Spanish Paradox #12,072

Until I moved to Spain ten years ago, I did not know what a clean home was. I do not mean your run-of-the-mill, vacuumed-and-dishes-washed clean. I am talking your-underwear-are-even-ironed clean. The social institution of marriage for many decades here has meant that in traditional families, males have had a life outside of the home, whereas womens life has been inside the home and often times her only source of pride has been how skillfully her sheets are ironed and that her floor is more immaculate than the Virgin herself. Despite all of the relatively recent changes in the division of labor in Spain (this is the country, after all, whose defense minister is a pregnant woman), we still have a few generations of women who take pride in their impeccable homes and of men who take pride in the fact that their women take care of all that crap for them. I could go off on a HUGE tangent here, but I´ll focus….

My point is, Spanish women keep impeccably clean homes.

This fact stands in stark contrast to the situation one finds upon entering a Spanish public bathroom (to date I have only encountered ladies rooms for obvious reasons…I can only assume the worst of men´s rooms). You would think that when all of the immaculate women come together in a social setting where they must share sewage infrastructure, they would sort of team together to help keep the public bathroom at least tolerable. The main problem I find is summed up nicely here:

Now I admit, there are basic features that a public restroom needs in order to function normally which are usually absent here -- namely, toilet paper, soap, paper towels or working hand dryers, trash cans, and sometimes toilet seats.

But, good Lord. When I walk into a Spanish public restroom the first thing I think is:

“Come on ladies, it does not have to be this way”. For crying out loud, is it really going to come to THIS??

And then I fantasize about the days when I lived in a country where not only were you almost guaranteed to find toilet paper, soap, and a hand dryer, but you were not likely to find a toilet seat covered in piss, and you would likely also find toilet seat covers to keep things nice and sanitary. Are those things really a luxury?

Oh, the things I had taken for granted.

-Bluestreak

"vergüenza ajena" of the "guiri"

It is always interesting for us foreigners to begin to understand a concept or idea that has no equivalent in ones mother culture. For example, the word “Procrastination”, or any equivalent, does not exist in Spanish culture (maybe it is so deeply embedded in their subconscious that it defies verbal expression, because anyone who has spent any time at all in this country knows it exists here).

In Spanish there is a concept called “vergüenza agena” which literally translates to “unattached shame”. There is an enlightening discussion on Word reference regarding vergüenza ajena that I thought was interesting and the final definition given is fitting. The person posting defines vergüenza ajena like this: when “You feel the shame the person who's making a fool of himself should be feeling - if he were only aware of what he was doing”. Bingo.

So why bring up vergüenza ajena? Stacy and I were talking about the vergüenza ajena we sometimes feel when we overhear conversations of American students here sometimes. She referred to two American girls that were speaking in Spanish to each other and it made her cringe with vergüenza ajena. We started to contemplate why we feel this way-- the poor things, after all, they are just trying to learn the culture and are just having fun. Stacy suggested that maybe there is something we recognize in ourselves in them that makes us cringe. For me, I think it might be just straight up envy of them for living a time like I once did with no stress, when everything was romantic and interesting and wonderful and I saw Spain through the beer-fogged lenses of a workaday gringo. “Stay a little longer my dearies”, I feel like saying, “It ain´t all sangria and siestas”.

Having fully accepted my guiri (i.e. gringo) status, on Friday when I got off work, I cracked open a beer for my walk home and thought, either I am a total ghetto rat, or life is damn good and I am a guiri in Spain. And as the Spanish passers-by gawked at me, maybe even with vergüenza ajena, I wallowed in the depths of my guiriness, sat my ass down in a beautiful plaza and finished my beer.

This is living.

-Bluestreak

Here I go again: another uninvited harangue

Those of you who know me in real life know that there is one theme I love to complain about above all other things: access to housing in Spain.

A bit of background: my husband and I have spent the last two and a half years oscillating between looking for a home to buy and looking for an unfurnished, nicer-than-current-house rental. Basically, we started to look for something to buy - got completely fed up with the whole thing after seeing that we could not afford anything we wanted to live in, then decided to rent. Once we started searching for a rental, we realized that rental prices had skyrocketed so much that it almost seemed more worth it to buy, so we stopped the rental search and started the purchase search again. And so the cycle has gone over and over again and we are finally back on looking for a rental again. And I am exhausted.

I have no idea what it is like in the rest of the world (aside from the U.S. which I think we can all agree is in crisis), but let me just say one thing about Spain in this regard: THIS BITES. In Spain average HOUSEHOLD income in 2007 was 23,400€ according to this article in El Mundo, and the average 80 square meter flat costs 190,000 euros to buy and 880€ to rent (according to Tasamadrid.com average per meter housing prices are 2374.61€ for Seville and according to idealista.com rental prices are at 11€ per square meter per month in Seville). To give you some visual examples, here is what you can buy if you are really well-to-do for 296,000€:



Here is the link if you are interested in purchasing it, as you can see, it is only missing a few small finishing touches, such as walls, and is practically "para entrar".

