Customer Service, Part II

This week has been the source of some anxiety, because next Tuesday, we fly to the United States.  No, not for a nice little vacation that will become a blog post on here, but for good.  We will be going back to our real lives.  The Kid is ready to go.  He wants to see his friends.  He wants to sleep in his bed.  Zoë and I have mixed feelings.  You see, while the Kid had to go to school here in Madrid, and thus had basically the same responsibilities as he does back home, Zoë and I have been living a more carefree life.  Readers of Zoë's blog have read her complaints about shopping, cooking, and laundry.  They may be unaware that she has also had the time to read 120+ books, most of them acquired free on the internet and read on her Kindle.  Not a bad life, really.  Ask her what she thinks of D. H. Lawrence, Truman Capote, Dickens, the Bronte sisters, Hardy, etc.

I, as you know, have been on sabbatical, writing what I am sure will be an epoch-making book on the Spanish in the Pacific Rim, 1520-1640.  You'll know it's done when you see the long lines at bookstores nationwide.  This has been hard work, but also deeply enjoyable work.  As any academic will tell you, no matter how much he or she likes to teach, being on sabbatical is much better than not being on sabbatical.  Especially when that academic is willing to break up his/her archive/library time with ample professional-development experiences, as I choose to call the many trips we have taken.  Now, I must face the horrifying reality of putting together syllabi, answering email, and eventually - gasp - grading papers.  NOOOOO!!!!!!!

But a more practical challenge lay between us and our so-called real lives back in C'ville, and that was packing.  We are now on day three of the great packing extravaganza, and I am happy to say that everything that can be packed right now has been packed.  Astonishingly, we have one fewer bags to check than we had coming here.  How have we managed this astonishing feat?  I will tell you.  We sent winter coats and boots home with my mother in March, and we got rid of a lot of our clothes.  We had brought little to begin with, and much of what we brought either got worn out, no longer fits us (we lost weight!), or we got so sick of it that we can no longer bear to see ourselves in them.  So bags and bags went off to the local equivalent of Goodwill, making ample room for, among other things, several pieces of ceramics, new clothes (some of them Moroccan), new books, an astrolabe, and a five foot Moroccan trumpet.  Are you surprised that we have an astrolabe and a five foot Moroccan trumpet?  Not if you know my son and me.

Today's task was shipping our books.  This was a colossal waste of time and money.  We all shipped books from the US to Spain at great expense, thinking we could not live without them.  Santiago read his.  Zoë did not ship that many.  I simply could not be without certain work-related books.  Of course, they sat on the shelves all year, as I spent time with archive and library collections I had come here to see.  Now it was time to ship the books back, once again at great expense.  We boxed them up.  Santiago and I lugged them downstairs and into the trunk of a cab, and we went to the post office at the Plaza de la Cibeles, where we experienced the sort of customer service that we, sadly, have grown accustomed to.

"You know how much this is going to cost you?  You're going to have to fill out so many forms!," the post office lady squawked.  There's this particular intonation that people around here put into remarks like this that you just don't get in Latin American Spanish.  It's a rising tone that sounds to my ears like a level of alarm completely disproportionate to the situation.  Rationally, I know that it does not indicate this, but it still puts my nerves on edge.  It's like they're saying, "Oh my god, I can't believe you would be so stupid as to actually ship this!" or "I can't even imagine having the time and energy to fill out the enormous pile of forms that you are going to have to fill out, you poor stupid jackass!"

A small douche-off ensued, as they weighed my boxes and quoted me prices that were much higher than what I had gotten using the internet tool for calculating shipping rates were.  "Well, you must have used it wrong!  Did you say you were shipping to the US, or Spain?  Who knows what you did?!"  OK, OK.  I was told I would have to pay in cash, that the post office did not take credit cards, that it had never taken credit cards, that everyone knew this, that it was part of the Natural Law!  OK, OK.  I had not even mentioned my hope of paying with a credit card.  I left the Kid with the boxes, and headed out of the post office, intending to hit an ATM I knew of two blocks away.  But - Lo and Behold! - there at the entrance to the post office was an ATM, which no one had thought to mention.

