Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Bon Nadal...

It’s Christmas time again. I can't quite believe it's already our second Barcelona Navidad (or more precisely in Cataluña: Nadal). Even more shocking, for me, is that it’s our eighth Christmas in Spain. ¡Coño!

Today is only our second "Boxing Day" however. That’s because there is no holiday on the 26^th of December in Madrid, as in most of Spain. But Cataluña is Cataluña, so for our two Christmases here, we’ve got a Boxing Day – although it’s not called that, it’s simply St Steven’s Day.

Maybe most of Spain doesn’t have a holiday on the 26th because Christmas is pretty long here - it doesn’t wrap up until after the public holiday on the 6^th of January. 

That’s because on the night of the 5^th, Los Rayes (literally "The Kings", but meaning the Three Wise Men) visit the homes of all good boys and girls to leave them presents – just as they did for Jesus Christ all those years ago.  

Here are some Christmas scenes from here in Barcelona.

The Pretty Lights

The Christmas Market

All the protagonists for your Belen (literally Bethlehem, but in this context it means nativity)

Gum-nuts and gum leaves are for Christmas here in Barcelona

Gargoners - literally "pooers" (look closely, they're all doing it). I've spoken about these guys before. They're a Catalan Christmas favourite.
 Traditionally it's got to do with bringing prosperity for the new year by fertilising the ground!

The Traditions

Churros. Best washed down with hot chocolate

Castañas (Chestnuts) roasting on an open fire

Lining up for La Loteria de Navidad - El Gordo (the Christmas Lottery - the Fat One)

Shopping at the market for Christmas (Eve) dinner

Checking out the Belenes in the barrio (neighbourhood). This one is in my local market.

Tio's de Nadal.  Very Catalan - you won't find these guys in Madrid. 
Underneath you leave sweets for good kids and coal for the not-so-good ones

My Cargoner. The detail is impressive (if a little gross)

Merry Christmas to all, Felices Fiestas a todos, Bones Festes a tots!    

Swapping Euros for Zloties (De Euros a Zloties)

It might be terribly clichéd to say this, but one of my favourite things about living in Europe is being so close to so many different places, languages and cultures. Here in Barcelona, I can jump in the car and in two hours everything is in French.

A few of weeks ago we decided to go a little further afield (three hours in the plane) and took a quick trip to Poland.

During winter, the only direct flights to Poland from Barcelona are to Warsaw. I hadn’t planned on visiting Poland’s capital (we wanted to head straight to Krakow) but seeing as we had to fly in and out of there, we decided we’d spend a couple of nights. I’m glad we did.

I found it fascinating. Warsaw was almost totally obliterated by the Nazi’s during their occupation of the city in World War 2 - only about 10% of its buildings were left standing.

Being on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain after that war (and obviously with an urgent need to build and build quick), Warsaw was reconstructed in good communist fashion: row after row of those broad, foreboding, Lego-looking blocks of flats so popular in the “Eastern Bloc” (as we called it when I went to school).  These days this communist legacy is feverously being interspersed with modern skyscrapers that would not look out of place in Sydney’s CBD.

The sensationally Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science (1955). For decades Warsaw's tallest building.

Post-war "communist blocks" are quickly giving way to modern skyscrapers in Warsaw's centre

And that’s what grabbed my attention: although I was standing in the centre of a city that dated back a millennium, just about everything around was an echo of only the last 70 years. It was a stark reminder of the horror of war.

Another such reminder we found in a little non-descript parking lot just off John Paul II Street, a post-war boulevard that cuts right through the centre of town. The back wall of this car park is all that remains of the wall that bricked in Warsaw’s Jews during the Nazi occupation.

According to a plaque fixed to the wall, at one point 450 000 people were crammed into the Warsaw Ghetto. One hundred thousand of them would die there from hunger and disease, 300 000 others would be sent to the gas chambers of Treblinka. It was chilling to stand there.

There is a Stare Miasto (Old Town) in Warsaw. It has a stunning market-square, cobbled streets lined with fairytale buildings, a castle and a wonderful city wall. The Stare Miastro and the confusingly named Nowe Miasto (New Town), just outside the wall, are a beautiful glimpse into old Warsaw and well worth a visit (we had a couple of great meals there too), but they also are less than 70 years old. They're a faithful reconstruction of the very same area before the War, rebuilt using the rubble that was left behind and done so well that it is actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The beautiful Market Square in Warsaw Old Town. All totally rebuilt after the wall

This is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It's not actually in the Old Town, but I wanted to include it mainly for
what is behind the guards. Look closely and you'll see yellow tubes just behind the feet of each guard. They're heaters.
It was so cold the poor buggers would freeze without them! 

