So are all the women gay?
Uh, which part of Spain?
Last year in a plane flight, the magazine carried an article about Spanish cuisine. It started by saying “there is no such thing as Spanish cuisine” and went on to explain that each area has a different kind of cuisine and each village its own specialty. True, and it also applies to many other things. Rather than bore you with examples, let’s just say that in many ways it is “Spains”. Each region has cultural peculiarities, which can trip you in the most inexpected moments. I’ve had worse cultural shocks in Castellón than in Miami, partly because in Castellón I wasn’t expecting it.
Some things that are the same throughout the country:
- very strong social nets. Yes, many times I’d like to bitchslap my mother from Navarra to Gibraltar. But still, even though I’m in Switzerland and my brothers are in the same town as she is, I’m her primary caretaker (Lilbro has taken over much of the front-line stuff and calls me when she doesn’t want to listen). Yes, her parents drive her up a wall taller than K2. But she and my cousin (who isn’t exactly in love with the oldsters either) are the primary caretakers.
If you go to college in the town where your parents live, you stay with your parents. If you’re unemployed, unmarried and don’t own a place, you move back with your parents. If you’ve got Alzheimer’s, your children establish turns, rotating you from a house to another or rotating who spends time in your home with you. Get a divorce and the house went to your SO? Move back with the parents. You were working out of town and got a job back home? Move back with the parents. - the concept of “doing the Americas”. This is a concept which I’ve explained here several times and which most Americans have trouble understanding. The idea is to emigrate either just long enough to save enough to get set up “back home”, or to emigrate until you retire, and then go back home.
- this is getting lost, but people try to separate the “nerves from work” from the “nerves from the house”. At the same time, work is often a place to make friends, but 99% of the social activities that involve “people from work” are neither work-related nor work-ordained. For example, several guys from a factory will form a team for a local amateur soccer championship: nobody is expected to join up or to go to the matches, but the guys in the team generally have a good time.
- very good Social Security. It’s getting a bit frazzled, partly because of immigrants who abuse it somewhat, but the general idea is that we have to find ways to shoulder the extra load, rather than “aaaaah, stop treating foreigners!”
- it’s very difficult to find someone who doesn’t have a close relative who was a migrant in the last 100 years. If you go up to 200, it’s impossible. This leads to people being, in general, pretty open to migration, both in- and e-, both across borders and within the country. Whenever someone grumbles about “damn foreigners”, he’s bound to hear “what, you didn’t have a cousin in Germany? Must be the only one in Spain!” (6 of my great-grandparents were born more than a day’s travel away from the place where they died)
Catalonia is becoming incredibly “navel-staring”: many people there think everybody has the same holidays they do, everybody eats the same things they do, everybody wants to go live there, and “foreigners” (meaning anybody from outside Catalonia) should just stay god-damn-wherever and not come here to bother us and when they come here they oughta speak our language like they weren’t from outside in no time. Madrid is the other place where you’re more likely to hear that kind of attitudes. Bilbao and Valencia, partly for linguistic reasons, partly for other cultural reasons, aren’t going that way (it’s certainly not because their respective nationalists aren’t trying).
Between the social network (which can often be the biggest drag to mobility, but it’s nice to have it when you do need it) and the concept of “temporary emigration”, people can be half the country or even several countries away from home and still keep their roots there. Not to mention the house they inherited from Grandmother, which is about twice the size of the flat they have in the big city (without counting the yard and the old henhouse).
Competitive people tend to get shuffled to sales-type jobs. Here the biggest sharks aren’t lawyers but corporate salesmen.
The school system isn’t based on competition at all. There are things like a country-wide prize for the student with the best GPA - but these students usually don’t even know about it until they get the letter from the Ministry of Education. And it’s state-owned-schools-only, which leaves out about half the students.
