about Raul. This is why I told the little punk next to me that he was going to get a serious beating if he ever got down to insulting Raul in his inventory of criticism for the Real Madrid team. His father seemed to agree with me as he threw his hands in the air in a gesture that means, “What are you gonna do?” This gesture translates into any language. I don’t know what you’re going to do, dad, but I’m going to give your kid a vicious beating if he starts in on Raul. I’d be doing it for his own good. I wouldn’t expect that a Canadian kid would have lived to see his first zit if he talked smack about Wayne Gretzky, Muslim kids don’t mock the Prophet, and this little runt needed to learn that in Spain, if you have anything bad to say about Raul, you keep it to yourself. Everyone at the bar seemed to agree with me on this.

I don’t think any Spanish court would convict me on this crime of threatening a minor, especially since Raul scored the first goal of the game on a penalty kick.

A Beginner's Guide to Las Fallas de Valencia

A Beginner's Guide to Las Fallas de Valencia

Before you attend Les Falles de València (that isn’t a typo, it’s in Valenciano this time instead of Spanish) you need to ask yourself a few questions. Are you agoraphobic? Afraid of crowds? Bothered by loud explosions? Adverse to overeating? Reluctant to stay out until dawn wandering the streets from one huge block party (called verbenas) to the next? These are all legitimate excuses for avoiding Valencia during Las Fallas (pronounced fa-yas), the city’s most important festival of the year and the biggest celebration I have ever witnessed first-hand.

I usually mock lists about places you must see or things you have to do; as if life can be reduced to a check-list and when you cross off that last item you can throw yourself on a sword or something. I remember seeing an article in a men's magazine a few years back that had a list of 60 things every man must do in his life written compiled by famous people. About 50 of the things on the list you could scratch off with a credit card and about two weeks of vacation time. Silly, amusement park stuff like driving an Indy car, rafting the Grand Canyon, drinking an expensive wine, going to the Final Four (honestly, a basketball tournament?), having a threesome (This was from a best-selling writer. Thanks for your wisdom.), playing golf at the Old Course in Scotland (Play Golf? Over my dead body.) and many more fatuous entries.

There were a few things on the list that I thought were sensible and noble aspirations for any man or woman: Serve your country (Chuck Yeager—I knew there was a reason I liked him), learn a foreign language, learn a martial art, plant a tree (Ted Nugent’s selection—you surprise me sometimes, Ted. You freaking freak.), get in amazing shape, or simply give something back to your community (NBA player Dikembe Mutombo). For the most part the article amounted to little more than a shopping list. So I'm not about to tell anyone that Fallas is something they must see.

No, I have never really been a big fan of events of almost any sort, preferring to avoid the crowds and the exaggerated claims of the organizers and friends who insist that I simply must see this or that. I didn’t have much choice in this matter seeing how—in a fairly literal manner—I lived right in the middle of Las Fallas. I can safely say that Las Fallas is something that you simply have to see to believe, although I will stop short of saying that you must see it. However, if you have a friend who is still living in Valencia next year and you don’t get over here for Las Fallas, you are a truly world-class fool.

If you believe the popular myths here in Valencia, it all started back in the Middle Ages when carpenters used to hang up planks of wood called parots in the winter to support their candles when they were working. At the onset of spring these pieces of wood would be burned, as a way of celebrating the end of the dark winter working days and to welcome the spring equinox. After a while, they began to put clothing on these scraps of wood, and then people started to make parodies of well-known local personalities. These became the forerunners of what are now known as fallas, the enormous cardboard, wood, polyurethane, Styrofoam, cork, plaster and paper maché figures that identify the festival today. Somewhere back in time, the Catholic Church decided to get involved and pretty much kidnap the festival by making it coincide with the celebration of the festival of Saint Josep, the patron saint of the carpenters. I don't like to cite history because it's mostly unreliable and anecdotal and it makes me feel like a plagiarist.

Las Fallas is a huge event taking weeks and weeks to set up, and the official program marks the beginning with a very inauspicious crowning ceremony for the hostess of the festival. The real fun begins on March 15 and lasts until the 19th but there are many events leading up to the opening day. Just setting up the infrastructure around town to prepare for Fallas seems to put everyone in the mood for the crazy party to come. Of everyone that I know in who lives Valencia, whether they are locals, foreigners, or Spaniards transplanted from other parts of the country, people either seem to love Fallas of hate it. I'm still in the “love it” camp.

The Mascletà: A Celebration of Crowds and Noise
The craziest thing about Valencia’s Fallas festival, at least for this outsider, is the daily ritual of the Mascletà. This is a daytime percussion fireworks display that happens every afternoon during Fallas beginning precisely at 2 p.m. and lasting only a couple of minutes. They begin on March 1st. They are held at the Plaza del Ayuntamiento and every single day there are tens of thousands of people who show up to have their collective senses of hearing assaulted and they all do it with great pleasure. This is during the middle of the afternoon so there are few rockets lighting up the night sky; there’s just lots of really loud explosions. The louder the better as far as the locals are concerned. The craziest part about the Mascletà is that I have grown to love it as well. I make try to make it down to the plaza every single day for my dose of noise. You get sort of addicted to the crowds and noise like you get addicted to eating spicy foods; it hurts a little at first and then it's fun.

Valencianos joke that the Mascletà is the only thing in town that is always on time. Indeed, you can set your watch to the warning rocket that is sent up ten minutes prior to the main show. The square starts filling up more than an hour before the blast off as people jockey for the best places to hear the explosions. There is a big area in the middle of the square with a 20 foot fence around it where they set off all of the rockets. Anywhere close by is considered a valued piece of real-estate. On the most popular days there can be as many as 100,000 spectators on hand, all for a bunch of explosions that last less than ten minutes.

How loud is it? Newcomers are cautioned to keep their mouths open during the explosions as this is supposed to keep your ear canals open so that you won’t burst an eardrum. I’m no ear, nose, and throat specialist but I figure it’s better to be safe than deaf. I look up at the rockets in slack-jawed marvel. I do know for a fact that the explosions are so powerful that you can feel the sound waves vibrating your clothing. It’s almost like getting a massage if you are standing close enough to the action. At the end of each show there is a tremendous flourish and the noise is so devastating that I can’t help but to burst out in crazed laughter every time that I go. I can’t explain it but there is something joyous in being completely overwhelmed by the thunderous explosions. It's not uncommon to see people crying with tears of joy. Not me, mind you, but other people.

It all ends incredibly abruptly and there is a huge ovation from the mob. Everyone almost immediately thereafter does an about-face and goes on to do whatever it is they are going to do. For most Valencianos this is when they have their big, midday meal so getting a table in a restaurant is like being in a 100 meter dash with 100,000 hungry Spaniards.

The best thing about the Mascletà is that it adds a lot of life to an already very vibrant city. There is an electricity generated by crowds of people. Crowds aren’t in any shortage during Fallas. The whole festival is more or less predicated on the assumption that there will be tremendous crowds everywhere in Valencia during these first few weeks of March. The Mascletà is sort of the daily christening of the festival but instead of breaking a bottle of champagne they set off a few thousand pounds of explosives.

