Today you can find new old photos on the site. They are from a while ago, but I never got around to posting them. They concern the visit of Matt, Peg, Sue and Jeff, and our trip to Almeria.

Coming soon: Photos from Mallorca and Argestues. Try to remain calm.

We haven't told you much about the movies here. But what's there been to tell, really? When we first arrived and lived out in the burbs, in José's brother's apartment, we had a TV. New TVs here have a little button you can push to make some shows, dubbed into Spanish, broadcast in English, and we used it liberally for a nightly vacation from utter confusion and incompetence.

In this manner we were treated to the best of the whatever we call movies that are 6-10 times worse than "straight to video." We saw whoever the dumbest Baldwin is fight off a team of sexy vampires with James Woods at his side. We watched Bridget Fonda shake off the effects of a rotten childhood with some therapeutic murdering in "La Femme Nikita." We watched that guy who plays all those tough guys beat up a biker gang, then go undercover for the local cops, beat up some cops to maintain his cover and then, surprisingly, cross the thin blue line. We even caught a BBC special on ruins in Ethiopia that featured more footage than we would have hoped of a shirtless Henry Louis Gates, Jr., yelling at crowds of people who wanted to be on TV, "I'm Dr. Gates. Henry. HENRY, from Harvard. HARVARD."

It was not inspiring, but it beat CSI dubbed into Spanish.

The rest of the movies we have seen have been the same ones you have, except six months later. The only exception here, in which you got to see something later than we did, was "L'Auberge Espagnole," or, as it was called here, "Una Casa de Locos." This was a pretty funny movie, generally plotless but with nice scenes of Barcelona. It also served the purpose of letting us think we had seen a movie that was sort of in Spanish, since maybe twenty percent of it was. Unfortunately, most of our practice had to come during the French-with-Spanish-subtitles scenes, since more people in the movie spoke English than Spanish, and so there was a lot of English with Spanish subtitles, too. But we were proud to read them ably.

But now we embark on a new adventure. Yesterday, I went to see a movie entirely in Spanish, my first. I had watched a tape of one of the Nets-Spurs games the night before and, even though half of the vocabulary was along the lines of "Teem Doonkin," I missed a lot of it. And not really all that much happened in those games, you may recall. I was nervous.

It didn't help that the schedule at the theater was different from the one on the web, which led me to miss the first ten minutes of the only movie playing, and miss the one I had planned to see altogether. I decided to take my chances with "Estrella del Sur," already in progress.

The first thing I noticed was that the movie was not set in Spain. It was set in….well, I couldn't really figure that out for a while. South America somewhere. This wouldn't have been too significant, except that South American Spanish sounds a lot different from Barcelona Spanish, insofar as they leave the endings off of a lot of words. As they say here, they "eat their letters."

It so happens, of course, that the ends of Spanish words tell you a few important things:

• whether something has happened or not,
  
• if so, when,
  
• and by whom
  
• and if it’s a noun, how many,
  
• and also what gender, though I tend to make a mess of this anyhow.
  

Sentences can go from:

"If I told him about what they did, would he be angry?"

to

"Tell him, they do. He was angry."

without your noticing that you missed much at all.

What I'm thinking is that I'm going to try to see the movie as many times as I can. It’s a shame, really, that I picked the one I did, because it was pretty stupid. I think. Here's my version of what happened, after Viewing I:

• Man moves his family from Spain to somewhere where they had come from before. Kids and wife are ok with this. There is no telltale airplane-landing-with-hazy-sunrise-behind-it to illustrate that the moving is complete, a fact that confused me for a long time. They may be headed for their grandmother's house, or she may be buying them a house, or, owing to a scene or two with the mother hunched over blueprints, they may be building a house.
  
  
• Kids seem to immediately have a ton of friends. Son takes up with some gun-toting revolution types who are too skinny and sweat a lot. Daughter sings a lot of Manu Chau and seems to have a friend who lives in the apartment – clearly not the grandmother's house – with them. Conveniently, the friend falls for the brother. Inconveniently, he has a girlfriend. Conveniently, the girlfriend falls for the head gun-toter. Inconveniently, the son is anguished by this and almost blows them all up with a homemade grenade.
  
