verano

I’ll start with apologies. I have indeed fallen off the face of the earth this summer. No one likes excuses but I’ll enumerate mine nonetheless. Much of this summer was spent hosting friends, family, and couchsurfers, and much more of it was spent on the road. Those rare days alone in Zafra were dedicated to teaching classes, reading, studying two languages (more on that later) and sitting in front of the fan moaning about the heat. Now that the visitors are gone, the travel funds have dried up, and the heat is waning, I will put it off no longer.

Levi and Carlos standing guard at Monsaraz

Already these trips are a blur, stories and images bleeding into one another and confusing my ever-struggling memory. Traveling southern Europe is a whirl of cathedrals and Roman bridges, vineyards and crumbling castles. But in June we took a weekend road trip to Portugal with our friend Carlos MacFarland, an Irish/Argentinean English teacher who has lived here in Spain for last few years.We made stops in villages and one 7,000 year old Neolithic monument along the way, ending our day on a beach on the western coast, where Levi and I slept in the back of the van and Carlos threw down some blankets and spent the night on the sand. 

7,000 years old stone circle near Évora

At around 3am, the bar further up the beach came alive. As we were packing up and heading out five hours later, the place was just dying down. A group of friends, dressed in full club regalia, was ordering a nightcap and a round of coffee at the café next door. I’ve never learned to keep up with the parties of the Latin world and, listening to their still-energetic laughter, I felt more certain than ever that I never will.

Mackenzie and I in Sevilla

In July, my parents and my sister came for a 9-day visit. It was wonderful to see them, to introduce them to our friends and show them around our town; having them here relieved the homesickness I hadn’t even realized I had. They rented a car and the five of us crammed into it nearly every day, racing off to various corners of Iberia. We spent a day touring castles within a 30-mile radius of Zafra, an endeavor which, thanks to the glamour-hungry nobility of medieval of medieval Extremadura, can amount to a very, very long day. We spent a day in Sevilla, sipping sangria beneath the Giralda and visiting Columbus’ tomb in the jaw-dropping Gothic cathedral. We lie on a beach in Huelva and sat drinking beer in the waves. We saw the Roman amphitheater and art museum in Merida and the ancient and pristine village of Monsaraz in the hills of eastern Portugal.

Mom, Mackenzie, and Dad at the Roman temple in Évora

In Évora, otherwise an elegant and cheerful Portuguese Roman city, we toured a chapel decorated entirely with human bones. In the 16th century, a real buzzkill of a monk decided his brothers weren’t giving enough thought to their own mortality. So he dug up 5000 skeletons from a few dozen churchyards and dismantled them, arranging their skulls in rows on the walls, lining the support beams of the room with femurs, humeri, and ribs. Apparently concerned that the message wasn’t clear enough, he left two of the skeletons, one of which had belonged to a small child, in tact and fully dressed in rotting tunics, hanging on chains from the ceiling. The entryway is engraved with the warning “Nós ossos que aquí estamos, pelos vossos esperamos.” Assuredly the most morbid tongue-twister ever conceived, it translates roughly as “We bones here lie, awaiting yours.” I'll spare you the photos.

The Rock of gibraltar

We passed one appropriately cool and rainy afternoon in Gibraltar, one of the last little holdouts of the British empire. It’s a surreal place, utterly unnatural. The territory is cut off from Spain by a runway, so before we entered, we had to stand behind a barrier as two planes landed not 200 feet from us. After crossing the runway (yes, walking on foot across a runway) we entered a town that does, indeed, look like a British tourist trap, save for the palm trees, Spanish skin, and bilingual restaurant signs. We ate fish and chips and drank dark beer at an oak-walled pub. We walked through tacky gift shops peddling royal wedding memorabilia and red phone booth key chains and visited an Anglican church decorated with an oddly aggressive nautical theme and countless Union Jacks. 

Mackenzie in Gibraltar (UK!)