Las Fallas
The festival revolves around the construction of large, cartoon-like satirical structures called fallas. The themes of the fallas are supposed to be critical in nature and often address issues like government corruption, waiting lists for hospital stays, local politicians, and a favorite my first year in Valencia, the money being spent to host the America’s Cup sailboat races. Each neighborhood builds its own falla which vary in size from modest little ones that are about the size of a mini-van, to enormous structures six stories high. The fallas are the center of each neighborhood’s celebration and the parties surrounding them also vary in size and intensity. The size of the falla does not dictate the size of the block party hosted by the neighborhood, however. My block had a modest falla depicting the female mayor of Valencia but the four nights of block parties were completely outrageous. This street, loaded with night clubs, has a reputation for heavy nightlife.

The fallas really do need to be seen because photographs do them no justice. It is impossible to get a sense of the scale of some of these creations from pictures because they are jammed into narrow streets or tiny plazas. Although they are all different, they all adhere to pastel colors and use the same materials; they are variations on a theme. By the evening of March 15th all of the structures must be finished and ready for judging. From this point on, hordes of people wander the streets admiring the works and taking pictures. I suggest you do this on a bicycle in order to cover more ground, at least if you start out early in the morning. By about noon it is impossible to get around in the city center on a bike as there are hoards of pedestrians. There are something like 800 fallas in all as each casal faller, or community, constructs a children's falla and a larger one.

The parodies brought out in the fallas are mostly inside jokes. I have looked at hundreds and hundreds of fallas and only once in a while do I truly understand their meaning. First of all, the inscriptions are written in a rather poetic Valenciano and they usually deal with local politics. It would probably takes years and years of residency to begin to understand the often subtle nature of the jokes built into the fallas, not that understanding them is essential to enjoying their beauty and creativity.

Els Castells
Things really start to heat up on the evening of the 15th. Each evening at 01:00 am (or is it 01:30?) for four nights there are fireworks displays set off from the center of the Turia Gardens, the main park which runs from one end of the city to the other. I have never been a big fan of fireworks but I have to say that these are very impressive. The most impressive thing is the huge crowds that fill the park for miles up and down the empty river bed that. Up to 1,000,000 spectators make their way towards the park to find a good vantage point to see the show.

These fireworks are called “castells” in Valenciano or “castles” in English. Valencianos will also use the Spanish “castillo” to refer to the fireworks, although other Spanish speakers call them “fuegos atificiales.” And Valencianos do like their fireworks. Both at the mascletà and at the castell Valencianos expect to be assaulted by light and noise

Verbenas: Block Parties
After the final flourish of the fireworks display (and it better be huge), the crowds descend upon their respective street parties which last (at least officially) until 4 a.m. These can range from modest affairs that look like a family cookout to DJ dance parties to enormous blow-outs with multiple sound stages for live music performances. Take your pick because there are hundreds of them going on simultaneously throughout the city and everyone is invited.

Part Bin Laden, Part Bart Simpson
There have been at least five processions (pasacalles) that have passed below my window in just the last half hour and more are coming. Each procession has its own band and is made up of Falleras, people dressed in traditional Valencia clothing of the Fallas. There have also been about a thousand explosions—both big and ear-shattering—in the last 30 minutes. One of my favorite things about Fallas is seeing all of the little kids dressed up for the event. Some are all decked out in colorful and elaborate traditional clothing that can cost hundreds and hundreds of Euros, others wear a traditional pañuelo, or handkerchief, and a smock. The kids are really cute but I can’t forget that they are also the enemy.

Yes, I am scared to death of the kids during Fallas because they are given carte blanche to blow the crap out of everything. Even the smallest of children are armed with little caps that explode when thrown. Rug rats in the 8-12 year range are outright terrorists during Fallas and should be avoided whenever possible. They are armed to the teeth with fireworks. If I see a group of little snot-nosed punks on a street corner during the festival, I will cross the street quicker than if I saw a group of Crips and Bloods having a shoot-out.

I was hanging out at one of my favorite bars in the neighborhood called La Flor de Ruzafa watching as they were constructing the Falla in the middle of the street. The Fallas are made of wood, Styrofoam, and beer, evidently. I had a great view of the whole process as I stood at the walk-up window. There was also a group of little kids lighting off firecrackers. I guess that is all part of the atmosphere. I felt like I was at a cross between the Carnival in Rio and the Green Line in Beirut.

The little terrorists must have run out of firecrackers because they stopped and I doubt it was because they got bored of blowing up shit, I know I wouldn't if I were their age. I wasn’t allowed to so much as light a match as a kid, let alone play with firecrackers. I don’t know if I am more annoyed by the noise or more consumed by jealously because these little kids get to do things I could have only dreamed about at their age. Firecrackers weren’t even legal where I lived so even if my parents weren’t worried about me blowing off a vital part of my body, I probably couldn’t have scored any explosives. The little, pre-adolescent al Qaeda kids were kicking around near the bar and the Falla construction site looking for something to do. This was at about 2 a.m., which during Fallas is a perfectly normal time for kids to be out, unsupervised, in the street.

I was talked into playing futbolín (foosball) with my sworn enemies. I got paired up with the leader of their little terrorist cell. It turned out the young Bin Laden and I dominated the table for quite some time until the others made us break up our winning team. The good news is that bars stay open really, really late during the festival so I didn’t have to choose between futbolín and last call.

Despertà The Wake Up
Getting in past four in the morning shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll just shut the blinds in my bedroom making it pitch black and get seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. Another tradition in Las Fallas is that no one is supposed to sleep…ever! At 7 a.m. Friday they do something called the despertà, or wake-up call in English, or assholes with fireworks is also an acceptable translation. People walk through the streets lighting off incredibly loud firecrackers. In fact, firecrackers are one of the overriding themes of the festival and you will be assaulted, day and night, by explosions both small and deafening during the entire festival. If you are lucky you will only have to sleep through firecrackers, if you aren't lucky a live brass band will make its way down your street bright and early.

Because of the noise, sleeping is all but impossible so you may as well just get up, go outside, and enjoy the fine weather. Every morning the city looks as if it was destroyed the night before. The little courtyard park outside my door was the setting for a party for hundreds of people the night before and is now filled with empty bottles, plastic cups, and every other item needed for an all-night bash. There is a wall around the Aragon Metro station that is about chest high, just the right height for a bar. The was a huge block party right across the street and the morning after the first party the wall was completely covered with the detritus from the thousands of people who came to see a rock group called Pato Daniel perform. The city looks as hung-over as you feel. You go out and get a cup of coffee or two while the cleaning crew army arrives to scour the neighborhood from top to bottom. By 11 am you are ready to start all over again and so is Valencia.

