Ever had a day when you looked back on it and wondered, "What was I thinking when I got out of bed?"  Today was one of those days.  We have had almost 35 mile an hour winds for two days and the pine trees that surround the house were bending all over the electric wires.  It's wild being on top of a hill when all the trees are swaying. The electricity in the house went out, I thought because we have had these gale force winds.  The internet connection died- my link to the free world.  I tried to recharge my cell phone at the grocery store- the telephone wouldn't accept my money.  Then I went back to the bank ATM machine to recharge and it was out of service.  And our house was freezing.  Visions of ice mummy-me being discovered when David returns from Turkey with Elisabeth. When this stuff happens in the US, I shrug it off and think- "Oh, well!"  In another country-though- you wonder what is it about you that is not up to the task.  The first thought may not be, what about this system doesn't work.

In my snit I called the landlady who happened to be in the Pyrenees up to her rear in snow-who said I can't call the electric company because I don't have the number with me.  Luckily she called her daughter who called me back with the name of the neighbor lady next door and the phone number for the police in La Canyada.  I wouldn't think to call the police if your power is out.  Alas, her daughter suggested that I check the circuit breakers, which I had not done.  Yes, I assumed there was a relationship between the wind blowing and the power going out--like it does at home. Nope, with the flip of a switch I was back in business.  Power going out had also affected the internet connection.  Lesson:  almost everything is a little issue. It's the language barrier that allows you to blow it up bigger than it should be.  However, I now have a year's supply of candles in case the lights do go out permanently.

What I realized from this little extravaganza is that with all the gates in front of houses like ours, you can't knock on someone's door for help.  I don't know how they do it.  Just think about it.  You have to know the person's phone number, ring them up to get help.  A very interesting experience of isolation.  I so feel for people in the U.S. who don't have English as a first language.

If I were operating in a hotel/community there would be built-in translators. Others who organize.

Living on the economy is challenging me to look at my normal reflex reactions of framing things as disasters.  I hope I move past this little shadow opportunity.  Jung was right, we all have one.There are new photo postings of my shadow and the barrio we live in with all its gated houses.  Yes, ours is gated too.  But it is a little isolating.  You have to choose to interact with others.  But it makes it a challenge to figure out how to knock on someone's door.  I take so much for granted.  So my shadow is catastrophic thinking. Anyone else out there share this little goblin?

David and Elisabeth are doing well in Turkey.  David gave a talk to 200 undergraduates had lunch with the University vice president and gives a talk to faculty tomorrow.  Elisabeth has interviewed 12 women about the Turkish headscarf issue and now seems to be cruising toward the finish line. So it's been a productive trip for all concerned.  Apparently it has been great for Ismail, David's former student as well.  Apparently having an American academic coming in does great things for you reputation.   Signing off until next time. 

I have not had the opportunity to see how dependent I am on having contact with my internet-connected folks.  Since we got hooked up to the Internet yesterday through many synchronicities, I have been obsessive about looking at web sites and trying to catch up with the news of the world.  

Here I have been reading El Pais, the nationally based newspaper, as well as the right wing rags.  It is hard to tell their bias, unless you know the underpinnings of the editorial policy and it's history.  However, it has been fascinating to see the election process here working.  Elections are March 9.  The ETA Basque terrorist group is threatening an action to disrupt the elections.  Hopefully it will not be a problem for David and Elisabeth who are flying in on the 9th from Turkey.  They will have to get to the Atocha rail station in Madrid to come to Valencia.  So say prayers for safety of Spain and them specifically that day.  You will remember that the Atocha station was bombed several years ago with lots of fatalities.  So hold them in the Light.

We saw a debate on tv the other night where the 2 presidential candidates, Rahoy (the conservative) and Zapateros (the socialist)  argue their respective positions.  The big conservative issue here is IMMIGRATION. Sound familiar?  The socialist position is about unifying a diverse population.  Sound familiar. It is a truly small world.  Here candidates on television for local offices keep saying, "Soy como Obama"  There is a world watching.  This Fallas Ninot pokes fun at the media and their coverage of the Queen Sofia.

Also the first academy award for a Spanish actor in No Land for Old Men was treated as a major coup for the Spanish film industry. 

