On fleeing and homecoming

There's no easy last entry for this blog...

I'm glad to be home, and glad that Spain has shown its best side in the last weeks.  But for my blog-reading peeps who can, stay in the streets.

So, my Fulbright grant is officially over.  I'll be back and forth to Spain over the summer, but I've made a quick trip home (the first since last September, and the first time I've left Spain this year).  I kept reassuring all my friends and neighbors in Carabanchel, "it's just for a couple of weeks.  I'll be back soon" and it's true...but I can feel the beginning of being uprooted, and I'm sad, because I've been mostly very generously welcomed...in Carabanchel, in Madrid, and in Spain.  (I know perfectly well from other Fulbrighters that the welcome extended so generously might be more ambivalent and unpleasant if I weren't white.  This hurts me because I love Spain and want it to be better, but I can still acknowledge the grace with which I have been received and made at home in my immigrant neighborhood, even as other people remind me that the glory of New York is that you can become a New Yorker, and the problem with Europe is that you and your children remain forever foreigners.)

I'm also being generously welcomed home in New York (it turns out I have friends), and I must say that from the moment of landing at JFK I felt the same relief and happiness about being home as always, and the same recognition that New York really is unlike any other place I've been, not only because of my personal associations, but because yes, the cross-section of people you get on a subway car here is more diverse than the (very beautiful) metro in Madrid, even in my neighborhood.  And yes, you can speak English if you want to, but it's really optional.  (I met up with Spanish friends in New York on my first day back, and kept being surprised when the children playing around us in the park spoke such good English.  My instinct is to speak Spanish with children and English with adults now, and I kind of had to reverse it.)

At one of my farewell dinners during my last week in Madrid a concerned Spaniard (considering visiting New York) asked me whether speaking Spanish was "stigmatized" in the city, and I could hardly help laughing as I assured her that it most emphatically was not.  And yet...this is a painful time to come home.

On religious expressions of culture and cultural expressions of religion

 

No, the Christmas Fat Man is not universal

Happy 2018, everybody! I have temporarily emerged from writing cave, and have time to do some reflections on the holiday season in Madrid. This is an entry I've been working at for a while, which is no longer completely contemporary, but still hopefully of interest. I kept meaning to revise it and then it kept getting longer. Sorry in advance.

The dreidels have arrived! (Note picture.) Sadly, I was not able to pick them up in time for nochebuena, so a couple of them still have to be delivered to their new owners, which they will be with a small delay, and a print out of instructions on how to play dreidel. And possibly also another delivery of chocolate coins, since the coins were super successful with my new young friends, who presented me with drawings and “a folder to keep secrets in” when they came over for nochebuena, and who had nearly as much fun spinning the chocolate coins (in the absence of dreidels) and timing how long they could make them spin as eating them. In general, I had a lovely and successful nochebuena with new friends this year, and managed to make latkes and let the kids play with the menorah, and generally have a nice conversation about various cultural traditions as well as the all important conversations about food. (The fact that I forgot to get matches and have an electric stove here meant that I had two candles left from the first night of Hanukkah, so the kids got to light them. They loved striking the matches, and lighting the candles, and also blowing them out. Playing with fire is fun.)

Happy Constitution Day

 

A flurry of puentes ushers in the holiday season

My plan for staying quietly at home during today's "puente" (although being a Wednesday it can't really be a "bridge" to any particular weekend) was dynamited today by a call from New York friends who have been in Barcelona and are flying home from Barajas tomorrow morning, who suggested that I go out to dinner with them.  So I did end up going into the city center this evening, on El día de la constitución, which is celebrating its 39th birthday today.  As I had arranged to meet my friends in the Plaza Mayor, I managed to make my way through the Christmas market there, which was filled with more crowds than usual, many of them holding sparklers of the kind I fondly remember from my childhood on the Fourth of July, that are now mostly illegal at home.  My friends were stunned by the crowds and noise and sparklers, and remarked that they had had no idea it was Constitution Day (though they had seen the news about the rally in Barcelona).

A further note on Spanish custom and gender norms....

 

Having just watched "El Intermedio" I have a quick further thought

 

 In light of the current (and recurring) hysteria about sexual harassment by politicians and so on in the Anglosphere, I watched the final (absolutely funny and charming) segment of "El Intermedio" this evening with something like shock.  I think it's superb that the Spanish manage to be concerned about sexism while still managing a considerable sense of humor about what my Complutense mentor refers to as the "national characteristic of invading people's personal space."

Funny/Not Funny

 

The news by newspaper and the news by mail only occasionally converge...

I got a piece of mail from Banco Sabadell today.  For a moment I wondered whether it might be something retro like a paper account statement in spite of their spiffy smartphone app, and then I worried that it might be some kind of bill.  But when I got upstairs and opened it I discovered a form letter (in English, since my account was set up in that language - they do have good software) addressed to "Dear Sir/Madam" and informing me "personally" that the bank's Board of Directors has decided as of October 5 to relocate their registered offices to Alicante in order to "fulfill [the bank's] commitment to take the necessary measures to ensure at all times the proper legal security and protection of the interests of its customers."  No particular reason.  They just want me to know that I definitely should not panic and withdraw money, and that they've always thought Alicante was lovely at this time of year (which I'm sure it is).