Monday, November 27, 2017

Misc. Thoughts




In the past week the reality of my two Universidad de Sevilla classes has hit me: in less than a month I will be taking two finals, each covering all of the material from the entire course, and each worth my entire grade for the semester. This means that literally anything covered in the term is fair game for the test, and in my Psychology class, the test will consist of 50 true/false questions, and incorrect answers count as a grade reduction. In my Biology class, the final exam is accompanied by a lab exam in which I will be asked to identify the parts of various microscopic plant tissues. While this might sound like a very doable task, it's currently feeling like a monstrosity and I genuinely am crossing my fingers that I will be able to pull off a passing grade.

So I've spent the week studying. A lot. And will just keep right on studying for the next month. I haven't studied so far in advance for a test since I took the ACT in 2013. I imagine that this might be what it feels like to prepare for the MCAT?

This post is just a series of random thoughts and observations from the last while in Sevilla.

- Christmas is here. The entire city center has been decorated with massive light displays. Unfortunately they won't be turned on until December 8, almost two weeks from now. All of the Christmas sweets are also appearing. And Jingle Bells was playing in a coffee shop the other day.

- Black Friday is also here, and I hated it. The streets were so clogged with people that I couldn't bike or even walk my bike. I ended up just standing in the middle of the pedestrian shopping street, immobile. So many people. In the US I do my Black Friday shopping exclusively on the internet.

- The weather finally turned cool a few weeks ago! Mornings are chilly, and afternoons are in the 70s. It's nice. My runs are so much more doable.

- Our program took us to an Irish pub for an American Thanksgiving dinner. It was very Irish, and I was a little underwhelmed. My host family, though, prepared a special holiday meal for me, in honor of Thanksgiving (jumbo shrimp, very fancy jamón, cheese, crackers, sparkling wine) and it was so very kind.

- I've been eating even more pork, and learning even more about ham than I mentioned in my last post. Imagine a some sort of roasted cut of pork, stuffed with ham, accompanied by delicious mushrooms sprinkled with ham bits. And broccoli salad with ham. And also roasted trout stuffed with ham. It's a new way of life!

- I now have people who I talk to regularly in both of my university classes, which is very exciting. In my psychology class my friends are the two boys from my presentation group. Our presentations last week went swimmingly. Even better, I think I made a really funny joke because the two of them were laughing with me (and usually they're laughing at me)!

- I moved host families several weeks ago and this one's a riot and I love them. Yesterday I sat on the floor and played Playmobile with the 6-year-old before I remembered that I had to study.

- I officially have a favorite ice cream place. It's called Bolas.

- This morning I needed to buy soap and suddenly realized that I had no idea where in the city I might find that. Most stores here are not like stores at home (Target!) in the sense that you can't go to one place and pick up grapes, toilet paper, sunglasses, and nail polish all in one go (consumerism at its most convenient.) That wasn't an issue for me until today, when I couldn't imagine what kind of store might carry soap. Lucky for me, my friends are good at shopping and directed me to the supermarket.

- I've been doing quite a bit of traveling: Italy, Belgium (ate almost exclusively fries, chocolate, beer, and waffles), Morocco, and this weekend Barcelona. This girl loves to travel, and also loves Sevilla; some days feeling conflicted.

I can't believe that I have less than a month left in this city.

Monday, November 13, 2017

Jamón (and my lacking knowledge of meat)

Shortly after arriving in Sevilla, someone asked me what top three words I had previously associated with Spain. The first one I could come up with was jamón, or ham, and two months into my time here, it's still the first word that comes to mind. Part of that is because there is just so very much jamón in this country, in every form; the other part is that jamón presents a distinct phase in my own eating habits.




By my observations, cured Spanish ham (jamón serrano) seems to be most popular. It's also not something that I had ever tried in my life before arriving. In the markets, entire left legs of pig hang from hooks, and vendors slice thin strips for customers. These same legs also dangle in restaurants and bars. I've heard that it's not uncommon for families to buy a whole leg and keep eating at it in their kitchen for extended periods of time, but I have yet to see that for myself. Besides the cured ham, chopped up pieces of ham come in all sizes and types and are added to everything, from pasta to vegetables to eggs to soups. There is just so much ham. 

The very special pork is the jamón ibérico, ham from Iberian pigs. My understanding is that these pigs somehow have more desirable meat and are very flavorful, and only live in the Iberian peninsula.  So jamón ibérico is an even bigger deal than jamón serrano; as far as I can tell it comes in all of the same forms, but is always more pricey.

Here's the thing. I grew up not eating meat almost at all. I wasn't vegetarian and my family wasn't vegetarian (although, Dad, you're maybe vegan now?), but we just didn't eat much meat. We'd eat fish once or twice a week, chicken maybe every other week, and beef a few times a year. We're Jewish, and as good reform Jews, we pick and choose which religious laws to follow - so we never bought or cooked or ate pork at all in our home. Due to this relatively meat-free background, I was never exposed to an abundance of forms of animal protein. 

Ham aside, in Spain the other significant turf protein seems to be ternera. Which I think is baby cow, so I guess it's called veal. For some reason Spaniards are way more into ternera than into regular beef, to the extent that ternera is frequently consumed in place of beef (or at least where I imagine regular beef would normally be found - imagine very soft hamburgers, meatballs, etc.) Veal is another meat new to me.

Because I didn't spend much time around meat while growing up, I don't know how to identify meat at all. My knowledge is simply too lacking. This means that when served meat in Spain, I often have no idea what sort of animal I might be eating (usually ham, veal, chicken, or a combination of the above), and to this I have become quite accustomed. For me a huge part of travel is the food (!!) and so in coming to Spain, I knew that I'd be eating all sorts of meat and I decided that I would eat pork. This is what I'd done while living in Honduras and in Mexico, but in neither of those locations was pork such a dietary staple, and in neither of those situations was every meal prepared for me. So I'm really turning over new leaves here.

Being exposed to meat has opened new doors for me. Since arriving in Spain I have fully embraced pork as part of the cultural experience, not just eating it when served to me, but trying it whenever the opportunity arises and never turning it down. I have had red pork, black pork, light pork, brown pork; hot pork, cold pork, thin pork, thick pork. I do feel, though, that my lack of knowledge about meat has set me back quite a bit in understanding what I'm eating. Because I can't identify meat, once I learn that I'm eating pork, that's all the information I can manage. I'm not equipped to appreciate each cut of pork, the differences between its varied forms, and the specific flavors. Instead, here I am consuming blindly - which I don't mind, but it does mean that I can't actually write about Spanish pork in much detail. I can quickly explain the difference between jamón serrano and jamón ibérico (one pig has black toes, the other doesn't), but I certainly can't taste the difference.

I was in Italy over our fall break with Camila, a friend from my program. Camila loves jamón. As we ate our way through Rome and Naples, my eyes were opened to a whole new world of food. In my previous life absent of pork, any time I saw pork on a menu, I wrote off the dish and looked for something else. I usually avoided meat altogether. But that was never the case in sharing dishes with Camila; my eyes were opened to the world of meat. We ate pasta carbonara with crispy bacon in it, and pizzas with salami or prosciutto or sausage or all three. It's really a whole new ball game out here, and I'm not quite sure what to do with my newfound knowledge of protein in gastronomy.

Final thought: haven't yet decided how I feel about jamón and pork in general. For now it's certainly not bad, and I guess it's quite the thrill to discover what new and unanticipated foods jamón has been snuck into.