Important life questions... everyone´s got them

Why are all librarians mean and grouchy? Also, why are there people who enjoy the taste of blood (the alive ones, not the undead ones)? These are just some of the important life questions I am addressing while living here in Spain...

Ok, technically we are only supposed to have 45 minutes on the computers in the library at school (my current strategic position of attack). The official process is going to the lady behind the fancy window and she assigns you a computer after scanning your student ID card. You go to your assigned computer and dick around on the internet or whatever until someone comes and kicks you off anywhere from 45 minutes to never later. The unofficial process is just sitting down at an empty computer until someone kicks you off whenever.

The lady behind the fancy window, however, is dealing with a major superiority complex. She is the keeper of the computers here in the Biblioteca Miguel de Cervantes at the Universidad del Rey Juan Carlos. For us it is very serious internet/computer using, family and friends communicating time. For her it is a time for head games and wielding power. It can get ridiculous.

I will come in and sit down before class for 20 minutes or whatever and there are about 5 computers being used amongst the 20 or so that are in this room. The very next person who goes to her and requests a computer she will send straight to yours if you didn´t ask her permission.

So you log out of your e-mail, blog, facebook and save your Word Doc and switch to the computer right beside that one. Low and behold, the next person who comes in heads straight for you. This is beyond annoying because it´s just petty.

I just want to yell at her sometimes! "Hey woman... it´s 9 am and everyone is in class or still sleeping! I am across the universe from my friends and family and all I want to do is check my stupid e-mail for a hello message for five minutes. Get off my back!"

Today I sat down before class because I was here at 8 to finish some homework and study for a midterm (it was a piece of cake, by the way... how many times can one person study the subjunctive case?). She yelled through her little window mocrophone, "¡Perdona, perdona!" This has never happened to me before.

I went to her and asked her if I could sit for five minutes and check my e-mail rápidamente. She said no (meanwhile there are, like, 4 students in the entire library). She has the feelings of an ice queen, that one.

I have taken the same approach with her that I do with flight attendants, bartenders and the icy, unfriendly doorman of my appartment building. I have been trying to kill her with kindness and melt her cold heart with my effervescent smiles of greeting. This works 99 out of a hundred times. She, unfortunately, is the one time it is not working at all.

Some days she is just so pleasant when I ask her how her day is going or amiably comment on the increasingly improving weather. Then other days she yells at me across the library to get the hell off the computer she did not assign to me.

This one is proving a tough nut to crack.

BUT my doorman slowly broke down and now even smiles when I cheerfully wish him a good day when I leave in the morning or ask him sincerely how his day was while I´m waiting for the elevator at night. He is this really tiny old guy who speaks with a high raspy voice and wears gray cardigans every day (he could have one or a hundred, I have no idea). He should be cast in a real-life version of that Pixar short that plays before one of their big budget films with the old guy who plays an intense chess game against himself. You guys know the one I´m talking about. He´s maybe not as skinny as that cartoon guy, but he´s a pretty good match nonetheless.

AND I wanted to write about my experience with morcilla the other night. Or rather, I should say my inexperience with morcilla the other night.

For a good dramatic beginning to this story, I will go ahead and tell you all that morcilla is blood sausage. That´s right, sausage skin (intestines? I´m not quite sure) stuffed with a mixture of pork blood, rice and spices. It is black as night because of the clotted blood and reeks of uncooked meat, well, and unsurprisingly blood.

I knew it was coming. Since the Spaniards eat everything stewed, cooked, boiled into oblivion (which is delicious but gets a little old when all you´ve consumed for the past 2 months is bread and assorted flavors of mush), Carmen begins stewing, cooking, boiling usually before I leave for school in the morning. I saw the pot that morning, too. I saw the chorizo, jamón and morcilla stewing away already in only the boiling water without the white beans and vegetable puree they would eventually be served with later that evening.

I thought about it sporadically all day. I tried my best to prepare myself mentally and had some boys at school tell me it was delicious. I don´t know why it freaked me out so much, I´m a very adventurous person when it comes to eating odd things. The girls I sat beside one night for dinner in Andalucía (who I absolutely cannot stand) said they wanted to throw up when they discovered that the meat we had eaten at El Escorial (which they sent back 3 TIMES to be cooked more) was ox. I didn´t really understand this because it tasted almost identical to beef. I told them that if they couldn´t tell while they were eating it I don´t think it was that big of a deal. They scowled at me.

ANYWAY, I arrived home that night and for the first time I dreaded dinner. Who am I kidding? I was actually really excited to eat no matter what I had to choke down like always :)

I sat down to it by myself. Vanessa was at yoga so her bowl of whatever it was called (Carmen told me the name but I can´t remember it... I do recall that it is a dish from Galicia though) was covered next to mine. Eating alone, I ate all my stew stuff around the hunks of blood sausage. Even the stew part, which was basically blended veggies and white beans which I really like usually when Carmen makes it for me, tasted like that coppery blood flavor. It tasted like when you´re 10 and cut your finger and suck on it because it´s the obvious solution to the problem of the newly forming blood droplets. Yeah, it tasted like that.

I got pretty close to the bottom with some help from some delicious fresh bagette. It was tough. I sat there and stared down the morcilla. I was trying to beat it mentally, which was proving more difficult than you would anticipate. It was the beating myself mentally that was the tough part, I guess, because I couldn´t bring myself to lift the fork and cut into the soft, boiled, bloody rice goop. I wanted so badly to be adventurous and be able to say that I tried it like I have everything else I have been served in Spain, but I just couldn´t do it.

This was how Carmen found me when she came into the kitchen a while later, staring down the morcilla like the wicked and taunting nemesis that it was.

"¿A ti no te gusta la morcilla?" she asked me.

"Carmen, quiero probarla pero no puedo," I answered her seriously with a strained look on my face.

"No pasa nada," she said as she laughed at me, "no tienes que comerla si no quieres." She is really a great lady, Carmen is. Very easy-going and affable.

"Necesito estar más preparada para probarla, Carmen," I told her. "Necesito más que un día."

"Te diré cuando la voy a hacer al principio de la semana, ¿vale?"

"Sí, pienso que sería mejor," I told her.

(Special Note: I of course was paraphrasing Carmen´s words to me... I am pretty sure all that is correct, but she said it more ornately I´m sure.)

She whisked my plate away, tossed the dreaded morcilla into the trash and told me repeatedly it was fine while I repeatedly apologized for not eating it. That stuff is expensive to just be throwing away and I felt kinda guilty. La próxima vez, I told her. And I will try it next time... maybe.

I was disappointed, though, that I couldn´t do it. There are only a few things food-wise in the Western world that I would not try at least once. Blood sausage so far has turned out to be one of them. I especially felt like an ass when Vanessa came home and tried it later, even though it was such small bite I don´t really think it counts too much. And THEN she told Carmen she tried it just for her because she loves her so much or something like that. This, of course, made me feel even worse.

Eating a food that is primarily made out of blood, though? That kinda creeps me out, especially since a kid in my program and I were talking zombie and vampire business in cooking class last week. I just kept saying to myself as I sat there staring down that morcilla that it was a positive thing that I didn´t have the taste for blood. Too vampiry for my comfort level, thank you very much.

Also, I finished The Sun Also Rises and I checked out For Whom the Bell Tolls today. I haev decided to try and read a book for every letter of the alphabet before I come home. So far, I have only 6, but I did just fall back into the reading swing of things.