Spanish views from a small town

This past week, town workers have gone and cleaned the ditches and shoulders of the road we sit on. Now, on my morning walks, not only do I have room to escape from a car without having to entangle myself in brambles, I can also look and see the detritus of our civilization.  Plastic wrappers, plastic bags, soda and water bottles, shredded Nestea cans, tattered cigarette packets, and a plethora of beer cans litter the ditch. It's amazing what people will throw out of car windows. Then, there's the debris left behind from a recent accident; pieces of a bumper, side mirror, and other pieces of hard plastic with no discernible relationship to a car.  Generally, Europe is a clean place. At least, it is compared to Boston. I remember the last time I went to Boston (fourteen years already!), stepping out of the terminal at Logan airport onto the street. The first thing that caught my eye was the trash. Despite a large trash can, everything was scattered on the ground. The street...

Without realizing it, it's all around us. I remember it was ubiquitous in every street in Boston. Here, even with the European fame of its supposed non-existence, you can find it easily in the most unsuspecting places. We're surrounded by trash. It is said that even on Mount Everest, one of the last pristine places on Earth, there is trash that climbers have left behind. If they could carry up their belongings, why couldn't they carry them back down? That being the case, it shouldn't be strange to see overgrown ditches stuffed with papers and plastics and cans along our roads. It has become commonplace for us when trying to find out of the way spots for our picnics when we drive around Galicia, to find a beautiful little corner and see it filled with all sorts of junk from previous travellers. Tissues, plastic wrappers, plastic bottles, bags, smashed cans, cans bleached from the sun, everything that was too much of a burden to someone to pick up and take back home to ...

Leftovers and trash. That's what the day after Christmas is all about. Leftover seafood, leftover meat, leftover sweets. How many recipes for leftover food can there be? It doesn't matter that you try to buy so that you finish the food in one sitting. There will always be moments of, "Well, everybody loves this dish, so of this I had better buy a little extra for seconds." Those seconds turn into thirds that leave something else uneaten. And, of course, after gobbling down three dishes of seafood, and one enormous dish of meat, the sweets are ignored. So you nibble on them whenever you visit the pantry. Which is often. The day after Christmas you look at the exultant refrigerator, you look at the pants that shrank, you look at your thinned wallet, you think of all those in the world who are starving, and you swear that next year you will buy less. And next year comes and you do the same thing all over again.  Trash is another story. I remember the trash day after Ch...