A weekend of changes & Madrid site seeing

View down a Madrid
alleyway

The second week in Spain differed quite a bit from my first week there.  I still worked at the English Camp during the days, but I stayed with a new family, visited Madrid a number of times, and helped choreograph a dance number with the oldest group of girls at camp.  However, my second weekend in Spain started off with some quality time with my first family.


Friday night Maria and I went shoe shopping, which turns out is hard for me to do in Spain.  They have amazingly cute shoes, but I am a size 41, just outside of the usual range carried by zapaterias (shoe stores).  Afterwards, we picked up pizzas & popcorn at the store, and the whole family watched a movie.  What movie did I travel all the way to Spain to watch?  The second film in the Twilight series.  Maria had been trying to read the first book, but found the language hard to understand.  Due to my great expertise on the matter, I could tell her a bit of the general outline.  The parents thought it would be a fun way to bond with me and their tweenager (and they had seen it already and evaluated she was ready to watch it.)  Oh my word, this series is more melodramatic than a Korean tv drama...something I forget a bit between viewings!  But Maria loved it & her mom thought it very romantic.  

Tourist attraction: take a picture with an antique
black & white camera.  Funny how now that we have super-
precise digital cameras, people will pay $10+ to get a
photo without color that looks grainy!

The family took me on a trip into Madrid on Saturday.  They used to live in the city, so they took me around to some of their favorite places.  On my previous trip to Spain, I took a similar tour but saw most of it in the company of non-natives.  This time I got extensive historical and cultural explanations from Josemi, and every hour or so we stopped for drinks at one of their favorite bars or eateries in the area.  One bar tucked away from the streets in a little plaza boasted small nozzles on the awnings that sprayed clouds of cool mist on customers.  Even though our waiter told Josemi that it cost 7,000 euros to put in (and thus was a bit out of his price range to install on his terrace as Josemi wished), I'm pretty sure that everyone who stopped did so specifically for the misting water.  
There we dined on pickled sardines on a piece of tomato & bread.  Another stop was a dark and historic wine bar (historic in that it hasn't been renovated or repainted in so long that paint is peeling off the walls & the bull fight posters on the walls are darkened from years of smoking.)  They were known for serving a kind of "meat" made from fish eggs squished and dried with salt to make them look like ham slices.  Gummy and not my favorite, but Bea adores it.  Finally we stopped at an up-scale diner in the middle of a park that runs the center of the main roadway.  It has been made around the same time as the Titanic and looks similar inside: red velvet banquettes, mirrors & stained glass, marble & mahogany.  There we finished up with some cinnamon ice cream (tastes like cinnamon with vanilla ice cream).  What a fun way to see Madrid, from the perspective of its eateries!


Sunday was a time of changing gears.  My second family had been on vacation the whole first week, and Tim was not able to find out exactly when they would be able to take me.  Until the end of the church service, I didn't even officially know that I would be changing houses that day!   As soon as the family confirmed they were back and could take me, everything happened very quickly.  I was thankful that Josemi & Bea came back from dog walking right as I was lugging my suitcase downstairs, so that I could still say goodbye to them.  The new family I came to lived in a residential community rather far outside of Tres Cantos (the city in which the camp was taking place.)  The houses are big like mansions

This house stands on a hill behind a big fence at the
end of the street.  And, yes, it's pink!

and have their own pools and yards.  (This is quite different than in the rest of Tres Cantos.)  I was placed with this family because the two kids were adopted as toddlers from India.  Varun and Eva are fully Spanish now, but they still look like they are from Calcutta.  Despite living in a multi-racial society like the United States, I think I assumed Spaniards look like, well, Spaniards.  But Spain is becoming a pretty multi-racial society too, and adoption from other countries has also become a more common thing.  Even in our English Camp we had kids from bunch of different races who were Spanish in every sense of the word.  So moving in with this new family helped me see a side of Spain I haven't gotten to see before.  

