¡Jalouín!

I have just understood in a wholly new way the old saying "absence makes the heart grow fonder." Or maybe "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til its gone."

I am talking about Halloween.

I am experiencing tonight, along with my family, my first Halloween outside of the US, and the sound emitted by the vast, sucking hole where this greatest of all secular, truly American holidays would normally be, is deafening. If that sounds like overstatement, come to Europe for the month of October someday and see for yourself. Take, for example, my walk home from school yesterday.

For those who don't already know, Andee and I work at School Year Abroad in Zaragoza, a mini American enclave surrounded by a VERY Spanish city of 750,000. All of our 67 students (save one Brazilian) are American, and five of the twelve adults working in the school are also "yanquis." So you can imagine that in "el colegio americano" Halloween is not lightly observed. On Friday, October 30, the school was decorated with pumpkins, bats, and spiderwebs. Most of the students arrived for classes dressed like elementary school kids all over the US on the same day, as did Griffin and I (pirate and vampire, respectively). There was candy and good cheer everywhere, and lots of photos taken (some to be posted on Facebook).

And then came my walk home.

Walking up the Paseo de la Independencia, at the core of the city's shopping district, I have to admit that I looked a little silly. OK, a LOT silly. Not because I was a vampire strolling past ZARA, El Corte Inglés, and countless top end boutiques, but rather because I was a vampire strolling along with a computer bag over his shoulder. But that is not the weird part. The weird part is that absolutely no one reacted to me. People were looking, I could see them stare. But I got not a single smile, not a single giggle, not even a disapproving shake of the head. NOTHING. Also, none of the stores were decorated. Very small pumpkins were available for 3 euros ($4.50) in El Corte Inglés (complete with Jack-O-Lantern faces conveniently pre-attached with black duct tape) but no stores had any displayed. And that is just a beginning. Here are some notable facts about "Jalouín" in Spain:

• There are no candy corns. That alone should have warned me about today.
• There is no trick-or-treating. Chaia is, with good reason, outraged.
• There are no parades. This, in a city that 2 weeks ago had a parade of around 300,000 people. In costumes.
• Chaia was not allowed to wear a full costume to school on Friday, only a hat. Outraged.
• If you look hard, you can find costumes for sale, as well as bags of candy. But again, no one wears costumes and no trick or treating.

I think what I am witnessing is a holiday being born. If you look around, the pieces are there. Its just that no one knows what to do with them. It reminds me a bit of the scene in Apollo 13, when the engineers dump all of the hardware pieces on a table and have to figure out how to make them work together. We are doing our very American best to explain things. Tonight we are having a Haloween party (just the 4 of us) where we will eat candy and play "pin the hat on the witch" (Chaia's invention). On Thursday we carved pumpkins (only 3 this year, they are a bit pricey), including one with Ben and Chaia's name carved into it. If anyone reading this sees Brooke Libby, please let her know that 10 years ago she gave us a pumpkin with Ben's name carved into it. We have done this every year since, adding Chaia's name in 2002.

Maybe what Halloween in Spain needs is a bit of hybridization, something along the lines of what the church did with the combination of the original Pagan holiday with Catholic veneration of saints (Nov 1 is All Saints Day in Spain) that gave rise to Halloween. Andee and I have suggested that we could start a tradition whereby adults dress in costumes, knock on doors throughout the neighborhood, and trick-or-treat for wine and tapas.

I think it could take off.

Las Fiestas del Pilar

October is big-time fiesta in Zaragoza. "Big-time" means no school, no work, and no sleep. If you can imagine the 4th of July, and then imagine that the 4th of July lasts for 10 days, you have a general picture of "Pilar" in this city. The festivities began on October 9, and ended promptly (sort-of) at midnight on October 19th. The center of the party is the 12th of October, a national holiday in Spain for 2 reasons: It is el día de la hispanidad (Hispanic day?), and also the holy day for Our Lady of the Pillar. The pillar is a statue of the Virgin Mary on a small marble pillar, and it commemorates the apparition of Mary in Spain during her life, to speak with the Apostle St. James. "The pillar" stands at the center of the Basilica in Zaragoza, so the big holiday focuses all of it's energy on this city. The population more than doubles for the festival. The religious/traditional/cultural high point of the week is the Ofrenda de Flores, where people dressed in traditional Spanish dress (mostly from Aragón, but other regions are also represented) process from, of course, our street, to the Basilica to offer flowers to a statue of Mary on a huge scaffolding. Andee and Chaia were invited to participate, so they lined up with the other 300,000 people processing (no joke) and made their offering.

