Dec 20

Others

My Old School and my Pantry Skeleton

This would have been my school if, during the civil Spanish war, a bomb wouldn’t have fallen on top of it and burned it all. Luckily, the school was empty. The air attack took place during a night of January 1938. The situation of the school was fatal for its existance… too near the port!

Nowadays it would be such a thrill to have the school by the beach! I would have loved it!!! Well, me and everybody, I guess. Imagine boys and girls back then in such a marvellous environment! When the rest of schools were kind of grey, boring and unimaginative. It was Paradise!

The school had only 5 classes, 2 for girls, 2 for boys and 1 for kindergarden. The building was on top of reinforced concrete columns so that the sea storms wouldn’t afect it. And the wooden staircases could come up in case of big swell and could come down to help the children go down to the beach.

There were lots of outside activities: sport competitions, sand games, a small tour with the school boat… It was just perfect! The school belonged to the city of Barcelona and its appearance and teaching methods were different from the rest of the schools. They based education on Social Life and Intelectual Life, therefore, the main subjects to learn were: Musical education, Games, Weather Report diary, Free Work, Drawing, Reading, Plastic Arts…. I could talk for hours about the School because it was finally my school too! Not by the beach, this time was up on a hill and with a perfect view of Barcelona and the sea. The education methods were still similar to those at its beggining. The third emplacement was this one you see hereunder… and it’s still there.

Isn’t it beautiful too? Well, this post has a meaning, really, maybe it’s just taking me too long to say why I’m explaining all these old memories. Some days ago I visited Thyme for cooking hosted by charming Katie and she has an event going on called Skeletons in the Pantry, which made me think of something that happened to me at school. That’s the first reason and the second also has to do with Katie’s blog: she was talking about good manners at the table, and this also made me think of my old school.

Okay, here comes the story and it has to do with food: see here above, this was my school dinning room… huge, uh? Take a look at the fireplace ( on the left), during Xmas celebrations one of the oldest boys in the school wore a devil’s costume and hide inside the chimney. When nobody expected it he would show up shouting and grumbling and we would all step backwards in fear! But it was great!!!

Here is where I learned good table manners, of course my parents also taught me, but at school rules were more rigid. For example, we couldn’t place our elbows on the table, we could not drink while having soup, we had to place our napkin on our lap, bla, bla, bla. And we did so… but, some days when the table head (the one controlling the rest of the table people) wasn’t looking we would do some funny things! One of us (kids about 8 to 12) invented a competition: Once or twice a week we had chickpeas for lunch, the thing was to throw down to the floor one chickpea, each participant one at a time. See all the waitresses serving lunch? Well, if a waitress stepped on the chickpea and it stayed stuck to her shoe that were 10 points. If the chickpea layed smashed on the floor that were 5 points. It was soooo thrilling and exciting! And I don’t remember being caught ever!!!

Another thing we did too, and I’m not very proud of, was to share our lunch between the table companions, but not in the usual way. You were supposed to finish all the food in your plate. No exceptions! If you didn’t like something, then you had a problem! I was lucky I just adored the school food. When the table head wasn’t looking, my companions (the ones that didn’t like meatballs) would roll them down through the floor near to my chair, I would pretend my napkin had fallen and take the meatballs to my plate. UUUUUhhhhhhh I still don’t know how I could eat those!!!!! Puaffff… I’m alive, though!

And this is my Skeleton in the Pantry. Well, in a near future, just after Xmas, I will post how to do Christmas Catalan meatballs (following all hygienic conditions, of course, je, je, je) . I’m sorry I’m not posting recipes now… these days I’m just too busy!!!