Sunday, December 20, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
A Spanish Thanksgiving
Not only was it the first Thanksgiving that I’ve spent away from home, but it was also the first birthday that I’ve been away from my family and friends. The night before I lay in bed unable to think about anything except how much I was dreading the next day, how lonely I would feel waking up without my best friends making me pancakes, without my dad’s fresh squeezed pomegranate juice and without the love and intimacy that I was always so lucky to have on my birthday. When I woke up and pulled open the curtain on my window, I saw a dark and overcast sky and raindrops pecking at the window. The second rainy day since I’ve been in Malaga had to be on my birthday.
The first pleasant surprise came as I was riding in the car with my coworker and my cell phone rang a familiar tune. My aunt Dina surprised me with a wonderful birthday wish and so started the kind wishes I received all throughout the day. I didn’t want to tell anyone it was my birthday, I wanted to just celebrate Thanksgiving and pretend like it wasn’t a personally special day as well. My plan was foiled completely because from the moment I set foot in the school teacher after teacher started coming up to me, kissing me on both cheeks and wishing me “felicidades” on my special day. After my presentation about Thanksgiving traditions the kids surprised me with a big birthday song during which I burst into tears for absolutely no reason other than the fact that a spell was cast on me when I was a child that ensures that I cry on my birthday. During recess the teachers surprised me with two little cakes with candles in them and sang the by-now familiar Spanish birthday song. I fled the school at around noon to catch the train from Alora to Malaga in order to embark upon the task of cooking a giant Thanksgiving turkey. As I was sitting in the little dive bar next to the train station, drinking a café con leche, watching the bartender chop onions while drinking a large Cruzcampo, Tracy Chapman’s haunting voice came on the radio singing “Baby Can I Hold You Tonight” and the second stream of tears came pouring out of my eyes. They certainly weren’t tears of sadness because I felt completely content to be sitting in this little Spanish bar, waiting for a train that would take me through the most breathtakingly beautiful valleys and mountains, back to the city that was now my home. They were just tears of astonishment, when life feels so surreal, so inexplicable, for some reason tears pour out of my eyes.
It was amazing how fulfilled and complete I was able to feel on this day, so far away from everyone I love, and it was all thanks to the beautiful emails, letters, phone calls and wishes I received throughout the entire day from all corners of the world. The power of words is something incredible.
As soon as I got home I peeked in the fridge at the massive, sixteen-pound turkey, that took up half of our fridge. I’d had a nightmare about it the night before, that it was still alive. The white feathers stuck out of the bag and it still resembled the bird that it once was. I quickly shut the door and started working on the stuffing instead of touching the bird. The onion, celery and bread stuffing was done rather quickly and I left it on the side to wait for its bird to be prepared. The night before my roommate and I made a pasta salad with olives, tomatoes and feta cheese, a Moroccan chickpea salad with green apples, red peppers and lemon and a sweet potato and carrot puree. We finally tackled the turkey. I did it with my eyes closed and my lips pursed. It may have been one of the hardest things I’ve done, after having been a vegetarian for so long, there I was picking feathers of a big turkey. We finally had it prepared enough to put in the oven and the epic five-hour cooking of the turkey began. In the meantime we made a Caesar salad, mashed potatoes and gravy.
The hours passed quickly and before we knew it, the hour was 9 and our guests were ringing the doorbell. First it was Herminia, my lovely 22-year-old conversation partner who’s from a nearby village but is living in Malaga and studying tourism. She came at the tail end of the preparation and helped us finish the dishes that had yet to be finished. The turkey was a golden brown in the oven and we finally pulled it out. With the next ring came Flores from Alora and Jose Angel, a teacher that works with us at the school. They brought wine and cheesecake. Next came Clare, my French roommate, with her French friend Elodie with champagne and red wine. Two rings later Eva and Patri, two 22-year-olds from Malaga that I met through my “intercambio” ads carrying several bottles of Lambrusco, a cheap but delicious sparkling red wine. And finally our last two guests, Juan Diego and Manolo, arrived from Alora with a beautiful red Christmas plant and more bottles of champagne and wine. The smells from the kitchen were intoxicating and everyone hovered over the dishes asking what they were, how we made them, what the traditional ones were. None of our guests had ever had a Thanksgiving meal before and they were all quite interested in our stories about typical American Thanksgivings. It felt so poetically appropriate to be having a Thanksgiving in a foreign country with the people that were still somewhat unknown but that had found themselves open to helping us adjust to our lives here in Spain, that offered their companionships so graciously, their language help, their travel suggestions and their food offerings.
We filled our plates to the brim, put the turkey on the dining room table, turned on the Beatles on my computer, poured ourselves little plastic cups of wine and all toasted each other for Thanksgiving. We each said something we’re thankful for and then embraced the delicious food. It was some kind of miracle sent from the heavens that all of the food came out so great, that we didn’t burn anything, or mess up a single recipe even though it was both of our first times cooking a Thanksgiving meal. The conversation was great, the wine accompanied the food nicely, and everyone reached for seconds, and thirds, and fourths. After a few courses, a few of our guests and Elena bustled around in the kitchen doing something secretive and suddenly they turned out the lights and brought out a birthday cake with candles. I was incredibly surprised and pink-cheeked but I managed to blow out all the candles and make a strong birthday wish in my head.
After desert everyone chanted for me to play my guitar so I serenaded our guests with my old classical guitar songs. Everyone was full, pink-cheeked from the wine, and content to have spent their first Thanksgiving in Spain. This was certainly a birthday that I will never forget – from the turkey, to the rain, to the people, to the cake.
The first pleasant surprise came as I was riding in the car with my coworker and my cell phone rang a familiar tune. My aunt Dina surprised me with a wonderful birthday wish and so started the kind wishes I received all throughout the day. I didn’t want to tell anyone it was my birthday, I wanted to just celebrate Thanksgiving and pretend like it wasn’t a personally special day as well. My plan was foiled completely because from the moment I set foot in the school teacher after teacher started coming up to me, kissing me on both cheeks and wishing me “felicidades” on my special day. After my presentation about Thanksgiving traditions the kids surprised me with a big birthday song during which I burst into tears for absolutely no reason other than the fact that a spell was cast on me when I was a child that ensures that I cry on my birthday. During recess the teachers surprised me with two little cakes with candles in them and sang the by-now familiar Spanish birthday song. I fled the school at around noon to catch the train from Alora to Malaga in order to embark upon the task of cooking a giant Thanksgiving turkey. As I was sitting in the little dive bar next to the train station, drinking a café con leche, watching the bartender chop onions while drinking a large Cruzcampo, Tracy Chapman’s haunting voice came on the radio singing “Baby Can I Hold You Tonight” and the second stream of tears came pouring out of my eyes. They certainly weren’t tears of sadness because I felt completely content to be sitting in this little Spanish bar, waiting for a train that would take me through the most breathtakingly beautiful valleys and mountains, back to the city that was now my home. They were just tears of astonishment, when life feels so surreal, so inexplicable, for some reason tears pour out of my eyes.
It was amazing how fulfilled and complete I was able to feel on this day, so far away from everyone I love, and it was all thanks to the beautiful emails, letters, phone calls and wishes I received throughout the entire day from all corners of the world. The power of words is something incredible.
As soon as I got home I peeked in the fridge at the massive, sixteen-pound turkey, that took up half of our fridge. I’d had a nightmare about it the night before, that it was still alive. The white feathers stuck out of the bag and it still resembled the bird that it once was. I quickly shut the door and started working on the stuffing instead of touching the bird. The onion, celery and bread stuffing was done rather quickly and I left it on the side to wait for its bird to be prepared. The night before my roommate and I made a pasta salad with olives, tomatoes and feta cheese, a Moroccan chickpea salad with green apples, red peppers and lemon and a sweet potato and carrot puree. We finally tackled the turkey. I did it with my eyes closed and my lips pursed. It may have been one of the hardest things I’ve done, after having been a vegetarian for so long, there I was picking feathers of a big turkey. We finally had it prepared enough to put in the oven and the epic five-hour cooking of the turkey began. In the meantime we made a Caesar salad, mashed potatoes and gravy.
The hours passed quickly and before we knew it, the hour was 9 and our guests were ringing the doorbell. First it was Herminia, my lovely 22-year-old conversation partner who’s from a nearby village but is living in Malaga and studying tourism. She came at the tail end of the preparation and helped us finish the dishes that had yet to be finished. The turkey was a golden brown in the oven and we finally pulled it out. With the next ring came Flores from Alora and Jose Angel, a teacher that works with us at the school. They brought wine and cheesecake. Next came Clare, my French roommate, with her French friend Elodie with champagne and red wine. Two rings later Eva and Patri, two 22-year-olds from Malaga that I met through my “intercambio” ads carrying several bottles of Lambrusco, a cheap but delicious sparkling red wine. And finally our last two guests, Juan Diego and Manolo, arrived from Alora with a beautiful red Christmas plant and more bottles of champagne and wine. The smells from the kitchen were intoxicating and everyone hovered over the dishes asking what they were, how we made them, what the traditional ones were. None of our guests had ever had a Thanksgiving meal before and they were all quite interested in our stories about typical American Thanksgivings. It felt so poetically appropriate to be having a Thanksgiving in a foreign country with the people that were still somewhat unknown but that had found themselves open to helping us adjust to our lives here in Spain, that offered their companionships so graciously, their language help, their travel suggestions and their food offerings.