On our way up to the Rock, we lost our way in what I suppose I’d have to call “real Gibraltar,” a disastrous maze of broken streets where trash spills into the sidewalks and the colonial language cedes ground to the native. No Kate and William commemorative dishes here. Just as we’re beginning to feel sufficiently disoriented, we start seeing the monkeys. They’re just right there, hanging out on the walls, watching you climb as they clean each other’s fur. They’re sort of the national symbol of this teeny little country, even occupying a spot on the money. There’s a legend that claims that as long as they’re around, the British will keep their hold on Gibraltar. It’s such an ingrained idea that Winston Churchill actually restocked the place with monkeys when their numbers appeared to be dwindling. As we climb through their ranks, the low mountains of Africa come into view from across the strait. 

One of the barbary macaques of the Rock.

While the family was here we moved out of our apartment and into the one above it. It’s a brighter, more comfortable place with a terrace that overlooks two ancient churches and a sea of terra cotta rooftops. Our first night here we threw a party for my family and our Spanish and German friends, and after a few drinks, everyone on the terrace somehow spoke the same language. 

With the McDermotts back in America, we felt the travel bug again and at the end of June we loaded our bags back into Carlos’ van, this time setting off north to France. This journey is a story of its own, and I’ll tell it soon. For now, suffice it to say that I am a seasoned camper and, should I ever have to live as a vagrant, I’ve got at least a basic education in gypsy survival. 

We had barely returned from France when our friend Remedios asked us to join her on a three-day trip to Almería, the southeastern coastal desert where many of the spaghetti westerns, including The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, were filmed. Couldn’t say no to that one, so we loaded up the tent again. We went to Cabo de Gata, a nature reserve dotted with villages in the style of northern Africa and frequented by a rather Californian crowd. Dozens of little coves are carved into the coastline, creating small, isolated beaches and warm little bays. We snorkeled around the reefs just offshore and followed the little jellyfish around (we watched quite a few people pay the price for that ill-advised activity and counted ourselves lucky). Every night after the sun went down, Reme curled up in the backseat of her station wagon and we set up our tent right on the beach and fell asleep to the sound of the sea. On one particularly beautiful night, we laid out our sleeping bags under the stars and were just drifting off when something that looked startlingly like a scorpion crawled across Levi’s foot. We set up the tent faster than we ever had. 

Katie at the Roman Theater

Not long after returning from Almería, my friend Katie paid us a visit. I had been feeling so lonely for my IU loves, and having her here was exactly what I needed. Levi graciously offered to teach my classes for me for the whole week, so Katie and I were able to spend day after day lying around on the terrace and at the pool, drinking the questionable homemade cocktails we always threw together in college and catching up on each other’s lives. I don’t have any close girlfriends in Spain, and I can only ask Levi to participate in so much female-specific tête-à-tête. Thus, plenty of reminiscing and chattering ensued. It was fantastic week.

One night during Katie’s visit, a young couple we’ve gotten to know this summer invited to Mérida for the annual Roman theater festival. We sat on the rocky benches of the thousand-year-old amphitheater and watched a beautiful rendition of Antigone. It was one of the most memorable experiences I've had in Spain.

Antigone at the Roman Theater

After Katie left, we had a sudden influx of classes. A disconcerting number of people failed their oral exam at the language school in the spring, and come August everyone was suddenly and frantically preparing for the September make-up exam. Now the exams are over and the school year has started, and we find ourselves in that strange period between the beginning of the academic year and the end of the fair. This fair (described here) is the most important event of the year in Zafra, and for the month before it, no one bothers to do anything at all. Classes are relaxed to the point of nominal and nothing beyond the absolutely obligatory is even suggested. When the fair opens in the last week of September, classes stop, work stops, life in general stops. So until October, when the fair closes down and we both get back to work, it’s a quiet season for us. 

