Only at Carnival...

It was fabulous. We arrived in Santonia at about 7:30 pm after a long day walking all around Santander, and the Carnival parade had just started. I don’t know who won the costume contest, but they were all a lot of fun. Like the Transformers who stopped once in awhile along the parade route and transformed into cars and airplanes. But one of the most fun, for me at least, was Barack and Michelle Obama complete with the Secret Service. It wasn’t just them – it was the fact that later in the night they met up with random other people who were dressed as Al Qaeda, Talibanis, and the Saudis. So many different and fun costumes, many of which wouldn’t go over so well in the States, and many were very driven by American and world politics. I saw more US Army and Navy costumes than you’d see in San Diego on ship leave. But if only the real world could bring opponents to such a fun and slovenly drunken place to sort out their differences…

Early in the evening was full of families and kids running around. Carnival is kind of like Halloween on steroids. There are no age restrictions, everyone’s in costume, and everyone is in group costume. It was amazing. Whole families – mom, dad, and a couple of kids – dressed as lions or ducks or clowns, or priests and nuns. My favorite was the little toddler dressed as a priest sucking on a pacifier on a white chain. So incredibly wrong but so cute. Then as the night wore on and the families disappeared, the younger crowd came out in all sorts of costumes. Mostly men in drag. But not like Brazilian Carnival men in fabulous sequins and feathers-type drag. Men in high-necked dresses with long skirts and their hair in Spanish buns with lots of makeup and rich red lipstick. The gals we met up with, Rocio and her friends who live in Santonia, were all dressed as punk rockers. And they brought costumes for me and Federica. We were “Little Red Riding Hood”. Cute. Very cute.

There were two big stages set up in town with music blasting until 7 or 8 in the morning, and the squares were both packed full at least until we caught the bus back to Santander at 4:30 am. It was good fun, dancing in the streets all night. But we were clearly not the professional party type. No, those were the kids who had packed 2-liter bottles of cocktails to power their alcohol fueled all night frenzy. 4:30 am was late enough for me. I zonked for the entire 30 minute bus ride back, and the 10 minute walk to my apartment was the longest trudge ever known to mankind.

So the next morning, we drove with Marta to visit Comillas. Ok, truth be told, it was afternoon before I dragged out of my apartment. But Comillas was nice and very worth the effort. It’s a village by the ocean that is typical Spanish with windy little streets and old houses. There is an old gothic chapel on a hill that has been converted to a walled-in cemetery. Unfortunately the two main attractions, Gaudi’s house and the religious university that he designed, were both closed for renovations, so we only got to see those from a distance and through scaffolding. But it was a nice visit and better than lying in bed all day. Which is probably what I would have done if not forced into the alternative.

One more full day and then I’m back to Boston. It’s been a great visit both for work and for fun. I haven’t wanted to turn this into a boring lab notebook, but suffice it to say that the main reason I came out here has turned out well. The work was accomplished, and I feel sufficiently trained to go back and do this myself. That is until sometime in the middle of the summer when things might just have to “stop working” so that I have a reason to come back and hang out on the beach, er, I mean slave away in the lab again. I’ve made some really good friends, eaten a lot of great food, had a lot of great drink, and stored away some “reserves” for the imminent trip to China. So stay tuned sometime around March 23rd for that one if you want to follow along some more…

P.S. I added a picture to the post below. This was taken on the subway in Bilbao. The first panel is “don’t hold the door”. The second panel is “don’t enter when the alarm is sounding”. And the third panel clearly reads “don’t sit while conjoined triplets are standing.”

Many animals died in the creation of this blog post...

I have an interesting observation about the old ladies in the north of Spain. I like to call them "The Fur Coat Ladies" or "The Fur Coat Clones". They're all the same, one right after another in a sourpuss brigade of fluff scuttling down the streets all day. And they all have the same expression of general disdain for someone who might otherwise be enjoying life. So I've developed a new game - to try to get them to smile. They all have the same old lady scowl, and if you smile at them their face turns even more into a lemon pucker. But every once in awhile I win when one of them flickers an unconscious smile back.

