It's raining, do I still have to save the world?

I was planning an amusing blog entry, but couldn't find the event that was supposed to happen.

First off, I should say for all those readers out there in the blogosphere that it's not snowing.  Somewhat north of here (in much of Castilla-León) it is snowing, and El País is reporting three deaths and multiple cut highways due to a winter storm.  The Guardian is also reporting that trains and roads are closed in Britain, which is getting a heavy dumping of snow (probably a lot heavier than northern Spain, to be honest), and I assume the same conditions prevail across much of the EU.  So, I'm lucky it's not snowing.

It's raining.  A lot.

After the super-dry autumn this is hopefully good for the reservoirs (though El País now is saying there are flood warnings for the Duero, so I don't know how much they'll be able to hold onto the water).  However, it also seems to have rained out an event I was planning to go to in order to spice up this relatively dull blog, as the last week or so since my return from Malaga has been quietly curled up reading articles, and doing a bit of outlining, and writing, which is not very interesting.  (That is, I think the content is interesting, but the process is not interesting to write about.)  I am giving a couple of guest lectures at the Complutense in a few weeks time, which I will report back on, but in the meantime yesterday on the way to the metro I passed a flyer pasted on a bus shelter calling for a "manifestación" to give Carabanchel its own Centro de Salud.  It was one of those wordy posters that explains the many years that the residents of Carabanchel have been forced to go out of their neighborhood to a different Centro de Salud for healthcare, with lots of statistics, some of which are repeated here.

The Prettiest Milonga in Málaga...and an unexpected encounter

My last evening in Málaga

Milonga "El Jardín" by the Cathedral in Málaga

Before heading to Málaga I checked online for milongas, and threw a pair of tango shoes into my bag just in case, since I saw that there was a regular one on Thursdays. I almost didn't go out Thursday evening, since I was tired, and very tempted to just stay in and watch TV. A desire to eat dinner propelled me out, but I decided (after further reading online) that I would just bring along my tango shoes as a backup, but would not change my clothes into the dress I had brought and the alternate shoes instead of my sneakers. So I wandered back to Málaga's Cathedral, and its pedestrianized city center....which is completely dead at 10:00. Seriously, it's weird, even the restaurants looked more like restaurants at 10:00 PM in other countries....open, but with people finishing dinner, and few people arriving. I've noticed generally that out of season things tend to close early in Málaga (the Alcazaba and the Roman Amphitheater at 6:00 – which is ridiculous since it's light until 7:00 and a bit after now), and the side effect of being so completely set up for tourists is that the hours are very un-Spanish. (Mind you, the Cien Montaditos in the food court at the railway station outside of the tourist center was packed and jumping at 10:15 on Wednesday when I managed to squeeze in and find a seat, and the food court in the station is open until 1:00 AM though there aren't trains after midnight, but that's different.)

Anyway, I wandered through the beautifully lit but eerily still pedestrian zone, wondering if I was making a mistake, and if I would find the restaurant where the milonga was supposed to be dark and silent, as has often happened when I've searched for milongas in the past.

Down among (yesterday's) grassroots

The Archivo Histórico Provincial de Málaga does not have things of immediate interest to my research...but it does have things of interest.

I had a productive Thursday, spending the morning in the Provincial Historical Archive again and combing through personnel files of the cuerpos de seguridad which were useless to my research but quite amusing. I discovered Nobby Nobbs levels of police corruption in one handwritten transcription of the deposition of various complainants and one guardia de vigilancia charged with buying lottery tickets on credit from them and not paying for the tickets throughout 1930-1931. He'd run up a tab of 50 pesetas to one lottery vendor and 45 to another before they finally got up the courage to complain. (Since El ONCE in Spain is traditionally run as a charity for the blind, and the ticket vendors were and are traditionally blind or visually impaired, this falls into the category of taking money from a blind man's cup, almost literally. One of the ticket sellers who complained added specifically in his deposition that his only previous contact with the police had been about precisely the theft of coins from his cup and that at that time he had been “attended to courteously and promptly” – suggesting that dealing with the shakedown guy who didn't pay for tickets was an unpleasant surprise.) As I know from reading several files, the annual salary for a guardia de vigilancia was 3500 pesetas, and for a blind ticket seller presumably considerably less. So 50 pesetas could be a week's income from the ticket seller, or at least a few days worth. (Say the equivalent of about 150-200 euros.) Abusing authority that way seems sleazy, if not actively criminal. The internal investigator apparently agreed, since the deposition ends by saying that the accused was forced to pay the amount he owed in the presence of witnesses.

Archives, alcazaba, rinse, repeat

Today was in some ways a repeat of yesterday...but more efficient.