Special Ed is a new concept. Traditionally, students are all mixed; even now, they only get sent to Special Ed when they just can’t be fitted into a mixed class. I did my first tutoring at age 4, helping a classmate who later we discovered was heavily dyslexic (when we were little we just said “she mixes some letters”). The school year is structured in 3-5 “evaluation periods”, followed by finals. Many teachers will let you skip the final for their subject if your average from the periods is high enough; in my schools the best students got to spend the weeks of “finals preparation” tutoring the worst ones (for most teachers). There is another final in September for those who failed in June. If you fail a subject, you have to repeat it.
In college, you can not drop a course unless it’s a “general elective” and the teacher agrees that ok, you really, really marked the wrong number. Some colleges let you take the final for each subject a limited number of times: you don’t have to take it every time it’s available, but if you fail it that many times you need to transfer to another school or something, you’ll never be able to graduate. My own college had no such limit, but there was a special and unofficial fail for “moral problems”: anybody who had a fail grade in the lab fraction of a course, either he’d been in a car crash the day before the exam or it was some sort of moral issue (horsing around, mistreating equipment, cheating).
The current Law of Education (about 12yo) blows, IMNSHO and in the opinion of any teacher you care to ask. Trying to copy the American system without understanding it at all, in a culture that unlike the American is not naturally competitive, and mixing it with the notion that “Paul Gassol is too tall, we oughta chop his legs off so people don’t feel short by comparison” (of course they coach it in other terms, but it comes down to “equalizing to the lowest denominator”), the previous Socialist government came up with a system that carries a ton of electives, very little orientation, and where students don’t get any negative consequences until they’re 16. K-10, a kid can insult the teacher, not move a pencil the whole year, and the teacher has to prove that failing the kid “will be psychologically beneficial and not cause a trauma” :smack: And a kid can have failed every single subject: unless his parents say he repeats the course, he doesn’t. Then they get to 11-12 and suddenly there’s consequences. They’re arriving to University with the worst literacy rates ever.
If Spain manages to go to hell in a handbasket in the next few years, it won’t be because of emigration or jobs going to India (lots of CS centers and programming warehouses here): it will be because of that law.
Social mobility isn’t even a concept. I have no idea what that would be called in Spanish! Sociologists must have a name for it, but I’d bet my MasterCard it’s just a translation from another language. Moving down suddenly is unusual because of the social networks; moving up happens but the economic level and the educational level aren’t necessarily related, so not even the concepts of “up” and “down” are clear.
There’s a growing degree of obsession with physical appearances. Cases of anorexia and bulimia are growing and I see girls of sizes that nobody in my whole college class had. At the same time, children are getting fatter. I saw someone American-sized in the street for the first time in 2002. I’ve seen more, but they’re still unusual. The government’s worried, though. Problem is, if you create an educational system that throws the old values out a window and don’t replace them with anything consistant, people will get the shiniest values… and yes, I realize I’m sounding like I should get a lawn.
Have I bored you enough? Anything else people would like me to hijack about?
Tsk, Tsk,…note the smiley 
I must admit I think I have a robust sense of humour in these things Chowder but I thought that even joking, your comment was a bit, well, inadvisable.
Hey that was good! But I still am confused though. A lot of this stuff makes sense, but I imagine that not all cultures seem to have the same clearly defined goals like America and Denmark.
By the way I love Valencia. I lived there for 6 months, and I later took my friend from Madrid there to visit and he loved it. It’s big enough, but still has many small-town advantages that Madrid clearly lacks. I remember being there with my friend and he said. “This is great, you don’t have to walk around like a Ninja all the time with eyes in the back of your head” Also we asked some shopkeeper where something was and he left the store and went to the corner for 5 minutes to explain. Very nice people there.
Well, thing is, goals for Spaniards have changed a lot in recent years and continue to change.
My mother is 66. Women her age who got education would most often be teachers or nurses, two degrees which at the time weren’t college. Among other things this lead to a saturated market, specially for the teachers: many of them didn’t work in their chosen field very long, not by choice but by lack of offers.
The first female student to enter my college did so in 75. I entered in 86 and my initial class included two more girls than boys (we were 210).
