¡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?

A New Traveling Companion

We've had house guests for a week, good friends who we have known and loved for more years than we could imagine when we first met them the year after we got married more than four decades ago. That means we have taken them to some of the traditional sites in this part of the Costa Blanca: the palmeral of Elche and the Huerta del Cura, the discount shoe factory, and an all-day bus trip to the Jalón Valley to see the almond trees in blossom.

But they have returned to Denmark and now when we drive out for a morning or afternoon trip, it's just the two of us and our new traveling companion, the Spanish lady that lives inside the GPS system that we acquired at Christmas. Yes, we were probably the last people on our block to feel the need for an electronic gadget to tell us which way to drive, but we were exposed to this new toy when other visitors with us earlier last year brought theirs, and we saw the conveniences. Truth be told, I saw the value of shifting back-seat driver observations to an objective, anonymous, and infinitely patient persona that sits on the dashboard instead of the front-seat passenger side.

The first decision to make was, how big was our world? We could buy a GPS that covers the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), all of western Europe, all of Europe, north Africa, and parts of the Middle East. I didn't see any in the stores that promised coverage of North America, so we decided to limit our sights to where we may drive without a major trip across the Atlantic. I believe the one we bought covers all of Europe.

The second decision, however, was what language to use for directions. We first selected English, since we most often speak English in the car, but neither the primary driver nor I could understand what the woman was saying! Of course, she spoke British rather than American English--but we have come to understand many dialects of English English pretty well. But when she pronounced the names of the streets and roads, she gave them a British intonation, which all too frequently places the stress on the wrong syllable, and pronounces some consonants very differently from the Spanish name. Fine for communicating with other English people about the Spanish environment, but not for our non-English household.

So we switched her over to Spanish, and this has become an excellent opportunity for me to learn certain Spanish phrases that I may never otherwise have the opportunity to hear, as describing entering rotaries and taking an exit are not the sort of conversations that make compelling Spanish lessons. It provides especially good practice for imperative mood verbs (commands, or requests), which are formed by adding the "opposite" vowel to the root word instead of the normal indicative mood vowel. Entra (from the infinitive entrar, for example. means "he enters" the rotary, but entre tells you to enter it. In 20 meters, for example, entre en la rotonda y tome (not toma) la segunda a la derecha. And then, 19 meters farther down the road, entre en la rotonda, and gire a la derecha.

We marvel that the methodical and patient GPS lady always tells us to turn right out of the rotonda. Perhaps that's a holdover from the English version, where users may need to be reminded that one comes out of a roundabout on the right in Spain, not the left.

Crevillente on a Sunny Saturday

When I looked outside my bathroom window yesterday morning, there seemed to be snow on the mountains in the distance. Not surprising, since we had had two days of very cold and damp weather. But Saturday morning itself was bright and sunny, so we hopped in the car and drove toward the mountains to investigate.

But we never actually got to the mountains. Instead, we veered off to the town of Crevillente, 26 kilometers up the AP-7 highway from our neighborhood of Montebello. Whenever we drive home from our nearest city, Torrevieja, we drive west on the Crevillente road (or Crevillent, as it is properly named in the Valenciano dialect). But we had never been to the town for which our main highway is named, and today seemed like a good time to do so.

Crevillente paseo viewed from the mercado de abastos

We easily found the center of town and even a parking place on the main paseo, from where we walked up the hill toward what we thought was the church. It wasn't a church, we discovered when we got there, but instead the mercado de abastos, an indoor market, and a very well-equipped one. We walked through the stalls of fruit and vegetables, meats, fish, olives, cheeses, and bread and exchanged pleasantries with two of the women vendors. They directed us farther up the hill and to the right, to the church and town hall. Then we found a papeleria and bought some watercolor supplies, and the clerk there directed us to a large municipal park. Somewhere along the line we stopped, of course, for a cafe con leche and split a tostada con atun y tomate, in a small bar that would have been smoky before the no-smoking ban was put into effect this month, but which was a joy now.



It was a glorious Saturday morning in Crevillente. The weather was warm--though I was in a sweater instead of a coat, I really didn't need the long sleeves--at least when I was in the sun. Everyone was out walking, buying, having a drink and a bit of food in the smoke-free bars, or practicing choral music, as we heard from a room at the top of the mercado building. On the way back to the car a couple hours later, we passed a beautiful fern tree. Its leaves looked like the ferns that I used to see along the backroads in New Hampshire, but this was a tall tree, and it was the delicate yellow-green of a promising spring. I know we will have cold weather again, and I will need long sleeves and a jacket, but then I will remember this spring-like January day in Crevillente.

Smoke-free bars in Spain?

This Sunday morning, I am not in Spain, and therefore I cannot see whether the new law banning smoking in all enclosed public places--including bars, cafes, and restaurants--is having the sudden transformational effect that has been hoped for by some and lamented by others.

A 2006 law regulating smoking in public spaces was disappointingly ineffective in regards to cafeterias, bars, and restaurants. Larger establishments were permitted to create smoking areas within the otherwise smoke-free premises. Though they were supposed to have separate ventilation systems and be positioned so as not to require patrons to pass through the smoky area when entering and leaving, I have seen some clumsily constructed structures that failed miserably in containing the abundant smoke generated by the faithful. Worse, establishments of less than 100  square meters of public space were permitted to exempt themselves from the no-smoking policy, as long as the management posted a sign at the entrance saying that smoking was permitted. For five years now, almost every little bar that I have entered has posted a "Se permite fumar" sign on the front door.

The new law took effect on Sunday, January 2 so as not to suddenly interrupt anyone's Nochevieja revelries as they celebrated the new year and downed their good-luck grapes. My own New Year's Eve day was spent in already smoke-free airports and planes, but I got the first inclination of a change when I checked in to a hotel next to the airport the night before my early-morning flight. For the first time in Spain I was asked voluntarily by the desk attendant if I wanted a smokeless room (thirty percent of hotel rooms may be reserved for smokers).

Toward the end of 2010 I read in the newspaper that bars and restaurants were investing in outdoor heating devices to enable the use of terrace and sidewalk sitting in even the colder months of the year. I remember now my surprise that the back terrace area of Bistro Alex, the restaurant within walking distance of my house, had been transformed into a pleasantly warm dining area with awnings and multiple heaters when I was there a couple weeks ago. I wonder if movable awnings--whether down or up--mean that an area is not "enclosed" and therefore may be exempt from the smoking ban. Most of all, I look forward to returning to the always-crowded  Carrefour cafeteria where we frequently enjoy a cup of coffee after making our purchases, but usually have trouble finding a clear table. I had noticed not too long ago that there was double the amount of seating space, with better views, farther beyond where we usually sit. It was, however, a glassed-in area for smoking. By the time I get back to Spain, that room should be cleaned and opened and a more pleasant space to recuperate from shopping.

The unusual thing I have noticed in all my reading about the tough new anti-smoking law in Spain  is that no one is attacking people who smoke, or denying their right to do so. The focus is on making more pleasant and healthy areas for everyone when they are eating and drinking, two activities that are major social occasions in Spain. Smoking is still permitted on the streets, in open air (except around playgrounds, schools, and hospitals), and in private areas in Spain. And I expect to see even more sidewalk restaurants and bars than there already are.