It finally feels like fall in Bilbao, Spain! After months of weather wavering between high 60s to low 80s (I still can’t do Celsius, don’t make me try), an anomaly for this part of Spain in October, November has brought cooler, but never quite cold, weather, and lots of rain! I am thrilled by this change, because I love good sweater weather, but the fact that it came so late has been messing with my head a little bit. Like I learned last year in Cambodia with perpetual hot weather, I realize how much growing up in places with four predictably timed seasons conditioned me. While more than two thirds of my time in Spain has now passed, in some ways it still feels like it should be the beginning of October, not halfway through November — purely because of the weather. My inner weatherwoman has not caught up to the reality of the calendar, and now I find myself scrambling! Just as my fellow study abroad students and I are finding our routine and feeling truly settled, we are beginning the final countdown, just one more month to go! So I plan to pack this last month full, to use one of my favorite Spanish verbs, “aprovechar,” to take advantage of all the time I have left!
Because this ticking clock only really hit me this weekend, the past three weeks have been relatively chill and routine, not too many exciting things to report, which is why there’s been a chunk of time between posts. It has been nice, though, to feel settled enough to just spend weekends hanging out with friends, crashing in coffee shops, finding a flow, and even as I run around to do things before I go, I think that sense of confidence and calm will remain with me.
My new host mom has continued to be fantastic. Our meals together are almost always nearly hour long affairs during which she talks my ear off about any number of topics, from her family history to cooking techniques to Spanish politics. It is fun and fascinating, even when I can’t get a word in edgewise! And she is a fantastic cook! Though she herself isn’t a vegetarian, she is super accommodating of me, and has had fun experimenting with new recipes. I even cooked a meal for her one night. The menu was standard fare for me: rice, puffy baked tofu, and a simple pepper stir fry. Easy enough, I’ve made this dozens of times for myself at home, and even several times for over 60 people when I cooked in my co-op at Oberlin. But I have never cooked it in a Spanish kitchen. For those of you who don’t know, European ovens are quite different from American ones. It’s not just the Celsius factor, which is obnoxious but convertible. They are also almost all convection ovens, meaning instead of having heating elements at the bottom and top of the oven, like ours back home, they have a fan that blows hot air throughout the oven. Now, they are arguably more effective at evenly distributing heat and cooking food faster, but if you aren’t used to them, it can get…interesting. My cooking had been going well. My tofu was pressed and had marinated in a mix of balsamic vinegar, white wine, olive oil and herbs for several hours. The veggies were cut, the rice was steaming. All that was left to do was pop the tofu in the oven at 400F (204C) for 15 minutes on each side while I cooked up the veggies, and we’d be in business! My host mom’s oven is “old fashioned,” according to her, so it still has heating elements on the top and bottom that can be turned on optionally in addition to the convection setting. I figured I would just use those, since I was more used to them, so I preheated the oven as I would at home. I don’t want to say it is fortunate that no buildings in Spain seem to have smoke detectors (seriously?! It is 2014), but at the moment I was grateful for that fact, because when I opened the oven door to stick the tofu in, billows of black smoke came pouring out, filling the small kitchen and leaving me wheezing! It turns out that since my host mom never uses the heating elements, grease had caked up on the bottom one, and it was burning! Well, things were dramatic for a moment, but we just turned the oven off, my host mom cleaned it off once it had cooled, and we let the smoke out through a window.
While she was in the kitchen, though, she remarked on the “strange” ways I was cooking my rice and veggies. Apparently in Spain, it is customary to cook rice more like pasta — put in way more water than you need, boil it for 10-12 minutes, and then drain it, not put in double the amount of water and then let it steam like I am used to. She also was astonished at the small amount of oil I had heated in the pan for my veggies, probably about two teaspoons worth. She said the veggies would never taste good like that, because they wouldn’t absorb the oil, and to have flavor and cook properly, they have to soak up lots of it. I watched in horror as she poured about a third cup of olive oil in with my two handfuls of veggies, as she insisted all Spaniards cook with this much oil, and all the food she’s made for me has been prepared like this! (It helps that the olive oil here, even of a low quality, is astoundingly good, the type I would pay big bucks for at home.) When the food was finally done cooking, she brought the customary baguette to the table to accompany it. When I told her that usually this meal wouldn’t be eaten with bread because of the rice, she looked stunned. “But I wouldn’t know how to eat without bread!” Still, she wanted to eat it my way, since it was my meal, and just broke off the smallest possible piece of bread for herself to use as a utensil — she always uses bread to push food onto her fork. Overall the meal was a success, despite the road bumps along the way, and my host mom has since bought and cooked tofu several times for me! Yay!
Classes have also been progressing pretty well. I am worried that my acquisition of Spanish might have plateaued; unless I was truly living, breathing, consuming only Spanish 24/7 with intensive grammar study, it’s not going to get naturally better at this point. That said, the level I have is certainly better than it was when I arrived, and I can truly communicate and understand just about everything. I rarely even have to ask my host mom vocabulary questions anymore! The only issue is continuing to stay motivated in classes where I don’t feel like I am really learning too much. The one class that continues to just be pure fun is my gastronomy class. Two weeks ago we made a field trip to Bilbao’s old town for “pintxos,” the Basque version of what is called “tapas” elsewhere in Spain, small bites of food, tasty and well-presented, valued for being yummy, creative, and inexpensive.
Though pintxos are typically consumed standing at a bar with friends while drinking a small glass of wine, hitting three or four different bars over the course of an evening, since we were a big group, they set up a table for us and brought over several different pintxos for us to try, including a special vegetarian plate for me (most pintxos are very meat-centered), along with the typical red and white wines of Basque country. Yum! This week we cooked a meal for ourselves again, making stuffed tomatoes, paella, and the Spanish version of what we call French toast! We are working on a cook book for our final class project, and if anyone is interested, I can translate some recipes and post them here at the end of the semester!
I have been on only one excursion since my last post, to the nearby town of Loyola (spelled here “Loiola”), birthplace and home of St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits. Though I am not religious, I went with the campus faith group, and enjoyed hearing about the history and significance of this saint, city, and the Jesuits, who I had only really been exposed to through their numerous universities in the US. It was a pretty uneventful trip, just a tour of the basilica and the museum, but I still enjoyed it.
I will be making a few more excursions before I leave Spain, the biggest one being a solo trip to Barcelona next weekend. Other than that, I have made a list of things I don’t want miss before I go, and I will be wandering around Bilbao as much as possible to soak it all up before I come home! More to come on how that all goes soon! Thanks for reading! <3