If that is a little out of your price range, consider this bargain, which is much cozier anyway (listed here on idealista.com):

95.000 euros, 15.807.000 pta
estudio de 9 m² exterior
bajo
1 wc
10.556 euros/m²

For that low mortgage payment, hell, I could get used to living in 96 square feet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (9 square meters).

If buying is not your cup of tea and you would rather wait, like me, to see if prices get better, you could choose to rent. Imagine cooking in a spacious, state of the art kitchen like this one in this home for just 420€/month:



Imagine the convenience of being able to wash your pots and pans WHILE you are cooking in them over your camp stove.

Please can someone explain how this makes any sense?????? And can someone also please explain the logic of "prices are never going to go down" that I have been listening to ad-nauseam for the last three years???????????

I am sorry but I know I am a real Debbie-Downer to some when I say that this situation cannot sustain itself and housing prices ARE dropping and I think they have a long way to go still. I am very sorry for all of the people that invested in real estate or those who had their hearts set on retiring a millionaire just by selling the crappy flat they owned.

But, alas, maybe I am wrong. I present you with the alternative, albeit sarcastically, a bit of humor I found in an anecdote someone posted on burbuja.info (a real estate "conspiracy theorist" website I like to hang out):

(Sorry if you don´t speak Spanish):

"Pues no, la vivienda nunca bajará. Mirad lo que explica un viajero del futuro:


Me he decidido a coger mi máquina del tiempo y contaros como van las cosas por el futuro:

Afortunadamante no se han cumplido las previsiones de tantos agoreros burbujistas y la vivienda en España ha seguido subiendo un 17% anual durante los últimos 50 años, de este modo nos hemos convertido en el país mas rico del mundo, porque por ejemplo un ático en la castellana cuesta mas que el estado de California y el palacio imperial de Tokio juntos; claro que ya nadie vive en la Castellana ni en ningún otro sitio de Madrid, por que esas casas son para invertir y no para vivir.

Yo por ejemplo aunque trabajo en Madrid me he comprado un piso de 40 metros la mar de apañao en un pueblo del Norte de Burgos, que con la autovía queda a un paso; para pagar la hipoteca nos hemos juntado con otras tres familias: un notario casado con una catedrática de universidad, un subinspector de hacienda casado con una abogada del estado y un magistrado del supremo (subcontratado a traves de una ett) casado con una arquitecta. De este modo destinamos cinco sueldos a la hipoteca y uno para vivir; estamos contentisimos con la compra porque aunque al principio nos está costando un poco luego seguro que ni se nota, además desde que lo compramos hace un año ya ha subido un 17% y por si fuera poco la mujer del notario esta de buena que lo flipas.

Aunque profesionamente no me va mal (soy director general adjunto de una multinacional, aunque también subcontratado a traves de una ett) la verdad es que la inflación que sufrimos al ser el país mas rico del mundo hace que nos tengamos que apretar un poco el cinturón; de todos modos es cuestión de acostumbrarse, cuando tuvimos que empezar a comer chopped de lagartijas todos nos quejamos y ahora se le da vuelta y vuelta en la plancha y tan rico que queda. De cualquier forma, aprovechando que han bajado la edad laboral a los 10 años a ver si saco al churumbel del colegio y lo meto en la ett, que un sueldo mas seguro que ayuda para la hipoteca.

Mi sueldo es de 2.000 tochos netos, el tocho es la moneda que sustituyo al euro cuando nos echaron de la UE a patadas (que fea y que mala es la envidia) y se cotiza a un centimo de euro. En la caja fuerte del banco de españa ya no se guardan lingotes sino ladrillos, que en este país han demostrado ser un valor mucho mas seguro y rentable que el oro.

Tras las guerras atómicas provocadas por los propietarios de vpo de andalucía la población ha quedado reducida a 5 millones de españoles y 50 millones de ecuatorianos trabajando de paletas, se han seguido construyendo 800.000 viviendas anuales (la construcción supone ya el 98% del PIB) y ahora tocamos a unas 20 viviendas por habitante (casi todas vacías porque como dije son viviendas para invertir, no para vivir) . El 90% del suelo esta ya urbanizado y se plantea empezar a construir ciudades en el fondo del mar (no se puede vivir en el fondo del mar, así que serían ciudades solamente para invertir) . Esto es lo que en el mundo se conoce y admira como "el milagro español" y es objeto de numerosos estudios y tesis doctorales en el campo de la psiquiatría. Cada año nos visitan miles de estudiosos de la mente humana de todo el mundo. No me extrañaría que muchos de esos científicos se quedasen porque la verdad es que como en España no se vive en ningún sitio.