I came back to the counter to find they had scolded Santiago for not starting on the customs forms.  "Why don't you get going with the forms?  Don't you go to school?"  Santiago had just fumed quietly, eager to avoid a douche-off.  I started filling out forms, and told Santiago to get a pen and do the same.  I was scolded for including information on a line that I was not supposed to fill out. "What?  Why did you put something on this line?"  She consulted with her colleague, who had been the one to inform me about the credit card policy.  She shook her head vigorously.  When I pointed to the written directions I had been following and expressed my confusion, I was shushed, and told a refrán, or popular saying, that said, more or less, "When in doubt, hold back."  I hadn't had any doubts!  The written instructions were quite clear to me!  But I refrained from insisting on this point.  Why escalate the douche-off?  After 11 months, I had learned that much.  I filled out the forms all over again.  I had Santiago fill out a form.

Packages were weighed.  Forms were completed.  There was much typing and asking of questions and spelling of names and addresses.  She declared all my books to be "gifts" because she couldn't find the button on the computer program for "books,"  and I shuddered, thinking about what this might mean in terms of tariffs on the other end.  A woman tried to interrupt so she could find out about a telegraph she was waiting for (a telegraph?), and she got douched off.  I was charged an exorbitant amount, but there was an issue about my payment.  "Don't you have a €5 bill?," she asked, clearly inconvenienced.  "No, sorry."  I was owed €8 in change, and the attendant had to walk all over the post office looking for the freakin' €3 she needed to provide me with my change.  I gritted my teeth as I thought that we wouldn't have this problem if they just accepted credit cards.

My boxes were off.  My customs forms, with the tracking numbers, were in hand, and I thought - mercy me! - to ask a question!

"How long, more or less, do you think it will take for my packages to arrive?"

She looked at me bewildered.  "Oh, I really have no idea whatsoever.  I know that letters to France take a week or two, but I don't know anything about the United States."  Oh.  I realized that everything she knew about the time it took things to reach different destinations was based on her personal experience sending things to friends and family, but that she knew nothing about shipping times in her capacity as a post office employee.

"Vale, vale. Gracias," I mumbled, turning away from the counter.

Did he really say "troglodyte"?

Zoë and Sou'ad work on marinating the lamb.

This is the story of our Morocco trip, Part II.  One of the true highlights of our stay was a cooking class we took at a place called "Café Clock."  The name derives from the fact that the cafe is behind a very old building that housed a water clock.  The clock has been disassembled for analysis and repair.  Apparently, no one really understands quite how it worked.  In any case, we met our teacher, the wonderful Sou'ad at 10am for a  trip to the market to buy our ingredients, which included fresh lamb, various spices, dates, and eggplant.  Along the way she explained how the markets were organized, where and how the meat was butchered, how it was preserved without refrigeration, etc.  Then, up to the kitchen, where Sou'ad had us do the grunt work of chopping onions, peeling almonds, and crushing garlic while she told us about Moroccan cooking and the role of food in Moroccan life.  Sou'ad was open, friendly, talkative, and funny, making the whole experience great fun.  At 2:30pm, we were ready to eat.  The menu included a spicy eggplant salad, a prune and apricot lamb tagine, and almond macaroons.  A "tagine" is a very common Moroccan dish, named after the clay slow-cooker in which it is traditionally made and served.  These days, people use pressure cookers, reducing the tagine itself to the role of a serving dish, out of which the family enjoys a communal meal eaten with bread. The whole meal was delicious, thanks to Sou'ad's formidable talent as a cook.  When she offered to have us back the next day for a meal of our choosing, we jumped at the chance, and made arrangements to have "pastilla" (chicken with spices baked wrapped in filo dough and topped with powdered sugar and cinammon) and chocolate covered dates.  After wandering around in the medina for a few hours, unguided, we stuffed ourselves with Sou'ad's cooking and enjoyed her company once again.

And for Mohamed, more sugar.

