Week 19

By Aaron

Lost in Translation: 
Last Friday we celebrated Joni's birthday with a gathering of friends at Cafe Manuela - a cozy establishment that features a collection of board games for patrons to play.  It didn't occur to us until we started looking at the games that, of course, they were all Spanish.  We had a good turnout of friends, but unfortunately only one of them spoke at a level of Spanish that would have made the games fun.  This was only momentarily problematic, as it soon became clear that we all had a decent enough grasp on Spanish vocabulary that we could translate on the fly and play Taboo and Headbandz.

                                                                                                  
There was also some confusion with our seating arrangement.  Joni called ahead and made a reservation, but when we arrived the (owner? manager? headwaiter?) told us that we had a table with one condition - that we move to another table around 9.  Apparently a group meets every Friday night of the year, and we had been given their table since the cafe was busier than anticipated.  It seemed a reasonable request, and sure enough we were asked to shift to another table around 9:30.  The most confusing part about the whole thing was that the group that arrived to take our place were all wearing masks with the face of one of their members.  We never did figure out for sure what kind of group this was, but I would not be surprised to discover it was some sort of cult.  One thing that had no elements of confusion whatsoever was the juice that Joni had - it was kiwi mango and it was out of this world!

Exploring the City: Against the better advice of at least two different people (neither of whom are Spanish), we set out to explore the Christmas market that has taken up residence in Plaza Mayor.  There is a nice seasonal market in DC we enjoyed visiting that featured food and crafts from local merchants, and had similar expectations for this market.  It turns out that the stalls setup in this plaza sell two distinct categories of goods: figurines for nativity scenes, and prizes you would expect to find at a Chuck E. Cheese.  The scale of the market was pretty insane - there are nearly 100 booths, and so many of them had identical goods for sale.  It was nice to see a lot of families enjoying themselves, but perhaps our expectations were a bit too high.



We've lived 20 minutes from a gigantic fabric store for three months, and Joni finally made her first visit this past Saturday.  She acted as a consultant to Cat, who has decided to buy a sewing machine.  The agreement is that Joni will teach Cat how to sew in exchange for access to use the machine.  On Tuesday, they had their first lesson which left Cat excited and Joni over the moon.  It had been a solid five months since she last used a machine to sew, a significant span of time to go without something that partially defines her.

   
Memorable Meal: While the womenfolk busied themselves crafting, Ben and I had our hands full in the kitchen.  I took advantage of the oven (we're really desperate for appliances, in case you couldn't tell) to bake a large batch of sugar cookies, and Ben gathered and prepared ingredients for an excellent southwest shrimp/chicken salad with cilantro lemon dressing.  I'm not sure if we've mentioned it previously, but Spain is not hip to the idea of flavor-filled salads (typically it's just lettuce and tomato, with oil and vinegar for dressing).  So we're pretty ecstatic whenever something like this comes our way, and are greatly indebted to Ben and Cat once again for the excellent meal.

En la clase: This past week was a short one for us, since Tuesday and Thursday were holidays in Spain.  I still had all of my Monday/Wednesday classes, but Joni ended up working a whopping 3 hours on the week.  Since we don't work on Fridays this meant we have a four day weekend...so we decided to go to Paris!  More on the trip next week.

Final Notes:
Much of our week was spent getting in the holiday spirit - from visiting a Christmas market to painting ornaments to baking cookies, eating a ton of turrón and crafting a tree skirt for our little Christmas tree. Joni went all out and spent about 3 days on this hand sewing project.   Oh, and all the while drinking hot chocolate, listening to Christmas music, and watching Hallmark/Lifetime/Ion made-for-TV Christmas movies.  The mood is generally pretty festive in Madrid, and we are really looking forward to a variety of seasonal activities as the 25th draws near.

Joni made this prior to having sewing machine access.  That's right, ALL BY HAND!

Our tiny tree, completely dressed!

One of the hand-painted ornaments...more to follow