Those are three random topics.
Earlier this week we tried a very new restaurant called La Ruta de Seda (Silk Road), a cute place with about 20 seats that serves Uigur cuisine. The night we went it was about half full when we arrived, soon after it opened at 8:30, and by observation everyone in the restaurant was Asian in appearance and speech. Two lovely young women on the staff, who were delighted to speak English because they feel their Spanish is weak, were very welcoming, but wanted us to know that they were only serving two dishes that night, each prepared for two so we would have to choose the same one, and both very spicy. We were fine with that. We chose a chicken stew with rice. We used chopsticks. They treated us to the native tea, which we didn’t know to order. I happily exclaimed to my husband, It’s like being in a foreign country!
I guess I don’t think of Spain as a foreign country any more.
My Spanish tutor decided she was too busy to meet regularly, so I’m now working with a Granadan fellow on Italki, which is actually very nice. We’re focusing on conversation, and eggs came up, and he told me that every egg in the EU has a stamp on it. Well, stamp is my word; actually stamping eggs might be messy. But honestly, I had not even noticed that every single egg has a label. The first digit is 0-3, a quality level, followed by a two-letter country code, and then a numeric batch code presumably with producer information. Every single egg!
We eat a lot of eggs. We had found a brand we liked pretty well, large eggs with thick shells that cost almost €5 a dozen, similar to what we were paying for the cage-free eggs at New Leaf in Santa Cruz. Well, it turns out those are quality level 3, the lowest. That means they could come from one of those industrial caged facilities with 40,000+ chickens, of which there are hundreds in Spain. Producers can’t cut the feet off the chickens in the EU, but are allowed to trim the beaks. The caged chickens theoretically must be able to “move,” which means stand and sort of twist, not walk.
I feel terrible about this, so we stopped doing it. For €6ish we can get eggs of quality 1, which could never be produced in the large facilities because the chickens have to be able to go outside. Quality 0 is better but usually more than €8 per dozen and certified organic, which means they have been fed organic grain, a mixed blessing. The best would be regenerative farm chickens that are allowed to eat grass seeds and worms, but we haven’t found that here. Honestly, I knew how to get those in California, but I never did because it certainly wasn’t possible to do so at the grocery store. I couldn’t see myself driving up to half Moon Bay every week for eggs.
We got our visa last September and our first renewal interval is one year, so we’ve been getting all the information together. Happily it takes about a 10th of the information for the renewal compared to the original application, appointments slots are automatically assigned, and the next renewal interval is two years. We went to our lawyer’s office on Tuesday and had everything scanned, and our application was officially submitted on Wednesday. While we were there, she asked us if we were looking for a new apartment, because a lot of people start out with a one-year lease. Thank goodness we got a five-year lease so we don’t have to deal with that!
We had to pick our country from the list, and Estados Unidos is EEUU. I had noticed that before and thought it was because EU stands for European Union around here, but I was wrong. First of all, in Spanish Unión Europea is UE. More saliently, EEUU comes from standard Spanish writing rules, in which doubling a letter means the word is plural. Some examples include RRHH for Recursos Humanos (Human Resources) and JJOO for Juegos Olímpicos (Olympic Games).
When will I learn not to assume things? Leaping to the logical, “obvious” conclusion is so often just a sign of ignorance.