She did it!

Eldest talked to her teacher.

I didn't ask her if she was going to, this had to be her agenda, and she didn't consult me about what to say or how to say it....but when she came home from lunch, she told me that she had talked to the teacher about the racial comments that had been made.

Reportedly she got the teacher when he was alone while all the other kids were playing soccer...a real team sport fan my eldest is...NOT! She said to me that she told the teacher that she had many friends in Canada who were from a variety of Asian countries, spoke a variety of languages, and none of them sounded like the teacher's version. She also apparently informed the teacher that there are over 300 Native American languages, and none that she knew of resembled what she had seen and heard in class. She said she started to choke up a bit while she was talking, but that he looked embarrassed and apologised when she finished.

Then she went and climbed a tree to read.



Can you say recovery time?



You GO girl!



My little arboreal Buddha.



Well. She isn't even really all that little anymore.



She used to be.

On a lighter note,

This little guy is not strictly in chronological order, but he was so cute, I just had to lead off with him....or her. What do I know? It's seriously adorable though.


We went out of our place and there he was tied up in the park near our house, I guess his owner wanted to get a drink at the local café?????

Back to a proper order here...Saturday morning I got started on this painting that was inspired by last weeks visit to the MACBA with Eldest. You can read about that here if you want.

When walking in the hills I came across a whole bushel of these cacti that had so massively overproduced fruit that they were not only sagging under the weight, but actually breaking. Poor things. Prickly too.

We went into BCN over the children's wild protestations to see this ancient Benedictine Monastery, that was founded in 912. Unfortunately we were not able to get inside, so there is only a photo of one part of a lintel and....

This bike leaned up in the courtyard. BCN has now got BiCing, which is a bike share program. Just brilliant. For 24 Euros a YEAR (yes you read that right) you get a card that entitles you to use a city maintained bicycle for a period of 30 min or an hour as many times a day as you want and as many days a year as you want. They have stands for the bikes everywhere, and I really mean everywhere....and it is so fantastic!

I also like the juxtaposition of the bike and the ancient monastery and it's stone work.

Some one dressed Chuck up.

Poor Chuck.

He actually didn't seem to mind much, though he shook the pants off pretty fast.

We went to the local teams football game, soccer in NA. The good guys got trounced 4 - 0, so Beth I can so relate. A 4 - 0 loss is a complete trouncing in soccer. Ah well. It was deliciously warm watching the game, the sun was shining, there was no wind...I was all hot and getting sunned. Mmmmm I felt just like one of those lizards you see lying out, soaking up those warming rays.....so good.

And there was a little bloodshed at the end of the match. An accident, but it almost made me feel at home, watching a hockey game. These soccer players though...sorry guys, but SHAKE IT OFF!

When we got back from the game the man and I sat out on the porch reading, chatting, planning for Christmas break, and struggling with paypal...

urgh. It was HOT! Woo hoo... I LOVE Spain.

This is the fire I lit in the house tonight. We have this really funky little fireplace in the kitchen wall, that we have never used, though guests of ours have.....

See it there?

My idea had been to roast a pumpkin in there. Have I mentioned that we still have quite a lot of pumpkin left. So I fired it up!

Only I didn't time this very well, because I forgot that at 6pm the man and I were going to church. Now before those of you who know us well drop down and wind yourselves, there was a choral concert on....so I had to remove my flaming-gradually-becoming-nice-toasty-coals bits and dunk them in the sink. Filled with cold water. You see, we just didn't think it was a good idea to leave the little fire-thingy lit while the kids were home and we went out. Even if the kids weren't home, it just seemed to need us to be there.

The concert was great...btw.

Because of this, I didn't get to roast my pumpkins...which looks suspiciously like butternut squashes that got really round.

Here's what I did on the spur of the moment, and you know what? It was great.

Grate up your pumpkin job-y, mine was about the size of an acorn squash. You peeled that first, right?

Now in a big heavy frying pan, preferably cast iron because I love them so much. They cook so well, clean up easily, hide any dirt you don't get, and keep your iron levels up...no kidding.

