¡Listo!

Something I did not expect about Spaniards originally, but in retrospect I really shouldn't have been so surprised about: Spaniards love to eat ham.  Last night, my señora invited me, my roommate Chris, and Meagan to go to a bar with her para tomar cerveza y comer jamón.  That literally means, "to drink beer and eat ham."  So we agreed!  It was actually quite a tumultuous experience, what with Chris and my señora arriving half an hour late, last-minute schedule changes, trying to figure out how to pay an un-split check between four people (because they don't split checks here in España), and Chris calling my señora old by accident.  It was crazy.  However, we still had a good time.  As we would say here about ourselves, lo pasamos bien, amidst food, drink, and somewhat awkward merriment.

About ham, though: this is not your average ham bought in the grocery store.  This ham is very lean (supposedly), fresh, treated meat.  Spaniards are very prideful about their ham, saying it is among the best in the world.  And it is, actually.  It's different, and it's very valuable and rich.  There's a certain type of ham, jamón ibérico, that literally cannot be bought in the U.S. because it literally cannot be shipped across the Atlantic Ocean.  It spoils too quickly.

Another thing that surprised me about Spain is that there's a lot of open space.  I know that's probably a naive thing to assume a country didn't have, but I had always expected Europe to be pretty jam-packed because in terms of continents, it's pretty small.  I always got this impression that cities were everywhere and you could walk everywhere and all that.  This could be true for other countries, but I doubt it.  Regardless, Spain is really a collection of, as my book put it, oases in the wilderness.  Cities are scattered about everywhere and what's left in between is just open expanses of fields, farmland, mountains (Spain is the second-tallest country in Europe), etc.

So there's actually a lot of places that pigs can be reared.  My señora says that each province of Spain gets the best of all the other provinces, because they will of course export their best goods to show for them.  So I'm pretty certain we got some good quality jamón.  And if you ever come to Spain, I seriously recommend trying it, whether it's just plain jamón or chicharrones or some kind of complete dish with jamón mixed in.  It's a delicacy that you might not be able to have anywhere else.