  
• Son and his friends hatch a plot to kidnap a guy who drives a sweet yellow Mercedes. Watches are synchronized, guns are made to do that "click-click-my-gun-works-and-now-I-will-stuff-it-in-my-pants" thing that means that people are ready to get going. Son needs to leave for kidnapping, but (uh oh!) Dad catches him in the hallway. "Son," he says, "I found drugs in your room." Son yells. "You don't own me," that sort of thing. Angst, here, when you're about to commit a violent felony?
  
  
• Rich man is kidnapped and put in cell. Kidnappers begin to fall in love, drift home, fight with their parents. Son puts in a little time cultivating new romance with a potter. Makes many references to a good luck charm, which apparently she had made for him, that he wears around his neck.
  
  
• Audience member (one of two) notices "Uruguay" license plate, pats self on back.
  
  
• Kidnappers need to either move victim or body of victim. Son leaves abruptly again. Body is handed off between three or four cars, a stolen cab, and one horse-drawn carriage. Father is following son, but loses him. Police chase father – or is it son? – this was a very confusing scene, and there was not even any dialogue.
  
  
• Son, for no good reason, tosses grenade into trunk of car as police approach, cremating victim and burning self badly. Winds up in hospital. Police come for father, who – oops, forgot to mention this – left Uruguay because he was being investigated for revolutionary violent stuff himself. They quickly decide, after some grouchy speechifying, that he isn't involved, just the son. Many scenes ensue of kidnappers being shot and arrested.
  
  
• Family sits on beach in front of new shiny house. Son and father are nowhere to be seen? Jail? Dead? No, they're in the car, up above, talking about how the son might now go to Chile where it is colder. The grandmother appears in the driver's side window with some advice. Then, in the passenger window, the daughter appears. Then the mom, driver's side. Doctor, passenger side. Cop, driver's side. This was a very weird device for wrapping things up. No mention of jail for the son, who was, after all, seen by about ten cops tossing a grenade at a person he helped kidnap. He is, though, in a wheelchair. It is an old one, and maybe the authorities thought this was punishment enough. The family retreats to a long table with a lot of fried fish and bottles of soda for a welcome-home party. Fade to black.
  

I'll let you know if it makes more sense the next time. At least it didn't include a Baldwin. The sequel probably will.

Last week, José sent us an e-mail announcing that he had found a deal. Sixty Euros for two nights in a hotel at the beach, all meals included. "We'll take it," we said. So it was that we found ourselves in Lloret del Mar, a small city on the Costa Brava about an hour north of Barcelona. "Lloret del Mar," in Catalan, means:

Old Orchard Beach * Point Pleasant^(Germany+1)
Wealthy Russians + (√Spanish teenagers/Men in Speedos)

It was a tangle of stores selling expensive flip-flops and leather goods, Mexican and pizza restaurants, and hotels looking at the beach. Ok, ok, our deal did not exactly include a view of the beach. But it did include dinner, which led to this exchange on the first night:

We wandered into the dining room. Melissa, as is her custom, was carrying her purse. The hostess stopped us at the door. "You can't bring a purse in here," she said.

"Why?" said Melissa. The woman explained that, since the hotel's Russian guests steal lots of food from the buffet line, they have invented a "No purses for Russians" rule. But, she explained, she trusted us. Unfortunately, if the Russians saw that we had purses, they would ask why they couldn't bring purses, too. This, unsurprisingly, was pretty confusing for us. Now, normally, when I am confused, I assume that I simply haven't understood some Spanish. You sort of forget, when learning a new language, that sometimes people are confusing in your first language, too.

Hence it was with great joy that we then heard José ask to have the whole thing explained to him again. Exonerated, we hit the free buffet. The food was unremarkable until we spotted a little girl with French fries and asked where they were, at which point the hostess emerged from the kitchen with an entire steam tray of fries. Since the other choice was enormous hot dogs swimming in something that looked like ketchup sauce, the fries were a hit throughout the dining room. They may have been easier to steal, however. Covering things with sauce tends to keep them from being lifted.

