Spain Part 25 – La día de Descansa y Tarea

Alicia left for Granada early on Friday morning, but I slept in for a little bit.  I got up and desayné (ate breakfast) and chilled out reading my book for a little while.  My book is pretty interesting, I bought it at a librería (bookstore) in the Plaza de la Virgen, and it’s basically a book about at the reading level of a teenager, but I’m having fun learning from it.  Unfortunately it took me the entire morning to get through half the book because I had to keep looking up words or asking Lucía for help translating phrases.  Lucía is so helpful, but she does tend to explain herself using about 5 or 6 very interesting stories.  I have to make sure I have an hour or so to kill before asking her a question.

 

For almuerzo we had a sopa con chorizo with some ensalada and watched the telediario (news).  There’s a lot going on here environmentally, the winds in the south are really bad right now and the hotel owners are worried that not as many tourists will come for the festival de Fallas which is in less than a month.  I don’t know whether that will be good or bad for around here, I’m guessing we might end up with more people here if they don’t want to go to the south so the streets will be even more crowded.

 

I spent the better part of the afternoon finishing my book, which ended sadly like every piece of Spanish literature I’ve ever read, but I did finally get around to doing some homework before pasapalabra y la cena.  I had a bocadillo, with super fresh bread.  I am seriously going to miss the bread here when I get back to the US.  I’m sure there are similar things, but even the fresh baguettes that I’ve had in the states isn’t the same as this bread.  It’s impossible to explain.

 

On the subject of food, I actually do miss something from the US that is hard to find here.  They don’t use peanut butter.  In fact, the next time someone asks you for an example of authentic American food tell them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because that’s something that I’ve yet to see here, even in any of the “American” food places.  Which reminds me, apparently the bread that McDonalds uses for burgers in most of the world did not go over well in Spain, so they switched to using bocatas.  McDonalds conquered the burguesa de pollo y pavo (most of the burgers here are made of chicken and/or turkey) with the Big Mac but they couldn’t mess with the pan (bread).  Españoles know their pan. 

 

I spent the night experimenting with internet signal in the casa.  There’s a network that we seem to be able to pick up here, but only in the comedor.  It isn’t a strong signal so the internet is kind of slow, but it works.  We have to be careful about using it I think because I don’t think that Lucía would approve.