News on the Mo-town

Soon it will be three months since we came, and we barely noticed it. Lots of things have happened, and it's not much long ago since we started to settle in the new home, getting to know the places around us, etc. Talking about surroundings, we can say we are very lucky. Not only the neighborhood is really nice, but our house is also in walking-distance to some shops, pharmacy etc. which living in the States, trust me, it's luck. :)

Today I decided to pick some interesting news from the city and the country, that way you get to know better what is going on here. Some of them are nice, some others are hopeless, but nevertheless worth knowing them. 

The first thing I want to talk about is the so called "March Madness". That refers to the basketball championship played by the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association). 

This tournament is played by the best 68 college basketball teams, that means, the players are students and not professionals (yet). Believe it or not, lots of people prefer this games to be NBA. Also, the tournament structure is crazy, because it is a SINGLE-elimination tournament. Every phase happen in one day, as follows:

• First round: from 68 to 64 teams, here the games are still very equally (that means that teams that have similar capabilies actually play against each other for a place)
• Second round (round of 64): These are games where very good teams play very bad ones, which make it sometimes very interesting if the bad teams have luck and defeat the good ones. The winners pass to the next round, that means, that day there is 32 games, 32 winners, and 32 losers.
• Third round: 32 teams play each other, only 16 pass to the next round (the "sweet sixteen")
• Regional semifinals: 8 games leave 8 winners that pass to the next round (the "elite eight")
• Regional finals: 4 games, the final 4 go to the semi final
• National semifinal
• National championship 

 Michigan has two big teams, Michigan and Michigan State. Under no circumstances you should confuse those two, if you ask Michigan State people if they support Michigan team, they will want to hit you in the face. These are the logos of the two universities.

Michigan University (blue and yellow) is located in Ann Arbor, a nice city just about 40 minutes from where we live. Michigan State (green) is represented with the "S" from Spartans, they are located in East Lansing.

With the name of the Championship you can imagine how excited the Americans are, especially because most of them support the college they went to.

With the good feeling of the basketball in the mouths, I get to other kind news that unfortunately don't make us as happy. But the truth is that we live close to a city that has big problems, and after three months here we have been exposed to some of the bad news about the present and future of Detroit.

Something that happened recently might be enough to describe the situation that the city is living. A few weeks ago, the city's governor declared a fiscal state of emergency in Detroit. Altough there have been movements against this decision, it has been made in a dictatorial way, say the citizens, who just had voted down the emergency manager law last november. 

The fact is that the city is constantly in risk of bankruptcy. In 2009, Chrysler's bankruptcy led to tens of thousand of workers being fired. Since that, there have been improvement, however the number of city jobs has still decreased. The city is facing a monumental crisis. Public transportation is in an abysmal state, lighting is out in large sections of the city, and streets are in gross disrepair.

However, the citizens don't think that the solution is to have an emergency manager in charge, since his task will only be that the banks recover the big debt from the citizens. Like it is happening in some European countries, the real problem of the people is overseen, and the first priority is to save the banks (this might sound familiar to the Spaniards...).

Looking into statistics, all taken from this very interesting link, Detroit is a city that has lost 97% of its property value in the last 8 years. Moreover, the population has decrease from 1.6 million  in 1960, to 700.000 in 2010.  Even the last 10 years have meant 25% decrease in population.

In spite of the great depression that Detroit is living, there are immense efforts to help the resurgence of the city. There are a lot of amenities that take place in downtown Detroit (as reported in a previous entry, we went to the Muse concert in Joe Louie Arena), as well as restaurants, theaters, museums etc. There are also many buildings under construction, and planned to make the city more amusing. It is desired that more people move to the city center, which is necessarily joint to the target of having a new start in the Mo-town, that used to be a dream city, and has been falling down for decades. 

We will surely witness small changes in Detroit, but 3 years are certainly not enough to reestablish the equilibrium in this very distressed city. Happily, the basketball tournament can make people forget temporarily the problems in their society.

 Lots of love to our readers!
 

Delicious country

Today's entry is about one more surprising fact that every foreigner finds in their way when entering a new country: the food style and their cooking habits (or the lack of them). Right from the beginning, we have to say that this is a generalization, and not everybody is included here. But the amount of people that don't cook is way bigger than in other countries, and certainly not Spain or Germany, where we have lived before. So we decided we can share our observations with you.

It is unavoidable, one of the  things that everyone can think of when talking about the US is the food. You can get delicious food, really tasty, all ready to go whenever and wherever you want. The food offer is so big, that I can hardly believe that the places can be profitable, mostly thinking that some of the places are open 24 hours a day!

