Thanksgiving

This year Ben and I got to celebrate two Thanksgivings. Our Bible study, which has some Americans, is on Thursday nights so the leaders bought a turkey and we all chipped in with side dishes. It was a great night filled with lots of laughter and yummy food.

Saturday, our friend Shaunna from my program and her roommate hosted a Thanksgiving dinner. This dinner consisted of people from Great Britian, Spain, Ireland and the USA. We fit about 30 people into their small apartment and enjoyed some delicious traditional Thanksgiving food along with some less traditional food like sushi and the Spanish tortilla. After we finished eating we split up into teams, the Europeans and the Americans.  The Europeans wrote down 10 words in Spanish and we Americans wrote down 10 words in English. The theme was "Thanksgiving" of course! We traded words and played pictionary with them. We had to guess the word in the respective language though. This game put my Spanish to the test.

Although we missed being at home with family and friends to celebrate, we enjoyed having two Thanksgivings here.

Thanksgiving #1:

 

Thanksgiving #2

 

Playing multilingual Pictionary. The American Team:

I had to draw: peregrino (pilgrim)

Ben had to draw: relleno (stuffing)

Jamón Chips

The Spanish are obsessed with pork and more specifically Jamón.  Jamón is a dry cured ham leg that is sliced very thin. There are at least 100 different kinds of Jamón. I recently found some Jamón flavored chips which taste amazing. 

The Mercado

Madrid has about 10-20 Mercados scattered throughout the city. These Mercados are large warehouse buildings filled with small individual stalls. Each stall is owned by a different family or farm. One of the largest of these Mercados is “Mercado Maravilla” 3 metro stops north from our house.  I love Mercado Maravilla. Encased in this warehouse are well over a 75 stalls and small shops selling everything imaginable. The fruits and vegetables are grown locally and sold by farmers. Most of the produce are Heirloom varieties and several of the family owned farmers boast unique “family” varieties of tomatoes, squash and various vegetables. I have found dark purple tomatoes, 3 foot long orange beans, and red and yellow stripped “Ángel” pumpkins. The lady I buy olives from makes them herself and let me sample all 15 different kinds before I ended up buying some. The butcher shops have every single part or organ of the animal on sale. The fishmongers have fish less than a day old from the ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The crabs, snails, shrimp, lobster, and mussels are all still alive and moving. Many times there will be an occasional snail or crab crawling across the floor attempting to escape. The best way to find the really good stalls is to watch where the little old ladies congregate. These stalls have the best prices or the best quality produce. Every time I have gone to Maravilla it has been packed, and I am usually the only one that speaks English. I have found that I am a bit over confident in my level of Spanish. Most of the time the stall keepers just look really confused at what I am saying and the conversation degrades to a lot of pointing and gesturing.

Last week I was waiting for my number to be called at an extremely popular fruit and vegetable stand for almost 10 minutes. I was getting impatient and was about to leave when finally my number got called. As I reached up to hand the stall keeper my number a little Spanish lady grabbed my arm at the elbow and pulled it down. Shocked, I look at her and she said something to me in Spanish and then pushed in front of me and started to hand her number up. I caught a glimpse of her number and noticed that it was higher than mine and realized that this woman is actually cutting me in line. So I taped her on the shoulder and told her in perfect English “Hey I was first.” She then turned around muttering in Spanish and gesturing wildly. There was no way I was going to let this little 5 foot tall Spanish lady cut me in line. I began to reach over her and she in turn started ramming her small rolling cart into my legs and trying to give the stall clerk her number first. At this point another little lady starts yelling at the cutter providing enough of a distraction for me to get my number in and tell the clerk what I wanted. I win.

The street view of the market. 

My meat guy. 

Dried fruit and nuts.

Jamon, Chorizo ect...

After I am done buying all our food for the week I will stop just before the last row of stalls and have a drink and some tapas at a local Spanish bar. I order a cana of beer and get a free tapa. 

 

 Some of the tapas.

 

Kristin came with me last Saturday and our free tapa was a portion of Paella with our drinks.

My second drink came with fried squid and sardine.

Thank You

For those of you who have been praying for Ben and I, thank you. If there is one thing this experience of getting here to Madrid and getting settled in has taught me, it is that God answers prayers. He may not do it in my timing but he is faithful to take care of His children and provide for them and His answers usually far surpass my expectations/requests.

As most of you know, Ben and I had no clue what he would do in Madrid. Once I started school Ben posted online for being an English tutor and he was quickly hired by an agency. For about 2 months now he has steadily had 6-7 classes a week. Recently, we have been getting a little worried about his visa. His travel visa is up December 5th. He tried appyling for the auxiliar program, (a language assistant) a month ago in the hopes he could get a more steady job and that the program could help him with the visa but they said he would have to go back to San Francisco to get the correct visa and they could not help him.