It's been a great few days, and I've discovered that the world (at least in science) is very small indeed. I've known for a few weeks that a woman from a lab in London was coming to give a seminar and get recruited for a position at a new institute here in Santander. I felt like her name was familiar, but couldn't place her until we got to the airport (me and Marian) to pick her up. Marian was digging through her bag and not paying attention when Federica passed through the doors from baggage claim, and so I saw her first. Yep, I know her. And she didn't see Marian but saw me. And wasn't expecting someone she met once in Wood Hole a year ago to show up out of nowhere in an airport in Spain when she's here for an interview. It was quite a priceless look on her face. So fortunately for me, I have a travel buddy for a few days. She's staying through Sunday evening to see some of the area, so we traveled together today to Bilbao and are going to Santona tomorrow for Carnival. Sinfully glutinous fun.

Bilbao was great but mostly because of the Guggenheim. The building is a Frank Gehry work of abstract steel curvature, and the galleries inside are all off of a main cathedral-vaulted central entrance. There are two major installations. One of Murakami - a Japanese artist who does ridiculously brightly colored anime-style paintings and sculptures and another by Richard Serra - an America "sculptor", of sorts, who creates 12 foot tall steel structures that are meant to sort of bend your perception of space and time. They gave me the feeling of what I would imagine walking inside of a rosebud to feel like - you enter in one place and walk around and round to the center of the sculpture. But sometimes the big steel plates curve inward or outward with respect to each other and psychologically force your body to tilt in that direction even though there is plenty of room to walk perfectly upright. And sometimes the steel echos your footsteps, voice, and giggle so that it sounds like there are duplicates of you wandering between the giant plates. But my favorite was an installation by someone whose name I didn't even catch that was a series of 10 digital light boards about 6 inches wide that reached from floor to ceiling in the central entryway. They ticker-scrolled words up and down and backwards that were essentially the description of an obsessive relationship that goes badly. They're very short sentences "I see you. I breathe you. I tickle you." and then it goes badly "I need you. I follow you." and then worse "I bury my head. I bury your head. I cry." and then there's brief reconnection and a final end. For some reason the way it was presented in the flow of short text was very emotionally dramatic.

So from the Guggenheim we wandered through the city to the old part of Bilbao and into a cafe on the central square after watching the kids wander the streets in their carnival costumes. 6 glasses of wine, two glasses of Pacharan, and 10 pinchos later it was time to catch our bus back to Santander. The last bus was at 11:30. We left the bar at 10:20 and started following the compass in my head that rarely fails me in getting from point A to point B. Except there was an enormous hill between those two points, and the Lonely Planet fails to make their maps topographical. Add to that the fact that alcohol diminishes my sense of distance, and we were in a rough state. So after asking a few very helpful locals, we managed to find the metro and get on a sensible train back around to the bus station with time to spare to pass out on the last bus leaving for the night.

And the food. The pinchos in the bar were delightful and deserve a description. We had a wafer thin pastry cone that was crispy fried and filled with chorizo, mushrooms, and grilled vegetables topped with snowflake-finely grated cheese (asiago, perhaps?). Then rounds of delicately tender beef cooked rare and wrapped around bacon and cheese on grilled leeks on top of a slice of baguette. And finally a soft white fish battered and lightly fried with thin slices of jamon and a single tiny sage leaf on top. All spectacular and unique. And I'm already hungry for them again...

I love the Spanish mullet

It's pervasive and beautiful. In an ironic sort of way. So many young men in Spain have a fabulous mullet that is either all shaggy and distinctively "business in the front, party in the back" or the alternative "business in the front, Bob Marley in the back" dredlocked version. Awesome.

Today was quite a good day. It's been a long week of hard work, so I look forward to the weekends very much. And bonus for today is that it was sunny. Very sunny. Cold and windy, but the first time that I could walk outside and feel bright warm rays on my translucently greenish skin. I think I was starting to grow my own colony of lichen from all of the damp cool air and long hours sitting almost mime-like hunched over the microscope. So I took advantage of the day, after a brief trip to lab, to roam the town a bit. I wandered over to the cathedral coincidentally right as the church bells started to toll to call for 5 o'clock Mass. It was an amazing cacophony as two off the bells swung around and around about their mounting - four chimes per rotation of each iron bell off set from each other in a succession of impressive clanging. As the rotation slowed and the tolling subsided, the peals softened until there was an almost mournful trail of the final soft tones, calling all late comers to scurry up the steep stone steps of the cathedral.