Having a moment with Don Quixote & Sancho Panza

On the other hand, gone were the breakfasts and dinners eaten over conversation with my host family.  Louisa is a single mom, and her two teenagers often run on their own time schedules.  In particular, Varun was getting ready to spend a year abroad in the U.S. and needed to spend a bunch of time preparing for that.  Sunday night his cousin took me out instead on another tour of Madrid.  This one, occurring in the evening, gave me yet another view of the city.  The people of Madrid are known for keeping very late hours, eating, drinking, and generally enjoying themselves.  Carlos, also a high schooler, was a pretty good tour guide, getting me to try a fried squid sandwich and other various sandwich finger foods.  He thought we were calling it an early night when I expressed being tired and wanting to head home to sleep.  Silly, American.  It was only 12:30am.  The night was only just beginning!  Oh well, it was nice for Carlos to hang out with such an old fuddy duddy like me.  :D

My host family - Pt.1

To make a spanish omelette:

The secret is that you must fry the potatoes first.  1) Peel & slice the potatoes thinly. 2) Fry the potatoes by boiling in olive oil.  3) Remove potatoes from the pan.  Add 6 eggs to potatoes & stir it all together.  4) Pour eggs/potatoes into pan with some oil @ bottom & cook til it's starting to fry the bottom.  5) Use a plate to flip the omelette onto; then slide back into the pan, cooked side up.  6) Slide out of the pan & eat its deliciousness!  

A Spanish omelette

I wanted to write this all down here, so you too can make a delicious Spanish omelette.  My host mom learned how much I like this Spanish food & let me watch to learn the art.  My host family really went all out to provide great food & accommodations for me.  They had me try sheep's cheese and a fruit called a "paraguaya" (like a peach flattened into a disk) and some special chocolate pastry that is their grandma's favorite.  The paraguaya in particular has now become one of my favorite fruits.  Our evenings at tapas bars and our day in Madrid were full of similar food tastings, including things that seemed quite weird to my palate.  The pig’s ear was a big no for me, as well as the fish eggs pressed into something that looked like ham.  (Spaniards and their jamon.  Seriously!  What would they eat if God hadn’t created pigs?!)  However, the pickled fish on bread & cheese was pretty good, and I’ve found I really like tinta de verano.  It makes me slightly ashamed of what a bad hostess I am when people visit me.  I may not like cooking & I don't show my love to others through cooking, but this family has shown me how being a great host also comes through listening and then using what one learns's about the guest to create moments of sharing together.  Like when I answered a favorite movie question with “I enjoy the Muppets.”  They chose the new Muppet movie for the next weekend’s movie night in order to share the experience with me.  (Their review: most of the things I laughed at didn’t translate into humor in Spanish.  Sad!  Or maybe I just have a weird sense of humor.) 

 My family is also really good with helping me practice my Spanish.  They correct me and answer my questions as needed, but usually they are okay with me botching grammar horribly or returning to English as needed.  I try to return the favor by talking to them in English in a similar way.  (One of the reasons people host us monitors is the opportunity to get English conversation practice.)  I love talking with Bea (the mom) b/c we move pretty fluidly between Spanish and English.  We speak the other's language for the easy things and our own language for the harder things.  The 12-yr-old, Maria, seemed to get embarrassed by her mother’s mistakes in English, but I bet she didn’t realize how comforting it was for me to hear her mom's mistakes.  It helped me know I could expect the same grace when I needed it during conversations.  

It was fun to spend so much time with a tween-aged Spaniard though.  Last time I came, I felt that the teenagers (most of whom idn’t speak English) kind of blew me off b/c I couldn’t speak the same language as they.  With Maria, I was able to have a lot of good conversations, since we could move back and forth between our native languages.  One day we went to the pool.  Maria wanted to show me this boy she has a crush on.  I asked her if she'd ever spoken to him, and she said "once."  Gosh, I remember being a middle schooler like that!  And probably like that in high school too.  Haha.