Ethtoy en Ethpaña

joyeux noël!

christmas wasn’t christmas this year, there’s no denying it. there was no crazily decorated tree, no candy-colored lights, no snow, no eat-until-you-burst spanish dinner, no drunken revelry. my parents sent me a wonderful package (that actually made it through customs this time) with truly awesome presents but it’s not the gifts that make the holiday–it’s the people and the traditions. and since danny and i had neither available this december, we kinda blew off the holiday altogether.

there were no scrambled eggs or cinnamon rolls for breakfast this year–just coffee and croissants. instead of opening presents under the tree we wandered around town with a bunch of equally christmas-less spaniards, and our christmas dinner consisted mostly of alcohol consumed while watching naked ladies shake their stuff. not your typical holiday, that’s for sure.

our pay-what-you-want tour started out at the fontaine saint michel near the sorbonne:

we wandered downriver (or upriver… i’m not really sure which) towards the end of ile de la cité where a bunch of heretical knights of templar were burned at the stake on friday the 13th, 1314, and loosed their famous curse on the world:

we scaled pont neuf, the best party favor ever (henry iv supposedly immortalized his guests in the faces that line the bridge)…

and headed back down the island to admire notre dame up close:

just like amelie does in the movie, we crossed from the institut de france to the louvre on the pont des arts, stopping to read the love-locks that have sprung up on the bridge like mushrooms since they were all taken off in 2010:

the view from the louvre end of the bridge (at least i think that’s where this was taken!):

and while we never actually made it into the museum (the line was 3 hours long!), we did get to peek in a window at the original sculptures from versailles:

the cool thing about paris is that there’s just as much outside the museums as there is inside–if not more!

as we wandered past the grand palais our guide told us about the nazi occupation and the plot to pretend to destroy the city before the allied liberation. the german commander knew paris was going to fall and had been under tons of international pressure to not be “the guy who destroyed the most beautiful city in europe” (a claim i don’t quite agree with, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog entry). unfortunately, the commander was totally stuck between a rock and a hitler–if he gave the city up without a fight he’d be deemed a traitor and die führer would put a price on his head. his ingenious idea to protect paris and himself at the same time was to burn one building, and one building alone: the grand palais.

the smoke it released blanketed the city so the germans couldn’t see what was happening from the air and had to take the commander’s word for it. pretty smart fella!

if you’re a fan of woody allen you might recognize those streetlights from “midnight in paris”… danny and i started across the bridge and flipped out when we realized it’s the one from the last scene:

we weren’t the only folks who’d taken a shine to the pont alexandre iii. according to our guide, tons of out-of-towners take advantage of its views of the eiffel tower to do their wedding photo shoot, and his words were proven to be true in no time:

so of course we had to follow suit and snap a quick pic:

the tour ended over by napoleon’s tomb, a tiny, subtle little thing (har dee har har) and spent the afternoon desperately searching for lunch. not a whole lot was open on christmas day and what was was packed, so we ended up lunching on kir with a side of bread & butter (and ham for danny). alcohol or caffeine on an empty stomach always makes me loopy so we walked it off on our way back to the hotel, where we cleaned up for our big night out (this is where the naked ladies come in).

…cuz nothing says “christmas in paris” like a burlesque show!

paris, oui oui

and a couple of weeks later danny and i were celebrating christmas together in the city of light. or rather, we were sleeping through it.

danny and i spent the night of december 23rd crammed into his niece’s twin bed in sevilla, and bright and disgustingly early the next morning his sister’s boyfriend drove us to the airport. it was a direct flight to paris but it left us fried, so when we got to our hotel in montmartre we had just enough energy to chow down on a christmas pizza. not the most traditional holiday meal but i’m not complaining.

we had to power through our exhaustion and day one in paris, so we pulled on our coats & scarves and got walking. we strolled through the hustle & bustle of rue des martyrs, buzzing with too-cool-for-school frenchies buying last minute ingredients for christmas dinner. we laughed at their ridiculously impractical iphone handsets & nonsensical umbrella usage (it wasn’t even sprinkling!) and thanked our lucky stars we hadn’t been born chique:

we had no idea where we were going beyond trying to steer ourselves towards the seine, and we stumbled upon an old candy shop with the quaintest christmas display in the window:

and after traipsing through what seemed to be little japan, we came out onto a wide boulevard right in front of the copper-roofed cupcake of the opera garnier:

we rounded a corner and came upon our first sight of the louvre…

…and the eiffel tower peeping out over the tuileries gardens:

we crossed the river and spent the afternoon dashing through the musée de orsay:

the views from the clock tower are spectacular, paris looks like a theater setpiece from up there:

by the time the museum closed we were wiped out so we crashed back at the hotel. the idea was to take a quick power-nap and hop up again in time to get to notre dame for midnight mass, but that’s not what happened. it’s so hard to get out of a warm bed at 10pm and tromp across an unfamiliar town in the dark–even on christmas eve. so we slept through it this year, but man, those extra couple of hours of sleep sure came in handy the next day!

