The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: Spain

  • The Teleportation of Gil Pérez

    That had to have been startling.

  • CHARLAS AL FRESCO

    A delightful tradition that’s worthy of preservation.

  • Mondragon Corporation: A Lesson in Cooperation

    There are alternatives to capitalism.

  • The Dolmen de Guadalperal

    2,000 years older than Stonehenge.

  • Sound Memories

    This coming June, I’ll have officially lived longer without my mother in my life than I did with her. What a concept. I can no longer remember her voice, except for the sound of one painfully high note she would hit when we’d sing a particular song. “Ain’t gonna GRIEEEEEVE my Lord no more!” I…

  • A Story About Reframing Misfortune

    This month, the theme for the monthly storytelling group I attend was “Starting Over”. I’m the poster child for that, but I didn’t feel like being too intense this time, so I thought about a blog post I did a while back on the Evil Eye. That’s the story I told, with some modification. If…

  • Spanish Proverbs

    One of the things I love most about the Spanish language, and one of the reasons I chose to learn it, is that it is full of wise sayings. There is no exact translation for some of them, and that’s a pity, because a lot of them are gems. We can learn a great deal…

  • Convivencia

    There was a period in Spanish history between the beginning of the eighth century and the end of the fifteenth century known as the Convivencia, which, roughly translated, means the time of living together, when the Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in relative peace. Not to say that Spain hasn’t had a past checkered with…

  • I Was Here

    Approximately 40,800 years ago, someone, possibly a Neandertal, painted the oldest known cave art in a place called the Cave of El Castillo in northern Spain. This is the first evidence we have of someone saying,  “Death shall not silence me.” And we’ve been saying it ever since. Wanting to survive beyond your expiration date…

  • The Evil Eye

    Location: Some Nameless Godforsaken Village in Northwest Spain Year: 1986 So I’m with a friend, sitting in a café that overlooks a green slimy swamp. To say we were in the middle of nowhere would be generous. You couldn’t even see nowhere from where we were sitting. I had no freakin’ clue how this restaurant…