el peregringo

OK, so hate is a pretty harsh term, but as a single word antonym to love, it works pretty well. I mean does anyone really love chocolate, want to marry it and have it’s babies? So for the category, hate is a convenient term. Real hate I reserve for the truly hateful, like Bill Gates, Microsoft, and George Bush.

I hate the pillow cases here. Everyone knows what a pillow case is. It’s a bag that you stick your pillow in. Of course the thing that makes a bag work is that it has an opening, and a bottom. I mean, come on, you go to the grocery store and they ask you “paper or plastic” and you don’t have to wonder if they mean “bag” or like the Spaniards, if they might just mean tube.

Spanish pillow cases are tubes. You buy pillow cases and they’re open on both ends. This is quite frankly, stupid. Do you know how much muscle memory there is in holding the pillow with your chin while dropping it into the pillow case? Here, they just drop right on your feet, and you’re left holding the bag, er, tube.

Many Spaniards have seen the folly of the system and when they buy pillow cases, the first thing they do when they get them home is sew up one end… they way they should have been sold in the first place. It might be a conspiracy. Some homes keep a sewing machine just so they can turn what they just bought into something actually functional. Others buy their pillow cases and stop at a tailor to have them sewn up there. More research needed here…

So the pillow cases are bad, but my god, the sheet fiasco here is beyond comprehension. I’ve just spent 4 full days in bed with the worst flu I’ve ever had. I nearly died. Not because of the flu, because of the friggin’ sheets here. For some absolutely incomprehensible reason, when one makes a bed here, they leave something between 3 and 4 FEET of extra sheet at the top that gets folded down over the blankets. Sure looks pretty, but have anything approaching disturbed, feverish sleep, and you’re bound to end up with those 4 extra feet of sheet wrapped around neck and struggling to breath. Somehow this is considered “normal.”

I’ve heard several other ex-pats mention this, which makes sense since I know of no other culture that routinely tries to strangle foreigners in their sleep (more on Spanish xenophobia later). But I have never heard a Spaniard complain when in the the US that they really miss those extra yards of superfluous fabric, though I have to say my wife, if left to her own devices, will gradually lengthen the amount of top sheet until I beg for a reprieve (maybe she’s trying to get rid of me?)