2 years

as of the first weekend in december, danny and i had been together for 2 years. to celebrate we went back to the place where we got our start, only this time we were staying in a sweet hotel instead of the van:

not too shabby, eh?

we had a big honkin’ dinner at warung, same as always:

and spent inordinate amounts of time at the beach, same as always:

but for once we did something artistic. on our way back home we swung through lagos, portugal, in search of a former women’s jail that has been rehabilitated into an art gallery and studio space. portuguese streets are laid out just as confusingly as those in brazil so it took us a couple of laps round the neighborhood to find it, and when we did it was abandoned. the door was open so we slipped in, and found a smart little exhibition hall:

most of the cells are workshops or studios, but one was reserved for a clever little piece about growth under captivity:

it’s such a great re-purposing of the space, you see it in a much happier light and almost forget what it used to be:

it was a nice end to a nice weekend.

goa

i’ve been pestering danny on and off for over a year to get a dog– there’s something so comfy and cozy and unconditionally loving about them that makes me forget just how far i am from home. and finally danny said yes.

this is goa. she was born on may 22, 2011, and is an adorable, hyperactive sweetpea. she keeps us company when we’re sick, has chewed through i-don-t-know-how-many beds, and sticks to us like a leech. i love her.

and danny does, too:

but goa hasn’t always been the easiest dog to get along with. she gnawed straight through the passenger seat in danny’s van…

knocks over any small children in the vicinity…

and has an aggressive streak that makes her try to dominate other doggies (and me too, at first):

but usually she’s just a sweet, silly, wonderful puppy:

galicia’s haunted, did you know?

maybe it was the grey drizzle or maybe it was the orujo, but the minute we got up from lunch and set off to explore bueu danny’s gallego cousins got to talkin’ about ghosts.

ghost stories have always scared the bejeesus out of me. when i was in indian princesses i always stuffed my fingers in my ears when some sadistic dad started talking about dead people around the campfire, and really old houses give me the heeby-jeebies. they’re showing “night of the living dead” at a bar in huelva tonight and i’m seriously wondering how i’m going to last the whole movie without embarrassing myself. so you see, i’m pretty susceptible to ghost talk.

we’re strolling down this narrow road in the rain in this tiny little village on a hill above the ocean, and this little ol’ lady in an apron and slippers starts talking about this one time when her uncle was a kid and goes wandering down the mountain at night. he hears a cow lowing in the dark and as he gets closer sees a calf stuck in the mud. he runs back home to get a piece of rope to pull it out but when he goes back out the cow has disappeared and left no tracks. not too creepy, you might say. well, what about this: every time you reach a crossing in the road you must be very careful, and if you hear bells ringing, hide. the santa compaña is coming for you.

the santa compaña is a procession of lost souls who go about bringing death to folks who have the bad luck to meet them in a quiet intersection. another of danny’s ancestors ran into the santa compaña one night to a soundtrack of screams and cries, and he dashed off acojonado (so scared he “lost his testicles”). as he approached his house he heard the cries once again, growing louder the closer he got to the door, and when he entered he found all his female relatives wailing over the body of his father, who had passed away that very evening. a qué es creepy?

even danny’s mom, a relatively pragmatic, no nonsense lady, believed. her house was dotted with figurines of bruxas, the bushy-haired galician witches that must go to the same salon as those troll dolls from the 80′s, and every year at halloween she performed a queimada with danny’s nieces to protect them from evil spirits. this year we had one in her honor at danny’s sister’s house in sevilla, and despite the fact that most of the potion is brandy, you get surprisingly undrunk.

in a ceramic dish pour in a ton of firewater, white sugar, lemon peel and coffee beans. light the thing on fire and stir, reciting the spell over the blue flames and getting out all those evil spirits:

