Being a vegetarian in Spain

dead baby, originally uploaded by arimoore.

Yes, yes, you all warned me. I know Spain is the land of Jamon or Ham in Spanish. But was it really going to be as bad as the whole of South America, or Vietnam where I ate oreos out a desperation for days? Well yes it is much worse. It is so bad that they hang dead pig legs up everywhere. A proudness in their slaughtering that I have not really ever seen in any culture. Most people don't want to see or meet their meat, but here you really don't have a choice. I have kind of had to tune out to the point where I had strangers making me aware and apologizing for the grotestqueness of it, even though they aren't the ones hanging it up for all of us to enjoy, but really they should be saying thanks to an animal that has lived a really shitty life, confined, and treated extremely poorly so they can have a salty snack. We so often forget that animals actually feel something, like our pets that we love and adore, pigs are no different. Considered more intelligent then dogs, and cleaner then most animals as well, yet we treat them like slaves and slaughter them with the known fear that they are going to die.. which is probably better then living they way they had been living. Spain is horribly stuck on Jamon. As a European country it seems absurb that the only thing you can eat in a day is bread, cheese, eggs, and jam. But this is it! It can get exhausting in small towns where every single "bar" sells the exact same microwaved meal.. all show cased in the exact same picture menu all across Spain. 6 to 10 euros for a microwaved meal? You can walk for 100's of kilometres and see fresh fruits, and vegetables.. yet the Spanish don't eat it. Most of it gets exported out of Spain, and the Spanish stick with their white bread.
As the city filled with protesters against the banks .. yes the banks are scammers, I felt like yelling.. "You are all hyprocrits, you don't even care about life when you hang dead meat at your door and consume it all day". It's fucked, and it is not something I can relate to, or relate with, a culture of so much slaughter, and unecessary consumption.