David is recuperating as am I from the flu and it's aftermath.  But we have been taking Spanish medication that has lots of aspartame and sorbitol in it.  Really sweet.  That is formulated for the sweet tastes of Spaniards. But it seems to be doing something!  

The weather continues to be good today.  Warm and sunny.  There are clothes drying on the line outside.  And the pine trees are pushing their pollen out on every possible surface.  Entire streets were covered with the yellow stuff, It was so thick in the rain the other night I thought maybe it was paint.  

David will be speaking pretty fluently by the time he comes back.  He now has a Spanish tutor, Mona from the U.S. who lives in a little town north of here.  She is coming to the house. Amazing.  Until we meet again.  There are new pictures up of the Fallas sculptures.  If you are interested in Las Fallas just google it and check out the 2008 Fallas.  I will actually have the site I've seen on the next blog entry.

   February 22, 2008

The sun has just come out and its glowing on the terrace of the third floor of this place in the woods.  Had you asked me about the weather in Spain I'm afraid it would have been a lot like Pennsylvania from Sunday the 17^th until today, the 21^st.   It was cold and bitterly raining most of the week.  David was literally on his back during the worst of it with our friend la gripe. 

He thought he had gotten a light case of it, but no.  We didn't have a thermometer so went out and bought one for the occasion.  His temp easily was above 104.  That is with all the calculations for the Celsius thermometer.  We are always doing this is it "9/5" or "5/9" thing and add something.  Yes, high school chemistry was a LONG time ago. 

To honor the occasion, we rented all of the Star Wars episodes and David had his  sick little eyes fixed on the screen when they weren't closed.  Being sick in Spain is a lot like being sick in the U.S. except when you  go to the Farmacia here we sound like we are 2 year olds speaking baby talk.  I have to go with the least common denominator in terms of words to achieve the end result.  My sense  of humor is with me and I can only imagine what people on the other side of my words are smirking/smiling at.  I am sure I am quite creative in the way I put verbs and nouns together.  Glad to be a source of good humor for others.

A huge accomplishment for today was calling the guy, Pablo, who delivers propane to the house and requesting 4 more containers of propane-butero.  I guess it's butane.  We went through an entire unit of it trying to keep the house warm while David had the chills.  But I managed to sputter out our address and the number of units we needed AND they arrived.  I didn't screw up the address.  It's really humbling to not know how to put one of these containers on the heating unit.  When you are living on the economy with everyone else rather than in a hotel, things look really different.  It costs 13 euros per tank and in 2 weeks we have gone through almost 2 tanks.  So for 4 tanks I just gave Pablo 52 euros plus tip.  Poor guys had to haul these four heavy tanks up the hill to our house.  With the rain the truck wouldn't make it up the hill.  These guys don't need to work out.

Last week we ordered ADSL for the house- yikes- the Internet is coming.  The messenger from Telefonica arrived unannounced yesterday to give us the kit so we could install it.  That was the good news. He was supposed to call and make an appt. Nah!  He came in and vaguely ponted to the place he thought it would go.

Then we spent several hours trying to figure out which plugs went in which orifices of the visible system.  Alas, we think we are in for a bit of negotiation with the company as the line that is supposedly hooked up to the Internet line does not seem to have a phone attached to it.  Ironically, the Germans who ordered the box for the house, Birgitta and Jan, received a call here yesterday from a German friend who didn't know they weren't here.  I told the friend to thank them for putting in the line- but it was a little premature.

So we are hoping that by some miracle Birgitta will call us for the heck of it  and tell us what they had to do to get the system operational. David got a Math buddy here, Pacho to call Telefonica today to have them walk us through the instructions VERY SLOWLY.  They are not allowed to speak English with us even if they know it. 

Well, I'd like to be all chatty and tell you we have been traveling, but this week it's been using the metro and schlepping back and forth to get food at the market in Valencia. We now have a little old lady cart to roll to the metro, then to the downtown market.  I guess we are adjusting,  Yesterday I was so proud of myself for finding the elevator at the metro station so I could be self-sustaining and get the vegetable laden cart down into the bowels of the metro on my own.  However, the elevator outside at street level was not working.  I took the leap and started pushing the thing down the stairs.  One thing that's really nice here is that young men apparently can't  stand seeing older women in distress so this muscular young guy grabbed the bottom of the cart and hauled it down for me.