Everywhere at Once
Because Las Fallas is broken down very democratically into dozens and dozens of local celebrations, it is impossible to see everything that is worth seeing. Everywhere you go there are parades and processions, music and dancing, food and beverages, and crowds. I was standing in line at the Mercado de Algirós, minding my own business when a procession of men and women in traditional garb marched by accompanied by a brass band. Something you don’t see every day—except during Las Fallas.

You can make it to most of the main events if you hurry. You should probably make it to the flower procession in the Plaza de la Virgen in which women in traditional Valencian dress bring in wreaths of flowers that are used to create a five story depiction of the Madonna and child.

Don’t you people have homes?
Valencia’s population more than doubles in size during Las Fallas with the majority of the tourists coming from Japan, followed closely by Britain and Italy. The hotels are booked far in advance but from all of the people on the streets at all hours of the day you wonder if anyone actually spends any time in their hotel room. The headline in one of the local newspapers asked, “¿Nadie tiene casa?” This loosely translates as, “Don’t you people have homes?” For the last four days of the festival all automobile traffic is banned in the center historic district of town. Even without cars I had to walk my bicycle through the huge crowds flowing through the streets like a swift current.

The trains that service the surrounding areas of Valencia, called cercanías, are full to the point of bursting, causing breakdowns and delays. The same is true for the subway and bus systems. I had to take the metro at 6 a.m. one morning and I’ve never been on a train with more people before, and never with so many people drunk or hung-over—but to their credit they all seemed happy.

Eat, Drink, and then Drink Some More
The traditional thing to do in Valencia, and especially during Fallas, is to drink a glass of horchata, a smooth milkshake made from tiger nuts (I’ve never heard of them either). There are horchata stands everywhere and usually right next to a stand selling buñuelos and churros which are fried pastries covered with sugar. These stands all pop up like mushrooms during the festival and then promptly disappear, probably off to find another celebration in another city. I wish they were around all year. With their brilliant neon lights they look more like garish carnival rides than food stands.

Almost all of the block parties have their own concession stands which sell food and drink but at rather inflated prices. In spite of the high prices there never seem to be enough places selling drinks, especially the hour or so before the nightly fireworks. Everyone gets a cocktail and heads towards the park. One popular drink that I noticed was a big seller all over town was the cubalitro which is a play on words for Cuba libre which is a rum and coke but in the super-size liter variety. When you order the bartender will ask you when to stop pouring the rum. I wasn’t paying attention when I bought one and the gal put in so much rum that I didn’t know if she was being flirtatious or it was an assassination attempt.

Most of the younger kids just bring their own booze and mixers to the block parties. They set up little mini bars close to the action and avoid the high prices and waiting in line. For all of the alcohol that is consumed you don’t seem to notice many intoxicated people, at least not obnoxiously drunk, but I didn’t look in any mirrors when I was out. During the 2009 Fallas festival there were 72 arrests for drunk driving which seems incredibly few considering how the city is literally awash in alcohol. Maybe the police were busy in other matters and those 72 arrests were just the people who turned themselves in for driving while intoxicated.

La Cremà: Now that’s what I call an exit!
I have mocked the phrase, “All good things come to an end,” but I will say that some good things come to a better end than others. The last official act of Las Fallas is the burning of all of these beautiful creations that have been the object of admiration these past five days or so. This is called the Cremà in Valenciano. It seems almost tragic to commit these masterpieces to the torch. There was a picture in the paper of a group of young girls in their Fallas costumes all crying as their beloved falla went up in a tower of fire. It also seems like an incredibly fitting way to close this wild celebration. What a better way to mark the end of the festival than to reduce the objects of the celebration to ashes?

I was able to watch the demise of my neighborhood’s falla from the comfort of my apartment. It wasn’t until almost 1 a.m. on the final evening when it began with an impressive fireworks display made even more impressive by the fact that my street is a claustrophobic narrow canyon. The falla is doused with lighter fluid and a string of fireworks is then lit which acts as a fuse. Soon the depiction of the mayor of Valencia was engulfed in flames and a huge billow of smoke made the clear night completely black. I was thankful that I was watching from a closed window in my back bedroom.

You’ll have to speak up, I live in Valencia
The locals go way overboard when it comes to firecrackers during the Fallas festival. There are explosions, big and small, all day and all night. They recently changed the law, under European Union pressure, to limit the sale of firecrackers to kids over 12 years old—not that anyone cares what the law says. You see kids of all ages setting off firecrackers and other explosive devices on every street corner. It’s probably a little like living in Baghdad. I’m thinking about buying an AK47 to shoot off in what I call a Gaza salute. I think that you have to be at least 15 to shoot off an AK47.

Perhaps I will hold out for a rocket propelled grenade launcher as I don’t want to be out-done by any of the little brats, some of whom are packing some pretty serious explosives. My motto has always been, “Fight fire with fire...and then some.” Although I can find no moral reasons against it, there are probably some legal restrictions against actually shooting the little terrorists who set off fireworks all day long in the courtyard under my balcony starting at about 9 a.m. after I’ve been out practically all night. It’s not like I’d be shooting to kill; I just want to shoot the firecrackers out of their little, elfin hands.

It just seems like a recipe for disaster to allow young kids to shoot off explosives with no adult supervision. I wasn’t even allowed to light a match as a kid, let alone play with something perfectly capable of blowing something else up. It just isn’t fair. I suppose that I should be grateful because I was crazy enough as a child that if I had the license to kill like these little punks, I’m sure that I’d be short a finger or a major appendage or two. Perhaps this loss of little fingers explains why the Spanish type slower and buy fewer rings than all other Europeans. It’s true.

I half expect to see infants in strollers throwing firecrackers as they do tend to start young here. I’m rather gun-shy of these little half-pint hoodlums. It’s not like I’m afraid of a single kid but there are thousands of them out in the streets during Fallas. I wisely keep my mouth shut but I just want to scream out from my balcony, “Yo, al Qaeda. Go watch cartoons and give the illegal immigrants a break." Don’t they have video games in Spain? Firecrackers have even usurped soccer for the attention of the rug rats. I have seen kids throwing firecrackers while kicking a ball around but I haven’t seen anyone playing soccer without an explosive accompaniment since Fallas began.

I guess the lack of sleep and the constant bombardment have made me a little grumpy. I tried wearing earplugs which didn’t help. I started listening to loud rock music through my headphones. Self-induced deafness is one way to combat the noise but I will probably just tough this out and deal with being shell-shocked.

The Hangover
It is absolutely amazing to me that there isn’t a complete breakdown in the social order with massive crowds intersecting with a seemingly endless supply of alcohol. In fact, there were only 124 arrests during the celebrations in 2009. There are virtually no restrictions on drinking in public and about the only problem you may notice is that there aren’t nearly enough public restrooms to go around. The city only provided 350 port-o-pots with individual street parties supplying another 250—not very many considering that a million visitors come very year, not to mention the other million residents of Valencia.

