A Special Concert

This is the new auditorium of the province of Alicante. It opened to the public today, and we were there.

No, we did not go to the special invitation-only assemblage of dignitaries last evening, but we were there for the first concert open to the public. It was a "family concert," starting at 12:00 noon on this Sunday in Spain, no tickets necessary. Expecting a long line, we arrived at 10:45 AM. We were not the first, but there were not many people standing in groups around the outside of the building. The parking attendants told us that doors would not open until 11:30, so we went across the street for a café con leche and media tostada con atún y tomate, but we had a front window view and in only 20 minutes we high-tailed it back across the street to find out place in the line that was forming.

A half hour later, the line started moving, and we made our way inside. The Alicante Symphony Orchestra played "El Sueño de Eros," by Oscar Esplá, originally an alicantino, then Mahler's 3rd Symphony, Dream of a Summer Morning, "That Which Love Tells Me." After the intermission, during which I toured the building, there came three Spanish pieces, and then three encores, one of which was vocal. Plus a charming speech by the director, Joan Iborra, congratulating Alicante on the achievement of this cultural icon. And lots of applause.

There is a video on YouTube that shows and explains (in Spanish) the ingenious logo of the auditorium, only part of which you can see in the photo at the top of this piece.  It's a clever musical play on the initials ADDA, Auditorio de la Diputación de Alicante.

It's a wonderful experience to be a small part of the inauguration of a cultural monument.

American Coffee and Old Memories

Until this week I could count the number of Americans I know living on the Costa Blanca on one hand. Now I need two.

It did not happen overnight. But one person knows another person, and that one knows someone else... So when I got an email inviting me to "American coffee" in Algorfa a couple weeks ago, I said, "Sure."  As the email discussion went on, it became clear that non-American spouses were also welcome, so both Johannes and I headed out last Wednesday to our favorite café bar on the Algorfa town plaza, Badulake. It was a bit cold, so instead of seating ourselves at a table on the plaza at 10:30, we ventured inside.

We were the last to arrive. It took no time at all for the others to greet us (I guess we just look American) and we all settled in at two round tables and ordered café con leche--though I heard one request for an américano--and some of us decided this was a good excuse to indulge in a tostada.

Conversation never stopped for the next two hours, and it was probably the first time I have been in a bar in Spain where those in my group were making more noise than those at the other tables. We were an American woman married with a Spaniard, an American man married with a Costa Rican woman who had lived in the U.S. for many years, an American man married with a German wife who had also lived in the U.S. for some years but in Germany more, and this American woman married to a Dane who had lived in the U.S. for many years. We all had in common the experience of being married to "foreigners," and of living in at least one country as a foreigner.

And the Americans among us shared certain of those almost indefinable memories and associations from our growing up years in the U.S. in the 1950s, ´60s, and ´70s. So even though we all had to be told by the proprietor of the bar that "Badulake" is the 24-hour store in the TV show "los Simpsons," we all were able to compare notes on how we experienced Yosemite on childhood trips in various years, we were able to name the actors playing Ben Cartwright´s sons in "Bonanza," and we all could laugh and appreciate Jack Benny´s solution to aging.

Such moments come seldom and are special.

Happy Father's Day

Today (Saturday) is Father´s Day in Spain. I was prepared. I saw ads in the grocery circulars and also in the promotions from the traditional father-like commercial stores...electronics, gardening supplies, DIY. I even noticed a sign last Thursday, St. Patrick's Day, in my favorite grocery store that said it would be closed on the 19th of March.

Father's Day has always snuck up on me in Spain. First, I'm conditioned to not really expect it until June, after Mother's Day has made its appearance. I also expect it on a Sunday, but it has not come on a Sunday in Spain within recent memory. It wasn't until last year that I began to understand why Father's Day always seemed to come on a different day.

In Spain, Father's Day is celebrated on the saint day for St. Joseph. St. Joseph's Day has been observed in many countries on March 19 since the Middle Ages. The day changes, but the date does not. It's always March 19.

