Spanish views from a small town

Last Sunday was the annual Christmas lottery drawing in Spain. On that day most people wake up and turn on the television, hoping to see the children who call the numbers call the only number that matters - theirs . The illusion of the lottery is to adults like the illusion of Christmas is to children. Children dream of presents they have asked for and await. Adults dream of being able to pay off debts and buy that car they've been dreaming about. It's not that this drawing has the biggest prizes. It's that the prizes are generally well scattered. People tend to buy décimos , which is a ticket that is a tenth of a number. Numbers are sold in 160 series. In each series there are 100,000 numbers in sets of ten tickets, called a billete . Since an entire billete costs two hundred euros, it's common to buy décimos at twenty euros each. People also buy participaciones , generally at five euros each. A participación is generally sold by a store or association. The bigges...

Eleven years ago, on November 13th, 2002, a hard, driving rain was stinging and the winds were screaming at gale force at sea and loudly enough on land. I had gone to Santiago de Compostela with my mother that afternoon because she had a doctor's appointment. As we were coming back, close to nightfall, I had the radio on and I heard a news bulletin on the hour telling us there was an oil tanker offshore that was having trouble with the heaving sea. It wasn't the first time during a storm that a boat or ship had sent a call for help and that it got on the news. It didn't sound good, nothing like that ever does, but in a storm like that only to be expected. Later, on the news that evening, they mentioned that the ship was in serious trouble and some crew members had been evacuated as a precaution. The next morning we woke up to the information that it had come in toward land and that it was leaking part of its cargo of oil. It was a few miles offshore in front of Muxía, a s...

If you drive by a field in Galicia and see two people talking heatedly and one of them swinging a hoe, they're probably arguing over the stone that marks the boundary between their two fields. And the hoe is about to get used for something other then hoeing. There are passions in village life. One of them is the boundaries between properties. You may go to a bar any night during soccer season and set up a heated debate about which team has the best players, but no one will start a fistfight over that. There are soccer fanatics everywhere, but only hooligans in the big cities get physical over it; village people are smarter. But now, walk into a bar on Saturday night and start discussing whether a stone marker was moved, and someone better call the cops. Things are about to get serious. If someone suggests a marker was moved either way, all the lowest things a family has ever done will be raked up and brought into the sunlight like wriggling worms. "What do you mean I moved t...

Mark Twain once said he counted over a hundred different types of weather in one day in New England. If he had lived here in Galicia, he would only have counted one - rain. My husband once told me that from the middle of September to the end of April all it ever did here was rain. Some days it would be a little more, some a little less, some days would be simply cloudy, but rarely would the sun be seen. These past few years, that's what has been happening. October rolls around and the sun makes only cameo appearances, pretending it'll stay a few days but going away sometimes after only a few hours.The upside are the green woodlands, emerald fields and gurgling rivers and streams that are spread throughout this verdant north of Spain. The downside is when a holiday comes along in the fall and you see on the news that on the Mediterranean coast temperatures are in the eighties and people are crowding the beaches as if it were August. And you look out at the grey skies and the riv...

English language teaching is not exactly a strongpoint in Spanish schools. There must be something wrong if, after learning English in school from the time a child is four years old until he's eighteen, upon graduation that child is not able to string together two sentences that make sense.  It's become a Spanish tradition to bewail the fact that we can't speak English and that we'll never speak it. Some people say Spaniards simply can't learn foreign languages, that it's a genetic defect. I say the genetic defect lies in our education system. I remember studying French and Spanish in high school in Boston. We had a foreign language class every school day for four years. By the last year we had read literature in the original language, not adapted for learners. Most classmates could speak Spanish or French at a rudimentary level and understand it at a higher level. The same went for the fewer who studied Italian or German. And then Americans think they have ...

Hall oween isn't as American as some may think. Even here in Spain some think that cutting up a pumpkin and putting a candle in it is an importation from Uncle Sam. Nothing further from the truth. When October thirty-first rolls around and the typical anchorman announces on a national channel that once more Halloween is gaining in popularity, in detriment of the more Spanish All Saint's Day, I blow my top at the television. If those reporters had done their work more thoroughly they would have discovered that the celebration of All Hallow's Eve is more ancient than that of All Hallow's Day, even in Spain, but especially in northwestern Spain.  Of latter years here in Galicia the old custom of cutting up pumpkins and turnips has been revived and given, erroneously, the name of Samaín. Yes, the habit was peculiar to the area until around forty or fifty years ago, when the Church and its arm of the law in Franco put paid to an ancient tradition. But it was never Samaín...