One small example of the anti-establishment mayhem that goes on during Fallas happened on the last night when we were waiting for one of the big Fallas to burn in the Ruzafa neighborhood. We arrived a bit early to stake out our place and there were already quite a few people waiting. There was a fire ladder truck on hand as there are at all of the larger Fallas. There weren’t any firemen in sight and a crowd had descended on the truck and was using is as a viewing stand. There were empty beer and wine bottles covering the truck and little kids were climbing all over it. I found this to be hilarious but the Spaniards didn’t think anything of it. When the firemen were ready to take back control of their vehicle they weren’t even jerks about it. They just politely asked everyone to get down and they pulled the truck into position in front of the burning structure.

The whole point of the level of intensity with which Valencianos celebrate Fallas is that when it is finally finished everyone is completely relieved that it is over. It is almost impossible to have any regrets, at least if you were going along with the program over overindulgence. The day after the final night of festivities you wake up to a completely changed city. No more fireworks, no more all-night parties, goodbye rivers of booze, adios stuffing yourself on buñuelos, it’s back to the real world again and you have never been so glad to return. One more day of Fallas just may have killed you. It was fun while it lasted but one more day of fun would be way too much.

The cleanup begins even as the last embers of the Fallas have been extinguished. During the entire length of the festival there is an army of city workers cleaning up after each night of revelry. Some 1,300 workers scour the streets day in, day out picking up something like 7,500 tons of trash. It takes a few days to clean everything up and take down all of the lights and other infrastructure. This is about the same amount of time it will take you to recover and finally feel rested after a couple weeks of anarchy.

Summer

Veraneando - Summering

There are plenty of reasons to visit the Mediterranean during the other months of the year but absolutely no excuses for missing summer. The mix of great weather, spectacular views, diverse cultures, amazing food, endless beaches (The beaches are topless? Really? I never noticed.), laid-back lifestyle, and the beautiful sea itself make it a paradise for tourists and residents. Summer is usually a full five months of the year, from May to the end of September, at least. My summers in Greece spoiled this season for me ever since. I have had lots of great summers everywhere that I have lived but the Mediterranean has always been the standard to judge all of the others.

Holgazanear (intransitive verb) to idle, to laze about/around, to loaf
The infinitive form of Spanish verbs end in er, ar, or ir. I recently learned that you can use an infinitive in Spanish to answer a question. So if someone were to ask me what I've been doing this month of July I could reply with:
-Holgazanear.
What else am I supposed to do? It's July in Spain and not just Spain but the endless beaches part of Spain, the part of Spain where other people in Spain go to goof off. Along this entire coast you can't spit without hitting a topless beauty…or a fat, naked, 60 year old foreign tourist. Of course I'm screwing off, there is nothing else to do. I'm no history expert but I'll bet every battle the Spanish have ever lost took place in July when at least half of their army was taking a trip to the beach with their families and the other half was working in the family café trying to keep enough beer cold and sardines on the grill to serve the summer hordes.

One of the coolest things about Valencia is that you can take the subway to the beautiful city beach called La Malvarrosa. There aren't many cities in the world that you can say that about. I live on the line that serves the beach so I see a lot of people either going or coming. My favorite sight is the stuff that parents pack to entertain their little kids when they spend the day on the water. Pails, shovels, watering cans, sailboats, and, of course, balls are part of what the beach caravans have in tow on the Valencia metro. This is one aspect of Spanish life that is exactly the same as it is in America: kids all use the same paraphernalia when they play at the beach. The kids in America and Spain are even in agreement about the soccer balls as more American children now play this sport than play football or baseball.

Many Valencianos drive to the beaches south of town and for this ten minute expedition families bring more baggage than a Spice Route camel caravan. Chairs, tables, umbrellas, blankets, volleyball nets, rackets, and all of the kid junk listed earlier. It's hard to imagine that all of this stuff fits into the little cars people drive—maybe they make two or three trips. Goofing off requires a lot of equipment if you are doing it right.

If you can find a restaurant that is actually open in July it will be filled to capacity, at least during the hours when Spanish people eat, which seem to get later and later as the summer moves along its trajectory. Lunch is still going strong at an hour when many American early bird specialists are already packing up their leftovers in doggie bags. The crowds wash in and out of the beach cafés like the tides. If you were to take a water sample of those tides, the results would come back as coffee, Coca Cola, red wine, and beer. It probably takes at least one nuclear reactor just to power all of the espresso machines working furiously along the coast. I would rather suffer the consequences of a dozen reactor core meltdowns than risk having a few million Spanish people go without coffee for a single afternoon.

I'm pretty sure that they still print newspapers in July, and there is probably news on television, but maybe if we just ignore it the real world will go away—it can at least wait until September. I'm too caught up in the trashy Spanish novel I'm reading to bother with the newspapers, except to read the Calvin and Hobbes comic in the local paper, Levante. Even soccer takes a break in July so there's no reason to read the sports.

Thank God that in the middle of all of this hustle and bustle I have time to take a nap. These aren't my usual little power naps of ten to fifteen minutes, these are howling one hour affairs so intense that I don't know what day it is when I wake up (not that I really knew what day it was when I first laid down, but still). I wake up semi-paralyzed and semi-conscious and I check to make sure I didn't lose anything to some international group of organ thieves—not that anyone who knew any better would want anything coming out of this burnt-out old carcass. I use the slobber on my chin to fix my bed-head hair and then head down to the café for a coffee.

The café is full again and I am beginning to wonder if all of these customers have been evicted. It's hard to imagine they have homes when they spend 10 hours a day at this joint. I'm sure they think the same about me and I don't even bother changing clothes from day to day. I stick with flip-flops, surf trunks, and the soccer jersey du jour—I speak Spanish like Tarzan so I may as well look the part. I haven't worn shoes in months and can someone please explain to me again the purpose of socks? I don't know how much longer I can keep going at this frantic pace. Something has got to give and I hope it isn't the seam in the butt of my surf trunks from all of the fried squid I've been putting away.

I have to be honest; I'm exhausted. Sometimes at 8:30 a.m. I'm ready to go back to bed for an hour, maybe two, three at the very most. I don't know if I should be worried but my blood pressure is so low that the readings begin with decimal points. I'd call a doctor but they are all out of the office in July. For medical emergencies you are supposed to rent one of those sound trucks and try to page a doctor at the beach. I tried that but all the little kids mobbed me because they thought I was the ice cream man. It was pretty funny but things got ugly once the little animals found out I didn't have any ice cream. I was able to take out a few of them but in the end I got stomped something fierce. Ice cream sounds good right now, even if it is 8:31 a.m. In July, 8:31 a.m. is like four in the afternoon.

Summer Menu Changes
By the time it is officially summer it is officially very hot, especially if you are standing directly in the sun. My place has air conditioning but like most Spaniards, I don't bother turning it on—not yet, anyway. The air heats up and life slows down; instead of being a cold shock to the system, a dive in the Mediterranean is a welcome relief from the heat; tomatoes are riper and fatter than ever; cold beer tastes better; bike rides are shorter and sweatier; and the summer menu is now in full swing.

