Farewell 2011

It's already December 31^st and I have no idea where all my good intentions went. It seems that at the end of something, call it a year, a relationship, a job, whatever, our purest intentions come out and we want to make new amends. This year started like any other in a constant routine that had been playing itself for several years now. However, fate, destiny, the universe, karma, whatever you want to call it, has a way of bringing us down to earth when we get too full of ourselves. Since September, I have stumbled, not looked for, on a slow and languid pace. Not at all what I expected my life to be at the end of this year, but I'm really quite enjoying it! After the hustle and bustle of the last few years, it's been quite nice to simply do... ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

As I find myself standing at the checkout counter in the supermarket along with all the other people that like me forgot one last ingredient for their New Year’s Eve dinner, I notice that it is stacked with tiny green cans, each one enticingly labeled "the 12 grapes of luck." They're New Year's grapes, peeled and seedless. There is a Spanish tradition of downing one grape for every chime of the bells at midnight on "Noche Vieja" (New Year's Eve), 12 chimes, 12 grapes for luck. I have yet to complete this task of pop, chew and swallow 12 grapes before the last chime has sounded on New Year's. Every year I try it without any luck. It's not as easy as it sounds since I buy normal grapes.
Looking at the New Year ahead of us, I find myself aching for a fresh new start. And I can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, I need to accomplish the task of eating those 12 grapes before the last chime tonight. Farewell 2011, with all your good and bad experiences. Here’s to you 2012!

April Fools', Not...

As I read through my FB, I find it full of crazy news. Iker Casillas says he is leaving the Real Madrid and the Duchess of Alba who is 85 is considering getting pregnant via in-vitro fertilization. What?? And then it dawns on me. Today is a day of practical jokes, similar to what we in the USA celebrate on April Fool’s Day. It is called "Dia de los Santos Inocentes" or Day of the Holy Innocents. As with most of the traditions here in Spain, it has a religious origin. The young children who were slaughtered by order of King Herod around the time of Jesus’ birth were called "Santos Inocentes" or Holy Innocents because they were too young and innocent to have committed any sins. Thus the victim of a prank or hoax is called "inocente". The Spanish media get a kick out of making crazy announcements or "inocentadas". So it's not a good day to watch the news, especially if you're the kind of person like me, who doesn't usually know in which day you're living! Wonder if any of them will say the crisis is finally over...

The Fat One

In one of my blog posts, I had mentioned how superstitious Spanish people are. Due to the Euro zone debt crisis, Spain has the highest jobless rate in the European Union and is at the threshold of a big time recession. Five million people are out of work, but 9 out of 10 Spaniards will gamble on El Gordo (The Fat One) lottery today. Spain will be glued to the TV, Internet and radio listening to the monotonous chant of a group of children from the San Idelfonso school in Madrid call out the numbers drawn wishing that their number will be the lucky one. The chances of winning this lottery are 1 in 100,000. Statistically speaking, it’s almost impossible to win, yet people gamble. So what makes Spaniards dig deep into their pockets to buy at least a decimo (a tenth, the smallest unit sold) for 20 euros?

A few years ago, a Spanish friend of mine gave me a book called "The Myth of the Goddess Fortune" as a present. I thought he had chosen that book because he knew that I liked mythology, however when I flipped through the pages, I discovered that it was a self help type (not my favorite cup of tea) mixed with an illustrated myth about Fortune. No idea why he had given me that book, so I never took the time to read it and it’s been sitting somewhere on my shelves.

The Roman goddess Fortune or her Greek counterpart, Tykhe, is not part of the major deities and therefore not that well known. She was the daughter of Zeus and the goddess of fate, chance or luck. Her symbol is the wheel. It is believed she would spin her wheel to decide who would have good luck and who would suffer misfortune.

Now that I think about it, I should find the book and read it. Maybe, he was trying to enlighten me as to why Spanish people will be seeking this elusive goddess today. As for me, I have a better use in mind for my 20 euros!

More alcoholic wine? But of course…

As I’m looking through the bottles of wine lined up in the supermarket pondering which one to buy for my New Year’s Eve dinner, I find myself only looking and selecting from Spanish wine bottles. I favor Spanish wines because I live in Spain, but I really do believe that this country makes wonderful wines. Some are even known world-wide. I happen to live in an area known for its wine production. However, I will leave that for another post and concentrate on the matter at hand.

It turns out that the effects of global climate change keep going on right under our own noses. But sadly to say, if it doesn’t affect people directly, it doesn’t really matter. One of the latest symptoms is affecting Spanish wine producers and eventually will affect wine drinkers. According to El Pais newspaper, in the 1980s traditional varieties of grapes: garnacha, moristel, parraleta and alcañón, were yanked out of the ground to make way for the French varieties of chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon. And now it seems Spain will be one of the areas suffering the most by the effect of weather on grapes.

"Wines will have higher alcohol content, but their natural acidity will also be lower. Some reds will lose their color, others will lose their flavor, many whites will be deprived of their typical qualities, and there may be a greater proportion of reds to whites." (Yikes!)

Maybe now that the wine industry knows the effects are very real, they will contribute to use environmentally friendly techniques.