Y eso es todo lo que os puedo contar de lo que os espera; voy a ver si cazo unas lagartijas para cenar

Viajero del futuro"


I hope you laughed as much as I did, if not cried.

- Bluestreak

Cosmetological Entropy

Why is it that a trip to the hairdresser here means that I always have to end up with some crazy Euro-Mullet? Despite the fact that I ALWAYS bring a Picture with me in case the language barrier obstructs the lines of communication, inevitably the scissor-happy stylist asks, “¿Capas?”, which roughly translates to “May I take your lovely hair and form it into an ill-advised Euro-Mullet?”

Mullet aside, a trip to the hairdresser in Spain for an American is an entrance into the world of stylist anarchy. The mulleted result is the unintended consequence of salon chaos at its worst. In the States a trip to the stylist normally means you will have a stylist who will scrub your head, carefully comb your tangles out and then get on with whatever it is you asked him or her to do while chatting it up and working that tip and trying to make a loyal client out of you. This is the world of semi-controlled hair predictability. Enter Spanish hair-dresser chaos where you will tell the person wearing hospital scrubs that you assume is your stylist exactly what you want, she will nod and comment comprehensively, then she will walk away and you will never see her again. A different person will scrub your head, another one will yank your tangles out, then someone else will put dye all over it and leave you there for a really long time until your scalp feels like you have just been through chemical warfare. After that, another person will put you under a time-sensitive heat lamp and then pay no attention as to how long your left under there, and then once you are washed and dried by a person you have never seen before, finally the mullet-sculptor will make her entrance to see to it that you do not escape the salon mullet-free. This whole process will take approximately 4 -5 hours and no, you cannot make an appointment. Take a number.

There are certain things I had always taken for granted while living in the U.S.-- Escaping the salon in a timely manner un-mulletted was one of them.

Wish me luck on my next trip to the salon.

P.S. If you get bored, do a google search for mullets in spain and you will see what a widespread phenomenon this is.

Spring Fever....A Happy post about nothing.

Ahhhh, Spring Fever. I admit to not ever knowing what that term meant until I moved to Seville. Why is the Spring so much more intense here?? Suddenly there has been a change in the air and I am not such a whiner anymore. It is just hard not to be insanely happy when the orange blossoms usurp the city like this and you leave work and you still have a little bit of day left! Everyone around me is suddenly so good looking too. What is with that? Maybe it is all the skin I keep seeing.

I feel like I have been complaining all winter and now I have something to truly be grateful for. It comes in waves living over here. But I admit that when I have visitors come to town, especially when it is spring, I start to view this city again like I did the first time I came here (thanks for the visit John and Kelly!). I guess it is easy to take the surroundings for granted when you have to get up and go to work every day just like anywhere else. Sometimes I think people are under the impression that we are in a constant state of bliss just for living here, when that is not the case at all….but I can say I feel a little blissful these days.

Maybe it was the trip to Barcelona last weekend that has made me so happy. You know you are an American expat living in Seville when you go to Barcelona for Indian food.

Life is good and it smells fucking great in this city.

It is Friday, I do not know what the hell I am still doing at work with this kind of weather, and I am about to go have a beer.


-Bluestreak.

A Political Post That Might Annoy You

Most of you may know me as the non-politically engaged person that I am. I certainly do not consider myself to be a fervent member of any political organization or party and generally agree with many postmodern social and political theorists that claim that in the U.S. as in many modern democracies, there exists a false dichotomy between the two opposing parties (or to me it seems more like a Morton´s fork). For the most part, real political dialogue that allows multiple perspectives does not exist as it should in a healthy democracy.

That said, I will say outright that right-wing logic defies logic and being the logical person that I am, I normally lean left. Anyone who disagrees with this, is asked kindly to refer to one of the greatest pirates of our time who once said, "This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong."

Expats are often in the peculiar position once we leave our terra patria of defending our country´s behavior, customs, etc, often heatedly when in fact we would never do so back home. This is especially true, I presume, for Americans due to the fact that everyone outside of America seems to think they know what America is all about, after all, they saw it on T.V. We are more American than ever when we are outside American territory and explanations are often required of what America is REALLY like and who Americans REALLY are. This task has been particularly daunting over the last 8 years. Apparently, American people actually elected our current President, much to my surprise.

