Spanish views from a small town

I love her, I truly do. But I can't wait for classes to begin again and have the house to myself. I'm almost there, about a week and a half to go. My daughter is not a rowdy teenager who you can't seem to find when you want her, or who is forever underfoot saying, "I'm bored" as if you were an automatic revue show for her sole entertainment. She is an intelligent, thinking young adult who helps out around the house, whether you ask her to or not. She is responsible and mature, though still uncertain on small, everyday things, which is normal. That's not the problem. The problem is that I have grown accustomed to being alone. The "empty nest" syndrome was never a problem after the first few months, back when she was still fifteen. I have adapted to an empty house by day, and the sole company of my husband by night. I make the noise I desire, dance to music at the loudest volume if I want, or be extremely quiet, and let the sounds of the trilli...

Yesterday evening I received a call from a phone company rival to the one we use. The salesman introduced himself and his company, and asked to speak with the titular of the phone number. Tired of the pitch they all spin, I came out and said, "I'm the titular, and we can't get coverage from your company here." The salesman, not one to lose a dime on a lost cause, immediately hung up. The guy was succinct; if he couldn't make a sale, then cut lose and call someone else. While not a stellar salesman, he was still better than a woman who called me months ago. I forget if she was calling from the same company or another one, but she was insistent. I explained over and over, that there's only one company whose antennas reach this corner, but she still tried to sell me their service. Finally, frustrated, she asked me that if I didn't have coverage from her company, how come she could talk with me calling on their system? I think I either must have barked out a...

The Spanish Mediterranean is known for sun and fun, especially among young people from the colder, more serious north of Europe. As when I was a teenager in Boston, and high school seniors and college students went to Bermuda and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for spring break, so charters of young adults from Britain, France, and Germany come to the Balearic Islands and coastal towns of Catalunya. If the locals back then complained about those students unleashed upon the innocent population, so do locals here now complain about the youngsters from the north. Some have wandered the streets naked in all their glory in the center of Barcelona, others have had to be picked up by the garbage men in Magaluf and sent to the Emergency Room in an alcoholic coma, and others have had to be picked up by the coroner after jumping into the pool from a sixth floor balcony and missing the water. This last practice is called balconing , and is an Anglo-Saxon adaptation of transforming a noun into a verb....

Last night was another of those special nights this summer. A Coruña hosts a music festival during their traditional annual festival, the Festival do Noroeste. They have venues all over the city, including the Riazor beach. On the beach Saturday night, there were four bands scheduled to play, from eight until around one. Three were Spanish; The Soul Breakers, Lola, and Viva Suecia. The last one was British led by an American singer - The Pretenders. There was no way I wasn't going to go. It's a little over an hour away by tollway, and close to two hours by road. We travelled there by road to save on tolls, and arrived close to nine thirty, when the sun was setting over the city. A Coruña isn't a city I visit frequently. While it's the capital of the homonymous province I live in, Vigo, in the province of Pontevedra, is closer. Coruña (It has an article, depending on whether you speak Galician or Castilian, a or la , but many drop it when referring to the city.) has a...

It's our parish festival this weekend. Ours and just about everybody else's. Between this weekend and the next, most of Galicia will be jumping. Last month, around the 16th, there were festivals up and down the entire coast. It was the feast day of the Virxe do Carme , one of the many monikers of the Virgin Mary. O Carme is supposed to protect sailors and others who set out to sea. Hence, the coastal revelry. This month is the anniversary of Mary's Assumption into Heaven (let's leave it at that), and the second round of festivals all over the place. If you want troula (Galician), juerga (Castilian), to paaaarrtyy! (English), Galicia is the place to be in August. Our parish has three days of celebration, each dedicated to a saint venerated in the parish. There's the Virgin Mary (our parish isn't called Santa María for nothing), Saint Roche (don't look at me) and Saint Anne (comprehensible, she was Mary's mother, after all). Each night, except Sunday...

When I was a teenager in Boston, from time to time there would be classical music specials on channel 2, PBS. The ones that caught my eye and ear were the operas. Retransmissions from The Met in New York would bring me The Magic Flute, or Don Giovanni, or Aïda, or Madame Butterfly. Those are the ones I remember most, though there were probably others, as well. I would marvel at the music and the voices, and wish I could someday sit in a concert hall to listen to them. A couple of weeks ago, flipping through a website on upcoming events in Santiago, I came upon an event in the monastery of San Martín Pinario, the seminary in Santiago that holds cultural events. Madame Butterfly was to be shown on August 8th at nine o'clock, with tickets that began at ten euros. Exclamation points flipped up in my head. This was my chance to listen in situ to those marvelous voices! I convinced my husband, and bought the tickets.  It was pure luck I found it, really. Cultural offerings such as t...

Turn off the oven. I'm done.  Since Thursday, in our little, green, temperate corner of Spain we have been suffering a heatwave that have taken temperatures close to 38ºC/100ºF on the coast, and have gone to 43ºc/109ºF in the town of Arbo, province of Ourense, near the border with Portugal. The worst problem of all, was the humidity that invaded us. It was worse on Friday, though it hasn't gone away yet.  When I was growing up in Boston, we got heatwaves with temperatures in the 90's, and humidity so high, I was dripping as soon as I moved. Whenever meteorologist Dick Albert put up the three HHH's on the board (hazy, hot, and humid), I would go into a limbo of existence. It didn't help matters that our apartment was on the third floor under a hot pitch roof. Nights were spent with all the windows in the apartment opened and lying across the bed, trying to catch the whisper of a breeze. Extreme nights were spent on the porch, battling mosquitoes. Generally, whe...