Saturday, January 29, 2011

Do you eat sand in Spain?


Do you eat sand in Spain? I like to eat sand for breakfast. 
I was talking to a guy who really wants to come to Canada, because he loves the cold. He was trying out his English after an English class down the street, and was in the bar with his other classmates. He insisted that I should speak to him in Spanish, and he to me in English. I have been singing about “arena” along with Camaron, for quite some time now, and should not have gotten it mixed up with “avena”, which I just bought the other day. I could see through the package, so knew it had to be either what I was looking for, or else a close variant, like rye or wheat flakes.
Gaetane set out to find us some amigos the other night. This is not something I would normally go to a bar to do. You have to look for the bars that are overflowing. If people are sitting down at tables, it is no good. You are not going to meet anyone there. We tried some orange wine and ordered two glasses of refrigerated, expensive red at a cute little hole in the wall in trendy Santa Cruz. But after having a smoke, Gaetane started to look bored and tired due to lack of friendly people around us. That's when we encountered el sitio.

The bartender was a skinny woman, with a sharp wit, and seemed to include everyone while she talked and poured beer. A minute later we found our amigos.
Gaetane is my housemate, and is on a gutsy mission, in my estimation: here from Paris for about 10 days in order to improve her Spanish, for an upcoming job change, she decided to enroll in a crash course in flamenco dance, rather than study language, per se, in some boring classroom. As she knows little about flamenco, I took her to the pena with me the other night. It was a proper concert, with two young performers, singer and guitarist. For a couple songs, they were backed up by palmeros, one of whom (in sneakers) danced a stunning bulerias at the end. The sneakers may sound less than serious, but this concert was puro (hence very little dancing). The young woman singing was incredible, and guitarist no less. 

I have a new hypothesis that Sangre Latino is just the same sangre as the rest of ours. It just gets heated up more in the summer down here by the Mediterranean. At this point in the winter, the men are acting like Canadian men. Neither of the guys we talked to last night tried to hit on us at all. We both talked to them for quite a while, and had great conversations that everyone was enjoying. They told us they always go there after their classes Thursday, but never asked for our phone numbers or told us we were guapa.
In fact, as I said earlier, hardly any men have even called me guapa. Part of that may be due to the fact that I've not been very guapa, with ratty hair sticking out below my perpetual purple wool hat.

3 comments:

  1. I think you're on to something with your sangre latino theory, however, I would add consumption of spicy peppers to the list of "heating up" factors. Certainly wakes me up, whereas "Canadian" food (if there still is such a thing) tends to make me sleepy.

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  2. Hmm... I'll have to test that out a bit more. Do you think they have aphrodesiac properties?

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  3. But Mediterranean food isn't necessarily that spicy, unlike Latino food. They call stuff spicy here that barely has any spice in it... so maybe Latinos have even more hot blood than Mediterraneans. Maybe they are the ones to really watch out for!!

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