After a nice morning in the archives, in which I did not find anything useful, but learned a few amusing things about the "asociaciones culturales" and "casinos" (social clubs) of Málaga in the early twentieth century, and also started looking at the long ago personnel files of the cuerpo de vigilancia of Málaga, I headed directly back to the alcazaba, stopping for lunch at a Japanese restaurant I had noted earlier, that was quiet and quite good.  (The one problem with Málaga being so set up for tourists is that the restaurants tend to be overpriced and to offer "typical" foods which are anything but, and are not very good.  I made the mistake of ordering what was called "fideua" as a primero on Monday and found it was overcooked spaghetti which had been chopped up to one inch lengths.  A disappointment.  The teriyaki however was excellent, the waiters were Japanese and the clientele were Spanish, an ideal combination.)  Then I went back and visited the Roman amphitheater and the alcazaba a second time, this time with a fully charged camera battery and a memory card in the camera.  And it was worth it.  This may be more an entry of pictures than of commentary, simply because the Alcazaba is so beautiful.

Once more into the archives....

 

Today I visited two archives, and did not get as far as I had hoped, or as little as I had feared.

Greetings from sunny and spring-like Málaga, where the skies are blue, the palms are green, and the tourists are plentiful, even in winter, when the overbuilt beach isn't usable.  I got up with an alarm clock, and have walked at least ten kilometers today (probably more like fifteen altogether) and am exhausted, but certainly have plenty of adventures to write about.  I suspect that the blog entries, like my day, will end up being in two parts: the morning in the archives, and the afternoon in Malaga's stunning ruins.  So, on to the archives.  I started with the one closer to my hotel, on the Alameda Principal that connects the newer part of the city to the headland with the medieval center and cool ruins.  These are the municipal archives, of the city of Malaga.  They look like this:

"Americans! Strange people. Lovely manners."

 

Three days with 150+ Fulbrighters have left me wondering what exactly unites "Americans" beyond all being slightly strange.

Fulbrighters in Salamanca's Plaza Mayor.  "A Washingtonian, a Hoosier, and a New Yorker walk into a plaza..."

I should start out by saying that the title for this entry is a quote from the film Mrs. Henderson Presents, a comment of the title character (played by Judi Dench), upon being informed that a character is American.  I would never subscribe to the "lovely manners" generalization (frequently the stereotype of the ugly American is just the reverse), but the "strange people" certainly echoes the insightful John Oliver's comment in one of his stand up routines that Americans are "much weirder than you give yourselves credit for being."  I must say I think the Fulbright Commission in general is to be congratulated for coming up with a nicely wide sample of people who are both "decent human beings" but also interesting human beings, who have in fact very little in common, but are therefore very fun and interesting to talk to when the opportunity arises.  Three days in Salamanca actually made me curious about visiting parts of the US I've never visited before.

Salamanca - old traditions, and young people, in sun washed gold

The Fulbright mid-year meeting gave me a chance to get to know this charming town

"Salamanca" has been "the University" for a long time now.  So it's a glimpse of what a nice little places like Williamstown or Amherst may be like in 600 years if they're lucky.  (Adjusted for architecture, of course.)

Salamanca rises above the banks of the Río Tormes, just before a snowstorm

As mentioned earlier, I am just back from the Fulbright program's "mid year meeting" in Salamanca, which ran from Wednesday afternoon to Friday evening.  The commission put us all up in (two) hotels and kindly gave us all the option of staying Friday night if we wanted, so we had Saturday free to explore the city further, which I did.  (There are 155 Fulbright grantees this year, in addition to the families of the some of the researchers, so we're a big group.  Hence the two hotels worth.)  The mid-year meeting itself was interesting, and involved a few small group sessions about how our research or teaching is going, and how we're adjusting to life in Spain (during which I sat and felt stupid while other people complained about the difficulties of cultural adjustment, because I'm completely happy and contented and haven't missed buying peanut butter or eating dinner before 8:00 PM at all - partly because I seldom do either of those things at home).  There were also a much larger number of presentations by various Fulbrighters about either their research or their experiences in Spain mostly as English teachers, since the English Teaching Auxiliaries are the bulk of the program.  (Everyone calls them the E.T.A.s which I think is funny.  TA is a standard abbreviation for Teaching Assistant, but E.T.A. with the three letters pronounced stands for Estimated Time of Arrival for me.  And it's just lucky for them that the members of the Basque separatist group ETA pronounced as a word here are called "etarras.")  The presentations were generally interesting, and deserve their own entry, as does the socializing with 100+ young Americans (one of whom in a breakout session described his vision of cultural ambassadorship as "a kind of passive ambassadorship, just by being a decent human being so people know there are Americans who are").  My brief conclusion (to be expanded on at more length): the United States is incredibly less uniform in culture than I usually think of it being, and certainly less uniform than most Europeans believe.  But for now, I think Salamanca itself deserves an entry on its own, especially since we were brought there to get to know a new place, and it really is a pretty place, for a lot of reasons.  (See pretty pictures after the jump.)

Snow and cold

Another reason madrileños are called "gatos"....

This was the view outside my kitchen window this afternoon.  The white streaks that may be barely visible (depending on the size screen you're viewing this on) are not dirt on my kitchen window (I have nice clean windows, thank you).  They are fat, wet, almost snow-flakes, falling toward the ground (where they melt on contact, leaving the street all wet, but not frozen).

My across the street neighbor has just raised the shutter and opened the window, and is standing in her window smoking, and leaning out the window looking down at the street with an expression of disgust.  Two boys are huddled under the portico (just to the left of the picture frame) busily on their phones, with their coats pulled up around their ears, absolutely refusing to go out.