Saturday December 12...Meeting the Friends and Neighbors

Since I feel a bit behind with these postings (I would like to do this daily and write about our experiences as they are fresh in my mind) I will say my illness has continued to get better with lots of sleep and lots of Nyquil and Theraflu so I won’t bore you with the details and a daily run down. Christopher is now in the middle of a cold that seems to be more head congestion then what I’ve experienced. He hasn’t had the sore throat like I did-Thanks Dios!


Today is a gorgeous, sunny day in the upper 50’s. This is me and Daisy the Dalmatian (Sorry Phineas!) getting to know each other in the rodaso colored courtyard of the casa….


(We’ll get Christopher in the photos soon!)


Tom and Carlos invited five of their friend for a BBQ today. It was the perfect way to meet this very fun, close knit group who have careers ranging from rock star (a band called el lunatica) to attorney to property manager to tomato industry heiress. It also got us to jump right into the Andalucían dialect, which I am told is one of the hardest to understand. Having only been casually dating Rosetta Stone for a few weeks I was able to understand close to nothing. All I heard this day was Spanish flying around the room at break-neck speed. Now that I’ve been here a couple of days and have had a private lesson with a lovely, 70 year old lady named Juana (more on that later) I can totally see how this may prove to be a difficult dialect to learn especially after studying Central and South American Spanish (gracias Jocelyn Blvd Boys!). But I digress….

The BBQ was fabulous! Carlos made large plates of tapas consisting of frozen foie gras shaved over small rounds of toasted bread, a special, local tomato (kind of funky with its bumpy shape and purple/brown mottled color) that’s chunked up raw and served with chopped garlic and olive oil, the most exquisite squid that was braised in olive oil, bay leaves and pepper corns (heaven!), pollo y pimento salad on toasted bread, a traditional Spanish tortilla of fried potatoes (not browned) and egg and finally, toasted hunks of baguette that were spread with a salted tomato puree and drizzled with olive oil at the table. Tom added his American touches to the BBQ with cheeseburgers on sesame seed buns! It was perfect.
We drank a light, Italian asti spumanti, cañas of beer (not to be confused with coños!) and their friend Antonia brought a homemade wine she called vino de hombre or “man’s wine” due to its high alcohol content. It was a beautiful, clear garnet color with the slight hint of licorice (and it was strong!).
By the end of the afternoon it was time for a siesta as we were all very full and very tired from the drinking.

Through all of this, Christopher’s Spanish came right back to him and he was able to carry on conversation with the best of them. Although by the end of the afternoon he said his head was full and it was getting harder for him to keep up. I sat, listened, smiled (and looked pretty!) and was able to catch about every hundredth word. It was a good time.
I had not yet thought about getting out the camera so there are no photos of the party…I’ll try and do better in the future.