Unsolicited
Advice from the Spanish Grandmother You Never Had #12
When
making gazpacho don’t even think of skimping on the olive oil. Leave that
low-fat bullshit for some other wimpy dish you have planned. As a matter of
fact, this goes for just about every Mediterranean recipe so just turn the
bottle upside down and let it pour.
There
is one on every corner of every block. Often there can be two or three in the
middle of the block. They are everywhere, these places to stop in for a quick
glass of wine, or a not-so-quick glass of wine if there is anything even
remotely interesting going on inside—and there usually is. There must be at
least 1,000 of these small places in Valencia whether they call themselves a
bodega, a cervecería, a sidrería, a bocatería, a cafetería,
a taberna, a tasca, a café, a bar, or a restaurant.
Spain
only trails Cyprus for the most bars per capita with one bar for every 129
Spaniards (Cyprus has one for every 124 Cypriots). Spain has three times more
bars per capita than the United Kingdom and four times more than Germany. If
you've walked more than a half a block without encountering a bar, check the
map because you probably aren’t in Spain. Bars are one of the most popular
privately owned businesses in the country and everybody seems to be in the
business. One bar for every 129 Spaniards seems like an underestimate, at least
in my neighborhood where the ratio seems closer to one bar for every five
people, including children.
Speaking
of children, the drinking age in Spain is 18, unless the bar has a sign that
says it won’t serve anyone under 16, in which case the legal age there is 16.
I’m not sure but I don’t think that they have an official age at which people
can drink in a bar; it is up to the bar owner and the young people to decide
for themselves. Absolutely anyone can buy alcohol in stores. I have seen ten-year-old
kids buying wine at the grocery store, presumably for the folks. You will never
see anyone checking identification and you also won’t see kids getting drunk in
a bar. At least I never have, and I have spent quite a bit of time in these
Spanish institutions. Kids aren’t about to screw up too badly in bars because
there is a good chance that their parents or neighbors will be hanging out in
the same place. Kids here learn how to behave when they go out by direct
example. In America we keep kids away from bars and booze until they become of
age and then we expect them to know how to act in and around these new
influences.
This
isn’t to say that there are no problems with kids drinking in Spain, but it
isn’t something you hear a lot about unless it involves a traffic accident. It
seems that they give kids the benefit of the doubt and let them make their own
decisions about alcohol. As big a role as alcohol plays in the lives of the
Spanish, you don't notice a lot of abuse in any age group. I think this is true
in all Mediterranean cultures. We make this tremendous fuss about young kids
and drinking. In Seattle the police and liquor board were doing sting operation
in which they would send an underage person into a bar and if they got served,
they would haul away the bartender in handcuffs. For me bartenders have always
been the good guys. They used kids who were 20 years old. In a year, sometimes
less, they would be of legal age to drink. It's not even like Seattle has this
huge crisis of underage kids drinking in bars, but the police just thought they
would clean up the city. It's completely absurd.
Seattle
also has this ridiculous law which states that if a restaurant has a bar then
the bar must be physically separated from the rest of the establishment. The
physical barrier may be a wall or just a length of rope but it must be present.
I never could understand the purpose of this law. I'm sure that the people who
wrote this law thought that they were protecting someone from something. It is
just another example how we try to make alcohol out to be some sort of great
and mysterious evil for our children. We should just accept the fact that
alcohol is a part of life. Instead of wasting so much time and energy shielding
our children from the evils of drink, we should try to set better examples for
our children while enjoying this important aspect of human existence.
For
the Spanish, bars are a part of everyday life. Bars aren't off-limits to
children. For the most part there isn't much of a difference between bars,
restaurants, and coffee shops in Spain. Bars have much the same place in
Spanish society as supermarkets, vegetable markets, hardware stores, and just
about every business you can think of.
Just
as with cafés in France, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of
bars in the quotidian life of the Spanish. The purpose a bar serves here in
Spain is a pretty tall order, something that might explain all of the different
names they use. You see a lot of bars in Spain that can’t decide on just one of
these name designations so they use two or three of them on their displays.
