Mercado de San Miguel

In which I out myself to you all as One Of Those People who Photographs their Food.

Last weekend I went to the Mercado de San Miguel. It's basically in a giant glass warehouse (or something) with lots of different kinds of food to both be eaten there and taken home. In the center there are many booths and little seats for people to sit and enjoy their glass of wine and small pinchos.



Fish market!



Well hello there. I would like to eat you!



Also: beautiful produce.



And specialty pasta! (See the black spaghetti? Mmmm.)

But the best part about San Miguel is all the food that's just there, waiting to be eaten:



Pinchos...



Most of the time I don't know what I'm eating (I think that piece of fish was cod, possibly?), but it is all still delicious.



More fish. Caviar!



Cheese, of course. The one on the left is Manchego covered in paprika. Mmmm.



Oysters!



Yes, personal-sized bottles of champagne can be obtained at any of the like five wine stands in the market.



There was even salad! Although, because this is Spain after all, the salad part did come encased in carbs (that's a giant puffed out pita) and covered in, you guessed it, ham.



Proof that actual greenery was consumed.



What about dessert? Fruit and nuts? Looks delicious, but you want to know what's more delicious?



MINICAKES.



These cakes were not actually as delicious as they look. Too sugary, and one of them had marzipan in it.



I should have stuck with the fruit.



But also available at this chocolate shop was a giant bear made out of chocolate. This fact is probably not quite as funny to most of you as it is to me, because this entire city is obsessed with bears. They are everywhere. On banks, government signs, there is even a giant statue of one in Sol.



Proof.

So. The Mercado de San Miguel is a religious, delicious experience. Are you hungry yet? Because I am, and I just ate.

Déjà vu

First Haiti, now Chile. California had better not be next on the list.

What a disaster.

Domesticity

I came home today to much activity in the kitchen. All four members of my host family were in the (really tiny) kitchen baking galletas (cookies) and watching Grease videos on youtube. (Incidentally, the four-year-old knows the dance to "You're the One That I Want." I'm a little worried about her.) I, of course, hovered, figuring that I'd either be fed cookies or be allowed to help (I succeeded on both counts). Baking in Spain, like life in general here, is much less structured and involves a lot more olive oil. As far as I could tell there was no real recipe or even order to what they were doing, and nobody seemed to be keeping track of what other people had already added. When we ran out of butter, my señora poked the dough experimentally, said "No pasa nada" and added a few glugs of olive oil. It was glorious. And the cookies were delicious, so obviously somebody was doing something right.

Speaking of olive oil, the kind my señora uses, which I have mentioned before because I find it absolutely wonderful and incredibly delicious, comes in huge five-gallon jugs that she buys at the olive press, not at the supermarket. Another mystery solved, no wonder it's so spectacular.

I also found yarn today! The first store we went to was quite intense, with yarn that basically comes on spools and is sold by the kilo. (No, really.) It was quite similar to a fabric store in the States, where you choose the yarn you want, bring it to a cashier and tell her how much you want, and she cuts it for you. As we were rather intimidated (plus I have no idea how many kilos of yarn I would need for a scarf or something), we moved on and found a much more familiar store, with skeins and things. I am going back tomorrow after I develop project ideas. (I am going to crochet things for my family here.) Success, and I'm glad I don't have to order yarn by weight because I am nowhere near hardcore enough to do that.

Pieces of my mind

Random snippets...

Planning all this traveling is more simultaneously exciting and stressful than any of my classes. (She says, the week before midterms. Hah? Yeah...)

Running four internet chat/voice/video programs (GChat, Facebookchat, Skype, and iChat) simultaneously is quite stressful on both me and my computer, especially at night when all my Europe friends are home for dinner and all you people in the States are waking up. If I suddenly start ignoring you, I promise it isn't because I don't love you - I'm either distracted to the point of tearing out my hair, or my computer has begun to whir and make sad noises at me.

Another problem with all this rain (though as I write this it's slightly cloudy and breezy but not raining) is that your laundry builds up because there's no way to dry it. I have run out of clean pants.

