While my parents were staying with us in Madrid last week, I was reminded that I love small-town life. My parents come from Sioux Center, Iowa, population 6,500. They are small-town people.

Case in point. A piece of paper was taped up in the lobby of our apartment building a couple weeks ago that said this past week, the week my parents were visiting, a group of electricians would be working in our building to replace all the old wiring.

Monday morning after my parents gave up waiting for us to eat breakfast and decided to go get croissants from the orange bakery just around the corner (it’s the orange bakery because it doesn’t have a name that we know of, just an orange sign), I heard my parents at the door returning from the bakery while I was scraping my toast in the kitchen. My mom said Dad wanted to buy a croissant for the guy working with the wires in our hallway, so they did. They bought him a croissant, but my mom said he wouldn’t take it at first. He thought they were making some mistake. But finally he understood and took the croissant and ate it. My mom asked me if it was okay that they had bought a croissant for the guy in the hallway. “He looked so confused,” she said.

I told my mom it was okay that she had bought a croissant for the man in the hallway. My parents came with me to the mercado later that morning to help carry groceries, and I found myself wanting to see the mercado through my parents’ eyes, as if each one of the people standing behind piles of ripening tomatoes or ducking under hanging ham legs to sell me my groceries was actually someone who I could know.
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RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a technology that gives you a simple way to keep track of the latest articles and headlines from your favorite websites.

So for example if you’d like to keep up-to-date on the latest BBC World headlines as well as pick and choose from NPR’s daily “All Things Considered” radio news program, oh and follow what your friends are saying on their blogs, and last, but not least, be the first to read the latest essay on expat life in spain on kellycrull.com, RSS is probably what you’re looking for. It notifies you when new content has been posted on your favorite websites, and it keeps all that information in one place.

What you need to do is get yourself either a RSS newsreader or a RSS-suppported web browser like Firefox or Safari and then subscribe to the RSS feeds at all your favorite websites. The RSS feed for kellycrull.com is here:

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/kellycrull

If you have any other questions about how to use RSS or how to subscribe to the RSS feed for kellycrull.com, send me an email at kelly@caimail.net.

Enjoy!

Kelly

Some American friends and I were at a terrace tonight for drinks. It was a goodbye party of sorts for one of our friends, Zach, who is headed back to California. He was in Madrid for a year studying at the university through a study-abroad program. One of us asked Zach what he was craving to have when he got back to the States. What foods would he eat. What drinks would he drink.

These kinds of questions have almost become a ritual. When you’re living in a foreign country and one of your fellow countrymen heads back home, you ask them to tell you first about all the things they’ve been craving from home and then about how they will indulge themselves and satisfy all their cravings. The whole process is very drawn out with poetic gestures and plenty of embellishment. For an American it might be something like, “I’ll go the grocery store and find the biggest package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cuts I can find.” For my English friends, they talk about Vimto and gravy granules. In all cases, there are nods of approval all around.

So my friends and I at the terrace followed in suit and asked the question. At the same time, our waiter came around with a tray-full of glasses and bottles.

An easy one for Zach. “Free refills,” he said–welcome words to any American I know. In The States, free refills are a standard. In Europe, refills don’t exist.
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My parents left today. They’ve hopefully landed in Chicago already. My dad and I played a lot of frisbee in the park these last couple of weeks while they were staying with us. I still remember the frisbee advice my dad used to give me as a kid. “It’s all in the wrist,” he’d say.

Well, this week it was my turn to give my dad the same bit of advice. We were at my favorite paella place, Arrocería Gala, (the kind of place you only go to once a year when your parents are visiting) and for dessert I asked the waiter to bring out some porrón, a Spanish dessert wine.

Some say that drinks like cider, for example, taste the best just after they’ve been poured from the bottle. In fact, I was just in San Sebastian, a town known for its cider, and traditionally their cider is served only one or two sips at a time. They say the cider is the best just after it has been poured. I’ve ever heard someone say that a chemical reaction occurs in cider as it is being poured that brings out the full flavor.

People go so far with this thinking that they’ll put their cider glass on the floor, stand on top of their chair, and attempt to pour the cider into the glass from a distance of two meters or so just to get the best results from their cider.

Anyway, the same is true for porrón. The flavor is best just after it’s been poured, and the longer the wine is in motion before it hits your glass, the better.