Why is Father's Day observed on the day of St. Joseph? That's the real question. St. Joseph, of course, was the husband of the Virgin Mary. I think that the Spanish coincidence of Father's Day with St. Joseph brings a certain nuance to the idea of fatherhood.

On this day, I'm remembering my own father, Robert James Nicklet, and sending thanks to another good father I have known (Ron) and best wishes to a father-soon-to-be (Tim).

¡Choque!

Now that I've had a cataract operation on both eyes, my vision has improved so much that I only need to wear glasses inside the house to see subtitles on the television screen, and outside the house to see long distances and take advantage of their UV-protection and automatic darkening in sunlight. Last Tuesday morning was one in all-too-many cloudy days we had this week, so it was not terribly surprising that I managed to get myself outside the house and into the car for a trip to Ikea without my glasses. Four locked locks (garden gate, sunroom, front door iron grill, and the wooden front door itself) separated me from my glasses, so I just said, "I don't think I'll need them today," and decided I would be a passenger for the day.

Since I don't drive without glasses, I was not the one driving when we stopped quickly in a rotary at a crossing for the brand new tram running between the center of Murcia city and the outskirts of town where the commercial superstores are located--though I was the one who noticed that the light had turned red and a tram was approaching. Unfortunately the driver of the car behind us did not see the red light, nor the tram, and he did not stop. Smack! A collision, or choque.

This was our first choque in Spain. Spanish law allows those involved in minor accidents to fill out an accident report and file it with the insurance companies if both parties can agree amicably to the circumstances. Since the other car had plowed into our right rear fender with his left front fender, and both cars were still operable (though our tire was fast deflating) it seemed minor. But we did need to communicate.

The other driver spoke no Spanish, and no English. But we were lucky: he spoke Swedish. Native speakers of Danish can usually understand Swedish, and Swedes can understand Danish. This non-native speaker of Danish and non-speaker of Swedish had a little more trouble, especially when the Swede assumed that I understood everything and could carry on a conversation. I was in no mood to carry on a conversation, actually, and this one seemed to go on for ages. It took an hour and a quarter to exchange names and contact information, take pictures of the damage and license plates of both cars, find the insurance papers (the other driver was only borrowing the car he was driving), call our insurance company to report and verify procedure, fill out the papers (in Spanish), translate them to the satisfaction of the other driver, and get signatures. We parted amicably, though the other driver drove off and we still had a tire to change.

So now we are driving around--at no more than 80 kilometers per hour--on a little donut spare tire until Tuesday, when we meet the insurance adjuster at a car repair shop nearby and get delivery of a free loaner for however long it takes to fix the damage. If it had not been so clear that we were not at fault, we could have been liable for a 250€ deductible, but our insurance company has already told us that we don't need to worry about that. Getting a fully operating car again can't come too soon for me. Even though Spain lowered the maximum speed limit from 120 to 110 last week in a fuel economy measure, 80 kph is very poky indeed when driving along a motorway. In fact, it's almost dangerous. If you don't have blinking lights on, you might even get rear-ended.

The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies I Ever Made

Long-time readers of Sundays in Spain know that I sometimes pack chocolate chips in my suitcase when returning from the U.S., since the only small bits of chocolate resembling Nestle chocolate chips that I can purchase here--and with great difficulty--are miniatures and way too small to make authentic chocolate chip cookies. I didn't pack any this year when I came back in January (and for the first time, my bags weren't inspected by the TSA--perhaps they had always been attracted by the smell of chocolate).

So when I walked into my nearby Mercadona grocery store this week and saw the sign ¡Novedad! Gotas de Chocolate I almost ran through the store to find them, hoping against hope that they had imported some real chocolate chips.