The Euro-dollar exchange rate right now is really, really excellent. At the risk of sounding like an insensitive American (which pretty much comes with the territory at this point), don't hurry and fix your economy, Greece! This is great!

I have now planned trips to France on two separate occasions (Lyon and Marseille!), which will be the true test of the degree to which Spanish has killed my other language skills. Best case scenario: I sound like an idiot (slash a Catalan or Portuguese stroke victim)* for twelve hours before my brain figures it out and remembers how I used to be fluent in French. Worst case scenario: I lose the remainder of my ability to express myself clearly and effectively in any language.

Tomorrow we are going to go look at Velázquez in the Prado, and I am very excited.

A real post about Madrid is coming soon, I'm just too preoccupied by plane tickets at the moment, so it'll probably appear sometime tomorrow or Friday after I (theoretically) work everything out.

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*Caveat: I am not actually a horrible person. Mixing Spanish and French generally produces something that sounds close to either Portuguese or Catalan, depending on which elements of each language you transfer, and how many words you make up. And I am going to stop myself there to avoid another linguistics essay on phonetics and second-language learning.

Monday morning recap

On Wednesday, a friend from high school who's studying in London came to visit Madrid for the weekend. Since she's been in the UK since last year and loves interesting foods as much as I do, a lot of what we did over the weekend involved eating and drinking coffee, broken up by a few touristy things and some shopping.

Since I'm too lazy to do anything else, here are a few pictures.



This is the outside of what I think is officially my favorite European church ever, the Iglesia Santa María (I know, how original).



The art is absolutely amazing.



It's very different from other, more traditional European churches. It's south of Plaza del Oriente and right nearby one of my favorite tapas/wine bars, El Tempranillo, as well as a hole-in-the-wall taco bar that serves legitimate Mexican food.



There are many statues in Plaza del Oriente, and many are covered with pigeons.



They recently opened an exhibit in the Botanical Gardens, right next to Retiro, with a bunch of really interesting sculptures.





I don't have pictures of everything we did because at some point I forgot to charge my camera battery. Heh. Not pictured: Retiro, Plaza Santa Ana, the Reina Sofía (sadly lacking Robert Downey Jr., alas), Plaza Mayor, Pastelería Menorquina (much coffee was consumed), Paseo del Prado, much shopping, the Opera House, all of the food we ate, and some things I have forgotten.

So we were touristy, and we ate so much food. It was quite fun. Finally, here is one picture of the Mercado de San Miguel, where we ate one day. It was so amazing that it warrants its own post, but have a picture.



(Note to our families: never fear, we also took pictures with ourselves in them, I just would rather not put them out into the internet without her permission. I promise I'll send them on in an email.)

La vida cotidiana

Act I: La mañana

Scene 1
En casa. I wake up to torrential rain, contemplate not going to school, and eventually decide to compromise and take the bus.

"¡Qué horror!" says my señora as I eat breakfast. "¡Qué mal tiempo!"
I want to tell her that this talk is not encouraging me to leave the house and go to class, but it's too early for me to form coherent sentences in Spanish, so I say "Sí" and glare out the window at the rain as I try not to get marmalade on my jeans.

Scene 2
NYU in Madrid. I am attempting to study for my art history exam with intermittent help distractions from my fellow students.

"¿'Paloma' is 'dove' en español, sí?" I ask aloud, in the embarrassing mixture of Spanish and English characteristic of NYU in Madrid students. I'm looking at a painting by El Greco and wondering how I can say that the dove symbolizes the Holy Spirit in Spanish.
"It's more like 'pigeon'," says the girl next to me, who happens to be bilingual.
"Pigeon," I deadpan. "I'm going to be writing about the pigeon of the Espiritu Santo."
"I'm going to stick with 'pájaro'," another girl supplies helpfully.
"The pigeon, que simboliza el Espiritu Santo," I repeat, resting my head on the keyboard. "This is going to end terribly."

[Note: I think the translation of "paloma" depends on your dialect of Spanish, so don't quote me, or her, on it.]