Wait, I digress. In the pan, on med-high heat, warm olive oil...good stuff. Ours is grown locally and delivered to the door. (sorry, that wasn't nice) In it, put some rosemary, preferably fresh and coarsely chopped. Let that stooge around and get to know each other. Meanwhile grate up an apple, a good big firm tart one, like a Fuji or something...drop the whole mess into the pan, turn the heat down a bit. I put the lid on at first to make sure it would all cook through, and then took it off so it wouldn't get too soupy....stir it somewhere between fairly-often and now-and-then....I thought I would have to adjust the seasonings, as in add some, when it was nearly done, but NO! It was AWESOME. Tart and sweet and soft and textured....oh so good.

It was so good that we ate it all up and I don't have any photos. So sorry.

There you go, hope you had a nice weekend too.

Racism. It is wrong.

Chi*g C*hong Ch*ing Ch*ong....

Do you remember the whole Rosie O'Donell ch*ing ch*ong incident? ....then there is this eloquent response by the poet beau sia which points out the ignorance of the comment and the pain it can cause.

Well, we have our own personal ch*ing ch*ong incident -please excuse all the stars, I am trying to control who finds the site through nasty google searches- one of the teachers at the kid's school cracked a ch*ing ch*ong joke, and for good measure one about Native American languages too. Though the teacher implied that there is only one indigenous language in the Americas, neglecting the approximately 150 languages in the South American continent, which are the few survivors of the approximately 1,500 languages present at the time of European -read Spanish- contact in that region. This also neglects the approximately 28 Central American and Mexican indigenous languages, and the approximately 300 North American indigenous languages.

This joke was racist.

The fact that the teacher did it for a laugh and not in the context of trying to build cultural awareness and what can hinder peoples open-minded approach to the diversity of our world...

made it worse.

The fact that the teacher is a teacher...

made it worse.

We are drawing up our own response.

We do not anticipate being able to approach the eloquence of Beau Sia, especially as we have to have the conversation in Catalan, this however does not remove the importance of the issue.

I truly do not believe that this teacher is a racist. In that, I truly believe that he would not treat a child in his class differently if he or she came from another culture...that said, racism is alive and well here. I also truly believe that this teacher made an ignorant and harmful comment and needs to be called on it. Let's be nice and say educated if you want.

Here in Spain we are treated differently than other immigrants because we are immigrants from the so-called first world.

This is wrong.

We are not even called immigrants as this refers to poor people who often look different from the Spanish, as in not white, and often face economic challenges, most likely at least in part because of this labelling.

This is wrong.

Laughing at other culture's languages, or other people's faces

is wrong.

Doing so in an educational setting

is tragically wrong.

This country is one of the most open nations in Europe in their policies, in their admittance of refugees, in their willingness to provide every single person with medical care and education, but it is a nation that is new to having immigrants. It is something with which they are working, actively and diligently, on a daily basis.

But this behaviour, which I have also seen in other contexts,

is wrong.

It is not supportive of tolerance, which is this teachers job.

Tolerance is only the first pathetic baby step.

Tolerance implies merely a willingness to endure. It implies to me an element of distaste.

What we need is an open-minded welcome; an interest in and fundamental respect for all people and all cultures.

This behaviour does not support it.

What we need is a fundamental belief that the diversity of people, whether as individuals or as groups, by whatever commonality they are made, is one of the greatest riches that we posses as humans.

That we are one people, who are all different, and that this diversity is fundamentally and profoundly important is vital.

This behaviour does not pass on this message.

Now to pass my daughter's message about this subject on to the teacher.

In Catalan.

A thousand cuts and eye contact

I'm going to do it....I'm going to start changing over the e-mail address I think....so....as to that, if you already have my address, leave the same words before the @ and put gmail.com after it....

Now I have to figure out how to do a mass mailing without the cc's showing, and without having to send out 150 separate e-mails.

*groan*

If you know how to do this reasonably simple task, please feel free to pass on the info in the comments section......I would be most grateful.

I figured that since today was a day of a thousand cuts, I would go ahead and self-inflict a few more....

I went to catch a bus to a neighbouring town, arriving there five minutes early...a different but possible bus arrived a full forty minutes later. I might add that it is getting cold here now.

Then, I had to walk a fair distance to the office where I had to do the paperwork...the wind was blowing in my face and it felt like an icepick was being stabbed into my head. I am such a wimp...it just isn't that cold here, but my hat wasn't up to the task, and my sinuses have been bugging me lately...