I met Rushi precisely at 5 pm on the steps of the town hall, and he was hardly awake. That's part of why I arranged to spend the day with him - to drag him out into the sun for some much needed fresh air for both of us. The first words out of his mouth were "churros? I'm hungry." Oh yes. So we went to a little cafe that Marian says has been just the same for as long as she can remember. It's one of those places that was first decorated in the 1950s and hasn't changed even the placement of tables ever since. Churros are sticks of fried doough Fried dough wins in any form in my book, and churros are super awesome. They're served with chocolate in a small cup that's almost the consistency of pudding and rich but not very sweet. You dip the churros in the chocolate, and they're perfect. So after churros and chocolate, we wandered over to the waterfront and Rushi wanted coffee. I teased that we were just going to move from churros to coffee to beer to wine to dinner to cocktails, and that's pretty much the progression of the night.

We ended up around the other side of the peninsula in Sardinero which is more of an upscale ocean-front part of Santander and had a few beers in an "Irish Pub" overlooking fishing boats lit up on the ocean. Then we realized we were hungry and ready to move back into the main part of town. We decided to return to the restaurant where I got just a tease of a taste of pinchos last weekend but figured we would take a bus rather than walk in the cold wind. Best. Decision. Ever. That was the most entertaining bus ride of my life. Of course it's valentine's day which is apparently not much of a holiday here amongst the other crowd but is picking up steam with the younger kids. So one stop after we boarded, a hoard of dozens of kids no older than 18 get on the bus, and it's totally like a grade school dance - girls at the back of the bus and boys at the front. Half of the girls were wearing cheap plastic tiaras with pink feathers and were dressed in high heels and short skirts. And then they started to sing. Rushi said it was something about how this is a special day, etc etc. And then the boys all started clapping in rhythm and singing their own song but as more of a lyrical rap type performance. Completely surreal and like some bizzare scene out of "Westside Story". And even though the two groups of guys and gals didn't interact for the whole bus ride, they all got out at the same destination. And presumably proceeded to stand across the room from each other for the rest of the night.

So we ended up at the pinchos place and found our little spot at the end of the bar, ordered 5 pinchos, and devoured those in less than 2 minutes. We stuffed ourselves. I think our server was a little bit appalled since the tradition in spain is to have a couple in one place and then move along to the next destination. But they're so good. It's my ideal food - three perfect bites. One as the new discovery, one bite to appreciate the mix of flavors, and the last bite to part ways and prepare for the next delightful treat. For those who missed the earlier post, pinchos are mostly piles of stuff on bread. Sometimes it's some sort of meat with mushrooms or tuna with anchovies or fried quail egg with spanish ham or egg with potato or potato with octopus, but they're all yummy. And since it's difficult to decide we just kept telling the guy "bring us 5 more that we haven't already had" and ended up with 15 in total. They're cheap which is cool, but our tab still ended up being a mile long with 15 pinchos, 4 beers, and 2 after dinner liquors to make it all settle a little better. Then we moved to a bar in the square that has outside seating and "people watched" all of the groups of made up gals tottering on high heels, the groups of international students who had recently arrived, the drunken men oscillating between threatening to punch each other followed by "I love you man" making up. I'm glad Rushi is only part adopted Spanish and yet still enough Indian to recognize that 2 am is late enough and not try to keep me out until past 5 in the morning again. Especially since tomorrow is supposed to be another beautiful sunny day...

"My room has no strength"

Yep, that's what I said. That's apparently why Carmen looked at me so strangely. When I told the lab folks what happened, they started laughing at me. I looked up all of the words in my handy little phrasebook, but I should have looked up "electricity" instead of "power". Apparently the literal translation for "power" doesn't cover electrical power. Only physical power. Oops. So now I'm looking up spanish words but then looking the same word up in the "spanish-english" section to confirm that the meaning is really what I want to say. Oh well, at least I figured out where the breaker box is which is good. It seems that the burners on my stove are the problem. If I have both going at once, it trips the breaker.

So I am now fully recovered from my second all night out partying with the Spanish. It's the first on this trip but pretty much a redux of my experience in El Escorial in August. A group of us started in a little bar in the market downtown and then moved on to a place for "pinchos" for dinner. Pinchos are a type of tapas. Basically, it's a bunch of stuff on slices of baguette or piles of stuff in little pastry cups. They're totally delish. Absolutely fabulous. And unless you eat enough of them, not. filling. at. all. It was me, Rushi, Irene, and two other gals they know. The girls (me excluded) were all eating super slowly like little birds while Rushi and I hovered around the edge drooling thinking "are you going to eat that?" They ordered three rounds of food (one thing per person per round) and then were ready to move on to the next location. My first thought was "Sweet. These were tasty appetizers, and now we're off to dinner." Nope. We were off to another bar. To be followed by another and then a dance club until they upped the lights and shooed everyone out at 4:30 am. So by the time I got home, famished, at about 5 am I was still awake enough to throw together a sandwich to curb the hunger. I so want to go back to that place with Rushi and/or Marta, belly up to the bar, and just eat my fill of those things. Super yum.