But we were, oddly enough, not there to eat. This may, in fact, be the first vacation we've ever taken that ended up focused on something other than food. Instead, this was focused on going to the beach. The next day we took the bus to a much nicer town called Tossa and hopped a glass-bottomed boat to a small cove. Through the glass, we could see a lot of bubbles and the occasional rock and fish. The woman sitting next to us, a recent graduate of Cal State-Chico, was surprised to find the Mediterranean both salty and shark-free, a pair of conclusions so oddly juxtaposed that they left us unable to say anything in response. Our collective silence allowed her to keep talking: she had majored in interior design and had attended high school near the town where Melissa grew up. This is the actual exchange that followed:

Melissa: Oh, huh. I'm from Framingham.
Recent grad: Wow! Did you know Kristy?
Melissa: Kristy? I don't think so.

They next day, talking to the hotel clerk about lunch, we were asked where we were from. He loved our answer and declared the United States the best country in the entire world, "because rich people control everything, and they are in the United States." He loved Bill Clinton, he loved George Bush, he loved the New York Stock Exchange. He did not like Europe. Why? Because, of course, the stock market here is rigged, and he had lost a lot of money.

His fellow clerk, obviously used to playing the straight man, brought up Enron. Enron is a relatively widely accepted symbol here of how loco our system of paying for retirement is. That one day you could wake up and realize that you are going to have to work forever and that all the money you thought you were saving has vanished is essentially unthinkable in Spain, owning to a more humane system of pensions and such.

Enron was not an issue to this guy, however. He was on to actors. "Do you know who my favorite actor is? John Wayne. Also, Bruce Willis. And The Godfather, Brando, DeNiro. One, two, and three. But the second one is never as good, but in the Godfather it was great. And Ronald Reagan."

We were quiet for a moment. "What?" he said. "You don't like George Bush? I like Clint Eastwood, too." His friend was making circles in the air by his head with one finger, a gesture he had obviously had to use a lot working next to this guy.

"Ok," we said. "We're off to the beach. Thanks!"

He followed us out the door. "I like all the American presidents!" he yelled as we walked down the street, trying to maintain some polite eye contact while still escaping. "Clinton, Bush, they are so intelligent! And the stock market!"

It is better to be liked, I suppose, even for a collection of presidents and actors, than to be suspected of stealing hot dogs.

Note: It seems that our web host is doing some sort of thing that involves taking our site down and then putting it back up someplace else. The address and appearance ought to remain the same, but some of the photos might not make it, they say. That, in addition to my chronic laziness, is why there haven't been new photos of our trip to the mountains and such. When we are safely in our new home, I'll put up fun new pictures. As they say in Barcelona, "Disculpeu les molesties"

I am a sucker for marketing. After experiencing the Fundació Antoni Tapies once , and having a sort of “where’s all the art?” feeling, I went back. Why? Because they had plastered the city with black and white posters that read, “KILL ‘EM ALL.”

Who among us wouldn’t have been curious?

The KILL ‘EM ALL exhibit consisted of three huge video screens, of the sort used to show the Pats game at the Good Times Emporium in Assembly Square. Projected on the screens were an array of underfed young men, dressed in plain old jeans and t-shirts. They sat in cars with the doors open, or lay on the ground near the cars. They were supposed to be dead.

But they were not. They were so not dead, in fact, that some of them kept blinking. Some appeared to have fallen asleep and were breathing the sort of deep breaths that are rare in the dead. This went on for a while, during which time there was exactly no violence or exciting stuff. Then a title flashed on the screen: “4 puertas, 5 cuerpos.” Four doors, five bodies. And then it started over. And then I went to the gift shop.

Maybe we’re done with museums. Last weekend, for example, we tried to enjoy the spoils of Catalunya differently, by going to a house we had rented in a town called Argestues. There would be no festivals, no parades, no museums or castles. Just a lot of mountains and goats. Though no mountain goats. In fact, we got stuck behind a herd of goats on Friday night when we were driving up there. Luckily we were almost there when that happened.

Like most of our unstructured time in Spain (and, I suppose, in the rest of Europe, and also in the US) we broke the day into manageable portions by eating, sleeping, and thinking about what to make for the following meal. Early Saturday, after frying ourselves on the house’s front deck for a while, some of us ventured into town for provisions. “Venturing into town,” when you’re in Arguestues, means driving down a mountain, across a river, and on a little highway for twenty minutes. Then you’re in Organyá, a wild metropolis consisting of one street, one general store, eight cafés, five or six meat markets that sell raw meat, five or six different meat markets that sell cured meat, and about four bakeries. We bought something at each of them, including an ice cream cake, and headed back up the mountain.

