There's a new Transylvania market down the street that specializes in Romanian products. F and I were curious so we stopped in. It is basically a spotless, gleaming walk-in closet that carries routine cooking and cleaning stuff as well as Romanian food products and newspapers. The proprietor was a flamboyantly-dressed yet stern and obviously Eastern European woman who was chatting with a large square-jawed gent in what I assumed to be Romanian. When she paused to interact with us she spoke excellent Spanish. I got a chocolate bar and F was more adventurous and got a carp egg salad with onions, which is apparently #1 in Romania. The chocolate bar had strong overnotes of imitation butter with a soupçon of malt or maybe carob. I had to fight an initial disgust (an unexpected reaction for an excessive consumer of sweets such as myself) but found its overwhelming artificiality to be sort of addicting, though I wanted to scrub my esophagus with Lysol and a bottle brush after eating it, and must write a note of apology to my teeth after I finish this post.
We live in an industrial town just outside of a fairly expensive international tourist destination, so there are a lot of immigrants from all over who end up here-from Morocco, Pakistan, China, various Eastern Europeans, Senegal, Spain, and unknown parts of sub-Saharan Africa. There are gypsies and well, one North American. There are also lots of Peruvians and various other Latin Americans who you can hear singing corridos at the karaoke bar and who have a large enough presence to warrant several locutorios where it is possible to get guanabana and tamarind popsicles at 10 p.m. As in the U.S., there are mixed reactions by the locals to immigrants, depending on their niche-there are the Chinese stores where people write nasty graffiti outside while going inside in droves to buy cheap plastic stuff and which will quickly induce infertility through BPA fumes. There are very tall, thin Africans who walk around town loaded down with purses and toys who hawk their wares to people sitting at the outside tables of bars. You see many Latin Americans in service work, taking care of the elderly or tending bar, since they already speak Spanish. As is expectable during a time of economic hardship, there is some resentment, whether warranted or not. I have heard more than one local person say something derisive about "Macchu Picchus," usually in reference to Latin Americans, regardless of whether they are actually Peruvian or not, about how they all get paid under the table and don't contribute taxes or to the national healthcare system, or some such thing. They have even said this in front of me, because well, I guess I look more like the people who are from here and am not lumped into this category, which usually makes me feel worse. Knowing how difficult it is to get through the Spanish administration, I am frankly surprised that there is as much legit commerce as there is. People wanting to contribute face quite a few barriers, not to mention that many of them are fleeing much worse economic situations than what we have here.