 

It is the way we dreamed about when we were kids, and wanted to get every day pizza, or Burger, or french fries... However our family didn't agree with us in that point, and obliged us to eat some healthy vegetables that didn't taste at all how we wanted. I remember asking my grandmother what we were having that night for dinner, she always answer: "Comida" (=food). She never explained what she was cooking, in fact, she didn't even want us kids in the kitchen, that was her business. Then, at the table, we would say that we would not want the food that she cooked. And she answered that she hadn't asked if we wanted it or not. We HAD to eat it. The argument was then over. I remember one time we had asparagus with mayonnaise for dinner, and my brother took a baguette and made one big sandwich for every single asparagus, loaded with so much mayonnaise that we would not notice the taste of the asparagus. one other time i had to eat a salad in the school cafeteria, and I disliked it so much that I threw up. Thinking about that, it is hard to think how I got to like salads...

Then coming here, those feelings come to mind again, and you get anxious to taste all these things as soon as possible, since they are not like the things you eat at home. All these delicious steaks, sauces, appetizers, etc.  And this makes that the first days or even weeks you enjoy this new eating style like little kids. It is true that you have fast food in Europe and all, no one does it the way the Americans do it here...

However, at a certain point, you realize you don't want that anymore. First of all, the food from the restaurants is very tasty, maybe even too tasty. In fact, the salt content of the food here is huge in comparison with what we are used. Even if you order a salad, although you just want something fresh, the dressings are very taste full, that you end up having a heavy digestion. This is nothing surprising or necessarily negative, it is one more aspect of the cultural shock, that makes you want to go home and start cooking yourself.

We learned recently that we are very lucky, because we were taught how to cook, and can do it ourselves at home every day, unless we don't want. Unfortunately in the US, there's a lot of people who can't cook, never learned how to do it, and probably will never do it in their lives. We came to that conclusion after starting watching a series from the famous English cooking chef Jamie Oliver, named "Jamie Oliver's food revolution". He is in one small town in the US, and visits different schools, getting shock after shock because of what he sees.

That is a big shock for us, coming from Spain, where still now, despite long hours at work or busy lives, families and friends reunite for dinner and enjoy a home made dinner together. And it was hard for me to believe, for instance, that the kids in the schools shown in this series didn't recognize the vegetables they were shown (even common tomatoes, onions, potatoes...). That can only mean that they don't see them raw at home, but only processed in form of ketchup or french fries.

Pre-Processed food is being considered as a problem for the last years, that is no new information, also in Europe there has always been studies about it. The difference here is that there are families only having processed food. You see it in the supermarkets, where people ignore the fresh groceries zone, and go directly into the frozen department or the pre-cooked meals, or what they call here, "convenience food".

And the problem is that we just know too little about  the ingredients that are used to do these meals. For instance, listening to the radio the other day, it was said that the macaroni & cheese from the brand above used 2 additives (yellow dye 5 and yellow dye 6) in their US version that are banned in the other countries where the same product is sold. And the reason for banning them is that they seem to be related to hyperactivity in children, allergies, and perhaps even cancer. You can imagine that the least thing I want to do is try this product :) And similar to that is the substitution of common sugar by corn syrup, because it is cheaper, however it has been proven to be much more unhealthy than sugar itself... And the question that comes to mind is, what else is there that we don't know?

Apart from the dangerous ingredients in the food, the size of the portions is also pretty scary. It is true that here you can ask for the rest of your food to be boxed to take home, but it shouldn't be necessary on the first place, if the sizes were proper for a meal.

 Take a look at this main course, the whole tortilla barely cover what supposedly should be IN the tortilla. How many people can even take half of it?? And the problem is that it is difficult to  realize when it has been enough, because we have been taught to end up our plates... Changing the habits cost a lot at the beginning, and can mean a couple of kilos as a punishment.

On the good side, there is a lot of programs going on to try to improve this problem, from the already named Jammie Oliver program, to cooking lessons offerings that take place in many cities, as well as lots of restaurants where the calorie content of all foods are listed in the menus.  I think they have a lot to do, but they really need to educate the kids to eat healthy, and to want to know what is in their food.

So don't forget it: let's eat healthy food made out of fresh ingredients!!

Lots of love
Lita&Andres

Back online

The last couple of weeks have been crazy and the fact that we have been doing a lot of stuff combined with the lack of internet the last weekend has made that we could not update the blog as often as we would have liked to. There have been many different situations where I was think: "Ey! I gotta post this on the blog!", so let's see what we can remember (and hopefully, not much will be left behind).

One of the biggest news was the purchase of my car. This was some time ago, but I never posted anything about it so at least I am going to put a picture. What car is it? well, I could not resist getting the "car of my dreams". Many people ask me if this is really the car of my dreams and I just say, "this I can afford, of course I would rather drive a lamborghini aventador but I am still very happy with my pick" and then smile :)

 

Before getting to the States, we were told, that the US people are very active. This means, they need to be constantly doing something and if you say for example that you have no plans for the weekend, they feel sorry about you! (From time to time I want to have some good rest and even once or twice a year remember what the feeling "bored" meant. Well, we definitely wanted to fit in the culture, so we decided to try out this kind of lifestyle. Here in our area there is always something going on, the only thing you need to do is just to decide what you feel like doing the next couple of days, look it up on the web and pay the more than reasonable priced fees they request for the different events.