Then it was time for fire. We grilled whatever we could get our hands on and had, well, a little too much meat, to be frank. There was a field of sheep below, admittedly a little hard to find cute while you are grilling a lamb chop. Dominos was played.

Later, three of us went for a walk. It would have been a hike, since we were in the mountains, but it occurred on a dirt road and therefore, in my mind, doesn’t qualify. In search of a river to in which to swim, we came upon a mildly scary looking family who did not appear to have left the mountains in a few generations. They were holding pointy sticks. Yes, the pointy sticks were about to be placed in a tomato garden, but they were scary people holding pointy sticks all the same. Albert (not the one who lives in our building) talked to them for a while in Catalan, and I could tell he was a little scared himself because he stopped swearing while he did it. If you had seen him hold the baby who belonged to the couple that owns the house we rented, swearing in the same voice you would use to say something like, “Hey, you’re a nice baby,” or whatever, you would know how surprised I was.

Soon we found the river, after turning left at the pile of abandoned bedsprings as we had been instructed. It led to a small waterfall and was so cold that it hurt your feet to step into it. That, however, didn’t stop Albert from getting in in a hurry and taking Katie, his wife, with him. It was a very good river.

Blah, blah, blah, more grilling, more dominoes, more grilling, more dominoes. No conceptual art, unless you count meat and dominoes. And at one point, we turned on the tv. It was about three in the morning. We quickly saw the Mighty Ducks pop in three goals against the Devils – live – and went to bed. Satisfied that they wouldn’t close out the Stanley Cup that night, which would have led to some kind of big celebration, which would have meant a crowd, which, even on TV, we’re trying to avoid these days, we went to bed. We had to be up early to start the fire, look at the mountains, not go to museums, and plan lunch.

We were not a part of this.

Have you ever met anyone who ran a chocolate factory? Isn’t the hardest thing keeping yourself from asking about the Oompa Loompas? Paul, Denise, and I spent nearly an hour making conversation with a man getting ready to open an artisanal chocolate shop in Colorado. Paul opened the conversation by insulting the guy, when he asked if it would be like some other Colorado-themed chocolate. The answer was no: this chocolate would be made directly from beans. Most chocolate factories just buy chocolate (the gall) and make it into other things.

This guy was the sort of artisanal chocolate maker – we’ve all met them – who assumes everyone else is at least pretty familiar with the vocabulary surrounding chocolate-making. There are terms for the big things that crush the beans, for example, and he used them a few times while discussing the old equipment he had discovered in this or that factory. He talked about factory parts a lot, then told me I should buy a computer program to improve my Spanish pronunciation, and added that lots of Spaniards had asked him where his accent was from. I think he was taking it as a complement, like they were expecting an answer along the lines of “Montevideo,” but I think, personally, that they meant something more like, “Edinborough” or “Yellow Knife.” Not that my pronunciation is all that great, mind you – I was ordered to go to a special class with all the British and Asian students, in fact, to improve it – but I don’t think spending more time with the computer, while living in Spain, is the best idea.

Anyhow, we heard about beans and things, then went off to see Barcelona’s best kept secret: Los Dragons, of American football fame. Arancha and Philippe have season tickets (!) and Saturday was “take someone, anyone, please, to see the Dragons” Day. A crowd of maybe 3000 watched the Claymores score 5 touchdowns on their first 6 possessions and run all over our beloved Dragons. Stat of the day? Despite racking up 31 first downs to our 13, Scotland only had five third downs. All those touchdowns really help the stats. By the end, the players were so bored that when we yelled their names, they were willing to wave to the camera. All of them, that is, except a grouchy-looking former Brown University superstar, who refused to acknowledge Paul’s perfect rendition of “We Are Ever True to Brown.” He didn’t even crack a smile when Paul won a free shirt.

The Spanish contingent in the stands gave no indication of caring about the score, though they did begin a cheer which translates to, “We are going to win the game.” We were assured that it was sarcastic, which was easy to believe, since it began when we were losing 45-0. Barça did score a touchdown with about a minute to go in order to get some names in the paper, but by then the fans were throwing confetti at each other and mooning the referee. The Dragons have been outscored 92-20 in the last two weeks, but remain tied for second place. World Bowl, here we come.