Luckily the "ascensor" was operating down to the train level. As I got out of the elevator I saw that my train to Lliria was there in the station. Panic.  Do I try to push on as the train is full?  I took one deep breath and shoved myself and the rolling bag overflowing with vegetables and water filters and….. onto the train with the help of a lovely young woman.  We just grinned at each other as we collapsed into the mass of humanity.  Saying prayers that this wouldn't be too much for the train. Mind you this is at 2:00 p.m. when everyone is going home for lunch.  I made it!

Spain seems to give much lip service to handicapped entrances and the like.  But like  so many places, there is more window dressing than reality.  If  I had been in a wheel chair it might have been a whole different thing.  There are lots of signs that indicate for handicap access.  But there are often steps in the way of the ramp. 

I will go into the University tomorrow and add this episode into the blog and add some pictures of La Canyada.   I have pretty much taken over the third floor for photo/computer time.  It's  now pretty warm thanks to the taste of natural gas.  I do miss electrical heat.  The gas aftertaste is a bit much for me, but I can go out and breathe air from outside if it's too much.  

Oh, and I made hummus today.  Boiled the garbanzos for a million hours and used a hand tool in the house that I'm sure is supposed to be for chopping small amounts of things.  Sort of like fingernail clippers or a tiny, tiny Cuisine Art blade on a long stick.  It took forever to squash the beans.  But after half an hour, we have hummus with plenty of garlic to scare away the bad guys.

We meet Elisabeth in Madrid next Friday,29^th of February, then she and David go off to Istanbul on Saturday morning.  Istanbul and Athens have had SNOW.  It's big news here.  Then I will have a week on my own before they come back for Las Fallas, the festival where they have papier mache puppets that are hauled all around town then all but one is burned on the 19^th of March.  It's regarded as the beginning of Spring here.

Here´s a little update. Today the 22nd I took lots of photos of the Ninots, the papier mache figures they will burn in a Mardi Gras like festival.  There are hunreds of them. So photos will appear shortly.  Think lots of figures that look like Disney characters, but Spanish ones.  Lots of sexy sculptures with women with extraordinarily large boobs.  Lots of photoshop to do.  David is back on his bike, although looking pretty pale and wan. 

Cheers, let us know what You are up to.

Much love, Paula and David

We are officially residing in La Cañada now through June.  We lived through a pretty harrowing couple of days waiting for the contract to be written by Isabella Cañas´ lawyer to discover that we had a contract. It´s remarkable that things work out, but they may hang you over the ledge a bit  before they finally come together. What doesn´t kill us makes us stronger.  This is a little "milagro".  Miracles are normal but with your guts wrapped up in knots, wondering if the deal would go through, it can be a little hair raising.  Yes and it would have been all my fault if we had to leave the hotel with nowhere to go but David´s office.  Don´t think they would have appreciated our sleeping on the hard tile floor.  But, alas- a miracle occurred. 

For those of you interested in snail mail our mailing address is: 

David Johnson or Paula Michal-Johnson, 

Calle 538 nº 10, La Cañada , Paterna, 

Valencia 46182 ES

I may stay a little longer than I had planned because the place is so nice. The lower garden has three gnomes guarding the ground, we found orange trees, lemon trees, lots of airplane plants growing in the ground along with jade, just sprouted out of the ground.  I left my own jade plant outside in Fountain Hill and it got all mushy and soft and sort of died with the first freeze.  It´s quite amazing the difference between Valencia and Pennsylvania. We are not rubbing it in.  We are just constantly surprised at what grows here.

Moving in was a trek on its own.  We rented a little panel truck from PepeCar in Valencia. Very cute, only one problemo - no maps.  The woman looked at me like I had three heads. "What? You want a map plus the vehicle?"  But the force was with us, so we managed to get to the bank near the university to  take money out for the rent and deposit only to discover that on Friday, the bank did not have 2,000 euros.  A not so helpful Spanish man at the bank, who was alone and was not so interested in foreigners gave us really poor directions to another bank nearby that would have the money.  So we tripped all over ourselves trying to find the bank, snaking back and forth. Luckily the bank guy had given us the name of a grocery store, Consum, that we would need to pass. That saved our rear ends.  Before we found the bank, I crossed another street, Calle de Santa Theresa.  I saw that as an omen that we were on the right path.  This time it worked.  

