John Scheck's Blog, page 4

I'm not Afraid to Admit when I'm Wrong

I was buying a few things in one of Valencia’s ubiquitous green grocers that are almost the exclusive domain of Pakistani immigrants. As I placed my items on the scale, the shop owner asked me if I wanted to buy a watermelon. I said that I didn’t, thank you very much.

He countered my knee-jerk dismissal of his offer by asking a simple question.

“Why?”

You got me there, my man. I didn’t have a “because” for his “why,” at least not a good one, so I bought a beautiful watermelon. Not the most sophisticated sales pitch I’ve ever heard, but his earnestness made me laugh.

Moral to the story: It’s summer; buy a damn watermelon already!

Humor Highlight of Friend’s Visit with His Family

It’s almost time for the paella to hit the table where oldest child is tutoring youngest child on fractions or something which I'm not sure is even legal on vacation. Exasperated father who feels kids aren’t moving quickly enough to set the table shouts at youngest daughter, “Stop doing math!”

I’m pretty sure that was the first time those words were ever uttered by a parent to a child.

A Terrible Waste

So I cleaned my apartment this morning because I’m having people coming for a visit. I somehow screwed up the dates and they won’t be here until the week after next. I feel like such an idiot. That’s 10-15 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

A Tale of Two Cities

Los Angeles Suburb

Ruzafa neighborhood, Valencia

Two equal areas: one is a typical suburban housing development and the other is my wonderful neighborhood in Valencia. It would be difficult to calculate exactly how many more people live in the lower photo than the suburban area but one thing is apparent: there are no businesses in the top photo, it's strictly housing while everything at street level in the city photo is dedicated to retail. Lengthwise these photos represent over one kilometer which encompasses an almost infinite variety of choices for the city dweller. In the Valencia photo there are probably over 50 restaurants, and that is being very conservative. I would have to think very hard to come up with something that I couldn't find in this small section of my city.

How far would you have to go to get to a major supermarket, a pharmacy, two fruit and vegetable shops, two telephone company outlets, a shoe repair shop, an appliance store, a couple of shoe stores, a newsstand and internet café, a hairdresser, a yoga studio, a stationery store, a second-hand store, and a tobacconist? I can walk to these places without crossing a single street. If I cross over the street to the four blocks adjacent to my block there are over a dozen cafés and restaurants, three banks, two variety stores (or "Chinos" as they are called here), a Latin American grocery store, two pre-schools, a surf shop, two bakeries, three dentists, a printing shop, a copy center, a tailor, a boutique beer store, a launderette, two car repair garages, an auto parts store, a hardware store, a furniture store, three travel agencies, an electrical supply store, and an architectural firm. All of these businesses are less than about two hundred meters from the front door of my building.

How is this possible? It’s all about population density. An average city block here has around four buildings on each side and each building has about six floors of apartments with two apartments on each floor. This translates into 190 apartments on one block. That means 190 families living on the land used for perhaps ten suburban homes. Being very conservative let’s say that there are only two occupants in each of the 190 apartments on my block and four people living in each of those suburban homes which means 380 people on my block and 40 people in an equal area in suburbia—almost ten times the density in the average Spanish city block than in the 'burbs.

I spend the better part of my life inside the boundaries of this urban grid which represents the neighborhood of Ruzafa (the biggest building you see towards the left is the food market, the epicenter of the hood).

Of course, in my neighborhood everyone walks. If you need a bicycle there are five bike-share stations within the confines of the area represented in the photograph with another 5-6 just on the outer boundaries. Just why anyone even bothers to own a car here in Valencia is a mystery to me. I think that most car owners could probably just rent a car once or twice a month and save themselves a lot of expense and headache because if there is one thing my neighborhood doesn't have it's parking, which just isn't my problem these days.

In the Neighborhood

A café in my neighborhood recently changed staff and the new Chinese couple appear to be right off the boat, as we say in America. They speak almost no Spanish. Every time I go there, I witness innumerable acts of patience, kindness, sweetness, and charm from the Spanish patrons as they walk the couple through the intricacies of how to work a corner café.

I’ve never witnessed any unkindness and no taunts along the lines of “Why don’t you speak Spanish?” or “Why don’t you go back.” This isn’t to say that there is no racism here, but it isn’t toxic, it isn’t literally killing people.

Disorderly Eating

The jamón-flavored potato chips (only in Spain) I buy have a recommendation on the bag that once you open them you should finish the product in a week. Do I get some sort of prize if I finish them off by myself in less than five minutes?

If I had the will power to open a bag of chips and leave them around for a week, I wouldn’t have to avoid that aisle in the supermarket as if it were the infectious disease ward at the hospital (which I really do avoid because, eww, I have a lot of health problems I wouldn't want to pass on).

Scheckism

When I was in the U.S.A.F. our unit had a notebook we passed around that served as our lampoon. People would put in humor and drawings and other bits of foolishness that passed for humor in the American military. My little bits were called Scheckism (from my last name, no one uses first names in the military because they don't print those on your shirts).


Scheckism:

Have you ever noticed that the expression “Who died and made you the Pope?” doesn’t make any sense at all? I’ve been thinking about that all day. I mean, obviously, the person who died must have been the Pope because if not, we wouldn’t need a new one. And the College of Cardinals elects the new Pope—at least that’s the way it was before I got kicked out of Catholicism. So, both questions are answered: The Pope and the College of Cardinals.