But that's only one event out of manymanymanymany events.

So what else happens?

So many things that I can't possibly put them all here. I'll try to sum up, hitting on the major events (I'll forget some, I'm sure).

• First off, there are fireworks every night in different parts of the city, at about 11:00. Also, there are concerts. SOOOOO many concerts in different parts of the city, some free and some not. On the nights of the 16-18th, the concerts were basically right outside our apartment, starting at 10:00.

• Also, there is an artisan's expo for the entire festival. It fills the park near our street with food, toys, and other crafts (ceramics, metalwork, woodwork, you name it). No junk, all pretty nice craftsmanship.

• Next to the artisan's expo is a tent, filling a street for the week. In it, there are free concerts all day and evening, and food and drink (not to mention childrens' activities throughout the day). In the tent you can get Ternasco, grilled lamb, day and night (ternasco is the regional meal of Aragón) along with your beer or wine at snack break (about 10:30 am) and at mealtimes, or with vermouth before mealtimes.

• There are parades sporadically occurring through the week, most of them on the major street adjoining our street. Sometimes they are organized, purposeful processions, and sometimes just 30,000 rowdy, drinking, singing members of various peñas (clubs) showing off their singing skills.

• In the city parks there are nonstop activities for kids and their parents.

• In the larger, divided streets with pedestrian walks in the middle, there are tents and kiosks selling everything imaginable. Prices range from expensive to REALLY expensive.

• There are contests of every kind (running, rowing, speed skating, you name it).
• There are processions of gigantes y cabezudos, big puppet characters of 2 kinds: The gigantes are 15 foot tall statues of famous and not-so-famous characters held on the shoulders of a REALLY srong person, and the cabezudos are regular-sized people with enormous heads, also of famous and not-so-famous characters. The gigantes are fascinating; they are huge, and fun, but also possess a strange nobility. They make you feel like a little kid. The cabezudos, on the other hand, are truly bizarre. They carry whips, which they use on unsuspecting children as they are chased down the street. Then the scary, big-head puppets give the kids candy. No joke, this is the stuff that nightmares are made of.
• There are bullfights, bull expositions, and vaquillas, which are pretty big cows (but not bulls) that are let, one at a time, into the bullring where a gang of hormonally imbalanced teenage boys attempt to got chased by the cows. Occasionally a teenager gets hurt doing this, which really gets the crowd going. The notable thing about the vaquillas is that it takes place at 8:00 in the morning. Silly me, thought:"Wow, I'm impressed that people get up so early to watch and participate!"

Wrong.

These teenagers (and most everyone watching) have been awake all night, and this is just the last stop before a mid-morning nap. After the nap, the whole party starts again.

• There are street vendors, artists, henna tattoo guys, pirated DVD sellers, comedians, acrobats, and of course at least 20 Andean music bands playing the theme from Titanic over and over from noon until 2 AM. All week. Right outside our apartment.

Basically, the city turns into a circus for a week and a half (I forgot to mention the circus- that's here too). Everyone is exhausted all of the time, and everyone is poor and hungover from overeating once the week ends. By the last weekend of Pilar, we had had enough festival to last the rest of the year. We rented a car and went to the Pyrenees for some peace and quiet. That trip gets detailed in my next blog, as soon as I get the theme from Titanic out of my head.

October is here

So the weather has changed, cool mornings and nights are here for the time being, and I can now safely venture outside without protecting my calva infantil (loose translation: my baby-bald head). A number of things have occurred since my last post, including the following highlights:

• I took four students and Ben to Barcelona for Yom Kippur services. Yes, in a city of almost 800,000 people there is not ONE synagogue. We had to take a train 200 miles to go to services. When we got there (surprise, surprise) we discovered that the rabbi was Argentinian and most of the congregants were American. A nice day, a lovely walk down Las Ramblas (a beautiful pedestrian street that cuts through the middle of the oldest parts of Barcelona, filled with cafés and street artists), and great "Dad-Ben time."
  
• My bicycle was stolen. Honestly, how many people get robbed twice in one month? It was locked up to a bike rack in one of the ritziest, busiest areas of Zaragoza in the middle of the day. And every Spaniard that heard about it said exactly the same thing: "Must have been foreigners." Okaaay.....
• Andee's twin sister Maria came for a visit. I picked her up the day after Yom Kippur in Barcelona (yup, another train trip for me) and we traveled together back to "ZAZ". Maria is a terrific guest, and we had a really good time visiting "our fair city" as well as a day trip to a small town about 15 miles away famous for its ceramics.

