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.

Some evenings I go on walks or hikes with my friend Muhammad, who’s a Moroccan immigrant and one of two friends that I’ve made here in Alora. He’s 23 years old (his birthday was just last week) and is the oldest of six kids born to a village family in Morocco. What he has to say about his country and its rulers is appalling and the distribution of wealth seems completely undistributed. For this he fled his country to come to Spain illegally in order to make money to take back to his family. He told me of his voyage, a clandestine and incredibly dehumanizing trip, that consisted of his swimming across the ocean from the tip of Morocco to Gibraltar, going days without food or water, and not being able to utter a word of Spanish. He was thankfully taken in by a young Spanish man in Sevilla who gave him a place to stay, food and then enabled his trip to Alora, where Muhammad was reunited with his uncle, who’s been living and working here for twelve years. He’s a wonderful young man, a devout Muslim who fasted all through Ramadan and didn’t understand my own explanation when I told him that my Muslim background kept me from being observant. He’d never tasted wine or pork in his life and he goes on two-hour runs every day, saying it keeps him connected to his god. It’s been interesting spending time with a person of faith who’s not a Christian, as I’ve been exposed to the latter often back home, but have never really seen the Islamic side of spirituality. They seem to me similar in a lot of ways. The way Muhammad worships the earth and everything nature has to offer, the way he talks about life and meaning, the way he seems to explain everything echoes in my head of the things I’ve heard from spiritual people from the United States. It makes me think we’re not as different, even in our most personal beliefs, as we’re made to think.

Flores, my other friend in Alora, has been a wonderful companion and an incredibly helpful local to show me around the town. She’s around 30 years old, but has the head and heart of a 20 year old. She left Alora when she was only 18, dying to get out of her small town, and moved to Germany and then England. She’s lived there for the last ten years and speaks immaculate English, German and some Italian. She then literally traveled around the world for nine or so months and then came back to Alora to live with her parents and figure out her career and the rest of her life. She’s been so open and honest and it’s been wonderful to have someone to share my thoughts with.

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.

After a lot of thinking and searching (I must have seen 15 apartments in the last week) I realized that a better option for me at this point, both financially and mentally, would be to live in a booming, young city with students around my age, and to commute to my village to teach. That way I think I’ll get the best of both worlds and the option to spend my time in whichever one I want. Malaga is also more convenient for traveling, for internet access, for writing opportunities and for language immersion. I found an adorable little apartment on the fifth floor of a building that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. It’s only a five minute walk from the train station, where I’d be taking the train to Alora each work day. I’ll be living with two others: a 20-year-old girl from France named Clare, who’s in the ERASMUS program (Europe’s version of study abroad) at the University of Malaga, and a 25-year-old Spanish guy who’s in Malaga doing an internship at a law firm. I’m happy to be sharing a living space with young people with similar goals and aspirations, as well as people who will be speaking only Spanish. If there’s a single concrete goal for me from this experience in Spain, it’s to liquefy my Spanish speaking ability so that it pours out like a running stream, rather than a stumbling and rugged mountain path. I watch more television than I ever have in my life, trying to immerse myself in the language, I try to strike up conversations with strangers just to practice my speaking and my confidence, and I just checked out Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from the public library in Spanish and am reading it. Of course, movies dubbed in Spanish are one of my new favorite pastimes as well.