We filled our plates to the brim, put the turkey on the dining room table, turned on the Beatles on my computer, poured ourselves little plastic cups of wine and all toasted each other for Thanksgiving. We each said something we’re thankful for and then embraced the delicious food. It was some kind of miracle sent from the heavens that all of the food came out so great, that we didn’t burn anything, or mess up a single recipe even though it was both of our first times cooking a Thanksgiving meal. The conversation was great, the wine accompanied the food nicely, and everyone reached for seconds, and thirds, and fourths. After a few courses, a few of our guests and Elena bustled around in the kitchen doing something secretive and suddenly they turned out the lights and brought out a birthday cake with candles. I was incredibly surprised and pink-cheeked but I managed to blow out all the candles and make a strong birthday wish in my head.
After desert everyone chanted for me to play my guitar so I serenaded our guests with my old classical guitar songs. Everyone was full, pink-cheeked from the wine, and content to have spent their first Thanksgiving in Spain. This was certainly a birthday that I will never forget – from the turkey, to the rain, to the people, to the cake.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
One Sugar Cube of Ronda and a Secret Andalucian Village
Never have I wanted to return to a place so much as I want to return to Ronda. After only getting a small, teasing serving of the little town and a two-or-so-hour tour, I’m now dying to go back and watch more sunsets over the valley. Ronda is a relatively large village about an hour or so away from Malaga but it feels like a completely different world. As opposed to Malaga’s polluted air, Ronda has the freshest mountain-top air and barely any haze in the horizon due to pollution. It sits on top of a mountain with a winding path leading down all the way to a river and a valley down below. It’s relatively large for a village as it has a very European-looking shopping street with marble-lined streets and a couple of large squares with fountains. But the thing that sticks out most in my mind about Ronda is the light. Once darkness fell, the entire town was illuminated in this yellowish, fairytale like glow. The walls of the buildings reflected the light off in slightly different shades, and the streetlamps sparkled in the night, almost like candles. It may be one of the most romantic places I’ve been to, as it makes you yearn for your lover or gives you the nectar to want to fall in love on the spot. Imagine an entire town, candlelit and glowing, the night breeze blowing slightly as though it’s whispering secrets of the past in your ear.
The physical education teacher at our school, Agustin, offered to take me and my coworkers Elena and Jose Angle to Ronda and another nearby village for an afternoon of sightseeing and driving through the beautiful countryside. We left Alora after school and drove a couple of hours along winding, countryside roads. Eventually the roads became steeper and steeper and Agustin was proud to have shown us that Malaga does indeed have mountains. We were climbing higher and higher, the valley below shrank farther and farther away, and our stomachs became more and more knotted with each curve that he took in his little red sports car. We finally stopped at a little restaurant with a magnificent view of everything beneath and filled our stomachs with delicious and typical Spanish food. Of course that meant a couple of platters of meat – pork, beef and lamb – with greasy but exquisite French fries buried within. Then the waiter brought out a big plate of Manchego cheese, a very typical and sharp sheep cheese, and jamon Serrano, thin slices of cured beef. Who ever would have thought that this former-vegetarian would be drowning her palate with meat, and enjoying every moment of it? At last came a glass of local red wine and more cheese and finally a coffee and a sweet liquor shot.
With full stomachs and rosy wine-tinted cheeks, we got back into Agustin’s car to go to what he called “the most secret village in Andalucia.” It was a tiny, tiny, tiny little pueblo blanco, consisting of 200 residents, hidden on the side of a mountain named Benadalid. Agustin is building a house in the village so that he can escape the city life in the next few years. He would work at the one school that the village has, and he’d watch the sun rise every morning out of his big bedroom window that looks out over the valley. After a life of playing music, traveling the world, drinking, smoking, essentially partying and finally settling down to a stable career, he’s decided that he’d want nothing more than to settle into a quiet village life to reflect on the years past. We took a little walk around the village, saw only a couple of villagers and a little white, energetic dog and walked up along a chestnut-wooded path.
After the little tour of Benadalid, we drove back down towards Ronda, where Agustin dropped us off to explore while he settled things with his bank for the house. We walked along a huge bridge that towered over the valley below with the rock faces cascading down. It felt like we were standing at the edge of a cliff. The sky was turning pink, then orange, then deep red and then purple We walked along the edge of the cliff to the other side where a huge park bordered the towering cliffs. We watched more of the color-changing sky, mesmerized by the sounds, smells and paintings in the sky. After night fell, we walked to the city center, which was bustling with people and glowing in the yellow night light. We bought chestnuts and ate them in the main square, watching kids play with their grandparents and lovers walk by holding hands. After Agustin finished his business with the bank, he walked us around the historic part of the town and showed us the cobble-stoned paths that the villagers used to take on horseback many years ago. After a long, uphill walk back up to the town we went into a restaurant and got a refreshing drink and then got back in the car to wind all the way back to Malaga. Ronda now feels like a glimmering dream I had last week. A dream that’s becoming more and more abstract with each day that passes to separate me from it, but a dream whose glimmer I will never forget. Next time I want to linger longer, walk slower, and eat one too many chestnuts.
The physical education teacher at our school, Agustin, offered to take me and my coworkers Elena and Jose Angle to Ronda and another nearby village for an afternoon of sightseeing and driving through the beautiful countryside. We left Alora after school and drove a couple of hours along winding, countryside roads. Eventually the roads became steeper and steeper and Agustin was proud to have shown us that Malaga does indeed have mountains. We were climbing higher and higher, the valley below shrank farther and farther away, and our stomachs became more and more knotted with each curve that he took in his little red sports car. We finally stopped at a little restaurant with a magnificent view of everything beneath and filled our stomachs with delicious and typical Spanish food. Of course that meant a couple of platters of meat – pork, beef and lamb – with greasy but exquisite French fries buried within. Then the waiter brought out a big plate of Manchego cheese, a very typical and sharp sheep cheese, and jamon Serrano, thin slices of cured beef. Who ever would have thought that this former-vegetarian would be drowning her palate with meat, and enjoying every moment of it? At last came a glass of local red wine and more cheese and finally a coffee and a sweet liquor shot.
With full stomachs and rosy wine-tinted cheeks, we got back into Agustin’s car to go to what he called “the most secret village in Andalucia.” It was a tiny, tiny, tiny little pueblo blanco, consisting of 200 residents, hidden on the side of a mountain named Benadalid. Agustin is building a house in the village so that he can escape the city life in the next few years. He would work at the one school that the village has, and he’d watch the sun rise every morning out of his big bedroom window that looks out over the valley. After a life of playing music, traveling the world, drinking, smoking, essentially partying and finally settling down to a stable career, he’s decided that he’d want nothing more than to settle into a quiet village life to reflect on the years past. We took a little walk around the village, saw only a couple of villagers and a little white, energetic dog and walked up along a chestnut-wooded path.
After the little tour of Benadalid, we drove back down towards Ronda, where Agustin dropped us off to explore while he settled things with his bank for the house. We walked along a huge bridge that towered over the valley below with the rock faces cascading down. It felt like we were standing at the edge of a cliff. The sky was turning pink, then orange, then deep red and then purple We walked along the edge of the cliff to the other side where a huge park bordered the towering cliffs. We watched more of the color-changing sky, mesmerized by the sounds, smells and paintings in the sky. After night fell, we walked to the city center, which was bustling with people and glowing in the yellow night light. We bought chestnuts and ate them in the main square, watching kids play with their grandparents and lovers walk by holding hands. After Agustin finished his business with the bank, he walked us around the historic part of the town and showed us the cobble-stoned paths that the villagers used to take on horseback many years ago. After a long, uphill walk back up to the town we went into a restaurant and got a refreshing drink and then got back in the car to wind all the way back to Malaga. Ronda now feels like a glimmering dream I had last week. A dream that’s becoming more and more abstract with each day that passes to separate me from it, but a dream whose glimmer I will never forget. Next time I want to linger longer, walk slower, and eat one too many chestnuts.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Thursdays with Myself
Thursdays have become the day with which I mark time, the day of the week around which the rest of the days revolve. Every Thursday I find myself thinking about the days before and the days to come, the past and the future, it’s the board from which I spring into the rest of the days of the week. Thursday is the first day I have off of work after three days in a row and it’s also the day on which I have the most time to myself. Thursdays in Spain have taught me how to spend my free time, how to make an endless amount of time and space into a fulfilling and personal one. On most Thursdays I sleep in a little bit, though sleeping in for me means waking up at 8 as opposed to 6:30. I make myself a strong cup of coffee in my little silver percolator and I sit on the balcony next to my blooming basil plant and I look out across the ocean outside my window while the seagulls call above me. My slow cup of coffee accompanies other lazy morning activities like letter writing, reading (right now “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in English and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in Spanish, and Spanish learning.
