making paella

For me, the highlight of Fallas was easily the Paella competition on my street: chatting up old ladies for recipe tips and techniques, sipping cold beers, inhaling the smoke from the orange and pine wood fires...it was awesome.

What the hell is Fallas? Fallas is a festival that coincides with the Christian celebration of San Jose (March 19). It´s really the pagan side of a very Catholic, traditional, staid holiday - what´s leftover of the rituals of spring renewal at the solstice. During Fallas, sculpted figures are erected throughout the city representing or alluding to various public, uh, figures or recent events/controversies. On the 19th, the last day of Fallas, all the figures are burnt to the ground, save one (the winner of the best Falla competition). The burning of effigies to mark the spring solstice clearly recalls the festival´s pagan roots and adds to the almost carnivalesque feel of the celebration, however, it does have a more recent Christian, and even cuotidian, origin. But, as the sun sets and after all the good little Christian families parade down the street during the day, the craziness begins (at night, duh) and all hell breaks loose.

Today´s Fallas evolved out of what had been a long and very practical tradition in Valencia: Carpenters, on the eve of the day of their patron San Jose (Joseph - he was a carpenter, remember?), would place a wooden figure covered in painted-on paper strips, on the street in front of their workshops. This rite was initiated by the carpenters´ guild as a way of cleaning out their workshops before spring and getting rid of old shavings and pieces of wood, which they later burned in a purifying bonfire. What used to be a utilitarian and even reverential custom changed at some point in the 18th century, when some of the carpenters began creating more elaborate and satiric figures, exposing and shaming real people to the public. Today, the figures include monuments up to 4 or 5 stories high.

¨Fallas¨ also refers to the neighbourhood group and the activities surrounding the actual figures. During Fallas, each neighbourhood group, or ¨Falla¨, organizes activities and events for their members, including this wicked cook-up (the Paella competition). They hire an artisan to construct the falla (and raise money throughout the year in order to pay him sometimes as much as .5 million€), hold parties every night on the street, march around the neighbourhood in traditional folk dress or aristocratic outfits (these people are called Falleros/as), banging drums and playing the same song over and over. There are more than 300 Fallas in Valencia and each one of them hosts its own local celebration as well as participating in the city-wide events (like the Ofrenda, or Offering: each falla marches to the Plaza de la Virgen bringing flowers, which they offer to a giant wooden statue...of the virgin, the flowers are placed on the bare wooden skeleton, forming the virgin´s dress, or, we might say, clothing the virgin), and of course, on the night of the 19th, each group BURNS their Falla. It´s an environmental disaster. The Polytecnic university is actually conducting an environmental study on this, because all the figures are made of polystyrene...

Anyway, I took some photos of what I think was the best part of all this. More than the nights spent shoving through hoardes of people and knocking old people into the gutters, guzzling rum and dancing to Shakira, I enjoyed wandering around the city looking at the monuments, buying buñuelos (deep-fried pumpkin donuts), oggling falleras, and: Paella. On my street there was a 25 paella cook-off. I settled in with a few beers to enjoy the spectacle:
This women in particular seemed to know her stuff, so I stuck by her, watching and learning: First, she fries chicken and rabbit in olive oil, adding chopped tomatoes after about 10mins. When the meat is browned, she adds artichokes and green beans, which she then fries for another 5mins or so before adding the water. The water should go up to the rivets, a little higher than you see in this picture because she tossed some more water in a second later.
When the water reaches the boil add the rice, roughly 100g per person. Stir initially, then let sit. That´s basically it. Except for spices: rosemary, paprika, safran, salt, pepper. Add during the add water stage. It´s really a lot harder than it sounds, especially if you´re cooking over a wood fire, but you can make a pretty good go at it at home on the stove or on the barbecue. I found this whole process fascinating.

¨So I´ve just made myself redundant at one of my jobs (Wall Street), let´s see how long it takes for them to notice and fire me…¨

I cut and pasted this out of a rough copy I had scribbled in between classes 10 days ago and didn´t have time to post. The plan was to make myself unavailable for certain inconveniently far away classes and let myself be pushed slowly and comfortably out of a job — while continuing to collect my monthly salary, naturally. That didn´t fly. So I quit. No more riding the immigrant train Mon to Thurs to Fuente del Jarro, the biggest industrial polygon in Spain, to teach a 1.5hour class. Well, actually I´m completing the last week of my ¨two weeks notice¨ from Tues to Thurs next week, but that´s it.