Tuesday the 13th?

I forgot what day it was (been doing a lot of that lately) until I checked FB and noticed that several posts talked about Tuesday the 13th. For superstitious people in this country, as well as in Greece and Latin America, today is unlucky. I've asked people why, but most don't know and some quote a saying that means something like don't get married or board a ship on this day.

So I checked Internet and it turns out that this goes all the way back to Tuesday 13, 1453 during the fall of the city of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks marking the end of the Byzantine Empire which for Christians caused a big trauma and symbolized a war with paganism. Of course there are others that associate the word for Tuesday in Spanish (martes) to the Roman god of war, Mars.

It strikes me that most Spanish people are very religious (Catholic religion is taught in public schools) yet very superstitious. There are some TV channels that around midnight show people calling for fortune telling and Tarot readings. In the town where I live, people will tell you with a straight face that someone has given them the evil eye, a belief that people can bestow a curse on you by staring. Some will wear protective talismans and others will go to a shaman to get it cleaned. Also a cat here has only 7 lives, so does that mean it's less lucky than American cats?

High Fidelity or the Art of List Making

A while ago I was posting on FB a top 15 list of albums and an old classmate made the comment that it should be a top 20+ list because all his favorite ones didn’t fit, or maybe divide the list in stages. I disagree. The whole purpose of a top list is to weed out all unnecessary items and list only the best. The smaller the list is, the more difficult it is to chose, but it will also guarantee your true favorite ones. Just as I was pondering on this, I remembered a film called "High Fidelity" where John Cusack and Jack Black try to summarize life in top five lists. And this gave me an idea. Since this is my blog, I will only post top 5 lists. A top 5 list is a true encapsulation of your tastes and way more self-revealing than a longer list.

High Fidelity top 5 records. Side ones, Track ones

Town Mouse and City Mouse

Where do you live? I happen to live in a town. Well, according to the natives here, we live in a city. They’ll tell you proudly that it says so in their coat of arms: "…Very Heroic City… ". But what really makes a town a town and a city a city? According to Spanish people, a city is a place that holds more than 30,000 people. But to me, a city is a place where you can go for a walk without finding anybody you know and feel obliged to say hi or find out people have been talking behind your back. It’s a place where there are more than two buses, one yellow and the other red, which pretty much have the same route. And more importantly, it’s a place where there is more than one water pipe going into it. Last month the whole town had no water for three days, yes three. Imagine no flushing, or bathing or anything else. The supermarkets were making a fortune selling bottled water and those that weren’t, had none in their shelves. So shouldn’t having more than one water pipe be an important factor considered for a definition of a city? As far as I am concerned I still live in a town.

TV or not TV, that is the question…

Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. All of a sudden, all my appliances have conspired to start acting weird or simply stop working. Last week, the washer decided to open its door right in the middle of the cycle pouring all the clothes out onto the floor. The TV followed by deciding not to turn on. So we have been without television for several days now.  It's been sitting there in a virtual coma, but there has been no sign of life. And the question is do we spend our money on fixing it or splurge to get a new one? I hate the new flat panel TV sets that might look great in your living room, but have a limited viewing angle. Of course finding an old TV set like mine that works is out of the question. You see, in Spain, second hand stores are non-existent or really hard to find. Somehow this country doesn’t believe in second hand recycling. This society believes in buying new stuff every time something breaks or not. And that says a lot about a country which is in a big time crisis and has almost five million people unemployed.

Turning Back Time

3 am - As I am lying awake listening to a radio show. I realize I have to set the clock back an hour. And then it hits me. Why? Why do we have to change the clocks twice a year?

We’ve all read the argument that it was created to save energy, but is it worth it? Something is worth it if its benefit

exceeds its cost. Is it? I fall asleep as I ponder this...

9 am or is it really 10 am? - I sip my first cup of coffee while reading the headlines. And what do you know? There it is. The headline reads something like this: Zero savings when changing the time. So then what is the purpose? Russia has decided after 30 years not to change the time. Spain continues to do so.



Ahorro cero por el cambio horario

Battling Windmills

So why this title for my blog? If you think it’s not very original, you are probably right, but it really has less to do with the song Windmills of your Mind than it does with Spain. I actually live in Spain, in a region plagued with windmills. The same region where Cervantes placed his epic hero battling windmills. So why not? I will lower my lance and tilt at the windmills since that seems to be a recurring theme in my life adventures lately.

Sting - Windmills of your Mind

Closing Cycles

This text is often attributed to Paulo Coelho, but he didn't write it, he just made some corrections. I find it so powerful and true, that this is how I want my blog story to begin...

One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through.
Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters – whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.
Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end? Did you leave your parents’ house? Gone to live abroad? Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden? You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened.
You can tell yourself you won’t take another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that. But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister.
Everyone is finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.
Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away.
That is why it is so important (however painful it may be!) to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the books you have at home.
Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts – and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place.
Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them.
Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood.
Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.
Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, decisions that are always put off waiting for the “ideal moment.”
Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back.
Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person – nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need.
This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important.
Closing cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life.
Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust.
Stop being who you were, and change into who you are.