After my cup of coffee I usually go to the center to meet my two new friends, Cristina and Silvia. Silvia answered my “intercambio” ad at the School of Languages and we started meeting to exchange conversation practice in our respective languages. They’re both older than me, but I’ve had a wonderful time passing a few morning hours with them each week talking about many different subjects. Silvia is in her thirties and is dark skinned, with big brown eyes and short brown hair. She laughs often and is quite shy with her English. When she starts a sentence in English she stirs in her chair as though she’s getting ready to jump of a bridge. She teaches salsa classes for a living and is an incredible cook. She has two kids named Victor and Lucia, and she even invited me to come live with her in her house, with no rental fee, to practice English with her kids. Cristina is also in her thirties and is Silvia’s cousin. She’s very fair-skinned, has a million little freckles on her face, and has big and interested blue eyes and blonde hair. She studied pedagogy and now works at a language institute teaching teachers how to be good at their jobs. We spend a few lazy hours that pass quickly sitting at a café and talking about politics, love, careers, and cultural practices. I’ve really come to appreciate having friends who are a little bit older than me and being able to talk with them as though we’re equals. The perspectives that they give and the advice that they bestow is incredibly wise.
After my intercambio date, I usually go for a long, explorative walk around a new part of the city. The nice thing about Malaga is that it’s so big that I think I’ll continue to get lost until the day that I leave. But getting lost and then finding my way again has become my favorite pastime.
After my meandering stroll I go to the public library, which is also the cultural epicenter of Malaga, and I find a new book on the shelves and sit at one of the brown wooden tables by a big window and read for a few hours. My mind craves another coffee around this time so I make my way to Plaza de Merced, where Picasso did most of his musings, and I go to a little coffee shop and tea house called El Pintor. I order a caffe con leche and sit in the sun watching the people pass by, writing in my journal as my mind is fed with inspiration.
My stomach starts growling and I look at my watch to see that it’s already almost two o’clock, when most of the stores and markets close for the daily siesta. I ask for my check, pay my smiling waiter, and head towards the Mercado Ataranzas to buy fruits and vegetables to make lunch. The market is huge and crowded at this time, as everyone is scrambling to buy before the start closing down the stands. There’s everything from fresh fish, to buckets of olives, to avocadoes, grapes and amazing cheese. I buy a kilogram of red and white grapes, a few avocadoes, tomatoes and cucumbers and a bag of Aloran olives, made with rosemary and garlic. Finally I go to a cheese stand and buy local manchego cheese and a baguette. My stroll home takes about half an hour and I arrive to my apartment just as my roommate is getting back from work. We make lunch together and sit at our little dining room table, catching up on our days.
After an afternoon siesta, during which I never do actually sleep, I put on my running shoes and go out by the water to run along the Paseo Maritimo, which spans the entire length of the Malagan coast. I run alongside hundreds of other runners, bikers, rollerbladers and walkers as the sun is setting in the horizon. After a long stretch and a warm shower, we make dinner together – usually a big salad with all kinds of vegetables, a tortilla de patate and grilled vegetables – and we dine with a glass of red wine. Some nights we go out into the city after dinner and seek the nightlife, other nights we settle for a movie in Spanish or a quiet reading before bed. Whatever it is that ends each Thursday passes quickly, and ticks the Thursdays away like leaves falling from trees.
After my cup of coffee I usually go to the center to meet my two new friends, Cristina and Silvia. Silvia answered my “intercambio” ad at the School of Languages and we started meeting to exchange conversation practice in our respective languages. They’re both older than me, but I’ve had a wonderful time passing a few morning hours with them each week talking about many different subjects. Silvia is in her thirties and is dark skinned, with big brown eyes and short brown hair. She laughs often and is quite shy with her English. When she starts a sentence in English she stirs in her chair as though she’s getting ready to jump of a bridge. She teaches salsa classes for a living and is an incredible cook. She has two kids named Victor and Lucia, and she even invited me to come live with her in her house, with no rental fee, to practice English with her kids. Cristina is also in her thirties and is Silvia’s cousin. She’s very fair-skinned, has a million little freckles on her face, and has big and interested blue eyes and blonde hair. She studied pedagogy and now works at a language institute teaching teachers how to be good at their jobs. We spend a few lazy hours that pass quickly sitting at a café and talking about politics, love, careers, and cultural practices. I’ve really come to appreciate having friends who are a little bit older than me and being able to talk with them as though we’re equals. The perspectives that they give and the advice that they bestow is incredibly wise.
After my intercambio date, I usually go for a long, explorative walk around a new part of the city. The nice thing about Malaga is that it’s so big that I think I’ll continue to get lost until the day that I leave. But getting lost and then finding my way again has become my favorite pastime.
After my meandering stroll I go to the public library, which is also the cultural epicenter of Malaga, and I find a new book on the shelves and sit at one of the brown wooden tables by a big window and read for a few hours. My mind craves another coffee around this time so I make my way to Plaza de Merced, where Picasso did most of his musings, and I go to a little coffee shop and tea house called El Pintor. I order a caffe con leche and sit in the sun watching the people pass by, writing in my journal as my mind is fed with inspiration.
My stomach starts growling and I look at my watch to see that it’s already almost two o’clock, when most of the stores and markets close for the daily siesta. I ask for my check, pay my smiling waiter, and head towards the Mercado Ataranzas to buy fruits and vegetables to make lunch. The market is huge and crowded at this time, as everyone is scrambling to buy before the start closing down the stands. There’s everything from fresh fish, to buckets of olives, to avocadoes, grapes and amazing cheese. I buy a kilogram of red and white grapes, a few avocadoes, tomatoes and cucumbers and a bag of Aloran olives, made with rosemary and garlic. Finally I go to a cheese stand and buy local manchego cheese and a baguette. My stroll home takes about half an hour and I arrive to my apartment just as my roommate is getting back from work. We make lunch together and sit at our little dining room table, catching up on our days.
After an afternoon siesta, during which I never do actually sleep, I put on my running shoes and go out by the water to run along the Paseo Maritimo, which spans the entire length of the Malagan coast. I run alongside hundreds of other runners, bikers, rollerbladers and walkers as the sun is setting in the horizon. After a long stretch and a warm shower, we make dinner together – usually a big salad with all kinds of vegetables, a tortilla de patate and grilled vegetables – and we dine with a glass of red wine. Some nights we go out into the city after dinner and seek the nightlife, other nights we settle for a movie in Spanish or a quiet reading before bed. Whatever it is that ends each Thursday passes quickly, and ticks the Thursdays away like leaves falling from trees.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
El Colegio Guadalhorce
When I received my letter from the Spanish Ministry of Education back in July, the only information I knew about the school where I’d be teaching was the name – C.E.I.P. Guadalhorce and the address in a town called Estacion. I was utterly confused because I thought “estacion” meant train station and I had no idea what the mysterious four letters C.E.I.P. stood for. I felt similar to the way Harry Potter must have felt when he received the mysterious letter from Hogwarts telling him he had to go to platform nine and three quarters in order to catch the train to Hogwarts. I Google-mapped the address and found out that the school was actually in the town of Alora, not Estacion. Everything else was to be discovered upon my arrival to the big white school with little square windows.
It’s utterly unfathomable that it’s already been an entire month that I’ve been teaching at el Colegio Guadalhorce. I quickly came to learn that C.E.I.P. was an acronym denoting the age groups at the school. My school has roughly 200 students between the ages of three and thirteen and it’s split into three levels: infantile, the adorable little babies, primaria, the elementary school-aged children, and secundaria, the first two grades of middle school. I work with both middle-schoolers and elementary-schoolers, and watch the little ones with adoration during the half-hour recreo where all the kids go out into the courtyard to play.
I work twelve hours a week and it’s been kindly arranged for me to work only on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays from nine until two or two-thirty. That gives me four-day weekends and I doubt that I’ll have the luxury of such long weekends every again in my life. I take the early morning train from the city to Alora and arrive at the train station just as the sun is rising, while the air is still crisp and the dew is glistening on the tomato plants. I walk about ten minutes from the station to the school along a little winding road surrounded on both sides by lemon trees and get to a little bridge with a little creek beneath it and cross it to instantly find myself in the “Estacion” neighborhood of Alora. I get to the school just as the younger kids’ parents are kissing them goodbye and sending them off for their day of school. The older kids start an hour earlier.
