Friday, December 15, 2017

Dreidels "por encargo"




Oh dreidels, dreidels, dreidels, you are quite tough to find...

Some thoughts on shopping trips, and a new neighborhood.

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My menorah and candles

My quest to find a menorah in Madrid ended up being only a ten minute walk from my apartment, and as you can see above, the Aladdin's lamp is working nicely.  (It's on tin foil to prevent hot wax drips and sparks on the nice wooden furniture.)  As I now have the menorah in place, and one of the friendly medievalists I have met here has invited me for "nochevieja" I of course reciprocated by inviting her and her family for this weekend so they get to have a "traditional" (within the very loose sense of the word) Hanukkah.  As she has volunteered to bring her children so they can light candles, and as when it comes to tradition I draw the line at looking up prayers in Hebrew that I don't know and don't normally recite, I thought I should have dreidels for the kids to play with.  (If I have any European readers who don't know what I'm talking about, this is a dreidel.)  This turned out to be difficult, and may yet be impossible.

I started logically by googling "donde comprar dreidel madrid."  To my surprise and pleasure, the CLC Madrid popped right up in the search engine, along with their online catalogue.  If you clicked the link, yes, that is their store front in Madrid, and yes, "CLC" stands for "Centro de Literatura Cristiana."  So (like the Libreria Los Olivos where I purchased the menorah), they're evangelicals, which is why they call themselves "cristiana" even though the majority of Spaniards refer to "evangélicos" as being opposed to Christians.  Since the Wikipedia article I linked to about dreidels says that they're probably a Yiddish adaptation of a German adaptation of an early Tudor gambling game, in a way, I can't think of a more appropriate place to buy a dreidel.

In any case, their website offered a selection, and rather than fussing with mail order, I decided to take a field trip out to their store this morning, so I set out on a gray, cloudy, blustery day, to take the number 5 line to Ventas.  Ventas is Madrid's official bull fighting stadium, and I haven't been there since the first time I visited Spain, way back in 1994, when I was young and naive enough to believe that seeing bull-fighting stadia was an essential part of learning about Spanish culture.  (Even then I passed on actually seeing a bull fight.  I was young and naive, but I wasn't stupid.)  Since then I have figured out that if bull fighting were actually that central, the bullring would be where the football stadia are, much closer to the city center.  Bull fighting is folkloric and costumbrista, and Spaniards vary between being embarrassed by it and mildly sentimental about it.  But they are intense about "el fútbol."  There's a movement to ban bull-fighting on the basis of it being cruel to the bulls, and consequently a conservative movement to keep it because every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  But if anyone were to suggest (based on good and sufficient peer reviewed studies published most recently I believe in Holland) that (European) football should be banned because heading the ball leads to repeated low-intensity concussions (and thus is arguably cruel to young humans) they would be met with incomprehension, laughter, and finally a depth of popular rage which the pro-taurinos nowadays can only dream about.

In any case, I emerged from the metro at Ventas, under a cold gray sky into an empty plaza where both the bull ring and the stand selling "helados" were tightly shuttered, and the statue of bullfighters and bulls which is surrounded by sunburned tourists in the summer (unless things have changed a lot in the last twenty odd years) was deserted.  Stadia with no people around are rather depressing under any circumstances (I would say the same of the grim and endless expanse of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx not during game time, or of Shea Stadium, aka Citifield.).  But Ventas, with its ridiculous neo-Moorish architecture and giant mosaic proclaiming it was finished in 1929 seemed exceptionally sad and anachronistic, like something from an abandoned movie set, where the very expensive feature film has just flopped at the box office.  I know, of course, that Ventas is much more than a bullring, and that everyone from the Beatles to Fidel Castro played there, and filled seats.  (I don't mean Fidel Castro brought a band, although it would have been cool if he had.  Alas, he lacked the sense of humor of tonight's El Intermedio, which managed to get members of opposing political parties to dance merengue together because dancing leads to understanding and common cause.  Of course, if he'd had that much sense of humor, he might not have done what Unidos Podemos leader Irene Montero referred to as "el baile política" with Franco.)

In any case, after wandering around Ventas and getting lost a little on the Calle Alcalá my phone helped me find the much smaller Calle Marqués de Mondéjar, a street of apartment buildings set back among private gardens, little dance schools advertising ballet lessons for children, and a "fair trade" store devoted to chocolate and teas and other specialty items, which seemed oddly apropos in terms of my quest.