Our final day in Morocco was spent on a trip to the Middle Atlas, the mountains to the south of the city.  We were greeted by our driver, who, as it turns out, spoke no English, so the day was spent listening very closely as he explained everything in slow, clear French.  I would like to thank Pasquale Hashemzadeh and the other members of the UVA French language faculty of the mid 80s for making it possible for me to understand roughly 80% of what he said.  We hit a variety of stops in the mountains, most of them local tourist attractions visited by Moroccan families, and in one case, a troop of Moroccan Boy Scouts.  The first was the village of Bhalil.  Our driver asked is if we wanted to stop there to see the . . . did he say "troglodytes"?!  I thought this was a misunderstanding on my part, perhaps an Arabic word that I was hearing all wrong.  But no, he did indeed say "troglodytes," meaning "a cave dweller."  We were met at the entrance to the town by Mr. Mohamed Chraibi, the official guide and himself a . . .  troglodyte.  Like Granada, Bhalil has a section where people long ago converted caves into homes, building structures atop of, or in front of, more or less naturally occurring caves.  Mohamed took us to his cave-home, where we sat and had mint tea, with lots of sugar.  After shoveling three heaping serving spoons of sugar into the teapot, Mohamed poured out the cups, tasted his, and said, "For Mohamed, more sugar."  He always referred to himself in the third person.  He also asked me to share his address with my friends, so that you could contact him if  you were ever in Morocco, and wanted to visit him:

Mr. Mohamed Chraibi
B.P. 42
Bhalil Par Fes
Morocco

He said he is happy to have visitors to his home, and will be glad to show you around and make you tea.  It's polite to pay him for all this, of course.

Zoë makes a monkey very happy.

The other highlight was the macaques.  We drove through the Middle Atlas, seeing the scenery, the lakes, the little towns each with its own diminutive mosque, stopping at an upscale resort town for lunch.  Eventually, we made our way to a national park where cedar trees cover the hills, and provide shelter to macaques introduced from the Middle East.  These supposedly wild macaques have been thoroughly domesticated by visitors who feed them.  Vendors sell bananas and peanuts, and the gentle macaques take them from your hand when you offer these foods to them.  They also hover around picnic blankets, hoping to get lucky.  Interestingly, they know not to beg from the food vendors themselves.  They've learned that the venders won't fork anything over, and actually watch while you buy the food from them before the start looking at you with banana-lust in their beady eyes.  Some of them are exceptionally fat.  I can't imagine any of this is at all good for the animals, but it's been going on for some time and they seem to be completely adapted to it.

Back in Fes, we took a dip in the pool at the riad (yes, fellow Fes travelers, our riad had a pool.  Just try and top that.) and enjoyed a wonderful dinner, another tagine, poolside.  The next day, it was back to Madrid, where we would finally have to face the horrifying reality of packing up our things to go back to the US for good.  Or, where we could keep denial alive by blogging about Morocco.

Off on the Road to Morocco

Morocco was fantastic!!!  At one point, we were standing in the Medina (the old downtown, dating from the middle ages) saying to ourselves, "How could we have ever considered skipping this trip?!"  Why would we have done so?  Well, for one, it was right in the middle of the month between London and our final return to the USA.  Oh, second, we really couldn't afford it.  BUT our logic was that we can't afford any of this anyway, so why stop now?!!  Particularly since Zoë has a big birthday coming up, and she deserved a trip to a place she had always wanted to see . . . So we were off on the road to Morocco, just like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope once were, except that we flew RyanAir instead of riding a camel.  And we weren't singing that dumb song.  Well, I was singing it, but Zoë and Santiago weren't.  They did not approve.

In any case, our destination was the amazing city of Fes, Morocco's traditional capital, and home to the largest and best preserved medieval medina (the aforementioned downtown area) in the Arabic-speakign world.   This was our first trip to an Arabic-speaking country, a Muslim country, and to the continent of Africa.  We stayed at a wonderful place the Riad Cles de Fes.  A "Riad" is an old-style house, large, and constructed around a central courtyard.  Several of Fes's riads have been transformed into bed-and-breakfast places, and ours was one of them.  Built originally in 985 ACE and remodeled in the past six years or so, it was our very own Alhambra, with amazing tile and stucco work, not to mention a friendly staff and delicious food.

Our first full day was spent on a tour of the Medina.  We are not usually ones for guided tours, but in Fes it's essential.  The medina is a warren of little streets and alleys, and you really need a guide to get around it without getting lost, at least until you get your bearings.  Our guide, Aziz, took us around the perimeter of the medina first, to see the old fortifications, the walls, the king's palace, the Jewish quarter, and then he marched us into the medina itself.  There are a few monumental structures inside, including a very large and historic mosque and two medresas, or religious schools, dating from the middle ages.  As non-muslims, we couldn't enter the mosque, but we could peek in from the door.  Going into the medresas was no problem.  All were feasts of tile work and stucco.

