Halloween-a

I did a bad thing today. Granted, it was worth it, and not "bad" in a particularly pejorative sense, but rather something that obviously isn't done around here.

To begin with, I have three classes today, thanks to a double session of linguistics, because my professor is going away to a conference in China and he'll miss class sometime next week. However, today was the official "Start of Term Opening Ceremonies" at the Centro de Lenguas Modernas, which basically meant that everything was supposed to stop at 12:30 so that we could indulge the ancient director of programs and listen to him speak for an hour. The Center manages to do this by promising everyone in attendance free beer and wine afterwards; personally, I think everything would go much more smoothly if they served drinks beforehand, but I'm not in charge. Unfortunately, 12:30 was the only time that my make-up class could meet, so when our class was forced to end after only an hour so that all of us could catch the tail end of the speech, I snuck out of there to go buy peanut butter - the guy was still talking, and the bar hadn't opened, so there was really no reason to stay.

There is a store here in Spain called El Corte Inglés, which is something like a Macy's, if Macy's also had a grocery store, electronics center, more furniture, CDs, a bookstore, local artisan crafts, and a travel agency. People here talk about it with the disdain which we in the US reserve for WalMart, because they love it but hate to love it. You see, El Corte Inglés sells everything, including my imported, crunchy Peter Pan peanut butter, whose virtues I'm pretty sure I've previously extolled. The biggest problem with El Corte Inglés is that it's crazy expensive, much more so than even other big chains here. But it's worth it for the peanut butter.

Anyway, I had been planning my stop for peanut butter and granola for a while, but had given up hope of ever seeing anything related to Halloween in there (Halloween, as you may know, is my favorite holiday). Imagine my surprise when I stepped off the escalator to find little marzipan lollipops in the shape of pumpkins, ghosts and goblins! Well, this was nothing compared to seeing little, head-sized decorative pumpkins with sticker cutouts shaped like eyes and a mouth, all interspersed with the fruit at the fruit counter! I should explain: in grocery stores and fruterías here, you aren't allowed to select your own fruit; instead, you must wait for the attendant, ask his or her opinion on the state of the melons that day, and have her select, weigh, and bag them. This is always frustrating and rarely helpful, but it is what it is. There and then, I decided that I must have a pumpkin. They don't do jack-o-lanterns here, and I've never seen a pumpkin for sale anywhere - we're cutting it close to the line here, people! Only seven days to go! So, I waited by the selection of gins for the fruit lady to help an old woman smell apples, ran over to one of the pumpkins, put it under my arm, and began speed-walking away. The problem was, I didn't know if they were for sale or just decorative, but it didn't really matter. The fruit lady was shocked at my audacity, taking something from her stand without asking about its ripeness, or then again she may just have been yelling at me because they don't sell pumpkins. I don't really know. As I huffed it away from her, I muttered something under my breath about only being able to speak English.

Now don't think that I just walked out of the store with the pumpkin - A) it was way too conspicuous for that, and B) I had my peanut butter and granola to think about! Thankfully, the woman at the cash register only shot me a strange look, typed some numbers in, and charged me three euros for the pumpkin. I think it showed up on my receipt as "vegetable." Walking home was the fun part. You must try to imagine me, to begin with weighed down with my umbrella, computer, messenger bag, and four notebooks, now with a bag of peanut butter and cereals, and a bright orange smiling face sticking out from underneath my arm. I had put my sunglasses on in the store before walking out to find it raining, and had no option taking them off with the balancing act I was carefully pulling off. I would have been a sight at home, but here, this was too much. I had five separate groups of children stop while passing me (school was getting out) to muse over what it was, exactly, that I was carrying. Men in suits, grandmothers, a line of construction workers all could not understand what I had with me. I knew that pumpkins weren't common, but come on! This became more clear once I got home and found that Irma (my "mom") had no idea about our wonderful pumpkin-carving tradition, but was relieved to hear that my "brother" had seen them in a movie, probably something of high quality like the teen-slasher flick Halloween H20. People need to watch more TV!

So that was fun. I had a wonderful lasagna for lunch, for which Irma made her own dough for the pasta and homemade sauce (the other day I had homemade gnocci, the little potato pastas...), and I sit here typing while eating my peanut butter with a spoon. Tomorrow I'm going to visit a friend / professor from Bates near Córdoba in a little pueblito somewhere in the country, and I'll be back late on Saturday. Hopefully. Apparently the buses are pretty infrequent out there. Until next time.