At long last, Santoña finds itself in the middle of what everyone has been warning me about — cold, wet, dreary winter days. With Thursday as an exception, this whole week has been doldrums-inducing weather. There is a perpetual drizzle, and the sun’s balmy rays are nowhere to be felt. On top of all this, my apartment, until this very afternoon, has been without heating. This has frankly been brutal. The past week or so it has gotten so cold at around 10 or 11, I have had to retreat to the blankets and covers of my bed and continue what I was doing there, oftentimes going to sleep with my toes still cold as icicles. Getting up in the morning and leaving my blanket-haven has been an ordeal like no other, and I have had to altogether remove cold showers from my routine because I remain cold for the rest of the day. I also have Raynaud’s, so I think I am especially susceptible to being uncomfortably cold.
But today I have received heating, and all is well and good. Honestly, I am somewhat thankful I’ve had this experience because, as someone who has lived my whole life in the taken-for-granted-comfort of adequately heated spaces, I now see it for the necessity it is. I also started to reflect upon how poorly designed my apartment is for heat-retention and insulation, and how much cozier a little one-room-wooden-cabin-with-a-wood-stove would be.
I will say this weather is making me excited to return home to sunny ole Florida for a couple weeks, where I will be, all things to plan, on Friday. I should let you know that this will likely mean a pause in these updates for a couple weeks, as I’m not sure I will have anything eventful enough to write about. But maybe I’ll do a post on some reflections of USA life with the clarity living in Spain for a few months has given me. TBD.
Notwithstanding the weather, this week has had some good bright spots. I had another good week of class — less classes than usual as many teachers gave exams during this week — where I did some Christmas themed activities (presentation on USA Christmas, Christmas-themed escape room), as well as talked about the Oxford English Dictionary word of the year with the older kids: brain rot. Many of them confessed they suffered from this malady, and there seemed to be a general feeling of resignment over any cure. My brain is rotting and rotted, they told me with a shoulder shrug, and so it shall remain (in simpler English, but still).
This day in class was just further evidence for something that in past months and years has been revealed with more and more lucidity — that social media has been and is horrendous for youth. I say youth because I think most of the data on this stuff focuses on teenagers, but it has certainly negatively affected people my age and on into people in their 30s as well. I have been following the growing debate over it as it unfolds around the world (Australia passed a ban for under-16 usage a few weeks ago), and America has a bill up for consideration now that would be a pretty huge step in the right direction. Jonathan Haidt is probably the most outspoken guy on this stuff right now, and he has some compelling stuff on Substack, for ye who may be interested: https://substack.com/home/post/p-153038711.
On Tuesday, Cris had bought me some mussels from the market to cook, and on Tuesday night I was planning to cook them but noticed these gnarly red worms inhabiting the white barnacles on the shells. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it had I been boiling the mussels on their own, but I was planning on cooking them in a red sauce for pasta, and so was a little wary. I am pretty surprised I haven’t been sick here yet, and don’t want to push my luck.
So I waited until Wednesday, and Cris came over to check it out (partly for her own self-assurance; she had already eaten the same batch earlier). She texted the women at the fish market who said those were normal and die when you cook them, so it was no problem. I proceeded full steam (pun intended) ahead, and cooked the mussels and added them to the pasta I had made the day before. They were tasty and for 5 euro a kilo, a hard-to-beat fresh market buy.
I will, however, add a note here. Thoreau has a section in Walden where he talks about how every now and then he’ll catch a fish from the pond and clean and cook it, but then wonders if it is really worth it for the mess and effort. I thought of that section after I made these mussels, because to me it often just wasn’t worth it. You have to clean the mussels and remove the “beard,” then you boil them and have a bunch of shells and used plates, and in the end only get a wee bit of meat. I think there’s a good argument to be made for living as a vegetarian solely for the simplicity of it as a culinary lifestyle. You don’t have to cut and gut and fret over freshness or rawness or any of it. I’ll be dammed if I ever find a worm inhabiting my black beans.
Thursday I didn’t have class, so I decided to take advantage of this and head to Bilbao to hang out and see a symphony concert. This was the one good-weather day of the week, and made for a beautiful bus-ride along the northern Spanish coast (the highway basically parallels the Camino del Norte, which is neat) as I made my way into Bilbao late morning. I walked around in the hopes of doing some shopping for Christmas gifts, but sadly didn’t have much luck here anywhere. After checking into my hostel, I got some pizza (my first pizza in Spain. A very solid and respectable 8/10).
I had realized Bilbao had a symphony orchestra a week or so prior, and checked the upcoming concerts to see if there were any Christmas/Holiday Pops ones I could catch. There were not, but there was a performance of a Beethoven piece, a Mozart piano sonata, and Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, which is iconic for its first movement, forever immortalized in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The famous scene is at the 6-minute mark, and if you haven’t watched the movie, you should. Kubrick is a veritable genius.