I headed into the "Centro de Literatura Cristiana" after checking out their (impressive) window display of books and toys for the upcoming Christmas holidays, and was politely greeted by a gentleman who emerged from the back when he saw me standing and looking indecisive by the "regalos" section.  I explained what I was looking for and he said briskly "ah, es por pedido?"  (Did you reserve them?)  I apologetically said that I hadn't but had seen on their website that they were advertised.  He explained that they do carry dreidels, and had several in stock, but that they were reserved for pick up by another customer, because they have to be specially ordered "porque es una cosa especial para el Janucá, sabes."  Under the circumstances, the simple thing seemed to be to order some, so I left my name and phone number, and he said he would place the order tomorrow morning, and call me as soon as they came in, and asked how many I wanted, and if the colors and designs mattered.  They are wooden, and brightly painted in various colors.  I ordered three and asked for a selection of colors.  Three should take care of holiday gifts for my under ten-year-old friends in Madrid.  Naturally I can get them other cooler things too, but dreidels are legitimately fun to play with, and count as being cultural and educational from their parents' point of view, so I hope that they arrive soon.  I doubt they'll be ready for this weekend's guests, but one can't have everything.  (My other challenge for this weekend is how to make latkes without a food processor.  Grating potatoes by hand is not appealing.  And in this land of the tortilla de patatas I'm afraid they might be a let-down in any case.)

I headed back to the metro at Ventas, heading for yoga (where I arrived too late to do the whole sequence, which annoyed me, but still got a fair amount done).  Heading down the Calle Alcalá toward the bullring I saw the huge numbers of (skyscraperish) buildings that extend down the Calle Alcalá, and thought of how when I first came to Spain Ventas was literally the end of the line for both the 2 and 5 lines.  No more.  A large building with a sort of ragged orange wave on it caught my attention, and I wondered for a moment whether it was an ING Bank that had somehow been vandalized or was incomplete.  Then I saw that it was also hung with giant banners with the electoral logo of Ciudadanos-Ciutadans, and remembered that they are (for some reason) "la formación naranja."  (Podemos tried to stake out purple as being "neither red nor blue" with respect to the conservative PP - blue - and the PSOE, who are proudly and traditional "los rojos."  The best thought process I can come up with for Ciudadanos being orange - aside from the good colors being taken - is that they want to associate themselves with Valencia where people speak a variant of Catalan and are not independence minded, and oranges come from Valencia?  I'm stretching here.)  In any case, while the orange is a bit unconvincing, I do think Ciudadanos' election logo is both pretty and apropos:

https://www.ciudadanos-cs.org/var/public/sections/page-imagen-del-partido/corazon-tribandera-01.png?__v=386_0
Ciudadanos has revived the medieval "shield" with many devices, in the form of a heart.


 


Apparently I'm not the only one who likes it, since I understand from El intermedio that the PP has been shamelessly trying to rip it off.  It occurred to me that the heart flags of Europe and Catalunya (together with Spain) out beyond Ventas are sort of the perfect symbol of the way Ventas has become a bit archaic.  Once on the edge of the city, it's now been absorbed.  But it's also a relic of a right wing that staked national identity on bull-fighting and on "Spain is Different" and couldn't possibly imagine a right wing that proudly insisted that "Spain is Europe."  Or for that matter that "Spain is federal."  The city is growing out beyond Ventas, and the country (even or especially parts of the old right wing) is growing beyond certain kinds of old-fashioned nationalism.  With growing pains, of course.  But still, growing.


So that was my new-old neighborhood and my little shopping quest for the day.  The other shopping I did was for some wool at the little mercería, or yarn and sewing store, in my neighborhood that I have passed dozens of times when it was closed, and finally went into when it was open today.  It is a funny place, with something of the air of an old fashioned pharmacy, where a white coated attendant behind the glass counter attends to clients one at a time, and pulls yarn, or buttons, or zippers, or ribbons, or what-have-you down from meticulously organized shelves to show to the client and then has a serious discussion about the nature of the project (or the symptoms of the patient), and offers judicious suggestions.  It was quite different from the CLC, but also amusing.  Oddly, it's hard to get 100% wool here (I finally settled for a wool acrylic blend) even though this is the original home of the famous Merino.  (Literally, Merino sheep come from Castile.)  But it was still fun to do that little shopping, and now I have a little knitting project.  (Again, the holidays are almost upon us, and gifts call.)

The one problem with all of this is that I am not getting the writing done that I need to get done.  I apologize in advance if this blog is a bit silent over the next few weeks.  I have other writing to do, and short of posting page and word counts (which I'll do if requested in the comments, but not otherwise), writing is dull process, which doesn't even involve fun anecdotes or curious places like research, and is instead a question of moving from couch to chair back to couch, and plugging away.  I will report on writing when I have something to report.  In the meantime, as I say, apologies if there is radio silence for a few days.

2 comments:

  1. Couch to chair to bed to desk! ... plus frequent snacks! you can do it ...

    On latkes: grating by hand really isn't bad if you have a decent grater, the large holes will work fine. I made this recipe last year and was pleased with it.
    https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018472-french-potato-pancakes?action=click&module=RecipeBox&pgType=recipebox-page&region=latkes&rank=0

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  2. Awesome! Thanks for the recipe tip. There's a fruteria near my metro stop that's advertising a special on 10 kilo bags of potatoes, but I was hoping to get away with fewer than that....

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