Starting
at the beginning of the day they function as a coffee shop. People stop in for
a quick jolt of caffeine before they start work. You see many cafés that open
at 7 am, at least that's what they advertise. I'll have to take their word on
that as I'm never out in the street at that hour. The breakfast crowd is
usually happy with a coffee and a roll of some sort.
At
mid-morning they host the coffee break of the office workers, then comes the
before-lunch coffee or beer, followed by the lunch crowd, followed by
after-lunch coffee or cocktail, after-work meetings with friends, before-dinner
drinks, dinner, after-dinner coffee and cognac, and then some places even morph
into something of a night club.
There
is a rather comforting sameness to bars in Spain; most of them look pretty much
like all of the others. If you think there are a lot of Starbucks in American
cities, multiple that by about 500 and you'll get an idea of how many corner
bars there are in Spain. People here just think that a bar should probably look
a certain way. Tradition tends to win out over innovation as far as how bars
look. Elegant ceramic tiles cover the floors and walls, and the bar top is
usually stainless steel, marble, or zinc. There is a glass covered cooler on
top of the bar which displays the food selections. In many parts of Spain, a
small appetizer, or tapa is served with every drink that you order. This
custom isn’t very common in the Valencia Community or in Catalonia; not that
bars in these two regions lack a variety of good things to eat.
I
think that just about everyone in America knows that beer in Spanish is cerveza
(pronounced with the double lisp ther bay tha in Castilian Spanish).
Just asking for a beer will certainly work when traveling in Spain but it's
good to be armed with a few more useful words and phrases for ordering. Coming
in at first place as the most ordered beverage is the caña, of a small
draft beer. Cañas usually hold about six ounces. A doble, or
double caña, is just that. Beers are also served in bottles, either in a 1/3-liter
bottle or a 1/5 referred to as a tercio and quinto,
respectively—at least in Valencia. Wine is also a popular beverage, more so in
Castilla and Andalusia than in Valencia where I live. Vino tinto, or red
wine is often served chilled during the hot summer months. This practice is
also common in southern France where the summer days are scorching and where
they don’t produce a lot of white wine. If it has to do with wine, and they do
it in France, I think that it is an acceptable practice.
Almost
every bar has a slot machine, at least one. I sometimes hear the cartoonish
noises from the slot machines when I am lying in bed at night, or I’ll have one
of the catchy tunes stuck in my head as I walk around town. The slot machine
music doesn’t quite have the chart-topper quality as say, the theme song to Ms
Pac Man, but they can be excruciatingly annoying in their own way. I’ve never
been a gambler and have never invested a single coin in one of these things,
although I have often thought about paying other people not to play them
when I am trying to read. The slot machine sound effects are almost as
bothersome as the unmuffled whine of a moped or the constant yapping of a small
dog—two other noise hazards ever-present in Spain. I suppose that if I started
playing the slots. I’d stop complaining about them. Then I’d just have to
figure out what to do with the yappy dogs and the mopeds.
When
you come to a city not knowing a single person and with a fairly weak grasp of
the language, you have to take your conversation practice wherever you can find
it. Standing at a bar is about the best place I've ever found to ambush some
poor Spaniard into having a chat. It’s nice to know that you can file “going
out to a bar” as an educational experience. It's tough when you don't know a
single person and you barely speak the language. It is also tiring for a
Spanish person to have to try and talk with someone who speaks their language
so poorly. I apologize to all of the people I bothered during all that time
when I was suffering through the basics of learning Spanish.
When
I first arrived, I absolutely refused to speak English. I avoided English
speakers and the likeliest places to find them like they had the plague. I was
determined to learn Spanish as quickly as possible. After I had been in Spain
for a while and my Spanish improved, I happened upon a bar run by two English
expatriates. I kept going back because I found that the locals who hung out
there were more inclined to speak Spanish with me than the people I met in
other places. I think that Americans and Brits are generally a bit more open
when it comes to talking to strangers than the Spanish. The Spaniards who hung
out in this pub seemed to have adopted the American and British openness.