A couple of weeks ago we went with a German friend that has been here in the US for almost six months to a comedy club in Royal Oak. It is one of those experiences that I really recommend to everybody, because first of all when you get in you feel like you are in one of these movies where a stand up comedian is making fun of somebody sitting on the first row ( I would suggest that only people that are not shy to sit on the first row, you will be used in different ways to make other people laugh:) and second of all you have more than an hour of uninterrupted entertainment, where you cannot stop laughing so badly, that your abs are sore the next day!

We went to see the stand up comedian Keith Alberstadt. His name might sound German-ish but once he opens his mouth you clearly see he might be the 2nd or 3rd generation:) He is a quite famous comedian that has participated in many late shows like David Letterman. Here I found a video with one of his participations in this show

Another thing we could not avoid was attending to Maria's first sports event. One "annoying" thing that they have here is that the TV is always ON transmitting some kind of sport (footbal, american football of course:); basket, hockey or baseball).

You go to a bar: sports on the TV

You go to a restaurant: sports on the TV

You go to a disco club: and.......sports on the TV!!!

Being bombarded all time by some sports it is quite understandable, that it did not take too long until we went to watch the Detroit Pistons play (I like the name, as we are in the Motor City!). For this occasion we had two Spanish players playing against each other. On one side of the ring, Jose Calderon for the Detroit Pistons, and on the other side Marc Gasol for the Menphis Grizzlies.

Of course, the last couple of years, the Detroit Pistons have not been doing anything but loosing and for that reason we decided that the Piston's goal should be not to loose for more than 20, which the achieved:) Nevertheless, we will keep on supporting them and watching them play life from time to time.

Another interesting experience we had, was to drive to downtown Detroit at night. The ocassion was a Muse concert that took place in the Joe Louis Hockey Arena. We went with our Italian friends and enjoyed really much the concert. We did a couple of videos of it, but knowing how the SGAE and GEMA work, you most likely won't be able to see them... so for that reason I will just post, for those who like their music, a concert they did in 2012 that was very similar to the one we went to:)

After the nice concert, we are were on a good mood, so we decided to go to a brewery in downtown. It is impressive to see such extremes, some part of the city with almost no lights, homeless people walking around and 100 meters away some other people going from bar to bar enjoying the cold weather and nice places to eat and drink in downtown with the option to see some important buildings iluminated.

The last thing that we wanted to include in this post was us moving to our new home. It is a nice ranch (meaning it is only one floor), with a garden (imagine that in Germany or Spain :)), and a lot of space, so much that it almost doubles what we had in Germany. It is also near to work, which makes it pleasant, thinking that sometimes, with bad weather or so, there can be a lot of traffic jam. It takes us like 10-15 min, it's luxury!!

However, the move has made us work like crazy, well, the normal things that happen at every move, only with a couple extras. Like for example, we took our lamps from Europe, and didn't really thing it through. Then we came here, and realized that our light bulbs don't work in US. We thought that a resistor is only a resistor, but didn't understand that the energy-efficient light bulbs are more than that. Well, now we have already a couple of things to bring when we move back to Europe, in three years or so... The same thing happens with the TV, although we did realised it wouldn't work here before coming, our idea was to buy a transformer to be able to use it here. The problem is that we've heard that even then the quality is very poor, and the tranformer is really expensive. So now we have a nice TV in its box, waiting for 2016 to be used...

Here is a couple of pics of the moving day. One funny detail, the hadrware for the bed didn't travel with it, so the moving guys left us here with a bed in pieces... After a couple of days, they came again with screws and so on from IKEA, and could finally build the bed.

But other than that, there's a lot that got done in the past days, we bought appliances, got internet, got our own things that stayed in the container until we could move (after two months without living in your place, you miss some things so much so wouldn't believe it), and somehow at the end of this week we can say we can live already how it is. Of course it is not finished, but it is ready to be shown to you, we hope you like it, at least we do, especially days like today where  we could enjoy the garden a little bit, spring is coming!!! By the way, the video is in spanish, but I think it is not difficult to understand every part of the house... That way you also learn :)

 

We are glad that we now have a couple of years without moving, because since November last year, we haven't been able to feel like we are starting to do now, and it is a good feeling! I don't want to discourage anybody that has to move in the next weeks, but my personal advice would be to pay somebody to do it and dissapear until everything is done :)

With that in mind, we say goodbye, we have no excuse to write the next weeks, so beware of the next entries :)

Lots of love