Noche Vieja

After Christmas I headed to Madrid and Spent two nights in a hostel and explored the city for two days. I really like Madrid; it is quite different from southern Spain. When I arrived in Madrid I felt like I had just stepped into Europe for the first time. Southern Spain is quite agricultural and rustic, whereas Madrid is very cosmopolitan and feels very alive. It was nice to experience something different.  I ended up making friends with a group of Brazilians, Australians, Portuguese and French people in the hostel I stayed at and we went out together at night and went to some museums together during the day.  The nice thing about knowing English is that the majority of people in Europe can speak some English, but Spain is sort of the exception and has much fewer English speakers. Something I found interesting was that among all of the Brazilian, French and Portuguese people I was the only one who could speak Spanish, so I had to speak on behalf of our group when we went out.

After I explored Madrid for two days I met up with my friends Paloma and Alfonso who were exchange students at my high school for a year. They are my friends that I met up with at the beginning of the year and went with to the bullfight. Their family has vacation homes in Galicia which is the northwest region of Spain (I frequently describe where I am from by saying “I am from the Galicia of the USA”). Their homes are in a town on the Atlantic Ocean that is called Cabanas. The NW of Spain is actually quite similar to the NW of the US and reminded me a lot of Oregon. Normally it is cloudy and rainy in winter in Galicia, just like in the Pacific NW, but I was suuuuper lucky because it was sunny the entire time I was there.

Paloma and Alfonso’s family and family friends are all members of a maritime club on the beach which is really awesome. It is basically a large building with a massive kitchen, dining hall and dance floor. I realized that I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to spend New Year’s Eve with Paloma’s family because both Paloma and Alfonso told me that they usually don’t take even their best friends to Cabanas because they have a ton of fun hanging out with all of their cousins and family members and want to enjoy their time with them. Alfonso told me that they made an exception in inviting me because I am a friend from Newberg High school and I didn’t have any family in Spain! haha. The family was very welcoming and friendly to me; I felt very comfortable and appreciated. Paloma’s father, Eugenio, was incredibly generous and paid for everything for me, refusing to let me pay for anything over the four days that I was with them. They were very nice to me.

New Year’s Eve is called noche vieja in Spanish, which means the old night. On the day of noche vieja it was beautiful outside and Alfonso wanted to try to go surfing and invited me to go with him. I had never been surfing in my life before but I was amped to be able to try. Alfonso lent me an old wetsuit that had a hole in it and one of his friends lent me an old board. I was absolutely flipping out over the fact that I was going to try surfing for the first time in my life on December 31st in northwest Spain on the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean was gorgeous and the day was perfect, I couldn´t have asked for more. Alfonso and his friend gave me literally a 15 second tutorial on how to surf and we jumped in the water. The water was freezing cold and I was really feeling the water coming through the hole on my back. I was horrible, at first I struggled just to sit up on the board out in the ocean. I had no idea how I was supposed to dive under oncoming waves with the board so I was getting tossed around like a rag doll about seventy percent of the time. I made a few good attempts to try to stand up and ride a wave but every time I started to try to stand the nose of the board sunk down and I fell and subsequently got dominated by the water. I would describe my hour and a half attempt to surf as a personal understanding of the force of water and my lack of balance. Even though I was frozen and was never close to riding a wave, I had an amazing time being in the water under the sun and looking out over the ocean and along the green coastline. My excitement about the entire situation never let up, it was an experience I will never forget.

After surfing Alfonso and the rest of the family advised me to try to take a siesta because the night was going to be long and tough. We spent the rest of the day saving as much energy as we possibly could so we could make it through the night.

Apparently the family tradition for their new year’s celebration is that the men cook for dinner all day long and drink. By the time dinner is served everyone is in very high spirits. Eugenio, Paloma’s father was dressed in a white apron, chef’s pants and a chef’s hat – it was great.  At about 9 pm we went to the maritime club and dinner got started. Everyone was very well dressed, all the men were dressed in suites including me, wearing a suit that Alfonso´s friend lent me (I was kind of dying later in the night because I wanted to take the suit off because I was so hot, but my friends told me I couldn´t do it because it would be disrespectful to the parents). It was a great scene; there were over 130 very excited people in the dining hall eating, drinking, toasting and singing. In Spain there is a tradition that just before the clock strikes midnight twelve bells ring and each time a bell rings everyone must eat a grape. So for the last 15 seconds of the year everyone in Spain is working on eating 12 grapes, one at a time with each bell. This is not that easy to be honest. A lot of people peel the grapes and take the seeds out to make it easier. I harnessed all my concentration and eating abilities and finished the grapes on time without peeling them!

As soon as it was midnight the party started to kick off. After eating grapes everyone gave each other kisses and started making drinks. People were in rare form dancing and singing like crazy. It was pretty unreal because everyone was going all out, even the 60+ year olds were saying they were "borrocho perdido" which means lost in drunkenness, haha. People were not literally that drunk, but just dancing and having a great time.

