Any excuse to get out of the city, no matter how small, is usually a good one. This week Huckleberry had the fortune of being invited to hang out with a friend while he made a batch of home brew. The bready smells of fresh malts and the cutting smells of citrus hops were welcome relief from the carbonated amber colored water bars served in the name of beer.

That wasn´t the only fresh smell come February. Running into the Old Man (Francisco the Shaman) on the hill, Huckleberry learned where one can find savage, wild, and extra crispy garlic to be unrooted, chard to be raptured, fennel to be stalked, chicory to be rainchecked and dock leafs/sorrels to be harvested by the fistful. Spring has unjustifiably come early for Huckleberry and his brain is figuring out just what to make of it, since his metabolism only just went into hibernation mode during the month of rainy weather that just ocurred and seems to already be on its way out. A short lived winter.

Some trees are already budding with pink and purple flowers. It seems rather strange. Perhaps this is the reason that Huckleberry´s sleeping capabilities are slimming down and his exceptionally lucid dreaming is accelerating its hungry spongelike expansion into new territories. Everything is just a bit off kilter. This Spring seems unsure of itself, and suddenly downshifts through different backbeat accents bringing everything to a snaring halt.

The creperia closed down, and one of the only foodie shops here in town will be closed for good as of March. Venezuela, Thailand, Bahrain, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil. 6 countries with heavily publicized demonstrations, manifestations, protests. Many, violent. A dry realism hangs about as the seasons exchange places at the throne, and thrones exchange dry international looks weighing in on opportunities and gambles to come.

The pleasing complexity of Proustian conversations fill his salon on legs like a comfortably furnished bird house on stilts as they sip awake the temporarily sunny mornings. Hawks have been offering Huck a new perspective for the narration of idle vision. Puddles are shorter, less messy around their rocky edges.

All of a sudden all momentum seems to have pooled into a deep recess.

What must a man do, to kill time? Make a liter and a half of kimchi of course!; and this is where our story begins. A naive boy wanders out into the dangerous world in hopes of making delicious kimchi – a celebration of Spring rolling in.

Like all true religious rites, kimchi requires an encapsulated death of about three days. All the world dissassembles and sits in the salty primordial bath encased by the invisible bounds of an Italian made glass jar. All the enormity and the virtue of both world events and local happenings stuck in this temporal gridlock could be digested over 2 hours devoted to dissassembling fermentable diceables. First, they must be acquireables, of course.

Getting veggies in Cáceres is quite the trip. As is getting herbs. There are fruit and veggie shops lining the fabric of the apartment quilted Cacereñan city. Most of the required roots, bulbs, and heads needed for Huckleberry´s Rite of Spring could be found by traversing various shops. However, Chili peppers and any form of herb would require extreme measures. Not the extreme measure of visiting the old lady that sells freshly snapped sprigs of romero, tomillo, and laurel while trying to con you into buying dried guindilla peppers or picking up two euros worth of white beans from her burlap-sack-island-like goodie shop. No, this was not a time to embark on typical spanish herb quests – it was time for Huckleberry to man up and make his first trip to, Carrefour.

It´s the same evil, by a different name. This is Wally´s sister in arms, Carrefour. You walk in and it smells like the freshly laid car tires on sale to your left. This non-sequitor placement shocks and disorients you as you try to pick up a basket on wheels. You mistakenly pull out two baskets and fumble them to the ground as the handle elongates to the infinity of your embarrassment below. Looking around you discreetly dislodge the extra basket back into its case and proceed past the Doughnut island just across from the fresh flower cooler. Dear god, this was exactly the human processing plant you hoped to escape in the American mid-wasteland of Wal-marts, the French bureaucratic Targets, and the do they still exist K-marts.

First they disgust you with the tires, then they feed you sugar and flowers hoping that you won´t have noticed the chillout music lounging in from the speakers behind the ever-other-one-is-lit strip-ped down lighting. Its rather disgusting. Same old game, different name.

