-The word "Gracias" is amazing. To encompass, "Thank you," "I appreciate it," and "You're very kind," and anything else to show gratitude in one word is an impressive linguistic feature for a culture.
-The Siesta really is performed in Spain and can be maddening if you don't know to expect it. There were about four times where I found a store or museum or restaurant right about the time they closed up shop for a nap through the hottest part of the day. Great idea, but hard to wrap your mind around if you're not used to it.
-There is a lot more standing around and talking here, especially on the street, and especially at night...again a cultural feature that I can appreciate, but one that messes with me because I'm used to moving down the sidewalk unimpeded and I tend to get frustrated when people are just standing around in my way. Not their fault or problem, purely my own.
-Dog leash laws are enforced to a much lesser degree here. Kind of like, "if your dog needs a leash, use one...but it's your decision."
-Maybe it's just because I was the middle of the city, but there is a never ending amount of shops, stores, and markets, pharmacies, bars, and eateries. Like everyday is the State Fair or something. One possible reason for this is that the country was under the Franco dictatorship until the mid 70's. After that I imagine there was a huge influx of the capitalistic ideal and the situation that has resulted is all these stores and shops. On top of that, the capitalistic ideal was limited to all these shops and did not include (1) malls, (2) box stores like Wal-Mart and Target, and (3) chain stores like Walgreen's. This interesting to experience, coming from The States. Not everything that I want or need is in the place that it is intuitive to find it which leads to much more window shopping and actually walking into stores than I am used to (albeit, some of this might have to do with the fact that I can't speak or read the language). I have built up the strongest immunity to shopping that I ever have had.
-Another thought about the stores which seems counterintuitive to me as a citizen of the U.S. Stores generally group together. Like, if there is one eyeglasses place that is doing well, two more will open up within a block. I've observed this with music stores, comic book stores, eyeglass stores, clothing stores, and even movie theaters. I guess the idea is that if people are looking for something specific (and with the absence of big box retailers, it's harder to find specific things) you can go to the neighborhood and find what you're looking for in at least one of the places...kind of like the other side of the coin of "one stop shopping."
That's it from Spain, though...heading to Frankfurt via Paris for a few days breath before the massive amounts of French culture that gets hurled at me in a couple of days.
From Spain, adios.
3 comments:
So at that spanish naval museum did it have anything about how they got their butts handed to them by the british?
dunno...it was all in Spanish, but the British naval museum had a bunch of stuff about how they handed them they're butts at the battle of Trafalgar...even had a cool computer display.
Not the Spanish butts, the French ones...but whatever.
Post a Comment