Gallego

English

Mouchos, curuxas, sapos e bruxas. Demos, trasgos e diaños, espíritos das neboadas veigas. Corvos, píntegas e meigas: feitizos das menciñeiras. Podres cañotas furadas, fogar dos vermes e alimañas. Lume das Santas Compañas, mal de ollo, negros meigallos, cheiro dos mortos, tronos e raios. Ouveo do can, pregón da morte; fuciño do sátiro e pé do coello. Pecadora lingua da mala muller casada cun home vello. Averno de Satán e Belcebú, lume dos cadáveres ardentes, corpos mutilados dos indecentes, peidos dos infernais cus, muxido da mar embravecida. Barriga inútil da muller solteira, falar dos gatos que andan á xaneira, guedella porca da cabra mal parida. Con este fol levantarei as chamas deste lume que asemella ao do Inferno, e fuxirán as bruxas a cabalo das súas vasoiras, índose bañar na praia das areas gordas. ¡Oíde, oíde! os ruxidos que dan as que non poden deixar de queimarse no augardente quedando así purificadas. E cando este beberaxe baixe polas nosas gorxas, quedaremos libres dos males da nosa alma e de todo embruxamento. Forzas do ar, terra, mar e lume, a vós fago esta chamada: se é verdade que tendes máis poder que a humana xente, eiquí e agora, facede que os espíritos dos amigos que están fóra, participen con nós desta Queimada.

Owls, barn owls, toads and witches. Demons, goblins and devils, spirits of the misty vales. Crows, salamanders and midges, charms of the folk healer(ess). Rotten pierced canes, home of worms and vermin. Wisps of the Holy Company, evil eye, black witchcraft, scent of the dead, thunder and lightning. Howl of the dog, omen of death, maws of the satyr and foot of the rabbit. Sinful tongue of the bad woman married to an old man. Satan and Beelzebub’s Inferno, fire of the burning corpses, mutilated bodies of the indecent ones, farts of the asses of doom, bellow of the enraged sea. Useless belly of the unmarried woman, speech of the cats in heat, dirty turf of the wicked born goat. With this bellows I will pump the flames of this fire which looks like that from Hell, and witches will flee, straddling their brooms, going to bathe in the beach of the thick sands. Hear! Hear the roars of those that cannot stop burning in the firewater, becoming so purified. And when this beverage goes down our throats, we will get free of the evil of our soul and of any charm. Forces of air, earth, sea and fire, to you I make this call: if it’s true that you have more power than people, here and now, make the spirits of the friends who are outside, take part with us in this Queimada.

i like that it ends calling on the spirits of those not present to take part in the queimada…

sifting through mari carmen’s childhood

we spent the rest of the day riding on a 100 proof alcohol high and exploring what remained of the place where danny’s mom was born in 1939.

our elderly gallego hosts even drove us a ways down the highway to get rained on in pontevedra, an old stone town with a totally bewitching main plaza:

then it was back to bueu for more eating. that’s right, our stomachs still had a little empty space that needed filling. so we all rolled our distended bellies into yet another cousin’s house, this one resembling a ’70s industrial magnate’s mansion rather than a dollhouse. the bottom floor was all garage (full to the brim with barrels of wine and orujo) and bare bones kitchen-dining room, perfectly beige down to the linoleum flooring and countertops. it was only when i desperately needed to pee that i discovered the small palace hiding upstairs. each room looked like it had been done up by your nouveau riche sicilian aunt from the bronx: lots of gold and bronze and shiny glass and even shinier woodwork and bedclothes made to match the curtains (or vice versa). and it was all in such a state of utter perfection, as if no one had touched it in years except to wax and polish and dust.

when i finally found my way back downstairs (don’t worry, i wasn’t snooping–all spaniards love to give guided tours of their homes, it’s never enough to just show you to the toilet) a private bagpipe concert was just getting underway. the youngest grandson of one of the cousins (beats me which) is learning to squeeze loud noises (like a dying goose might make) out of a little velvet bag with black pipes stuck in it at all angles like giant voodoo pins. it was a heartwarming gesture that brought tears to my eyes and made my ears bleed just a little bit (bagpipe at close range can be dangerous), and set the neighborhood dogs off in a frenzy of barking. it was the perfectly quirky, hilarious, overwhelming ending to a long damn day.

gallego hospitality

we spent the rest of that day with carmen’s cousins, following them around like lost puppies who’d just come home. after the funeral they took us back to their house for what promised to be just coffee and cookies, and ended up being a five-hour eating marathon. i see where his mom got her christmas overindulgence from…

the house was a typical stone house that they’d built themselves, totally surrounded by plants (i also see why danny has such a green thumb) and decorated like a 1970′s dollhouse. there were roses arcing over our heads as we made our way down the front walk…

green grass that looked more like astroturf than the real deal inviting us out to the backyard…

potted plants hanging off nearly every surface of the back of the house…

…and squeezed onto every corner of the hórreo (more on this weird little house later)…

and as if all that wasn’t enough, the family also had a plot of land they’d farmed below the garden full of lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, collards, potatoes, onions… you could smell the fresh veggies in the air.