Faced with all this down time, we finally started dealing with the issue of what to do with ourselves when our jobs end in June. We had been talking about southeast Asia for a while, so Levi sent an e-mail to a friend of a friend who operates an English school in southern Thailand. We researched the place, and it sounds perfect. We both applied and will interview in the next few days. If all goes as hoped, we’ll be on our way in less than a year from now! Always over-eager about things like this, I’ve started studying the Thai language. This script is difficult and the tones are still escaping me, but I’m feeling pretty good about it. I’ve also been brushing up on my more academic Spanish by reading complicated pieces of literature, so my brain is awash with foreign syllables and baffling idioms. Three weeks remain of the lazy Spanish life, cooking elaborate meals simply because I’ve got the time, watching all five seasons of The Wire and, whenever the languor momentarily subsides, keeping this thing up to date. Hasta pronto, สวัสดี

wounded gatos

It’s been a long day. My head is aching with hunger and the glare of the Spanish sun as I stumble into the house. Levi’s on the couch. He greets me and then sinks back into the cushions. There’s concern in his eyes.

-I had a weird moment today, he says. His fingers find their way to his hair and tug, the way they tend to when he’s thinking something through. 

-It could be weirder in my head than it really is...But I’m walking to the grocery store and I pass some dumpsters in this roundabout. This guy comes up with a bookbag. He lifts up a trash bag out of the dumpster and carefully puts the bookbag back in. Then he puts the trash on top of it, and he runs away. I go to check it out. I open the backpack and- 

He pauses, his hands still in his hair, his eyes glazed as if he’s replaying the memory to make sure he’s got it right. 

- and it’s full of hair. Thick, black hair. Full to the top. I mean, it could have been a doll, but it was just so...thick. I freaked out a little; I just put it back in the dumpster and walked away.

My appetite’s gone.

-....hair?

-It was hair.

-Was the bag...heavy?

-A little, yeah.

-Are you sure he ran? He didn’t just sort of jog away?

-No, he kinda took off.

It’s bizarre, but of course it’s nothing. We decide to let it go. But my stomach’s in knots, and I can tell it’s still on Levi’s mind. It just doesn’t feel right.

We take a walk. At this point I’m obsessing.

-Ninety-nine percent chance it’s nothing, I say.

-It’s nothing. Of course it’s nothing.

I can’t leave it alone. It's just too bizarre and too creepy and frankly, intriguing not to investigate. As absurd as it seems, we turn around and start down Levi's path to the supermarket.

My imagination calms down a bit when I see the area around the dumpster. It’s an open roundabout in full view of at least a hundred apartment-complex windows. This wouldn’t be the place for that outrageous worst-case scenario whose visions I’ve been repressing.

But someone’s returned here. The bookbag, left on top of the pile in Levi’s hurry to get away from it, has been reburied under bags of trash. Levi pulls it out, a dirty, worn old backpack, and unzips it. My stomach muscles relax. Having never played with Barbie dolls or worn witch’s hair on Halloween, he’s simply failed to recognize a wig composed of those frizzy, ever-tangled threads of polyester. He shakes the bag around, revealing what appears to be just more trash in a plastic bag. My childish scary-movie chill subsides.

-That’s good enough for me, I say. Despite the apparently innocent nature of this bag, something just doesn’t feel right and I’m ready to leave.

But as we walk away, we’re both still wondering. Why would the guy run away? Why hide it under trash bags instead of just tossing it in? And why return to rebury it?

The curiosity is now stronger than the nerves. We turn back. Levi opens the bag, this time turning it upside down and shaking it.

I can’t help but laugh at how silly we’ve been. It’s just someone’s stash. A glass jar about a third full of weed has fallen out. Some teenager just dumped off his stash, afraid his mom would find it. Paranoid, he ran away when he saw Levi and came back to make sure it was still hidden from view.

But Levi’s still shaking the bag, and a brick falls out. Then another and another, then four or five smaller ones. It’s hash. I’m no market expert, but this is hundreds of dollars in hash.

We both just freeze, staring at the visual evidence of this ludicrous situation into which our curiosity and overactive imaginations have thrust us. It’s broad daylight. Here we are, two foreigners hunched over a dumpster in a highly populated area, two bricks of hash in his hand and five or six more and a jar of weed scattered across the top of the pile of trash. The dealer came back once; he knew his goods had been disturbed before their intended recipient found them. He had been watching. He was likely still watching. And all these windows...so recently comforting, they now looked sinister, each one obscuring a would-be good Samaritan watching the scene from above, misinterpreting the role of the foreigners at the dumpster. And that guy, this clumsy dealer...that guy's around here somewhere. 