The classes are hot and cold, up and down, exhausting and invigorating, intimidating and simple, exciting and boring all at the same time. The energy of the kids is electric and so very contagious and it’s impossible to be around them without absorbing their attitudes. The two older groups that I work with are much harder to inspire and work with, but all of my classes at the primary level are a pleasure to teach. I teach art to the oldest secondary school group of kids. They may be the worst behaved group of students that I’ve seen in my life. Within an hour of class, at most fifteen of those minutes are actually spent teaching and the rest is spent disciplining. The teacher with whom I work with this group is quite a character and the students seem to misbehave the most around her. Her name is Marina and she’s a short, pudgy woman with stringy blonde hair, bangs that plaster across her forehead and an uncannily red face. She has a screeching and high pitched voice that can be heard in a closed classroom down the hall and she uses it more often than not. She wears platform sneakers, red and pink tights, mismatched and intensely shirts, long scarves in her hair and she carries three heavy bags full of junk with her all the time. She’s the coordinator of the bilingual program for the secondary school and is the most frazzled and disorganized woman I’ve ever met in my life. She’ll start talking about one topic, make a mountain of copies of some materials and then instantly changed to another subject, completely forgetting what it was that she was doing before. Talking with her in class is impossible because the moment I start talking she interrupts me to screech at the class, for no apparent reason. She calls all of her coworkers “Profe-maestro-teacher” and insists on kissing each of us two times on the cheek every day, still using her screeching voice to say good morning. The students treat her like a clown, especially the oldest group. A student threw an eraser at her, hit her in the chest and aimed it to fall in her shirt. She spent the next thirty minutes yelling and threatening to punish the entire class unless someone confessed that it was them that threw the eraser. Nobody tattled, so she punished the class. The next day she’d forgotten about it. She’s from Benalmedena, a little village in the Malaga province, and she drives her car only to a certain point when she comes to work in Alora and then insists on taking the train to the school. When I asked her why, she said that she gets panic attacks when she’s driving.
The oldest group is currently learning pointillism in art class and Marina makes me repeat everything that she says in English and then has the class repeat after me. Needless to say, we don’t get very far. The students mindlessly repeat sentences in both Spanish and English and make no connections in their heads. They’re learning words like “pointillism” and “expressionism” in their English class, yet they can’t even exchange a simple salutation in English. Obviously, the bilingual program needs help at Guadalhorce. Esteban is the class clown and he sits in the middle of the front of the class, directly in front of Marina. He’s a chubby kid with big green glasses who hits his classmates, draws graffiti on his desk instead of art on his sheet of paper, and can’t pronounce a word of English. One day he gave me a handful of chestnuts as a preemptive gift to give him a ten on his oral exercise. Little does he know I have absolutely nothing to do with his grades.
The younger group of secondary school is also unbearable and Marina spends most of the class screaming at the top of her lungs. The girls tend to just sit at their desks, waiting patiently, watching their male counterparts act like clowns and disturb the entire class. In this group, Salvador is the class clown. He’s a tiny little boy with a Mohawk haircut and a blue piercing in his chin. A few of his buddies in the class have the exact same piercing and their game is to sneak up to the front of the class when Marina isn’t paying attention and draw horses on the board. They like to talk about horses a lot as well, I assume because each of them has one of their own.
The rest of my classes are with the younger kids and they’re much more enjoyable and productive. The little kids actually seem to know more English than the older ones. My class of six-year-olds I teach with Pilar, who’s the coordinator of bilingualism in primary school. Pilar is an incredibly thoughtful and organized woman, who is really dedicated to her job as well as the bilingual program. She has three kids of her own and lives in Malaga and has gone out of her way to collect maps and magazines for me to travel around the Malaga province. Her class is full of sweet kids who call my name with joy and clap their hands when I come to their class to work in English. We’re currently learning about healthy and unhealthy foods and just finished an art project where we created a food pyramid. Mary Lo is a cute little girl in the class who loves to talk and ask questions. One day she told me that she thought I was beautiful and that her friends tell her she’s fea (ugly). She then told me that she really likes to clean and help and that she wants to name her kids Andres and Isabel.
My other group of little ones is five-year-olds with whom I feel like I need to get down on my knees to communicate because they’re so tiny. The teacher I work with in this class is also named Marina and she’s a bit of a vagabond-looking woman with thick black hair that she wears in a loose bun. She has a piercing in her chin and used to be a taxi driver. She’s surprisingly really gentle and loving with her kids. I taught this class “Old McDonald Had a Farm” one day and after repeating it a few times I asked the class, “How do you say cow in English?” and a little boy named Ruben with gelled-up hair said “Moo moo here” in all seriousness. It gave me quite a laugh.
My seven-year-old group is really good with English, compared with the rest of the students. They know their colors, their numbers, their foods and other simple things. Alejandro is by far the most impressive of them all – a little blonde and pale boy with thick-rimmed blue glasses, who raises his hand with all his energy and pastes the other one across his mouth so that he doesn’t yell out the answer from excitement. Juana, their teacher, is a young and garrulous woman with curly brown hair. I spend an hour every week with her helping with her English through conversation and she always smiles really big and loves the intricacies of the English language, is fascinated by everything I have to tell her, and would love to travel to the United States one day.
Augustin is the physical education teacher at the school and the first person that I met when I came to Guadalhorce. He’s a thirty-two-year-old former rock star bachelor who realized at age of thirty that he’d better do something with his life. So he became a gym teacher. He’s traveled all over the world playing music with his band, he’s partied with Rod Stewart and Calvin Klein and he has a Swedish lover who he likes to talk about almost every day. He’s becoming more and more balding every day and has a five-o-clock shadow on his face. He’s great with the kids though and they all look forward to their P.E. time with him.
Jose Angel is the handsome, young first-year teacher from Cordoba. He lived in Ireland for two years and speaks perfect English. His students adore him and the girls draw him hearts with their names engraved in them. He’s originally from Cordoba, and says he needs a big party in his life because he’s been quite bored living in the small town where he works and using a hand puppet to talk to little kids all day. He too says he turned to teaching as a last resort, when he couldn’t figure out what else to do with his life. I wonder if I’ll find this to be a recurring trend.
The headmaster is a man named Salvador who looks like a character straight out of a Western movie. He wears tight, high-rise pants with a big belt buckle at his belly and he has pointy cowboy boots. His hair is slicked back across his head and his ear hair crawls down his jaw and neck. I found out that he used to be the mayor of Alora, before he took on the position as headmaster at Guadalhorce. As far as his job goes, he’s hard to find. I have yet to encounter him in his office when I need him.
So that’s the world I live in. They call me “Jasmine” with a beautiful Spanish accent because they can’t pronounce my name, and there’s nothing more exciting than walking into the gate in the morning and hearing a multitude of little voices calling my name across the courtyard, happy to have me there.
It’s utterly unfathomable that it’s already been an entire month that I’ve been teaching at el Colegio Guadalhorce. I quickly came to learn that C.E.I.P. was an acronym denoting the age groups at the school. My school has roughly 200 students between the ages of three and thirteen and it’s split into three levels: infantile, the adorable little babies, primaria, the elementary school-aged children, and secundaria, the first two grades of middle school. I work with both middle-schoolers and elementary-schoolers, and watch the little ones with adoration during the half-hour recreo where all the kids go out into the courtyard to play.
I work twelve hours a week and it’s been kindly arranged for me to work only on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays from nine until two or two-thirty. That gives me four-day weekends and I doubt that I’ll have the luxury of such long weekends every again in my life. I take the early morning train from the city to Alora and arrive at the train station just as the sun is rising, while the air is still crisp and the dew is glistening on the tomato plants. I walk about ten minutes from the station to the school along a little winding road surrounded on both sides by lemon trees and get to a little bridge with a little creek beneath it and cross it to instantly find myself in the “Estacion” neighborhood of Alora. I get to the school just as the younger kids’ parents are kissing them goodbye and sending them off for their day of school. The older kids start an hour earlier.
The classes are hot and cold, up and down, exhausting and invigorating, intimidating and simple, exciting and boring all at the same time. The energy of the kids is electric and so very contagious and it’s impossible to be around them without absorbing their attitudes. The two older groups that I work with are much harder to inspire and work with, but all of my classes at the primary level are a pleasure to teach. I teach art to the oldest secondary school group of kids. They may be the worst behaved group of students that I’ve seen in my life. Within an hour of class, at most fifteen of those minutes are actually spent teaching and the rest is spent disciplining. The teacher with whom I work with this group is quite a character and the students seem to misbehave the most around her. Her name is Marina and she’s a short, pudgy woman with stringy blonde hair, bangs that plaster across her forehead and an uncannily red face. She has a screeching and high pitched voice that can be heard in a closed classroom down the hall and she uses it more often than not. She wears platform sneakers, red and pink tights, mismatched and intensely shirts, long scarves in her hair and she carries three heavy bags full of junk with her all the time. She’s the coordinator of the bilingual program for the secondary school and is the most frazzled and disorganized woman I’ve ever met in my life. She’ll start talking about one topic, make a mountain of copies of some materials and then instantly changed to another subject, completely forgetting what it was that she was doing before. Talking with her in class is impossible because the moment I start talking she interrupts me to screech at the class, for no apparent reason. She calls all of her coworkers “Profe-maestro-teacher” and insists on kissing each of us two times on the cheek every day, still using her screeching voice to say good morning. The students treat her like a clown, especially the oldest group. A student threw an eraser at her, hit her in the chest and aimed it to fall in her shirt. She spent the next thirty minutes yelling and threatening to punish the entire class unless someone confessed that it was them that threw the eraser. Nobody tattled, so she punished the class. The next day she’d forgotten about it. She’s from Benalmedena, a little village in the Malaga province, and she drives her car only to a certain point when she comes to work in Alora and then insists on taking the train to the school. When I asked her why, she said that she gets panic attacks when she’s driving.
