Johanna Writes Madrid

Squashed Popcorn

I am a formerly proud puffy piece of popcorn which has been dropped onto the ground, speared by a stiletto heel, angrily shaken off, and then peed on by a dog before finally being squashed into the cement by a grumpy old man. This is the state that apartment hunting in Barcelona with two children has reduced me to.

At this point I mainly remember a blurry haze of whining (Nico), screaming (Luca), vomiting (also Luca) and rain. Also a hotel room that looked as though about 800 synthetic zebras were slaughtered in order to decorate it.

You are probably guessing by now that we still do not have a place to live in Barcelona. We must have seen about a dozen different apartments. Some were very nice but looked as though they had been constructed on the set of Fight Club.  Others were in great neighborhoods but appeared to have been built for a family of moles who had no use for either light or space to turn around in.

Apparently during Franco's era, people were encouraged to have a lot of kids but few could afford to house them properly in the cities. The result are warrens of small and dark bedrooms all connected by long, narrow and maze-like corridors. The kitchens are usually the size of broom closets (rarely do urban Spanish kitchens have enough room to even put a kitchen table in) and many of the bathrooms don't have bathtubs which for me is an absolute necessity. There is also a major lack of closet space.

I am finding that these deprivations can seriously compromise my decision making skills. An apartment could be made out of Tinker Toys but if it had a giant kitchen, it would probably still go on my "To consider" list. Or it could have enormous closets and have me jumping up and down with delight despite the fact that the living room looks out on an elementary school playground (and YES we did see such an apartment).

To make matters worse, we did find what seems to be the perfect apartment, only to be told the next day that the agency requires a five year contract. The longest I've lived in one place in the past 16 years is for three years in Tokyo. I'd love to stay in the same place for five years but the chances of that happening don't seem high enough to risk signing that sort of agreement (with the prospect of losing thousands of euros at stake).

Last night I had a dream in which I had just gotten married in a dress that I thought was incredibly elegant and classy. For some reason I walked home alone from the wedding, only to pass by the Disney Store, glance inside and see that the dress I was wearing was an exact replica of Snow White's. Anyone can deduce that I am feeling the pressure. 

Recently Reading:

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

Lit by Mary Karr

Best Food Writing 2009

Recently Cooking: (By the way, if I link to a recipe here, you can assume it is seriously yummy!)

Chicken and Dumplings

 

So you want to be a bullfighter

 
This past weekend we took El Tren de las Fresas (The Strawberry Train), which travels the old route from Madrid to Aranjuez. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting. The advertisement featured a train blowing strawberries out of its smoke stack so naturally I supposed that the whole thing had something do to with strawberries. Au contrario. Aside from being handed a pint of berries as we embarked on the train, that was the extent of any fruity talk.

It turns out that Aranjuez is known for its fruits and vegetables (including strawberries), but we didn't hear about any of that on our journey by old-fashioned steam engine through the vast barren wastelands of outer Madrid. Instead we were treated to two people (dressed up in 19^th century-style clothing with giant microphone speakers attached to their butts) who screamed back and forth at the top of their lungs about their differing opinions as to what were the most fun things to do in Aranjuez (“WHAAAAAT? Is there a crack pipe in your bustle? You think the Bullfighting Museum is fun?? You should try the SCENIC BOAT RIDE and then take a stroll through the FORMER ROYAL SUMMER PALACE!!!!”) Or something like that.

 

As for us, the highlight of our day was definitely the bullfighting ring. While we were there, some young bullfighters were practicing with their coach, a short balding man wearing a track suit who screamed out periodically “You have NO FUCKING CLUE what you’re doing do you???!” to the bewildered toreros in training. From the sound of it, one would have thought it was just another day at football practice were it not for the periodic appearance of the “bull,” a large bull’s head mounted onto a pair of wheelbarrow handles.

During our tour of the museum, Nico fell utterly in love with our guide, a middle-aged woman who had bunny rabbits cavorting along the hem of her mini-dress. He held her hand throughout the tour and when we left, he asked if one day we might come back and visit her. “I’m going to miss her soooo much!” he lamented, as though they had spent four years in a sorority together, rather than held hands for 20 minutes in front of a glass case full of bullfighting paraphernalia.

As we left the bullring, I commented to Alex that I had thought of a good bullfighting name for Nico (in Spain, famous toreros are often given nicknames). Before I could say it, Nico looked at me in alarm. “But Mommy I haven’t decided yet!” “Decided what?” I asked. “If that’s what I want to be when I grow up!” he responded, clearly worried that I was going to head off the next morning and put his name on the waiting list for Bullfighter Kindergarten or wherever it is that aspiring young bullfighters go to begin their educations. I assured him that he had many years to decide whether he wanted to be a bullfighter or something else (the other top contenders for future career are currently astronaut and woodcutter). He was very relieved.

 

Not everyone can say they've been breastfed inside a bullfighting ring!