I had to wait forty minutes for the return bus...

The poor dog has the runs and had a crap in the house

The medical center did not accept my FOURTH application for a health card I should have had ages ago, because one of my photocopies was not up to snuff.

The internet hookup was dicey today, especially irritating after my battle with Telefonica a few days ago....

Ho hum.

Now, onto the good bits...the class I taught was fun, though the kids were appallingly behaved, they were funny too....I went out with a friend for an hour in the evening, and I met, albeit briefly, a fascinating Senegalese man who is from the Casamance region in the south of Senegal, he has been here three years, speaks drop dead beautiful French, Woloff (of course), Arabic, Spanish and quite good English. I was most impressed.

I used to think that people always talk to me, but I realised a while ago, that actually I always talk to people.....I make eye contact, as long as they don't look freaky, and smile...then I get talking. I didn't realise that I did this for a long time, I just thought that people thought they could talk to me, and maybe they do, but I often start it myself.

I am supposed to be a city girl, brought up to not do these things, but there it is, I do.

I kind of like it that way. You get to meet some interesting folks.

Dog dynamics.

I was walking in the hills with Chuck today along with a friend of mine and her dog ...the dogs are good buds, and partners in crime.

Nona, my friend's dog is a greyhound, and a diva who is unafraid of anything or any dog however aggressive, and she defends my wimpy Chuck frequently, and so, with his bud by his side he grows much more assertive than he would otherwise be...today being a case in point....there are some folks here who leave their dogs unleashed and wandering. Unfortunately most of these dogs are not fixed, male or female, so their interactions have an intensity I am not used to seeing. There is one male who frequently joins us....he lords it over Chuck, being a freaking enormous German shepherd, but defends him against others...as in, "that's my whipping boy, thankyouverymuch". I don't really like him very much, but it is difficult to make him go away.

Part way through our walk we met a trio of other loose dogs. Giant Shepherd, Nona the greyhound, and the usually timid and friendly Chuck get into it....Chuck gets in further than he likes and finds himself cornered....I had to wade in yelling at this point....the dogs are very obedient to humans, well, at least they go away when you tell them to. As an aside I am learning more Catalan swear words during these interactions. A truly educational event.

Once I worked him out of the corner, Chuck decided he had had enough and trotted rapidly and contentedly down the road with Nona pulling up the rear...behind her the Giant G.S. Interestingly, as we looked back a little later, the enormous GS was sitting, just sitting in the middle of the road while Nona and Chuck retreated into the distance. The other three dogs were standing looking edgily at us as we retreated and more nervously at Giant GS....If I had been faster I would have taken a photo....Chuck seems to be the wimpiest of the lot, he isn't as big and has no where near as much attitude. For which I am glad.


It is interesting watching the inter-dynamics of the dogs...who hates whom and who likes whom...who beats up on whom and who defends whom....there is a very interesting interplay of size attitude and gender that goes on....


That said, I am not sure how much fun it all is.

Telefonica, language and service guys.

You know when you take your car in to the mechanic because it is making a weird noise and screeching when you brake, but once you get there and your driving around with mechanic and he is smearing grease all over your passenger seat from his dirty clothes and unwashed hands and the car doesn't do it at all...no screech, no ping or bang or knock and you feel like an idiot...and he looks at you like you are an inferior human because your a woman and when someone asks you what kind of car you saw you answer that it was blue????



That happened to me today.



Except it was the phone.



Nomad tried calling me several times the night before last, then finally e-mailed and commented that she couldn't get through. This alerted us to the problem. You see the phone doesn't ring very often around here. Then once we looked at it the little number things and the date and all on that preview screen thingy, well that wasn't happy either. The whole screen thingy was flashing on, then off, then on then off....sometimes we had a dial tone and sometimes not. The computer, which is hooked up to the same jack on the same line was fine....



Then the phone started ringing about every 10 seconds. Of course there was no one calling but our modern day poltergeist. Easily solved. Unplug it.



Then the computer access died.


Now that was a crisis.



Here's what really bites though. I cannot call Telefonica myself because despite the fact that I am living deep in the heart of Catalonia, the telefonica people on the 24hour customer service line ONLY SPEAK SPANISH.



