Week 32 – Almost Famous

As I walked into the doctor’s office for my week 32 appointment, I was accosted with an unusual greeting. “Hola famosa!” my favourite nurse said. “I saw you on television last night.” At this, I nearly did an about face and walked out again from embarrassment.

It turns out that on Tuesday night I was on Catalan television, on a program called Karakia, which features foreigners who live in Barcelona. It is a food program that focuses on one country per episode. In each episode, different members of the featured country cook recipes from their homeland. I was contacted through the friend of a friend to see if I was interested in participating in one of the two Canadian episodes they were filming. Those of you who know me well – or really at all - will be unsurprised to hear that my reply was an enthusiastic yes, since I love food and all things food-related.

The only problem was that the whole show had to be filmed in Catalan. I have never taken a Catalan class in my life and speak it rarely, since in Barcelona everyone regularly speaks both Catalan and Spanish. For readers who are wondering, Catalan resembles a blend of Spanish, Italian and French. I hasten to add that it is a language, not a dialect. The fastest way to alienate a Catalan is to refer to their language as a dialect. A dialect is just a language without an army, they might tell you tersely.

Catalan is spoken by roughly six million people in the world, most of them resident here in Catalunya (with pockets of speakers in Latin America, especially Argentina). Most of what I know of Catalan I have learned in food markets or by accident. So, I was a little nervous about doing a whole show on cooking in Catalan.

Canadians are good at many things, but linguistic prowess isn’t generally among them. Aware of the average linguistic abilities of Canadians, and North Americans in general, I confidently predicted that at least half of my featured compatriots would speak in Spanish. This would mean that my relatively thin Catalan would benefit by comparison. Not so. The film crew happily reassured me that all the Canadians on the show would be speaking in Catalan. There was nothing for it but to muddle through.

In the end, it wasn’t too bad, perhaps because in the editing process, the crew excised lots of my mistakes. My friend Joel, arbiter of all things Catalan (who ironically now lives in Canada), said that I got it 90% perfect, but I think he was just being nice.

The idea was to organize a Canadian-style picnic, featuring typical picnic fare. Spaniards don’t really do picnics in the Canadian or English sense and we live just in front of a park, so I thought it would be original to organize a real outdoor picnic in the park. Plus, pancakes and maple syrup were already taken.

However, Barcelona chose not to cooperate on the selected day. It rained. It doesn’t often rain in Barcelona, but when it does, it does so decisively. It is rarely the kind of on again off again drizzle that you get in Britain and is much more likely to be an assertive rain that hammers down all day long. The chosen filming date was just such a day. So, we ended up eating the picnic in the living room.

To rustle up some typical fare, I prepared my mother’s gigantic picnic sandwich (or a Spanish version of the same, since the market didn’t have the right bread); a side of salmon with crushed potato chips on top; a Christmas salad, so named because of the contrasting colours of spinach and strawberries; and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

I also had the help of two sous-chefs, Demian and his brother Norbert. Norbert did a splendid job of chopping onions and somehow managed to appear docile on film, which just goes to show that you can’t believe everything you see on TV. Demian also managed to look at home in the kitchen, as though he loved cooking and did it all the time. Both were great on camera, not to mention the cats, who were perhaps the superstars of the whole thing.

When I actually saw myself on television so many months after filming, two things immediately occurred to me. The first was that I am not made for TV. It was hilarious but, after seeing myself on screen, I don’t think television is where my future lies. The second was the realization that I used to have a waist. The filming was done back in March, just before I became pregnant. So, in the program, I appear with a relatively flat stomach and a real waist. At this point, I haven’t seen my waist in so long, I forgot I ever had one.

Since this show was airing on Catalan television, I assumed that the audience would be small. Instead, the day after it aired, I got calls from all sorts of people telling me they had seen me on TV. So did Demian. People stopped Norbert in the street, asking him in awe, “Are you the guy who chopped the onions?” He says all this publicity is cramping his style and making it hard to get on with his life. (Okay, this last comment is made up, but the calls from friends are true.)

Even so, I was flabbergasted that the nurse had seen the show. I had carefully avoided telling too many people about it, in case it was a disaster. Even my doctors saw it and are now clamouring to get some Mesaglio Seasoning, the super secret spice recipe that I used on the salmon and which you have to marry into our family to obtain.

Back in the doctor’s office, after chatting casually about TV and fame with Dr. Castellanos, we got down to business. The appointment went well. She did a thorough ultrasound, doing the usual measurements, and found nothing untoward. The baby now weighs two kilograms. His heart still shows no signs of suffering. And he continues to kick a lot, which is a sign that he is not hypoxic (low on oxygen) since if he were, he would start moving less in order to save scarce oxygen for the brain and major organs.

Shanti was there with me for the ultrasound since Demian had a meeting. When she saw the baby on the screen, she said he had Demian’s nose. Go figure.

All in all, it has been a good week and our babe is holding on.