Scene 3
NYU in Madrid. The power goes off as I am taking my grammar exam. (This is a more frequent occurrence than you might think.) My professor suggests that we all move so we're sitting closer to the one window in the room.

Act II: La tarde

Scene 1
Café Segre. I order my usual ("Un montón vegetal y un café solo, por favor, para llevar") plus an extra café con leche for a friend.

"¿Dos cafés?" she asks, looking suspicious.
"Sí," I confirm, "un solo y un con leche, para llevar."
"Solo y con leche," she says, and walks into the kitchen.
Ten minutes later (yes, really), she emerges with my sandwich. I'm already holding both cafés, and hand her €10. She looks at me and my coffee.
"¿Los dos, para ti?" It's not like I've picked them up and am willing to pay for them, or anything.
"Sí, sí."
"Los dos," she repeats. "Un solo y un con leche."
"Sí, gracias." At this point I'm worried she won't let me leave with more than one type of coffee.
"Vale," she says, still looking perplexed, but hands me my change. "Hasta luego."

Act III: La noche

Scene 1
En casa. Violeta, for some unknown reason, has to translate a recipe into English for school. Being the intelligent and technology-savvy teenager she is, she copy-pastes it into Google translate, and then asks me if the English version is correct.

"'First, catch four eggs and break them in the blender'," I read, and laugh.
"It's incorrect?" she asks, in English.
"Sí," I say. "'Catching' the eggs..." but I dissolve into laughter again. Viol looks confused, so I perhaps unwisely switch to Spanish.
"Es como..." I say, "como los huevos..." more laughing, "los huevos escaparon, los huevos están corriendo..." but I can't, I'm laughing too much.
"What is the correct?" she asks.
"'Take'," I say, amidst giggles. "'Take four eggs'."

[Note: the mistranslated word is "coger," which in Spanish can mean "to catch" but also "to get" or "to take."]

Scene 2
En casa. I am looking through a few of the Madrid guidebooks that were in my bedroom when I moved in, trying to decide which one to lend a friend tomorrow. I finally settle on one, and continue reading for a few more minutes in a vain search for indoor activities in this city. I wonder why I haven't picked up this particular guidebook before.

After five minutes, I realize why: it's in Spanish.

And scene.

Snow and silly things

So instead of preparing for my grammar or art history exams tomorrow, I have spent the past three hours watching Project Runway and Skins, eating Nutella, and in general screwing around on the internet.

[Aside: Skins, who are you and what have you done with my entertaining and shenanigans-filled show. This depressing crap makes me think and wonder too hard - that's the kind of stuff I watch Damages for. Project Runway designers, please learn to follow directions. Like sharing, it's something we all learn how to do in grade school and is a skill we use the rest of our lives. Well, most of us, anyway.]

Borowitz Report imagines what will happen when the very-unfortunately-yet-entertainingly-cluelessly-self-styled "Teabaggers" finally figure out why everyone under 35 hides smiles behind their hands at the mention of the moniker. I'm waiting for this to actually happen, and then I will laugh and laugh and laugh. The entire situation is a little bit like the iPad, where you just sit back and have to wonder what all the clued-in people (and by "clued-in" I mean aware that sometimes words have more than one meaning) were doing during the "Name Choice" meeting and why none of them could find it in themselves to inform the masses that their self-branding of choice was not only leaving them open to ridicule but just plain unfitting as well.

Today's xkcd was particularly apt given Madrid's sudden turn towards Arctic temperatures and its newfound propensity to snow/slush/sleet a whole hell of a lot (yes, I'm a wimp, hush). My favorites are Legolas, Prius and Higgs boson.



xkcd

And finally, in what has become a Monday night tradition, I have spent half an hour looking for a piece of good news to present in my conversations class tomorrow morning. There is precious little good news going on right now, but BBC usually comes through for me with some weird, quirky story about a llama in Nepal that gave birth to conjoined twins or something. Tonight, while I have still not been able to find one piece of good news, I did find out that people in Greece are throwing flour at each other and that the infamous backless hospital gown has been redesigned. Thank you, BBC.