cranky...is it good or bad?

The man and I spent a few hours today going through the details of the house plans to ensure that all is well, lights, heat, water, etc...

Again.

We'll have a meeting with the architect (mark 2 who seems to be working out better) to finalise these details, or get as close as we can to doing that.

I am getting so very tired of doing this over and over and over.

Ho hum.

I don't know if this is a Catalan thing or if architects the world over do this, but they keep telling us to decide where we're going to put the furniture so that we can decide where the outlets and lights should go.  I have to confess that I don't affix my furniture to the ground with concrete and possibly whomever lives in the house after us would like their own furniture, and maybe arranged differently.  So, maybe we should just put these things in a logical kind of place....no?

Whatever.

I've been reading Edward Abbey in anticipation of lending it to a friend to read.  He is so funny and so cranky.  The Journey Home.

Kissing Catalans

One of the things I have been trying to figure out lately is how to kiss Catalans.

The man?  No problem, got that all figured out.  It's everyone else.

You see, the Catalans do that cheek to cheek kiss thing like the French do, and the Polish and and and and.....the trick is figuring out who you're supposed to do it with and when. You know what I mean, no? Your mouth doesn't actually touch the person's face, because you are both still facing forwards, but your cheeks touch briefly, right cheek to right cheek, then left to left.

I have been quite contentedly going along essentially following people's lead on this for some time and in truth, there are very few people that I do the kiss-kiss thing with.  There is, sadly, no work in English for this greeting - that I know of, and strangely the Catalans also don't have a word/verb for it.

Now, there are the obnoxious air kissers who get close to you but don't quite touch your face and make no noise at all, then there are the really juicy sounding ones who, with their mouth quite close by your ear make big MWAAAAAH noises.  Not so keen on either of those.

Then there is me.  I basically follow the lead, but I am sometimes a wee bit, ah, clumsy in the execution. My poor sisters-in-law have suffered the worst from it, as they were the ones I did the double cheek kiss with most often, especially early on.

You see, sometimes I seem to misjudge distance or speed and come away with aching cheekbones....I've actually whacked someone with my face. They are always very polite about it, and I have never seen anyone actually rubbing their cheekbone as they back away.  Very polite they are.

Ooops.

Then there is the rest of your body.  Do you lean way forward to keep distance with the rest of your body or step right in and stay fairly upright but with much greater proximity?  Do you shake hands or touch in any other way?????  I have offered a hand and then been pulled in for the kiss-kiss like a confused guppy into a vortex of salutation.

If you are in the middle of saying something, do you keep talking?  Pause the conversation?  Let it drop???  Haven't figured out that rule yet.

Some rules I have figured out:

Rule 1.  Unless you are very pretentious the kiss-kiss is only done when you quite like someone and haven't seen them in a long time.

Rule 2.  Rule 1 does not always apply.

Rule 3.  It is normally not done within a professional setting, for instance your OBGYN should not kiss you at the beginning or end of a visit.

Rule 4.  Rule 3 does not always apply.

 Rule 5.  It is not an appropriate way to congratulate someone, nor an expression of affection or contentment.  ie, it cannot substitute for a hug.

Rule 6.  People look surprised if you make an error with rule 5.

I have done that twice recently, hence the study.

One was a friend's birthday.  She is quite a good friend and we went for coffee on the big day.  I wished her a happy birthday, and if she had been another North American I would have given her a hug, however, we were in the center of a small town café and it Catalans just don't really hug.  However it felt quite cold to not touch her at all on her birthday, so I went for the kiss-kiss.  She didn't complain, but was distinctly surprise.

Second occasion, I ran into a woman here in the village who I really like, and I believe feels the same way, though we have not advanced to friendship per se.  We were chatting about something or other, and she mentioned something that left me utterly delighted.  I would have hugged her in Canada.  Again, public street and a strong sense that hugging just isn't done, so I went for the kiss-kiss and she looked surprised.  Not unhappy, but a bit stunned.

So I arrive at rule number 7.

Rule 7.  Kiss-kiss actions are purely for greeting someone and for saying goodbye. Anything else is odd.

I believe they chalk my errors up to fruitiness.  Could be worse.

There is also considerable gender variation within this rule,

Rule 8.   Men do not do the kiss-kiss thing unless they are life long friends or family.   This means that the when the man and I are out, I will get kiss-kissed by people who shake his hand.  Considerably less familiarity is needed for a man-woman kiss-kiss than a man-man combination would allow.

There are also some unspoken rules about men and women instigating the kiss-kiss thing in a man-woman combination. This I am unsure of as I always simply follow other people's leads.

There is also an age related element to this, which I haven't figured out at all.  Sorry, no help there.  For instance no one does the kiss-kiss thing with teenagers unless they are really quite a bit older; 40 min (Eldest, when asked, stated that only really really old people do the kiss-kiss with her, like my age and up.)  Teenage girls hug.  They hug a lot.  Teenage boys punch each other in the shoulder or grab each other around the neck.  Younger children are kiss-kissed by a wider range of people, from 20 up but they both say that it happens quite infrequently.  I have seen very very few to no seniors doing it.  Maybe they only do it with family.