Nonetheless, Huckleberry went there to accomplish a few things. 1. Spicy peppers are notoriously difficult to find in Spain. 2. Red curry paste is something you might see in a movie here, once. 3. While he was at it, a bit of cilantro would go nice in a red curry sweet potato soup he could rig up for dinner with some leftover kimchi hopefuls. Hell, he hadn´t tasted fresh cilantro since he got here because, well – its just not very Spanish. 4. And perhaps that´s partially what this Rite was ushering in – Project Immersion had plenty of success – he could put down the zeal for doing typical Spanish things for a good while.

The Veggie section of Carrefour was like a sacred cloister hidden behind the fortress of household necessities and moderately expensive kitchenwares.

Huckleberry scanned the bountiful, mist sprayed and cooler chilled islands of produce. Nothing. He asked the kind Oracle behind the screen lit desk where he might find something spicy.

“…”  “…have you tried padrón peppers?, they´re from Morocco, and they´re supposedly spicy – but you never know, sometimes you get a batch and they don´t bite at all.”

This, of course, would never do for Huckleberry Kimchi.

“Do you have any dried peppers that have decent bite?” Huckleberry pleaded to her holiness, the Oracle of Veggies.

“We got dry Geen-deedja´s”

<Ah, yes, the Guindilla pepper. Spoken like a proper extremaduran.> Huckleberry thought to himself, quietly. The Wally world of Spain was not to be underestimated in its tenacious vigilance. Market paranoia was watching his every deed, best not think too loudly – or clearly. He accepted her guindilla offering, the Oracle had spoken and delivered. At this point, he had found both fresh cilantro and the Rite spice. Now he was ready to find the red curry demon, and obtain coconut milk in one fell swoop. Many months of meditation in spiceless as well as herbless ascetism were about to pay off.

15 minutes pass

Huckleberry stumbles out of the disorienting and challenging forest of initiation trials. He looks at his won treasures, sacred amulets. He savours the flavor of fresh cilantro on his 5 month herb starved palate. Now, all he had to do wash, chop, grate, smush, salt and seal veggies and roots for 2 hours while his system digested the all in all happening around. His brain worked best when left alone, so -best get busy with the kimchi. Cutting open a fractal-like cabbage is all you need to satisfy your bird´s eye perspective.

After all was cut and pressed, Huckleberry sealed the salted concoction and put its colorful purple cabbage canned tapestry on his desk to bask in room temperature normality for three days. <Deliberate and disciplined patience can do a lot. Here´s to hoping that the release of this temporal slingshot´s momentary pause comes up healthy blossoms wherever they have the luck to bloom. And here´s to hoping we have the courage to work with what ferments.>

At this point in Huckleberry´s contemplation, a bunch of silver chandeliered light bulbs lit up and a small, white haired man with a green cape walked up to the altar. Time to get out of the way of Catholic mass and leave the San Juan church with its quiet stone walls baking in Friday morning´s sunlight. Time to visit that old lady with the sacks of beans and buy some laurel sprigs on the way home. Time to stop at the neighborhood pastry shop to eat a tecula mecula ( a dessert traditional to the Extremadura region of western Spain)  accompanied by a coffee and reflect on what he realized today.

Chapter 12: Fear and Loathing in Cádiz, part 1

Huckleberry made a pre-siesta jaunt over to the supposedly Jesuit cistern in the old town of Cáceres. The discovery of the cistern was relatively recent, and it´s opening to the public is so new it´s still free until this April. Huckleberry had seen newpaper articles once in a while trying to establish more factual grounds on just what the history was of that cistern. One of the oldest clichés was certainly, “there´s nothing new under the sun.” But a cistern doesn´t exactly sit in the sun, someone had to come round and make it first.