So, my fellow Spaniards have concocted a funny device for drinking porrón. It’s this glass jug with a long spout that comes to a point. There’s a tiny hole at the end with a diameter equal to a spaghetti noodle.

Here’s where the frisbee advice comes in. The trick is to hold the jug above your head, aim the spout at your face (!), and flick your wrist. If the wine gods are on your side, you’ll feel a tickle at the back of your mouth, and the wine will create a perfect arc from the spout into your mouth.

If you’re truly after a full-flavored porrón, or just want to impress the Mrs., you’ll carefully pull the jug away from your mouth, so the wine is a good distance away. I think my dad, the one in the photo, managed maybe a hand’s length or more between the spout and his mouth.

And if you’re not so lucky, you’ll have wine stinging your eyes and dripping from your nose. And in some rare cases if your mom happens to be in town visiting and sitting next to you, you may find her dipping her napkin in her glass of water and smearing it all over your face before you even have a chance to say anything.

I want to introduce you to my preferred drink of the summer. It’s called tinto de verano. The name literally means “summer wine”. It’s a very basic drink, only two ingredients really–wine and ginger ale. You can use almost anything to substitute for the ginger ale as long as it has a lemony flavor to it. As far as the wine goes, any Spaniard will tell you there is one thing to keep in mind when you are selecting a wine to make your tinto de verano–the wine has to be cheap. That’s right. Mediocre quality is a must.

I’ve had a finger waving in my face more than once because I got lazy and used a low to mid-scale wine to make tinto de verano because I didn’t have any of the cheap stuff on hand. I’m not sure if this is common around the world, but here in Spain, stores actually sell wine in what looks to me like an Orange Juice box. A typical box of wine here in Spain will set you back maybe 60 cents.

I’m still not sure why box wine makes the flavor of tinto de verano just right, but after only a year of experience, I can tell you box wine is a must.

I’d also like to add one more ingredient to the mix since we’re talking about my preferences after all. It’s nothing I’d add to the drink itself. It’s more of a suggested atmosphere. If at all possible, I suggest drinking tinto de verano outside, and if I can get really technical, I’d drink it on an outside restaurant terrace around a table with some friends at about 9 o’clock at night when the sun is on it’s way out.

Many of the restaurants here in Madrid set up tables outside in the summer. I love living in Madrid the most when I’m sitting at one of these terrazas with friends drinking a tinto de verano. I’m almost snobbish enough to think that you can only really drink tinto de verano when you’re here in Spain sitting at a terrace. But I won’t go there.

Head to the grocery store. Pick up a bottle of ginger ale (7-Up, Lemon Fanta, or Lemon Sweppes will do just fine) and a bottle of the cheapest wine you can find, and you’re set to enjoy the summer! Enjoy!

I haven’t had many experiences with watching dance performances. Before I moved to Madrid, my experience didn’t go any further than my sister-in-law’s 6th grade dance recital, which involved about 50 acts crammed into 2 hours, and about 200 too many family members piled on top of each other in a box theater that very quickly took on the nostalgic aroma of a junior high boy’s locker room.

My friend Paul broadened my experience with dance performance this past fall when he invited April and me to join him and a friend to see the Compañía Nacional de Danza.

The experience was proof that good art can change you, even if you know nothing about the art form itself, and possibly more significant, the experience was proof that good art is not actually meant to draw attention to itself or to the artist, to make the viewer think the art is good and skillful and altogether well done. No, good art is transparent. Good art gives the spectator the sense that what’s going on on the stage is actually the most natural and right way of expressing one’s self. In the case of dance, suddenly the movement of the human body becomes the most natural way of saying “I love you” or of asking yourself “Who am I?” or of expressing any one of a thousand truths we live with.

This idea that good art is transparent is why I’ve always loved reading John Updike. When I read Updike, it’s only a matter of minutes before I forget that I’m reading someone else’s words, and I begin actually believing that the words on the page are my own, the characters in the story, these are the characters of my life.

When I saw the posters in the metro this past week for not the first company, but the second, called the Compañía Nacional de Danza 2, I couldn’t resist going to the show. April and I went, and we dragged a few friends along. The new company, the second one, was just as good as the first. Just as transparent. I highly recommend the show to anybody.