So,  we took the little panel truck, using made-up directions to La Cañada, getting pretty fricking lost.  The google map directions had evaporated so we had to ask for divine help.  Luckily we got off the auto route at just the right time. The rental car folks give you the car with an empty tank, not full, so we were desperate to find a gas station. I saw a gas station REPSOL we took a careening exit, got gas and realized according to David´s GPS unit that we were at the La Cañada exit.  Talk about blind leading the blind.  So we met the landlord, signed the papers, she was in a hurry and we only  half-heard what she said and understood less.  

We unpacked all our stuff --way too much. Went to the Mercadona--grocery store, and got all our provisions for the coming months.  Got in the Pepecar tiny van ( with it´s peeling plastic insignia on the side) to return it to the center of Valencia. It had gotten us into the 'burbs, but our luck changed significantly when we left the house 11 km from Valencia at 6:30 p.m. We were in a powerful force field of absolute confusion for almost 2 hours.  At 8 pm. when the Pepecar closed, we were out of luck, lost beyond repair and had to wait til the next day to return it at a significant penalty.  Their special Pepecar trick is that there is NO ADDRESS on your receipt.  So David´s GPS unit wasn´t working.  I called PepeCar´s number, Surprise, all options are in rapid fire Spanish.  All the clerk would say is "we close at 8:00 p.m."  David´s GPS unit, does not work well in cities with buildings all around.  It also could not count the exit numbers on rotaries.  Almost all turns are with rotaries here, so it would print "take the 2nd exit at the roundabout" but would ignore that the first one was an entrance ramp.  So all calculations on turns were hysterical.  By this time David, our conductor is raving in good English cursewords asking where we were.  I couldn´t read the map I had of Valencia that fast, so it was a royal disaster!  Finally,  I recognized a Chinese restaurant that we had passed  from the AIRPORT when we came into Valencia.  Yes, we were that lost.  So we retraced our steps back to the old town part of Valencia and took  San Vicente de Martir  out to the highway and found our way back to  the house we had left only 2 hours  before. Loved the name of the street.  We were feeling like martyrs.  It only took us 20 minutes to get back home on more familiar terrain.  Lesson:  don´t try to return a rental car in a strange city after dark. 

The next morning we took the car back and David vowed never to drive again in Spain.  Valencia is a very difficult city to negotiate.  There are jokes about other mathematicians who have chosen to drive here, circling the auto route many, many times before they figured out how to get off. Add one more mathematician and a totally clueless companion to the list.

We are happy in the  house and had our first Sunday meal on the terrace, it was a bit cold, but possible.  There are a lot of guard dogs in the neighborhood and we laughed our asses off walking to the metro yesterday to find a really ostentatious house called ""La Alhambra" that had it´s own video surveillance cameras, tennis court etc.  The Alhambra in Granada, of course, is the biggest Moorish castle in the world - we think.  So we are totally outclassed living among the rich and famous.  Or, they think they are.  

Today the snafus continued.  I made reservations for David and Elisabeth to Turkey, only I didn´t notice that an announcement on the reservation said the flight you want is not available, try this one.  I booked it, it cannot be changed. So we have to see if Elisabeth´s flight to Spain can be changed for a small fee of $200.  Dumb mistakes here are very costly.  Not all that different for foreigners in the US, only we never so completely empathized  before.  

Hopefully, we will post another entry when we have the Internet at the house.  Another adventure.  I hope it´s in a week, but we were told it could take months to get  hooked up because Telefonica, the state-run phone company which  is the only provider for the house we are living in, is a post Franco bureaucracy in spades.  We were told yesterday that it´s against the rules to speak anything but Spanish on the phone.  So if someone truly speaks English- they are not allowed to do so for fear of punishment.  Or that´s the story an Israeli artist told us.  Maybe that´s just her story.

So we struggle, we love being here, we struggle, we love being here.  Clearly a sense here of being the OTHER.  More photos to come, but they will come more slowly 'til we get the internet at the house unless I can save them to my little key chain drive and upload them from David´s office computer.

