Beery

After battling the transportation repercussions of clouds over Philadelphia, flying seven hours over the Atlantic, and busing nearly three hundred miles through the dusty, lonely terrain of the Spanish dehesa, Levi arrived Wednesday at the little bus station in Zafra. After getting his bags unpacked, we spent the evening exploring our little town and eating a great local meal—ham, cheese, more ham, some more ham, steak, and beers—at a restaurant near the Parador, the fifteenth-century-castle-turned-five-star-hotel. Afterward we wandered back to the castle for drinks at the Irish pub beneath it.

The place is, on the surface, exactly how it sounds. Paddy Virutas, it’s called. Guinness signs decorate the entryway, and beer logo flags are strung across the ceiling. The castle lends its striking medieval feel to the little pub; a vaulted ceiling arches dramatically over our heads, constructed of ancient wood beams, and an enormous stone fireplace presides over the scene, overlooked by a small balcony lined with worn barstools. Levi was ready for a good beer after a long day of travel, and I was dying for something tastier than the weak Spanish lagers I’d been living on for three weeks, so we were excited by the distinctly Irish scenery of this place and ordered a round of Guinness.

But heartbreak of heartbreaks, the Spanish have gone to such lengths in their love of weak, fizzy beer as to ruin Guinness! What arrived at our table was not the creamy brown elixir I’ve been craving, but an amber-colored, Guinness-flavored soda pop, as heavily carbonated as sad Cruzcampo, the Spanish Budweiser. It’s got a kick of that warm, chocolaty flavor in the finish, but all the smooth creaminess of true Guinness is lost. It seems the company knows the Spanish market better than I would have liked.

As Levi was gasping at the abomination in our glasses, I noticed an enormous Union Jack strung over the back bar, reigning over the Guinness and Murphy’s taps, the Celtic hurling posters, and the shamrocks carved into the woodwork.

But despite the near miss of this little place, it’s wonderful to be back where we belong—together in an “Irish” pub.

•••

The following morning marked the beginning of my unexpected career as an English teacher. El Instituto de Educación Secundaria Cristo del Rosario is a public secondary school north of the heart of Zafra, and is home to 12-16 year olds, with an optional additional two years for college-bound kids. It’s a sunny, colorful place where impressive student artwork adorns the hallways and glass doors open onto tiled patios and the low Extremeña mountains beyond. The fairgrounds are nearby, so the school was shut down for the duration of the feria due to the parents’ discomfort at the thought of their children walking through that utter shitshow on the way to class. So I was off the hook till Thursday, and even then only one of my lessons actually took place.
I remember what it was life was like inside a seventh-grade Spanish classroom. We didn’t have the experience to successfully converse in the language, and it was far cooler to refuse than to mess up in front of your friends. So I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised to discover that trying to get a bunch of Spanish seventh graders to speak English was largely impossible on the first try. A couple of obvious overachievers were happy to fight their way through their limited verb tenses to tell me about themselves, but the rest kept insisting (in Spanish) that they just didn’t understand me, and a few entirely ignored me.

This group of ten first-year students is a class I will have three times a week, in their English, Arts, and Social Studies classes. They’re a group who have tested into (likely at their parents’ insistence) bilingual coursework, so in addition to their English class, their Arts and Social Studies classes are supposedly taught in English. I learned Thursday that this is not, strictly speaking, what is actually happening. The Arts teacher speaks solid English and was eager to use me as a reference to improve his own grammar and vocabulary, but he seemed to surrender when confronted with confused little faces and switched to Spanish without much provocation. I foresee this being a problem in my other classes as well. I have one class with each of the three different non-bilingual first-year groups, three with the second-year bilingual section, and one each with two fourth-year non-bilingual sections. Hopefully I’ll be able to have some of these kids comfortable in at least trying to speak by the end of the term.

•••

My $100 visa is only good for 30 days (thanks, EU) so I have to get a foreigner ID number and card to make my stay legal and receive payment from my school. The nearest police station that handles these affairs is in Almendralejo, a 45-minute bus ride from Zafra. So Levi and I took a little day trip on Friday, only to discover that the police station is open for two hours every day (thanks, siesta), that we had missed it by fifteen minutes, and that there is absolutely nothing to do in Almendralejo while you wait five hours for the next bus. Bars it is.

We ducked into a dodgy little place near the train station, a hole-in-the-wall with dirty windows and dusty tables. I love places like this because they’re the same in every country—all they offer is cheap beer and good people-watching, and I require nothing more. We order two tubos (tubes, literally—tall, skinny cylinders of Cruzcampo) and take a seat in a corner. A thin, long-haired hipster type, maybe Thai or something in the neighborhood, stood at the noisy slot machine that decorates every Spanish pub, unsmiling. About halfway through our beers the thing lets out an ecstatic squeal and starts spitting out hundreds of coins. He’s won around €50. He lights a victory cigarette and smokes it coolly as the change comes pouring out. He bags it up and leaves. After finishing our beers and moving down the road, we see him ducking into another pub—he skips the bar entirely and moves straight to the machine.

We find another pub and discover that Murphy’s Irish Red is pretty good here and that Paulaner is freaking delicious—smooth and honeyed. So there’s a success.

We’re exhausted by the time we get Zafra, deciding on the walk home to go immediately to bed. It’s around 11 and we’ve had a day full of nothing but boredom and beer, and are suffering the resulting lethargy. But as we approach our door, we’re drawn in by the lively buzz of the Plaza Grande. The bars, closed for the last two weeks to avoid competition with the feria, have flung their doors open at last, and on this Friday night they are overflowing. We can’t help it; we find a dark dive and have a drink. We spend a half hour or so watching a rerun of a soccer match (Spain vs. Lithuania) with the bartender, then get some delicious artichoke concoction from the pizzeria, which is apparently the site of teenage date night.

Life here is better with a partner. A small town can be a lonely place, especially in this family-centric culture. The world stops for siesta, so I had been spending three or four hours of every day wandering empty streets or sitting in an empty apartment. I was always the only solo drinker in cafes and pubs, the only lone shopper or walker; activities often carried out by one person on her own in the US are things to be done in groups in Spain—personal space and personal time don’t seem to be concerns, and the attention I already attract by my foreigner looks was probably compounded by the fact that I was, strangely, alone. Zafra is a better place now.