Another interesting study of this:  a group of my adult students were finishing a course.  We had been working together since October so at this point we know each other pretty well.  It is, however, the last class.  One of the male students thanked me sincerely and shook my hand making clear eye contact.  One older man came to the kiss-kiss but with a sense of reluctance because others were doing it. Two younger men simply leaned in and did the kiss-kiss, one of the two women, again younger than me simply kiss-kissed, while the other woman, who is not Spanish, but is from Georgia though she has lived here a long time was awkward.  I suspect that she usually follows other people's leads, as do I, so the two of us together found us doing that sidewalk dance, plus she added in some holding onto my arms, which felt like a hug that wasn't allowed to go any further.

Interestingly, I felt the most completely thanked by the man who shook my hand and looked me in the eye. Something about the level of eye-contact led to a higher sense of sincerity.  The kissers who left a stronger sense of sincerity followed up with eye-contact as well as a bit of conversation after the kiss-kiss event.

I so have to invent a word for this.

So?

Who do you kiss????  Who do you kiss-kiss??????

Disillusioned second try.

I wrote the first post today and it was a wee bit dark.

Bleak.

Disillusioned.

Not going to post that one just yet.

Had a laugh with the man over all the crap.  Goodness it's great to be married to him.

*deep breath*

Chalk it all up to anthropological investigation, no?

OK.  Getting a little opaque here.  Sorry.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about kissing.  Promise.

Hair and money.

Another busy day...the paperwork for all of this is horrific.

But, we have a mortgage again now....mixed blessing that one, but definitely better than NOT having one.

Went out for lunch with the girls!

Went to the hair dresser for the first time in about a decade.  The man has been cutting my hair for ages...disappointingly most people haven't noticed I got my hair cut, so I'm not sure it was worth the effort. Whatever.  It was pretty cheap.

Eldest is now the proud possessor of coloured hair.  She has green, blue and purple stripes...no, streaks in her hair.  Looks pretty cool. She wants more and Youngest wants any.  We'll see.

I was a wee bit cheeky at the bank today.   The Spanish are, shall we say, commission happy.  There is a commission on our mortgage, just for getting it, of over a thousand Euros.  I was, um, *cough* clear in my comment that I thought this was outrageous.  Pointed out, in this many words, that considering the amount of money they are going to make off of us with this mortgage, they had some cheek asking us to pay this sort of commission to get it.  Everything also has to go through an official notary - there's a license to print money- he got paid a couple of hundred Euros (or more) for reading a document, watching us sign it and then signing it himself.

They mentioned that part of the commission was notary fees.  I pointed out that we don't have that either in Canada.

Lalalalallala.

Maybe it isn't such a good idea to alienate the manager and notary before you sign...but what the heck, no?

Nothing like getting mugged in the cold light of day.  Legally too.

La Lacuna

Barbara Kingsoliver.

What can I say.  I love her books utterly and absolutely.  (Except the Poisonwood Bible that EVERYONE loved.  Hated it.)  This one transported me.  Goodness it was wonderful, and I was all prepared for a miserable ending.  Braced.

Then she pulled it right out of the hat.  I don't want to give any spoilers here, so let me just say that the ending was unexpected but so completely and beautifully perfect.  A delight.  And so very logical and fitting once it was done.

Makes me not want to read another book for a bit.

Well, almost.

Only sad thing is that I don't have another Kingsolver to read right now.

*sigh*

House next step.

Plans are submitted to the town hall for approval!!!!


OMG!!!!


MOVEMENT!!!


WOOOOOOTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sunshine and dogfights.

What an utterly perfect day.

Painting, walked in the mountains and read there for a few hours - La Lacuna, Barbara Kingsoliver -  beautiful sunshine and warmth, I was sitting in in a tank top.  Chuck yawned and groaned in boredom and sprayed me with dirt as he dug down to cooler soil.  Retribution for my inaction.

On the way home Chuck definitively won a dog fight.  A loose boxer whose owners didn't come around the corner quickly enough.  I let his Chuckiness loose as things warmed up, it's easier to fight without a rope around your neck.  Great growling and snapping and then they pulled their dog off.  I've broken off a dog fight or two, but this bruiser was big and the aggressor.  Then I got Chuck who wasn't quite ready to finish the rumble when the other guy was leashed.  Bellowed at the owners for good measure.

Got him home and looked for cuts, there was blood, but seems that none of it was his.

Way to go Chucky!!!

Back to some more painting!

Think we may go out for burgers for dinner, just to cap it all off.

Goodness I love sunshine and warmth.

Bookstores

What is it that makes one bookstore wonderful and the next one kind of, meh.

I was in a variety of bookstores today hunting for a book for one of Eldest's classes....I went to my preferred bookstore first, Alibri in BCN on Blanes.  It doesn't look like that great a bookstore.  Almost a little big boxish with a slightly industrial feel to it.  No interior designer work done, a little too spacious for the current field of bookstores, lots of books on tables that are a little too low to be easily read, and a huge huge huge section of language learning books in the second room all give it a superficial feel that maybe it won't be so great.  But then......you look at the books.  Best English language selection I have found YET in BCN, and great books too.  Listen, we're talking a selection smaller than a fairly crappy airport bookstore, a lot smaller and there are GOOD books there, not schlock at all.  Then there are the folks that work there, super helpful and knowledgeable.  I had a bit of a book conundrum because the requested book turned out to be out of print.  We started searching for an alternative.  All four women working there helped.  Very cool.

