Spanish views from a small town

Once upon a time there was a town that decided to bring tourists in through their stomachs. Since there was a local product that was of good quality, they decided to celebrate it. And so the first food festival was born. Actually, the first food festival was a wine festival that began in 1953 in Cambados. It celebrates the famous albariño wine of the area. From there the idea spread and has now touched almost every township in Galicia and most of Spain.  From the end of January to December you can take your pick of the food you want to try. Though most of the festivals take advantage of fine summer weather. That's when you can find most of the seafood festivals. From razor clams to barnacles, to sea urchins, to oysters, during the spring, summer, and Sailing out to A Illa de Arousa. fall you can find a celebration almost every week. Though the ones that take the cake are the seafood celebration in O Grove at the beginning of October this year and the one in A Illa that is cel...

Yesterday was Election Day for mayors all over Spain and for a few regional governments. I voted, like every elegible member of a community should, even if only to show discontent. There was about thirty-three percent abstention in our township, up a little since the last elections. Mostly because people say it doesn't matter, they're all thieves. In our town the regional separatist party, leftist, won. The Socialists and the conservative PP were punished by the appearance of another party, also leftist. I believe our town has not had a conservative government since the death of Franco in 1975. Call us Reds. But at least we've had different mayors. Some towns have had the same mayor forever. In Cuevas del Valle, Ávila, Licinio Prieto was mayor since 1954, when he was designated as mayor by the Civil Government of the province of Ávila, until he stepped down for health reasons in May of 2014 (he was over ninety years old, health reason enough). Except for two terms, he was...

Last night was the Eurovision Song Contest. I had never really heard of it until I moved here, twenty-five years ago. It was set in motion ten years after the Second World War, in 1955. It was seen as a way to promote unity in the incipient European Union. Since then it has grown outside the boundaries of the Union, and of Europe itself. Now it includes participation from countries such as Armenia, Azerbaizhan, Turkey, and Israel. And this year it had Australia as a special guest. There are so many countries now (originally seven) that there are two nights of semi-finals before the final, always on a Saturday night and always in May. This year the final tally was twenty-seven participants. The quality of the songs is debatable. This year to me they seemed weak. Other years they have had quality, and in still other years the Contest was used to poke fun at itself with entries that had no other description apart from freakier than freaky. Spain has won a few times, but over forty years...

The day before yesterday there were a lot of seagulls flying inland. One even confused my car with a landing pad. My daughter, walking by the cathedral in Santiago, saw many flying around its towers past midnight. Santiago is more than forty kilometers inland. When I mentioned these facts to my husband, he automatically said, " Gaivotas á terra, mariñeiros á merda. " Which translates as "Gulls in to land, sailors to hell." And, yes, yesterday the north wind was fiercely blowing, and it was no day to set out to sea. Some people prefer looking at the sky and checking where the wind is blowing from to watching the weather forecast on television. It's more reliable. My mother-in-law says that when " farrapos de lá " appear, the next day it's going to rain. She's almost always right, because those clouds that look like balls of cotton wool generally precede a weather front. Also, if at home we can hear our church bell chiming the hour, that means ...

Getting a cold is simply bad luck. It's a natural disaster to you, but to others it's just a little sniffle. You may feel like you're about to die, as your throat doesn't let you talk, the cough gets in the way of thinking, your nose feels like it's been anesthetized, and you really don't care what you eat because everything tastes the same. You may be eating the best brandade morue ever prepared, but it tastes like a cheap sandwich from the vending machine. Sleeping has become something only lucky, healthy people can indulge in. All night you awake from bad, repetitive dreams that only make you feel worse. You resolve to dream about something else and think of something that makes you feel good. No dice. The bad dream comes back like a bad penny. And, of course, the advice. From my husband, "Mix honey and lemon juice and drink it as hot as you can." The only way I'll eat honey is baked in a cake and I'll drink the lemon juice in lemonade - ...

It was my lot yesterday to accompany my father in the hospital. He just had to spend the night, but the chemical smell and the monotonous hallways took their toll on me in the first hour. The room door was open during most of the day and I could hear the television in other rooms and see people shuffle by and hear snippets of conversations. The nurses' trolleys clattered and rolled by from time to time, punctuating the hours. In the hospital, time is ruled by nurse visits and mealtimes. Just after eating lunch I found myself eagerly awaiting the afternoon merenda to take another trip out of the wards, down to the cafeteria. At times I would walk to the end of the hall, passing closed doors and open doors where I could see a microcosm of worry, hope, pain, relief, and despair. There are between two and three beds in each room. Two or three stories of illness and interrupted lives taking time off to dispell sickness. There are the better stories, like ours, where a brief interve...