There
are educational advantages of bars and cafés other than bothering the locals
for conversation practice. Besides talking with the staff and customers, you
can read one of the newspapers lying around on top of the bar. When I first
arrived in the country, I remember looking up every unfamiliar word in the
newspaper headlines. I thought that if a word was in a headline, this means
that it must be important. Why bother putting a word in large, bold print if it
isn’t worth knowing? I don’t know if this makes any sense but you have to start
somewhere when learning a new language. No matter where you look, there are
going to be a lot of words you don’t know, so you may as well start somewhere.
I suppose that there are better ways to gain useful vocabulary than gleaning
newspaper headlines but I can't think of any.
I
stop in almost every day at a bar or café to spend an hour reading something in
Spanish. I am fairly picky about where I go for these study breaks. I like
places that aren't too popular so as to avoid distractions. Outdoor seating is
essential during the months when it is comfortable to sit on a terrace. I like
a bit of seclusion, not only to concentrate but I also don't want anyone to
think I'm crazy when I read out loud to sharpen my accent.
For
football matches I will venture out of my little neighborhood and make my way
to other side of the stadium to the Plaza del Valencia CF where there
are four bars next to each other. They each have big screen televisions facing
out into the small square. One of my favorites is called Manolo el del Bombo
named after the owner who you can see with his trademark drum at every game of
the Spanish national team. For important matches the square is packed with
rowdy fans and is the next best thing to being at game itself, if for some
reason you can't go. When the games are held at Mestalla, home of
Valencia Club de Fútbol, the roar from the stadium adds a lot of
excitement to the game on TV. Sometimes I think the people inside the stadium
can hear the noise the fans are making across the street in these bars.
Wine
and Democracy
In
one of local free newspapers that are always lying around the metro stations
there was a column lamenting the fact that wine consumption has dropped in
Spain. In many European countries that is considered a bad thing and I would
agree. People should drink wine, and plenty of it. The author put most of the
blame on the fact that restaurants charge too much for wine which has led to a
reduction in restaurant wine sales of 9%. Restaurants here generally charge
double the retail price for a bottle of wine and sometimes as much as three
times. The author seems to be saying that wine is in danger of losing its
democratic and populist standing if it is priced out of reach of consumers, any
consumers.
I
think that American restaurants begin with three times the retail price and up
to four times as much. It isn’t unusual to pay $9-11 for a glass of wine in
some places. I was at a restaurant in the Chicago area before I came to Spain
and I asked the bartender pick a modestly-priced glass of wine for me. She
charged me $14. I guess I looked like I had either fallen off the turnip truck
that morning or that I was made of money. This was in a decent restaurant, but
nothing top tier.
In
almost every James Bond movie there seems to be the obligatory scene showing
Bond as being some sort of incredible wine snob. “Yes, I’ll have the 1962
Chateau Trou du Cul.” Fetishistic wine knowledge is generally portrayed as the
height of sophistication and breeding, whatever breeding is. I don’t think you
would ever find Bond buying wine at the bargain rack at Trader Joe’s.
Somewhere
between the Bond-esque wine snob and the slob who gargles with his vino there
is room for the way wine is supposed to be consumed. I suppose that it’s a huge
understatement to say that wine is becoming increasingly popular in the United
States. We produce some of the best wine in the world but there doesn’t seem to
be the same effort by producers to reach the entire American market. We still
see wine as a luxury and a status symbol. It is up to consumers in America to
force producers to supply good wines at a modest price. If there is a market
for this sort of product someone will fill the niche.
Wine
in Mediterranean countries is seen as more of a basic right—like free
speech—than a luxury enjoyed only by the elite. The prices that I would pay at
the wine bargain bins back home seem almost extravagant to me here in Spain.
The grocery store across the street from my apartment has a fairly large
selection of Spanish wines and I don’t think that any are over $10, most are
under $5, and there are many for as little as 1€. I wonder which wine Bond
would choose.