Forget about using the oven. Even cooking on top of the stove is to be avoided at all costs, at least during the day. I don't even turn it on to make coffee in the afternoon, switching instead to a favorite beverage that is the national summertime drink in Greece but unknown here in Spain: the frappé. Spaniards will mix ice with their coffee during the summer months but that is a very imperfect substitute for an ice-cold frappé.

Frappé
In a cocktail shaker add ½ cup of milk to a cup of water. Add ice, Nescafe instant coffee and sugar. Shake vigorously and pour into a tall glass. Drink it with a straw.

A frappé is foamy and sweet and perfect on a summer afternoon. Unfortunately, they don't drink them in Spain so I had to import them myself by making them at home. When I lived in Greece I would have to say that drinking a frappé at some little café on an island was about as close as I have ever come to perfection in this life. Now that the afternoon temperatures are soaring I try to get to that same place whenever I am at home by making a frappé for myself. In Greece I always had to ask, “Just a bit of sugar,” because the normal version must have about half a cup of it. After introducing this Greek import, my Spanish friends are now completely addicted to frappés as well.

Gazpacho
I made gazpacho for the first time in my life my first summer here. Now that I have lived in Spain, and I made it once, I guess you could say that I’m kind of an expert on the subject of this cold, tomato soup. I have heard it described as a liquid salad which sounds more accurate than calling it soup. What I can say with authority is that it’s really good and it’s almost impossible to screw up. What more do you want out of a menu item?

Since I have adopted a Castilian accent to my Spanish I now pronounce this simple yet wonderful dish gath pacho. gath pacho.

Gazpacho
4 tomatoes (peeled and chopped)
1 onion (chopped)
1 cucumber (peeled and chopped)
1 garlic clove (diced)
1 red pepper (seeded and chopped)
Bread (I used three slices of the 5 seed whole grain stuff. Soak it in water briefly and then squeeze out the water)
I had a zucchini lying around so I peeled it and cooked it in boiling water for a few minutes.
Salt, pepper, a dash of cumin, a tablespoon or two of olive oil, and a few dashes of red wine vinegar (No, not balsamic).

I like to chill all of the ingredients beforehand so that as soon as you process everything in a food mixer it will be ready to eat. Most recipes call for you to strain the soup in a food mill after mixing after processing but my blender is powerful enough to liquefy everything. Garnish with a bit of avocado.

I prefer to drink gazpacho out of a glass instead of treating it like a soup and trying to use a spoon. So you kids out there fighting over whether gazpacho is a beverage or a soup just break it up. It’s both.

I rarely drink any sort of alcohol before evening, and in these months it's much too hot to drink wine in the afternoon, but it's hard to turn down a glass of sangría. Sangria is something rather unique to Spain. I have never come across anything similar in Greece, Italy, or France, and lord knows that it wasn't for lack of trying on my part, but I may be wrong. There are as many different recipes for sangria as there are people making it. The important thing is that it be served cold and that some sort of red wine makes it into your glass accompanied by fruit. The rest is up to personal interpretation.

Sangría
Preferably in a ceramic pitcher, add red wine, a bit of Spanish brandy, lemon and orange juice along with slices of both fruits, any other sliced fruit that sounds good to you, sugar, cinnamon stick, and top off with something like lemon-lime or club soda. Serve very chilled.

The Little Malarial Mosquito That Could (Almost)
Most inspiring tales have humble beginnings, and what could be more humble than a mud puddle in equatorial Africa? Even in the lowly world of larva, your mud puddle was nasty and nothing to write home about. Almost the moment you got airborne out of that pestilential backwater, a fierce wind carried you north across the great Sahara desert where another wind, the sirocco, swept you farther north and out over the Mediterranean Sea. During the flight, other mosquitoes in your swarm told stories of older siblings who had the fortune of landing on cruise ships in the Mediterranean, ships full of fat, thin-skinned tourists who provided an eating orgy for the half-starved mosquitoes on this same pilgrimage. All your party can muster up en route is a garbage scow registered in Liberia with a crew so scraggly and diseased that you decide to hold out for better prospects.

It has been over a week since you said goodbye to your little mud puddle, a week of adventure and little blood. Just when you think that you can't hold out any longer and are about to do a belly flop in the sea, you see lights on the horizon. Someone in the swarm who has made this trip says that it is Rome up ahead. Ah Rome, the Eternal City. You have always wanted to see Rome. Maybe you will stick it to the Pope, so to speak. The Coliseum would be a good spot to hunt…oops. A strong easterly sweeps you back out to sea. Goodbye Rome, hello Valencia, Spain.

You would have liked to check out the beach as there is less in the way of clothes to get to bare skin. Instead you finally come down in the heart of the city. It is something like 3 a.m. and there is no one in the street. Almost crazed with hunger you fly up, and up. Somewhere in one of these endless apartment buildings there awaits your first meal in over seven days. You fly into an apartment on the sixth floor. No pesky screens in this country. The kitchen and living rooms are empty. As you attempt to enter the bedroom you are repulsed by a chemical being emitted from a socket on the wall. The anti-mosquito device is just too powerful.

Is this to be the end, not only for you but also for the malaria protozoan parasite that rode as a stowaway all the way from the steamy jungles of Africa? What a cruel evolutionary demise for the both of you. “Adiós, protozoan parasite. Adiós, little mosquito.” You land on this strange plastic thing that hums quietly. Death is near.

But then someone enters the room, and get this, HE ISN'T WEARING A SHIRT! You are almost delirious from hunger and it is difficult to see in the darkness. The great shirtless one sits down and touches the strange plastic thing that hums quietly. Miraculously the strange plastic thing lights up. It is like seeing a lighthouse in a storm. You point your needle and fly as fast as you can, sticking it into the hilt in his chest. You take out so much blood that you almost faint. What happened to protozoan parasite? I guess this is where he gets off. He didn't even thank you for the ride. You don't want to, but you pull out your needle and flap your wings. You are so full that it is going to take extra effort to get off the ground again. You flap your wings furiously and start to move just as you see something coming your way. It is a long limb with five digits at the end. What could it be?
SPLAT!
Note to self: buy a can of aerosol bug spray for when I can't sleep at night and want to do some writing at my desk which is outside the range of the bug zapper I have in the bedroom.

Closed for Vacation
August is the month when everyone who is anyone closes up shop and heads out of town. There are signs posted on businesses all over town explaining that they are taking the month off and will be back in September. The signs are an interesting mix of apology, exasperation, and things that look like counterfeit absentee excuses written by delinquent children. Some of the notes read like messages found in bottles which vaguely explain the whereabouts of the owners and contain an even more unclear explanation as to when they plan to reappear. Many of the signs I have read say that the closure is so that the employees can rest—as if they are all off to some tuberculosis sanitarium to take the healing waters.

