blurbs

One Friday we spend a cold evening at a Moroccan-themed bar in Zafra with two American girls (one from our very own Midwest) and a crowd of Spanish college students home for the holidays. It’s not clear how this group has spontaneously formed, but it’s a good collection of people. I’m sitting next to Alva, a model of Spanish hipness in her tights, denim shorts, and high-top sneakers. Her black hair is carefully styled into a tall pouf and her eyelashes extend for miles. She tells me it’s her life’s dream to go to New York City, that as soon as she finishes her studies and finds a job, it’s the first thing she’ll do. I ask her what she’s studying. ‘Medicine,’ she answers, taking a long drag of her cigarette.

On my left, Levi is talking to Manu, a self-proclaimed club kid with a beefy build and quite a lot of gel in his hair. He’s playing techno songs on his cell phone, raving about the power of that music. ‘I love all music,’ he says, ‘but this’….he rubs his forearm. ‘This makes my hair stand on end.’ He shows us a video of a concert he recently saw with Alva; strobe lights pulse through the crowd as naked women dance onstage. ‘Porno party,’ Alva says in English, giving a wide-eyed nod from behind her beer. Manu tells us a story about stumbling home one night to find a half dozen strangers watching tv in his living room. ‘This is my apartment…’ he says. ‘What’s up man?’ one responds. He just sighs in resignation and goes to bed, hoping to find them gone in the morning.

Rosa, a few years older than the rest, is a student of one of our American friends, and she speaks better English than she likes to reveal. She says she’s embarrassed by her errors so she avoids speaking altogether. I force a few phrases out of her, and she agrees to have some English-only conversations before her next exam. She corrects my Spanish grammar as I speak. The Argentines I knew were always quick to do this, and I’ve missed it in Spain; I think the people here tend to see it as impolite. It’s by far the most useful language-learning tool though, and it’s refreshing to encounter it here.

Amanda, who is more American in her dress than any of us Americans, tells us she’s always wanted to learn English but it’s just too damn hard. ‘My name is Amanda, hello,’ she laughs, insisting that this is all she knows. She excitedly shows us her Hot Topic-style SpongeBob shirt. ‘Bob Esponja!’ she says, pointing. ‘Y Patricio!’ She’s one of these nonstop smilers and the mood is contagious. We’re all laughing all night.
•••••
Christmas Eve here turns out to be the botellón, an early-evening drunken disaster on the Plaza. Someone’s car speakers are repeatedly blasting the techno song that took over Europe this summer. Bottles smash, shots lined up on the benches, there’s a guy puking under our balcony and someone pissing outside the hotel. The party has cleared out by 10pm, and the city sleeps in on Christmas morning.
•••••
On Christmas Day, Levi and I drink the Guinness we gifted ourselves and watch the rain through the French doors.
•••••
We get locked out of our apartment tonight, conveniently also without a cell phone. We bang on the door for a while, but our neighbor’s out of town. We walk to the home of a friend of our landlord to try to get a hold of him, but she’s out of town. So we track down a phone book at the police station and call the landlord from a payphone, but the listing is bad. Running out of ideas, I ask the Italian guy who runs the pizzeria for his phone to give the number one more try. No dice, but the owner’s son, a big hairy guy covered in flour and olive oil, grabs a menu and heads to our door. He unsuccessfully tries to jimmy the lock with the laminated paper for a while, then finally sighs, shrugs, and kicks the door in.
•••••

vantage

There’s a road that begins at a small, gray plaza just beyond the boundaries of the old city wall. A gritty little watering hole called Bar Taxi sits at the northwest corner of this square; it’s the kind of place where you can expect to encounter drunken retirees by noon every day of the week. Just beyond the bar the road loses all marks of the urban as the pavement gives way to dust and dirt and the sidewalks narrow until the street is flush against the doorsteps. The row of dingy white stucco structures terminates in a house whose strange swaths of color add confusion rather than cheer to the dreary block. The place was gutted but the project went no further; the rusted padlock on the splintering front door hasn’t been touched in years.