The entrance to the cistern beneath the courtyard of the adjacent baroque structure, was preambled by a museum. The museum was a futurist´s wet dream; a multisensory documentation of the holy week in Cáceres. At the back of the room was a purple underlit glass deck where nearly 10 icons of catholic brotherhoods stood, hooded and garbed appropriately. The Nazareth brotherhood looked remarkably mystical while the Black Jesus brotherhood was more earthly and mundanely humble. At the flank of these imposing figures were little boxes where Huckleberry was invited to smell typical incense, rosemary herb from the hill, observe a candle, listen on headphones to Saetas and processional music from any one of the 10 plus processions of the Easter week. One could try out a mechanical device that would allow you to feel how heavy it is for each person helping to carry religious icon float (About 20 kg shouldered per person), one could try on a fancy brotherhood …hood (which Huck politely opted out of), one could observe a model of Plaza Mayor during an multi-icon procession (occurs once every 5 years, the next being 2015), one could read the history of each brotherhood and each icon (they are quite Reformatively beautiful), one could watch a video of various processions, and one could talk to Martha – one of Huckleberry´s students. Huckleberry had been running into his students all the time everywhere everyday in Caceres. Finding out that one of them worked at the local Aljibe museum was not surprising. Martha enthusiastically gave him the low down on all the things the multisensory museum had to offer. After making his way down through the museum Martha filled him in on the details of the cistern.

The cistern was a richly satisfying acoustic phenomenon. Multiple drain holes in the ceiling supplied the pool of water below with constant droplets to color the walls with infintessimal echoes. These nine meter high arch ceilings would make for a fantastic recording opportunity, Huckleberry noted. After filling his historical appetite to the brim, he thanked Martha for her thoroughly detailed tour and wished upon her a great deal of chocolates which Oscar, her boyfriend, owed her on this Feb. 14th´s Cousin Vinny´s Day.

Before he popped in for a peak at the Aljibe museum, Huckleberry had checked out the neighboring museum across the medieval street. There he had run into another acquaintance. She came from London, had a petite build and lovely shaped legs, and had a character a bit worn by the play of years. A grainy brunette color fell about her face. Stereotypically, her teeth were slightly unaligned but still quite clear like aged ivory. She came to the museum near St. George´s honorary statue and I met her there, just waiting to be touched. It had been a while since Huckleberry had been in the presence of such a formidable classical piano from the days when pianos were a necessary status symbols of the rising middle class and were the patient bearers of the stile galante being hammered out by newly priveleged families across the wealthier parts of Europe. This beautiful home piano was a charming reminder of a whole educational history that is now officially three years over. Still, all of the important relations between the evolution of society and economy hadn´t gone completely forgotten – the work of his exceptional teachers was not in vain. It might, in fact, “pay-off” in his teaching assistant gig, after all.

Trying to be useful in some regard, Huckleberry had tried advancing territory on “Commerce, Shopping, Goodies Et Cetera” in conversation classes. Among terms like “fair trade” and “E-Commerce” the word every student ended up trying to use at some point or other was, The Man. Huckleberry studied how The Man changed from era to era in the western music canon. It was required and informative paranoia for all music students hoping to, essentially, get on The Man´s good side so they could spitefully spit on his nice shoes for the rest of their lives. They´d continue shining his shoes, of course.

Back to the classroom..

After bucketing up opinions from the wells of their English vocab banks, the conversation game would get on and flow smoothly. At the end of class, a student asked Huckleberry what his opinion of commercialism was. He had been combing their minds for details, so it was only fair for him to share, right? Karma hadn´t lost its touch.

Outside the classroom, in the past two weeks there was one sunny day and one other day that the sun came out for a brief moment. Everyday it rained several times sporadically. Never a heavy rain, more like thick mists. Like the sky was casting a beady net you couldn´t avoid. The addition of huffing wind made everything cold, wet, and awkward for everyone.