As magnificent as these places were, however, they competed for our interest with the medina itself.  The medina in Fes is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, not just for its many, many old buildings, but for the many traditional crafts that are still practiced there.  Both buildings and activities are protected by UNESCO.  As you make your way through its maze of streets, you go through different areas dedicated to different crafts.  Dying, tanning, weaving, brassworking, and others are all represented.  You go through different markets.  Produce.  Meat.  Leather goods.  Shoes.  Traditional clothing.  Western-style clothing.  Spices.  Etc.  All of this takes place on streets that would count as alleyways, or even hallways, in many other places.  Hardly any of them are marked, and there is very little discernible pattern to them.  Except for the occasional motorcycle, you see no motorized vehicles, only donkeys, many of them not particularly happy to be doing what they are doing, like carrying large propane cans.  People jostle you.  Merchants try to hustle you into their stores.  People shout in Arabic or French or a combination thereof. Kids push by with handcarts full of goods.  Stray cats wait patiently for the butcher to drop something.  What is it he's cutting anyway?  Oh, it's a cow's heart!

More to come in the next post.  More pics on Facebook.

A street scene in the Medina

Donkeys in the brassworking quarter

Important Terms for You to Learn Before Visiting Spain

Those of you who know my beloved wife Zoë may be familiar with her ample capacity for linguistic coinages.  Here are a few of the gems she has come up with over the course of the year, which you may find useful on your own travels through Spain.  Notice that many of them could be put to use outside of Spain as well.

• Crone - Not really a coinage, since this the word already existed, but Zoë has brought it out of mothballs to refer to the elderly gypsy women who beg on the streets of Spanish towns and cities, particularly the ones who do so just outside the door of a church.
• Cronage - The crone's performance of her role as a crone.  These women are experts at soliciting sympathy through moaning, limping, and other such displays of misery, authentic or feigned.  When you see a particularly impressive performance, it is appropriate to remark, "That's some damn good cronage!"
• Crone change - Small change that you would not hesitate to part with when moved to give money to a crone.  Anything below twenty cents, or ten, depending on how miserly you are.  This term can be used to refer to such change in any context, even one that has nothing to do with the presence of a crone.  Example: "Do you have a euro for the locker?"  "No, I only have crone change."
• Whack-a-Mole - Throughout Spain, one sees elderly women (not crones) who are exceedingly small in stature, perhaps coming in at less than five feet in height.  Their diminutive size is probably due to privations suffered in their youth, during and after the Spanish Civil War, when hunger and malnutrition were the norms of live for many a Spaniard.  These lovely ladies like to stroll about, often with their arms locked in twos or even threes.  If you find yourself walking behind one, or two, or three of them, you may experience frustration at the pace of their progress down the sidewalk, a pace that is usually much, much slower than the one you would like to assume.  In your frustration, you may find yourself seized with the desire to whack these little ladies as if they were moles in a whack-a-mole game.  We encourage you not to do so, since physical violence is rarely justified, particularly when it is directed against the elderly.  But you might enjoy explaining to your friends, when you arrive at your destination slightly later than anticipated, that you were stuck behind a "whack-a-mole."
• Ho Phone - Only official residents and citizens are allowed to get cellular phones with contracts.  Everyone else has to settle for a debit phone, or "burner," or, as Zoë calls them, a "ho phone," in reference to the use of such phones in the pursuit of illegal activities, such as prostitution.  Notice how much better "ho phone" sounds than some of the alternatives, such as "pimp phone" or "drug dealer phone."  
• Douche-Off - Embarrassment is a problematic emotion in Spanish culture, as it often is in Latin American culture as well.  A common reaction to the experience of embarrassment, especially when it is triggered by an accusation of some sort, is to respond with a counter-accusation, usually leveled in an aggressive tone.  For example, I once witnessed a man complain to the woman cleaning the men's room in a gas station by saying, "You're always cleaning the restroom when I need to use it!"  The cleaning lady responded, in the same frustrated, accusatory tone, "Well, what do you want?  A dirty restroom?"  The original accuser backed off, and waited for her to finish her job.  This exchange of rather angry accusations is called a "douche-off."  The original douchey remark is met with an equally douchey counter-remark.  At this point, the original douche-bag must choose whether to escalate or back off.  Oftentimes, he or she backs off, thereby restoring social order without any sacrifice to anyone's dignity.  Other times, the douche-off continues through another series of exchanges.  This behavior is a long-standing feature of Spanish culture.  Don't believe me?  Check Scott Taylor's Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain.  When I told Scott about the douche-off, he remarked, "That idea got me tenure!"