I´m typing this in David´s office shared with a phenomenal graduate student and a very silent Japanese researcher who is here for 2 weeks.  It´s quite hard to imagine three silent mathematicians sitting, doing their work separately. Well, not so silent, we are all coughing!  So think silence...cough...silence...cough.  David and our Japanese friend are really dueling to find solutions to mathematical problems in a hurry.  Luckily David has a longer time frame. We don´t know the Japanese guy´s name he does not talk to us.  Not social at all.  So I am a little mouse in this room of silent coughing mathematicians and it´s so hard for me to be quiet.

Adios, Paula

In the last 24 hours we were going to be homeless for two days until we looked online for a room, the only available room was about 30 minutes North of Valencia on the beach.  A huge Ceramic Expo is here  for the week.  Our hotel apt. was booked through the fair when we got here, so we thought we would look elsewhere. One apt. at the Jesus metro station, might have been available but we missed the time when we were to call her and she rented it to a Physics professor.  After we had our reservations for Sagunto (where the townspeople burned the town rather than turn it over to Hannibal) I came back to the apt. and there had been a cancellation! Yes!  The only snag was that it was 117 euros and we had been paying pre-feria prices of 50.euros  Oh, well.  It is a challenge to stay upright and grounded.  It does feel like play money.  We keep looking for the crumbs to follow. In the end it all will work out, it's just in the moment to moment things that there is total upheaval. The major accomplishment last night was going on-line in Spanish and cancelling the reservation for Sagunto and the train reservations.  It may have taken 45 minutes to figure out what all the technical terms meant in Spanish.  Not a one of them was in my cheap dictionary.  David's birthday is tonight-so we will go out to dinner with Olga Gil-Medrano.

Our wild journey today involved visiting a 3 bedroom house with a two-tiered gardens, a terrace off the dining room, a fireplace and hopefully an internet connection.  The trip out of the city didn't start all that well as we took a train to Paterna, 4 stops short of where we were going, La Canyada.  The graffiti at the train station was pretty third world, and prior to the stop I managed to get my purse caught in the train door and it took 4 people to get it out.  I was in a panic.  People were quite nice and helpful.  Dumb American.  It's ok, (vale) everyone here thinks we are German or British.  Guess that makes sense.

There were a few things lost in translation.  Like we thought the deposit was 300 euros and it turns out it was 1000.  David got a check today from Univ. of  Valencia that will cover first month's rent and deposit.  We meet Isabel, the owner tomorrow morning to sign the papers, at a bank- they will check the validity of the check and we will sign over 2,000 euros.  This is all amazing.  Expensive and amazing.  

But Isabel's son in law speaks fluent english - so hopefully we will have a list for him to handle week after next.  We will have Spanish TV, DVD's and internet.  Huge kitchen.  Pictures await.  David took some with his little camera there.  I was so tired trying to translate that my gray matter is somewhat coagulated.  Like it's amazing that I am writing this.  It was like being in Mexico and going for a day with an entire busload of Mexicanos 33 years ago.  The brain, she is like putty.  But after we move next Wednesday- have food in the house and buy some sweaters to keep us warm, all will be well.  

So feel free to join us.  There is room for a really big party here.  Earlier in the day we went to see a 1 bdrm. apt in the city center-occupied by a really nutty& bombastic beauty from Latin America.  David's most obvious reaction was that her boobs were jumping out at him, served on a platter so to speak, when she hugged and kissed him.  It was wild.  All part of the journey. Across the way was a construction site. So during working hours, no privacy with workers ogling into apartments.

I think we will be happy, it's 5.5 k (3.5 miles)to David's office which is a good commute for him.

Trains are going to be interesting.  I think we can take a free bus to Paterna) two towns down--where trains are more frequent without walking over giant hills. But we may need to get a tandem for David to do all the work or a scooter.  Some adjusting to do.

We arrived with more luggage than anyone should have- 4 big bags, 2 little bags and a humongous bicycle carrier for - David's bicycle.  The flights were easy except for our good luck of sitting in front of two very sick babies,an exhausted British Mum, and her husband who was coughing up a lung here and there.  Olga Gil, David's compadre in Matematicas at the Univ. of Valencia ,Burjassot met us at Manises airport with her jaws dropped.  It took two taxis for all our stuff to get to our home for two weeks, Living Valencia, in the Plaza de la Merced.  A lovely old building that is home to one of the oldest housewares shops in the city, Mas Masia. 