-What do we do? Levi asks, a little numbly, turning a brick over in his hand.

-We need to go. We need to get out of here.

We all but bolt, leaving the bookbag open and the bricks scattered across the top of the trash bags. A man a house or two away watches us as we hurry off, pulling out his cell phone as we pass him. We take the long way home.

primavera

Spring here is brief. For three or four weeks it wakes up the palms and calls the people back to the patios, then it disappears into the dry heat of summer. We’re at the end of it now; midday temperatures already illicit heavy moans of “Ay, que calor” from the shoppers on Calle Sevilla as they retreat into the air conditioned stores.

The better the weather, the more cancellations, so we spend hours unemployed in the crowded plaza bars, drenched in sun and iced red wine, listening to the French and German of passing tourists, migrating from table to table as friends come and go.

One day we’re sitting on the patio of a favorite café when one of the plaza barflies joins us. Juan’s in his sixties, or maybe just looks it after years of Spanish sun and cigarettes. He has a spectacular bird’s nest of a beard and deep black wrinkles on his leathery face. His eyes are bloodshot from the joints he chainsmokes.

We’ve met several times, but he asks our names, having remembered us only as ‘los americanos.’ He calls over a younger, more clear-eyed friend who introduces himself as Ignacio. Ignacio is the sober voice of reason in this relationship; he spends the next hour scolding Juan for his often nationalistic and occasionally racist tirades.

Juan has a problem with everyone, but never a problem that can’t be solved with another drink or another joint. He can’t stand these Zafra folks with their big-city arrogance; his neighboring village of 300 people is where the ‘real Spain’ lies. Then he points out his apartment, about 50 feet from our table. He says Levi’s not handsome enough to have a redheaded girlfriend, then demands that everyone at the table tell Levi how gorgeous he is. When Ignacio consents and tells Levi he is indeed guapo, Juan laughs and calls him a fag. Then suddenly he’s at war again, telling us all that Ignacio is no fag, and that none of us should be calling him that. Every time his blood seems to rise, he disappears behind his glass for a moment or two and emerges, calm and smiling.

After a couple of beers, he begins an assault on our ringless fingers. ‘You’re living in sin!’ he insists, Cruzcampo sloshing in his glass as his arms wave angrily about. ‘Aren’t your parents angry? It’s a sin! You have to get married right away! You’re living in sin!’

He settles back into his chair, his apparent anger suddenly evaporated. He takes a long drag off his joint and cracks a mischievous smile as he exhales a cloud of smoke. ‘I’m only kidding.’ He puts down the beer and fixes his eyes on mine, suddenly a vision of earnestness and wisdom.

‘Gods don’t exist.’

His seriousness passes quickly, and now he’s on about immigrants, particularly those from Africa. He doesn’t care for those Gypsies either. Ignacio is shaking his head at us in embarrassed apology.

Juan’s curious about life in the United States, and asks a few questions about the day-to-day experience of Americans. ‘What about safety? Do you lock your doors at night?’ I tell him it depends on where you live, but generally people in the US do lock their doors nowadays.

‘I bet that’s because of all the blacks.’

That’s it for us, and Ignacio’s had his fill too. He invites us back to his house for a drink with some friends, and we leave Juan to another table of friends.

•••••

We’ve hit Semana Santa, the week-long Easter celebration typical in the Latin world. A friend tells me that this is the one time of year the otherwise only nominally Catholic Spanish become true devotees, weeping as processions of white-robed men carry a wooden body of Christ though the streets. She also warned me to be prepared for what, to my American sensibilities, is going to look strikingly like a KKK rally. Lovely. Potentially offensive photos to follow.

portañol

We were deep in the planning stages of moving to Istanbul—talking to a friend who’s teaching there, looking into housing and work and saving up for plane tickets and new luggage. We’d even taken a few exploratory stabs at the Turkish language. The plan was to show up in the city in June and hope for the best.

