One Night in Gijon

It was a quiet day in Lake Wo--... whoops, I mean, Oviedo.

We took a family trip north to Gijon this weekend, so that Annabel could attend a birthday sleepover, Eric could play Magic, and Alex and Eric could go out on the town.  Despite being only about 25% larger than Oviedo, Gijon has a different vibe, a little hipper, a little more funky.  Oviedo is one of the most conservative, clean (multiple winner of the Platinum Broom Award for cleanest city), and buttoned-up cities in Spain, whereas Gijon seems to be a little more open about its working-class, dockside roots.  Annabel semi-joked about the tall buildings and empty streets (on Sunday), saying it reminded her of a post-apocalpse horror movie.  I didn't see any particular architectural distinction from Oviedo, and Alex and I had fun speculating about various flats for sale while Annabel insisted she could never live in such a spooky place.

Everyone had a great weekend, despite some nasty cold, wet weather.  Annabel had tremendous fun at her sleepover, an unusual event for Spanish folks who don't ordinarily entertain in their homes, and don't ordinarily have homes in which seven girls can sleep over comfortably (each on her own little fold-up cot).  I was very sorry not to see the house, which Annabel described as gorgeous and overlooking the sea.  (As you can tell from these pictures, the sea is a prominent feature of the Gijon landscape.)  She said it reminded her of Rosemary's house on Paros, which is a heck of a compliment as those of you who read the Paros blog entries will realize.  The birthday girl's mother was apparently one of those incredibly fun and cool and industrious parents who put together complex games with prizes for the party, games that are actually fun for the kids.  Alex always expresses amazement at such mothers, while I try not to point out too strenuously her own amazing-fun-mom accomplishments.

Alex employed her extraordinary trip-planning skills to find us a cheap and cool hotel right in the middle of the old district, and while I played Magic she had time to do a little shopping.  (She happened on some amazing reddish-brown wingtip Camper boots, in her size!)  I returned and we headed back out at a very reasonable Spanish hour, about 9:00, had a drink in a bar near our house, then walked over to check out a couple of restaurants that she read about online.  We had another glass of wine in one of them and looked out over a small plaza filled with hundreds of underdressed teenagers going in and out of bars and milling about in the nasty cold weather.  We had to weave our way through hundreds more of these teenagers in the course of that evening, moving in packs through the streets everywhere in our district, including crowded around the door of a bar across from our hotel.  We indulged our fuddy-duddy-parent natures while watching these kids, criticizing their high heels, short skirts, and lack of layers.  The whole heel thing is absolutely amazing--teenager after teenager tottering around on three-inch spikes.  And there is this crazy Spanish fashion at the moment involving short-shorts and thin stockings, popular even with young adult women, and even in the coldest weather.  Personally, I don't get it--it's ugly and impractical and skanky.  You'll just have to imagine the depths of Alex's disdain.

As morbidly interesting as the spectacle was, eventually we had to move on, after deciding that neither menu at the places we'd scouted really appealed to us.  We went back to an Italian restaurant we'd passed that seemed busy, and indeed it was--no table available until midnight, we were told.  So we went across the street in a little bit of a funk, and discovered what turned out to be a fantastic restaurant, well worth the forty-five minute wait in the bar (where we stretched out our single glasses of wine, by now feeling the effects of three drinks and no dinner at 11:00).

Boy did we feel Spanish, still eating dinner at almost midnight!  And afterwards it was only two blocks to our hotel, although we did have to maneuver around the horde of teens.  Their noise was, thankfully, just a dull background rumble from our hotel room.

The morning was beautiful for a while, sparkling, with a rainbow over the harbor while we had coffee near a little church I wrote a poem about back in 2004.  Then we stopped at a gallery built from an old palace, to see the work of the painter Barjola (whose wife was from Gijon).  We spent some time at the seawall overlooking the sea, where the tide was out and there was plenty of room for the dozens of gleeful dogs who were dashing about on the beach and entertaining onlookers like us.  Annabel was returned to us there, bubbling with stories about the sleepover, and we went underground to look at the Roman baths that we'd first visited in 2004, where Annabel became enamored of ancient ruins and where our family mythology developed what turned out to be the very important distinction between Romans (who take baths, use utensils, etc.) and Barbarians (who are very, you know, barbaric in their personal habits).  It was fun for us to revisit our own family history as well as ancient Roman history.  However, having just spent three months in Greece, Annabel's perspective on Romans had shifted significantly:  she now thinks of them as the barbarians.

