The Search for Deliciousness

Some things, dear reader, this food-obsessed writer cannot do without. For instance, Thanksgiving without cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie would be a sad affair. When I was twelve, my family spent Thanksgiving in a cabin in the middle of the Panamanian rainforest. We had to hike a mile through jungle, cross a rushing stream on a halved-log with only a single wire as a railing, and ride forty minutes down a road that seemed to consist only of boulders in the back on a real jeep (the kind you go sit in at the Africa exhibit at the Oregon Zoo) just to get to the hotel with a restaurant where we could eat our meals. A twelve year-old on their first out of the country trip in ten years cannot be expected to appreciate the exotic and fascinating environment. The uninspiring pizza and gamey burger that constituted my Thanksgiving meal (we ordered American food in an attempt at something familiar) were severely disappointing and could not be entirely saved by the sheer awesomeness of the french fries that accompanied them. Today, stemming perhaps from that traumatic meal, I have an unreasonable need to consume all the traditional foods at Thanksgiving. Thus, I have recklessly promised to help host a Thanksgiving party for the gluttonous holiday deprived group of Europeans I am friends with.

However, cranberries seem to be unknown outside of the continent of North America, definitely not in Spain, and while winter squash is sold fresh in stores, canned pumpkin does not appear on the shelves. Not even in the snobbish gourmet supermarket I shop at. This, dear readers, presented an enormous problem as you have probably already deduced. Thanksgiving without cranberry sauce and with strange pumpkin pie? Say it isn't so! (Although, to my credit I actually produced a dessert resembling pumpkin pie for my piso's highly successful Halloween party using pumpkin that I cooked and mashed myself.)

I turned where many troubled souls in this day and age turn for the answers to their confounding questions: I turned to the internet. And lo and behold, I found a store in North-Eastern Madrid, the Salamanca barrio, that sells "American" food and is named "Taste of America." The website promised to have everything one might need for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays.

So, today I trekked to "Taste of America." For a girl accustomed to central Madrid and to walking everywhere she needs to go, this was a real trek. I had to take two different metros and then walk about a mile to the store. It was really tiny, about the size of a small convenience store in the US, but then everything is smaller here. More importantly, they had Ocean Spray canned cranberry sauce (the whole berry and jellied varieties both), Libby's Canned Pumpkin Puree, and (dear reader this was a miracle) Libby's Pumpkin Pie Mix. I have to admit that I wandered around the store for a good twenty minutes and bought a lot more things: Quaker oatmeal, ground ginger (which is the only spice it is impossible to find here), vanilla extract, two kinds of tea, English ginger biscuits, and peanut butter filled pretzel nuggets.

Using my handy knit market bag, a birthday present from my friend Sarah, and my Portland Farmer's Market cloth bag to conceal the plastic bags that had "Taste of America" written in enormous letters on the sides, I triumphantly walk and rode the metro home. This year I have vanquished chance; I will not be deprived of my culinary tradition.

Greetings Spaniards, take me to your Starbucks

It's always interesting when you find yourself suddenly looking at things from a fresh perspective. More often than not, when we see ourselves through others eyes we discover things that we had not realized before. I've been feeling pretty down and out about my Spanish. After two months in Spain I felt like I was struggling to be understood and that things kept coming out in English. I also had a general case of the blahs.

Yesterday a girl I lived with last Spring, who is studying in Paris, came to Madrid with her two friends. I took them out in the afternoon and the evening. Spending time with Americans who didn't speak Spanish, and especially Americans who haven't been in Spain for a while, was really shocking to me. "Un choque cultural" is a cultural shock (literally a "choque" means a collision or crash) in Spanish, a term that I think communicates the violence with which cultural differences sometimes can hit us. It didn't help that these Americans were, well, pretty married to their American ways. Just to give you an idea, we spent the first hour in the H and M shopping, and then they wanted to go to Starbucks.

I flatly refused, because this is Spain and not Seattle. I was not going to go into a Starbucks in Madrid, sit there lazily with Americanized coffee, and speak English. I offered to go back to my apartment and meet up with them later, but they said they wanted to do what I wanted to do. So I took them out for chocolate with churros.

For those of you who don't know this delicacy, when the Spanish youth get the drunk munchies or hung over cravings, they go to chocolaterias where they dunk churros (which are like long, plain donuts) into hot chocolate that almost has the consistency of melted chocolate chips. Basically the most decadent treat in the world, and unbelievably Spanish. Unfortunately I took them to one of the most popular chocolaterias in Madrid when it was rainy, and the only table we could find was outside. It didn't help that we moved tables after we had ordered, making the waiter incredibly grumpy. I actually became quite embarrassed as these Americans got fed up with the service (which was typically Spanish), upset about the cold and the rain, and started cussing all over the place. My friend asked an English buy for a cigarette and he joined our table where he started to spew all sorts of travel advice. We were so obviously American and tourists that I felt we stuck out like a sore thumb.

Then I made the mistake of taking them to eat at a Greek restaurant my Greek-German flatmate had found. Little did any of us know that it was not very authentic and involved dinner theatre with a drag queen in a toga and red wig who called herself Aphrodite. Had I been with just my flatmates it would have been okay and hilarious. One of the Americans, however, was Greek and he got more and more offended, even though he couldn't understand what they were saying. He complained about the food, about the show, and then all three of them freaked out about the price and got in the way of me sorting it out with the waiter by talking at him in English. I felt caught between a rock and a hard place. I both understood that in Spain this wasn't a big deal, but I also understood the American abhorrence of anything not PC. It was almost a relief when the three decided they wanted to go back to the hostel instead of going out. I didn't know if I had the strength to spend a night on the town with them.

