Word: catalan
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...fails and is sent away with an admonition to do better next time, though not unkindly). The restaurant manager is summoned ("I shouldn't be doing this in front of a reporter," she says, "but I have to say something") and told to replace the red mullet in the Catalan fish stew with a less oily fish. (See 10 things to do in Beijing...
...this last element that attracted attention across the country. "Masturbation Workshops for Adolescents," ran the headline in Que!, a free daily in Madrid. "Extremadura Promotes Masturbation," cried the centrist national paper El Mundo. Criticizing the spending as frivolous, especially during a recession, the Catalan paper La Vanguardia sniped, "Extremadura's youth may have the highest rates of unemployment, but they'll be the best masturbators...
...this highly autonomous region, others see the rejection of bullfighting as a rejection of Spain itself - and thus a promotion, in the Manichean logic of such things, of Catalan identity. In Catalonia, after all, people dance sardanas instead of flamenco, prefer their death-defying feats in the form of castellers (human towers comprised of people standing on the shoulders of others in ever-smaller circles) and turn every Barça vs. Real Madrid match into a bout for national honor. More substantively - and controversially - the region requires all students to be educated in the Catalan language and is engaged...
...Bullfighting used to be extremely popular in Catalonia," says Matthew Tree, a Barcelona-based author who writes frequently on Catalan identity. "But things change. Franco made it a bastion of fascist Spain, and that switched off a lot of Catalans. It was forced on them as this aggressively Spanish thing, and that was offensive to them...
...deputies are likely to cast the critical deciding votes on the initiative in parliament. Although some pro-autonomy parties like the Catalan Republican Left will be voting for the motion in a bloc, the more conservative CiU is allowing its deputies to vote their conscience. And that may just be enough to pass the ban. "There are some within the party who see bullfighting as a tradition worth protecting," says Rull. "But there's a larger group - I count myself among them - that believes we shouldn't treat the torture of animals as a public spectacle anymore." (Read "In Spain...