The oldest group is currently learning pointillism in art class and Marina makes me repeat everything that she says in English and then has the class repeat after me. Needless to say, we don’t get very far. The students mindlessly repeat sentences in both Spanish and English and make no connections in their heads. They’re learning words like “pointillism” and “expressionism” in their English class, yet they can’t even exchange a simple salutation in English. Obviously, the bilingual program needs help at Guadalhorce. Esteban is the class clown and he sits in the middle of the front of the class, directly in front of Marina. He’s a chubby kid with big green glasses who hits his classmates, draws graffiti on his desk instead of art on his sheet of paper, and can’t pronounce a word of English. One day he gave me a handful of chestnuts as a preemptive gift to give him a ten on his oral exercise. Little does he know I have absolutely nothing to do with his grades.
The younger group of secondary school is also unbearable and Marina spends most of the class screaming at the top of her lungs. The girls tend to just sit at their desks, waiting patiently, watching their male counterparts act like clowns and disturb the entire class. In this group, Salvador is the class clown. He’s a tiny little boy with a Mohawk haircut and a blue piercing in his chin. A few of his buddies in the class have the exact same piercing and their game is to sneak up to the front of the class when Marina isn’t paying attention and draw horses on the board. They like to talk about horses a lot as well, I assume because each of them has one of their own.
The rest of my classes are with the younger kids and they’re much more enjoyable and productive. The little kids actually seem to know more English than the older ones. My class of six-year-olds I teach with Pilar, who’s the coordinator of bilingualism in primary school. Pilar is an incredibly thoughtful and organized woman, who is really dedicated to her job as well as the bilingual program. She has three kids of her own and lives in Malaga and has gone out of her way to collect maps and magazines for me to travel around the Malaga province. Her class is full of sweet kids who call my name with joy and clap their hands when I come to their class to work in English. We’re currently learning about healthy and unhealthy foods and just finished an art project where we created a food pyramid. Mary Lo is a cute little girl in the class who loves to talk and ask questions. One day she told me that she thought I was beautiful and that her friends tell her she’s fea (ugly). She then told me that she really likes to clean and help and that she wants to name her kids Andres and Isabel.
My other group of little ones is five-year-olds with whom I feel like I need to get down on my knees to communicate because they’re so tiny. The teacher I work with in this class is also named Marina and she’s a bit of a vagabond-looking woman with thick black hair that she wears in a loose bun. She has a piercing in her chin and used to be a taxi driver. She’s surprisingly really gentle and loving with her kids. I taught this class “Old McDonald Had a Farm” one day and after repeating it a few times I asked the class, “How do you say cow in English?” and a little boy named Ruben with gelled-up hair said “Moo moo here” in all seriousness. It gave me quite a laugh.
My seven-year-old group is really good with English, compared with the rest of the students. They know their colors, their numbers, their foods and other simple things. Alejandro is by far the most impressive of them all – a little blonde and pale boy with thick-rimmed blue glasses, who raises his hand with all his energy and pastes the other one across his mouth so that he doesn’t yell out the answer from excitement. Juana, their teacher, is a young and garrulous woman with curly brown hair. I spend an hour every week with her helping with her English through conversation and she always smiles really big and loves the intricacies of the English language, is fascinated by everything I have to tell her, and would love to travel to the United States one day.
Augustin is the physical education teacher at the school and the first person that I met when I came to Guadalhorce. He’s a thirty-two-year-old former rock star bachelor who realized at age of thirty that he’d better do something with his life. So he became a gym teacher. He’s traveled all over the world playing music with his band, he’s partied with Rod Stewart and Calvin Klein and he has a Swedish lover who he likes to talk about almost every day. He’s becoming more and more balding every day and has a five-o-clock shadow on his face. He’s great with the kids though and they all look forward to their P.E. time with him.
Jose Angel is the handsome, young first-year teacher from Cordoba. He lived in Ireland for two years and speaks perfect English. His students adore him and the girls draw him hearts with their names engraved in them. He’s originally from Cordoba, and says he needs a big party in his life because he’s been quite bored living in the small town where he works and using a hand puppet to talk to little kids all day. He too says he turned to teaching as a last resort, when he couldn’t figure out what else to do with his life. I wonder if I’ll find this to be a recurring trend.
The headmaster is a man named Salvador who looks like a character straight out of a Western movie. He wears tight, high-rise pants with a big belt buckle at his belly and he has pointy cowboy boots. His hair is slicked back across his head and his ear hair crawls down his jaw and neck. I found out that he used to be the mayor of Alora, before he took on the position as headmaster at Guadalhorce. As far as his job goes, he’s hard to find. I have yet to encounter him in his office when I need him.
So that’s the world I live in. They call me “Jasmine” with a beautiful Spanish accent because they can’t pronounce my name, and there’s nothing more exciting than walking into the gate in the morning and hearing a multitude of little voices calling my name across the courtyard, happy to have me there.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Spanish Holiday in Portugal
On our first national holiday in Spain, Fiesta Nacional, we decided to take advantage of the five-day weekend and take a road trip to Portugal.
The cast was unforgettable: Andrew Magill, who entertained us by running into the freezing Atlantic Ocean wearing nothing but his curly red hair; Andrew Crosson, who drove his first car in Europe like a professional, aggressive European driver; Alisha Wolf, who satiated the urges for sweetness by providing a plethora of milk chocolate; Elyse Keefe, who ate a clove of garlic a day and kept her trail smelling like garlic perfume; and Jasmina Nogo, who acted like a squirrel in the roads of Lisboa while crossing the street.
Alisha, Andrew and Elyse took a bus from Motril to meet Andrew Magill and I in Malaga on Thursday evening where the car was waiting to be rented. It seemed too good to be true when the rental agency handed over the keys to a sleek, black Citroen car and Andrew pulled out of the parking lot in Malaga with us and our backpacks crammed into the back. The first step to our Portugal road trip was taken as we squeezed through the narrow and clogged streets of Malaga. When we finally got out of the knots of Malaga a euphoric excitement struck all of us as the car cruised down the winding roads of Andalucia, heading towards Huelva on the western border of Spain. We cut through mountains and valleys as the sun was setting on the horizon creating an intensely colorful backdrop to our cascading path. The positive energy in the car was mirrored by the mesmerizing colors in the sky and with chatter and music the hours passed quickly and we crossed into the border of Portugal. We stopped only once to satiate our hunger with bread and cheese, and then quickly got back on the road.
We arrived to our first destination of Lagos, on the southern coast of Portugal, around midnight and found our hostel in the dark with no problem. The little town was glowing from the streetlights and the little cobblestone streets led us directly to the door of our hostel. Lagos reminded me of what I’d imagined Greece to be like – bleach-white buildings, narrow cobbled streets, terraces with flowers on them and a beautiful rugged coastline on the Atlantic Ocean. Although it showed to be quite a tourist destination, everything about Lagos still had a small-town feeling. It felt like the town was tucked into the cliffs of the coast and buried behind the grottos, to be discovered only by those who ventured.
We stayed up long enough that first night to share a bottle of red wine between the five of us and stacked into the bunk beds of our room like popsicle sticks and fell quickly asleep, tired from the road and the sprinting thoughts. In the morning when we got up for breakfast, we were pleasantly surprised by the gracious meal being served in the hostels kitchen. A nice Portuguese woman served the food, and all I could say to her over and over again was obrigada, thank you in Portuguese over and over again. I had forgotten how debilitating it was to be unable to utter a single expression in a foreign language. Portuguese was similar in a lot of ways to Spanish and it was certainly comprehendible, but when it came to speaking I was mute and we all looked to Andrew Magill for help when approached by the Portuguese. The breakfast consisted of croissants with cheese, butter and jam, hardboiled eggs, yogurt, orange juice and café con leche. We sat in the hostel’s little outdoor courtyard and enjoyed our first meal in Portugal.
After breakfast we walked down the winding main streets of Lagos to explore the town and quickly found ourselves by the coastline. We found a small fortress with a moat and explored around the coast for a little while. It didn’t take long to see the entirety of the town so after our walking tour we decided to get into our car again to drive out to a nearby beach. The beach we found was phenomenal: an endless beach coastline with white, runny sand and crystalline water all along the shore. Given that it was the middle of October there weren’t many tourists so we almost had the beach to ourselves. Andrew and I swam in the freezing cold water for almost a half an hour, and afterwards I couldn’t feel the skin on my body from the cold but it was fabulously refreshing. I was in the Atlantic Ocean once again except this time my eyes looked in the direction of home so very far away. We took a long walk down the coast, across the jagged rocks and beside the towering cliffs.