However, spending time with the Americans helped me look at my situation with markedly different eyes. I noticed for the first time how fluent in Spanish I have become, how sometimes I speak in Spanish automatically, how it is almost difficult for me to speak in English at times. I noticed how European I am becoming, how comfortable I am with the culture, how easily and painlessly I take care of things like speaking to waiters and ordering food. I realized how independent I have become, how cool my apartment is, and how much I love Spain.

Probably hanging out in the US, I would have had fun. They seemed like really nice people. But here in Spain, encountering such bold Americanism was an enormous "choque cultural."

I got my birthday wish: Obama was elected President

How often do you get to turn 21 years old on the day of a historic Presidential Election, which happens to be the first time you can vote for President? Once in a lifetime, so I decided to make the best of it. And I had a seriously epic November 4.

The day started out pretty calm. I wore a new sweater, skirt, and tights to school where I gave a presentation in my literature class. Then I went out to lunch with this girl from the program that I am getting to know. We went to a café connected to this gourmet chocolate shop, so we got chocolate desserts of course. And then I bought myself a box of chocolates filled with liquors as a personal birthday present.

I had invited a group of my European friends over for dinner, so on the way home I stopped and bought soda and Mahou Cinco Estrellas, which is the favorite beer of Svante, our Swedish friend. There was an obligatory meeting that I thought was at 6 but then at 5:30 we checked on Jane’s email and it said the meeting was at 5. So, having accidentally missed the mid-semester meeting I didn’t really want to go to anyway, I went instead to a wine shop and bought four bottles of pretty good wine. Mostly I asked the lady behind the counter of recommendations and she helped me pick out one white, one red, and two bubbly. The Spanish equivalent to Champagne is called Cava.

Svante was the first friend to arrive. He cooked a pasta sauce loaded with cream, Justine (my French flatmate and friend) cooked Spanish tortilla, and I made a salad with vinaigrette. We sat down to eat at about 9:30, with some of the people from my apartment and Vincienzo, the Italian guy. They decided to sing “Happy Birthday” to me, starting in Spanish and then each person sang in their native language, so I ended up getting sung “Happy Birthday” in eight different languages: Spanish, English, Chinese, German, Greek, French, Swedish, Italian, and Ana tried to sing to me in Catalan, but forgot half the words.

Shortly afterward three of the other guys showed up, turned out the lights, and brought in a birthday cake in from the kitchen with lit candles. The cake was pretty odd, one layer with a concave surface and a hard, kind of transparent icing, but they had made it themselves. They had tried to write “Feliz Cumplianos Miriam” in the middle, although the icing ran and pretty much all that was readable was “Feliz.” It was probably the cutest birthday present I had ever received. They sang “Happy Birthday” to me in Spanish, again. To my complete surprise I also got other birthday presents: dessert wine, a bottle of sidra, candles, birthday cards, and a large box of chocolates. Between the wine I had bought, the sidra we opened, and then the shot of rice liquor that Yao, our Chinese flatmate, insisted we drink to my health, I was nicely tipsy. While the other washed the dishes and dealt with the plugged up sink (something that we have to call in a plumber to fix, Joe are you avaliable?) I ended up in a conversation with Jane, my American flatmate about our live, our love lives, and our families. We opened my box of chocolates and between us and everyone else finished off about half before we realized we were eating too much of already full stomachs and cut ourselves off.

People trickled out and at about 1 AM, Jane and I left for the Democrats Abroad Party in the Circulo de Bellas Artes, a prestigious building in central Madrid, not fifteen minutes walk from my piso. It was good that we didn’t go before because we met up with people who had been waiting in line for an hour and a half. Apparently the Democrats had over sold the tickets, but they opened another floor of the building and so after about forty minutes wait, in which Jane and another girl got a bottle of wine and then were interviewed (with the wine) by a Spanish news station. When we finally got inside it was totally crowded, but we made our way up to the top floor and spent hours standing around, watching CNN on giant screams, screaming for every projected Democratic win, and drinking. At one point I went to the bar for a rum and Lemon Fanta with Ana, this girl who is super friendly but I haven’t really talked to, and we had an hour long conversation about politics and then art, her drunk and me tipsy.

Finally, at about 5 or 5:30 in the morning, we counted down to the closing of the West Coast polls (represent Oregon!) and then when we reached zero and CNN flashed up the words “Barak Obama Elected President” everyone went freaking insane. Everyone was screaming, jumping up and down, hugging and kissing each other, and (in my case) tearing up and saying “Oh my god!” over and over. It felt so surreal and yet so amazing. We watched McCain’s concession speech, which was a little hard because a number of people were drunk enough that they wouldn’t be respectful and shut up so we could listen. At the end of the speech they belted out the goodbye song from “Remember the Titans.” Then we waited around until Obama’s acceptance speech, which was a long wait because my feet were hurting. At 6 AM Spain time, Obama walked onto the stage with his family, and I have to admit that I teared up again. We lost about 4 minutes of the audio of his speech due to technical malfunction, but we heard the beginning and then end. That man is one hell of a speaker. I hope he becomes one hell of a President.

At 6:30 in the morning I walked home along the streets of Madrid. The fruit store below my piso, which doesn’t seem to have a set schedule, was open. At home I got out my computer and called my family. I finally went to bed at about 7:40 when it was getting light outside.

So yes, my birthday was freaking epic.