The northeast (a slice from Santander to Tarragona, jump over Castellón and include Valencia) is more “feminist”; in those areas, women have traditionally being on more equal footing with men; this shows, among other things, in how many women under 40 place career before or at the same level as family. A recent government poll (sorry no linky) found that about 45% of people still think that a woman should stop working to care for her kids at the very least; another 5% said as soon as she gets married: the immense majority of those respondents were from Andalusia, Madrid and Extremadura, the most machista places. My extremeña friends who are now in their low 30s and just married or with a small child keep getting flak from their families to stop working. Their husbands are from the “feminist slice”, they don’t expect the wife to stop working just because one day she wore white.
So depending on where you’re from and whether you get called Scotty for wearing a skirt, your goals change a lot. The main goals are “salud, dinero y amor” (health, money and love), but in what order and what exactly you mean by love varies a lot. Many women still plan their careers by proxy, like Mom ended up doing; they plan the husband’s career because it’s more acceptable than planning their own. Or they plan social careers, again because professional ones aren’t acceptable.
And the group that’s got more women in the most-macho-redux of construction work? Gypsies. Uh? But aren’t those the most machistas in the whole wide world? Yeah well, 'cept when not.
I wouldn’t say effeminate, but to my (English) ears, Swedish does sound quite lilting. Danish, OTOH sounds like a (very civilised) dialect of Klingon.
Ha ha ha!
Klingon! I would say that Klingon probably is a bit easier on the ears at times…My dad, who doesn’t understand any danish at all, noted to me how ugly the language was on the answering service on my phone. But hey, I can even find some good things about the language!
Hey lighten up ferchrissake.
The operative word being “joke”
Perhaps I’d have been better on the pillaging patrol
Just a word of advice: pillage first, then burn. 
I’m unfamiliar with Danish, but I do know a little Dutch, and that’s the language that struck me as the most guttural, at least in terms of using velar and palatal fricatives like “ich” and “ach” in German. Dutch uses those far more, because they can be used at the beginnings of syllables and words as well as in medial or terminal positions. Once on a train in Holland a little boy who must have been about three came up to my compartment and started prattling about something, and it sounded like he was quietly gargling.
“Hugge” is a Danish term which is untraslatable-I think it means basically being satisfied. Denmark is a clean, safe, nice little country, with a very good living standard…but the winters are pretty rotten. :eek:
It’s “hygge”, and it means basically enjoying oneself.
So my fair home country is the happiest place on earth ? I mean, it’s not bad at all, but number 1 ?
The article is funny, but not what I’d call research - the bit about the 1992 championships is more or less lifted from “The Xenophobe’s guide to the Danes”, a surprisingly precise but definitely tongue-in-cheek guidebook. As has been posted, the winters alone should disqualify it. Cold enough to be inconvenient and dangerous, yet not cold enough to really allow for fun stuff like skiing. Think cold sleet and 18-hour nights.
Can’t say I recognize the impossibility of getting ahead - I have several friends and aquaintances who have built very nice careers for themselves. It is as hard as anywhere else - there are plenty of takers for the corner office - but by no means impossible. But if you want to get ahead, you’d better get the degrees and the experience - raw talent and 60-hour weeks is just not going to be enough. Of course, the small size of the country also means that you’re forced to play nice, because chances are you’ll meet whoever you engage in your chosen field more than once.
But that goes well with the culture of compromise - it seems to be a Danish tenet of faith that things can be worked out, once everybody sits down and talks it over. Forcing a deal with a clear winner and a clear loser is bad form. Announcing that a deal was a huge win for you and a huge loss to the other side - that’s incredibly bad form. Which probably links to the Danish distaste for showing off wealth. You can build a nice house on a nice lot, but a large house is showing off. You can certainly get a nice car, but a fancy car - not necessarily good form. So for a well-off Dane, there are fewer ways to spend money. Travelling is popular. So few Danes have his-and-hers jet-skis in the driveway, but a lot of Danes have seen the sun set over the Bosporus.