A quick 30-minute flight from Warsaw is Krakow. We wanted to visit Krakow for two reasons: 1) it’s magnificent World Heritage-listed Old Town, which was thankfully spared the bombs and dynamite during WW2 and 2) it’s proximity to something far less appealing.

The Stare Miasto lived up to the hype. The Market Square is one of the most beautiful squares I have seen. It dates back to the 13^th century and is lined with more fairytale 14^th and 15^th century buildings (although I was horrified to see that in one of them there is a Hard Rock Café and another a Zara).  

Krakow’s Old Town is a lot bigger than Warsaw’s and it was great to see that it's not all just for tourists (although there is a lot of that). The stunning University Quarter is still full of students and professors and throughout the Old Town we found bakeries, bars, cafes and even a Polish fast-ish food joint (in which I had some sensational goulash with dumplings) where Polish was still by far the dominant language being spoken.

The early 14th century St Florian's Gate - part of the old city wall (most of which is now gone)

Outside of the old town, we visited the Wawel Castle area, a wonderful fortified precinct high on a hill overlooking the Vistula River and the place where Krakow began a thousand years ago, Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter before WW2 and just over the river from that, Podgórze, where Oskar (Schindler’s List) Schindler’s factory is still standing. To be honest, it’s just a bland industrial building, but we wanted to see it and stand within the walls of a place where such good was done during such bad times.

The Cathedral inside the Wawel Castle precinct

Part of Wawel Castle

Which brings us to talk about a place that’s an incongruously pretty, hour-long drive from Krakow, through quaint villages of neat and brightly coloured homes: the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz.

The contrast of these villages to Óswięcim, the town around which the Auschwitz camps are located, could not be starker, or more fitting according to G. It’s a shabby, industrial place with little character and situated by a major railway junction - one of the reasons why it was a perfect location for the camps.  Ominously, a single railway line branches out from the junction and runs alongside the road, accompanying you to the first camp.

We took a tour from Krakow, which included a guided tour through both the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps. The guide was a very proud Pole who was obviously distressed about what had happened in his country probably more than twice his life ago. It was quite powerful to listen to him. You don’t have to, but I’d recommend visiting Auschwitz with a guide.

I’m nervous that anything I say about Auschwitz will sound puerile or clichéd. It’s a ghastly and disturbing place obviously, not so much for what it looks like (at first glance, Auschwitz I doesn’t actually look all that bad, the 25-times bigger Auschwitz-Birkenau is another matter entirely) but for what went on there and of course its very reason for being.

The main entrance to Auschwitz I camp with the famous and terribly cynical "Work brings freedom" motto written above it in German.

Auschwitz II - Auschwitz-Birkenau

We’ve all seen documentaries and films or read books about the Holocaust, so there’s no need to go into the details. I’ll just say that despite the difficulty of the visit, we were both very glad we went. It felt right to visit a place where such evil happened, both in memory of the victims and to more immediately acknowledge what went on there by actually standing in the same spaces. 

For this reason I was really happy to see a lot of school groups there and from all over Europe too. I must admit though (in an obvious sign I'm becoming a grumpy old man) they were bloody annoying at times...

Reading back over this post, I’m worried I’ve portrayed Poland as just about memories of war and its horrors. Apologies to my Polish friends as there’s obviously much more to the country than that. I hope some of the photos I’ve included here at least hint at that.

To the doctor! (¡Al medico!)

A Catalan tarjeta sanitaria (health service card)

The other day I went to the doctor in Spain for the first time.

It started off similar to what one would expect in Australia: up to the reception desk to announce oneself, give over the tarjeta sanitaria (health service card), get ushered into the sala de espera (waiting room). From here though, things started to deviate from my normal experience.

As in Australia, Catalan GP surgeries are run by private doctors or campanies who charge the public health system for their services. But you wouldn’t guess that from the look of my local surgery.

It was very clean, tidy and pretty modern, but exuded that typically continental-European public building ambience: austere, heavily utilitarian, devoid of creature comforts like magazines or pictures on the walls and everything- walls, seats, floor - a cool pale blue.

On entering the waiting area, an etiquette quickly became evident. In Spain, when you go into a shop or even get into an elevator, people tend to greet each other, with a “hola” or a “buenas dias”.

It turns out it’s pretty much the same at the doctor’s. And as in a shop or a lift, it’s the new entry who must start this off, which I was quickly prompted to do by the other patients looking me right in the eye as I walked in.

