El Gringoqueño

Patton said it best "Good tactics can save even the worst strategy. Bad tactics will destroy even the best strategy."

Business plan = Strategy
Execution = Tactics

The dot com’s failed because they were mostly formed out of greed by untalented opportunists with an eye on getting rich.

You should care more about creating something real, real products, employment, and create them with passion.

So if you are going to start a company, it’s not your business plan
that’s going to save your ass, it’s the people with whom you surround
yourself, the talented, dedicated, morally straight folks that care
about the business and its success. Besides, you’re going to throw out
your business plan in the first year anyway.

And I didn’t even need an MBA from Harvard to figure that out.

You have arrived on the island of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory in the Caribbean Sea. You have traveled a long way, about 1000 miles south east of Florida in the Greater Antilles and about 500 miles north of Venezuela. I would love to tell you all about Puerto Rico, but instead of all the basics, I will try to give you the flavor, el sabor, of Puerto Rico. El Sabor means "the flavor" in the local language of Spanish.

Flavor is something that is taken very seriously here.

It is hard to talk about where I live without mentioning food, as it is a central focus of local culture. The other day, I was in a cafeteria ordering food, and there were people around me picking out their lunch items from the displays. They asked for the food to be served on their plates with such cariño (care, or adoration pronounced cahr-EEN-yo), I almost believed they were speaking to a beloved family member, like a dear grandparent, in the most reverent tones. Each dish, yuca in garlic sauce, fried pork, beans liberally applied to the top of the rice, was carefully selected with much respect and devotion.

These were gruff men, in from construction sites, labor jobs, working hard in the hot sun. It was a hot day, as it is hot year around, 85o and with tropical humidity. Some of the men were picking up food for their co-workers, selecting it with the same care as their own. They were on a mission to obtain that special dish, a taste of home-cooked comfort food like mom used to make.

As I watched these men all pick their lunches, I heard them laughing, joking, teasing each other in a jovial manner. Although sweaty from a hard morning of work, they welcomed the rest, air conditioning, and the smells of food that seemed to bring them alegria (happiness pronounced ah-ley-GREE-ya).

Puerto Rican food consists of mainly rice (arroz pronounced ahr-ROHZ) and beans (habichuelas pronounced ah-bee-CHU-ey-las) in a sauce called sofrito. There are many variations of this dish. Sometimes the beans are white, pink, green. Sometimes the sauce has potatoes or another root called yuca or pumpkin (calabasa), and different herbs. I like my rice and beans with an avocado on top. When the avocados are in season, they add a refreshing accent to the dish.

Some other typical Puerto Rican foods are rice and chicken (which is my favorite), fried meat pockets called acapurias (pronounced ah-cah-POO-ree-as), fried fish fritters called bacalaitos (cod fish pronounced bah-cah-lah-EE-toes), plantains (a cousin of the banana that is eaten green here and tastes like potatoes). One of my favorite snack foods is something called tostones (pronounced toe-STONE-ays ) which are fried mashed plantains. They are sort of like round french fries, but tastier.

I picked up my lunch, paid my five dollars, and stepped outside into the hot tropical sun. My car, a little Ford Focus, was like an oven, so I let it cool a bit before getting in. Once back on the road, I realized my oasis of comfort and rest was over, as the cars and hustle and bustle of San Juan closed in around me. San Juan is a very crowded metropolitan city of 2 million people in just a few square miles. I would compare it to Newark, New Jersey in terms of population and crowding. In general, Puerto Rico is a pretty small island, just 100 miles by 35 miles. Oops, I hit a pot hole. I should pay more attention. I sure don’t want to have to change the tire again, especially since it has started to rain heavily. In fact, it rains very heavily almost every day, but only for a short time, and then the hot sun drys it out in just a few minutes. You can watch the steam rise up off of the hot streets. There is so much sunshine and so much rain, that rainbows are a frequent occurrence. I stopped taking pictures of them after about a hundred.