People
sometimes buy an expensive bottle of wine with the intention of keeping it for
a special occasion. The wine is supposed to improve with age; at least that’s
what the books say. I’ve never been able to keep a good bottle around for very
long. The good ones get knocked off right along with the cheaper bottles when
you have friends over. I used to try to build a little fortress of inexpensive
bottles of wine and put my more expensive bottles inside of it for protection.
If you have enough thirsty friends over, they will eventually lay siege to the
wine castle and sack the good stuff right along with the swill.
The
attitude here in Spain seems to be. “Today is a pretty good day to drink wine,
so why wait?” As far as that fancy bottle you were planning to save, drink it
today. You can always go out and buy the same thing when you have something big
to celebrate. The point is that you should celebrate every day, or at least
every good meal. Any meal that you have taken the trouble to prepare deserves
to be honored with wine.
Excuses
for Stopping in at the Bodega for a Glass of Wine
No
matter what you call it, whether it’s a bar or a restaurant or a bodega, they
are everywhere in Spain. If there are 1,000 places to grab a glass of wine or a
beer then you’ll need at least 1,000 excuses to visit. I’m the cautious type so
I have more excuses than are legally required in Spain.
-The
bar is right next to the bin where you drop off your recyclable plastics. I
drop off my bag of recyclables and I stop in for a glass of wine; it’s called
multi-tasking. I also recycle glass and paper separately. The bar is also near
the trash bin so this excuse counts as four (plastic, paper, glass, garbage)
which is really multi-tasking. I could take all of my trash out at once but
where’s the fun in that?
-Football
also encompasses at least a dozen or more excuses. The bodega is the place to
watch a game, watch the highlights of a game, see highlights from games played
20 years ago, watch a funny segment on football bloopers; I think you are
getting the point. I can also read one of the several football daily newspapers
lying on the bar. Football accounts for at least 90% of the business in most of
these joints. There are those agonizing weeks of summer without football.
We are only talking about a week or so, but still. Spain without
football? Everyone goes to the bodega for a glass of wine to moan about there
being no football.
-I
was cooking and I needed to go down to the store to pick up something I needed.
This is a great excuse to go to the bar. I turned the heat on the stove down
low so I won’t burn down the apartment. Besides, I think that my kitchen has an
automatic sprinkler system. I’ll have one more glass, please.
-I
run out of wine at home so I stop in for a quick one before I go to the supermarket
to buy another bottle of wine. This may sound redundant to you but I see things
differently since I moved here.
-My
cable TV is out in the apartment. This probably means that it isn’t working at
the bar either, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take.
-The
café is an integral part in the quotidian life of the Spanish people and I need
to be there to experience it. While I’m there I need to drink a glass of wine
or two or I’ll look like a tourist.
-The
bodega recently installed air conditioning. I can stop in to beat the heat. I
like to sit outside but I'm sticking with this excuse.
-The
bodega is right on the corner so at least I won’t drink and drive. I don’t have
a car but still. There are other consequences of drinking far from home. What
if I got tipsy somewhere across town and then used the wrong metro card on the
way home? I could waste a three-zone fare card on a one-zone ride. Also,
friends don’t let friends take cabs drunk. Trying to explain to a cab driver
where I live in my labyrinthine neighborhood would be a chore for someone who
is both sober and completely fluent in Spanish—two things I will probably never
be at the same time—not any time soon at least. Every time that I order a glass
of wine, I feel like I am dodging a bullet.
-I
don’t want to bore you with a lot of details concerning balance of payments,
international currency fluctuations, and other macroeconomic insights that you
wouldn’t understand anyway, but just trust me on this one: America and Spain
are both counting on me to prop up our mutual reliance on free trade. Excuse
me, I have to get back to work now.
-I
hate to use the excuse that the bodega is between the metro stop and my front
door because there is a bar between everything and my front door. I’m surprised
that there isn’t a café in the lobby of my building or on the elevator. I live
on the fifth floor, how long am I supposed to go without a glass of wine? I
promise that I will only use this excuse as a last resort.