Meanwhile, we hadn´t heard back from Fernando, the man who helped me get my visa and who said he would be working on Ben´s so I decided to email him. He told me he was still working on it and he would get back to me later. Four weeks go by and Fernando emails me to say he is still working on it but wants Ben´s phone number so that he can give it to the Consejeria de Educacion because they might have a job for him and it will make it easier for him to get his visa if Ben can get hired for this job. So then we started praying about this job. A few days go by and we hadn´t heard from anyone when Ben gets a call at 10pm on Friday. Which is odd because I am pretty sure I am the only one who has his phone number. Ben answers and it is Fernando checking in to see if we have heard from someone yet. When he found out we hadn´t he said he would look into it Monday for us.

Ben got a phone call on Tuesday to come in for an interview. He was hired on the spot and he was able to pick a primary school in Alcorcón which is only a 5 minute walk from my school! Just yesterday Ben recieved his letter of acceptance to the program. We are still waiting to hear back about when the visa will be ready. We have been praying that he won´t have to go back to San Fransico but it doesn´t look good. However, we are trusting that God will work this out too. We are just happy that he will be able to live here legally and work!

My school is the purple bubble and Ben's is the "A". We would walk most of the same route from the metro before splitting off to our schools.

And just a few other updates. I got my NIE card the other day which is an identiy card and proves that I am a legal residence so that was exciting! We will be celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday with our small group and again on Saturday with some friends from my program. So that is a bonus to being out of the States during an American holiday. We get to celebrate it twice!

And another one of Ben´s "moments". (This is the benefit to me writing these blogs. I get to tell on him on all the funny stuff he does!)

My phone that I have here was made for old people. There is a huge button on the back that they can push if they need help and it sends out a text that says "Please help me!" to your emergency contacts. I didn´t have anything to do at school one day during I break so I put Ben and our Bible study leaders in as emergecny contacts. I thought I had disabled the button so I never worried about pressing it. Ben was messing with my phone and all of a sudden an obnoxious noise was coming from the phone and "SOS" was flashing across the screen. I am telling him to make the noise stop when we hear that Ben gets a text that says "Please help me!" I glare at him and then all of a sudden I get a text from our Bible study leader asking "Who is this?" And then I realized it sent texts to the emergency contacts. Thankfully one of them was for a home number so they didn´t get a text. I then had to explain who I was and why she got and SOS text. I told Ben he wasn´t allowed to play with my phone anymore!

14N Huelga (Nov. 14th Strike)

I ended up having Wednesday off because the two teachers that I work with on Wednesdays decided to participate in the strike. It was nice to have a mid-week break.

We woke up to the sounds of helicopters flying around getting video of the protest. After breakfast we decided to go on a walk about to check out the protest.

It was a beautiful day for a protest. Sunny and warm.

This protest is significant because it is for the entire country of Spain and I believe Portugal and Italy decided to have a strike on this particular day too. It is called a general strike because it was not specific to one business or line of work. From small pubs to schools to pharmacies to Starbucks, anyone and everyone could choose to go on strike.

This is the second general strike the labor unions has called for in the last 8 months. It is the first time in history that a general strike has occured multiple times in one year. The strike is for the huge cut in social provisions such as health care, welfare, education and unemployment benefits. 

There was a march in the morning and one for the evening. Someone handed me a flyer explaining that everyone was to meet at fuente cibeles at 7:30pm and they were planning to stay there until 9am the next morning. Fuente cibeles is near all the government buildings so whenever there is a big strike or protest going on, people usually end up there. It is also where the three main roads through Madrid converge so it can be frustrating for drivers because the roads end up being completely blocked off for quite some time.

Overall it seemed to be a peaceful protest. Lots of whistles being blown, flags waved, stickers being stuck and flyers being thrown into the air. 

At one point, we saw people grabbing the road blocks used for construction and placing them across the road to block traffic. They had a taxi cornered and a few people took out their stickers and plastered them on the taxi’s windshield. The police officers had to remove the barriers so that the cars could get through. I believe they eventually had to close down the road because of all the people.

After walking around a bit we decided to head back home and enjoy a relaxing afternoon at home. 

We thought about going back down to fuente cibeles at night to check that out but I didn´t feel like leaving the apartment so we stayed home. I later heard that isolated groups of protestors were starting fires and throwing rocks at policemen which resulted in the use of rubber bullets. So I was glad we didn´t go back down. 

People posted signs such as this one on their businesses: "Closed for general strike"

Fliers were everywhere!

We think the police lined up here because the business behind them was open and they were being heckled by protestors. 

The red stickers were advertising the protest and they were posted everywhere!!

People were pulling out the garbage cans and construccion blockades to block traffic. 

This taxi was a victim of a walk by sticking of stickers. 

Do you see the fliers in the air? This women stood here for about 20 minutes tossing fliers in the air!