The rain turned the once trickling stream that cuts between the main of the town and the mountain, into a flowing stream, at times overflowing onto the unsuspecting banks – one bank in particular a drinking water well, now with dirty water streaming almost to the tips of the faucets where Huckleberry sees locals grab water everyday. A messy diffusion running on without concentrated revision. It was definitely the first time Huckleberry could really hear the stream above the traffic of the nearby bending road. On that particular day, post rain, the near siesta meander would take Huck into the realm of a local Shaman. His name is Francisco Granados, he stands about 5 feet 5 inches, he wears an green Flat cap with eyes that looks grey at the outside and orangish brown near the pupil, and has been seen feeding the horses and cats on the hill ever since Huckleberry first started making trips up the hill for a quick bit of fresh air. Francisco picks up plants along the road and feeds them to the horses while throwing tasty bread bits to the kittens. He likes talking about how smart and resourceful wild cats are when it comes to catching birds, stealing eggs, embarking on herbalicious endeavours and not being too proud to accept the shaman hand that feeds them bread – said hand being Francisco. At one time, there was a wonderful coincidence between the 1. mountain being so full of kitties and 2. a protagonist making several important trips to a Pueblo de los Gatos in a book Huck had been reading. Every once in a while, Huckleberry found that some books were written right beneath his eyes.

This time, on the way down the hill, Huck encountered Paco who was carrying some leafy greens in his hands. Huckleberry began to wonder how Paco would explain himself.

“G´day! Long time no see!” Huck presented the floor of dialogue.

“Hey! It´s a bit sunny today, finally.” And then, without wasting any time, “Have you eaten yet?”

What a seemingly contextually absurd question that is otherwise always appropriate, and relevant. Sometimes talking with elders was like reading the mental math of child prodigies.

“Yeah, I had a bite to eat before coming up here.”

“I´m gonna eat at home, ´round 3:30. Listen, you want some of these? The doctors say they are good for your blood. It is acedera, pretty acidic.”

<You only live once,> Huckleberry humored to himself, <and that one time deal could be signed off by some senile man and dangerous plants! but, hey, what do I have to lose again?> “Sure I´ll take some,” Huckleberry reached out and grabbed half of Paco´s bounty. While Huckleberry chewed on some of the leaves they talked about being 80 and not having any serious body pains, about education and where kids are getting their heads into during this whole crisis ordeal, about the benefits of drinking no less than half a liter of wine everyday – or a least a little cañita, about home cookin´, about local edible plants like the externally spiny but internally delicious taganilla (Scolymus hispanicus), and about language.

Meanwhile, Huckleberry was reminded of some fruit from back home. He let it go so he could pay attention to Paco´s thick Badajó(z) country accent.

“But you see it´s hard for Spaniards to learn English. English and French aren´t like Spanish. In English, you write one way, but you don´t say what you write (referring here of course to pronounciation).” And then he walked write into hiz hone chrap. “For example, in Spanish we say your name – in this case – André, and we write it the same, “André”…(s)” While he could have chosen just about any spanish word, he chose my name which happens to end in an aspirated s, which is neither a rule nor an error. It´s regional. We both smiled and shrugged, acknowluhjing thuh hill airity uhv his mistayk, while also acknowledging the general truth of what he was trying to say. Huckleberry asked Paco where he should look for acedera, and having obtained this information parted ways with the talkative Flat capped gentleman.

“Granny smith apples” At precisely that moment, this rich in iron and vitamin C herb brought to him the taste and the memory of crispy-sour granny smith apples.

Another day, in a luminous opening between rains, another strong memory came to Huck – a two week chamber music ensemble workshop in New York with students from Butler University, where his brother attended college. The only year Huckleberry attended was precisely a time when he was trying to recover from tendonitis – therefore just about the worst condition to attempt keeping up with actual classical musicians. To be honest, recovering from tendonitis should never have anything to do with putting your healing pains through quickly learning difficult repertoire under pressure. Nonetheless, the memory of enjoying a sunny morning after a rain while a quartet group practiced Ravel´s believably famous String Quartet in F came to Huckleberry as he ran the hook of his umbrella along the wooden rail shooting through the vibrant moss of ancient rocks strewn about the hilltop. On his way down and to the “sunset park” the quartet played in his mind´s chamber, influencing his perception of the symphonic world about.