So, that leaves me with my Spanish classes everyday from 12 to 2pm. Evening classes 6:30 to 9:30 at Casa Americana, and a pair of private classes with some snobby rich kids. Wicked.

valencia from the hills

This picture is from Lliria, a village about an hour away from Valencia. You can see the city in the distance, or you could if it was bigger (the photo not the city, well, ok the city too). As you can see, it´s REALLY flat here, the city included. There is a ring of mountains that surrounds the fertile Valencian plain, on which (the plain not the mountains) grow oranges. Em, you can see where the mountains meet the sea to the right of my right shoulder, they do the same thing on the other side. Maybe I´ll take some pictures facing the hills next time. The plain is dotted with farms and intermixed with light industry. Yes, I have lost weight, thank you for noticing. Seriously though, I feel really greasy. There´s oil in everything. If not, then it´s cheese or meat, and even then you´ll probably find oil on it.

valencia from my roof

took these pictures the other day while I was having some beers up on the roof. It´s uglier than I had imagined. The first and second pictures are looking towards the city centre, but in between are all the barrios (neighbourhoods) uh, in between. It´s about a 25 min walk from my place to the centre. This would be fine except that the metro doesn´t work past 11pm at night here, in Valencia, in Spain. People don´t eat until at least 11pm here on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night. Where are they supposed to go after they eat dinner? How are they supposed to get to dinner in the first place? There are cabs. A few, but most of them only operate during normal Spanish hours. Arriving at the bus station in the creepy part of town after 10pm? Good luck getting a cab. Or on the 11 O´clock express train from Barcelona? Yer fucked, think again. I get around most of this by riding my bike, and I like the little village I live in, but this is ridiculous. Get your act together Spain. Geez.

And another thing. Between where I live and downtown are five decades of disgrace. I mean this is fucking disgraceful! You can see what I´m talking about in the pictures, all those really ugly buildings they threw up on the fertile fields that used to lie between here (the village of Benimaclet) and the city. The worst thing is that the last two decades have been especially disgraceful, especially considering Franco´s been long gone for at least 20 years. You guys have to stop using that as an excuse. Are you telling me that town planners couldn´t see how they should have been building the city by looking at the older, far-nicer buildings? Or going somewhere else to find out what they were doing there? There is no residential architecture here post 1950s, and as you get closer to present day the buildings just get worse. They seem to simply throw up the cheapest thing possible without giving any thought to design, use of space, materials, innovation, nada. Sometimes I think Spanish architects have a toolkit with like 5-7 models in it, they sell these models to construction companies, and these guys throw them up as fast and as cheaply as they can. Actually, someone does seem to be cluing-in though. I read the other day that they´re considering a law that would limit some of the out of control construction. I fucking hope so.

The bottom picture is facing (South?) towards the sea, which I inevitably think of as South but is actually probably not South. Maybe it´s more like East. You can see smoke. That´s from fireworks. Valencia is the capital of fireworks. I have more to say about this. Below the smoke along the first line of the beach there are some new buildings.

There are no less than 31 cranes in this picture, I counted. And what look to be at least 16 buildings in varying stages of construction, each and every one of them the same as the next. Up close they´re even
more creepy because of the tiny differences they´ve concocted to play with your head, like there´s a sculpture in the courtyard in one of them and then not in the next, and as you walk past at siesta, passing nobody because everybody is inside, you can´t help but ask yourself, why? Why couldn´t you have altered the height of one of these buildings, knocked down a wing on one end to let in a bit of sun and break the claustrophobic monotony of the perfectly equal entrances? Fuck.

so long no post

so I forgot my password. I created this blog when I still had internet access at home, and my password was saved on that computer. I thought I knew the password anyway since it´s the same one I´ve always used, but, until now it hasn´t worked. Today though, for some reason, it has suddenly worked, the same stupid thing I´ve been trying to type-in at the log-in screen for two weeks.

Ok, well, blog´s up again. I took some pictures of where I live, will put those up here for you to see. By the way, looks like I´m coming back to Canada in August. My classes here in Valencia finish at the end of June, but I´m going to be working in a summer camp in Ciudad Rodrigo July 1-28, where I worked last year, then I´m coming home.