f scott

'It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. "How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.'

I've just reread The Great Gatsby for the umpteenth time, having left it alone for an unusually long spell of two years, and this quote caught my attention. I had no recollection of it, and given my almost embarrassing level of familiarity with this book, I have to assume that it had always simply seemed too inconsequential to commit to memory.

But when I encountered it the other day, it struck me that I've experienced precisely this feeling in Zafra, where lost-looking tourists occasionally wander through empty streets during siesta hours and, in either desperation or ignorance, overlook the fact that I hardly have the face of a person who might know her way around a southern Spanish village. In speaking to them, I find I recognize their accents, that in their heavy esses and lispy dees I hear Madrid and Andalusia, not the mysteriously vague 'somewhere in Spain' I heard two years ago. Moreover, I know exactly where to send them. This is no great accomplishment, considering that they always ask for the central tourist sites, which are more or less concentrated within a small circle that also encompasses my apartment, but I can't help but indulge in a moment of self-satisfaction. It pains me a bit now to leave that comforting mastery behind.

Leaving always makes me sentimental. Just yesterday I spoke with a friend from college who is packing to move away from our beautiful campus town. As my flurry of reminiscence was reaching its crescendo she reminded me, quite truthfully, that it's not the place I miss, but the time. I was tired of Bloomington's spirit, of drunk freshman and pretension, and I'm tired of Zafra's isolation and immutability. But despite the cons list, it's hard to let go of such a great time.

el rollo de los visados

Getting a visa is a real bitch. In Argentina, the process included a thirteen-hour vigil in a sweltering warehouse-turned-public-office in a ghetto of Buenos Aires. To come to Spain, I made two trips to Chicago (a three-hour drive from my hometown) and spent weeks waiting for various papers with various official stamps from Washington, Madrid, Mérida and, inexplicably, The Hague. Upon arrival in Spain, I paid four highly stressful visits to the federal police station in Almendralejo (Zafra being too small to merit national police), where I spent hours arguing with one of the most arrogant, mean-spirited people I've ever encountered before finally leaving (half in tears) with my residence card.

So, when I read the website of the Thai embassy in Madrid and learned of the apparently simple and straightforward process, I should have been more suspicious. They wanted merely a package, delivered by a private messenger company, containing our passports, resumés, the paperwork from our Thai school, and a police background check. Since neither of us are registered with the Spanish police, we ordered this last item from a online company in the US and sent everything off with the required 55 euros each (because apparently in Spain it's cool to mail cash).

After a few days of radio silence, I called the embassy. No one there spoke English and the Spanish of the receptionist was broken and heavily accented in a way with which I was completely unfamiliar, so the conversation was...tricky. The background checks are no good, she flatly informed me. You've clearly just gotten these off the internet. We need something official, something with a stamp and besides, we can't read English. Get an official translation. That should also have a stamp. (Our boss in Thailand had warned us of this Thai affinity for stamps but I still had trouble suppressing my laughter at her insistence on this point). There was no swaying her, and my phone credit was spent, so I gave up.

Peter, our boss in Thailand, advised us to show up at the embassy to smile, plead, and if it came to it, panic and cry. So we printed off more internet background checks (the tab for the endeavour is over 200 bucks at this point) and caught the immensely unpleasant midnight bus to Madrid. After killing the early morning hours in a cafè, we rang the doorbell at the embassy.

The consular officer, a gorgeous Thai woman not much older than me, turned out to be tough and sarcastic and visibly furious with her lot--we'd had several phone conversations at this point and she was entirely fed up with me. 'This is from the internet again!' she exclaimed, her hands actually shaking in her rapidly-escalating irritation. 'I'll have to talk to someone else. Come back at eleven.' She flashed us an forced smile (or maybe she was just baring her teeth) and turned to the next customer.

From a café down the street, we sent a slightly desperate e-mail to Peter, who we calculated would be in the middle of his workday and probably too busy to help. We knew we needed help from someone who spoke Thai, and thought maybe if someone made a phone call to halfway around the world...right this second, preferably...a bit of a Hail Mary. The e-mail remained unanswered and as we walked back to the embassy in the pouring rain, I tried to whip up some tears.

As we waited in the lobby, my Spanish cell phone rang and Peter, who had been trying to call the embassy since receiving my e-mail, told me that his Thai wife would call me in a moment, and that I was to give the phone to the woman. She called, and I passed it to the baffled and aggravated receptionist. We were clearly making no friends here, but we had confused them into complacence and harassed them into a state of such profound annoyance that they wanted only to be rid of us. Send us this one more paper, my pretty amiga told us, and you can have the visas. Triumphantly, we left the office in search of wifi to thank Peter and his wife for their incredible helpfulness.

The visas arrived in the mail on Monday; everything is all stamped and official. Only twelve days left in Zafra.

hablar

On a rainy weekend in mid-April, Levi and I got on a bus with forty adult English students and rode to Hervás, a beautiful Medieval town tucked into the snow-capped mountains of northern Extremadura. The group of students came from the Official Language School in Almendralejo, a small city near Zafra. The activity was a three-day language immersion. Levi and I, along with four language school teachers and nine other native speakers, were to see to it that not a word of Spanish was uttered all weekend.

I had expected it to be formal, maybe a bit tedious, but we actually had a fantastic time. Every hour I met with a different group of three or four students to play games, take a walk, have a beer, or just talk. Saturday night everyone piled into a little rec center at our campground and learned some highly effective American drinking games, much to the displeasure of the rent-a-cops. On Sunday we took a hike into the village. We stayed in a cute little cabin with four Spanish guys, all of whom we've met up with since. It was a great weekend.

Borrowed from the internet because my pictures are on my crashed harddrive, but this is a good representative shot of the town

At dinner with our cabin mates

The whole group