My Amsterdam

Amsterdam was Amsterdam. We visited the beautiful parks, Vondelpark and Rembrandtpark, and strolled through the streets of tall, skinny, leaning houses. We took a tour on a canal boat and visited the flower market as well.

We had yummy open-faced sandwiches with spicy flavors from the previous Dutch colonies like Suriname and Indonesia.

But the whole time we were in Amsterdam, I was thinking of one thing: a local Minneapolis hit from the mid 90s.

One bonus is that now the singer, Jim Ruiz, is our local head librarian at the Southeast branch of the Hennepin County libraries.

And now, we are in Madrid, enjoying our last day of Spanish sun and wondering exactly what to do with ourselves. It’s a strange day indeed.

One road in, one road out

I was thinking about this post as I was running through the streets of Lisbon last night. Running in the mountains around Siles was a very different experience, though Lisbon does have hills of its own.

I remembered when we first looked at a map of Siles after we were posted there, and we saw that there was only one paved road in and one paved road out (the good ol’ A-310). When we arrived a few months later, we came in from the east, and as we left last Wednesday, fittingly, we took the road to the west. We’ve taken both of these roads many times before, but symbolically it seems right to arrive on one and leave on the other.


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I was thinking about other apt metaphors and symbols for the changes we are experiencing, and one that my friend M (the principal at the high school in the town of La Puerta) mentioned came to mind. He was discussing leaving La Puerta himself as he sought to advance his career and described it as finishing a book and putting it on the shelf before moving on to a new one. This metaphor works for me. Siles has been a good book that we enjoyed. There were happy chapters and sad chapters; the end was a sort of climax, and now we are starting another book– a novella about an American family traveling for five weeks in Europe.

I was thinking about this too as I was running, and I couldn’t shake the iconic scene from Pulp Fiction in which Jules decides to quit his job as a hitman after a near-death experience and explains his next plan to his partner Vincent. Like Jules and Caine, for five weeks at least, we are going to “walk [drive] the Earth and have adventures” and just be us. The fun has already begun in Lisbon where we have met our friends R and D from Minneapolis to do the town.

More on that later, but for now, here’s the scene, delivered via someone’s Portuguese upload to YouTube. I hope it works in the US. Warning: this scene contains what is euphemistically called “strong language.”

Fat of the land

Mother’s Day is celebrated this Sunday in Spain. And here is C holding her Mother’s Day bouquet: an armful of fresh, wild asparagus.

Okay, it’s not really her bouquet; it’s a gift from our landlord who picked it while he was working in his olive grove. While there isn’t quite as much excitement as there was about mushroom hunting, picking wild asparagus is currently a very popular pastime.

And while we are on the subject of food, it’s time to come clean about our favorite unhealthy snack in Spain: potato chips cooked in olive oil and garlic. They are even relatively local, coming from Ubeda, about an hour away by two-lane road.

They are so tasty that they inspired F & H to choreograph the “chippy chip dance” when we first experienced them last fall.

Enjoy.

 

 

It’s our town!

Siles made it into a “let’s learn about our province” segment on the local news (well, local being two hours away). It seems so romantic now.

0:13 this plaza is 1-1/2 blocks from our house
0:28 El Paseo– the main street in our town
0:40 El Cubo– the town castle which no one can go into because it is about 800 years old and is falling down and the Catholic church (I hear there’s a new pope) in the background
0:50 Arco Malena– one of the entrances to the old city; this is directly across the street from our house; we walk through it everyday– how could they have missed us?
0:58 our neighbors’ clothes three houses up, and this is how we dry our clothes too, though on the back terrace, not in the street
1:03 this is our street; the car BEHIND the lovely blue Renault Megane on the left is THE EGGPLANT! Our house isn’t visible, but it is a little off the street on the right where the circular blue sign with the red border is (that’s a no-parking sign); and yes, it is like parking in San Francisco: leave it in gear, set the hand break, turn the wheels to the curb, and pray.
1:28 that church is about 2 blocks from our house, and those bells are loud.
1:39 that kid on the left is bad news
2:12 through there and to the left, they make some yummy cured meats
2:23 “estamos aqui,” we are here— yes, we are!

