Monday, October 09, 2006
Some things that are different…
a step beyond the obvious ones like coming home for three hours in the middle of the day and kids out with their parents for dinner at eleven…
* You can get Ben and Jerry’s here, but it’s a bit hard after the deep freeze…David and Silvia had to resort to desperate measures.
* Wine in barrels. Once a week we go down the three flights of stairs with our handy dandy plastic jug so the guy in the wine store on the first floor can refill it from the keg o’ wine. There are a few kegs of white, a few of red, and sparkling of course.
* Nakedness. Today on the beach just below they city I watched from behind a book as three generations in family stripped down and put their bathing suits on. Nobody seems to think twice about it, imagine teenage girls at home feeling comfortable
* No checkbooks. Bank transfers are the big thing here. I don’t even want to think about how many people have our bank information. The landlord, the utility companies, the gym….checks, they’re some archaic anomaly that unfortunately take three weeks to clear. Even Spanish ones.
* Street cleaning- back in Somerville, you had to remember to move your car to the other side of the street, but that was just once a week. I think they clean the streets here EVERY DAY! And, they seem to use soap, water, and multiple implements.
* Stuff is really old. Saturday morning Andrew and I had our first foray into Tarragona tourism with a visit to the Roman walls that bound the old part of the city. The first gated communities if you will. These walls date back to the second century B.C., the second Punic wars between Rome and Carthage. So I was wondering, since there’s such a strong ethic of historic preservation here, when did that start? I mean, even 500 years ago, the stuff around here was already 1,500 years old! Were they trying to preserve it back then? Maybe they just didn’t have very big bulldozers. What’s cool is how many of the houses/buildings just went with what was already there, making the walls part of their construction.
* You can get Ben and Jerry’s here, but it’s a bit hard after the deep freeze…David and Silvia had to resort to desperate measures.
* Wine in barrels. Once a week we go down the three flights of stairs with our handy dandy plastic jug so the guy in the wine store on the first floor can refill it from the keg o’ wine. There are a few kegs of white, a few of red, and sparkling of course.
* Nakedness. Today on the beach just below they city I watched from behind a book as three generations in family stripped down and put their bathing suits on. Nobody seems to think twice about it, imagine teenage girls at home feeling comfortable
* No checkbooks. Bank transfers are the big thing here. I don’t even want to think about how many people have our bank information. The landlord, the utility companies, the gym….checks, they’re some archaic anomaly that unfortunately take three weeks to clear. Even Spanish ones.
* Street cleaning- back in Somerville, you had to remember to move your car to the other side of the street, but that was just once a week. I think they clean the streets here EVERY DAY! And, they seem to use soap, water, and multiple implements.
* Stuff is really old. Saturday morning Andrew and I had our first foray into Tarragona tourism with a visit to the Roman walls that bound the old part of the city. The first gated communities if you will. These walls date back to the second century B.C., the second Punic wars between Rome and Carthage. So I was wondering, since there’s such a strong ethic of historic preservation here, when did that start? I mean, even 500 years ago, the stuff around here was already 1,500 years old! Were they trying to preserve it back then? Maybe they just didn’t have very big bulldozers. What’s cool is how many of the houses/buildings just went with what was already there, making the walls part of their construction.