They hadn't, but it appeared that they had made their own under their Hacendado brand. Gotas de Chocolate "Para Fundir" (chocolate drops "for melting"), it said on a light tan box the size of a 4-inch high 3x5 card. Pictured on one side were all sorts of Sugerencias (suggestions): a chocolate-dripped bundt cake, chocolate sauce melting over ice cream, chocolate drops on a cupcake, chocolate-dipped strawberries, a cup of hot chocolate, and a stack of eight little cakes that looked for all the world like real American chocolate chip cookies. On the other side of the box, life-sized chips of chocolate that looked like the real thing cascaded into a pool of melted chocolate. Both ends of the box showed diagrams and described in text how to melt the novel gotas inside (baño Maria, microwave, or in a cup of hot milk) and the bottom of the box listed the ingredients and carried the essential nutritional information for the 250 grams of cacao and sugar.

I probably could have found the original Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe on the Internet, but I had recently had a gourmet discussion by email with a very good friend, which started with tapas and ended with her sending me a recipe for oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies that she had copied from a Quaker Oats booklet. I followed the recipe as near as I could. But was my azucar moreno the right brown sugar? Why did the one cup of butter and the sugar never really get "light and fluffy"? And how was I ever going to get three cups of oats blended into the already stiff dough?

Well, the cookies turned out O.K.  The chocolate chips looked just like the ones that come out of the golden yellow and brown Nestle bag, and I measured about 1 1/2 cups from the 250 grams. The cookies don't look like the traditional ones I made in my childhood--they are flatter, in spite of the fact that I used what I believe is the equivalent of cake flour instead of regular flour, and they are crispier--probably due to the very dense real butter (not margarine) I used. But they taste good, and Johannes says they are the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever made. Of course, they are also the first ones I have made in years. But not the last.

On the other hand, Quaker Oats has at least two chocolate-oatmeal recipes on its website that sound good.

Oatmeal-Chocolate Chip Cookies (credit to Quaker Oats and a long friendship)
1 cup butter or margarine
1 1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3 cups uncooked quick or regular oats
1 cup chocolate chips

Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy; blend in eggs and vanilla. Add combined dry ingredients except oats and chocolate; mix well. Stir in oats and chocolate. Drop onto greased cookie sheet by rounded teaspoonfuls. Bake in preheated 350 degree F oven for 10-12 minutes.
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My cookies would have floated off the baking sheet if I had greased it in addition to the cup of butter in the dough. I used baking paper--something else I never did when I was making these cookies when I was a child. Baking paper makes it a lot easier to clean the pans afterwards, too.

Almond Trees in Bloom

Photo by Johannes Bjorner 2009

In Spain the almond trees trees usually blossom in the month of February, and I couldn't let February go by without a photo of this beautiful sight. The picture to the left is from Almeria and is two years old, but earlier this month we took a day trip to the Jalon Valley and viewed beautiful fields of almonds there. Then last week we took the back road up to our village of Algorfa and discovered a whole field of blossoming almonds almost on our doorstep.

One of the prettiest pictures I have seen this year is this one that appeared in Spaniaposten, a free Norwegian newspaper that provides current news and geographic, historical, and cultural stories about life on the Costa Blanca. In addition to several other nice images available on page 22 in the PDF of the printed newspaper, Spaniaposten also had a nice informative story about almonds.

Nuts are called frutos secos in Spanish, dried fruits, and the almond is indeed dry, but botanically speaking, it is not a nut. It is the seed of the almond tree, which grows inside a hard and inedible shell. Spain exports lots of almonds but keeps enough in the country so that they are a frequent aperitif or snack in natural, toasted, salted, and/or fried forms. as well as being used in cooking. We buy toasted almonds almost every week at the Sunday market to add to my breakfast oatmeal--4 euros for a quarter kilo. Almonds are high in protein and fiber and are low in fat and carbohydrates. They also contain vitamin E, which supports the immune system, and magnesium, which is good for the heart and blood pressure. The almond tree came to Spain with the Moors from North Africa and is also native to Iran, northwest Saudi Arabia, and western Jordan, Lebanon, west Syria and southern Turkey. The Norwegian paper also pointed out that almonds are an essential ingredient in marzipan and kransekake, a festive confection throughout Scandinavia.

