EuroYankee

Apparently, and alarmingly, the Easter Bunny doesn’t hop across the Pyrenees into Spain. While visiting the Basque Country, I asked about the Conejito de Pascua and got blank looks. Yet a fellow houseguest  assurred me that chocolate eggs are common in France, Germany and other European countries. There’s a chocolate easter egg market to be exploited on the Iberian Peninsula.

The Basque Country remains as gorgeous as ever. Ate outrageous amounts of meat, lost arm wrestling competitions to both Itziar and Naiara (for the rights to Ben Stiller and Johnny Depp respectively) and did some hiking.

Back in Valencia, it’s going-to-the-park-in-a-skirt-and-tanktop-warm. So that’s exactly what I plan to do right now. Ciao.

The fallas celebration turned out to be even crazier than I imagined. My German computer guru got my laptop kinda back up and running, so I’ve posted a fallas photo album with some pictures. I’ll put up more when I get back from San Sebastian next week.

[Here's the picture of the falla next to my house, which turned out to be the lamest one in the entire city]

fortunatelz, mz roommate returned with his computer. unfortunatelz, it has a german kezboard. at this moment (1:55 a.m.) mz neighborhood is having a street partz with music so loud that it sounds like a disco from mz bedroom. i came home earlz because i have to wake up at 7 a.m. to go to the airport. but i have no idea how i will sleep.

the fallas are definitelz the crayiest citzßwide partz in europe. thez erect gigantic figures in all the neighborhoods of the citz. there are more than 300 around. the most expensive cost more than $300,000. so all the streets get closed to traffic. then, the women put on elaborate silk dresses and crayz hair and parade around. i have alreadz seen two parades. each lasted more than an hour. at the end of the weekend, thez will burn all of the figures except one, which gets saved and put in a museum.

everz night there are fireworks as well. i went to see them last night after hearing Luz, a wellßknown spanish singer. tonight, the fireworks started at 1 a.m. sleeping seems out of the question.

My computer has been on the fritz for more than a week. It’s a complete disaster. Fortunately, a very cute technician is flying in from Germany. Hopefully it’s “fixable.” We’ll see.

Lots of good stories have been lost in the meantime. To recap:

Imagine me in a gigantic latin disco surrounded by thousands of South American immigrants dancing salsa and samba. Got home a little after 7 a.m.

Went to see Luz play. She is a famous Spanish singer and she rocked the crowd. The concert was held outside in a botanical garden. Really nice. At the end, we watched the fireworks and drank in the street.

Everyone drinks in the street during fallas. Many of the streets have been closed down for the party, so everyone brings beer or litre bottles of rum and coke and just hangs out all night.

There are crowds of people everywhere. It`s impossible to describe. To walk a distance that would normally take 5 minutes takes 20 because there are so many people crowding the sidewalks.

More later. Now it’s party time. We have seven houseguests rolling in this week. Good times. I’ll post pictures soon.

My computer is messed up. whenever i open Word, the number eight begins appearing over and over and over again. pretty much can’t do anything. i have lots of news and pictures which i’ll post as soon as i overcome these technical difficulties. Ciao.

Festive lights have been turned on everywhere in this city. The plazas have filled with gigantic ninots (it’s hard to translate. something in-between a doll and a float). They will get paraded around Valencia for the next week and at the end will be set on fire.

Spain doesn’t have much going for it in the way of wildlife preserves. I would recommend guidebooks print the following: “Warning, American nature lovers will not be impressed with any Spanish lake, no matter how “pristine.” Went to the Albufera today, a lake near Valencian less than a mile inland from the Mediterranean. It had some mediocre sand dunes, a pine “forest” as well as herons and sea gulls. Palmar, a fishing village, sits at the edge of the lake. It’s one of the nastiest tourist villages I’ve seen in Spain. The town fills up at lunchtime with people from the city who  come there to eat paella. Every building is a restaurant.

My favorite time of day is towards the end of siesta when the sun has dipped behind the buildings, yet the air is still warm. I was walking home from the park down Conde Altea street. All the stores were closed, yet there was the sense that bustle was just a few minutes away. I walked at my normal brisk pace. As I passed by a sidewalk cafe, an old man said to me: “tranquilo, tranquilo.” Which basically means “chill out.”

“We have 30 minutes to walk five blocks,” I was told by a Spaniard earlier this week as we went to a play. “We have time to look at the people and the buildings and the sky. There’s no hurry (no hay prisa).”

Nothing like a little noise to get everybody in party mode. Every day at 2 p.m. the mascletà rocks the main Plaza del Ayuntamiento. It basically consists of a gigantic firecracker display in the plaza between city hall and the main post office buildings. You can hear the explosions from my apartment. On Wednesday, I was returning from a corn tortilla-finding expediton to the Mercado Central and decided to stop and watch. Unfortunately, the second row was (audibly-speaking) too close. The explosions caused physical pain in my eardrums. Not even Gwar made my inner ears vibrate like the mascletà. So Wednesday I stood further away. And managed to retain some of my hearing. 

Spain has among the lowest daily newspaper readership of Europe. And Valencia is at the bottom of daily newspaper readership of anywhere in Spain. This has something to do with the relative recentness of the Franco dictatorship and decades of censorship. Yet studies show that people in places with nice weather are less likely to read. As a professor explained it to me, in northern Europe life revolves around nuclear family and time is spent in cafés or at home, reading. Spaniards live life in the street and don’t find time for such a solitary, sedentary pastime.