One day after school a couple weeks ago, I was rambling about my students to Levi again, bubbling with excitement over something that had finally clicked in the little brains of my first-years. Two of the girls had that day been giggling to me about boys they liked and another had said, in perfect English, “We love you Savi.”

When I finally stop my gushing, Levi says, “Sav, I’ve never seen you this happy. Do you want to stay here?”

It just felt right, and by the end of the week we had both extended our job commitments an extra year. We’ll be here until June 2012. Both of us love this little place, and our leaving felt rushed and premature. There’s so much more of Spain I want to see, there’s more of the language I want to master, we have great jobs and friends and a nice apartment. We weren’t ready to leave.

(NOTE: This gives all of you one whole extra year to come visit me. DO IT.)

So with the money no longer set aside for Turkey, we bought bus tickets to Lisbon. We couchsurfed with a guy who lives in a trendy downtown district and spent four days sightseeing, drinking port, and eating fish and pastries. Lisbon is, with very few close rivals, the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen. Downtown sits just uphill from the waterfront and the city radiates behind it across a series of steep hills. Trolleys haul tourists and commuters up and down these brutal inclines through narrow, ancient stone streets. At the pinnacles of the highest hills the view is stunning; the dozens of levels at which the place is built create layer upon layer of terra cotta rooftops, white stucco, and entire buildings tiled in brilliant greens, blues, pinks, and yellows, set against the waters of the Rio Tejo and the Atlantic beyond. From the lowest points, the dizzying view up through these layers culminates at the Castelo de São Jorge, a Moorish castle built on the highest of the hills.

On our second day, we took a forty-minute train ride to Sintra, a ritzy town-turned-tourist-trap on the Atlantic coast. Moorish rulers, British aristocrats, and Portuguese royalty have all occupied this far-flung suburb and made some amazing and bizarre marks on it. The Moors left one of the biggest castles I’ve ever seen, a ninth-century crumbling masterpiece of turrets and ramparts and an enormous curtain wall.

Atop a neighboring hill is the Palacio da Pena, the Disney princess palace built by a bored king in the mid-nineteenth century. Because he and his wife couldn’t agree on the style, the place is a confused jumble of the round and the square, the Arabic and the Romantic and the Iberian, with splashes of all the colors of the rainbow. It only served as the royal family’s summer home for forty years before revolution drove the monarchs out of Portugal. Now it’s crawling with tourists, all eager to see this strange and gorgeous monument to the powers of excessive cash.

By Day Three we were exhausted from all the hills and decided to give our legs a bit of a rest, taking the metro to two of the outlying neighborhoods of Lisbon. To the northeast sits the site of the 1998 World’s Fair. It’s all glass buildings and metal modern art sculptures and skyrides overlooking the river and the gardens. After walking along the pier for a while and posing for some pictures with some chatty Brazilians, we took a bus to the far opposite side of waterfront Lisbon, Belém.

We went to a modern art museum and an old monestery before seeking out our real objective, Pastéis de Belém. It’s a famous café and bakery that’s been open since the 1830s and is known for having the best pastries in Portugal. Pastéis is the Portuguese for ‘cakes,’ although I’d be more apt to describe these things as pies, or as HOLYSHITDELICIOUS. They’re crunchy little pastry baskets filled with a fluffy custard that’s been torched on the top like créme brulee. In short, they warrant their reputation, as well as the mile-long line we braved to get to them.

Our last day in Lisboa was Fat Tuesday, Carnaval. We went to the central square and watched the parade, getting ourselves good and doused in confetti and streamers before the rain came, sending us back to the warmth of our host’s apartment with a cheap bottle of port.

It was a perfect vacation, but I was excited to be back in Spain. I love my life here. I feel so lucky to have landed in such happy cirumstances in such a wonderful place. I’m in no hurry to leave.

busysorta

Levi has a new job at a language center in our neighborhood, so I’ve taken on a few of the private lessons he had to give up. I’ve also taken on quite a few new lessons, presumably New Year’s Resolution cases. So now, in addition to my three four-hour days at the high school, I have ten hours a week of private lessons. No, a 21-hour week is by no means strenuous, but my classes stretch across eight to twelve hours each day and are bookended by racing around town to various locations, and at the end of the day I’m actually feeling tired.