Politics comes to the pueblo

As we have suggested to some folks who have asked, the terrible economic and political climate in Spain at the moment doesn’t usually have noticeable effects in our little town. When there are protests or riots in Madrid and Barcelona, we see it on the news, but there are almost never companion activities in our corner of Spain. It’s clear that many of the residents of Siles are struggling economically, but that could just be life in rural anywhere. It’s hard to scratch a living out of the mountains no matter what’s happening in the outside world.

Yesterday (Friday), however, politics finally came to the pueblo, and (for us as Americans) in a very strange way.

As mentioned in the previous post, yesterday was the celebration of carnaval (think Mardi Gras) at my school. The teachers and children have been working on costumes (it’s amazing what these people can do with a plastic garbage bag and some tape) and songs and dances for the last two weeks. For the last two hours of the school day on Friday, they donned their regalia and performed these songs and dances in an all-school assembly in the gymnasium.

And the political aspect is that as a form of protest against the government’s lack of support for education, for the first time ever the teachers locked the parents out of the celebration.

Now, clearly, I lack information about the history of education in Spain, the current state of education spending, the culture and history of parent/teacher relations, the role of school programs and festivals in the community, and all number of other influences on this situation. However, I still found this decision bizarre at worst, counter-intuitive at least. In my American mind, I can’t comprehend what is to be gained from alienating the parents by not allowing them to see their precious little angels perform (the degree to which the children are–or are not– precious little angels is grist for another post, but I have my reservations about their angelic nature). I can’t see the parents blaming the government; I can only see them blaming the people who made the decision: the teachers. To put it colloquially, this strikes me as a perfect example of “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

Again, I’m making these observations as one who is outside the culture in which the decisions are being made, but I feel vindicated in my position because what I imagined would happen above is exactly what has happened. The parents are completely irritated to the extent that friendships between teachers and parents (remember it’s a small town) are being strained and even lost. The teachers are being roundly derided and continue to lose what little status they had before this decision. They appear to have gained nothing unless they’ve gained some self-satisfaction.

I work with these teachers, and I see the pressure they are under. I see the strange system of employment they work under that keeps them jumping from job to job every year. I see the lack of support they get from many parents when it comes to the children’s education, whether that be in the form of helping with homework or standing together on behavior issues or even just instilling in children that education is valuable. I see the deteriorating infrastructure and materials they work with. I understand their frustration. I understand that they want things to change. That part I understand. I truly do.

But, from a political standpoint, I don’t understand this decision.

So, I was allowed to go the celebration because I am a member of the school staff, but like the other parents, Chris wasn’t allowed to watch. In fact, she initially came to the gym to watch because we had not seen the note banning parents (F&H conveniently forgot to show us), and she was asked to leave. A few other parents wandered into the balcony and experienced the same treatment.

And let me just say that the teachers and director are fortunate Chris is not a native Spanish speaker because there’s that old saying about the wrath of a woman scorned, and if she could speak Spanish, there’d still be some ears burning. What I have written here is the picture of diplomacy compared to some of the discussions had in our house yesterday.

And now for the silver lining: Chris was discussing this with another mother who then commented that we are in Spain at a “bad moment,” and I can’t get this song (and this version) out of my head:

More lessons and goofy music

At CEIP Santa Teresa de Jesus, I work the most closely with the English teacher and coordinator. Among other things, she’s taught me to be very forgiving of the bad choices children make in their more boisterous or thoughtless moments. She’s also shown me the power of music to soothe the savage six-year-old.

On most days we have a few minutes to talk about music, and today she reminded me of a band and one song in particular that fit in with the goofy three-year-old songs from my last post. In fact, she claims her three-year-old sings this song, and I would really love to hear that.

So, here’s one from way back for all the math and techno geeks out there.