By the time we came back up from underground, the weather had turned nasty again.  We bought a couple of cute Asturian presents/souvenirs and had lunch at that Italian restaurant we'd seen the night before, then picked up our bags at the hotel and walked up to our bus just as it was about to leave for the thirty-minute ride back to Oviedo.  A very fun weekend was had by all, though it went by too quickly, and now it's time for another week of school.  A short week, as Annabel will miss Friday for our excursion to Barcelona.  Hasta pronto.

Back home in Oviedo

It certainly does feel like home.  Same apartment, same neighborhood, same furniture, most of the same restaurants and stores.

(Our apartment is roughly in the middle of this picture.)

Even the same school for Annabel!  Well, it turns out that this part of life is in fact very different this time.  Entering a new school at 11 is a lot more traumatic than doing so at 4.  Back then she was hardly aware of not speaking the language, and picked it up quickly with no conscious effort.  This time she knows how much she doesn't know, and hates not being able to understand what's being said around her.

And the classes are a challenge, for a variety of reasons.  English and Math are sometimes extremely boring, Spanish and French and Social Studies (all taught in Spanish) are so difficult that she's been assigned tutors to work on her own beginning Spanish and French.  Only P.E., Music, and Art are just right.  But the worst "class" of all is lunch.  She has to eat the hot lunch from the cafeteria, as all students do, and the teachers make her eat what they consider enough of each course (technically only half) before allowing her to move onto the next (and eventually to be dismissed to recess to talk to her friends).  It's a shock to the system of a non-Spanish self-proclaimed picky eater.  Although her pickiness is much reduced these days, her tastes do not extend to everything on the lunch menu.

The friend situation, luckily, is going well.  She almost never sees her old friend Aitana and other old classmates, unfortunately, because they put her in a lower grade, the one where her birthdate is supposed to locate her (partly because her old class was full and had already turned down other students).  Her old class is the first year of secondary but she's been placed back in the last year of primary, and the two have different schedules entirely, including the breaks, so she only sees Aitana on the bus to and from school.  (Moreover, those lucky secondary students are not in thrall to the lunch police, and they get to have lockers, and...well, you get the idea.)  But she's made three friends in her new class, including one native English speaker, and already has a sleepover party invitation for next week, thirty miles north of here up in Gijon.

So, on balance, the classes are trying, the friends are great, the lunch is awful.  Add in the fact that she hasn't been subjected to the discipline of a long school day since last May, and you can perhaps understand that Annabel is not a happy camper.

At least she loves the uniform, even though she misses not being able to wear other clothes to school.  Isn't she cute?

This is her doing homework in the "track suit" version of the uniform, for the two days a week when they have P.E.  A more formal version of the uniform will no doubt appear in a future blog.

We had our first excursion out of town this weekend, to the shrine of Covadonga and the cute coastal town of Ribadesella.  It was sponsored by the local international student organization, and we went with all six of our students as well as forty more students from several different groups.  Alex and I were the only "older" people on the trip, and the representative of the student group who was supposedly in charge of things was more interested in talking to his girlfriend that providing any information about the places we were visiting.  (To be fair, he was not an expert in those places, being himself from Peru, but he had lived in Oviedo for several years and was nominally in charge of the operation.)  We were forced by ice on the road to change the itinerary and abandon the leg of the trip that would have taken us up to the beautiful lakes in the mountains above Covadonga.  But as you can see, we still saw some beautiful sites, including both the mountains and the sea.  (There's a taste of the thick fog we traveled through in the picture of the church at Covadonga.)

Annabel and I did a little beachcombing, since we wouldn't allow her to swim in the North Atlantic in January (what horrible parents!), and I'll leave you with a final shot of her in the purple hat she bought that day in the market in Cangas de Onis.