Three of my new students are teachers with high levels of English; this is the easiest ‘work’ I have ever done. They’ve all requested simple conversation practice, so the job is to pick a topic and spend an hour bullshitting about it, explaining idioms and unfamiliar vocabulary along the way. All of them are interesting, intelligent, friendly people, and I actually feel a bit guilty taking money for having an enjoyable conversation.

I inherited ten-year-old María and twelve-year-old Álvaro from Levi’s class schedule. Both are smart, curious kids and who are bored senseless in their English classes at school. The English curriculum is the same for every year of school; it’s only the pace that changes, and that only slightly. I recently discovered that the tables of contents in the books of all eight levels of English at my high school are identical; the only difference is that the lower levels don’t make it beyond the halfway point of the textbook. So for a motivated, intelligent student, English class is mostly verbatim repetition of the same handful of topics for years on end. Neither of these kids want to review anything from class; “It’s justo soo easy,” María always moans when I ask about her homework. So I’m picking up where Levi left off, teaching them verb tenses and vocabulary that many of my seventeen-year-olds wouldn’t understand. They’re both sweet and eager to learn, and I love watching those little light bulbs go on.

Marta and Rita are both fourteen and far behind in their English. Marta is friendly and interested in putting forth some effort, but Rita reminds me of my oh-so-pleasant self at that age, scowling when asked direct questions, checking her cell phone incessantly, and patently refusing to do any of the studying I ask of her. I always leave her house feeling immense remorse for my own teenage behavior. Sorry, Mom and Dad…

The strangest addition to my schedule came just last week, when the gym teacher at school approached me about a job opening for which I was literally the only available and suitable person in town. His son and said son’s girlfriend run a daycare center together and were looking for a young woman to come twice a week and just speak English to the kids—teach them ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’ and colors, maybe send them home singing American nursery songs. It sounded hilarious, so I gave him my number.

So I come in on Wednesday for what proves to be one of the funniest hours of my life. I walk into the place to find twelve two-year-olds seated at tiny tables in tiny chairs, their hands folded politely in their laps and their eyes searching me expectantly. Carlos and his girlfriend Mavel walk around to each of them, asking them to introduce themselves, but only a couple of the bravest souls can bring themselves to say their names. I tell them my name and say ‘Hello!’ as I wave to each of them. They’re astonished; never in their lives have they heard something so strange. Noelia, the boldest of the group, gasps and asks me in a squeaky Spanish, “Savannah, why do you talk like that?!” Mavel, suppressing her own laughter as I’m roaring with mine, explains that I’m from a different country, a faraway place with a different language. Noelia can’t believe it. She doesn’t take her eyes off me again for the next hour.

We pass out cardstock pictures of beach balls to fingerpaint yellow, hoping to begin teaching them colors. I walk around with the fingerpaint, demanding the word ‘yellow’ of them before I let them dip cautious little hands into the paint. Most of them produce various adorable mispronunciations and giggles. I get to Marta, one of the youngest of the class, and ask her to say ‘yellow;’ she instantly bursts into terrified tears.

Later we sit on the floor together and I teach them ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’ and ‘stand’ and ‘sit.’ Three of the girls have adopted me and are climbing over each other, each hoping to be the one in my lap. Mónica perches on my knee and plays with my hair, her gaze transfixed and as she runs her fingers through it, barely blinking. “What long hair you have!” she says with the kind of amazement usually inspired by miracles and double rainbows.

As I’m leaving, Noelia races up to me and begs me to stay. Mavel tells her that I’ll be back on Friday. The little girl tilts her pigtailed head to the side and looks up at her teacher. As if explaining something very simple to someone very stupid, she slowly says, “But we’re playing right now.”

••••

My kids at school are slowly but surely chipping away at my “I don’t speak Spanish” charade. When I arrive in class this morning with my first year bilingual group, I was instantly subjected to a carefully-planned attack, naturally all in Spanish. Each of five or six of them had a detailed piece of evidence against me.