And, they ladies checking out the books have chairs!  Not only that, they were drinking tea from ceramic mugs while they were doing it.

Maybe that's the trick, subtle work in place to keep the folks working happy and a great selection of books.  I always come out poorer in pocket and richer in mind. Today's haul?  Alice Munro in Spanish, she hasn't been translated to Catalan yet, No entenc el món àrab by Tahar Ben Jelloun in Catalan and Morrison's Song of Solomon in English plus Zadie Smith's On Beauty in English. (how someone can be so beautiful, so creative, so smart and so capable is amazing, no?)  Sweet that I was buying books in three languages, no? (even if I can't read the Spanish one yet, maybe I should try.)

Another store I really like is Altair, on Gran Via.  Primarily a travel shop it also carries a wide range of literature that is set in related parts of the world, Kerrouac On the Road, of course etc.....all done by region.  One of the things I like here is that they simply mix the languages up. You go in and there's a Spanish book beside a Catalan beside an English flanked by a French and German.  Sweet.  Comfy armchairs, designer cosy decor, if they don't have hardwood floors it feels like they do.  A bookstore you  could spend a day in (and a fortune).

Then there is FNAC, they have a big bookstore in there, they have a lot of books, but it is totally blech.  Teens with McJobs working the aisles, no one knows anything, like shopping in a train station.  Blech blech blech, definitely last resort.

Grand Libreria Catalana across from El Corte Ingles, I end up in there cause it's big but the folks who work there are subtly surly, maybe it's the lack of chairs and the incredibly cramped space they've stuffed the English language books into so tight you can't get back enough to read the titles and the ones down at your knees?  No hope.  The organisation in the place seems strange too.  Meh.  Good store, but somehow cold.

I think about the stores I like most, and the decor is good, coffee shops are fine, but knowledgeable interested happy staff coupled with a good range of books RULES!

So, where's your favourite bookstore, and why?

Gosh, I never even got to used stores!!!!

Nikolski

OK, for those of you who were not sitting with baited breath waiting for the results of this year's Canada Reads debates, I am utterly delighted to inform you that Nicolas Dickner's Nikolski WON!!!!

YEAH NIKOLSKI!!!!

Now, here's the back story.  I am doing a course for very high level English students, more a keeping-your-English-fresh course than anything else.  We are reading books as part of the course, but I am also looking for books that have a very high level of alternative media associated with them so that the students can also do listenings and read a wide variety of texts in formality and informality all surrounding the subject.  The first book I chose was Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.  Morrison has no shortage of on-line presence to say the least, everything from Yale University courses to Nobel Prize Lecture to talks given my major art galleries about her portrait!

I wanted to use North American books as well, I am a wee bit tired by the endless slam that North America has no culture other than Hollywood and McDs.  I won't go into it all, but let's just say it bugs me.  So Morrison got the nod for the first book, but I really really wanted a Canadian book for the second, and there are just SO many to chose from, however....the Canada Reads excitement was going on at the same time as the course, so that seemed a natural.  I ordered the books; all the Canada Reads books.  They didn't arrive.  I had to order the books for the students, so I did some on-line searching about the books and went for Nikolski.  I loved what I heard about the style of the book, the etherial untidiness of it, and I loved it's pan North America (and further) movement.  I loved the mystery of some of what I heard, and as Catalans, who consider the Quebecois to be brothers in oppression (a mite strong, but the sympathy is there) or repression, or risk I thought a book by a French Canadian author might ring well.  Plus some of us do translation work, so the fact that it won the GG for translation too sang well.

The books still didn't come.

I ordered an extra copy of Nikolski for me.

The books arrived, and with some trepidation I cracked to cover.  I was committed to teaching this book and I had never read it.  Imagine my relief when I got part way through, then finished.  It has a lovely haunting depth to it that calls for re-readings. There is space for the reader's imagination, like beautiful peaceful music.  I was enchanted.

Then I was very very happy when it won because now they will be interviewing the author on CBC on Monday and dedicating a month of the book club to it as well.  BONANZA!!!!

Picked a winner!

There are decent people in the world

My workplace in Canada wasn't looking over the computer's proverbial shoulder when it filled in the forms to mail me my T4 form (vital Canadian tax document) and it got sent to some random office at one of the universities in BCN.

Some lovely woman there, who shares my first name - including the unusual-for-Catalans spelling - went to the trouble of searching for me on google.cat and sending me an e-mail.  That was two days ago.

Got the letter in the mail today.

Amazing, no????

Now I get the fun of thinking of a Canadian novel I can mail her (in translation) to thank her for her effort.  Suggestions?  I'm thinking of Alice Munro myself...but....

....on another note, watching your children eat when they serve themselves too much wasabi at once can be very very funny.  Cruel, but funny.