-The
bodega is a good place to practice Spanish. I can also speak Spanish at the
market, or the library, or museums, or at home with friends, or just about
anywhere. This is Spain and they speak Spanish here (at least when they aren't
speaking Valenciano, or Catalan, or Basque, or Gallego). I think there is
something that you aren't fully grasping here and it's kind of important. I can
get a glass of wine at the bodega. Seeing that this is Spain, they probably
serve wine at the library; I just don't know where to ask.
In
the few Spanish-speaking countries that I have visited which include Spain,
Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Miami, any bar where old dudes play dominos is
at least as noisy as a saw mill, or a bowling alley. I don’t know how the game
works but evidently you get points based on how hard you slam the pieces down
on the table.
Walk-up
Culture: All the World's a Bar
A
lot of restaurants in Valencia have a little walk-up window that connects the
street directly with the bar which obviates the need to even walk into a place
to get your cortado or your quinto (a small 1/5-liter bottle of
beer). So not only are there more bars per capita in Spain than any other place
in the world, they make it even easier for you to get your shot of coffee or
whatever suits your mood.
When
I lived in south Florida, I thought that the walk-up coffee window in
restaurants was a Cuban thing. There was a place called La Habana Restaurant
just down the road from my apartment with great food and the little coffee
window that opened to the sidewalk on the side of the place. People would step
up and order their little Cuban coffees, a cortado or a café con
leche, and either knock them back immediately or take them to go, this was
in America, after all, even though you couldn’t tell from the very Latin aspect
of the neighborhood. I loved this place because it made me feel like I was
living in some exotic locale.
At
the time I thought it was a Cuban thing—which it is but its origin is Spanish.
I had been to Spain a couple of times before I moved to South Florida but I
didn't notice this feature in Spanish bars. I have never seen one of these
walk-up windows in Mexico, Peru, or Puerto Rico, and I've been to a lot of bars
in Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico—the only other Spanish-speaking countries I
have visited. Perhaps this aspect of Spanish life immigrated to other Latin
American countries besides Cuba. If it has, I haven’t seen it.
The
whole notion of knocking back a quick shot of coffee at a walk-up window almost
seems antithetical to the unhurried pace of life here, unhurried at least until
people get behind the wheel of an automobile. If I were forced to explain the
phenomena of the walk-up window, I would say that the services provided by bars
are so important in the quotidian life of Spanish people that direct access to
the street if sometimes necessary. It's like removing a buffer zone between
citizens and espresso. I'm surprised that they don't have waiters with trays of
espresso patrolling the sidewalks so people don't even have to stop walking to
have a shot. They actually do have waiters serving coffee in the street
in my neighborhood on Monday market day.
Depending
on the weather, I usually prefer to sit at a table outside at a café or stand
at the bar inside. This is an important part of every single day for me. If I
am alone, I use the time to read a book, a football paper, or a newspaper. I
sometimes study my vocabulary lists or I study what is going on around me. If
you are a tourist, bars provide the best place to connect with Spanish people,
something that is true even if you aren't just passing through. If you are out
to literally “rub elbows” with the locals, the walk-up window is the place to
do it. Whenever I stop for a drink at one of these widows, I always feel like I
couldn't be more Spanish if I were wearing a matador's costume. I would love to
have a picture of a matador at a walk-up window (to digress a bit, I saw a
little boy the other day wearing a matador costume and it was so cute that you
just wanted to squeeze him). The walk-up is also handy if you are on your bike
and don't feel like locking it up to go inside.
Not
every bar in Spain has a walk-up window. In fact, when I went out looking
specifically for bars with this attribute, I found a lot fewer of them than I
thought I would. However, it seems like the bars that don´t have a
window were just built wrong, with the bar being against a back wall away from
the street instead of along the side of the place moving up to the sidewalk. If
I ask an older person here about this, I'm sure they will tell me that back in
the good-old-days every bar had a walk-up. I actually had someone tell me the
other day that there used to be a lot more bars in Spain than there are today.
I can't see how that is even possible unless there used to be bars inside
of other bars.