I finally got back to my office where I checked my e-mail and had a cup of coffee. Coffee here in Puerto Rico is truly something to savor. Local culture, as with all things of the palette, holds coffee as one of its most prized possessions. Puerto Ricans will proudly tell you that during the 1600′s to 1800′s Puerto Rico supplied the Pope in Rome with coffee grown here. They will also tell you that la tierra (the earth) in Puerto Rico is better suited for its cultivation than any other coffee growing country, including Colombia. It is just that Puerto Rico doesn’t have as much land to grow coffee as Colombia. Coffee is Puerto Rico’s quiet little secret and is only exported to the finest coffee stores in the US. I drink it every day and consider it one of the finest pleasures.

After a hard week at work, we decided to take a break and head for the beach. You can go the beach and swim every day of the year in Puerto Rico. The heat which makes you sweat, also allows you comfortably enjoy the ocean any time you want. The water in the summer is sometimes as warm as bath water. I prefer swimming in the winter when it is slightly cooler and more refreshing.

Gulliver finds that it is quite easy to stand out among the
Liliputians. It’s just that their size can be so frustrating at times.

They are evil. They are monsters. They are the devil incarnate. How could this happen. We scream that we will destroy you. We flail, we gnash our teeth, we writhe in anger, angst, bewilderment, pain and grief. We can’t work, we can’t play, we can’t find meaning in life again. It’s just so senseless, so meaningless. How could someone do such a thing. They must not be human. They can’t be from the human race. We must wipe them out, we must stop them from doing this again. Let’s call on all our might, military might, wash them from existence, our existence. They are not fit to live. Why oh why are they doing this?!!

We fall back heaving, uncomfortable with our own skin, clawing at ourselves looking for answers, possibly even the right questions to define what has happened. We roll from side to side as if in a feverish nightmare from which we cannot awaken. Everything we took for granted means nothing. We aren’t buying anymore, we aren’t going out. We have no grasp on the reality that someone destroyed in a matter of minutes the lives of 6000 Americans and their families in a tragic and horrific manner. How could…?! why?!!

We have NO concept of what has happened to us.

But more quietly… it’s happened before, recently and going back some time. We’ve dealt with this before. We’ve seen it, touched it, pulled it apart with the apathetic spirit of a child pulling the legs off an insect. We think we understand it, but we are just going through the motions, and when we close the book we are satisfied that we GET it. We executed the proper judgment, analysis, and action required and moved on. News media wraps up the event faster than anyone, before the blood is dry, we’re back to Hollywood scandals, infidelity in Congress, the Pennant race… World events that are so far away… so very very very far away. We listfully drift into a pleasant slumber, a collective shrug of our shoulders as we press our hands together and rest our head upon them. So profound is our lack of understanding that the only course of action is the return to folly and sleep.

We know of no desperation in America.

We’ve seen its results… Columbine, Oklahoma, various other mass murders or acts of senseless violence designed to take the maximum amount of lives in what amounts to a suicide. It is an act of such desperation that neither the quantity nor the quality of lives destroyed matters at all. I don’t care, I don’t care, I DON’T CARE!!! My life is meaningless, I have nothing to which to look forward, my life, this thing called existence is pain, emptiness, misery, anger, fear…

Fear. There’s the thing. Let me get in there. Can you shine that light over here? I need to get a grasp on it. Let me wiggle it a bit. Hmm, need to brace…, nughgh, won’t budge… Are you sure that’s it? Let me get the manual.

Americans live a life of plenty, generally. We are affluent, powerful, motivated, caring, loving, kind-hearted, full of life and we know no desperation. We have so little despair in this great nation of ours, we don’t have tools with which to combat it either here when it rears up nor abroad where it is more plentiful. We punish it. We execute it. We launch cruise missiles at it. We sanction it. These futile actions only serve to demonstrate how ill-equipped we are to combat despair.