Now, can you imagine living in Quebec, and we're not talking Montreal here, or even Quebec City, lets say, Trois Riviers, or Chicoutimi....and you cannot call customer service in French? Then the service guy that comes to your door, and surely lives in Quebec, and works for a national company...we're talking the Bell Canada equivalent here ladies and gentlemen, and he does not speak a word, not a single word of Catalan.



My my my.



No wonder they want to seperate.



SO



I had to get a woman from work to phone for me, as I cannot talk to them myself...talking on the telephone is dodgy even in Catalan...I cannot wave my arms about...in Castillian? Worse than hopeless. The Catalans I talked to thought I might manage in English (imagine that, customer service in a foreign language being more likely that customer service in one of the officially recognised languages of the country) but every time we tried there was not any English help either. Maybe they are all in Barcelona.



So my buddy organised it for me.....and I will grant that the phone company responded very quickly. He was due to arrive the day after we called, which was today, at 1pm. He arrived around 2:30 which given these sorts of things, isn't all that bad.



Except that the phone was fine. It behaved completely normally.



I am glad and all, but I don't trust it to keep working and I will probably have to pay for the service call that I didn't need.



What is it with these inanimate objects? And with Telefonica, about whom I think EVERYONE in Spain has an "I hate Telefonica" story.



Life otherwise is good. We started conditionals in the Catalan class yesterday when I wasn't there. I am afraid. Very afraid. Conditionals are those verb structures like....I would sing if. They are reasonably straight forward in English (says the native speaker) but the Catalan ones, predictably, are more complicated.



Keeps it lively.



They say that if you keep your brain active throughout your life you are much less likely to suffer from loss of memory and dementia when your older. Think of that when your struggling over something, like your kid's 'new math' homework assignment that you cannot figure out yourself, OK?

A rant and a little more

I hate hotmail.



I hate the ads.



I hate the difficulty using it.



I hate live hotmail, classic or full.



I hate how small the screens are.



I hate how slow it is to type on.



I hate that I cannot forward my e-mail to my gmail account.



I hate that when I signed up for messenger for my students all I got was porn.



I hate that it was difficult to uninstall messenger.



I hate that it is going to be such a hassle to switch over to gmail if I do it, which I am inches from.



Grrrrrr.



I just want my d*mn e-mail thankyouverymuch without ads for singles networks or e-bay. I want it to load quickly and neatly. I don't give a rat's behind what colour it is. Truly.



'nuff said.



I am going to go back to my thoughts at the MACBA...the modern art museum in BCN that I referred to on Sunday. There were two main exhibits on...one is called under the bomb, and is a look at modern painting between 1946 and 56 when the core of modern art work shifted from France to NYC. Where it seems to still be.

Be bomb was, understandably depressing in the first section...it is French painting during the occupation. There was one light of relief amongst the bleak works, a Matisse -how I LOVE Matisse - with colour. Objectively and in another context it was a rather alarming work itself, though a pastel coloured portrait, the woman looked mangled, if not flayed...flat faced, completely without shading and an alarming shade of pink...but STILL it was a delight to see the colour.

As I went through this show I discovered how powerfully I am attracted to bright colours. Mmmmmmm.

As the show moved on there was more and more English in the show....displays, video presentations, art work, entire movies...without the least bow to the Catalan or Castillian that is the home of this museum. This, of course, continued in the display of Joan Jumas' video installation/performance art piece...she is American...but still, I had to wonder how much the other folks there were getting out of it as so much of the show was in English only.

I guess it does illustrate the nature of the art world at the moment...the gravitational center seems to be in NY, not Europe.

I found this fascinating....especially as so much American culture is viewed as McDicks, Britney Spears and Walmart...which is certainly a dominant aspect...but there is so much more going on too.

I did start to feel like I wasn't in Spain any more...Toto.....


I love it that my google spell checker didn't recognise Walmart!!!

Painting class

I am definitely the fly in the ointment.

The freak on the doorstep.

The extra strange extranerjo.