Saint Otto is the patron saint of, among other things, mad dogs and rabies. Perhaps this mildly unappetizing association is why the otherwise forthcoming wait staff at Ot, a restaurant we hit on Thursday with Paul and Denise, declined to tell us about it, even in the face of questioning delivered in no doubt flawless Spanish.

Me: What does “Ot” mean?
Waiter: It is a saint’s name. In German it is…it is…um…
Us: Otto?
Waiter: Otto, yes.
Me: And he is the saint of what?
Waiter: A saint, you know, like a holy person.
Me: Yes, I know. But the saint of what?
Waiter: Like at church.
Me: Does he…represent anything?
Waiter: (looking puzzled) You know, a saint. A person, from a church.
Me: Ok, thanks.

I looked around quickly for the old woman with six teeth, but she was not on the premises. He was working alone on this one. But he hadn’t been during dinner. The tasting menu at Ot requires a team of explaining, carrying, and clearing specialists. First, they set out a little tray of olives, and then poured us olive oil from Girona in one small bowl and Tarragona in the other. Girona, in case you were wondering, was better.

Next a small cube of buffalo mozzarella on a toothpick appeared in front of each of us. It was covered with a little tomato confit and sitting in a pool of vanilla oil. After having something that tastes like vanilla, most people enjoy a little octopus, and so we were overjoyed to see the next course: guacamole with octopus sashimi. It was served in a spoon the likes of which you have seen in bowls of wonton soup. It was, as Denise pointed out, nice to be told exactly how to eat these curious courses. Both were excellent.

A salad of squid cut into noodles, grilled calçots, romesco sauce, and fancy lettuce then led us to a cold asparagus soup with a ball of lime granita and an – quick, what goes with lime ices? – an oyster. Ot was still batting 1.000. Who knew squid made such a nice noodle? One could make a case that the point of going out to dinner is to eat things you are unlikely to prepare for yourself at home. If so, this was well on its way to being worth it.

Another kind of thing we usually don’t cook at home is the meat-from-pig-heads family of food. And so the next course kept the streak alive. A slice of porgy, grilled and laid on line of celery mousse, covered with a sauce of reduced red wine, shared space with a capipota ravioli. Cap means head, and pota means foot, and those are parts of animals that we prefer to leave in the market. But again it was all delicious. The celery mousse was very…uh…celery-y (Can you think of an adjective that describes the taste of celery?) and the head scraps and feet scraps went nicely with the red wine sauce.

Next came the traditional Catalan combination of rabbit and snails. Yet again, we were in no danger of finding this course inferior to how we might have made it ourselves. They were served in a sort of stickless shish-kebab style, small bits arranged in a nice neat row. Among the bits were cubes of baby garlic polenta with soy sprouts on top of them. Another hit. For a couple of garden pests, rabbit and snails are pretty good.

Next they brought out a cheese course – we were instructed to begin San Felicien, which is a mild French raw-milk cheese that had the sweet taste of stickin’ it to the FDA. Next, muenster, followed by some kind of fruit jelly, to get ready for the last cheese: tupi. This one, sitting in the bottom right corner of the plate in a small schmear, looked pretty unthreatening. However, one of our four waiters warned us that it was to be saved for last, to be eaten with jelly, and, essentially, to be feared. It contained milk, olive oil, and aguardiente, which is some sort of liquor about which everyone disagrees on the matter of ingredients. It was strong, as we had been warned, but not too strong that it couldn’t be overcome by…

…watermelon soup, of course. With some kind of fresh cheese in the middle. This one, we all agreed, we had made at home: cut up a watermelon, put the pieces in a container, wait a few days. This marked the beginning of dessert. Next came ginger ice cream with a sort of banana chip wedged in the middle of it, thin broiled orange slices, things called “clouds” that I can only describe as tiny homemade marshmallows, and tiny chocolates with curry. All that and some pineapple foam as well. The whole lot was neither too sweet nor too adventurous and took us home nicely. We were left not too full but not hungry either, in that rare way that you can sometimes think about how good food has just been but also definitely not want any more of it right at that moment. It was a feeling of satisfaction that we agreed could only be compared to knowing that, as we ate, we had also been completely protected from both angry dogs and rabies. Thanks, Saint Otto.