Internet Piracy and Film in Spain

I have been seeing increasing references in Spanish newspapers to something called La Ley Sinde, and when I read that Álex de la Iglesia, president of the Spanish academy of cinema, had resigned his post in opposition to the law, I finally decided to spend some time figuring out what was going on.

I knew that the law had something to do with Internet piracy, and I assumed that it was strengthening sanctions against the practice of unauthorized (i.e., unpaid) downloading of copyrighted music and film works. What I didn't know was just how inbred in Spanish society the practice of downloading from the Internet was.

A year ago, an article in the Los Angeles Times ("In Spain, Internet Piracy is Part of the Culture") provoked heated controversy among Spanish Internet users who couldn't understand what the fuss was about. The article quoted two middle-aged individuals who routinely download a couple movies a week from the Internet. They didn't feel like pirates, and they weren't, strictly speaking, for in Spain, such downloading is not illegal as long as it is not done for profit.

I didn't know that. Apparently that means that it is not illegal to buy the DVDs of English-language films on sale by street vendors along the beach promenade or at the Sunday market--though it is illegal for the vendors to sell them. So may I rest easier about the copy of The King's Speech loaned to us by some neighbors a week ago that I have enjoyed immensely--twice--all the while feeling guilty because I suspect that it was purchased as a pirated copy for only a couple euros at most and has now provided an evening's entertainment to at least five families?

I learned more from that article and others that I researched. Reportedly there were 12,000 video stores in Spain when I first came here in 2003, but by the end of 2008, there were only 3,000. That rings true--there was just a single video rental store in Roquetas, where we first lived, and since we moved to the Torrevieja area we have yet to find one. There are also few cinema houses. There was one in Roquetas, which showed films in their original version (i.e., not dubbed into Spanish) for a time, but it soon abandoned that practice for lack of an audience--we were usually the only two customers on a Sunday afternoon. I guess most people were just downloading the original version from the Internet instead of paying 6 or 8 euros per person for the cinema version.

Even more surprising to me was that Apple's iTunes website apparently doesn't sell movies or television shows in Spain, though it does in Britain, France, and Germany--and when I read that, I finally realized why I had had so much trouble registering to use iTunes in order to download a free iPhone app several months ago. And while illegal movie downloads grew from 132 million a year to 350 million between 2006 and 2008, DVD sales and rentals fell by 30%. Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Michael Lynton was quoted as saying that Spain was "on the brink" of no longer being a viable home entertainment market for Sony.

We are now beyond the brink, according to a recent article in El Pais, which asserts that for the fourth year in a row, Spain is expected to be on a U.S. Department of Commerce blacklist of countries with which U.S. firms should not engage in business involving intellectual property. This article appeared in the same issue reporting on the final passage of La Ley Sinde, which is named after Spain's minister of culture, Ángeles González-Sinde, who is also a screenwriter and film director. The law is still controversial, since some see it simply as buckling under to U.S. commercial interests and to those who refuse to recognize the "new marketing model" of the Internet. I see it differently, as I come from a tradition and make my living in a profession that acknowledges some monetary value for the work of writers, performers, and other creative artists. I think the law is rather mild anyway. As near as I can figure out, it creates a panel to hear cases against Internet sites allowing downloads and empowers a judge to close such sites. No provisions against the downloaders or the sellers of copies.

I still feel guilty about watching a copy of The King's Speech that may have been illegal, even though I did not break a Spanish law. I would have been happy to go into a store and rent an authorized copy of the original version. I would have been even happier to be able to see the film in a movie theater. But the problem remains that films in Spain are dubbed into Spanish. Can you imagine watching and listening to The King's Speech in Spanish?