Back in Australia or London, I seem to remember always wanting to avoid eye contact with other patients at the doctor’s – and the feeling seemed mutual. Maybe us anglosajones feel that illness is a very private thing and we are a little embarrassed to be out in public (?) It seems that's not the case with Spaniards.

Not long after giving my greeting and taking a seat, the doctor came out and called my name. Brilliant, I thought, it’s my turn already. But as soon as I said “sí”, she called out another name, and then another. Turns out she was telling us our place in the order of things. I was after the person she named after me, who was after the person she named after them.

This roll call, along with all that eye contact, made me realise that the etiquette of the doctor’s surgery in Spain (or at least Cataluña) is pretty much the same as that of the market, which I wrote about some time back: it’s all about everyone being secure that everyone else knows their place in the queue!

After a while, my first and second queue-mates came and went. I stopped reading the newspaper (on my phone) and anxiously waited for the doctor to emerge once again and call my name. But she didn’t. I was confused. What do I do? Do I get up and walk into the consulting room or do I wait?

As I contemplated this dilemma, my name boomed out of the consulting room, in a tone that could only be described as slightly annoyed. Obviously, it was the former.

This was the first taste of what was to be my last lesson in visiting a Spanish GP: “bedside manner”- it’s all very much straight-down-to-business. I don’t remember a smile or even a “what seems to be the problem?”.  I was just shot a look that seemed to say, “start talking”.  

What followed was lot of banging on the computer keyboard as I rattled off my reason for the visit and, without the raising of even one eye from the computer screen, the barking of questions back at me.  I was a little taken aback.

It was all strikingly akin to scenes depicting visits to the doctor I’d seen in Spanish films, which I never quite believed.  I remember asking a Spanish friend about those depictions once and he told me “it’s always been like that here”. I didn’t quite believe him either. I owe him an apology.

Don’t get me wrong, she was very thorough and she gave me quite a lot of time and barked lots of questions about lots of things at me. I certainly felt that I was getting good care.  

It’s just I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in the principal's office back at school!

Cacerolada

Click on the audio link above. If you think it sounds like a whole lot of pots and pans being banged together, you’d be right. I took it from my balcony on Tuesday night but you would have heard something pretty similar if you stepped out onto just about any balcony in Barcelona between 10 and 10:15 every night this week after that (this page is in Spanish but the video has some good scenes of the pot-banging).

It’s called a Cacerolada or Cacerolazo (cacerola is the Spanish word for a cooking pan). It’s a form of public protest very popular in much of the Spanish-speaking world – and has even reached a few other places, like Canada.

The residents of Barcelona were banging their pots and pans together in protest to the latest set-back in their fight for a referendum on independence from Spain. Here’s a post I wrote about the Catalan push for independence the other week.

A makeshift bilboard for the Sí Sí (Yes, Yes) camp

Since I wrote that post, the central government took the referendum to the Constitutional Court, which duly froze it.  In an attempt to keep his word but not break the law, the Catalan Premier, Artur Mas, called a “proceso participatorio” (participatory process) - a sort of unofficial referendum – in which the very same questions would be asked, on the very same day (today, November 9) but with a non-binding result and without the same Catalan government involvement that an official referendum would entail.

That didn’t satisfy anyone. The independistas felt betrayed as they were not getting the true referendum they were promised. The “unionists” thought it was even worse than the referendum as it would lack the democratic guarantees of an official vote.  The Catalans who want the derecho de decidir (right to vote) but who were planning to vote to stay with Spain saw the compromise as a farce in which the only people who would bother voting would be the independistas. And the central government argued that any vote would be illegal and took this one to the Constitutional Court too, which froze it on Tuesday.

And hence all the pot-banging this week.

I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t a tactical error on the part of the central government to go back to the Constitutional Court as it has, at least temporarily, shifted the anger away from Artur Mas straight back onto them.

The independistas and others in favour of the derecho de decidir might not have been happy with the Premier’s compromise, but they are even more unhappy, or better said angry, firstly with the Spanish government for going back to the Constitutional Court and secondly with the Constitutional Court itself for, in their minds, trying to rob them of their democratic right to have their say.

The referendum countdown clock, as it looked today, the day of the vote

And in the end, the vote has gone ahead anyway (the first vote actually being cast in a Catalan polling place in Australia!). It’s looking like the turnout has been big too - more than two million of the six million people who could have voted. Not bad for an unofficial referendum in a county where voting is not compulsory. 

The result is pretty much not in doubt: a win for the first part of the question at least: “Do you want Cataluña to be it’s own State?” And probably for the second part of the question too: “Do you want that State to be independent?”