I'll
probably never find out why the Spanish feel these windows are necessary and
other people of other nations don't. Spanish people probably just feel that it
is too much of a chore sometimes to walk inside of a bar to get a coffee. I
mean, if you have to actually walk through a door you might as well cover the
place in barbed wire or build a damn moat around the place. When you are
walking the block and a half home from the market who needs the hassle of
opening a stupid door just to get a beer?
It's
not like there aren't millions of cars in Spain but walking is still a big part
of city life. I have yet to see a drive-up window here and I hope that this
never catches on—anything that keeps people inside their cars is a bad
thing in my book. I'm sure that a walk-up bar window would be breaking about
nine million laws in the U.S. but anything that caters to pedestrians is OK by
me. I suppose it just depends on what kind of culture are you looking for,
walk-up or drive-thru.
Cork
You!
Dear Makers of Lenorio del los Llanos
Wine,
Right
now I am calmly sipping a glass of your wine and enjoying a plate of olives. I
am the picture of serenity and sophistication. This was not the case only a few
short minutes ago as I was struggling violently to remove the cork from a
bottle of your wine. From the effort I was exerting you would have guessed that
I was trying to free my only child from beneath a huge boulder. If I had been
trying to free my only child, I can only hope that the little angel was already
dead or unconscious so as not to hear the torrent of obscenities I was
screaming out as I yanked for all that I was worth, and then some, on the
stubborn bit of cork that was dangerously positioned between me and my wine,
like a clueless hiker separating a mother grizzly and her cubs n(I think that I
just mixed metaphors but sobriety makes people do desperate things).
I
really like your wine. It is a fine product and very reasonably priced. I would
like to offer a little advice on how to make your product a little more
accessible to the general public. MAKE THE CORK EASIER TO EXTRACT! I am an
adult male in decent physical shape yet I almost pulled my back out trying to
get the cork out of your bottle. No kidding. Perhaps you could suggest some
other upper body exercises that would aid me in opening your bottles. Either
that or you should have a list of chiropractors on the back of the label.
If
this is your subtle way of trying to get me to drink less, let me assure you
that this is a failed strategy. I already thought out a back-up plan if I
couldn’t open the bottle using conventional methods. I was planning to break
the top off the bottle and then pour the wine through a coffee filter. Brute
strength won out in the end but I was going to get at the wine one way or another.
Sincerely,
a Loyal Customer
Coffee
A
human being can live for up to two months without food and 3-5 days without
water but if it’s past about 07:30 and I haven’t had a cup of coffee there’s a
very high probability that someone in my near vicinity won’t survive. If I
don’t resort to violence you can—at the very least—expect to hear a polyglot
and very profane aria coming from my kitchen as I inspect an empty container.
For
the good of all humanity I remembered to buy coffee this morning. You're
welcome.
Coffee
is recognized all over the world as one of the greatest gifts to mankind. Spain
isn’t too different from the United States in many respects but just like every
other aspect of their daily lives, the Spanish bring a host of idiosyncrasies
to the way that they choose to celebrate coffee. As a fairly heavy coffee
drinker myself, I couldn’t help noticing the differences.
Coffee
usually takes one of three forms in Spain, the most popular being a cortado,
a shot of espresso served in a small glass with a bit of hot milk poured on
top. Café con leche is an espresso served in a coffee cup filled with
hot milk. A café solo is an espresso. That’s about it, no flavors, no
variations in size like the bewildering polyglot nature of American coffee shop
sizes with their grandes, ventis, mediums, and talls (mustn’t say “small”).
Spaniards
don’t usually sit around and savor a big cup of coffee; they prefer to take
their caffeine in small, short doses. Most people take their coffee standing up
at the bar or out in the street. In fact, in Madrid it’s almost impossible to
find a café where you can sit down as is more the custom in France. Madrid was
recently rated as being at near the top of the list of cities where people walk
the fastest. Stopping in for a coffee doesn’t slow them down much and sometimes
it seems that they barely miss a step.
Valencia
is a little less frantic than Madrid but most people still choose to take their
coffee standing up. They are usually pretty quick about it unless they are in a
larger group, which is usually the case during the mid-morning coffee break, or
almuerzo. In my particular neighborhood the cafés are completely full at
about 10:30 every weekday morning, weather permitting (and permit it does most
days of the year).
