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 units to make comparisons and find the best deal. I didn’t have internet access in my holiday rental apartment but every neighborhood in 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 calls 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 that was about all I could afford back in the 1980s. 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 because I thought that I could write off any apartment situation as a learning experience, no matter how horrible it would be. 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 which the hosts of the shows 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 beautiful silk exchange building 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 attending 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 Barfi’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 motorized vehicles. 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
Downside of Apartment Life #634
The only thing worse than waking up to an obnoxious alarm is waking up to your neighbor’s obnoxious alarm…twice!
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.
One disadvantage to living
in a city is that just a step out your door life can be painfully, sometimes embarrassingly
public. I just took out a load of trash looking like a total slob who slept on
a park bench (not a bad look for me). In the gauntlet of 25 meters between the
front door of my building and the trash container I have to pass a supermarket
and a bus stop. Believe me, you can definitely be under-dressed for a trip to
the dumpster.
The Price of Conservation
The postal service is so slow between Spain and the United States that I begin all of my letters with, “By the time you read this, I may already be dead.”
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 peak 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 dog 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 residents of 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 the damn 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.
Reality TV, 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 barfi 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 wear 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 local 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 “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 roommate’s 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 alongside 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 hordes of sun burnt British retirees. Make sure the door is locked before going to bed.
New Digs
If you accidentally knock something off your 4th floor balcony on to the sidewalk below, never, ever peak over the rail to see the consequences of your stupidity. Unless you’re willing to toss money down after your mistake, there’s no way to undo what you did so don’t try; it’s sort of the apartment life version of a hit and run.
I over-watered my plants one morning and looked down on this angry mob queuing up to enter the supermarket. And as far as what happened today replace “over-watered plants” with “dumped a whole bunch of potting soil over the balcony.”
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 movies. 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. 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 woman 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-Mart, 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.
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