All of this becomes a bit more complicated when you introduce even more cultures, as is often the case with our large group of international friends in Granada. We host a fair number of parties and events at our house, and as often as not several guests arrive at the same time. This is the true test of the etiquette paranoid. The first person through the door could be Spanish, Italian, Dutch, British, Japanese, Swiss, or even, American. In a situation like this your guests may or may not follow the “when in Rome” philosophy and may still greet the way they do in their home country. I’ve found that some British people (but only some) do not like to be hugged or kissed for example. If I’ve read the body language correctly I’ve scared more than one Japanese guest in my home by leaning in for the double cheek kiss at the same time they start to bow at the waist. The most difficult of all of these however are the three kissers that start with the opposite cheek. In Granada, you always lean in to kiss a person’s right cheek and then you kiss the left. If everyone follows this it’s comfortable and passes without incident. However, if both people lean in the same direction your first contact is a big crack on the cheek bone. Once you’re off on the wrong cheek it’s nearly impossible to recover and on the most dramatic of these occasions I once nearly brained myself on my guest’s forehead.

Twenty years ago this week I lost – my family lost – my 15 year old sister, Kerry Ann Walker. She disappeared the week before Christmas 1988 and we learned a year later, almost to the day, that she would never be coming home again. We learned that she had been killed in December, 1988. The police eventually ruled her death a homicide, although to this day – in what seems merciful ignorance to me – my family does not know much of the specifics as to the who, the how, or the why.

What seemed unbearable in the early days and months following her disappearance: posting “Missing” posters of your baby sister; waiting for first days, then weeks, then months with no word; the eventual phone call you never in your life wanted to hear and never in your life will forget with words like “skull” and “dental records”; the graphic and horrifying news coverage on television complete with film footage of the “site” and the searchers as they combed the woods – all the things that seemed impossibly unbearable, eventually became bearable, simply because they had to. (This is in no way to undercut or downplay the very real impact of violent crimes on families/survivors who often go on to suffer through divorces, suicides, alcoholism, drug addiction, post traumatic stress disorder…, etc.)

Although we will never forget what happened to my sister or who she was in the short lifetime we knew her, we grieve almost more strongly because we do not have her in our day to day lives and cannot share with her the sorrows and joys any family goes through. We also grieve for who she might be today. She was an unbelievably artistic and creative child from the start. She never picked up a musical instrument (of which there were many in our household) she could not play, she created sophisticated art work from a very early age, and she was hands down one of the most social and cheerful children, and later young women, in every neighborhood in which we ever lived. There are times I cannot help myself wondering who she would be now, as a 35 year old woman. What kind of relationship might she and I have? Would she have children? Would I have nieces and nephews? Would she live in a small town or big? (or even in the US at all?!) Would she still look like our grandmother? Would she be an artist, a dreamer, a visionary, a thinker, a talker, a painter, a ????? Of everything, the greatest continuing tragedy of it all is that this world is short one Kerry Ann Walker.

It is rare that I talk about my sister or how she died and have usually favored more private ways to honor her memory. When Brian and I got married, for example, we decided to both change our names, each of us adding the other’s. People asked if that was because I am a feminist or because I am progressive and while I hope I am both of those things, we kept the name Walker because it is the one I share with my sister. On this, the 20^th Anniversary of her disappearance I want to publicly bear witness to who she was and how we lost her and that is why I write this today.

For every bit of sadness we feel this Christmas (and all the days she is not with us) there is far more celebration in our lives. I long ago resolved that to live any other way would mean that whoever killed my sister had gotten us both, and quite frankly I’ll be damned to let that be so. So this Christmas we remember Kerry Ann Walker with more love than can be put into words and celebrate the endless things in our lives there are to celebrate. We wish the same celebration for you – Merry Christmas.

A few weeks ago I received 2 speeding tickets in the mail, one each on the way to and from Madrid. I was caught by photo radar so I had no knowledge of the tickets until I got the notices in the mail. The way you pay speeding tickets in Spain is to go to the bank, so I went to my bank and talked to my friend Jorge.

I like Jorge for many reasons, one of which was how he handled me trying to pay my speeding tickets. He noticed on the ticket that our car is not in my name, it is in the name of my employer who leases it for us. His first question was why I would pay the ticket if the police didn’t have my name. I assured him that my employer did have my name and knew which car I had so they would find me eventually. Do you have a radar detector? No. Ok, that’s good because they are illegal in Spain. How about a GPS? Yes. Ok, here’s what you do. Google “radares fijos” and get the location of all of the photo radars in Spain and then your GPS can tell you when to slow down.