I hadn't heard the Beethoven before, and it was a stunning piece opening with big resounding chords from the string section. The woodwinds come in, and the piece takes on a lightness. It’s Beethoven, though, and soon it is back to the Sturm und Drang, strings at full force and angst. I liked the ending too, which was drawn out and impressive.
I was extremely excited for the 2nd “Adagio” movement of the Mozart concerto. I had been watching a Terrence Mallick film with my parents before leaving for Spain that employed this movement a lot in the movie, and I had listened to it a lot since then, so was excited to hear it performed live. It was very well done.
The Strauss first movement was one of the greatest things I have heard performed live. Some of this has to do with the fame of that movement, but hearing it in a concert hall, seeing the timpani and everything was remarkable. I had never heard this whole opus either and everything put together was special. Overall a phenomenal show with some classical crème de la crème on display.
I had a horrendous night at my hostel (automatic lights in the room that are triggered when anyone gets up? A bathroom/shower that is separated by a curtain which doesn’t block out any light or sound? Communal lockers which were 2 feet from my bunk?), which maybe should be expected for the 15 euro price tag, and I was ready to get outta there in the morning.
Friday, yesterday, was the end-of-semester teacher lunch. This was held in a neighboring pueblo, Escalante, at a nice restaurant. Because I didn’t have class Friday, Cris set me up with some other teachers who were finished early and I went to get a drink with them. From the time I met them to get a drink, at around 1:15, to the time I got back home, around 10, I was speaking Spanish, which was probably the most sustained usage I have ever had. It was empowering, and I am starting to feel pretty comfortable in social situations. I still f*ck up a lot, and nod + say sí to a lot of things that I didn’t actually understand, but I do so with confidence and a burgeoning ability to work around what I don’t understand or know how to say.
The meal was a full-on Spanish almuerzo. First course was a delicious salad with berries and walnuts and some cooked cheese in the center. It was actually the first time I had seen a salad of this nature in Spain, which was refreshing. Whatever nutritional benefits there were in this rare Spanish salad were immediately were offset by the next course — an array of croquettes, calamari and some other fried seafood thing I forgot the name of. After that was a dish of clams in green sauce, something I hadn’t had yet in Spain, which were tasty enough, though a little difficult to eat because of how small they were. Main dish was either a red meat (pork maybe?) and frites, or some merluza (fish) which I got. The merluza was a tad underwhelming for the caliber of this restaurant (this was agreed upon by all afterwards), though still quite good. Dessert was one of the best desserts I have had. It was ice cream with a little cookie on top, and a slice of cheesecake, quite possibly the best cheesecake I have ever had (it really may have been better than the San Sebastián cheesecake I had with Heather). The ice cream was sweet but also tasted like yogurt, which I loved. MAN, I’m salivating just thinking about it again. Sadly I took no pictures of this sumptuous meal.
I happened to be sitting in the worst possible seat for this whole meal, directly in between both tables, to where I wasn’t really part of either. If you imagine the letter “U,” and the two lines are the two tables, I was at the direct bottom of the slope. Purgatory. No man’s land. Silver lining was I was sitting next to a teacher of Econ (we had a good laugh over our shared social limbo), chatted with him for most of the meal which was great. We even exchanged book recommendations, a good sign, I thought, of our nascent friendship.
We continued the evening with some drinks back in Santoña, which was a swell time. All of it made me realize how isolated the teachers are from one another at Marismas (which isn’t helped by English/French department having its own space where only those teachers hang out), and it was kind of sad to realize a few months had passed and I had only met a salt pinch worth of the faculty. I even learned there were several other faculty in their 20s, and had a good time meeting them. Perhaps this kind of thing is what workplace environments in the real-world are generally like (people go to work, do their work, and then go home to their separate lives and families or whatever), but I think its no good. If I ran the school I would have like once-a-week social hour, coffee or drinking or something so all the teachers could meet and hang out.
These reflections bring me up to the present moment, where evening descends here in Spain and I gear up to begin my night shift working on the anchovy boats. Kidding. I don’t really have weekend plans, catching up on some applications for things in my #postSpainfuture, making some vegetable stock and going to try to go to Santander for some shopping Monday. Also working my way through a Thoreau biography. Riveting stuff over here.
That’s all I got today, arrivederci. Good tidings (realized typing this that I had no idea what a tiding was but am now correctly informed) and Feliz Navidad.
🎄
-Will
Basque style. Perfect ratio of firmness to softness, this one had an almost crème brûlée type flavor to the top layer. And to think I didn’t used to like cheesecake.
This was a great read. I envy your cheesecake experience. The cheesecake here is extremely spongy and light, which leaves me craving a true dense/creamy slab from home. Is this cheesecake you’re eating Basque-style cheesecake? Or NY style?