Hasta la Próxima

From the private terrace outside the penthouse apartment we were given when the heat in the apartment we paid for didn’t work, it now looks like this version of us in Spain is about to come to an end. Except for some last-minute watercolor painting that “we” have to do and a couple of bars we haven’t hit yet, it’s time to say adios one more time to the:

One-way streets that are so close to being zero-way streets that I almost lost a part of an arm.

Products that are developed from objectively terrible concepts.

Awkward English translations of pretty simple phrases that could easily have been copied from signs in front of almost every store on the block.

Recognition that while a picture says a thousand words, sometimes it’s impossible to figure out which thousand words the picture is saying.

Reus

We made an unplanned detour to Reus, once the second-most wealthy city in Catalonia because of its textile trade.

When you are the wealthiest, most prominent couple in the second most wealthy and prominent city in Catalonia, and you give the most famous architect in Spain free reign to design and build you a house with a cheque blanco, this is what you get. Including, in 1905, running water, electricity, flush toilets, telephones and radiant floor heating.

Much like me, Spain has a little bit of an independent streak. And because of this, when it designed its national railway system it didn’t bother to check to see how wide the tracks were in the rest of Europe. As a result, all of Spain’s train tracks have a slightly different width than the tracks in the rest of the continent, whose countries were better at cooperating. Now that Spain sees the benefit of sharing with others, it is adding a third rail to countless miles of track so that both Spanish and non-Spanish trains can travel on them. Which is my roundabout way of saying that because of rail construction we couldn’t take a train back to Barcelona as originally planned. But happily, the national railway provided a free luxury bus to take us to the closest available station and we got a train from there to Barcelona.

And it’s Martha’s birthday so we got to do whatever she wanted, which unsurprisingly turned out to be going to a bar for dinner. And we didn’t have trouble getting a table because eating dinner at 8:30 means that we’re in and out a good hour before everyone else starts thinking about dinner.

Vila Seca

There are clear benefits to travelling here in January, especially in a small town like Vila Seca where our friend Robert lives, because the streets are quiet, there are no lines anywhere and the shelves in the bakeries are full of doughy things still warm from coming out of the oven next door.

But it is an enormously bigger benefit to travel here in January because you can learn about the famous Catalonian shitting log (or for more sensitive readers, “pooping” log), which was the primary Christmas tradition around here before everything got Americanized.

With roots going back to ancient traditions that I’m going to say originated with frustrated parents trying to figure out a way to get their kids to contribute to maintaining the house by dragging some logs into the house to burn, the shitting log tradition encompasses all of the characteristics we treasure in the holiday season, tenderness, nourishment, violence, shitting and candy.

Around the middle of December, we bring a log into the house and give it a face, then cover it with a blanket so that it doesn’t get cold. For the next couple of weeks, the kids feed it every day by forcing food into its face. Then around Christmas time everyone notices that the log hasn’t um . . . gone to the bathroom despite eating all that food. 

So the kids hit it violently with sticks while singing a song that includes the lyrics “don’t poop hazelnuts that we don’t like, poop nougat,” trying to get its intestines moving a little. The kids then go into another room for a few minutes to concentrate real hard on the topic of what success looks like in this context, and when they return they find that the log has indeed pooped out a pile of turrones, which is kind of like Spanish peanut brittle.

We took a field trip today to the Parc Natural de la Serra de Montsant, which involved some very windy roads and very beautiful views.

And we also found out why it’s best to have a well-defined budget before construction starts to improve the façade of the town church. If you don’t, you may run out of money before the job is done.