these people live utterly surrounded by green: green forests, green water, green plants growing out of every patch of available land. it was such a change from dry, yellow andalucía. but the hospitality was the exact same that i was shown by danny’s mom since that christmas a couple years ago when he brought me home to meet the fam. gallegos sure can pack it away!

from coffee and cookies they quickly shifted gears into full-blown lunch preparation: a massive platter of salad from the garden for the vegetarian, a bucket of homemade french fries, fresh seafood pulled out of the bay that morning, and pork ribs cooked in the woodfire stove out back:

but it was after lunch when they really busted out the big guns: aguardiente. you know, firewater. literally, burning water. and what an apropos name it is…

this stuff is disgusting. straight up awful. it hurts. it will make your eyes water and your throat shrivel up and steam come out your ears like a loony tune cartoon. pffffff… and danny’s gallego family make it themselves, leave it lying around the house a while cogiendo fuerza, and then force it on unsuspecting guests with the guilt-trippy tagline, “it’s homemade!” so of course you can’t say no. it comes in a variety of fun flavors like neon yellow, dish detergent green, and tar brown that allegedly taste like herbs, more herbs, and coffee. blech.

the whole meal i had this overwhelming feeling that we were all doing exactly what danny’s mom had wanted us to do when she asked us to come up to galicia. there was nothing she loved more than to surround herself with her batty family and tons of delicious food and liters of alcohol and watch the mayhem unfold, and that was exactly what we did that day. and she may not have been physically with us but she was there every way that mattered.

off to bueu we go

talk about awkward.

in the midst of all the family drama the carballo kids had to plan and perform the burial their mother had asked them for–not an easy task when half of the siblings refused to talk to the other half. thank goodness there was no way we could all fit into the same car and had to drive separately–i can’t imagine just how awful 11 hours trapped in a tiny european vehicle together would have been.

when we finally made it to bueu, the village in galicia where danny’s mother was born, we checked into the hotel that danny’s younger brother had insisted we stay in. it was pricey and a bit much for a place where we’d only be sleeping, but in order to maintain a little familial tranquility we capitulated to the brother’s whim. but that didn’t make anything much better. we spent dinner that night making awkward jokes and sitting through awkward silences, and the next morning everyone did breakfast on their own to avoid a repeat performance. it’s a shame we were all so on edge because it was an important day…

danny’s mother’s elderly cousins had driven to the bed & breakfast to show us the way to the beach where carmen had asked for her ashes to be spread, so we stifled our discomfort and pretended to be civilized adults, at least for a little bit.

the cousins were totally cheery and chatty and even though they’d had almost no contact with carmen’s children, they welcomed us all with wide-open arms. we followed their jeep through the village and around the other side of the bay, to a quiet white sand beach almost swallowed up in green:

as danny and his family made their way down the beach to a secluded corner perfect for illegally spreading (cremated) human remains, his sister’s boyfriend and i stayed at a distance, snapping photos. her oldest son released her into the water with the rest of the mourners watching from the sand. danny and his niece were the only ones spry enough to wade into the water for a closer goodbye.

danny said he felt lucky to be the child who would spend the most time with his mother from then on… every time he jumped into the ocean to go surfing.

sad summer

things started going bad last spring. danny’s mom just wasn’t doing so hot. a pain in her hip made walking hell and she didn’t have much energy. after multiple visits to the doctor they realized that her cancer was back with a vengeance, and this time it had entered the bone.

every day the outlook was different. she stopped walking and  needed to be wheeled around her home by one of her kids, who were constantly with her to keep an eye on her. she lost her appetite to the point where not even coffee and toast went down well. her body was failing her little by little.

things didn’t look good when i headed home for what was to be 5 weeks last summer. i was on pins and needles the whole time, checking in with danny via text and skype and the telephone. some days she was on top of the world, laughing and sitting up to chat with friends in the living room; other days she rambled on in gallego (the galician dialect that’s her first language) as if she were back in her childhood village. we’d been warned she didn’t have much time left, but you never know… my granddad took 12 years to die, who was to say that stubborn carmen carballo wouldn’t as well?