Notice that these terms, or the activities to which they refer, are not mutually exclusive.  For example, I once stood in the middle of the Corte Inglés (a department store), engaging in a douche-off on my ho phone.  There were whack-a-moles in the immediate vicinity.  

Lo que pica, y lo que non

As we make our way through our last month in Spain, I can't help but think about things that I will miss, and those that I will not miss.  Here are some.

Things I will miss

Chocolate con churros (porras, actually), friends here in Spain, regular access to jamón serrano, The Real Academia de la Historia (an archive), The Biblioteca Nacional, cochinillo asado, the history seminar at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, cordero asado,  having my big meal in the middle of the day and siesta afterwards, one sunny day after another, living within a 10 minute walk of three world-class museums, Picasso's Guernica, the Plaza Mayor in the early morning, being on sabbatical, the sun setting very late in the evening, my tertulia on Tuesday nights, Velázquez's Las Meninas, Las Lanzas, and everything else he painted, the Bismallah Sweet Shop and its fresh samosas, Goya's Tres de mayo, palmeras con chocolate, Goya's Dark Paintings, Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, romanesque art, Breughel's The Triumph of Death, El Greco, the tarta de membrillo at the Horno América, bread from the Museo del Pan Gallego, scones from the bakery on Calle de Leon, reading El Pais in print, the Museo Cerralbo, Lavapiés, La Latina, sweets made with yema, the cathedral in Toledo, fat Spiderman, the Mezquita Cristo de la Luz in Toledo, not having to mow a lawn, the view from our balcony, Restaurante El Labriego, traveling in Europe, the Plaza Santa Ana, having lots of good restaurants within 5 minutes walking of my house, the Buen Retiro park, Can Punyetes restaurant, knowing the city is still very much alive, now mater how late I go to sleep, walking my son back form school, not having to drive, high-speed trains, the clock tower of the Telefónica building, the Café Comercial, the Plaza Canalejas, asadores, the Café Gijón, music & theater in Madrid, calçots, coffee with fellow researchers in the cafeteria of the Biblioteca Nacional, my walk there along the Paseo de Recoletos, the Plaza de la Cibeles in the evening sun, the clock with bells and dancing figures down the street, day trips to amazing places, the reading room at the Ateneo, coffee at the Ateneo (best in Madrid).

Things I will not miss

The euro, life on a single income, being far from family and friends, overpriced restaurants with bad food, mediocre air conditioning, government bureaucracy from hell, the big hunk of meat, not being able to get certain books I need b/c the Biblioteca Nacional does not own them however important they might be, mediocre mail service, my not very comfortable IKEA bed, crowds in the Puerta del sol, the douche-off, IKEA furniture in general, bad customer service, needing a passport-sized photograph for everything,  needing a sello.

London Calling

Hello, mates.  Or is that more Australian?  My test is always, "Does it sound more like Monty Python, or Crocodile Dundee?"  But I digress.  Recently, we were in London.  And before I get more of those "Don't you ever work?!?" remarks out of you lot, I should explain that the trip was motivated by my participation in a conference called "The Global Dimensions of European Knowledge, 1450-1700," at Birkbeck College, University of London.  Not only did I speak at this conference, but I even helped to organize it!  Well, a bit, at least.  I helped my collaborator select the papers, but she did most of the dirty work.  Zoë, Santiago, and I did provide an invaluable service by helping to color-code the nametags on the evening before opening day. If you had not heard of this event, it is probably because of the royal wedding earlier this year, which seems to have monopolized all of the media attention that otherwise would most certainly have been devoted to the conference.  No, I am not bitter about this.  William and Kate did us a favor by diverting the peering paparazzi away from our august gathering of minds.

