My stint as a professional wrestler

I may be going bar-hopping with some local Cantabria kids tomorrow. Caranceja is a tiny town, so if I stand out in the plaza for any extended period of time (say, making phone calls), I am usually sure to see someone I know. One of the kids I met at the party, named Jorge, saw me two nights ago and invited me to a house to chill with some friends. Everyone said they had met me at the party, and I knew none of them except my homie Jorge. It was surreal, like I was on the Truman Show. I literally didn´t know them, and they were irked when I asked their names. But they got over it, and we may go into Cabezon de la Sal tomorrow and bar-hop.

Taking care of Jorge is easy. We play sports. His favorite show is ¨Prison Cut,¨ which is what they call WWE here, so we re-enact wrestling fights. He is the Undertaker and I am whoever he says I am.
Teaching Jorge English ridiculously hard. When we are chilling, he speaks in Spanish, which is a sure way not to learn English. I speak in English, and then repeat my sentence in Spanish, because he becomes frustrated when I say things that he does not understand. And, when we are in lessons, he periodically asks me how long until we finish the lesson. He really just wants to go back to sleep or go outside and play. Today, the lesson went especially badly. I was giving sentences for him to write, and the first two went well. Then, I told him to write ¨I started to pet the dog.¨ Something about the sentence confused him, and he refused to write it. I asked him what he did not understand.
¨No lo he dado,¨ he said.
¨I don´t know what that means,¨ I said.
¨No lo he dado.¨
¨No puedo ayudarte se no me explicas,¨ I said. I can´t help you if you don´t explain to me.
¨No lo he dado,¨ he said.
¨¿Que´ cenifica?¨ I asked. What does that mean?
Angrily, he wrote ¨No lo he dado¨ in big letters on the sheet.
Later, I learned that the meaning. ¨I haven´t learned it.¨ It killed me.
An hour later, we watched Prison Cut, re-enacted it, and everything was fine.
Thank God.

Whoa, fireworks are shooting off outside the window. This is crazy. As a general rule, cannons fire at random times during the day here. I used to think it was official, but now I think that people just take the initiative. Noise is no thang. Parties blare across the town until 3 am. Less regulation than in the US, I guess.

And now, for my favorite topic...separatism!
Miguel (the father of the family in Olot that we stayed with on the Eurotrip) had said that Cataluña was rich, and that Spain took more money from it than it gave back. Manolo (Jorge´s dad) unintentionally confirmed this fact when we were chatting. His justification:
¨There are richer areas and there are poorer areas,¨ he said in Spanish. ¨Cataluña is one of the rich areas, and they don´t want to help the poor areas. They want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.¨
But then he admitted that the area with the greatest tax surplus is Madrid.
¨The people who make the tax laws give their area the most money!¨ I said. ¨A conflict of interest, no?¨
He agreed, but I must tread softly. These independence movements stir the Spanish up. Manolo swears that if Cataluña split away, the Spanish would mount a widespread and effective boycott (not a state-sponsored embargo, but a grass-roots informal boycott). For this reason, he believes a split would be bad for Spain and Cataluña.
I tend to disagree. For Spain, yes. For Cataluña, no. First of all, Cataluña would sell to the rest of Europe. Second of all, the boycott would collapse. People buy the products with the best value, and if Cataluña makes products most efficiently, and my sense is that they do, Spain will buy them, even from an independent Cataluña.
So, yes, Spain will be hurt. Cataluña sounds like one of Spain´s major engines of industry. How unfortunate for Spain.
The truth is -- and I keep this truth quiet, because people here really care about keeping Spain unified -- that I have quite a bit of sympathy for the Cataluñan separatist movement. They have their own culture and language, and, for this reason, Spain´s extraction of wealth from Cataluña seems more like a colonizer abusing a colony than a country getting help from its ¨richer area.¨

I know less about the Basque separatists. The Basque area was once rich, but it is now poor. Manolo says that the ETA (a Basque separatist terrorist group) is to blame. They demand money from businessmen, and refusals result in deaths. So businessmen leave. Also, the terrorism dries up tourism, which was once a major industry for the Basque area.
In the Basque area, big changes may be afoot. For the first time since Spain became a democracy, in 1978, the governor in Navarra is a Basque nationalist. (Navarra is one of several Basque provinces.) Zapatero, Spain´s President, is up in arms. Miguel (the hotel director and the guy in whose house I am staying) decries Spain´s decentralization of power.
¨In the US,¨ he said in Spanish, ¨the states are of a federation. The central government has power.¨
That is the second time that someone has compared Spain´s power-sharing system to that of the US. Both times, the comparison favored the system in the US. Comically, the comparison given to me by Miguel the Olot father framed the US as better than Spain because it gave its separate states power to make their own laws, while the comparison given by Miguel the hotel director framed the US as better than Spain because its central government held the important reins of power.
And in America, the streets are paved with gold...