El brasero

el brasero = a heating device placed underneath a table, underneath blankets. When the blankets are lifted, you can put your feet near the heat and warm yourself up. My "madre" (the woman whose house I'm living in) uses it frequently.

Why?

Because the homes here do not have central heating and are designed to stay very cool to make the summers tolerable. As a result, it is always colder inside my house than outside... a weird sensation in the Winter. I'm forced to wear pajama pants to bed and slippers when I walk around. If I had a bathrobe I'd pretend to be Hugh Hefner.

My apartment is nothing like the Playboy mansion, however. Shocking, I know. It is anything but. A euphemism for it might be "quaintly crowded." It consists of two bedrooms: one for me and my roommate, the other for my madre and her 22-year old son, Oscar. Yeah, they share a bedroom.

Then there is the tiny bathroom that we all share with a 2-square-foot shower and a pull-chain toilet. There is also a modest kitchen, a living/dining room, and a TV room. Each room seems smaller than it actually is because they are cluttered with items--broken computers, old flat screen TVs, frames of family photos, clocks that have long since run their course, tacky trinkets from who knows where, worn-out books, and more.

I think Oscar may have had a job fixing computers. Now he just sleeps all day and plays video games all night. He is part of the "generación ni-ni," which means he "ni trabaja ni estudia," or doesn't work or study. It is something like 15% of kids ages 16-25. Most are not motivated to get a job or go to school, so they live at home with their parents. (It is actually very common for Spanish people to live with their parents until they get in a serious relationship or get married, so it could last a while...)

Curiously, "Generación ni-ni" is also the name of an MTV Real World-esque show. I haven't figured out what it's really about yet.