Buried in chestnuts and snot

This week I peeled approximately 400 chestnuts for a chestnut/chorizo/saffron soup that I made for some friends. It was delicious but Good God I will never ever do it again. The skin under my fingernails is still sore from peeling back the shells (husks?) of all those chestnuts. Luckily my friend Shannon was here visiting from Switzerland and she helped me do it.

 

Other than that, Luca has regressed back to waking up to eat every two hours throughout the night and Nico has a cold but refuses to blow his nose. He is also very worried that someone will try to borrow the baby from us even though I’ve assured him that this will not be happening (although now that I see it in print, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, at least between the hours of 11pm and 8am- anyone interested?) The solution, Nico has decided, is to make a “tag” for Luca so that everyone will know that he belongs to us. The tag will say “This baby is not for sharing!” and we will glue it to Luca’s hand using Elmer’s School Glue. That is the current plan anyway.

 

Alex is on an all-expenses paid invited trip to China. The poor man just has it so rough. In the meantime, I’m living on easy street with two small sick children and nothing but a part-time Icelandic babysitter to ease the pain. I know that plenty of people have it much worse (single mothers and inhabitants of mental asylums for example) but I’m still wallowing in self-pity.

 

This next week I’m hoping to post a little piece I’ve been working on all about the cultural differences in garbage disposal between New York, Japan, Switzerland and Spain. It promises to be riveting and very dirty indeed!

 

Stuff

I recently read a Modern Love essay about a woman learning to accept her husband’s collection of junk. I can relate to this. I too, am married to a man with a fatal attraction to useless objects. He came home the other day bearing several blank videocassette tapes that he’d found in the park (“just to see what’s on them”), and he may be the only person I’ve every met who goes out of their way to veer towards the people passing out fliers on the street. Nevertheless, as I read the Modern Love essay, I couldn’t help but think about how the detritus that follows my husband home is a drop in the bucket compared to the utter crap that my children have brought into my life.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my kids. I just don’t love most of their stuff. Before Nico was born, I assumed that his belongings would consist of a few wooden toys that were both aesthetically pleasing and educational. As for his clothing, he would dress tastefully with nary a sign of weapon wielding panda bears, sponges who wear pants, or bilingual girl-explorers who ask way too many rhetorical questions. Needless to say there were a few things I didn’t take into consideration.

Chief amongst these factors is my mother-in-law, a lovely woman really, but one with a seemingly fatal attraction to over-sized stuffed animals, Disney characters and tiny plastic doo-dads. This means that each Christmas and birthday, we are showered with a veritable mountain of all of the above. She is also a sucker for clothing bargains and will snatch up anything on sale, seemingly blinded to both the age and gender that the item is intended for. Therefore, a typical holiday gift for Nico might include a sack full of minuscule plastic toys that are often unidentifiable in both form and function, a humongous stuffed armadillo and perhaps a pair of skin tight flared sailor pants with rhinestone detailing. And while on principle, I have no objection to my son dressing like a combination of Fred Astaire and Barbie, I’m not sure that his schoolmates would be quite so kind.

The plastic crap is what bugs me the most. Like most preschoolers, when surrounded by a heap of little plastic toys, Nico is as happy as a 12-year old girl basking in a vat of shimmery lip gloss. Tiny plastic cats wearing sparkly necklaces, plastic cars with missing wheels, plastic weapons that once belonged to plastic superheroes who are now missing plastic limbs. I could go on but you get the picture. For years, my mother-in-law has both driven me nuts and perplexed me, by giving Nico copious amounts of plastic toys that are clearly from fast food restaurant children’s meals. I couldn’t figure it out. Was she secretly dining on Happy Meals every night and saving the prizes or did she have some kind of black market connection to purveyors of fast food toys? Turns out to be the latter.

Yes indeed, you may be surprised to hear that somewhere in the depths of the Upper-East Side in New York City, there exists a small savvy gang of children who make a healthy profit on the street, not by selling drugs, phony Gucci handbags or $5 sunglasses, but rather by hawking toys; the majority of which once made their homes in a cardboard box next to a cheeseburger. Unfortunately for me, my mother-in-law has discovered their whereabouts and is in the habit of taking full advantage of their covert services. Sadly, I am not pulling your leg on this.

So what can I do? Yes, I have been known to “disappear” things that haven’t been played with for a while and just the other day I gave the little girl down the street a tee-shirt with a sparkly butterfly and the words “American Cutie” on the front (part of the latest installment of gifts), but in general, it’s an uphill battle. The giant stuffed animals are particularly challenging because while a two-inch tall plastic Madagascar figurine which has been lurking at the bottom of the toy box for months is unlikely to be missed, the same cannot be said for an enormous florescent green dragon with sparkly purple wings which takes up a third of my Nico’s bed. Any suggestions?

 

Bowl Hair Cut

Me- I had this weird dream last night. I was a man with a bowl haircut who thought I looked really cool until I looked in the mirror one day and realized I looked ridiculous.

My brother Jake- Wow- that sounds exactly like junior year in high school.