“I heard you speaking Spanish on your mobile once.”
“I asked you a question in Spanish once and you answered me.”
“You said ‘hola’ to my mom on the street!”

It was only a matter of time, I suppose. Small town.

altered

Try as we might, we couldn’t make Morocco happen. Overpriced hostels, no available Couchsurf hosts, and I was coming down with a nasty sinus infection or something. When we discovered the outrageous hassle and expense that would accompany the process of obtaining permission to reenter the country (since I’m still awaiting my residence card), we decided to let this one go and opted instead for a quiet weekend in Sevilla. I adored the place when I visited during my France-Spain jaunt with Lindsey, and Levi had yet to see it.

Sevilla is a lovely city, full of that old European romance and charm that rarely exists beyond the silver screen. It’s the kind of place I always pictured when I was entirely ignorant of what really exists in Europe: colorful buildings lining a wide river, church steeples, elegant bridges and busy sidewalk cafes. The whole city has a romantic, dream-like quality to it. It’s a hard place not to love.

It is also, however, the most unnavigable city I’ve ever visited. Streets are born and die within a block, and those that eek out some extra life invariable bear six or seven different names, another conquistador hero honored in every half kilometer. We struggle for hours to find our hostel and the various tourist spots, and it’s only by accident that we eventually stumble upon the shopping district we’ve been looking for.

Nighttime find us weaving through those contortionist streets in search of the small, dark sort of bar we’re always drawn to. We pass the crowded corner pubs full of study-abroaders and the techno-pounding clubs with velvet-roped queues until we come across the perfect place, a dark wooden spot that can only be described as miniscule. Five or six barstools crowd around an oak bar barely long enough to accommodate three. The place has a delicate, Victorian sort of décor; burgundy stripes accent the baseboards and sepia-toned photos hang in ornate frames on the walls. It all clashes oddly with the body-builder bartender, whose immense bulk is complicating his movement behind the tiny bar. He’s speaking English to the only customer, a rotund Arab man in a grubby grey sweat suit. We order a round of beers and tapas and listen in for a while. Before long, we’re consulted on an English word and join the conversation.

The customer introduces himself as Ahmed Rassad, which he explains is Arabic for “Servant of the Most Merciful Allah.” He’s Kuwaiti, a well-traveled, educated thirty-something, eager to hear about our home and even more eager to tell us about his.

He tells that as far as the Middle East goes, Kuwait is a reasonably progressive, liberal country. Compared to their Saudi neighbors, the very thought of whom send Ahmed into scowls, they’re practically Utopian. Although the social influence of conservative Islam has tightened in recent years, women are still treated fairly, non-Muslims are not persecuted, and the constitutional monarchy is largely secular. Gays, however, are still driven underground, and although there is a lively secret gay scene, homosexuality is socially unacceptable. He scans our faces as he shares this information, carefully reading our reactions.

Once we’ve told him enough about ourselves for his comfort, he dives right in.

“You want to know why my country hates America?”

I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count. Frustration with the United States runs so deep that no one can resist once they’ve learned I’m American. They feel me out for a few minutes, comfort themselves that I’m not a bullheaded nationalist, and then whip out that too-familiar question. My answer is always yes, so I’ve learned some interesting, albeit discouraging, things.

Spain hates us because we supported their fascist dictatorship. France hates us because our culture has infiltrated and overpowered theirs. Great Britain hates us because they feel we use our ‘special relationship’ to control their leaders. Canada hates us because we’re socially backward. Sweden hates us because we’re backward on clean energy. Brazil hates us because we’ve imposed prohibitive visa laws on them. Argentina hates us because we supported their fascist dictatorship and turned a blind eye on the tens of thousands of murders it committed. They also think we’re arrogant bastards. Tibetans are pissed that we’re so beholden to China, Israelis think we’re morally bankrupt, and the Swiss see us as undereducated and dangerously conservative.

Superlatives, of course, and mostly based on conversations with a just few young backpackers from each country, but the general sense of aggravation is overwhelming. German and Irish friends alone, in what I can only assume to be beer-inspired camaraderie, have told me that their societies are generally pretty cool with America.

