Farewell

In February I experienced my first "first" in a really long time. It was a hard, emotional and draining experience. The passing away of a loved one here in Spain.

My boyfriend's grandmother passed away at the age of 87. She was born in Villacañas where she got married, had three children and died. She's only left there a handful of times. She didn't have her first washing machine until she was given one by her son when she was already in her 80s. Even then she would fill it up with a bucket of water, hand wash her clothes in it and then wring her clothes out in the tub. She would help her children harvest grapes and olives until she was in her 80s. Used a wood stove to keep warm. Never went to the doctors until she had multiple-organ failure last year and slipped into a coma. And she's struggled ever since. Struggled with being lonely, with feeling useless and restless.

Her birthday was in January and we had got the whole family together to celebrate. She spent the day with her three children, six grandchildren and one great granddaughter and respective "others."

She was staying with my boyfriend's parents and we had spent the weekend with her. Sunday afternoon we said goodbye before leaving to come back home. We didn't suspect anything. But as we parked our car outside our house a little over an hour later, we received a call. She had started seizing, vomiting for about 15 minutes. And that was it. She died.

Although it shouldn't have been, it was a real shock. We had just spent the weekend with her and in one short hour she was gone.

In Spain, when someone dies, they are immediately taken to the mortuary. They didn't perform an autopsy on her, no need. She was dressed in her wedding dress which was black. She had it fitted years ago and had bought her coffin too in preparation.

Her body was layed out on a table behind a glass for the whole of the night. She was holding a bible and rosary. The family stayed there and received visitors for almost 24 hours. Local women came and chanted and prayed for her soul.

She was then taken to the church for a short service. Afterwards she was placed in a hearse that drove slowly to the cemetary. The men followed on foot and helped lower her in her grave. In Villacañas, people are not buried undergrown. Instead they are placed in cement tombs above ground. She was to be placed in the same tomb as her husband and other relatives and in order to fit that many bodies in there, the bones of the others were placed in burlap sacks and sat on top of her coffin.

You will be missed Melitona.

Lifestyle choices

So today's post is going to be a rant. And that rant is directed at the Spanish population. However that's mostly just because that is who surrounds me everyday, and if I lived anywhere else, I'd probably rant about that population too.

I love to eat healthily and to exercise and just to lead a natural, good life (except for a pesky diet coke addiction). But organic, semi-vegetarian diets are not common in today's society. Girls going mountain biking (especially here in antiquated, chauvinistic Spain) is a rare sight. And no one seems to know what to think about it. No one has ever encouraged me to eat better here in Spain. Only a handful of friends don't look down on me for exercising.

They know they enjoy their oily, greasy fried foods. How much they love to sit around chatting. And they want you to partake in what they love. If they're going to "sin", they want you to do it with them. And they want you to enjoy doing it with them so they don't feel bad about enjoying it too.

Every time I turn down a third or forth helping of food, every time I mention that I went for a run, when I say I want fruit instead of pudding for desert... I get the most negative feedback ever. It's amazing. They want to know why someone as thin as I am would want to do exercise. Duh! As if me being thin has nothing to do with working out! They think eating right is being on a diet. Something temporary that you would only do if you were obese. Why would I ever want to be on a diet?

Grrr. It's not like I run a marathon every day or am wasting away from hunger. I would just like to enjoy a healthy lifestyle and I'd like people to take a positive interest in it.

Healing

These last couple of years have been tiring and stressful and definitely a right of passage into adulthood whether I liked it or not. It's when I gave up giving English classes as a freelance teacher and began my first 9 to 5 kind of job. Except 9 to 5 would have been a dream compared to what I was doing. As project manager at a translation agency in Madrid, I had to face several battles every day: a 2.5 hour commute to Madrid everyday plus the hour lunch break that ate up all my free time; a hysterical, illogical, rude, inflexible, impatient boss who doesn't understand how to use capital letters or punctuation marks; many long, irritating conversations with (Spanish) clients that insist that they speak English better than any native; the smelly, noisy, cantankerous people that would push, shove and step on me on public transportation.

Thankfully that period of my life has come to an end after a rather emotional, hysterical summer spent either screaming at my boss or avoiding her altogether.

Last Wednesday I embarked on a new adventure in my life as a freelance translator/proofreader working from home. Since my only connections are my old company (who's greedily internalizing all proofreading work) and other translators I've met along the way (who are also greedily holding on to as much work as possible), things have been really slow around my "office", i.e. my house.

I thought being couped up all day would drive me mad, but it hasn't. It has also just been a week and you might find me crawling up the walls in the near future. But for the moment a very new and unfamiliar peace has come over me. For the first time in months I'm sleeping like a log, eating home-made meals and doing exercise daily. I feel a lot more positive. Not about my future or anything in specific, it's just a lot easier to feel happy when you're not being pushed around any more. A lot easier to feel happy for other people too.

Opposites attract

My boyfriend is a complete carnivore that believes french fries fall in the vegetable category. So it was no surprise that he wasn't thrilled when I told him I wanted to go almost vegetarian over a year ago.

When I made that decision, I decided three things:
1. If I'm doing a lot of exercise, am sick, etc. and I need more iron, I'm going to eat meat.
2. I'm not going to push people to adopt my diet beliefs. Mutual respect is a must.
3. I'll save my meat meals for when it would be highly inconvenient to insist on vegetarian meals (like at someone's house or a steakhouse).

Since we both work a lot, dinner time is really important to us. But it hasn't been easy. I still ask him what he wants to eat naively expecting him to answer something other than "meat". And each time I've taken it as an attack on my wishes and unfairly gone off on him.

This last week we've finally found a meeting ground for our differences and it feels like we're making progress. We let each other know when we're hungry and we each make our own meals. When we go out for tapas we get at least one non-meat item (if that's even possible). Amazingly enough my in-laws are starting to back off and are accepting my quirky ways (they had Spinach leaves in their salad for the first time last week!).

Thinking we're going to make this "opposites attract" thing work.