The most astonishing thing about London for the three of us is that everyone speaks English there.  We knew that they did, of course, but we nevertheless found it strange to be surrounded by people in perfect command of a language that we had become accustomed to hearing only inside our own apartment.  Another astonishing thing was how much things cost.  Accommodations are through the roof, and food is not cheap.  London, it seems, exists to make Spain look affordable.  I should say, though, that the prices were not as bank-breaking as we expected.  We found it easy to eat at affordable prices, if we stuck to ethnic restaurants like Thai places and Asian noodle shops.  This was fine, because this is precisely what we were craving, and British food being what it is  . . . Although we did discover the joys of "Modern British Cuisine," which is basically the British version of the local food movement that you find in other countries.  We had some very taste experiences there.  And now that we're back in Spain, prices in euros seem cheap!

Chapel in Greenwich

We stayed in an apartment on King's Cross Road, not far from King's Cross station, a major transportation hub.  I had two days at the conference while Zoë and the Kid spent time at the Tower of London and, sadly, in the apartment as Zoë tried to recover from a bad cold that hit her just after our arrival.  The three of us managed to see the British Library, the British Museum (the Kid's fave), the National Gallery (my fave), the Victoria & Albert Museum, Somerset House, Greenwich, the London Eye, Westminster Abbey (Zoë's fave), and St. Paul's Cathedral.  Highlights included Poet's Corner in the Abbey, Holbein's "The Ambassadors," a romanesque reliquary at the V&A, Christopher Wren's Chapel at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, riding double-decker buses, eating Asian food, and taking in the over-all atmosphere of this very vibrant city.  We also got to see our friends from this blog post.  They gave us a little tour of their super-cool neighborhood, Notting Hill, but I could not get this fucking song out of my head the entire time we were with them.  Sadly, the market on Portobello Road was not in action when we saw them, so I was not able to verify if  I could have indeed bougth "anything and everything a chap can unload" in its market stalls.

One totally geeky experience which many of you will apprecieate, because you are either a map geek or an Ecuadorian, was standing on either side of the Greenwich Meridian, the imaginary line running through Greenwich, England, that defines the point of origin for measures of longitude around the world.  The experience bears comparison with Ecuador's "Mitad del Mundo" monument, where you can stand on either side of the equator.  0º longitude at Greenwich.  0º latitude at Mitad del Mundo.  Here are some pointless comparisons between the two places, that will allow you to procrastinate working for just a little bit longer:

• The equator is a natural phenomenon, while the prime meridian is entirely arbitrary.  This difference has no effect whatsoever on the geeky thrill involved in visiting them.
• The equator separates the world into northern and southern hemispheres.  Everyone knows this.  Technically, the prime meridian (along with its counterpart, the International Date Line) separates the world into eastern and western hemispheres, but nobody cares.  Who would ever say that the city of London, which lies west of Greenwich and its prime meridian, is in the western hemisphere?  Not I.  
• There are many, many more souvenirs available at Quito's "Mitad del Mundo" monument than at Greenwich's Royal Observatory, but many of the Quito souvenirs are actually Ecuadorian handicrafts that can also be purchased from pan flute bands in any of the world's major cities, while the Greenwich souvenirs are unique to Greenwich, and exclusively prime-meridian-themed.
• At "Mitad del Mundo," you are more likely to eat something that will make you sick.  At the Greenwich Observatory, you are more likely to pay through the nose for whatever you eat.
• At "Mitad del Mundo," when you take your picture with one foot in each hemisphere, you will be facing either east or west.  At the Royal Observatory, when you take your picture with one foot on either side of the prime meridian, you will be facing either north or south.  Another detail that is completely irrelevant to the experience.  
• At "Mitad del Mundo," you will most likely arrive by car or bus.  At the Royal Observatory, you will have walked up a hill in Greenwich Park.  Ironically, however, you are more likely to be out of breath at Mitad del Mundo, because you are 9200+ feet in elevation.  
• "Mitad del Mundo" is an elaborate tourist trap which includes an ethnographic museum and a recreation of Quito's colonial downtown.  It is actually called the "Ciudad Turística [Tourist City] Mitad del Mundo."  The Royal Observatory has the dignity that one would expect from a place once associated with the British crown.  

Please feel free to provide further comparisons in the comments section, or to remark on how stupid you believe this comparison to be.  

Ricardo with one foot on either side of the Prime Meridian