The ballot paper

As the result is not binding, even if that prediction proves true, I won’t be needing a visa to live here any time soon. But now that the question has been asked, what comes next is going to be very interesting. All eyes are on both the central and Catalan governments to see their next moves.

A final word on caceroladas.  I took part in one once. We were demonstrating in Madrid’s Plaza Chueca, the traditional heart of gay Madrid, against moves by the Town Hall to limit the city’s famous Gay Pride celebrations.

I’ve got to say it was a lot of fun and it is quite an effective manner to protest in the sense that it does get you noticed - a relentless banging on hundreds of pots and pans simply can't be ignored.  It wasn’t so successful in stopping the limitations though and these days Madrid’s Pride is sadly a shadow of its former self. But that's another story for another post.

Trick or treating with all the saints (Truco or trato con todos los santos)…

Last night was Halloween, or like they tend to say here Halowin. The H in Spanish is silent, it’s the G that gives a similar sound, although it comes from deeper in the throat.  So an English word that starts with an H can be quite difficult for Spaniards to say, leading them to often over-pronounce the H. It’s reminiscent, although not quite as extreme, as Manuel from Faulty Towers:

Now before you get up in arms at me for poking a little fun at Spaniards speaking English, I promise I’m doing it in the best humour. Besides, I’m acutely aware of my own accent when I speak Spanish – which is a bit of a shocker - so I know I’m in no position to throw stones.

But back to Halowin. It’s become quite a thing here in Spain, as judging by the photos my friends with kids have been putting up on Facebook, it has in Australia too. I don’t remember it being that way when I was a child.

Here though, the truco o trato of October 31^st is just a prelude to a much older tradition and holiday: the Día de Todos los Santos (All Saints' Day), which is today.

It’s probably the busiest day of the year for floristas (florists) and most certainly for cementarios (cemeteries). It is the day to take flowers to the graves of your loved ones, make sure all is nice and tidy and to stop for a little chat with the dearly departed.

It’s quite a sight: typically chaotic throngs coming and going and buying flowers at the myriad of flower stalls just outside the cemetery, most of which have sprung up just for the day. The stalls closest to the cemetery entrance seem the most official, becoming less so the further away you go until finally you find the dodgiest-looking venders flogging flowers of dubious origin, but much cheaper.

All ready for the big day - in Poblenou Cemetery

Just outside the cemetery gates, a less-fancy set-up (but a nice big smile)

I like Spanish cemeteries. They’re generally very well kept, filled with pencil pines and scattered with impressive, if sometimes somewhat chilling, sculptures and statues.  

The "Kiss of Death" sculpture in the Cementiri de Poblenou. 
Beautiful and someone chilling at the same time.

They’re also home to a style of internment I hadn’t seen in Anglo cemeteries: niches.
In Spain,in the cities at least, most of us live on top of each other in pisos (flats). And if you end up in a niche (which chances are you will), it's the same in death too.

As an aside, I wonder if any Almodóvar fans reading this think a couple of the photos above look a little familiar. If they do, it’s because I took them in Barcelona’s Cementiri de Montjuíc, scene of Rosa´s (Penelope Cruz) funeral in the wonderful film Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother).

Montjuíc Cemetery is spectacular. It seems to have been carved into the steep slopes of Montjuíc, the mountain that pops up right next to the city and port, forming terrace after terrace of tombs and niches, linked by winding, pencil-pine lined roads and perilous sets of steps.

It is on one of these sets of steps that Manuela finally meets up with her long-lost, dying, transsexual ex-husband Lola in one of the climaxes of All About My Mother.  So Almódovar.

Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and Lola (Toni Cantó) in the Cementiri de Montjuíc during Rosa's funeral 
- from Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother

But the Día de Todos los Santos is not just about cemeteries; it is also, in typically Spanish style, about food. Just about every Spanish holiday is typified by some type of food - especially something dulce (sweet).

Depending on where you are in the country, the tradition can be different, but there is one that is somewhat common and rather perfect for the day: Huesos de Santos – literally Saints' Bones. They’re little marzipan treats that are meant to resemble the tibia bone. It's a little shocking but actually very fitting for Spain’s Catholic traditions, in which relicarios (relics - basically saints' bones and body bits) are extremely important.

The traditional marzipan treats for the day: "Saints' Bones"

Here in Cataluña there is another traditional treat – Panellets. They’re little pastries that are packed full of sugar, apparently originally designed to keep people going through the long night from All Saints' Day to All Souls' Day (November 2) during which the church bells would ring all night.

Panellets on display in the escaperate (shop window) of my local cake shop

The bells no longer go all night, thank goodness, but the Panellets, happily, live on.