Yeah, so I managed to have my early morning post-bar snack and stay up late (early?) enough to re-hydrate and metabolize some of the alcohol in my blood stream so that Sunday was not so painful. Albeit, I woke up at 11 am and napped again from noon to nearly 2, but it sounds like I was better off than most of the others. Sundays are gloriously lazy here. It's easy to lounge without feeling guilty when there are few other options. Besides watching "Abre Los Ojos" which is an awesome movie. It's the Spanish version (original version) of "Vanilla Sky" directed by Amenebar. He also did "The Others" with Nicole Kidman and (my favorite) "The Sea Inside". If you haven't seen that last one, go rent it. It's a wonderful flick. It's in the same vein as "Talk to Her" and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" - also great movies.

Let there be light...

I really should have been sound asleep 2 hours ago since there are many many eggs to be dealt with, but I'm ever nocturnal and it's sometimes a challenge to force myself down at night. So one blog entry, and I'm off to dream land.

I've had more semi-bilingual adventures of late. Yesterday was a fun Spanglish lab meeting. We covered a paper that's a big fat whopping review of a bunch of complicated models without a whole lot of consensus, and I give huge props to my Spanish colleagues for the effort to conduct the discussion in English even though it's not a comfortable conversational language for all of them. The result was that the conversation was held more or less twice - once in english with me included and a reiterated and continued discussion in spanish for those who struggled a little through the english. 2 hours, and we only got through the first half of the paper. To be continued monday. Most of the folks at the medical campus speak and understand a good amount of english - it is an academic center after all, but a some of them focus on reading and writing papers and don't have much opportunity to speak. They're the easy ones to pick out because there's a bit of a deer in headlights look when I approach. Like today when Marian asked Mamen to help me with a protocol. Poor thing. Mamen is so sweet and smiley and is always singing or making funny noises and happily bouncing around the lab, but she turned flush red and quivery when she came up to me. She apologized that she'd been avoiding me because she was afraid to try to speak english with me, but she underestimates her abilities, and we communicated quite well. Though she insisted Irene stay nearby to bail her out in case she panicked. I keep telling everyone they should feel good because everyone's english is FAR better than my pathetic Spanish.

And today my lack of Spanish got put to the test again when I had just gotten home, got all comfy, started arranging dinner, and *pop* the power goes out. But only in my room. The hall lights were on, and I could hear TVs in other rooms. So I dug around looking for a fuse box and realized I would have no choice but to go down to the desk and try to explain to Carmen that I have no power. Out comes the phrase book. "Mi habitacion tiene no poder" which I'm sure is not correct grammar, but I looked up all of the individual words and at least figured I'd get my point across. So feeling like John Cleese in the Monty Python sketch, I head down to the desk and say "no poder. tiene no poder" and get the look that the failed gubernatorial candidate, Gary Coleman, was famous for in the ever popular and yet incredibly politically incorrect 80's sitcom "Different Strokes"..."what you talking about, Willis?" So I tried again, and she understood I was trying to say "power" when I struggled to pronounce "luz" for "light". So after asking about lights in the halls and all she goes rattling off something about housekeeping tomorrow, etc, etc, and I quickly start digging for the word "flashlight". At this point she's giving me the look like I'm a crazy lady and gives up trying to understand (though I was actually quite proud we'd gotten that far with my phrasebook and a rudimentary understanding of a few words of spanish and english between the two of us. So she headed up to my room, discovered that I wasn't crazy and it was the breaker that flipped. And now I know that the breaker switches are all in a little box over the door if it ever happens again. Poder restored.