It has been a great place to start!  Olga took us to a French restaurant our first night Chez Lyon. Spectacular food with good Rioja wine.  What we have realized now is how difficult it is to adjust to different appliances in the kitchen, dishwasher and washing machine that you need to set the temperature, size of the load and the television - oh the television.  It took us 2 hours to figure out how to turn on the tv there wer 3 unmarked remotes.  David finally successfully turned on the tv after midnight to discover many sex channels and no CNN.  Our ears are not yet attuned to Valencian Spanish and David is especially noticing that his French doesn't work in lieu of all  Spanish words.  

The technical things have shamed us.  But it's not killing us.  We discovered how to get new SIM cards for our cell phones for 15 euros a piece, then just yesterday we found out that you can add more euros, thus minutes, to your cell phone through ATM's.  Many people have pay as you go phones here.  There is no A to B for gringo tourists.  There is just, false start one, default false start two, and blindly lucking into the answer.  

We have had two bites on apartments, one from a lovely American woman who was so kind as to connect us to her two good friends in Valencia who are artists working to get the new Valencia Zoo ready to open next year.  Unfortunately the apt was too far away, but at the beach.  We will look at another apt. tomorrow.  A mathematician's mother is interested in renting her apartment to us for 550 euros.  It is just South of the old city, easily connecting to Metro.  So we will see what happens.

In the meantime we are discovering the Central Market (Mercat Central) in Valenciano the dialect spoken in Valencia. David was mesmerized at the Market which is a block from where we are staying.  Lots of oranges, jamon and fresh vegetables.  Teas for whatever ails you.  Valencia is sort of the bread basket of Europe.  Long growing season.  There are flowers blooming and the temperature has been about 16 degrees Celsius- maybe 50 degrees F.

I have done pretty well physically, we are walking quite a bit. The only downside has been that our temporary apt. has the tempurpedic mattress which I'm allergic to and lots of wooden cabinets that have pressed wood in them.  Hack, hack, cough cough. But I will survive.  Taking pills to counteract it all.  I realize what a little cocoon we have in Fountain Hill, with so few pollutants in the house.  New is clearly viewed here as "better."  People are shocked when we say we prefer older apartments with real wood furnishings.  IKEA like furniture has made it here in a big way.  

David met about ten cyclists on Sunday at the Plaza de Toros in downtown Valencia for a ride, maybe 70 k, to the north near the mountains where he trekked to a fresh spring.  The cyclists are hardy, at their lunch, several had beers which amazed David as they made a quite circuitous ride back down the mountain. But he has found his group!  Several people spoke English and his GPS unit has gotten him back and forth quite easily.  He just has to keep batteries charged.

Let us hear from you via email or I think  you can respond to this posting, but not sure yet.

About ten o'clock p.m. on October 8th (the night before we got on a bus for the Big Apple to visit the Spanish Consulate), David said "I need 3 passport photos for my visa application."  So I thought to myself, this can't be too difficult.  In ten minutes I created a mini digital passport studio in our living room.  Complete with lamps with their shades off to be sure there was no shadow!  It had to be perfect.  So I guessed at the dimensions and when I thought I had it right I tried to figure out how to determine whether the distance from his chin to the top of his head was between 25 and 35 mm. At midnight I discovered the picture had to have a half-inch clearance on the top for the passport cutting tools so they wouldn't decapitate the applicant. My Photoshop program automatically reduced the top to 1/8 inch. Grrr. At this point I gave up and figured, while the effort was a good one I did not have all the tools to accomplish this task. There is a reason you can go to the drugstore to get the photos, which we did in the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City while waiting for our bus back to Bethlehem the next day. Needless to say, we discovered how ridiculous our original thought of going the next daying and actually applying for a visa was.  Turns out we did not even have the right visa application.  We have to go on a student research visa.

The next morning in New York we realized exactly how clueless we were.  We thought only David applied for the visa in my name.  Turns out I needed 3 copies of the Schengen application as well and 3 passport pictures of me too.  It's a comedy of errors.  Next week we go to New York to apply for the visas.  We also discovered we didnot have to have a criminal check because we will be there for less than 180 days.  Check out the first photo- the evidence of the criminal element in action.