Monday June 21, 2010
Isabella, Dashell (a short-haired black rising junior at Yale), and I were at Casa de America to check Adriana Lestido’s photo exhibition: Amores Difícules (Tough Love) , when the security guard at the front desk stopped me to ask if I were Chinese. At this point, I was thinking: okay now, even employees at official places want to be pushy with knowing my origins… I get it. I look Asian. But this time it turned out to be different. This time, he rolled up his shirt to ask what the two large Chinese characters meant that were tattooed on his right bicep. I couldn’t be of much help, seeing that my Chinese reading level is of that of a housefly. I could only read the first word: 清, which means pure/clean. But I blanked on the second. It did have the water root, so I guessed it was related but in simplified form. When I told him that I didn’t know the second character, he was, like, “Joder! Nobody I’ve asked knew either. I got that tattoo from an old Chinese lady on the street, and she reassured me that it meant pure.” Too bad. Too bad. After a bit of research at home, i.e.: asking my sister, it turns out 清凈 means peaceful. So no scam here, ladies and gentlemen. Phew.
Lestido’s photo exhibit’s message was… how can I put it lightly… something along the lines of… I AM A FEMALE ARTIST. LET ME TAKE PICTURES ABOUT FERTILITY AND BABIES AND LOVE AND BEING A WOMAN. Not that it was bad or anything, there were some very touching pictures of mother-and-daughter pairs and teenage mothers with their children.
We also went to a group exhibition Encubrimentos (Concealments) at Instituto Cervantes that was just a couple blocks away from Plaza Cibeles. The exhibition of Latin American artists was awesome and the set up was great, with black tap running every which way along the walls and over the partitions. One especially creepy work was pictures of empty rooms with real and imaginary suicide notes that people left before taking their lives in those rooms. Raised above the area of the exhibition, gallery-visitors sat/lied on small grey beanbag chairs to look at the photography books strewed on the ground and to watch a great video of photos/video that was projected onto a large screen above timed to music and that showed a sequence of artistic images of different people/families. Everything flashed by quite quickly. Sex, giving head, pregnancy, food, cuddling, birth, babies, babies, babies, toddlers, playing, crawling, kid, pet, kid playing with pet, falling asleep. It was quite indie.
Our dinner was set with the cooking class we signed up for through IES. A group of fourteen IES girls (oh no, not stereotypical at all, we just know our place in the world) sat in a semi-circle in little school desk chairs in the unfurnished living room of an apartment that looked on a kitchen, making us feel like audience members of a cooking show. The chef made us a giant ceramic punch bowl of sangria first, pouring in the soft drink, red box wine, fruit, and azúcar abundante (geez, thanks for the specific instructions, printed-out recipe lying on my desk). God, no wonder restaurants make a killing off of tourists ordering sangria at €15/jarra or litre. As we snacked on Iberian ham and tomato sauce on toasted bread and drank our sangria, Isabella and Vivian (an Asian rising junior at Harvard) volunteered to help make the tarta de Santiago that had to be baked during our class while we cooked the other dishes. I went up to help cook the paella with Emily (a white rising junior at Trinity University). She worked the large paella pan hard as I added the chicken, seafood, rice, etc. In the beginning, the chef yelled at me, because I was going to dump the sliced pieces of chicken breast into the paella pan of hot oil, which probably wouldn’t have been a good story… The cook then made a large tortilla española (think: thick, perfectly round potato and onion omlette) to show us how my favorite Spanish dish (typical, I know, I know…) was prepared. She then brought out two small bowls, a large box of presliced and cooked onions and potatoes, two small frying pans, and two giras tortillas. So we each went up to make our own delicious mini tortillas with expert beating, mixing, frying, and flipping action. The paella was quite delicious, too. It was a shame that a lot of the girls don’t like seafood. I don’t understand how life would be enjoyable otherwise. To finish off, the chef took out the lightly baked tarta de Santiago and sprinkled powdered sugar on top with a stencil of a sword on top. What a meal!
After we took off our aprons and thanked the teacher and her sous-chef, we were in a mad rush to catch the last half of the Spanish World Cup game against Honduras. Originally, we were going to watch the game at the closet bar, figuring that we could watch it outside the stadium with the hyped crowd for Friday’s game against Chile when we would have the entire game to watch. But we changed our minds and decided to rush to the stadium, five metro stops away, which turned out to be a good thing since one can never predict where one will be during a future game. The game was projected from a large screen outside of the fúbol stadium, with a mad crowd of people in yellow and red standing in front and botelloning it up. Because we got there so late, we had to content ourselves with watching from the left side of the crowd, where there were god damn tree/pole/people in the way. I didn’t think I would ever fantasize about cutting down a tree ever in my life. Thankfully, the American guys standing to our right was nice enough to allow us to inch our way into the crowd more, the guy standing next to me even gestured for me to stand in front of him. No doubt, the crowd was bat-shit happy that Spain won. Riding the excitement was just as exciting as seeing the victory. Now, I really ought to learn the Spain song instead of mumbling along with the crowd. Don’t want to be like the Key Clubbers with the Canadian National Anthem, now do we?
Photo credit: Haley’s dad.
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