One last point to make again about food. I (pretty easily) convinced Rushi to join me for dinner last night but made him pick the restaurant and order everything. I love this arrangement. Another amazing meal. We started with slices of octopus on thin medallions of potatoes drizzled in olive oil and generously sprinkled with paprika. I never realized octopus could be so good, because it's most often a nearly inedible tire rubber consistency that you either want to spit out or give up chewing and swallow whole. And without much taste. But this was incredible. Apparently it's a specialty in Galicia, the next province over, and they tenderize it by pounding it then freezing it, then boiling it, and then lighly sauteeing it in olive oil. The result is well worth the effort and is still a little firm around the edges but rich and buttery soft in the center and soaks up the richness of the olive oil. Next we had skewers (I love food on sticks). One was mushrooms, peppers, onion, and bacon. The other was chunks of pork (I also love pig) marinated in olive oil, oregano, and enough garlic to expunge the world of vampires. The last dish was one of the best and yet simplest things I've had so far. It was little squids (baby tentacles and mantles) sauteed with caramelized onions and red and green peppers that were cooked down almost to nothing with extra flavorful blackened bits of onion. All of that was swimming in olive oil and seasoned with oregano and a generous but not ruinous amount of salt. Then across the top was a fan of thinly sliced and perfectly golden potatoes. Yum.

Lazy Sunday

The lifestyle here is starting to grow on me. It took some time to accept that nothing is open on Sundays. Pretty much nothing. Almost absolutely nothing. The few exceptions are the cafes that cater to those who don't cook for themselves which is good because people here would otherwise starve on Sunday. I just got back from the lab (also very much empty) and found that the cafes are actually full this evening of men riveted to some sort of football game. That's soccer for you yanks - the Super Bowl is going to come and go without notice in this part of the world.

I had to make an effort to go to the grocery store last night to stock up on groceries so that I'd have something to eat today. Beef stew. I'm excited - my first attempt to cook something real here. It's difficult to cook in a strange country since nothing is quite what you're used to. Like onions - they had sweet onions and green onions (scallions) so I went with the green onions. Now sort of wishing I'd gone for sweet. Or just said screw it all and got a block of yummy dried meat and more cheese.

Yesterday was super fun. Marian and her husband met me and Marta in the morning for a drive out into the countryside. We stopped first in Santilla which is a midieval village that's been preserved and turned into quite a tourist destination. Apparently the narrow cobblestone streets in the summer are thronged with foreigners, and you can see evidence of their past and future presence in the hotels and hostels and pizza and burger bars. But it's delightful in January on a misty day in the 50s. We wandered a few streets with local delectables and had coffee before progressing on to the next destination. Apparently we're going to try to make a return trip on another day because it's close, and it's the village nearest the Altamira Cave.

The second village was also midieval but different from the first in that Santilla is where the wealthier marquis lived, and it has a big old Romanesque cathedral and larger nicer houses whereas Barcena Mayor is up in the mountains and is a more rural agricultural village. The houses are all made of rock with dark wooden terraces, many of which are draped in vines and potted plants. The houses are built in multiple levels with the ground floor serving as housing for livestock. Many people have since converted their ground floors into a garage or shop or workshop, but there was a pony under one house and evidence of livestock under a couple more. The village is a historical site now so even though people still live there and carry on about "normal" agricultural lifestyles, it's in the presence of a lively tourist attraction with bed and breakfasts, restaurants, and giftshops dotted throughout the windy cobblestone streets. It's tastefully preserved, and the benefit of it being a tourist attraction is that the government supports conservation projects that keep these 600+ year old houses intact.

And what blog post would be complete without a description of the meal of the day? We dined at a little restaurant on the river that runs down through the valley along the edge of the village - El Mason Rio Argoza. Another fabulous meal. I only look at the menus to see if there is anything I recognize and memorize the treats that are ordered for me. Otherwise, I leave the selections entirely up to my hosts. Good idea all around. We started with a warm dish of eggs scrambled with wild mushrooms that was perfectly salty. Then there was a dish of sauteed slices of chorizo made from wild boar swimming in scarlet red grease, a plate of thinly sliced ham (jamon) which is a staple of just about every meal, and a platter of assorted "puddings". The puddings were interesting. A Spanish pudding, at least in this area, is a block of something between a mousse and a semi-soft cheese that's made at least partially of egg and comes in several flavors. Our platter had one made with the delightful soft blue cheese that I wrote of earlier, another of fish, a third with mushroom, and the last with crab. They were all wonderful and served with little squares of something similar to melba toast. And we Americans have no appreciation for proper bread compared to the Europeans. The bread here (most of it at least - if it's good) is super hard and crunchy on the outside but light, fluffy, and delicate on the inside. It's inspiring me to crack open my new bread book when I get back and try to master a good artisan loaf.

I'm making myself hungry with this post, so I'm going to be off to finish my stew and settle in to watch a movie before dozing off for the night. I hope everyone is well and enjoyed your weekends. Hasta luego...