What is Spain? Spain Is Metal.

 Jaime really liked dinner tonight. 

"It reminds me of when we had braised lamb with pepper pellets for school lunch," he said. 

After we figured out he was talking about peppercorns, my mind revisited a topic I think about often: how different our childhoods were. 

"It's not like we got a whole leg or anything. They were fillets, and a lot of kids didn't like it, which was great because they gave their fillets to me." I couldn't remember the other school lunch he loved because other kids hated it and therefore gave him their portions. 

"Fish pudding," he reminded me. 

Ah, yes. Fish pudding. 

I told him that rectangle pizza was pretty popular at my school, and he laughed appropriately. 

Jaime went to an English language school in Spain run by Opus Dei, taught by Filipino teachers and called Edelweiss.  It was his parents' second choice. 

His school day started about the same time as mine, but he wasn't released until almost 6 pm. He'd have dinner with his family at about 9:30 or 10 then go to bed around midnight. Edelweiss was his elementary school. This might sound crazy to those of us who were brought up through socialist American schools, but that schedule is still the norm for kids in Spain today. 

Schoolchildren do have a long break called patio or recreo, which is like recess, during the afternoon siesta time. 

Jaime gets offended when non-Spaniards rib him about siestas. There's almost always an underlying accusation of laziness, so it's understandable he's annoyed. I used to envision the whole country sleeping in their underwear during the hottest part of the day, too, but that was before I saw for myself what really happens during siesta. 

Daily, between 2-4 pm, everyone eats an incredible and reasonably priced lunch and drinks wine or beer before returning to work and doing the bare minimum for the rest of the day until they clock out at 8. Spain is fucking metal, and what makes it metal is that Spaniards work really hard but play harder. 

(Jaime asked me to note his offense taken by the previous paragraph.) 

A couple of weeks ago, Jaime called me into a Zoom meeting he was having with a doctor at KU. Their actual meeting was over, but the man's wife was there because they wanted to tell us about their experience living in Valencia for half a year in the 1980s. 

They had two young children at the time who were attending a Spanish school. 

"I couldn't get over putting them on a bus in the morning and not seeing them again until late in the evening. I spent a lot of time at the grocery store even though the store didn't have the things I wanted." I could imagine her loneliness. Her husband was working, and the kids made friends and picked up the language easily. 

"One day, our son came home with a big bandage on his head. I asked him what happened, and he said another boy had thrown a rock at him. A teacher took him to the hospital where THEY SUTURED HIS HEAD then put him on the bus home." The school hadn't contacted her. 

Jaime and I laughed, but it was clear she was still pretty traumatized by this event. 

"Well, at least it was all free," I said. Spain really is metal. 

We had another Zoom call with our friend Antonio from the Galicia later that day and recounted the story to him. 

"Can you believe that?" we asked. 

"Yeah, I can." He said. It happened to me three times while I was in school. Metal. 

To this day, the best shit I have ever put into my temple.