On his way to the park where one best watches a sunset, unhindered,  he ran into Rachel. Rachel is a thorough doppleganger that is the result of a mixture between two of Huck´s friends back home. Like most people he runs into, Rachel is a student of his as well. At the end of their run in, he asked where she was off to. “Genetics class”

<Joé> he thought. <Don´t I feel stupid> Hoping his face didn´t reflect how stupid he actually felt, he then thought about how wonderfully shallow his knowledge of the students´ lives was. He knew very little, and if he had to guess, he wouldn´t stand a chance against reality. Rachel was a laid back artsy girl by dress who´s hairstyle shows complete acceptance that her thick waves of dirty blonde hair are absolutely crazy. Light earth tone sweaters cover a shirt of that one punk band and the dissarray of mildly hippie necklaces definitely always gave Huck the assumption that, <Hey, she seems like fun to talk to.> During the conversation, finding out that she was adorably concerned about her grades in genetics played right into the return of the determined pizzicato theme in the second movement of Ravel´s String Quartet in F Major. Time to catch the sun at the park before the fourth movement began.

Every person and every culture has their own way of being nice. Switching between norms of Niceties can be difficult. There are always exceptions to the rule, and there really are no rules, but if Hucklberry had to define a norm about the people here he would have to say, “Really nice”.

When he is walking down a hill after watching a pack of sheep mosey on down the zigzaggity road, he just might run into sheep cheese maker Jesus. He claims that his homemade artisenal Torta del Casar knocks the industrialized Extremaduran flag-ship cheese out of the ring – no holds barred. The reason Huckleberry finds him to be nice has little to do with the fact that they just shot the shit for 20 minutes over small-town-talk.  A classic not-what-but-how.

Friends here have no mercy. If they think you do something stupid, they tell you. They get all awkward and stuff and you know kinda like a kid who just told a lie when they try and hold back a really funny and astute observation or joke at your expense. It´s unnatural. They really want to tell you, and laugh at you, because hey – you´re friends.

When you look a little under the weather or stuffy, people get all up in your mucous. “When did it start?””Have you seen a doctor?””I had a crazy bout of diarrhea the other day, too””You don´t say? What was it like?” When did it become natural for Huckleberry to get into other peoples´business, especially all the juicy and bare assed details? Somewhere, sometime, this became friendly and often a nice bout of small talk.

To make a contextually comprehensive list of details that defines the Nicety of a people would be impossible. Just thinking about it racked his brain and he stumbled into the newly organized shelves of Appropriate Behaviours catalogued in the library of the small mindedness that housed his massive ego. One just simply gets a feel for it, he supposed.

Friendships and acquaintances were very different indeed here, but he could no longer specifically reference how. Guess he just wasn´t fresh enough off the press to make analytical comparisons. At this point that didn´t really matter anyhow, he felt welcome and at home among the Nice particular to this place. The world has a way of sneaking up on you; somewhere, somehow – Huckleberry could feel that the norms of interaction had come to a much more snug syncronization than before. He had hardly noticed.

And, now, he had been getting plenty of practice sneaking up on the black cats on the mountain. When he found them, he wondered if they thought he was bad luck.

After all, since his first success of haphazardly sneaking up on them, it had been raining almost everyday in Cáceres. It never really gets that cold there, and certainly never colder than his poorly insulated bedroom, but the cool damp temperatures were enough to put the lights out of the city´s activity for a while.