I thought it would be interesting (for me, at least) to come up with a few things that made it great to be in Zaragoza, and a few things I miss from home. So here they are, starting with the things that make me say "Ahhhh...Bethel..."

1. Hot wings. This may seem trivial, but those of you that REALLY know me know that I have a serious wing addiction. Anyone who knows Spain knows that spicy food is right out here. I mean, seriously, there is pretty much NOTHING picante in the whole country. I'm going to have to start inventing my own hot sauces; wings I can get easily. Now where can I find hot spices to make my sauce? Hmm....
2. Fall foliage. This is my favorite time of year, when the days are warm and breezy, and the nights begin to approach frost. the Mahoosuc mountains are spectacular during October, and I miss it a lot right now. Zaragoza, on the other hand, is in one of the dryest places I've ever lived. In spite of the river valley we live in, there are almost no trees surrounding the city. We happen to live in a part of town where the side streets are lined with trees, but it's not the same.
3. ..and..
   
4. Ben (& Jerry). Ouch. Spain does have Ice Cream, and it's not bad, but it's not Vermont's best. I have found a couple of places that sell Ben & Jerry's ice cream, but it costs about 6 1/2 Euros for a pint. For you Americans, that's 9 DOLLARS a pint!!! And they only seem to have weird flavors (sorry, I'm an ice cream purist- give me vanilla or give me death), and Cherry Garcia is not one of them.
5. Both of our sofas. This is a little thing, but the sofa in our apartment is REEEELY old, and mushy, and puke-green. It is so uncomfortable that for the 1st couple of weeks we just sat on the floor rather than sit on the sofa (or its matching puke-green-and equally-uncomfortable chairs). Our sofas in Bethel are the ultimate nap-spaces, and I miss them, and my naps on them. The only positive thing I can say about the chairs and sofa is that it was really fun to watch them, from six stories up, get stuffed into the back of a compacting garbage truck (our new sofa from IKEA gets delivered today).
6. American football. I knew that I would miss watching the Patriots this year, I just never realized how much. Last weekend Andee and I were so desperate that we hired a babysitter and went out to the one Irish tavern in Zaragoza that shows occasional NFL games. This is how desperate we were:
   

• We watched the 49ers play the Vikings
• We watched the game sitting in upright bar chairs
• We watched the whole game without sound. Anyway, Brett Favre's desperation toss into the endzone for the game-winning touchdown mad it all worth it.

I'll finish this blog entry with some things that are great about living here:

1. Coffee. Apart from the Mouse & Bean, there is no Spanish-quality coffee in Bethel. Here, you can get really fantastic coffee everywhere. Truck stops on the highway have the same gazillion-dollar espresso machines that M&B has. American coffee is....unavailable here.
2. Architecture. Zaragoza proudly displays buildings and partial buildings from Roman, Visigothic, Moorish, Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical periods. The Gothic cathedral and the Neoclassical Basilica are national treasures.
3. Schedule. Now, this is probably unfair, as you can see by looking at my previous blogs, but I love the fact that Ben and Chaia get on the school bus at 9:05. they get to sleep until 8:15, and everyone wakes up much happier and better rested. Also, lunch is at about 2:00 or so, and it's the big meal of the day (leaving good quality losing-weight tie for the rest of the day). Evening meal is at 9:00, and Ben and Chaia are in bed by 9:30.
4. Shopping carts. No joke, the fact that you insert 1 Euro into the cart to unlock it, and when you re-lock it into the other carts you get your Euro back. It really keeps people from leaving carts around the parking lot, or from stealing them outright. I guess if you want a cart badly enough, you'll pay the Euro and run with it.
5. Tapas. This is probably the best part. Almost everywhere, you can get small quantities of really good food cheap. If you're not super-hungry, you get 1 or 2 with a glass of wine or beer (yes, beer and wine with LUNCH!! How civilized!). If you're hungry, you get to try/sample a number of goodies. One of these days, I'll devote a blog completely to tapas.
6. Faculty meetings. I'm treading on dangerous ground here, because I didn't want to compare jobs. Here, I'm a part-time worker. At Gould, I live the life. HOWEVER: Faculty meetings here begin as most faculty meetings do in American boarding schools, with tapas and wine. Wait, what? Yes, Spanish faculty here wouldn't DREAM of a meeting without food and libations first. Oh Dan........... Wine and cheese in Ordway? Who's in?