One thing that I’ve noticed missing when living abroad is the proverbial safety net and the peace of mind that it gives.
For one thing, universal health care makes it somewhat easier to walk away from a job you hate. You can always come up with horror stories about any health care system, but judging from the quality of care I’ve seen my relatives get, I think the system more or less works.
Currently, I have a relative who can’t manage on her own living in a sort-of mental institution. (Pretty nice place, actually.) My family doesn’t have to worry about her care becoming more expensive as she gets more frail. She doesn’t have to feel that she’s living off someone else. And if she’d been SOL and had no family, she’d still be getting the same level of care. That’s worth a percentage point or two on the taxes, I think.
So yeah, a confidence that while you can fail, you’ll really have to work hard to fail completely and a small community with a built-in sense of belonging - I guess that can make for some happiness…
Oh yeah, I hear this. My mother has been post stroke for nearly 8 years, absolutely not recovering a whit, but fortunately they can afford for her and my dad to live together in a board-and-care facility, which is basically like a private house where a few elderly people live and have attendants to help them. It’s great for them because they live pretty much as they did in their own house, but Dad doesn’t have to worry about not being able to pick Mom up should she fall. But most people don’t have their resources, so I don’t know what most people do in their situation.
No restaurants??? huh??? They may not have restaurants selling Danish food, but they have plenty of other ones selling great food from all over. Indian, Turkish, African, …RizRaz is a very tasty vegetarian restaurant.
I bet the cycling keeps them in great shape. You hear a lot about it, but until you’re there and see the hundreds of bikes that pass you every minute during rush hour you can’t believe it. Women in their 40’s, 50’s, in business suits flying by you on bikes make a city in the US that is bike-friendly, like Madison, look like nothing.
Bad weather? I live in Wisconsin, I wish we had that bad weather. (3 inches of snow this morn)
Danish women did strike me as attractive…almost as nice as Stockholm. Sorry, they’re 2nd in that one.
Let me just start by saying I came out of Lurker Mode to post in this thread! Good to finally be able to take part.
Second, let me apologize for bringing up this old thread again, but I simply have to give my two cents worth on “my” country… 
I’m from a very international family and have lived all over, but for the past four years I have lived in Denmark at it is hands down my favorite country. After having lived for thirteen years in Hamburg (a lovely city, but very… German), coming to Denmark was like coming up for a fresh breath of air. In my whole time here, it has always astounded me how easygoing, open, and willing to partake the Danes are. Their entire culture seems to be about inclusion and “hygge”* It is very, very rare to have a complete stanger snap at you or send you unfriendly looks, but it is very often a complete stranger will help you. As an experiment, when you’re next in Copenhagen, stand on a streetcorner with a map and see how long it takes before someone comes up and asks whether they can help.
Part of this inclusive atmosphere, as has been said before, is the fact that Danes don’t make a big hoopla about celebrities. True, everyone reads the scandal-rag “Billed-blad” (but will vigorously deny this to all but their bosom friends), but the Queen has been known to sneak away from the palace security to go shopping at the local discount store on her bike (this anecdote from one of my friends who’s a palace guard). And the astounding thing is that noone will bother her more than perhaps a casual smile in her general direction. I mean, it’s just Daisy shopping.
As for the weather… looks out the window… hmm… okay yes, it is and has been raining for a week straight, and the winter is horrible. But come may the beech trees start unfurling their leaves, the sky is clear and everyone goes outside to sit on the grass in a park or field and drink Tuborg while watching the scantily clad young danish girls frolic. And yes, they’re all freakishly pretty. And they don’t know it, seeing as everyone is so good-looking. For a normal young woman such as myself, it can be very frigtening indeed!
And, The Big Cheese , how funny that someone from Wisconsin knows RizRaz! I just ate there two days ago with some friends! It’s a small world …
Someone from California does, too. I ate there when I was in Copenhagen this summer, and it was really good.
Just wanted tk know…