Take care and be warned of the wandering eye if you go to live in rural Spain. A sleepy little hamlet may seem deserted when you drive into it on a placid afternoon. But two minutes after parking the car to explore on foot, a curtain moves. A dog barks and a head appears in a darkened barn. Walk down the lane and someone will come out on their doorstep ostensibly to sweep the stoop but will look at you and follow you with their eyes to know where you're going. No, they're not scared you'll turn out to be a burglar, they're just wondering what neighbor a stranger is going to visit and why. A cat feels very much at home in a village, where all the neighbors are as curious as he is. The problem with settling down to live in a village is that your life is not your own and you have to work hard to protect your privacy. There comes a point in which you understand why some Hollywood stars attack the papparazzi. You step out the door, a neighbor walks by, "Good morning, ...

Education has always been considered a treasure in this country. For hundreds of years people who have had a formal education were revered. When my parents were children one of the most respected persons was the village schoolteacher. To become a maestro was considered one of the highest professions to achieve. The language reflects this reverance. To be polite is to be educado or educated. To be rude or impolite is to be maleducado , badly educated, ignorant.  For many, many years only the rich could study. Most poor didn't even know how to read or write unless they paid the village priest to teach them their ABC's. My grandparents couldn't read or write. Only one grandfather could, and he became a union member and Socialist and fought against Franco. It was part of the strategy of the ruling aristocrats and the Church to keep the lowly masses ignorant and dependant on the powerful classes. Surprisingly enough it was Franco who instituted obligatory primary education. ...

When I was a little girl Sunday dinner was important. It was then that my mother would make a big meal, almost always something Spanish, like empanada , a type of meat or fish calzone typical of Galicia. Other Sundays, especially on cold Sundays, caldo , a stew of potatoes, cabbage, navy beans and salt pork that has a dozen variations depending on which town in Galicia you visit. Any important event was also celebrated with food. My First Communion had my mother making food practically all morning and early afternoon. I suppose it's something Mediterranean. All the movies with the good Italian and Greek families show them sitting together at a table strewn with plates and platters of food. But I think my mother and most women her age always went a little overboard with food. After a festival such as Christmas there would be leftovers for a week in the fridge. My mother had a fetish about not letting anyone go hungry. If someone wanted seconds or even thirds, she made sure there w...

Last week, I travelled from our green little corner of Galicia down to Madrid by car. My daughter had to take an exam in Madrid in preparation for college applications so I drove her down and we did some sightseeing at the same time. We had already made the same trip at the end of May and had been surprised by the endless fields of green wheat stretching away under the relentless blue skies after we had left the mountains and arrived at the "meseta". I remembered as a child flying from Santiago de Compostela to Madrid and looking down at brown fields, with little towns from which radiated long, straight roads. The green that surrounded us belied that memory. This time, though, it was the last days of August. The wheat had been harvested and the fields were being turned over, leaving the rich, brown earth on view. The grasses covering small hills and the side of the roads were golden. The only green came from the occasional tree next to streams, some fields of sunflowers and...

Solidarity. That was something I never thought I would accuse a Spaniard of.  When the tornadoes hit Oklahoma earlier this year and everyone joined in to help the affected, I said, "Americans help each other when tragedy strikes. Spaniards don't."  Well, I was wrong. On the 24th of July, last Wednesday, I was at the hospital accompanying my father who had had surgery the week before.  It was the Eve of St. James and, as I left for home, I thought that if I didn't have so much work awaiting me I would have gone to watch the fireworks, even if only to celebrate my father's successful surgery.  But my husband and daughter were awaiting me and there was much to do before returning to the hospital the following day. I hit the highway. A kilometer or so along and a police van, lights flashing, passed in the opposite direction.  Another kilometer and another van, from the Civil Guard, went north.  I thought, "What an awful evening to have an accident on the hi...

It came to me this morning as I was driving around trying to find a parking spot to do a three-minute transaction at the bank. As I was driving around for over a half-hour for that miracle of someone pulling out of a legal parking space, I realized what was wrong with that scenario and so many others in this beautiful, egotistical country. In the past years of bonanza, when the money from the European Union was pouring in like milk and honey, that money was being spent to turn urban streets into pedestrian areas and to pave over areas of wild coastline. Once upon a time you could actually drive into a town, easily find a parking space and quickly finish whatever business you went there to accomplish. Now, not only can you not simply drive in and drive out, you can't catch a bus, either. Instead of spending all that money on embellishments that scream " money" , the local governments should have invested it on decent paving and sidewalks, parking garages with symbolic ...