Mayoral candidates are getting desperate. Apart from the cars with loudspeakers annoying the households on the roads, they've decided to go door to door. Yesterday afternoon I was aware someone was standing outside my door when the dog started barking and wouldn't stop (my doorbell doesn't work). So I opened the door and there are a bunch of people with flyers, pens, candy, and lighters, all with the logo of the PP, the conservative party. The leader was opening his mouth to speak when I shook my head and said, "Bye." They shrugged their shoulders and I closed the door.  They couldn't have known it, but if there's one thing I do not abide, it's someone showing up at my door and trying to convince me about something. From Jehovah's Witnesses to political candidates, to marketers of different phone companies, just the sight of them on my doorstep is enough to raise my hackles. I like to search for information on my own and make my own, unhurried d...

The most emblematic sound of summer is the crickets. When it's warm you can hear them in every patch of grass you pass by. They bring back memories of playing into summer twilights with friends and cousins. This week we're hearing a lot of them. Spain is supposed to get slapped in the face with air from the hot Sahara. Temperatures are rising to over a hundred in the south. Here the slap will be a simple tap on the face. In the interior, towards the Castiles, it'll be in the eighties, but along the coast in the seventies. It's a pleasure to drive with the windows down, the smell of green tickling your nose and the crickets tickling your ears. Last night, at ten thirty, we stepped outside and we could hear them. It was still sixty degrees outside and a luminous twilight. The first star was in the sky and the crickets were conversing about the day's light and warmth. The sun on the grass and trees had warmed them during the day and they were releasing that fresh sme...

Would you like some pig for dinner? Or some cow? Through daily use, one never realizes that in English there is usually one word for the animal and another for the food. In other languages there is generally only one word for both animal and food. Once upon a time there was only one word in English, too. Until William brought over some new vocabulary from Normandy in 1066. Of course, the Anglo-Saxon serfs would care for the pig and the cow, while the Norman lords would eat the pork and the beef. Gradually the two words shook hands in the new English language that came out of the hodge-podge of the local language and the introduced French. And we tend to do the same with foods from other cultures. We don't like to eat squid, but we'll eat calamari . Instead of saying rice and raw fish, we'll say sushi . English is a language that just keeps growing. Especially now, with all the different cultural imports from around the world.  Those of us who speak and understand Englis...

There are days when you feel too lazy to move. You wake up, get dressed, start doing something and feel like you're still dreaming. There are things you must do; wash clothes, make lunch, wash dishes, wash the car. But you can't seem to get the verve to do them. Then there are things you like to do and have time for. So you set everything up. But at the moment of putting pen to paper or opening the book and reading where you left off, the energy departs and you feel happy just in thinking about doing your favorite things. The sun is shining, a warm breeze is lazily flowing in through the open window, the temperature is just right, and you feel good. We all have those days we just want to lounge. Gratefully, mine fell on a Sunday. Sitting here, in my study, smelling the fresh, sweet smell of flowers from our garden, with a glass of wine before me further draining energy and replacing it with a comfortable lassitude, I'm wishing tomorrow weren't Monday.

I've been seeing from the news on internet that almost two years before the actual elections, some people have already declared their intentions to run for President of the United States. That is a little too extreme. The time will come when the day after the elections hopefuls will declare themselves candidates for the next elections, four years hence. In Spain, by law, no one can campaign until two weeks before each election. That is the other extreme. In two weeks you can't learn enough to cast an informed vote. On May 24th the local elections are going to be held in all of Spain. So last night at midnight they put up the publicity on all types of billboards. So now voters have two weeks to see who the candidates are and what their parties are promising. That doesn't mean they haven't been talking about the elections right and left. They have. But now is when they get down to their campaign promises. And the free air time on television with maybe fifteen minutes s...

We all know that in Spain people speak Spanish. However, if a tourist winds up in a small town in the region of Galicia and has to ask a question, the person he asks may reply in what the tourist thinks is Portuguese. He'll probably check his map twice to make sure he's still in Spain. Yup. It's just that the person in the street speaks Galician, or gallego ( Galego in Galician!). When the Romans came merrily marching and building their roads through Spain they brought that wonderful invention with them that would end up uniting most of western Europe - Latin. The locals learned to speak it and with time it lost much resemblance to that classical Latin of Cicero's "O tempora, o mores!" . It gradually evolved into Galician-Portuguese by the twelfth century. After the independence of Portugal at the end of that century, Galician and Portuguese started to diverge. Galician, however, still had a certain status and was used as a literary language in Castile unt...

When I was growing up I was taught (at school, mostly) that to have a conversation with someone I should not yell. I was told to keep my voice down because there was no need for the entire class to know what I was talking about with my friend at recess. That a normal tone of conversation was one in which the only one with the need to hear you was the person you were talking with. That was in American society. Not Spanish. We live on the outskirts of a village in a free standing house within its own property. Down the road in one direction is a house, and down the other direction is another house. Far enough to mute noises. Some days you can hear the neighbors having a normal conversation. Normal to them. To me it sounds like a shouting match, though they're not talking angrily. Sometimes I find out more about our neighbors' lives just by listening from our garden than if I were to ask them directly. And when anyone is out in the fields behind our house it's more of the sa...