The café that shares the courtyard with my building is run by the three brothers. They are rarely open at any time of year. If there is a big football match they will be open. If someone has booked the place for a first communion they may condescend to come in to work. They have been closed for all of August and they didn't even bother to post a sign. A written notice of their vacation plans would have constituted too much work for them. If they did have a sign it would read something like this:

Are you kidding? We are closed about 50% of the year and you come by here in this month and you think we will be open? We would all laugh at you except it is too pathetic to think that someone actually thought they could get a cup of coffee or a beer at our place IN AUGUST! Go away! We'll be back when we're back unless the day we're supposed to be back falls on a holiday in which case it will be the following day. Don't hold your breath.

August is the month when people make major renovations to their apartments because they are gone all month. It's the time when businesses overhaul themselves. Two apartments in my building have been gutted and are being transformed. The bakery in my building is getting a major face lift. There is a new bar going in around the corner. If you left town this month you won't recognize the place when you return.

I was down in the Plaza de la Virgin last night—one of the more popular sights in Valencia—and it was completely filled with tourists. Even the people speaking Spanish were out-of-towners. The waiters and waitresses all seem to be on loan from other countries. It's like the locals just handed over the keys to the city and left everything to the Visigoth hordes who have invaded.

I never thought that I would say this after living through the Fallas festival but it is really quiet here in Valencia. It is 8 o'clock in the morning and it is eerily silent. I haven't heard a car horn yet today and even the dog across the street who howls like a coyote every morning at this time is conspicuous by his absence—or at least his bark is. I am straining my ears but I can't hear a single jackhammer or any sort of power tool. The people doing all of the renovations in town don't seem to have bosses looking over their shoulders so they start work at a reasonable hour, usually after noon. There is no doubt about it; things are rather quiet around here. Why would I want to leave now?

Lots of Valencianos have second homes, mostly along the shore somewhere. The quiet little Mediterranean beach towns that I rode my bike past all winter are now filled to the brim with people, cars, dogs, and everything else that people from the city take with them when the exodus begins. I think that if I were now in one of those little beach towns I would be listening to the morning cacophony of car horns, jackhammers, howling dogs, and squawking parrots. It's a good thing that a lot of these places have bike paths because the traffic there in August is atrocious. The major beaches all look like U.N. refugee camps. Anything providing a bit of shade in these places is swarmed by older Spaniards with card tables and chairs where domino games and impromptu picnics are held. If the shade happens to fall on the bike path then you'll just have to ride around them; it's called “summer rules.”

With the sun and the heat my bike rides aren't as ambitious these days as they were back in the winter and spring. When it is almost 40° a little goes a long way as far as bike rides are concerned. I head to the beach at 4 or 5 in the afternoon and return as late as 9. Even then the sun is strong enough to dry me out before I have completely left the beach behind me as I ride the bike path back into town to the north.

It's not like I really need a vacation since I really don't have a job to need a vacation from—if I can even write a sentence like that one without getting beaten up by an old high school English teacher. Besides not needing a vacation, I like it here in Valencia more than ever. I seem to have the whole neighborhood to myself as well as this three bedroom apartment. If you're planning to visit me, now is the time.

I almost forgot to add one thing: none of the summer rules seem to apply to the immigrant community. The Chinese mini Wal-Marts are all open for business, the döner kebab places run by the Turks and Indian subcontinent guests are on their usual schedule, and the Africans still roam the plazas hawking electronic gadgets and other trinkets. Once again, no one sent them the memo about the vacation hours.

Too Hot to Think
We are in the real dog days of summer. You can feel exactly when the wind stops at any time of day—even when you are sleeping—by the rise in temperature. I leave my house to go to the beach at four in the afternoon and sometimes I will stop to have a beer or a coffee at one of the cafés overlooking the sea just to put off facing the blazing sun. There is a strong offshore headwind on the bike ride to the beach. At least it is cool. On the way home the breeze shifts, coming from the west like the air in a convection oven.

It may sound like it but I'm not complaining; I am just moving a little slower these days. The Mediterranean is warm to the point of barely being a refuge from the heat. Everyone in the world is at the beaches so they are a little crowded. I don't have the energy to ride the extra half hour to my private beach—at least not every day. I usually just stop at the newly refurbished beach at Pinedo just south of Valencia. On a bike I can find an empty spot that is too far from the parking lots to attract crowds.

I stand my bike up in the sand as close to the surf as I can. I dig a hole for both wheels and stand it up straight so I can hang my shirt and pack on it. Even in these hours of the late afternoon I try to limit myself to less than two hours in the oblique sun. Showering at the beach after a long swim is one of life's great pleasures. Yesterday there was a kid with a guitar playing flamenco music on the beach path within earshot of where I was showering—just in case I had forgotten that I was in Spain.

The earlier part of these days is best spent as idly as possible: reading at a shady café, preparing food in a cool kitchen, shopping in the grocery store that actually has air conditioning, or anything else that keeps you out of the sun. The days seem to begin more slowly and don't really get up to speed until the sun has set at around 9:30 or so. Lunches in restaurants start later and later every day, reflecting the intense heat and the idleness of the population boom of vacationers. No one sits down in a restaurant for dinner until it is completely dark outside and for a lot of diners the meal doesn't begin until after midnight, as if postponing the evening meal to the next day will offer some relief from the heat.

There are a lot of advantages to these scorching days of midsummer. I love it that I can take a shower without turning on the water heater. When I was freezing my tail off last winter I couldn't imagine taking a shower with anything but the hottest water possible. It still is a bit of a shock when you first hit yourself pointblank with the stream of cold water. Other than this initial jolt I couldn't imagine raising the water temperature a single degree. Cold beer becomes euphoric. White wines have more appeal during summer and you can thumb your nose at convention by chilling red wine. There are probably cold, nonalcoholic out there but I'm not going to sing their praise.

It is also the season to discover some of the lovely Spanish rosé wines. Most of these are from Rioja and almost all of them are modestly priced. I ran across the street from my building to the Mercadona to take a peek at their rosés. The big grocery retailer also has air conditioning. I asked them if I could live there for the next couple of weeks, preferably near the ice cream or in the wine aisle. A quick glance of their rosés:
Rioja Region:
San Asenio 2.55€
Romeral 2.65€
Comportillo 1.69€
Marqués de Cáceres 4.50€
Valencia:
Baron de Turis 1.09€
Castillo de Lliria 1,30€

I would have sprung for the Cáceres but in these trying economic times I didn't want to come off as a bourgeois pig at the cash register. I opted instead for the Romeral. These rosés are all fairly dry and shouldn't be confused with those horrible white zinfandels which no adult should be caught drinking. They go great with a salad, which is about all you'll feel like eating. The good news is that the tomatoes are looking great.

Just One
How many old, fat, and naked foreign tourists does it take to completely ruin about 500 meters of pristine Spanish beach? If I had written that last sentence in Spanish the declensions for gender would indicate that I am talking about the male of this particularly grotesque species. How do I know that he is foreign? I don't know for sure but past experience on Mediterranean beaches tells me that I probably guessed correctly. Northern European would be my first pick if I had to guess where he's from; that's just the way those dudes roll.

