Daily Iowan

July 17th, 2007

Robbery, dinner, and the musical education of Zara the Cat

Weekend recap: theft, paella, dubbed movies, and a new friendship with the feline. The glamour never stops.

A piece of advice: Whatever you do, never let anyone steal your cell phone in Spain. They can take your camera, your cash, your inhaler, an appendage — but do not let them have your phone.

You will only be punished for your vulnerability and your inability to understand customer service on the phone. And by punished, I just mean customer service told me I couldn’t understand English and then hung up. I may hit a daily limit on my bank account paying to replace the stolen phone.

I could juxtapose this advice with a killer story about how I bravely handed over my phone to an ETA member at gunpoint or something, but I have no idea what actually happened. The phone just sort of disappeared out of my back pocket. I never saw or felt anything. The woman on the phone totally didn’t believe the ETA story, so I just won’t flesh out those false juicy details.

Topic #2. Paella.

The first time Tina (my house mom) set paella in front of me, I started weeping. I was utterly terrified of what she had cooked. Paella is a Spanish rice dish, and its appearance would weaken the knees of most rational human beings. This paella was made with seafood, but the seafood still had its eyeballs, legs and feelers. I was frightened, and rightly so.

“But it’s yellow,” I told her. “They have eyes. Are you sure they’re dead? I’m afraid.”

Tina and the rest of the dinner table laughed. She told me that she’d sit there all night with me until I tried it. I didn’t want to spend my evening recapping dinner table memories from my entire childhood, so I closed my eyes and gave it a whirl. Everyone leaned in, enraptured with my facial expressions. It gave me a lot of confidence.

But you know, it wasn’t half bad. In fact, it was actually pretty phenomenal. Paella has quickly converted into my favorite dinner in Spain. I go to class and brag that Tina’s making paella for dinner, and my classmates drool. Tina cooks it with calamari, crayfish, mussels, tuna, salmon and shrimp. Be still my little taste buds. Paella is on the menu for tomorrow night — at my request.

Next up: dubbed movies. It turns out that sitting around watching TV doesn’t make me stupider, and spending large blocks of time watching it is actually helping out my Spanish. Yesterday, I watched Big, Lilo and Stitch, and Back to the Future. I may never leave my room again. In addition to the goldmine of dubbed American movies, I’m catching up on season three of “Lois and Clark: The Adventures of Superman,” hailing straight from the airwaves of 1997.

Need a memory refresher? Lois and Clark finally just got married, but Lois got cloned by some hot villain. He’s trying to woo her, but she’s too savvy for him. She meets her clone (oops) and immediately loses her memory. It goes without saying that I’m hooked and rekindling my crush on Dean Cain.

Also playing on a Spanish network near you: “Family Guy,” “Survivor,” “The Simpsons,” and a really horrible Spanish version of “Deal or No Deal.” Turns out this last show sucks in both languages, but Tina gets really worked up watching it, so I put up with it. The three of us really like our TV.

That’s right. I’m talking about me, Tina, and Zara the cat. If you’ll remember from June, Zara is the psycho-kitty who was breaking into my room and clawing apart my Steve Maddens every day.

You’ll be relieved to know that I finally decided to let this little gremlin into my life, and we’re becoming fast friends. Zara and I spend a lot of time together now. She watches me shower on a daily basis and has seen me naked more times than I’m comfortable sharing on the Internet. This afternoon we napped together, and we slept soundly until she began howling and sharpening her back claws on my skin.

I’m slowly exposing Zara to my musical library, and I think we may have a blossoming Radiohead fan on our hands. She starts purring and strutting when I play OK Computer, and then she goes and steals things from my bathroom. I knew she had to have some redeemable qualities.

Turns out, we have a lot of things in common. She can open doors and drawers, and she likes to drink water from the sink.

Oh, look at the time. I have to go pay my phone bill and cuddle with Zara while we watch Sweet Valley High in Spanish. Gotta boogie!
Peace and paella,

Ann

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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