Ahmed has one I haven’t heard before, but it doesn’t surprise me too much. Kuwait, he says, and the Middle East in general, hates us for our support of Israel. He says we will never be welcomed in the Middle East so long as we’re backing this artificial nation. He thinks the religious and cultural criticisms of the US are footnotes and distractions; the real issue is our hated ally.

But politics are wearying as the beer does its work, and we veer back to gay life in Kuwait. In what sounds more like a confession than anything, Ahmed tells us that after three failed marriages, he’s finally admitted to himself that he’s gay. It’s impossible to be truly out in Kuwait; his close friends and younger relatives know, but he keeps his mother in the dark. He proudly shows us pictures of his nieces, two grinning teenage girls in Western clothes. “They know and they don’t care,” he says with a smile. But it’s a hidden life of underground nightclubs and constant lies. There’s no legal persecution of gays in his country, but the social consequences of exposure would be crippling.

“I really do wish I weren’t gay,” he says, picking at the label on his beer bottle. “I know Allah hates me.” We insist that’s not true, and he tearfully thanks us for the support.

He tells a story he heard in his childhood. He says Mohammad once told it.

A devout religious woman spends her entire life following the Quran to the letter. One day a cat is irritating her with its mewing, so she locks it in a room and lets it die. She goes to hell. An unreligious prostitute comes upon a small amount of water in a vast desert. She sees a dog nearby, nearly dead for thirst. She lets him drink first, taking only a sip for herself. She goes to heaven.

He takes personal comfort in this story, hoping his good heart will save him from damnation for his sexual preference. I’m happy to see a soft, forgiving side of a religion so often portrayed as hateful.

A noisy thunderstorm has kicked up outside. We order another round and wait for the rain to ease up.

The bartender is looking bored. He tells us he owns the place. Three customers isn’t a great Saturday night, and in this rain it’s unlikely there’ll be more. His voice startles me; from somewhere within his 300lbs of muscle is emanating a high, dancing sing-song. He tells us he’s been to America a few times. On the most recent visit, he went to San Francisco with his boyfriend, where he entered, and won—you can’t make this shit up—the International Bear Contest. I have no idea how this happens, but a few minutes later he’s whipping off his shirt to show us his tattoo, four-inch Gothic lettering across his upper back. It’s his name, Cossío.

After this, our presence seems largely superfluous, as Ahmed has launched into an assault of shameless flirting. The rain lifts at last in the early hours of the morning, and we exchange email addresses with our new friends and head to the hostel, stopping off for some much-needed Burger King on the way.

The next day we walk some more of the sites and find a tapas bar near the river. It’s a good 10°F warmer here than it is in Zafra, so we sit at a table on the sun-drenched sidewalk. The waiter doesn’t even try Spanish, opting to launch into flawless and unmistakably New York English.

“Where ya from?”

He’s wearing—forgive me, I just can’t put this any other way—a gangster suit. Silky bluish-black with tiny white pinstripes, the vest, the mirror-shined shoes, rings on his fingers, slicked hair. He’s a portly Al Pacino. His name is Jesús.

I tell him I’m from Illinois, Springfield to be exact. This usually gets an “Ohh like the Simpsons?!?”

Not here.

"What the fuck're ya doin here?"

We laugh and tell him we're teachers living north of Sevilla.

"Springfield, eh?" Jesús scowls a bit as he nods. “I had a buddy in Brooklyn who lived in Springfield for a bit. Spanish guy. He came back here to Sevilla and got himself shot.”

It’s Levi who throws it out there after a moment of silence.

“Umm…how?”

Jesús shrugs. “He was a bastard. What can I get yous to eat?”

It’s the best meal in my recent memory. Potatoes smothered in light, herby aioli, fresh paella with rabbit and prawns, and pork loin in a whiskey sauce with lemon-roasted garlic. If you’re ever in Seville, seek out Bar El Toro.

The Spanish don’t usually tip, but we can’t resist leaving a few euro for Jesús.