Cumpleaños de Pilar

Alright, I felt like posting while this was still fresh in my mind- I am feeling pretty damn tired so hopefully I can still put together something nice.

I'm not sure if I have written anything about this yet, but my host dad's sister Pilar has been living with us because she hurt her arm a while back. I could elaborate but i'll just say that she is extremely nice, if a little bit depressing.

Anyway, Pilar's birthday was this weekend, so today we had a little celebration. I wanted to blog about this because it was just so damn pleasant and it was a new cultural experience.

For Pilar's birthday, we had another USAC student Premyer over our house because he stayed with my host parents last semester. So the five of us had a little birthday celebration that turned out to be the most fun 80th birthday party i've been to.

The celebration consisted of a special lunch, with a ton of food, and with the living room decked out in my parents' nicest tablecloths, glasses, plates, etc. Naturally I'm about to talk about the food. To begin, Rosa made roasted shrimp-SO good, and so much better when cooked whole in the shell. Next we had some croquettas(fried balls of bechamel sauce with ham) and calamari. After this, some awesome chorizo and then white asparagus. To finish this part of the meal was merluza en salsa, I think this fish is called "hake" in english but i had never heard of/ eaten it in the states. This fish was good. really fucking good. Just a really simple plate of fresh local ingredients. I wanted to mop the pan she used to cook it in with an entire baguette. After a good deal of shmoozing, we ended the meal with a strawberry tart. During all of this, the alcohol was flowing like I had never seen in my host parents house. We had a bottle of wine from La Rioja that I bought, a botton of Pacharán(a Basque sweet liqueur that tastes a little like licorice(to me at least)), and champagne to toast to Pilar. This definitely loosened everyone up and made for a fun ass time with my cooky ass host parents. After the meal, like the chulo padrino mafioso he is, Higinio pulled out some cigars for us to cap off the celebration. Needless to say it was a really fun time.

From this experience, I really enjoyed seeing how another culture celebrates events such as birthdays. It was nice to just relax, eat, drink, and talk as a family for a good four and a half hours of the afternoon. I feel like my host parents definitely conveyed the sense of it being a special day more than I normally feel during birthdays in the states. The whole thing just seemed simpler, but more rich. I have to say, at the risk of sounded like a lame old head, I preferred this kind of celebration to going out to a restaurant or going out, drinking too much, and ultimately behaving like a moron only because it is your birthday. While eating at a restaurant can be a special way to celebrate a birthday, I feel like the atmosphere can not match the warmth of a nice meal at home with the family. To get a little personal, I think what I really loved about it was just being part of a loving family and sharing a celebration like this without any fights or forced friendliness. I haven't thought about it much, but there really is a void in my childhood in this area of real family moments, as sad as it is to say.

OK, I'm going to bed. Goodnight everybody, I'll be writing about my trip to Andalucia hopefully sometime later this week. Hasta luego.