Monthly Archive

A short while after arriving at my homestay Elisa (the woman I was staying with) offered me lunch, and naturally as a bedraggled and confused foreigner, I wasn´t going to refuse. I was taken aback by the healthy plate that was set before me: endives cut in half with an anchovy placed lengthwise along each of them, with a side salad of chopped up tomatoes and avocados. All of this was drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and had a variety of little seeds including sunflower and sesame sprinkled on top. I was even more surprised when I ate the endive-anchovy combination and discovered how delicious it was. Usually I´m capricious with anchovies, I fear their mouth-shrinking saltiness; and I had never in my life met an endive. I had to look at the packaging to see what they were called. Therefore the reason why I was so surprised was because I hadn´t been expecting something so Andrew Weil-worthy healthy, so delicious, and so totally unknown to me. It was a great way to start my first day in Spain, an awakening by food.     

That same night the mother of the woman I was living with taught me how to make tortilla con patatas, which so as you don´t get confused with the Mexican idea of tortillas means simply a potato omelette. The trick according to her was to use a lot of olive oil when you´re first softening and cooking the potatoes, and then to drastically reduce the heat and take out all of the olive oil before putting in the eggs. It sounds simple but the removal of the olive oil is achieved by conscientiously ladling it out of the pan with a spoon, so it takes some time. What´s more you´ve got to be careful with the time you take at each step of the process (chopping the potatoes and putting them in the pan, taking out the oil…) for there is always that dreaded danger of burning the bottom. In saying all this however every household has their own trick in making tortilla con patatas, and anyone´s own ideal has only been arrived at through their own trial and error. Read the rest of this entry »

*Gasp*! *Choke choke GASP*

http://brainsciencpodcast.wordpress.com/

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Soooo tasty.

Earlier today I left to organise my train travel with a pair of authentic, down-to-earth kiwi girls (from Alexandra no less!) as companions, and as I was leaving the hostel I ran into the South Korean girl. I asked her what time she was leaving, she said tonight, and so I said great, I´ll still get to see you later then.

I did spend a long time at the internet café getting those posts out however and also got distracted by the wonderfulness of the infamous red brick park. Which in actual fact is not ¨red¨ brick, it´s more a faded orange. This makes a big difference! This evening there were hippies playing the drums, oddly enough evoking Chinese New Year for me, and a tall woman practising a flamenco dance on the honorary stage, right where the capoeira people had been playing and doing their roda last night. Plus today´s dusk was even more beautiful and soul soothing than yesterday´s. Read the rest of this entry »

I know I´m in Granada now but still got a couple more things to say about San Sebastián. It won´t happen tonight but sometime over the next week. I also hope to get more photos up because I really really need my memory cards free

 Otherwise, blog wandering again today: Mass murders, zeta males, and virtual life and The worst school massacre in American history: not Virginia Tech.

One day I will find some peaches and cream, one day.

Last night, my first night of socialising at the hostel, I had a conversation with a cute 23 year old South Korean girl who wore rectagular glasses with rounded corners and had gorgeously liso hair. She´d been living in the UK for 6 months, now in London after having spent some time in Cambridge. In the course of the conversation I learnt about the following stories from her:

- She has a North Korean friend who escaped the country by swimming across the sea to China and then travelling through Cambodia and around other parts of South East Asia. He finally managed to arrive in South Korea 2 years later, which apparently speaks of how lucky he was because many successful escapees take 5 years to reach the south. She said that in general the view of North Koreans in South Korea is that they are kind, lovely people; but they still have an extremely hard time adjusting. For example during the break time at school a teacher might give a North Korean kid a ball and tell them to go play, and the kid will just stand there holding the ball. Because they can´t play without being told exactly how they should play. Daily life is a struggle because it is difficult to truly grasp the idea of working to earn money and buy things. So they put in a lot of effort to try and fit in and to cover up their alienness.

- When she was in India she visited one of the homes of Mother Theresa´s order. She met a woman staying there, a woman who had been from an affluent family and who had married an affluent man, but who didn´t bear him a son for their first child. He consequently sent her to work as a prostitute and she fell dangerously ill. A worker at Mother Theresa´s home took her in and helped her get better, but by this stage her mind was mostly gone. Every time she saw a man after that she would scream and scream and wouldn´t stop until he was out of sight.   Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday I caught a bus from San Sebastián to Madrid in the morning, followed by a bus from Madrid to Granada a few short hours later. The hostel that I´m currently staying at is pretty interesting. It´s in Albayzín, an important Arabic quarter from Granada´s Moorish past. When I first arrived here it was 10pm and I had just navigated catching two buses in order to get from the bus station to a convent in front of my hostel´s street. And actually, the bus driver had forgotten to tell me where my stop was, forcing a backtrack which was fortunately todo derecho. What I was faced with: roadworks at the beginning of my street, with large blocks of stone unearthed, a long dusty trench and barriers to prevent general passage; a deserted cobblestone street made very narrow by the high walls of the houses on both sides; and big, heavy wooden doors with wrought iron grills on them. Needless to say I was a tad doubtful and intimidated. I´ve gotten used to it now, the narrow, maze-like streets that somehow find you a way through the jumble of secretive houses, and I love the sense of discovery it allows you to feel. I still always feel a little bit scared somehow though, unless there are a handful of other people around. And then it clicked ……Middle Ages design. No wonder I´m scared! 