We call them evil. We call them war like, hateful… dogs. Kill them all, let God sort them out. Recycle their karma. We call those among us, evil, deviants, mentally unbalanced. We lock them up or execute them. We hide or bury them. Was I the only one in the country that wanted Timothy McVeigh around for another 50 years… I wanted to see what kind of adult he’d turn into. Would he leave his despair behind eventually or not? Would he find a reason to live? Would he repent someday? I at least wanted to get to know him better, learn how a human could have so little empathy, so little hope, so little understanding. I want to understand.

But we trudge on, we good hearted, well-meaning Americans, oblivious to the one true cause. It’s that thing that binds us as humans… perhaps the only true commonality among us. Why are we here? We fear what comes after, tomorrow. We fear rejection, failure, pain, others, and life. We fear life because we don’t understand it. It’s the fear of life that leads to despair and eventually great suffering.

We Americans need to take a deep breath, think of all the horrific characters of history, those terrorists, murders, and criminals as infants newborn in their mother’s arms with so much potential for greatness and life, and we should cry for them. We should never look for excuses to explain how their lives turned out. But we should make great effort to look for the reasons why they became so fearful and lost themselves.

From an email conversation with my friend, Laura Golden, about The Latte Manifesto a forthcoming book about culture or lack thereof in Silicon Valley

Or, what do I do about the problem of de-latte-ization in the affluent urban centers?

Hey, here’s an idea!! Let’s use gene therapy to make apes smarter and use
them as domestic servants. Hmm, never mind, need opposable thumbs to serve
coffee, probably would spill. They would revolt, wipe out humans, and take
over the earth? What are you smoking, it would never happen.

We could get Mexican’s, they’d be cheaper. But then every damn politician
that came along would threaten to deport them all for stealing good jobs
away from Americans. Course by then, they’d be TECH jobs, because you’d
need to be a PERL/JAVA/PHP/C++ programmer to operated the web-enabled 5 GHz
Pentium 5(tm) espresso machine and to keep out the 31337 L337 hackers using
Zombie IRC chat servers to Denial of Service attack Starbucks Inc.

We could use robots? Wouldn’t be cheaper or more efficient… probaby would
spill more coffee and cost a lot more, but hell you could put it on the web
and track it… little coffee cam, clip together the funniest spills and
sell the tv rights. Or maybe you could order your drink remotely and then
pick it up… cold. Hmm, too stupid? This is America, I don’t think so
*G*.

What about 16 year old high school students? That used to work pretty well.
People complained that they were rude and hadn’t a clue about how to serve
coffee, but they at least did the job, and worked cheap? How about them?
What, you say? Too busy anyway rolling in IPO money and they have coffee
makers in their ferraris? Nevermind.

So where are we left? Well, I’m glad you asked that. You see the
problem of de-latte-ization in the affluent urban centers is one that I have
sworn to combat. I’ve been a strong proponate of education and school
vouchers. It is only through education that we can make a difference.

I’ve always loved the movie "Joe Vs. The Volcano." It’s always
touched me in ways that only a handful of other stories or pieces of
art do. I always thought I was the only one. Then I found out through
an idle web search that there are a lot of people out there who have
dedicated a lot of time and thought into enjoying and studying this
movie. Imagine my surprise and delight. Some great stuff.

A great essay

This guy sums up just how I feel about the movie and indeed it’s a
pretty good life philosophy for me. Then I read this other one that
started me off on my own little wandering path of thought.

Another great essay

As our business has gotten funded and we are moving out our fog of
discontent, things are starting to make sense again. Once again, I’ve
learned some valuable lessons from Puerto Rican culture. I’ve been
noticing that people generally put up with a lot from one another and
are slow to break ties over disputes, ill words or broken promises.
Perhaps it’s the island culture that no one is very far from one
another and getting along is sort of a survival instinct.

