Having been told that my blogs so far have been somewhat negative, I’ve decided to write about my best day so far in Spain in an attempt to lighten the tone!
November 7th 2010. The day Madrid hosted the MTV EMA awards, and the day I got to see one of my favourite bands, the one and only Linkin Park. The day didn’t get off to a great start – almost freezing to death having opted to start our Madrid adventure with a picnic, in a park, in a grassy spot with very little tree cover, on a windy day, in November wasn’t ideal. Ordering drinks afterwards in a busy pub with no spare chairs probably wasn’t too sensible either – we ended up taking up a considerable chunk of floor space, resulting in many bemused looks and several irritated Spaniards, who found getting from the door to the bar a little bit more like parting the red sea than they would have liked. However, very shortly we heard the beginnings of a familiar song...Linkin Park had started playing two hours ahead of schedule! I have literally never run so fast in my life as I did to get from the pub to that stage. Despite having no breath left in me whatsoever and feeling as though I might die (the most exercise I have done since being here is taking the three flights of stairs to and from my flat and walking the 15 minutes to uni four times a week – and two out of four of those days when I have particularly stressful classes which I still find difficult to understand, I ‘treat’ myself to a McDonalds on the way home – a sort of consolation prize: “Congratulations, your Spanish hasn’t improved at all this week!”) I somehow found the energy to bounce up and down and gasp out the lyrics. This was, however, only the sound check, and it was a further two hours before the first act of the evening came onstage. The event was kicked off by 30 Seconds to Mars, which was cool and somewhat unreal considering I’d seen a film with frontman Jared Leto playing the protagonist just a few days before. Katy Perry was the next to grace the stage, and she was fantastic. To complement her song ‘Firework’, there was a mini-fireworks display (didn’t see that coming at all), which was awesome and made up for the lack of Bonfire Night in Spain.
Holidays and events are so different here. I’ve already explained the beautiful concept of the puente – we’ve just had another one which resulted in a six-day weekend. Although this is obviously brilliant, it is strange missing out on some of England’s traditions, for example Bonfire Night, but also the more sombre events such as Remembrance Day – it felt almost wrong to go about my day without wearing a poppy, or without doing a collective two minute silence. Christmas is also quite a different affair in Spain compared to England. The most noticeable difference is that children believe in the three Wise Men instead of Father Christmas: they arrive in Spain on January 6th, the date that the Wise Men are said to have given gifts to Jesus. Children all over Spain leave their shoes out on their balconies, in the hope that in the morning they will be filled with gifts. This is all well and good, but I think that England is definitely the place to be at Christmas: for a start, shoes have nothing on stockings. I mean, there are only so many presents you can cram into a shoe. If I had grown up in Spain – and I’m sure that Spanish children have found many other ways to cheat this sorry system – you would not have caught me leaving out my favourite ballet pumps, or a school shoe – no, my balcony would have been adorned with the much more spacious Ugg or wellington boot. Now who’s the wise one... I suppose at least the concept of the three Wise Men is slightly more believable than England’s Father Christmas. British children are encouraged to believe that once a year, a fat and merry old man, driven across the country by flying reindeers, squeezes himself down their chimney or lets himself into their house (it’s worrying that so many kids believe in an idea that defies not only the laws of physics but also those of plain common sense); whereas Spanish children, by contrast, are told that the three Wise Men arrive in Spain, one on horseback, one on a camel and one on an elephant –so much more logical than flying reindeers (I do understand that Santa’s sleigh being pulled by eagles or bats wouldn’t have quite the same effect, but still, teaching kids that an animal can fly when it clearly can’t is just inciting ignorance) – and that they leave presents on balconies, no breaking into anyone’s house involved.
Anyway – back to the MTV awards. After five hours of waiting in the crowd, Linkin Park finally made their appearance. We all went crazy, especially when they started playing songs from their older albums. The one problem was that I was with a friend of mine, about a foot taller than me, who ended up standing right in front of me for almost their entire set! I was NOT happy –on the plus side however, a tall friend does make an excellent leaning post when one is wobbling around on one’s tiptoes in a desperate attempt to catch any sort of glimpse of one’s favourite band. Furthermore, courtesy of him I now also have some great photos.
The gig came to an end after the crowd had successfully requested two encores; and after I managed to get my legs to work again after having been stood in the same place for six hours, we headed off to find food and ended up, quite predictably, in McDonalds. It’s genuinely not through any fault of our own that we go there so often – cooking for ourselves in Spain has been, shall we say an experience – not only because we can only use either the oven or the hob at one particular time, but also because of the interesting culinary techniques employed by the Spanish. Frozen rice and vegetables in a packet, for example – the usual way to cook these items would be to cover them in boiling water in a pan and leave them on the hob for 10 minutes. Right? Not according to Spain – here, the packets advise you to fry the aforementioned items in oil. Fry rice in oil? Despite finding the whole idea very strange, we were at the same time very curious to test out this novel method of rice-cooking. Sadly the results of our little experiment were very unsatisfactory and begged the question as to why these packets are still on sale – having poured half the packet into the frying pan, we ended up with a mound of vegetables and about three grains of rice. The rest had stuck fast to the bottom of the pan, where it had burnt to produce a crispy black mess which had to soak in the sink for an entire night before we could even start to clean it off. All in all, probably not ideal.
The other thing that baffles me in this country is that ovens do not seem to be used with much frequency. I know several people on their Erasmus year here who are living in a flat without an oven – thankfully not us – I don’t know what we’d do without our chicken nuggets and chips when we stagger in drunk at six in the morning. I actually stayed with a Spanish family in Madrid over the summer while I was doing an internship, and although there were 11 people in the flat, I was the only person to use the oven in the entire month that I lived there. On one memorable evening, I put a pizza in the oven, in the usual way, i.e. on the baking tray at about 200°C. I noticed that one of the other girls living in the flat was watching me with a worried look on her face. Eventually she piped up, telling me that 200°C was definitely too high and that 200°C really is very hot. Well, yes, it is an oven – they don’t design them to go up to that temperature for no reason... I tried to explain it was quite normal but she clearly didn’t trust this strange English girl and her intentions, because when I returned to the kitchen five minutes later, she’d turned it down to 100°C. She also made the very unhelpful suggestion of putting the pizza on a plate before placing it on the baking tray in the oven. I was genuinely stunned that she, older than me, didn’t have the first idea about how to use one of the, for us, most basic kitchen appliances.
It’s not just this poor Spanish girl who has problems in the kitchen. A few weeks ago, we were invited to an international food day, or something along those lines: the idea was to cook and bring something that represented your country. In our defence, we had only been told a couple of hours before the event, although we probably could have done better than we did...after inspecting the fridge we decided that the most usable item was the big pile of Frankfurters, with which we made the delicacy known as hot-dogs. Although clearly these are of American origin, we justified it with the fact that it is at least an English-speaking country. Pudding consisted of strawberry and cream flavoured sweets which we found on an impromptu trip to the petrol station on our way – representing Wimbledon, of course, which we thought was quite an inspired idea (unfortunately, we were the only ones). New Year’s resolution: learn to cook and not to bring shame upon my country...
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