This inquiry is not some sort of riddle or the opening line of a bad joke; it's a simple rhetorical question to which we all know the answer. How many dead mice on your plate are enough to make you lose your appetite? For those of you who think that last sentence was in bad taste let me remind you that nothing is more tasteless than an old, fat, and naked foreign tourist.

So I'm riding down the beach bike path on a glorious day when I look up and on the sand dune in front of me stands the old, fat, and naked foreign tourist in all of his glory. All that I can do is shout out, “¿Porqué, porqué, porqué?” as I pedal by. Why, why, why old, fat, and naked foreign tourist? How could you possibly think that there is even one person on this earth who would want to look at your frightful human form? There is really no upside to being exposed to an old, fat, and naked foreign tourist but at least his gut was big enough to cover most of the truly horrifying parts of his misshapen and hairy carcass.

There you stand on the crest of a sand dune, like a hirsute scarecrow. If I ever wanted to have 500 meters of pristine Spanish beach all to myself I would hire an old, fat, and naked foreign tourist (OFNFT) to stand atop a dune. I guarantee that no one else will want to share this space with you.

I quickly ride past OFNFT but I will have to look at a lot of topless Spanish beauties to scour that image from my mind. You are like a visual Exxon Valdes, OFNFT. Who is going to rescue the sea birds that have been traumatized by this toxic spill of hair and bald spot and grease and flab and suntan oil? Green Peace says that their people won't move in until someone makes OFNFT at least put on some shorts and preferably a burka.

I consider myself to be a pretty tough guy but how do you defend yourself against an OFNFT if you are attacked? I have read that you should try to stuff something in his blow hole but I have the feeling that is exactly what OFNFT is looking for as he ambushes unsuspecting bicyclists on this stretch of pristine Spanish beach. Harpoons are awfully heavy to take on my bike rides but I don't know of any other way I can go by this stretch of beach and feel safe. I didn't want it to be this way but OFNFT has turned me into a two-wheeled Ahab.

Perfect Zeros: Doing Nothing with Style
You would have never thought that being a lazy slob was such hard work until you spend a summer in Valencia. Idleness is an absolutely relentless task around here. It starts the minute you get out of bed in the morning, or at least when you decide to open the persianas, the blinds on the windows here that block out every last ray of skin-scorching, house-plant-wrecking, and furnace-like sunshine that beats down on the little corner of the Mediterranean that I call home, or at least it's where I have been keeping my suitcases and doing my laundry. The word “lazy” in Spanish seems to be more of a challenge than an insult, so don't worry about offending me.

Yes, summer can be a real chore, a full-time job, and there is still a long way to go before it's over so you just have to dig in and battle it out like everyone else around here—or leave on vacation for the month. My whole life here is pretty much a vacation so I'm staying put for August. Besides that, it's too hot to move.

Wake up late, have a coffee and listen to people in the café bitch about the heat, maybe do a little shopping and stand behind women at the supermarket cooling themselves with hand fans, and then it's back home for a nap. Wake up an hour later in a stupor from which you are only partially revived by an ice coffee, lather up with 50 factor sunscreen, drink a few liters of water, and go out for something remotely resembling a bike ride. Bike rides in the summer are shorter and sweatier than during the other seasons. The dress code changes radically. Instead of cycling clothing, it's flip-flops, surf trunks, and a shirt that goes into my pack as soon as I clear the city limits. I wouldn't actually call my summer bike rides “exercise,” I just sort of go through the pantomime of a bike workout. It's too hot to think about where to go on my rides so I just go to the beach every day on the bike path. 30 minutes after pushing off in front of my building and I am carrying my bike across the sand at the beach at El Saler. I go for a swim, if you can call it that. Some days I just dive in and then head directly to the beach shower.

Showering outdoors is one of the biggest treats of summer. In my old bungalow in Florida I had a great outdoor shower that I used when I got home from the beach. I have often thought that outdoor showers could be a lucrative sort of business if everyone knew just how great it feels. I just wish that you could make the water colder at the beach showers.

One of the hardest jobs this time of year is choosing an outdoor café for coffee or a beer. The good thing is that you have lots of occasions to stop for a beer or a coffee. The even better news is that there are countless places to do it. Just about every bar and restaurant has what is called a terraza de verano, or summer terrace. Tables and chairs are placed on the sidewalks and often in the street. If anyone is bothered by this no one seems to have the energy to complain. In summer it seems that no one can make it the two blocks to the supermarket without stopping on the way there for something to drink, and maybe on the way home as well. What the hell else do you have to do?

A lot of people complain about the slow service in cafés during the summer. Have you ever tried to wait on tables while you are in a very deep sleep? And look at how peaceful he looks sacked out in a chair behind the bar. He looks like a little angel, even with his hand stuffed in his pants and a wisp of slobber on his chin. I don't have the heart to wake him up to order a coffee so I just sit at a table on the terrace and try not to disturb him as I read. The bar owner will wake up eventually and it's not like I'm in any sort of hurry. If there is something that can be defined as the exact opposite of being in a hurry then it comes pretty close to describing this place in summer.

Doing nothing becomes something along the lines of an Olympic event during summer in the Mediterranean. Judges give points for style and give lower scores for difficulty. It's not impossible but judges rarely award anyone a score of perfect zeros.

Plazas and Terraces
Because of Valencia's fine weather, people like to sit outside at cafés throughout the year. There are very few days when you won't see at least a few brave souls sitting at tables on the sidewalk or on park benches. The big plazas in the center of town are filled to the brim with cafés and are a natural place for people to gather and just hang out. I think it is an innate human instinct to group together with family, friends, and total strangers in a public place. In the summer months here in Valencia there are so many people lying around in cafés that you almost feel like you should have called ahead for reservations.

Every neighborhood has its own little park or plaza where people come and go throughout the day and each one of these spots seems to have its own personality. If the park happens to have a fútsal court (a small concrete soccer pitch), sport will dominate the theme of the place. Perhaps the ethnic make-up of the area will influence what goes on in the cafés. If there are a lot of Latin American immigrants, you will hear salsa music coming from portable CD players or car stereos. If you grow up under the influence of the rhythms of the Caribbean, music is one of those non-negotiable items in your carry-on baggage when you emigrate. Age groups often vary from one plaza to the next. Where one place seems to be reserved for older folks, another is full of young parents with strollers, and another may look like a nightclub for teenagers. The bars and cafés surrounding a park or square also tend to dictate the clientele. Any place in the center of town will be the realm of tourists, especially during summer.

Right outside of my building you will find a plaza as pleasant as any in the entire city. The Plaza Doctor Lambrete lies on the north end of the Ruzafa market. The 15th century church of San Valero is at one end of the small plaza. The square is more of a pedestrian shortcut for the neighborhood than a plaza. People flow through here all day on their way to the market or towards downtown a few blocks away in the opposite direction. There are two cafés in the square, which along with the half a dozen park benches all seem to invite pedestrians to stop and sit for a few minutes on their way to where ever they are going. Consolat de Mar, the only street adjacent to the plaza, is choked down to a single lane thanks to double parking. Cars can barely be heard—a big advantage for any hangout location. Get rid of automobiles and people will flow in. There is a modest fountain that is just big enough for kids to float their toy boats.