Part of the reason most people behave better with strangers than
loved ones, is that strangers, others, co-workers, and friends are
quicker to throw you away if you screw up. You put yourself on your
best behavior directly proportionately to your imperiled value to the
other person. In Puerto Rico, office cultures are sometimes what we
Americans would call unprofessional… lots of noise, people maybe
talking loud. People are quicker to bring their home problems to the
office, bring their kids, bring their personal lives into the forefront
of their professional lives. I suspect that since Puerto Ricans are
slower to throw each other way, in a way it’s like family. You deal
with it and try to make it better instead of cutting the guy a pink
slip, check and sending him on packing on his merry way.

Viserally, Puerto Ricans are connected to life in a far deeper way
than most Americans… work, life… these two aren’t seperate.

Increasingly I’ve seen technology make culture take on a more
drastic meaningless existence. Movies are all show and no imagination.
Two hours is a very short story if it’s all visual. And breathless
wanting kisses of the forties have been replaced by a carefully crafted
sculpted silicon breast shot. Shakespeare in Love? Shouldn’t it have
been Shakespeare in lust?

The fast pace of the Internet makes ALL the rules able to be
rewritten in a matter of months. The WAY of doing things seems to go
extinct overnight, with the next new thing growing ever closer and
closer. To what are we beholden? Increasingly we grow dissatisfied with
religion. We shift from thing to thing looking for some sort of self
satisfaction, peace, or wellness. We flit and click and jump from one
thing to next hoping that it will fill us. We don’t want to hold too
tightly to any one thing for fear it will evaporate in a heartbeat. So
we tie down emotionally and fill our lives with eye candy… the
illusion of life.

At work we can be replaced without a second thought. Shareholders
you know… Downsizing, cutting middle management, move to new
facilities, restructuring, not making the cut are all reasons people
are tossed aside.

Quoting Joe in the movie Joe vs. the Volcano, "Zombi lights… sucking the juice out of my eyeballs."

It’s difficult now, with all external indications that the US is
doing very well. We have lots of jobs, money, and we are busy busy
busy. Gotta move, gotta do, gotta be.

I sometimes criticize Puerto Ricans for not caring about doing a
good job, being lazy or not being efficient. But Laura shamed me the
other day as I was bitching about something she broke or damaged,
saying to her, "At least I care about how I treat things."

"Too bad you don’t feel the same way about people," she shot back.

And damn it if she wasn’t right. We Americans are so pointy clicky,
efficient, and bottom line oriented that we seem to forget that people
are more important than things. It’s easy to answer correctly on a
test, but hard in practice. That’s one thing at which Puerto Ricans
excel. Things are inconsequential. Sure they love gadgets, cars, and
all manner of cool toys, but 99% of them are damaged in some way…
including all these new Jaguar’s I’m seeing recently. You work it out,
it’ll work out. Está bien… tranquilo.

And so there I will leave this for now. I’m still learning, still
growing, still failing, but every once in a while these things just
come out of the blue and hit you over the head plain as day. I hope the
Latin influences of family, culture, fun, and society can have some
great positive influences on the American way of life.

The Day of the flat tire. I don’t know how many of you have had flat
tires, but today I have been initiated. This is no small thing. I am
sure that aside from excuses for arriving at meetings-work-dentists
appointments late it is a rare occurrence. Let me tell you about how it
works down here. Half the cars drive around with those ridiculous
little donut wheels (small spare tire). It’s almost an epidemic. The
other day I say a BMW (a nice one too) driving around with that silly
little wheel. If he had been in a car locker room the towel whipping
would have been fierce.

It’s all fun and games, however, until it happens to you which if
you live in Puerto Rico, it will. Maybe it has something to do with the
heat (perhaps the rubber is half melted anyway allowing anything from a
toothpick to a hard jolly rancher to penetrate your side wall), or the
fact that the streets seem to have an extraordinary quantity of pot
holes and debris. I don’t know. But today I came out to the parking lot
to find out that I had a flat. Aw man. I breathed a sigh of relief,
however, because thank God that it didn’t happen in rush hour traffic.