The painting class is populated almost completely by men who are at least mid 50's and some quite a bit older. Many have been coming for years. They are quite nice, but I am definitely upsetting things. I once again feel like a kid...so much younger than everyone else. They all wear white lab coats...I was there in cargo cord camos and a leather vest. They all have the space they have been sitting in for YEARS...and now there has to be room for me. There is one other woman in the class, she is also at least 56 and Spanish, as in no Catalan. We don't hang much. The teacher is younger than me and a woman, and hilarious...as much as I understand her.

The biggest difference though lies in the work we are doing. All but one of them is doing work that is a copy of a photo or a print. They are, all but this one guy, very pretty. Blue seas, green mountains, white stucco houses, pretty flowers...churches in the distance. The grandchildren are going to wonder what the heck to do with all this stuff....

There is one man though who is producing a very interesting piece...his colours are fascinating and he is doing multi-media, to a certain extent...he is also the only other person there who is working out of his head. I do have to say that one of the men has been slaving over a drawing that he is creating on his own...he half jokingly asked me to model for a figure....clothed I am sure....many women over the ages have wanted to paint and ended up standing still for ages, probably in between cooking meals. I laughed him off. Firmly.

I am also an odd ball...always an oddball it seems. Not only am I the only one who is under 55, the only female, the only one who cannot speak Castillian and who struggles with Catalan, I am also the only water colourist...all the rest are working in oils....I work faster, and work on ideas out of my own head....I don't do pretty, nor flowers....

Awkward ain't I.

This is what I have been working on....I didn't document as I went...awkward again, what can I say...
This is the facade...the stores here all roll metal blinds down over the doorways at night...these get graffiti and paint on them...some are interesting. This is my own design, and please recall that this is still a work in progress....



Inside the doors open...these are a LONG way from completion...there are six internal doors on each side and each door needs...well, embellishment...action...whathaveyou....though I want the newsprint to continue to show through...I may add some fabric in here as well. And that white on the inside of the main doors...gotta go.



And then in the center....I haven't decided whether to leave those last doors glued down, or to let them lift...I may have to glue them for strength. In which case...they will be unopenable. Which is cool too...I am thinking now on a conceptual level, but if the physical structural requirements intercede...so be it.



I'm not going to tell you what it's all about...if you want to...think about it, if not, don't...in Catalan..."sí no.... no."

Let's try that photo again...

Time travel

This is an onion-like story with in a story within a story.

Eldest and I went to MACBA which is the Modern Art Museum of Barcelona while the MAN and youngest went off to sea to watch the start of the Barcelona World Race; a double handed open sixty non-stop round the world race. That is a different post. MACBA and the collections there were astonishing, and I could fill several posts with my thoughts from today as well....and I may, but here I have a story to tell....

We went into the display rooms for Joan Jonas who is a Performance Artist who was a pioneer in video installation performance art pieces, which I have a bit of a weakness for; indeed for most performance art. This too is an aside.

While we were in one of the rooms, and one of the stranger ones...there at the back I spotted a video of people at the Berlin Wall, just after it had come down, hammering chunks off of it. I was there back then. In the early early spring of 1990 if memory serves me. It was an astonishing time. I had been to the wall before, several times. I had been to the Check Point Charlie Museum, I had stood and looked over the wall. I had been intimidated.

That day though was surreal and truly unbelievable. The sun was shining, it wasn't too cold. Folks were hammering away at the wall with chisels and mallets. People were selling chunks of the wall as well....enough had been eaten away the you could actually climb through gaps in the wall and go and sit in no man's land which a few weeks or months previously would have been a death sentence. I climbed through and sat in the warm spring sunshine leaning against the east German side...pristine and unsullied by graffiti. I sat there and looked over the open area where many died trying to escape. Where I had peered over myself. It was frightening and astonishing and unbelievable and and and...I cannot imagine how the Germans must have felt.

Today at this installation show it was like I was back again. The weather in the video was the same. I kept looking for myself in the show. The chances were slim, but possible. I never turned up of course, but Eldest did.

I am not sure if I can communicate this adequately...but I had been there, and felt that I might appear in the video. It was like watching a day in my life. A really remarkable and terribly strange day. Then I stood Eldest in between the projector and the wall, blocking the image. There was her shadow laid over the shadow that was me all those years ago. It's the photo at the top.

I didn't know my daughter was with me that day. Now I do.

The germ of another painting.....