A few elms, a few orange trees, and three big date palms keep the plaza in the shade even at midday in August. The breeze that is funneled between the church and the adjacent apartment block is almost always welcome. At just about any time of day, when you walk past the square, excuses for stopping for something to drink disappear. Since this beautiful little plaza lies directly below my apartment, it has become my de facto living room. If someone is planning to come to visit me I can sit at one of the cafés downstairs and head them off as they approach the front door of my building. I find it easier and more pleasant to read in a café than at home, and this time of year it is cooler in the square than in my place so I spend a lot of time at one of the tables.

In the Blink of an Eye
It’s all over so quickly. I often think that it’s a shame that summer doesn't last forever. At least I think about this whenever I live in a place where summer doesn't last forever. I lament seeing the first signs that summer is waning—a harvested field, the retreat of sunlight in the late evenings—but there is still plenty of summer left at this point. Here in Valencia I would say that we are just at the half-way point. Even with so much summer still in front of me I like to take time to appreciate everything this means. I like to take stock of all of the things that I love about this season so as not to forget about anything important that I may be missing—not that anything that I enjoy about summer is in any way important.

As far as food is concerned, the summer months are a bit paradoxical. It is almost too hot to cook and even eating becomes a tiresome task at times. Even thinking about what to cook gets to be a little tedious. Thinking, in general, seems almost hazardous when you are baking in the sun. Still, you have to eat. The good news is that you have friends who have barbecue grills on their rooftop terraces. If I had a wood-fired grill I doubt that I would cook food any other way—at least until I got tired of it. I suppose that keeping the grill clean is a natural impediment to over-using it. Here in Spain you can buy real wood coals instead of those charcoal briquette things that seem to have been hatched in a chemist's lab. They take a while to get going but waiting for the fire to get up to speed is why they invented cold beer—or at least one of the reason (note to self: write essay on all of the uses for beer).

Beer tastes a lot better in the summer than in other months. I love riding my bike to the beach in the early evening and the finishing up by stopping by for a cold beer at a bar near my apartment. There is nothing like that first, ice-cold swallow of beer after you have been out in the hot sun. The next five beers don't quite have that same zing to them but what are you going to do, quit after one mouthful of beer?

The next best thing to a cold beer after a good bike ride is a cold shower. As I said before, I don't even bother turning the hot water on in the summer except to wash dishes. In fact, the water never gets cold enough for me. Showering at the beach is one of the true joys of summer.

*I love how the streets are totally deserted on Sunday mornings in the old quarter of town. I ride my bike down all the very narrow roads and I can actually feel the vibrations of the church bells because there is no other noise.

I could go on all day about what I like about Valencia in the summer, but it's already too hot to be in the house and it's only 09:00. Too hot to write, too sunny to be exposed this leaves sitting under a canopy at a café or finding some shade at the park to read.

Sol y Sombra: The Beginning of the End
August ended just a few hours ago. There are still a few weeks of official summer as far as the calendar is concerned, and here in Valencia we probably have a few months of shirt sleeve weather. It is every bit as bright and sunny this morning as yesterday morning but I can't help but feel that summer has somehow slipped past. Yesterday was the last Sunday of August and probably the last really busy day at the beach this season. I remember growing up in America's Midwest when right about now you were just waiting for that first cold day when the temperature dropped to around freezing—a real sign that summer had ended. The climate here isn't nearly as drastic and summer slowly slides into fall like a hot bath gradually cooling after you turn off the spigot.

If the spigot here wasn't turned off about two weeks ago, someone definitely turned it down to a slow dribble. Just when you thought the heat was unbearable, summer hit its apex and, almost overnight, it is just warm outside instead of sweltering. Instead of leaving for a bike ride to the beach at 5:30 in the afternoon, lathered in 50 spf sunscreen, I find it safe to leave at 3:30 with 30 spf. Instead of diving into the sea that is practically at body temperature, I find that first dive to be a bit refreshing. Hot coffee in the morning has edged out the ice frappés that I preferred during the hottest couple of weeks of August. I don't have to run throughout the day to find shade, fearing the sun like some celestial bully.

Today most people in Valencia will go back to their businesses, take down the signs they had put up bragging about their month-long absence, and get back to work; appetites start returning for food that hasn't come directly out of the refrigerator; turning on an oven doesn't seem like suicide; and you begin to think that, sooner or later, you may have to return to wearing socks. Fall is a great time of year in Valencia; it's like summer in Seattle. As pleasant as autumn may be, I can't help but cling to summer like a shipwreck victim holding on to a bit of driftwood.

I still have to close all of the curtains and blinds in my apartment to keep out the heat, but this pitched battle with the sun has lost the desperation of only a few weeks ago when I had threatened to turn on the air conditioning almost daily. As it turns out, I only bothered with the AC on about three occasions this summer, following instead the example of the Spanish who use resources like electricity a lot more judiciously than we Americans. This was about how many times I was forced to turn on the heat last winter. Last night I actually groped for a top sheet to pull over me.

I can't recall the first day I opted to wear shorts this year. You see many people switching to shorts as early as mid March. I'll try to keep a record of when I return to long pants. I don't know how my feet will take to being shod again after at least three months of going in flip-flops. I can't believe that soon I'll have to start wearing a shirt around the house. I love summer here in Valencia and I want to wring it out for all it's worth. I am going to celebrate summer today by christening my new 46 centimeter paella pan that covers almost the entire top of my stove. My 40 centimeter pan just left me feeling like half a man. It also really wasn't big enough for a paella that contained half of a rabbit and half of a chicken, so it wasn't all male overcompensation issues that made me buy the new pan.

It isn't nearly as hot as it was only a week ago and I can actually hear the summer starting to wane just a bit every evening. There is a Mercadona grocery store across the street from my apartment and I can hear them close the shutters on the windows every evening promptly at 9:15. As we move into the middle of August it is almost completely dark at this hour when last month there was still almost an hour of daylight after they closed. These are the cues that the modern day urban naturalist picks up on to gauge the seasons of the year.

You can tell that it is summer by the faint amount of laundry that cycles through my washing machine. I think that I may have done one load in the last three weeks or so. The summer dress code in Valencia—at least for me—is decidedly casual: flip-flops, surf trunks, and soccer jerseys which usually follow me into a cold shower when I get back from a bike ride to the beach. There's a bit of a water shortage so I'm just doing my part by killing two birds with one stone.

The few neighborhood cafés that have remained open in August get pretty full in the evenings as not everyone has left town. It seems that everyone that has stayed now has more idle time than usual so café card games flourish, dominoes take on an added seriousness, and the extra chairs that are usually stacked against the wall are all in use.