I whipped out the tiny silly diminutive God-awfully goofy little
spare tire and cranked up those silly little toy jacks that take a
million turns to go up half an inch, put the silly spare on and drove
gingerly (avoiding pot holes and debris) to Santurce, a working class
neighborhood (some would call it a tough neighborhood) and found a guy
who repaired tires… for, get this… $5. Yes, you heard right. $5.
Tire repair around here is such a booming business that they charge $5
a tire and work around the clock. Hell, maybe I should get out of the
computer racket and cash in on the booming flat business. So the guys
found the hole repaired the tire and slapped it back on in about 5
minutes..

…which is good, great wonderful, brilliant, but remember that $5 I
was talking about? I didn’t have it. I had $4.50. Now I couldn’t
exactly try to scam this guy out of fifty cents on an already
impossibly low fee. Wouldn’t you know it, they didn’t accept credit or
ATM. To further compound matters, I was in an area where there were no
ATMs. Oh, did I mention it was now 5 o’clock. Aw geez, now I have to
navigate down streets that when they were designed were intended to be
two way streets. Today, however, Puerto Rican’s have taken parking to
new levels as cars are stacked on either side in impossible
configurations making this already small two way street an even smaller
two way street. So it became the Samurai on the bridge all over again.
You gonna back up to the nearest cross street or am I? I think not
knave. I have to find an ATM. You will suffer should you wish to
challenge me. It worked, he backed off and up he went to the nearest
cross street. I gave a little wave of thanks and made my way into the
heart of a six pack a day smoker, potato chip snarffing, egg guzzling,
red meat devouring, whole milk drinking, 500 hundred pound overweight
50 year old. CLOGGED is the word that kept rearing it’s ugly head as I
banged on my steering wheel and cursed the accursed traffic and the pot
hole ridden tiny streets. After about an hour, I spied it, an oasis of
money. A-ha, doh!, I’m on the wrong side of the street. Quick stop in a
gas station-run across the street on a pedestrian cross walk that only
half remained-narrowly missed by cars honking at this brazen fool who
stepped out of his car for even a millisecond-lunging for the security
of electronic cash, information age technology that would save my ass,
give me my cash and allow me to get on with my life.

So the deed it done, now I have to get back to the tire shop. To
relive the feeling, reread the above paragraph. Now I arrive back to
the shop and it’s closed. Ah, there he is. I breathe a sigh of relief,
and notice the humble tire change guy hanging out at the bar next door.
Here’s your money, I say, and thanks for your patience. Whew. The day
is done, the tire is repaired, I can go home complete, satisfied, whole
again.

I’ll worry about putting that jigsaw puzzle called the jack, lug
wrench, wing nut, spare tire assembly sometime next month. For now
it’ll just kick around in the trunk. Hey, maybe I’ll need it again
really soon.

Hurricane news: We’re fine… well if you count being without electricity and water for a week. It was just like camping. NOT!! Civilization doesn’t lend itself to camping very easily. What I wouldn’t have given for a tent, a campfire, and a hole in the ground (for you know what). Cities just weren’t made to be without water and electricity.

What can I say. It was very impressive. I’ve not seen anything like it in my life. Right now it looks like winter has struck this Caribbean paradise. What trees ARE left don’t have any leaves. Normally urban sprawl is just barely kept in check by the jungle seeking to reclaim the constructs of man. Now, I look out and it seems that humankind has won, our defenses have certainly proved themselves over natural selection.

It’s really sad, but all you see is concrete. "My God, is there really this much city?" Condado window has 43 cargo containers worth of glass on it’s way from New Jersey ready to install this coming week. Soon the skyscrapers will have their quick repairs, electricity will come back, and we will be on our feet completely by the end of the year, while the jungle will limp slowly back within years. That is if we don’t find something to do with the bare spots in the meantime. "Hey I never noticed that nice spot over there. Won’t that make a nice McDonalds."