unfortunately the doctors got it right. during a skype date one morning in august danny told me things had taken a turn for the worse, and i called the airline to change my flight. i wanted to be there for danny if anything happened, and i wanted to be able to say goodbye. his mom had been like an auntie to me, welcoming me into my house for christmas when she’d never met me before in her life, stuffing me with soups and chocolates every chance she got, trying to treat my entire family to a gourmet dinner during their visit to huelva… she was family. when i was with her i never felt lonely. the last thing i’d said to her when i left her lying on her bed, staring up at me, was “take care of yourself.” i never got to tell her just how much she meant to me, and how very, very much i appreciated her kindness and generosity.

carmen carballo died on august 10th, just hours after danny called to say that things didn’t look too good. i bawled my eyes out and made a big fuss, freaking out everyone from my little sister to my grandma to my teenage cousin. there was no way i’d be able to make it back to huelva in time for the funeral, much less the visitation. i didn’t get to say goodbye. and i didn’t get to be there for danny when he lost the person he loves most in this world. it was, and still is, an awful feeling.

thank goodness danny has the best friends a guy could ask for. tony and nicole and josé and sonya and alex and miguel and rul and machuca and juan and celia were there for him when i couldn’t be. if only his family had been so supportive…

the loss of his mother set off nasty family drama more suited to a soap opera than real life. i won’t go into the details but by the time my train arrived in huelva his siblings were barely speaking to one another, and danny was thoroughly disgusted. they say time heals all wounds, and it seems like his brothers and sister are picking up the pieces and trying to put some semblance of a relationship together again, but they’ve lost the glue that bound them and it won’t quite ever be alright.

last days with alli

from granada alli and i took a quick bus to sevilla in order to drag out our goodbye and make the good times last as long as possible. once there we left our backpacks with a señor who’d spent so many years working in the bus station bag check he seemed covered with a thin patina of mildew, and met up with stephie, the married texan teacher. unfazed by the heat, we strolled over to plaza de españa for one last touristy photo session:

we took refuge from the toasty afternoon in maybe the chicest restaurant i’ve ever been treated nicely in. hidden away in a narrow alley behind the cathedral, it was housed in an old arab bathhouse and exuded cool, refreshing refinement. and the food weren’t half-bad neither!

after lunch we dragged our stuffed bellies to the renfe station to catch a train out to utrera, the pueblo where stephie was teaching last spring. utrera is about as exciting as huelva (not very) and has even fewer picturesque buildings, but any new environs are good by me, especially in the company of some lovely galpals. after taking a quick shower to freshen up (it’s seriously hot in sevilla) we threw on whatever we could find (totally true in my case–i wore the same dress every night that week!) and headed out into the night. our objective was the fancy restaurant of stephie’s chef coworker for a gourmet dinner, and after only a couple wrong turns we arrived at the quaintest–and oldest–little white house in town. cooker man treated us to tim burton-esque cephalopod croquettes:

mango-covered cheese (how did he do it?!):

and shockingly complicated, exotically-flavored g&ts. who knew gin tonics came in flavors?!

dude has a 30-bottle gin collection and claims that each gin demands its own special mixers. we chose green apple (not that nasty chemical green cleaning fluid–the real deal), cucumber (strikes me as very old-school british) and incense & orange peel (no joke):

that last one was by far the most impressive concoction, if the weirdest. the bartender infused the ice cubes with incense by blowing smoke over them with a pipe, then shaved orange peel into the gin… and it actually tasted smoky and spicy, like a catholic church during mass! compliments to the chef (even if he charged us full price for everything–what’s the use of having a friend in high places if they don’t help ya out a little?!)

we’d had a bottle of wine between us to wash our dinner down, and with the g&ts bubbling on top things got a little silly… so much so that we ended up busting out our rugrats impressions for our fellow diners. ya know how phil and lil always seem totalk out of the side of their mouths?

utrera didn’t know what hit it, let me tell you.

the next morning stephie had to work (poor thing) so alli and i explored the town. all we found of note were the church…

and castle…

it would have been a pretty anticlimactic way to end our time together but luckily for us alli accompanied us all the way back to huelva to say her goodbyes to danny and the rest of the gang, and after a couple days spent running around the province it was time to say our real goodbyes. i’m getting used to seeing people off at the huelva bus station and never knowing when i’ll see them again, but there couldn’t be a less picturesque place to part ways. alli and i hugged under the moldy old orange trees and i stood watching until her bus disappeared out the grimy concrete exit. i’m so happy to know that she’s doing well back home in the states, and i’m thinking that it won’t be too long before i’ll follow in her footsteps.