Two of his friends, Manolo and his girlfriend Francis, decided they were going to make a food day out of this rainy Sunday. What a splendid idea. Nothing like a rainy day to excuse making yourself some extraordinarily fancy food. Something that did link the Nice of Cáceres to the Nice of Wisconsin was that very human love of food. However, like behavioural norms, the type of ingredients one might use to express the culture of your Sincerity or Taste will always be distinct and impossible to reproduce. This is not to say, however, that it is impossible to acclimate to new tastes and understandings.

People keep asking him what typical American food is.

Oof. Should a priveledged white boy speak for the entire USA? No. Nonetheless, for certain parts of Wisconsin, he could surely muster up some answers. Of course, there are a lot of contradictory movements, ideologically opposing establishments, local product limitations (and potentials!) on one hand and corporate crutches on the other. Wisconsin is, at times, quite clearly a homogenized people. However, this in no way makes it a homogenous people. Just like any other place in the world, everyone is different from everyone and the radius of inclusion changes on the dime depending on the topic at hand. The populace can´t be represented, and as we see in more radical (both “left” and “right”) communities – some refuse to be represented, and others refuse to represent. The overwhelming majority of people are of European immigrant descent. African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, Native American (North-Central-South, all of it), and other bloodline descent makes up a smaller population of Wisconsin. Further, segregation -most heavily marked by the African American segregated neighborhoods in Milwaukee- is terrible. People came to Wisconsin for many reasons: cheap land (while Wisconsin was the frontier), jobs in a state of growing industry, political freedom (many a liberal German moved to America following failed revolutions during the 1800´s), and the idea of being far away from the rest of the nation to be simply left alone. 

The only thing he can offer is recollection. If asked what traditional Wisconsin foods are, what would he recall? Where Huckleberry is from, he´s not a foodie. There are sooo many people more qualified to express what food culture in Wisconsin was like.  To be frank, maybe it wasn´t appropriate for someone like Huckleberry to speak for Wisconsin foods.

So, Huckleberry took a moment to think of what he personally identified with, in a food and drink sense, even though his is sometimes senseless. The unorganized list goes as such:

Friday Night Fish Fry; Corned beef and cabbage; Dumplings from every corner of the world; Chinese hot-pot; Coleslaw; Meatloaf; Beer Brats; Frozen Custard joints, Dill Pickles, pickled anything, Venison steak, Venison sausage, Turkey stuffing, German potato salad, Italian Deli´s, Butcher Shops, Burger joints (MickyD´s is just their cancerous monopolist mutation), Egg salad, Milkshakes, Goat cheese, Sheep cheese, Cow cheese, 12 YEAR OLD CHEDDAR, Brandy Old Fahioned´s (sour), pumpkin cheesecake, anything cheesecake, farm pork roasts, Rhubarb, Maple syrup, Cornish pasties, morel mushrooms, all things cranberries, orchard apples, cabbage, heirloom tomatoes, wild rice, fundraiser dinners, organic and local produce (I want to verify this quote, “Vernon County has more organic farms than any other in the nation and is home to Organic Valley, the country’s largest organic farmers cooperative. Madison boasts the nation’s largest and highest-rated producer-only farmers’ market, and is home to such sustainability-geared organizations as Slow Food Wisconsin and REAP Food Group.” source), Pretzel bread with hot-spicy mustard!, playing euchre or sheepshead on a pontoon boat while drinking beer and eating SQUEAKY CHEESE CURDS, we have Booyah! Local Craft Microbreweries with just about every beer style the liver has ever known, and pumpkin pie.

The general Wisconsin Food list goes on but stops for now. If someone asked him to describe Madison´s food scene, his head would explode into a thousand green nettle gnocchi´s under the embarrassing pressure of his inexpertise.

So, to pay back some of these super nice friends of his, he´s been thinking of what he should cook up for them. They keep asking him for traditional Wisconsin food..how could he choose? Where would he get the most important thing: the ingredients? He´d figure it out, eventually.

Chapter 10: Acquaintances