Canadian Food?

Why is Poutine the only truly Canadian dish?  Please, readers, do not comment on this post with descriptions of seal blubber or something like that.  Evan kept promising our friends the Serranos, that we would feed them "Canadian food" because they have been kind enough to introduce us to a lot of Galician food.  On Friday evening we finally kept that promise.  There are many problems here and they all stem from the fact that 'poutine' is the only Canadian food that we could come up with.  Oh, and also the fact that neither of us are accomplished in the Kitchen.  So... first... Poutine is kind of a lone dish... it goes best with a pop and a crowded skip lodge in the middle of a long day of snowboarding.  Or as 'desert' after a gruelling hour of walking the isles of costco, eating a supper of free samples.  It isn't the most complete 'meal'.  This resulted in the most american main course ever; hamburgers.  Oh, PS. Evan thought he bought dill pickles, turns out they were anchovy flavoured.  This brings us to problem number 2: The most important part of poutine... what makes or brakes it... the gravy.  I kind of bombed the gravy.  In my defence... it is hard to make!  Picture it if you will....  the lumps of flour and corn starch (i tried both) in a stubbornly runny solution of water and beef flavour.  Luckily we have a siv (i don't know how to spell this word).  It ended up ok.  I don't think the poutine was a hit but despite the runny gravy, I think it tasted pretty good.

Im trying really hard to think of something that would be interesting to write about.  Absolutely nothing interesting has happened lately.  Oh wait!  I finally have my guitar!  That is one good thing that has been helping to keep me sane... But seriously my days consist of sleeping, cleaning, video games, walks when it isn't rainy, studying spanish, and watching seasons of downloaded TV shows (Im on season two of the Mentalist which is awesome btw (thanks for the recommendation mom)).  All of the days run together into one big blob in my mind and the only way I know what day it is, is because of my Aerobics classes.  Our weekly trips to Pontevedra for church are the most exciting events of my life.  It is kind of strange but I only go crazy for a couple of days a month (...guess why...) and the rest of the time I am perfectly content if slightly bored.

Anyway, I do have some pictures for you to check out:

This is a 'graveyard'.  It kind of looks like the bodies each have their own cubby hole in the little buildings.

It is hard to see but here in Galicia 75% of the fence posts I see are made out of stone

These large structures on the water are to grow "mejillones" (muscles)  They can't touch the sea floor because then the crabs will be able to get them

Our sea-shell collection :)

History is the new Math

For those who don't know; I actually liked math in school.
This weekend the Serranos took us to a fort that was around eight hundred years old located on the coast at a little town named Baiona. It was really cool! We walked around the whole wall which was a couple of kilometers long I believe. There were old cannons and a couple of ruined buildings along with a nice, modern, government-run hotel. :p  The views from the walls were great and the whole thing felt very castle-like. I tried to imagine what it would be like for a soldier protecting the fort from invaders.

After the fort we toured a replica of the 'Pinta Caravel'. It is the first ship to make it back from the Americas, making the People of Baiona the first people in Europe to hear of the discovery of America. The ship is so much smaller then I ever would have thought would be able to cross the Atlantic ocean.  It would have been unpleasant to be a crew member in such a small place, especially when half of it was off limits to most of them. Talk about cabin feavor! Anyway, after hearing about what life on the sea was like, I think that having the flue on the plane to Spain could have been worse.

Last on the agenda for the day was the ruins of an ancient Celtic village. So cool! The buildings were all little tiny round huts. When they found the remains there were only a few stones left. Many of the walls have been rebuilt to show what it would have been like long ago but most have only had enough stones added so viewers can better see where the buildings were. I assume that families had more than one house each because the huts are so small how would they fit to sleep?

Life here is going pretty well. I am getting really impatient for my guitar to be ready so I can commence my plans on becoming a guitar genius while here in Spain. The weather appears to have taken a turn for the worse and I have a feeling that beach days are over for the next few months. It has been raining quite a bit.  On the worst days the wind howls through the spaces in our poorly insulated windows and wakes us up and I look outside and it looks miserable! In my head I am trained to bundle up and layer when the weather is like that, especially since I have to walk everywhere I want to go, but when I finally get to where I'm going, I am all sweaty and half my layers have come off. Unfortunately, my poor ears are always cold. (Mom I blame you for at one! lol). The weather really isn't bad except for the wind. And you would think that the worst part of the wind would be walking through it, or maybe the ghost noises coming from the windows?  Not true. It is the cause of a chain of events that I must admit I don't completely understand, resulting in the most ungodly of stenches. Rotten seaweed has become the bane of my outdoor existence (luckily I am safe inside as long as the window isn't open for too long). The beach that I so love to look at from my window has betrayed me by sheltering an unreasonably large amount of seaweed. When the tide goes out guess what doesn't go with it? I feel like I need a gas mask just to leave my apartment! To be fair, it probably isn't that bad... It probably goes away once I walk half a block in any direction but I feel like it is haunting me!

Anyway... Life is good, if just a little bit uneventful.