In reality the humans here have lost very little. Perhaps we have had a bit of inconvenience. And maybe we will finally learn to put the electrical system underground, as the power poles took heavy a heavy toll. Then the next hurricane might just pass us by, and we won’t even notice it was here.

In truth, it threw everything it had at us, and we’re still here. I think there were only a couple of deaths (heart attacks I think). The important lesson here is that this horrendous force of nature was thrown at us almost as if to say, "Hey you!! Pay attention, I can still kick your ass, " and it almost got overlooked. What people really worried about was the rotting food in the fridge, the unflushed toilets, the unshowered bodies, and long lines at McDonalds (they had power generators).

While I’m glad we live in the twentieth century and the loss of life wasn’t worse, and most people can weather an event like this pretty well, I just wonder if we’re missing something. Is the abstraction almost complete now. Will the bubble of urban life sustain us so completely and exclusively that we’ll lose all connection… and just float away.

I know this is a weird way to portray a hurricane, but I can’t help but feel like it’s all in slow motion, no big deal, just going on outside the bubble. It’s all so surreal.

But not to worry, today the electricity and water came back on. Looks like we’ll have air conditioning tonight.

I’m talking to myself more and more these days. I have this Puerto Rican friend that keeps me company. He’s in there with all my other voices. There are these personalities that I have inside of me, different voices that rise to meet different situations. There’s African-American Jim, the one that feels comfortable in African-American culture using the vocal cant the hand mannerisms and the manner of so many of the people I’ve grown up with. There’s blue collar Jim, the one that can listen and understand why management (or officers in the military) are such know-nothings/know-everythings that do little but live in air conditioned offices and fuck with the guys who do the real work. I can understand why people buy lottery tickets, complain about their jobs, scrape by, harbor the thought in the back of their minds that they don’t measure up, that someone else has the power. I listen to their conspiracy theories and after putting Skeptic Jim away, I actually learn quite a bit. I walk away with new respect, new understanding, and a greater appreciation for Blue Collar Jim and all the things he helps me with. I’ve come to realize the past few days that I’ve got the heart of a blue collar guy and the mind of an intellectual. I love good wine, fine music, art, and philosophy, but I really love it all. I don’t use them as talismans to protect myself from the rest of society, the part that actually makes it move.

So there’s Puerto Rican Jim, the one that calmly soothes me in the mist of small minded Puerto Rican drivers, or store clerks, or while people are shoving past you in line. I let forth a silent scream, the internal battle clearly visible on my face, "They are so small minded. You’ve got to have order, forethought, planning, organization. Rules are made to be followed, not bent into invisibility. Why even have them then? Arrghghghhh!!!!" my brain screams at me flooding the reasoning processes.

"Listen, Jim, my Puerto Rican voice says, in a somewhat irritated voice, "What is it that you have in your world? Do you have order, productivity, and prosperity? But how often do you socialize with people. How often do you show compassion for those around you. You see someone on the side of the street with car trouble. Do you help or do you think that AAA will take care of it? You think of consequences. Who is this person? Do I know them? What if they rob me? You plan your savings, squirrel it away for a rainy day that never comes. You hold yourself inside guarding it from the outside, saving it for some eventuality. Your feet are slower to dance, your voice reluctant to sing, your arms heavy to show affection, and your heart is hard and skeptical. Such is the nature of your Protestant country. It’s your work ethic.

We, however, live life with immediacy. We don’t save money. We spent it. We dance, we sing, we say "buen provecho" (bon appetit) to complete strangers. We stop to help, we listen to the problems of a hurrying father and respond with our hearts rather than with our heads. Yes, we get burned, and people scam us. They lie to get ahead, take advantage of our good nature, but it’s who we are and we are willing to pay the price. It’s just a different way of thinking, Jim. Live now or live later. It’s all about what you chose. Sure we drive like crazies, and we’d cut off our own mother to get ahead a couple of seconds, but that’s just our passion talking. Sure there are things to work on, but in general you’ve got to look at it with an open heart and mind. It can’t just be in your American context. You’ve got to see our context and realize the good things that come from our manner our culture and our Puerto Rican soul.