I followed Jorge’s advice and quickly found a list of all of the radar cameras in Spain and loaded it into our GPS, which now tells us when to slow down every time. The list of camera locations is not provided by the state, but rather an open source project in Spain – when you get a ticket or see a new tower being put in, you simply add it to the list. You can download the current locations here. An excellent open source project in my mind!

I did some quick searching to see if a similar project exists in the US and I wasn’t able to find one, although I did find some companies that sell similar data and/or combined radar detector and GPS units.

I have never seen such a high level of interest in an election, the spirit in San Francisco and Seattle was incredible. People were debating the issues, the interest in voting was incredible and the response to the election of Obama unbelievable. Following Obamas speech there were huge parties in the streets of Seattle and throughout the world, its both awesome and humbling at the same time. I can’t wait to be a part of and watch the next steps unfold.

More to come when we get a break from our incredibly packed travel schedule.

For a while I had been wondering if there was such a thing as a spelling bee in Spanish; it is a phonetic language so my first thought was it would be silly to have one as any fluent speaker should be able to spell any word they hear. It turns out they do exist. While I haven’t seen one, this post about a spanish spelling bee contains what I suspect is the telling hint in the comments about what makes these hard – when the word is poorly pronounced it is very difficult to spell it correctly.

I was also curious about why it’s a “bee” and not something else, but alas not even the Scripps people who organize the national spelling bee know why its a “bee”

Milo has had a great week; he is walking for a minute or two at a time, falling down occasionally. He is still not able to walk up the stairs on our street like he used to but he can get around the house without a lot of trouble now. He still sleeps with a cone (or lamp shade as they say here) on his head to prevent him from licking a couple wounds he has; on his leg and butt from dragging himself when he falls. They are healing though and hopefully he won’t have them for much longer. He’s also back to his usual self in terms of personality which is nice to see (or not, if you know how he is normally….)

Of all the things I never imagined I’d be doing – ever – high on the list is hosting a Super Bowl party. However, since we moved to Spain we have found ourselves explaining and celebrating all things American, for our Spanish friends. When they expressed interest, even bald excitement at watching the Super Bowl, it was *almost* contagious, definitely interesting. And, to be fair, there’s almost nothing we love more than throwing a party. So, as our good friend responded when we invited her to the Super Bowl party: “GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”.

Since I’ve only ever been to one Super Bowl party in my life, I’m not entirely certain how to host a “real American” Super Bowl party. From my recollection it’s all about food (and maybe beer?). (and I suppose the game…) As in all things “real American” I turned to the internet for guidance. In this way I came up with what I think is a solid “real American” Super Bowl party menu. Since then we have hit several stores to find things like refried beans, cheddar cheese, hot sauce for buffalo wings (sooo out of my league as a former vegetarian that we’re cooking them on the roof!), stuff for barbecue sauce and ranch and blue cheese dressings, tortilla chips, etc. Just about everything on the menu is totally foreign to our friends here and are they curious!! (Although in a nod to the less adventurous we’ll of course serve jamón, patatas fritas, almonds and manchego.)

This won’t be any ordinary Super Bowl party. Among other things, we have a friend (from Holland) who was amazed to learn the American National Anthem is not asking José whether he can see; the game starts here at Midnight and will have Spanish announcers; and, previous attempts at explaining the game have gone something like this:

Friend: “well, first, what’s the ball shaped like?”

Me: “Hmm – Like, not round like a futbol but a little more oblong (as if I can say oblong in Spanish) coming to points at the end.” (Said with lots of helpful air-drawing).

Friend: Silence.

Me: More air drawing while explaining that it’s brown with white stripes and made from the skin of a pig.

Friend: More silence and the look we so often get when trying to explain many things American…

Finally, while we’re prepared to explain the rules of the game, and that yes, Americans eat melted cheese on tortilla chips, I don’t know what we’ll say if anyone asks why so many Americans went nuts over Janet Jackson’s half-time “fiasco” – why it’s perfectly okay and even celebrated to gather the family around for ritualized commercialized violence, but God save us all if anyone has to see a woman’s nipple on NATIONAL TELEVISION.

We’ve changed the way we store our photos, hopefully for the better.  You can now subscribe to new photos on the site via RSS (see the link on the bottom left of the photo pages) just like you can subscribe to this blog, and you can also search for photos and generate a slideshow as well.  Click the icon in the upper left that looks like a -> to see the list of things you can do.

We’ve updated the homepage with a look back over the year we’ve spent here in Granada.

And finally we updated the look and style of the blog too.

Let us know if you like the changes!