After an afternoon on the beach we drove to a lookout point with a lighthouse on top of the cliffs and beautiful blue grottos down below. The water crashed against the cliffs, and the grotto glistened in its stillness. Tourists climbed up and down the rocky stairs to the grotto and back while we looked from above taking pictures and climbing to the peaks of the cliffs. It was one of those places that you only see on the travel channel and in magazines that look airbrushed, but it was so real and so beautiful that photographs couldn’t do it justice. Elyse once put it so well – pictures only capture the two-dimensionality of moments but they never capture the sounds, the smells, the music, the conversation, all of which paint the perfect moments in our lives. After the lighthouse we got back into the car and drove to the southwestern-most point of Europe – a little Portuguese town called Sagros. The town was so small that we made an impression just being there and walking down the street. At one point we walked into a tiny bar full of old men drinking beer and all heads turned in our direction standing at the door, to scope out the newcomers to this town. Our manner of talking, walking and dressing was such a strange sight to them. We went to a convenience store and bought snacks and beers and then went to sit on the windy coastal boardwalk, our legs hanging off the edge, the sun setting on the horizon.
Before nightfall we were back in Lagos and ready to eat our first real meal of the day. We followed the directions from a little flyer to a Mexican restaurant in the town center. Low and behold it was the most common destination for all of the tourists in Lagos. Only English echoed between the walls of the restaurants and even the wait staff was foreign to Portugal. But it’s places like this that seem to make the most money in little coastal towns. The tables had the game of Connect Four and we played a couple of matches, all losing to Andrew Magill and finally deciding that it was quite a conversation killer. Those of us that ordered burritos thinking we’d get our black bean stuffed Cosmic burritos were in for a surprise. My burrito had carrots in it, no rice, and big red kidney beans instead of the familiar black beans. And we decided they weren’t burritos at all because they weren’t rolled nor stuffed like burritos, rather just stuck into a rolled up piece of tortilla. But what were thinking eating at a Mexican restaurant in Portugal anyway? After dinner we strolled the streets a little bit, went back to our hostel’s courtyard and played an epic game of Never-Have-I-Ever with Pisco and Fanta mixed drinks. We have quite a way of bringing our American culture with us no matter where we go, it seems.
The next morning, after our filling Lagos breakfast served by the kind Portuguese woman who’d been to New York City and graciously refilled our coffee cups at least three times, we got back into our sexy black Citroen and headed towards the country’s capital city of Lisboa. The big bridge that led us into the city resembled San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge and an enormous statue of Jesus Christ towered over the entrance to the big city. Lisboa appeared huge from the highway with a distinct separation from the modern and industrial seeming part and the old historic area. After a couple of stops and getting lost only once, we finally found ourselves in the Barrio Alto in the heart of Lisboa. The streets were incredibly steep and cobbled, with electric trams running through traffic amongst cars, pedestrians, scooters and bikers. We finally found a little residence with room for five, after being turned down a couple of times, and settled into our rooms. The rooms were quite tiny, smelled like cigarettes and stale milk and were incredibly dark. Alisha described the place as creepy yet unique, but later retracted the second part of the statement and left it at just creepy. We only had to spend one night there, thankfully, and didn’t spend much more than a night’s dreams in its creepiness. That evening we stumbled upon a buffet for only 7.95 euro and our pockets couldn’t resist the deal so once again in Portugal we ate American-style. The buffet may or may not have been good, but we wouldn’t have known because we were starving and the cooked food filled our stomachs graciously.
After dinner we wandered the streets once again down to the coast and back up again through the evening lamp-illuminated marble streets. We found a little bar in our neighborhood and watched the Portugal soccer game which was being played only fifteen minutes from Lisboa. The streets were pulsing with life and hundreds of people just walking up and down, standing outside of the bars, listening to music, talking, living the European life. We all agreed that Lisboa was probably the most underrated European capital. It’s an incredible city both aesthetically and culturally, yet you don’t often hear of people traveling to it. By the end of the night we were falling asleep at the table of the little bar. I was so tired I hadn’t even realized the soccer match was over. Needless to say, once my head finally hit the pillow of the creepy hostel I was lost to the dreams that came that night.
The next morning we left the residence and checked into a different hostel, this one much more colorful, full of windows and travelers. We set off in the morning towards the heights of the city to see the old Arab castle. From the top we could see the entire city spilling out below, the big bridge in the distance, the statue of Jesus only a finger’s length from the distance. On the way back down the hill we stumbled across a little band playing traditional Fado music and a woman singing songs about loss and nostalgia in the most beautiful and resonating voice. People gathered around the little restaurant watching and taking pictures. A little ways further we came across another couple of street musicians playing the most interesting instruments – a guitar-like instrument called a “stick,” which he played with both hands, one for the baseline and the other for the melody. They perched on a little bench beneath a canopy of flowers, overlooking the blue water below. It was like a scene from a movie, as Andrew put it so eloquently, and it all happened like it does in the movies – a group of travelers stumble upon a musician playing in the street, with a picturesque backdrop and beautiful flowers hanging above and they sit down along the wall and stay upwards of an hour just rocking to the music, unable to stay still from the natural beats coming from the accompanying drum.
After our free concert we strolled along the streets and finally ended up in the city park where we found a nice plot of green grass and sat down for a picnic of bread, cheese and fruit. We took catnaps in the grass and after a couple of hours headed back towards Barrio Alto to check into our new hostel. The room we stayed in was full of different colors, had a balcony and the hostel had a community kitchen, living room and terraces. It was full of people from all over the world and the environment was completely conducive to making friends with them. We went out to the grocery store and bought ingredients to make dinner (each spending only 2.50 euro!) and took our food back to the hostel to make pesto pasta, salad and black bean dip. The kitchen was packed full of people making dinner, all speaking different languages. A group of Chilean guys made a huge pot of Chilean stew with all kinds of vegetables and chicken. They offered it around the table and we all got to try it. The Germans were baking a huge stuffed fish in the oven that looked like it belonged in a culinary magazine. The group of American girls made frozen pizzas and prepackaged salads. We all sat around the table and got to know each other and our cultures a little bit better. After dinner we took another stroll outside into the nightlife, hung out in the plaza where other Portuguese youngsters were spending their evening and once again went to bed relatively early from the exhaustion of the day and the foresight of the coming day of driving all the way back to Malaga from Lisboa.
The Citroen served us incredibly well thanks to Alisha and Andrew’s ability to drive a stick shift car. Gas was incredulously expensive (60 euro to fill up the tank!) but thankfully split between the five of us it wasn’t unbearable. We got it back the next day in six or so hours flat, in top notch condition, drove it into the parking garage beneath the Malaga train station and returned the keys and the car without a scratch. I couldn’t believe how perfectly the entire trip went and without unexpected expenses or unplanned detours. Five Americans, with several languages between us, actually managed to take a spontaneous road trip across Spain and Portugal.
The cast was unforgettable: Andrew Magill, who entertained us by running into the freezing Atlantic Ocean wearing nothing but his curly red hair; Andrew Crosson, who drove his first car in Europe like a professional, aggressive European driver; Alisha Wolf, who satiated the urges for sweetness by providing a plethora of milk chocolate; Elyse Keefe, who ate a clove of garlic a day and kept her trail smelling like garlic perfume; and Jasmina Nogo, who acted like a squirrel in the roads of Lisboa while crossing the street.
Alisha, Andrew and Elyse took a bus from Motril to meet Andrew Magill and I in Malaga on Thursday evening where the car was waiting to be rented. It seemed too good to be true when the rental agency handed over the keys to a sleek, black Citroen car and Andrew pulled out of the parking lot in Malaga with us and our backpacks crammed into the back. The first step to our Portugal road trip was taken as we squeezed through the narrow and clogged streets of Malaga. When we finally got out of the knots of Malaga a euphoric excitement struck all of us as the car cruised down the winding roads of Andalucia, heading towards Huelva on the western border of Spain. We cut through mountains and valleys as the sun was setting on the horizon creating an intensely colorful backdrop to our cascading path. The positive energy in the car was mirrored by the mesmerizing colors in the sky and with chatter and music the hours passed quickly and we crossed into the border of Portugal. We stopped only once to satiate our hunger with bread and cheese, and then quickly got back on the road.
We arrived to our first destination of Lagos, on the southern coast of Portugal, around midnight and found our hostel in the dark with no problem. The little town was glowing from the streetlights and the little cobblestone streets led us directly to the door of our hostel. Lagos reminded me of what I’d imagined Greece to be like – bleach-white buildings, narrow cobbled streets, terraces with flowers on them and a beautiful rugged coastline on the Atlantic Ocean. Although it showed to be quite a tourist destination, everything about Lagos still had a small-town feeling. It felt like the town was tucked into the cliffs of the coast and buried behind the grottos, to be discovered only by those who ventured.