In tracking the democratic primaries this time around, I am suddenly filled with pride and feel like shouting out, "See????!!!!! I knew it. America is not as bad as the world sees us". For the first time EVER for me, I am actually excited about a candidate and not just because of the historical implications or the symbolic message it is sending the world over. I am excited about the prospects of, as an expat, defending something worthy of my defense. Call me crazy, and gullible to his actually amazing public speaking skills when you compare him to John Kerry (I won´t even mention Bush), but I truly believe that Barak Obama will make us expats proud.

ANOTHER REASON WHY OBAMA RULES THAT YOU CAN´T POSSIBLY ARGUE WITH

For me, it comes down to one thing: DEMOCRATIC REFORM ("Democratic" as in Democracy, not the Democratic party). Here are the things that he is proposing related to reform (taken from his website) that pushes any other political agenda to the wayside. He proposes to:

- Create a centralized internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance for everyone to see
- Create an independent watchdog agency to investicate ethics violations
- Publically finance campaigns to reduce influence special interest groups who right now basically buy their candidate.
- Create a "contracts and influence database" which will disclose how much money is spent on lobbying and who is getting what contracts and why.
- Require appointees to conduct the significant business of the agency in public (via debates online)
-Nullify Bush´s attempt to make presidential records secret until years and years have passed.
- Disallow the signing of non-emergency bills without the American people being able to view it on the White House website, and comment for 5 days.
- Disclose of the names of legistlatures who request earmarks with an explanation 72 hours before they can be approved by senate.
- Require cabinet officials to hold townhall meetings to discuss issues.
- Disclose of public communications about policymaking.

These propositions are 100% non-political, and unless you disagree with democracy, there is no way you can argue against any of this. To me this is the single most important issue at stake and any other thing the candidate is running on does not matter if he is capable of doing what he proposes here.

This democratic reform, of course, assumes that Americans actually care and are willing to participate more democratically. This, I realize, is a big assumption.

I will close with a quote from Indecision 2008, a featured segment from Stephen Colbert´s Colbert Report, to transmit my strong desire for American democracy to work while at the same time suspecting that it might not:

"Don´t fuck this up, America".

Expat Purgatory

Seeing as I have gotten on a pessimistic note with my last post, why stop now? Now it is time to discuss Expat Purgatory (thanks Alexis for the term).

First, let us define the term:

Expat Purgatory: ex.pat (eks´pat´) pur.ga.tory (pur´gə tôr′ē)
noun

1. The distinct feeling that time stands still in the home country of a person living abroad. Side effects of such a state of mind include the re-surfacing of age-old issues out of the blue that would otherwise be resolved in a standard time-space continuum of a native living in a native land.

2. The state of being causing the sensation an expatriate experiences when returning to his or her native land upon which he or she only wants to re-visit places he or she remembers and has missed.
Ex: "Bummer. It would be cool to take Tiff to that new restaurant in Scottsdale while she’s in town but she wants to go to that lame restaurant we used to go to five years ago. She must be in Expat Purgatory."

3. A cause of the obsession upon returning to ones native land with driving by old places he or she used to live and houses of friends that have long since moved to Seattle, Atlanta, New York and Sacramento, so what the hell is the point of driving by?

4. A desperate sensation of not being able to move forward in one’s foreign land due to the inability to affront one’s past given the lack of any sensory reminders of it. Then when such sensory reminders present themselves (such as a hearing a song in a bar or being emailed pictures of an old friend) one’s past hits one like a ton of fucking bricks.

5. The sudden sensation that all one has done over the last 10 years of his or her life is assimilate a new culture and the realization that this is not enough because that culture then becomes as much a part of one as one’s ugly thumbs. This also includes the realization that besides the accumulation of said culture, one has done jack shit.

Expat Purgatory is a prime example of how space and time are essentially inseparable and meaningless one without the other. While time literally goes by with a space distantiation, it is meaningless because it lacks context. Space is meaningless too if the passage of time is not experienced. This is why it irritates me when I go home and they have torn buildings down that are supposed to be there or added new ones that are just wrong. The new space makes no sense because I have not experienced the time process there.

In Seville, however, I have welcomed the city changes with open arms. New bike lanes leading to a chaotic mutual biker-pedestrian and biker-driver aggression never before seen on the pacific sevillian streets? Bring it on. Light rail with obnoxious neon advertisement speeding by a 600 year old gothic cathedral nearly taking out 10 tourists in its transit and blocking traffic for miles? Sounds good. But you tear down a crappy gas station in Tempe, Arizona and replace it with a bright and shiny Borders Bookstore and that is just wrong. Put the scary gas station back with all the sketchy people hanging around. That is how I remember it, dammit.

I am in Expat Purgatory for crying out loud, have a little mercy.

- Bluestreak