At that time in Spain a song called Papa Americano (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWlrQDUjL9Q) was very popular. This song for me is both a massive pain in my ass and very fun because of course every time it plays people start dancing around me, pointing and singing "Papa Americano". Well I knew that Papa Americano was going to come on at some point during the evening and I was somewhat dreading it knowing that I would have to put on some kind of performance. At about 3:00 am Papa Americano started to play. I didn´t even recognize the beginning of the song at first but all of the family members did and started to form a circle around me. The circle started with about 40 people and continued to grow. I just started to laugh and tried to do a silly dance to appease the crowd enough to let me escape, but I didn´t get off that easy. I tried to leave the crowd but everyone was yelling ¨PAPA AMERICANO!!!" and clapping and pushed me back in the center of the circle. At this point the circle consisted of literally 80 people. I decided that if I was going to dance like an idiot in front of so many people I might as well ignore all inhibitions and forget myself consciousness. I can´t really put into words what the hell I did to entertain those people for 4 and a half minutes, but I just started jumping around and I guess "dancing" Hahaha. But everyone was going nuts the entire time yelling, singing and clapping. At about three minutes into the song I started to run out of creativity and couldn´t think of anything else to do so I resorted to the one dance that I know and always triumphs with people, swing. I grabbed the hand of¨ "Tutus" a very fun cousin who is a true character of the family and started to swing dance with her in the center of the circle. As soon as I did the first spin everyone erupted with shouts. The screaming, clapping and laughter only grew as we were dancing because people were dying over the fact that I actually knew quite a few swing dance moves. When I did the pretzel (a complex looking move) with Tutus people were flipping out and cheered us on even stronger! Tutus and I were dying as well, laughing and smiling. For the last ten seconds of the song I jumped up and down with my hands in the air doing spins and claps and everyone clapped with me. When it was all over an auntie ran up to me with a towel and dabbed my face and hair because I was drenched in sweat, then she kissed me and said “Que bueno eres!" - How good you are! Hahaha. After the auntie everyone started giving me kisses and hugs and were telling me how crazy and¨"beautiful" it was and that I had to return to Cabanas in the summer. Hahaha. Alfonso and Paloma came up to me wide eyed and said "You can come to Cabanas any time you want now! My family loves you! You are a cousin now!" Hahaha. It was absolutely unbelievable. For the rest of the evening I was a superstar.  It felt like something out of a movie, it was crazy. About an hour and a half later I had to do the dance again because some of the family members missed the dance and new people started showing up to the party and everyone wanted to see it. I had no desire to do it again, but when I tried to run away when the song came on about eight cousins grabbed me and were telling me that they had to see the dance. haha. Luckily they only played half the song the second time.

We continued to dance for the rest of the evening and at about 5:30 when the last parent went home I was able to take off my suit jacket, which I was dying to do all night. At about 7:30 in the morning we called it a night and walked home and went to bed.

The next day Paloma’s father drove the 5 hours back to Madrid which was a pretty terrible experience with the hangover that followed the evening.  New year’s day in Spain is actually formally called Dia de Resaca which means day of the hangover.  The 2^nd of January Paloma and her father brought me to a massive street fair in Madrid and then we went out for tapas, jumping to and from about 5 different bars eating different delicious finger foods.

I had an unbelievable experience with Paloma, Alfonso, Eugenio and the rest of their family. It was something that I could never repeat as an experience as a whole, my best New Year’s experience b y far!

Christmas

OK. I am very late in entering this, but the theme is Christmas. I spent Christmas in Granada, which is where I studied abroad three years ago. When I studied abroad in Granada I became good friends with Paco, the grandson of my host mother, and we have stayed in contact over the past few years. Paco invited me to spend Christmas with his family which was absolutely awesome because I already knew a good amount of his family. In Spain Christmas eve is the big Christmas celebration, greater than Christmas day. The night is called Noche Buena, which means the good night.
On Noche Buena apparently it is normal for all the young people in the family to go out to bars before and after the family celebration. So on the 24th of December I went out to bars at 3pm with Paco, his cousins and his cousins friends. I felt that this was very abnormal because to me Christmas Eve and Christmas day is a time you spend with your family, not a time to go out to bars and clubs to party. But when I went out it was apparent that in Spain it is very normal to go out on Noche Buena because all of the bars were packed at three in the afternoon. We drank and danced until six then went to his grandmother’s house. When we arrived the house was packed with 34 family members cooking, eating, drinking, and shouting. Everyone helped prepare the dishes for dinner and snacked at the same time. Everyone was very friendly and happy to have me at the party. Every other minute an auntie or and uncle was feeding me a different kind of food.
After picando (snacking) for almost three hours we sat down at the tables. At dinner it was obvious that the grandmother was the most important figure at the table. She sat at the head of the table and when she said the prayer before eating some of the cousins continued to talk all of the older cousins yelled at them “How disrespectful and shameless you are! Shut up and listen to your grandmother!” They were adamant about showing respect to their grandmother.  She was very funny and nice to me by ending her prayer with “And to our American friend who didn’t understand a word that I just said, but whom we are very happy to have with us here!”
 After the speech the dishes started to travel around the table. There were so many different kinds of foods that it was impossible to try every one and not become stuffed. I was already full from drinking at the bar and then snacking for three hours, but I had to keep eating. I ate soup, marinated salmon, stuffed peppers, shrimp, cured ham, pork loin, a seafood loaf (it seemed like meatloaf but with shrimp and crab) and a few other plates that I can’t remember. When I finally threw out the white flag and decided I couldn’t possibly eat anymore I was so bloated from food that I literally had trouble breathing. I have never eaten so much food in my entire life. I was packed with food that it hurt for me to move.
After eating everyone sat around and talked for about two hours to digest a little. I never stopped feeling completely stuffed that night. Despite feeling too full to do anything Paco and I had to go out and light fireworks and party with his friends (completely normal to do in Spain at 1 am on Christmas Eve). We ended up going to a discoteca but we were so full and so tired that in the end we decided to turn in early and go home at 4:30.
On Christmas day we hung out and relaxed. The family had another meal in the afternoon and in the evening Paco, his cousins and I rode go-carts and went bowling.
It was a great experience. I missed mom, dad and Hali a lot during Christmas time, but it was really nice to be able to spend time with friends and a family that was so welcoming and friendly.