Socks

Today Alex went to a company meeting in Barcelona. Upon returning home he collapsed exhausted on our bed and asked me to take his socks off for him, mentioning that he´d been in such a hurry this morning that he thought he´d put on a pair of my socks by accident. "Hmm yes," I agreed as I peeled off the socks, "That would explain why it looks like you´re wearing black anklets with your business suit. I hope you didn´t cross your legs at the meeting..."

Later when I went to pick the socks up off the floor and throw them in the hamper, I noticed something I hadn´t seen before.

Me-"Alex, you didn´t wear my socks today."

Alex-"I didn´t?"

Me-"No, you wore Nico´s socks. Didn´t you notice that the bottoms of your feet had raised plastic letters saying The Children´s Place 3-4 Years on them?"

You have to adore a husband who can go to an important business meeting wearing toddler socks and still manage to kick ass!

Imagine you're very poor and hairy

I never would have predicted that Nico's first concert would have been the Blue Oyster Cult but life is full of surprises.

The other day was one of those perfect New York City days where everything just comes together in the best way. For the first time in 5 years, my brother and I were both in the city at the same time. This was special because we both lived here for almost 10 years before each leaving for opposite sides of the world. Strolling through Union Square with him and Nico was so much fun, especially because the ASPCA was there with lots of adorable dogs to pet and oddly, the Blue Oyster Cult. Nico had a fabulous time with Uncle Jake and kept screaming "Oh my Gaaahd! It's suuuuch a nice day!" I'm not even going to think about how a two year old boy who has been raised entirely in Japan and Switzerland has come to speak like a Valley Girl.

Later Jake and I decided to get massages and as we lay on the side by side tables he commented that for brother and sister, we're actually pretty modest with each other. He mentioned that a guy he'd been dating had told him that his sister who did laser hair removal had removed all the hair from his ass and balls.

Jake: "I really cannot imagine having you remove all the hair from my ass and balls"

Me: "Well first of all, you probably can't imagine me removing the hair from anyone's ass and balls."

Jake: "Definitely not."

Me: "Well imagine that I'm a laser hair removal specialist. Imagine that that's what I do. Now imagine that you're really poor. And hairy."

Jake: "Yeah, you're right. Maybe if I was a poverty stricken Greek man I'd let you do it."

By the way, check out the photo of Jake with Angelina Jolie in the April Harper's Bazaar!

Take this glutinous mass and shove it

So while my husband treks off to find lost cities in the middle of the jungles of Colombia, Nico and I are comfortably ensconced in my aunt's basement a few blocks from my parents in SLC, Utah. All goes smoothly while we wait for our Spanish residency visas to come through.

Our leaving of Switzerland took place in a flurry of cardboard boxes and cleansing powder as I struggled to get the place in shape for the next tenants. This was rather a new chore for me since when I lived in NYC, the only thing you did when moving out of an apartment was make sure you didn't leave any frozen burritos behind. In Switzerland however, one must leave their apartment SPOTLESS and if you don't, you'll be charged a hefty fee of around $1000 to cover the cleaning costs. Most people decide to just hire a professional crew for the job but wanting to save a bit of money, I decided to do it myself. I can honestly say that I have never cleaned so hard or well in my life and that by the time I was finished, it looked so good that I wanted to move back into the apartment myself.

My final step was to fill up all the nail holes in the walls that we'd made when hanging pictures since I'd heard that we'd be charged about $5 per unfilled hole. Every Swiss person I'd talked to had told me that I should just get a tube of white toothpaste and stick a bit in each hole.

Thus I found myself standing in the toothpaste aisle at my local supermarket, attempting to determine which toothpaste to buy. The problem was that I had no idea which ones were white and there was no way of checking inside the tubes without ripping off the tops (I tried). I asked a few people but nobody knew and even stranger, nobody seemed to have ever even heard of filling holes with toothpaste. Considering that at least 5 people OUTSIDE of the supermarket had told me that this was the thing to do, I found it strange that nobody within the supermarket knew what I was talking about.

I thought that maybe, as is often the case when I'm trying to speak a foreign language, I just wasn't explaining myself correctly. Maybe instead of telling people that I wanted to fill in holes in the wall with toothpaste, I was actually telling them that I wanted to paint on the wall with toothpaste or whip up a tasty toothpaste goulash. Maybe that's why everyone was looking at me in that perplexed fashion with which I'm so familiar by now. But then I realized that I had been making sense when one chic lady with violet tinted hair and alligator pumps marched up to me and told me that what people actually did with the holes in their walls, was to chew up little bits of bread and then use the wet crumbs to fill up the holes. I'd never heard of this technique before but she had an air of authority about her and seemed to know what she was talking about. As she steered me toward the bread aisle, I reflected that perhaps her method might be my best option unless I wanted to head home with a lifetime supply of Swiss toothpaste.

I then pictured Alex coming home to find me running around the apartment with a baguette, frantically biting off chunks and then stuffing the glutinous mass of crumbs and saliva into the wall.

I left the supermarket empty handed and headed for the nearest hardware store where I invested in a tube of costly white spackle which I plan to hold onto for the rest of my apartment living life.