One of the first things I did here was amble around Sacromonte, which is just to the north of Albayzín; I strongly and highly recommend it to everyone as a walk. I´m not sure if it´s because of the time of year or whether most tourists prefer to drive or catch a bus, but I ran into fewer than 5 people over the course of my 3 hour walk. Don´t worry, I have a habit of taking a one hour walk and magically converting it into three. By and large I was left in complete peace to marvel at the haphazard cascade of white houses on the hillside on the left, and at the surprising pastoral scene, lush and green, that lived right next to the hills on the right. How I know a walk is good is very simple: it´s when I get happier and happier each few steps I take, and it´s not a happiness that is controllable or much understood. I only understand that part of it is made up of glee, but the uncontrollable, exponentially increasing part of it I have no explanation for. Anyway. The guy at the hostel had suggested it to me because apparently there are people who have built their homes in the caves of Sacromonte. I´m not sure if I did see these, the most I saw in this vein was some doors built into the side of the hill. I took some pictures so maybe these might help to clear up the question. Probably not, because they just look like doors leading into the hill.   Read the rest of this entry »

I now really want to watch the documentary discussed in this post*. Hope I find a way to watch it since I doubt it´ll be widely screened. Other than that I enjoyed her posts from the month of August; it´s great to get a peek into the process and concerns of a young filmmaker. Not to mention, go AZN PrYde! [Deathly serious about how much I am kidding, kidding, about that declaration...]

Sometimes blogs annoy me but on this particular morning I´m grateful that blogs like hers let me vicariously live other lives, other identities.

*NB: Not light-hearted fare

I have some questions, which will be posed with the help of visual aids. Unfortunately I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get the damn pictures to actually load on this page so I will simply link them. I´m sorry! I know I´m so late 90s…

Instrucciones: There are three questions. Observe the photos of each question and reflect for as long as you wish. If you know the answer, I would be most grateful if you could place it in the comments or email me. Or, tell someone who does email me. Read the rest of this entry »

It sucks unspeakably so that upon thinking of the word ¨confessions¨I hear the song by Usher. Die die die!

#1. I have really missed my family. Travelled all my life, mostly without giving them too much thought if any. Maybe it´s because of the small size of the school and the way in which people come so quickly together to form a new, young, mixed-up style of family. It´s so easy to make friends here and to spend all your time with other foreigners. Familiarity and a form of intimacy develop very quickly: first you have class together in the morning, and then you hang out together in your free time making excursions to other towns, trying out new activities together, and going out all night to bars and discos. This sounds ideal, and was ideal in the beginning. But apparently things have been moving too quickly for me. These are people who are multi-lingual, have great social skills, are by and large attractive and smart. They´re people you would show off as friends, for their life and their easiness. But my real family is a particular brand of weird, my favourite brand of weird. And as I´ve tried to slip into this new family, I haven´t been able to help but feel how immediately convenient this self-sustaining world of happy young foreigners is, and how much I miss real queerness.    

#2. I´ve been popping in DVDs of saccarine, OTT, Hollywoodian romantic comedies simply because they´re the only ones in the house and are a guaranteed hour and a half´s worth of complete immersion in English. I´d been puzzling over why I´ve felt the need to do this considering my interactions with the other students (German, Swedish, Dutch, Brazilian, North American) are mostly in English. Figured it out… there´s a difference between using this type of convivial/survival English and being able to take for granted the long unbroken flow of native speakers. Watching these movies is equivalent to taking a luxurious soak in a warm bubble bath for my brain. I never thought I was so mother-tongue-centric. This is shocking.

It´s been an age and my avatar has been nothing more than a square filled with black.  I can´t say much for that except that I have been lazy, surfing, and on and off sick. Sounds like an unlikely combination but it´s true. Oh yeah, that and I haven´t had internet access over the Easter holidays.  

Not sure where to start having been off the horse for this long… Some good news. San Sebastián has finally started to see sun! It´s quite crazy how much a little light can makeover a place.

What else…. hmm, I think I´ll explain what motivated my relatively long stay here.

I chose to come to San Sebastián because I wanted to be able to learn Spanish and surf at the same time. I wonder if that would work, language lessons on the water… My mum informed me that International House, a master operator of language schools around the world, had a really good reputation, and once I´d checked out the website for the Lacunza school here in Sn Sn I had no doubts that this was where I wanted to come. I´m coming on my last week of a month of Spanish classes, running from 9:30am to 1pm daily, and just last week I was strongly tempted to take on a week or two more of classes because I was so impressed with the progress that we had made. The teachers are very well-prepared, quick-thinking and fun, and the administrative staff are so helpful and thorough in their assistance that you might as well take them for a sort of concierge. Every week they post up activities that you can participate in, including film sessions, bar outings, intercambio (language exchange) with native speakers and dance lessons. One week I took on salsa with a couple of others from my class and from that will always keep the memory of a man calling out in a Count Von Count from Sesame Street type accent ¨Vuelta! Vuelta!¨, not to mention the original composition he taught us at the end that involved finger pointing, pelvic thrusting and shoulder shimmying. All in all, rave reviews for the school. If you´re at all wondering why I opted to not extend my studies, the answer is because the combined cost of accommodation and classes is pretty high, and while I could afford it my preference at this moment is to have the freedom to move around, more than to keep up a settled life in one place, as lovely and as easy as it is. Read the rest of this entry »