There are few things I love more than food. Cooking it, decorating with it, eating it – whatever it is, I’m down.
And I’m not a picky eater by any means. But living with a Spanish host mother here in Salamanca definitely changed my eating habits, from meal times to food preferences.
Here’s what a typical day consists of:
Breakfast: “El Desayuno”
The first meal of the day is always the same. We have a hot water thermos for Rojo tea, a small prepackaged pastry, like a mini-muffin or doughnut you could find at a 7-11 and exactly three thin tea cookies each for my roommate and me. This breakfast is very traditional in Spain, it’s supposed to be light and sweet. And it’s supposed to keep you going through a full morning of class from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., when we have our main meal of the day.
The first day, I pecked at one of the two mini-muffins that my host mother, Milagros, had put out on the table, and I drank a cup of tea. I neglected the tea cookies entirely.
What a rookie mistake.
I thought I was going to faint before my last class was over. We have class all morning, from 9 a.m. to a little after 1 p.m., with five-minute breaks each hour. I felt like I had been fasting all day by the time lunch rolled around.
A couple days later, I learned the secret to survival.
On the first floor of the building where my classes are, there is a coffee machine with about a dozen different options. I have never been much of a coffee drinker. I love the smell and the taste, but caffeine makes me too jittery, and I can’t focus.
All of that changed by the second day of class.
The coffee was only 50 cents. Desperate, I plucked the change from my wallet.
The machine gurgled and hissed, releasing a steaming hot espresso shot, a teaspoon of sugar and an adorable plastic stirrer into a petite paper cup.
After the first sip, nirvana spread throughout my entire body. The mid-morning coffee became my salvation.
And I haven’t neglected a tea cookie since.
Lunch: “La Comida”
By lunchtime, any health consciousness I had in the morning was completely out the window.
“Pues, a comer,” my host mom croons each day at 2:30 on the nose.
Waiting for my roommate and me at the medium-sized dining room table is the first course: some kind of vegetable and starch, along with bread and a tall bottle of water.
My host mother’s interpretation of “vegetables” is something a little different than what I was used to.
It can be zucchini slices covered in a mound of pasta and cheese or broccoli and potatoes smothered in olive oil.
A couple of times, we ate an incredible salad with avocado, peppers, cucumbers and shrimp. Of course, it’s doused with olive oil and salt.
I’m usually full at the end of the first course – my stomach shrinks every morning – but I don’t want to be rude and refuse food she’s already made, so I agree to the meat course.
Normally, it’s chicken slices, beef or pork pan-fried in a generous amount of olive oil. Sometimes chopped lettuce dressed with olive oil and salt or canned bell peppers accompanies the meat. Occasionally the options are more gourmet, like saffron rice with peas and roasted chicken or salmon and a baked potato.
For my host mom, though, it’s the same food every day: chopped fish that looks almost raw and noodles, without olive oil or salt.
We only speak Spanish with my host mother, so all meals come with some difficulty communicating. I arrived in Salamanca with only Spanish 1 and 2 under my belt, and the initial awkward silences between bites seemed endless.
But by our second week, the conversation was almost flowing, aside from uncomfortable moments searching for Spanish words to explain American culture.
Milagros has hosted hundreds of exchange students over the past several years, and the stories she told about them kept us laughing for hours. Much of her family, including her mother and sister, live in the same apartment building, and there is always something happening with them. She also loves to talk about her daughter, who lives in the U.S.
Recently, our conversations have gone from talking about our favorite movies to gay rights in Spain to why people in New York smoke cigarettes by themselves. It’s never boring.
After the meat course, we have some kind of fruit on a plate with a knife. I didn’t really understand why we need a knife to eat a banana, or a peach, or pre-sliced melon, but at the risk of seeming uncultured, I use it nonetheless.
Dinner: “La Cena”
A bowl of chicken broth with rice or noodles starts dinner each night at 9:30 p.m. It’s salty, tastes good and goes down easy, even on hot days. It is usually followed by pan-fried meat, and on some occasions it’s frozen pizza or chicken tenders. The olive-oil covered vegetables don’t make an appearance, and the dessert is usually a packaged cup of yogurt or chocolate pudding.
My host mother doesn’t eat dinner, though: she sits with us and watches us eat, intermittently making conversation.
Struggling to communicate at first, there were many long pauses as my roommate and I sipped our soup. I’d never had someone watch me eat before, but gradually it started to become normal. And Milagros never failed to surprise us when we did get to talking.
The other night we were sitting around the dining room table – my roommate and I staring at our food, our host mother staring at us – when my roommate remarked she liked Milagros’ watch. It was large with a neon green band and bright pink face, contrasting starkly with her white tank top.
She lit up with a big smile. Turns out, she had more than 70 watches in her collection, and this one was one of her favorites.
We only were acquainted a couple of weeks ago, but we were starting to get to know each others’ quirks and connect. It wasn’t going to happen overnight, but with a few more meals and awkward silences, any barrier between us was breaking down.