We stayed up long enough that first night to share a bottle of red wine between the five of us and stacked into the bunk beds of our room like popsicle sticks and fell quickly asleep, tired from the road and the sprinting thoughts. In the morning when we got up for breakfast, we were pleasantly surprised by the gracious meal being served in the hostels kitchen. A nice Portuguese woman served the food, and all I could say to her over and over again was obrigada, thank you in Portuguese over and over again. I had forgotten how debilitating it was to be unable to utter a single expression in a foreign language. Portuguese was similar in a lot of ways to Spanish and it was certainly comprehendible, but when it came to speaking I was mute and we all looked to Andrew Magill for help when approached by the Portuguese. The breakfast consisted of croissants with cheese, butter and jam, hardboiled eggs, yogurt, orange juice and café con leche. We sat in the hostel’s little outdoor courtyard and enjoyed our first meal in Portugal.
After breakfast we walked down the winding main streets of Lagos to explore the town and quickly found ourselves by the coastline. We found a small fortress with a moat and explored around the coast for a little while. It didn’t take long to see the entirety of the town so after our walking tour we decided to get into our car again to drive out to a nearby beach. The beach we found was phenomenal: an endless beach coastline with white, runny sand and crystalline water all along the shore. Given that it was the middle of October there weren’t many tourists so we almost had the beach to ourselves. Andrew and I swam in the freezing cold water for almost a half an hour, and afterwards I couldn’t feel the skin on my body from the cold but it was fabulously refreshing. I was in the Atlantic Ocean once again except this time my eyes looked in the direction of home so very far away. We took a long walk down the coast, across the jagged rocks and beside the towering cliffs.
After an afternoon on the beach we drove to a lookout point with a lighthouse on top of the cliffs and beautiful blue grottos down below. The water crashed against the cliffs, and the grotto glistened in its stillness. Tourists climbed up and down the rocky stairs to the grotto and back while we looked from above taking pictures and climbing to the peaks of the cliffs. It was one of those places that you only see on the travel channel and in magazines that look airbrushed, but it was so real and so beautiful that photographs couldn’t do it justice. Elyse once put it so well – pictures only capture the two-dimensionality of moments but they never capture the sounds, the smells, the music, the conversation, all of which paint the perfect moments in our lives. After the lighthouse we got back into the car and drove to the southwestern-most point of Europe – a little Portuguese town called Sagros. The town was so small that we made an impression just being there and walking down the street. At one point we walked into a tiny bar full of old men drinking beer and all heads turned in our direction standing at the door, to scope out the newcomers to this town. Our manner of talking, walking and dressing was such a strange sight to them. We went to a convenience store and bought snacks and beers and then went to sit on the windy coastal boardwalk, our legs hanging off the edge, the sun setting on the horizon.
Before nightfall we were back in Lagos and ready to eat our first real meal of the day. We followed the directions from a little flyer to a Mexican restaurant in the town center. Low and behold it was the most common destination for all of the tourists in Lagos. Only English echoed between the walls of the restaurants and even the wait staff was foreign to Portugal. But it’s places like this that seem to make the most money in little coastal towns. The tables had the game of Connect Four and we played a couple of matches, all losing to Andrew Magill and finally deciding that it was quite a conversation killer. Those of us that ordered burritos thinking we’d get our black bean stuffed Cosmic burritos were in for a surprise. My burrito had carrots in it, no rice, and big red kidney beans instead of the familiar black beans. And we decided they weren’t burritos at all because they weren’t rolled nor stuffed like burritos, rather just stuck into a rolled up piece of tortilla. But what were thinking eating at a Mexican restaurant in Portugal anyway? After dinner we strolled the streets a little bit, went back to our hostel’s courtyard and played an epic game of Never-Have-I-Ever with Pisco and Fanta mixed drinks. We have quite a way of bringing our American culture with us no matter where we go, it seems.
The next morning, after our filling Lagos breakfast served by the kind Portuguese woman who’d been to New York City and graciously refilled our coffee cups at least three times, we got back into our sexy black Citroen and headed towards the country’s capital city of Lisboa. The big bridge that led us into the city resembled San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge and an enormous statue of Jesus Christ towered over the entrance to the big city. Lisboa appeared huge from the highway with a distinct separation from the modern and industrial seeming part and the old historic area. After a couple of stops and getting lost only once, we finally found ourselves in the Barrio Alto in the heart of Lisboa. The streets were incredibly steep and cobbled, with electric trams running through traffic amongst cars, pedestrians, scooters and bikers. We finally found a little residence with room for five, after being turned down a couple of times, and settled into our rooms. The rooms were quite tiny, smelled like cigarettes and stale milk and were incredibly dark. Alisha described the place as creepy yet unique, but later retracted the second part of the statement and left it at just creepy. We only had to spend one night there, thankfully, and didn’t spend much more than a night’s dreams in its creepiness. That evening we stumbled upon a buffet for only 7.95 euro and our pockets couldn’t resist the deal so once again in Portugal we ate American-style. The buffet may or may not have been good, but we wouldn’t have known because we were starving and the cooked food filled our stomachs graciously.
After dinner we wandered the streets once again down to the coast and back up again through the evening lamp-illuminated marble streets. We found a little bar in our neighborhood and watched the Portugal soccer game which was being played only fifteen minutes from Lisboa. The streets were pulsing with life and hundreds of people just walking up and down, standing outside of the bars, listening to music, talking, living the European life. We all agreed that Lisboa was probably the most underrated European capital. It’s an incredible city both aesthetically and culturally, yet you don’t often hear of people traveling to it. By the end of the night we were falling asleep at the table of the little bar. I was so tired I hadn’t even realized the soccer match was over. Needless to say, once my head finally hit the pillow of the creepy hostel I was lost to the dreams that came that night.
The next morning we left the residence and checked into a different hostel, this one much more colorful, full of windows and travelers. We set off in the morning towards the heights of the city to see the old Arab castle. From the top we could see the entire city spilling out below, the big bridge in the distance, the statue of Jesus only a finger’s length from the distance. On the way back down the hill we stumbled across a little band playing traditional Fado music and a woman singing songs about loss and nostalgia in the most beautiful and resonating voice. People gathered around the little restaurant watching and taking pictures. A little ways further we came across another couple of street musicians playing the most interesting instruments – a guitar-like instrument called a “stick,” which he played with both hands, one for the baseline and the other for the melody. They perched on a little bench beneath a canopy of flowers, overlooking the blue water below. It was like a scene from a movie, as Andrew put it so eloquently, and it all happened like it does in the movies – a group of travelers stumble upon a musician playing in the street, with a picturesque backdrop and beautiful flowers hanging above and they sit down along the wall and stay upwards of an hour just rocking to the music, unable to stay still from the natural beats coming from the accompanying drum.
After our free concert we strolled along the streets and finally ended up in the city park where we found a nice plot of green grass and sat down for a picnic of bread, cheese and fruit. We took catnaps in the grass and after a couple of hours headed back towards Barrio Alto to check into our new hostel. The room we stayed in was full of different colors, had a balcony and the hostel had a community kitchen, living room and terraces. It was full of people from all over the world and the environment was completely conducive to making friends with them. We went out to the grocery store and bought ingredients to make dinner (each spending only 2.50 euro!) and took our food back to the hostel to make pesto pasta, salad and black bean dip. The kitchen was packed full of people making dinner, all speaking different languages. A group of Chilean guys made a huge pot of Chilean stew with all kinds of vegetables and chicken. They offered it around the table and we all got to try it. The Germans were baking a huge stuffed fish in the oven that looked like it belonged in a culinary magazine. The group of American girls made frozen pizzas and prepackaged salads. We all sat around the table and got to know each other and our cultures a little bit better. After dinner we took another stroll outside into the nightlife, hung out in the plaza where other Portuguese youngsters were spending their evening and once again went to bed relatively early from the exhaustion of the day and the foresight of the coming day of driving all the way back to Malaga from Lisboa.
The Citroen served us incredibly well thanks to Alisha and Andrew’s ability to drive a stick shift car. Gas was incredulously expensive (60 euro to fill up the tank!) but thankfully split between the five of us it wasn’t unbearable. We got it back the next day in six or so hours flat, in top notch condition, drove it into the parking garage beneath the Malaga train station and returned the keys and the car without a scratch. I couldn’t believe how perfectly the entire trip went and without unexpected expenses or unplanned detours. Five Americans, with several languages between us, actually managed to take a spontaneous road trip across Spain and Portugal.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
The Capital City of the Costa del Sol
The very first day that I went to the city of Malaga to look for an apartment I was devastatingly disappointed. I stayed around the area of the train station the entire time and perceived the city to be an ugly and polluted port town. I thought it was one of those places that had never been the destination but the rerouting station to head somewhere else. I was pleasantly surprised the next time I went back to the city to dig deeper for its charms. I couldn’t believe that the city where Pablo Picasso so proudly came from could be such a dumping ground. As soon as I crossed the Rio Guadalmedina, which cuts the city in two, and headed north into the center, the city took on a new face.