This
interruption in the mid-morning is a lot more social than a coffee break and
would better be described as a mid-morning happy hour. This is also when a lot
of people have their first glass of wine or beer of the day, just enough to
hold them over until it’s time for lunch, usually after 2 p.m. and as late as 5
p.m. I can tell a distinct difference in the noise and chatter of the café
crowds during the mid-morning breaks than the gatherings at other times in the
day.
Coffee
is every bit as important in the lives of many Americans but there are
significant differences. Spain hasn’t taken to the idea of coffee to go. It’s
possible but a fairly rare occurrence. People will sometimes order a coffee to
go to take back to work with them but this is a fairly rare occurrence. More
often than not they will just take the porcelain cups with them and bring them
back the next time they go to the café.
Talk
about cruel jokes, I woke up this morning and realized that I didn’t have
enough coffee to make even one cup. It was too early to go downstairs to a café
so I went back to bed. If only more of life’s problems could be solved by
just going back to sleep.
Sage
Advice
Never
pass up a chance to take a leak.”
-Anonymous
-Anonymous
Actually,
it wasn’t anonymous who coined that sage bit of wisdom. Anonymous gets credit
for a lot of stuff he didn’t come up with himself, the thieving Greek pirate.
Anyone who knows me will recognize that useful counsel as something that I
often attribute to my grandfather. My grandfather didn’t come up with it
either. I just attributed it to him so as to give the words a bit more weight.
I am the author of what could possibly be the best advice you’re ever going to
get in this life.
There
is an episode of Seinfeld in which George shows off his encyclopaedic
knowledge of good public restrooms in Manhattan. I don’t know Manhattan very
well but the rest of America has a pretty good reservoir of acceptable public
bathrooms. I think that George’s proclivity for finding good bathrooms in
Europe would be a more valuable talent as toilets are fairly rare over here.
This
isn’t such a big problem for me for several reasons. First of all, and I don’t
know whether or not I have revealed this little secret to you, but I am a boy,
and boys have decidedly greater options when you are talking about good public
bathrooms. We have a different definition of “good” than that of most women. We
also have a much different definition of “public” which at times means just
that, public, as in “exposed to general view” as opposed to “accessible to or
shared by all members of the community.” I’m not an animal; I don’t pee in
public in the city, but let’s just say that when I am out in the country,
finding a bathroom never seems to be a problem. The Spanish countryside: The
world’s biggest toilet. It’s not a slogan that you are likely to read in one of
those stuffy travel publications, but it is the truth. When I am out bike riding,
I am forced to ignore my own advice of never passing up a chance to take a
leak. If I didn’t, I would never get anywhere.
As
far as locating a good public bathroom, downtown Valencia provides a much
bigger challenge than the great outdoors. Of course, every bar or café has a
restroom, but they expect them to be used only by paying customers. Buying a
coffee or beer just to use the restroom seems like bailing out your boat
instead of fixing the leak, if you will pardon the pun. When I speak about
public restrooms, I mean those where you can just walk in without being
expected to buy anything or in a place that is big enough that no one will
notice that you are not an actual customer. The second reason that this issue
isn’t such a big deal with me is that I seem to have an extra-large bladder. It
probably fills up the area in my body where decorum and taste are usually
found. I suppose that you are able to tell from this essay that I was born
without those two human essentials.
At
times I am utterly dumbfounded by the lack of public facilities. At large,
outdoor public events there seems to be no nod towards this consideration. I
have boarded trains at the Valencia Estación del Norte many times and
only when I was returning from my last trip did I discover the whereabouts of
the restrooms there (on the north side). The good news is that there are
bathrooms on the trains. I can only think of one public restroom in all of
Valencia: downstairs at the Mercado Colon (and the recently uncovered facilities
at the station). That’s it. There are probably more. Where is George Costanza
when you need him?
So,
my advice to you is to never pass up a chance to take a leak. It could be a
long time before you have another opportunity.
Posts
