Going green
I keep on being vegetarian. It makes me feel healthy and purified. And so the blood test (mainly done to please my mum) says: my proteins, lipids, cholesterol, all is good after 3 months of veggies.
It all started many years ago, when I worked in a turkey factory for a summer in England. A slaughter house, to give you more bloody details. I was supposed to collect strawberries, work in a farm for the summer, or so the contract that I signed with a temporary job agency in Barcelona said,...but I ended up selecting and arranging turkey wings into EU and non-EU boxes. The latter, with a purplish color, were apparently sent to the Ruskis and ex-Soviet republics.
I smile when I think about that vegetarian summer. I learned very little English. Electrocuted turkeys do not talk. At times, I felt like an immigrant surrounded by equals treating me unfairly. This maybe how the millions of Peruvians, Ecuadorians and Paraguayans might feel in Spain these days. Spanish unemployment has gone up to 1998 levels (10%) and the question on every program, every coffee conversation and local bar is: Do Spaniards want to go back to the now immigrant-taken kind of jobs such as olive, grapes, vegetables picking up? My guess is probably not.
The Spanish psyche is currently absorbed by the very much televised economic crisis. Everybody says "Hay CRISIS". Economic crisis are cyclical, expected and relative. Coming from India it looked to me that Spain was the cleanest place on Earth. Driving through rural Spain my parents were giving me weird looks to my comments of "Oh, look at this forest, there are no plastic bags", "Mum, check that cloud, isn't the sky wonderful". The Spanish greenness and abundance of everything made me feel high.
It all started many years ago, when I worked in a turkey factory for a summer in England. A slaughter house, to give you more bloody details. I was supposed to collect strawberries, work in a farm for the summer, or so the contract that I signed with a temporary job agency in Barcelona said,...but I ended up selecting and arranging turkey wings into EU and non-EU boxes. The latter, with a purplish color, were apparently sent to the Ruskis and ex-Soviet republics.
I smile when I think about that vegetarian summer. I learned very little English. Electrocuted turkeys do not talk. At times, I felt like an immigrant surrounded by equals treating me unfairly. This maybe how the millions of Peruvians, Ecuadorians and Paraguayans might feel in Spain these days. Spanish unemployment has gone up to 1998 levels (10%) and the question on every program, every coffee conversation and local bar is: Do Spaniards want to go back to the now immigrant-taken kind of jobs such as olive, grapes, vegetables picking up? My guess is probably not.
The Spanish psyche is currently absorbed by the very much televised economic crisis. Everybody says "Hay CRISIS". Economic crisis are cyclical, expected and relative. Coming from India it looked to me that Spain was the cleanest place on Earth. Driving through rural Spain my parents were giving me weird looks to my comments of "Oh, look at this forest, there are no plastic bags", "Mum, check that cloud, isn't the sky wonderful". The Spanish greenness and abundance of everything made me feel high.
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