I must admit the first time he startled me with that in the car, I felt really bad about all the curses I was mentally issuing to my fellow drivers. He shamed me, and I hope he keeps my blood pressure down.

It was really in that moment that I began to feel what I had already thought. Total chaos is never productive, but neither is total order. Americans err on the side of order sanitizing life to a point that it’s as tasteless as a Denny’s Grand Slam Breakfast. Puerto Ricans run the dangerous gauntlet of disorder to the point of overwhelming positive productivity. However, with the right mix, chaos brings unexpected delights, serendipitous relationships that you might not have chosen consciously, parts of yourself that you might not have known. I might never have met Puerto Rican Jim, even though he lived inside me from birth. With order as well comes an ability to deal with those pieces, make sense of them, put them in their context and not be swept away by them.

I guess, it was a bit rocky there for a bit, but I am continually reminded of how beautiful lack of control actually is. It’s shaping me in ways I would never have suspected. It’s hard, but believe me, vale la pena (it is worth the effort).

Let the games begin. The season of the sagardotegi (sah-gar-doe-TEG-ee) has begun and this year we had the pleasure of making our first trip to the sagardotegi (cider house in Basque) with some of my friends from Ibermatica. It is really sweet that they still remember me and invite me out with them. The excuse to celebrate was the new job of Antxon (AHN choan) Alonso Lopez a programmer and abused grunt at Ibermatica. He’s free now and seems to be having a ball. He’s finally thrown off the yoke of the Ibermatica feudal system and struck out on his own. It’s a small Internet service provider start up and with Antxon on the job things are off on the right foot.

It’s funny but it feels kinda like I haven’t left the Bay Area (of San Francisco). Here I am 9000 miles from Multimedia Gulch and I’m talking about Internet startups… The Internet is everywhere folks.

Antxon: Perl programmer turned crazy cider drinking fiend.

So the sagardotegi is a wonderful time. In the sagardotegi is where grown drunk men will grab the back of your neck (affectionately) and sing to you. Hehe, it happened to me. I could only stand there thinking, “I’ve got to put this on the web page. The sagardotegi, a place where strange drunk men will grab your neck and sing to you.” Incidently they like to grab your ears too. There’s something about ears here. I haven’t quite figured it out yet

A cider house is pretty much just that, some guy’s apple farm, a house. They grow the apples, press them in this huge basement, and then invite people in as if it was a restaurant, except with 10 huge 5000 gallon barrels of great fermented cider. The funny part is that they almost literally throw food at you. You pay $25, for all you can eat, all you can drink, all the mess you can make… akin to some barbaric middle ages movie where there’s a roasted pig, mountains of food, and drink. Hombre, what a time.

The Cider, crowding for a bit of that sweet nectar.

The cider runs from taps in the kegs, shooting out from about eye level. The custom is to put your glass as close to the floor as possible, one: to let the cider breath, and two: to show how studly and awesome you are. I tried both, and I don’t notice a difference, so it’s probably just to show how cool you are. The floors are covered with cider as of course it spills, and the people are covered with it because, some of them are not as dexterous as others, and of course you can’t tell who is who, because “are you a mess because you’re a dork, or are you a mess because your buddy is a dork?” Ah, but those are questions better left to the philosophers.

Que mas?

So we ate some succulent barbecued veal (funny thing about veal, here veal is a pampered cow, fed the best stuff, babied like a pet, rather than tied up the way it is portrayed in the US. Also, a veal cow is a mature cow, a couch potato (patata here) cow, kinda like it ate nothing but Cheetos and drank beer it’s whole life (watch out UG they’re coming for you)). So, we had some of that and some bacalao in green sauce, as we stuffed out faces with this awesome french bread (actually it’s Spanish, but it’s just water yeast, and salt so it’s what we would call french bread).

We are looking to go a few more times this year.