The city center had a briskly modern yet historic feel to it and it pulsed with colorful and vibrating life. The historic center is full of little winding alleys that shelter quaint tapas bars and cafes. The streets don’t go predictably straight, but weave around in an interesting pattern, leaving a newcomer slightly lost. But I was thinking just how amazing it is to let yourself get lost in a city in order to learn it. When I started walking the streets at the beginning of the day, I had no sense of direction or orientation but by the end of several long hours of wandering and looking, I felt like I knew the city.
I went into a few ancient cathedrals in the historic center and wandered through many plazas and gardens, watching people in their chatter and their cerveza drinking. I soon found Malaga’s big outdoor food market Mercado Atarazanas and weaved all around its crowds and noise – people buying fish, meat, eggs, vegetables, and all the most colorful fruits. I bought a kilogram of little avocadoes and a large, ripe pomegranate, which to my splendor is native to this part of the country. Pomegranate trees line the steep walk I take every day back up to my village from the train station. I’ve often picked the fruits, but they never seem to be the perfect ripeness in the trees.
After a loop in the market I headed to the Plaza de la Merced, Malaga’s haven for counterculture residents. Here I felt quite at home, surrounded by vegetarian restaurants, little art shops and a multitude of little stores selling incense, colorful dresses and purses. Hippies with dreadlocks and long, flowing skirts hung out in the park at the center of the plaza. For a moment I thought I was back in Carrboro. There was a theater (Teatro Cervantes) just down the street At the back end of the plaza in a white corner sat the home of Pablo Picasso, which has been turned into a museum and just down the street the Museo Picasso, where a huge collection of his work can be found.
My walk naturally took me towards the Roman Theater, an ancient ruin, above which an old palace-fortress towered. The Alcazaba was the home of the city’s Muslim governors in the 11th century. The huge structure has meandering waterways, beautiful terraces full of leafy plants that rise into the heights of the mountain that it was built on. After the palace, I walked along the Paseo del Parque, a beautiful walkway shaded by tall palm trees with benches and fountains lining the path. Green parrots flew from tree to tree and the colors of the purple, pink and red flowers stood out from the greenery of the trees and bushes that lined it. Walking down the path felt like walking through a completely tree surrounded tunnel. Even above my head the trees knit together to create a shelter. The ocean sparkled in the distance; I was on my way to the beach.
La Malagueta is Malaga’s beach district and it unfolded before me as I walked out of the Paseo del Parque. The land of Malagueta juts out into the sea and the coast is lined with sandy, public beaches. I walked down the beach for a while, letting the grainy sand fill my shoes, and then took a looping path back towards the city center, passing Malaga’s Plaza de Toros, where the annual bullfights are held. One thing that I have absolutely no desire to see while I’m here in Spain is most certainly a bullfight.
I walked all the way back to the river that cuts the city into two and headed in the other direction to see the more residential area. I was pleased to find the University of Malaga here. I could tell I was in a university area because the people walked faster, holding books to their chests, and blocking out the city noise with their Ipods. I found the Center for Foreigners at which they have a great institute for learning Spanish. On the bulletin board here I found a lot of announcements of Spanish-speakers seeking English conversation partners to exchange language practice. My loop took me back to the centrally located train station and I jumped on my Renfe to return to Alora, happy now to know the city of Malaga as well. After having a month of isolation and village life here in Alora, I will be happy to move to the city for a more upbeat and exciting life. But to experience both is certainly fulfilling and irreplaceable.
The city center had a briskly modern yet historic feel to it and it pulsed with colorful and vibrating life. The historic center is full of little winding alleys that shelter quaint tapas bars and cafes. The streets don’t go predictably straight, but weave around in an interesting pattern, leaving a newcomer slightly lost. But I was thinking just how amazing it is to let yourself get lost in a city in order to learn it. When I started walking the streets at the beginning of the day, I had no sense of direction or orientation but by the end of several long hours of wandering and looking, I felt like I knew the city.
I went into a few ancient cathedrals in the historic center and wandered through many plazas and gardens, watching people in their chatter and their cerveza drinking. I soon found Malaga’s big outdoor food market Mercado Atarazanas and weaved all around its crowds and noise – people buying fish, meat, eggs, vegetables, and all the most colorful fruits. I bought a kilogram of little avocadoes and a large, ripe pomegranate, which to my splendor is native to this part of the country. Pomegranate trees line the steep walk I take every day back up to my village from the train station. I’ve often picked the fruits, but they never seem to be the perfect ripeness in the trees.
After a loop in the market I headed to the Plaza de la Merced, Malaga’s haven for counterculture residents. Here I felt quite at home, surrounded by vegetarian restaurants, little art shops and a multitude of little stores selling incense, colorful dresses and purses. Hippies with dreadlocks and long, flowing skirts hung out in the park at the center of the plaza. For a moment I thought I was back in Carrboro. There was a theater (Teatro Cervantes) just down the street At the back end of the plaza in a white corner sat the home of Pablo Picasso, which has been turned into a museum and just down the street the Museo Picasso, where a huge collection of his work can be found.
My walk naturally took me towards the Roman Theater, an ancient ruin, above which an old palace-fortress towered. The Alcazaba was the home of the city’s Muslim governors in the 11th century. The huge structure has meandering waterways, beautiful terraces full of leafy plants that rise into the heights of the mountain that it was built on. After the palace, I walked along the Paseo del Parque, a beautiful walkway shaded by tall palm trees with benches and fountains lining the path. Green parrots flew from tree to tree and the colors of the purple, pink and red flowers stood out from the greenery of the trees and bushes that lined it. Walking down the path felt like walking through a completely tree surrounded tunnel. Even above my head the trees knit together to create a shelter. The ocean sparkled in the distance; I was on my way to the beach.
La Malagueta is Malaga’s beach district and it unfolded before me as I walked out of the Paseo del Parque. The land of Malagueta juts out into the sea and the coast is lined with sandy, public beaches. I walked down the beach for a while, letting the grainy sand fill my shoes, and then took a looping path back towards the city center, passing Malaga’s Plaza de Toros, where the annual bullfights are held. One thing that I have absolutely no desire to see while I’m here in Spain is most certainly a bullfight.
I walked all the way back to the river that cuts the city into two and headed in the other direction to see the more residential area. I was pleased to find the University of Malaga here. I could tell I was in a university area because the people walked faster, holding books to their chests, and blocking out the city noise with their Ipods. I found the Center for Foreigners at which they have a great institute for learning Spanish. On the bulletin board here I found a lot of announcements of Spanish-speakers seeking English conversation partners to exchange language practice. My loop took me back to the centrally located train station and I jumped on my Renfe to return to Alora, happy now to know the city of Malaga as well. After having a month of isolation and village life here in Alora, I will be happy to move to the city for a more upbeat and exciting life. But to experience both is certainly fulfilling and irreplaceable.
Dipping into the Spanish Life, One Toe at a Time
The village of Alora continues to give me a special warmth upon coming back to it, no matter where it is that I’ve been. My daily routine has brought me into a special familiarity with the village people and the daily greetings and small conversations are always a pleasure to have. I go each evening to the Arab fortress to watch the sun set over the valley and it has yet to fail to astonish me. I’ve been visiting the town’s library often, on the second floor of the Casa de Cultura, and reading newspapers and checking out books in Spanish. Most of the time when I’m there, the noise from above, where the music school is, pours in to the library giving it a casual and open feeling. Each evening I go on an intoxicating run over the mountain that overlooks the town and the valley below. I’m happy to say, I’m not the only one that runs in this town, although most of the others seem to be old men. The coming of dusk seems to correspond well with the finishing stretch of my run and as the evening lights of the town flicker on I head out to buy ingredients to make dinner. My evenings have often been quiet, consisting of a meal for one, a glass of red wine, a Joni Mitchell soundtrack and the reading of Hemingway. I’m savoring the book like a piece of dark chocolate because its content is so alive here in this country. I’m almost finished with it and wish Hemingway had written it as a thousand-page novel instead.
It has now been exactly a month since I set foot in this country of Spain, that for so long was just an abstract idea in my mind. For so many months preceding my arrival here, I fantasized about a place and a life I knew nothing about and created worlds in my head about what my life here would be like. Former participants in this program bestowed advice on me about what it’d be like to live in an Andalucían village, friends encouraged me to embrace the solitude that would come with living alone in a small town, and my family told me it’d be good for me to try something foreign on my own. Here seems the appropriate time to insert a “but,” where reality actually cracks the foundation of the fantasy. But in this particular instance, everything I’d imagined about living in a sleepy, southern village actually holds true. And all of the advice I received about making a life from scratch on my own has been guiding me and making it all just a little bit easier.
There’s still a small element of impermanence in my mind when it comes to this village because I’m moving out of my current apartment and taking the leap to live in the city of Malaga, so I’ve had trouble creating a space to call home here in Alora, as in I haven’t yet actually cooked a meal nor bought permanent things like sugar, flour and laundry detergent. A home that lacks such articles of life, often doesn’t feel lived in at all, and that’s a good way of describing my place in Alora – kind of like a keeping ground for my things and a place to take a hot shower and sleep in a warm bed, but not much more.
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