A tangled mess of telephone wires droops near the house’s eaves, casting its angular shadows on the low, mossy stone wall of the neighboring pasture. Here on the ragged edges of urban life a distinct world reveals itself. Modernity once briefly took hold here, but the signs of its indifferent destruction lie everywhere. The twenty or so sheep grazing in the pasture munch grass from overgrown concrete patios and fallen metal fence posts. A porcelain bathtub propped against its only remaining foot and draped to its rim in weeds serves as a trough. The farmhouse itself, long abandoned for a cozier spot within Zafra’s limits, has lost most of its southern wall and an enterprising oak has taken notice, extending a spiny arm deep into the building. A vine later wrapped itself around that branch, climbed to the second story, burst out through a window, and forked in two. One prong now reaches back around through the gap in the wall and the other, having punched through the glass panes of the front door, creeps over countertops and around banisters.

Beyond the house lies a mile of similarly crumbling structures. Stone walls cut the hilly pastures into the odd geometric innovations land disputes will inspire. Rotting trash accumulates in clumps that stick on the protruding rocks of little streams.

A highway breaks up the countryside at the foot of the Castellar—it’s all uphill after this road. The bottom half of the mountain is organized into tidy little farms. Aging but well-preserved houses, barns, and pig compounds line the narrow dirt road that zigzags lazily from one end of the hill to the other, edging toward its peaks. The breeze smells of swine and wet earth. Rows of olive trees extend for acres, their boughs forming grayish green scribbles against the cliffs.

Around the halfway point the grass thins and the soil gives way to rocky sand and small boulders that have lodged themselves in place. A few intrepid farmers have given the place a go but eventually retreated to lower ground. The places they left behind are in absolute ruin and at first glance appear intriguingly ancient. Closer inspection invariably reveals modern drywall, nails and bricks; neglect in these harsh elements destroys a structure in a few short years. The results are eerie. One house near the summit, now little more than a vaguely quadrilateral pile of rocks, sits at an uncomfortable slant and seems to lean down the hill. It’s surrounded by the mangled remains of a barbed-wire fence whose makeshift scrapmetal posts have been entirely encompassed in rust. Impaled on one of these stakes is the filthy head of a plastic doll, presumably intended to scare off thieving birds. Its long, sun-whitened hair has fallen away in clumps. The bleached bones of a sheep or goat are strewn across the yard, scattered by vultures.

Higher up the grass disappears altogether and the hiker meet with the bases of the tall stone slabs of the Castellar. The only traces of the fortress are imbedded in the highest rocks, just a couple barely identifiable walls and one underground room now missing its roof. The wayward sheep who wander this far stand little chance, and their bones lie at every rocky level to the very crests. So hot is the sun and so numerous the vultures that the bones have been stripped of their meat and bleached perfectly white before the wool has had time to rot or blow away; it lies in sad, ragged piles on the rocks, bloodstained and muddy.

Zafra is a messy terra cotta cluster from here. The wind rushing in from Portugal silences the bells.

Empieza la Navidad

The second week of every Spanish December is the Puente (Bridge), the three-day stretch that kicks off the holiday season. Monday is Constitution Day, Tuesday is the regular workday that forms the crown of the metaphorical bridge, and Wednesday is the Day of the Immaculate Conception (a federal holiday, no church-state qualms here), the coasting bit that ushers the country into Christmastime.

By Thursday the decorations are hung, the lights are lit, and the shopping frenzy begins. Stores are open on Sunday now and Calle Sevilla is nonstop commercial mayhem. A neon carousel has appeared on the Plaza de España, belting out carnivalesque Christmas songs. A three-story inflatable SpongeBob stands beside it, crawling with pea coat-clad toddlers who climb its plastic rungs and come bouncing down its puffy slide. Glittering bells, snowmen, angels, and stars hang above the downtown streets and poinsettias and garland adorn the balconies on the Plaza Grande.

Levi and I had intended to use the Puente and the six-day weekend it afforded me (I LOVE my job) to spend some time in Madrid. He recently discovered he has dual citizenship thanks to his Quebecois father and is applying for a Canadian passport. This will allow him to leave the EU every ninety days upon the expiration of his tourist visa and return to Spain with a different passport, getting a new tourist visa and remaining legal. This means we can travel outside of Spain without fear of immigration issues, a far superior option to the hide-out-in-Zafra plan we had previously worked out. So we planned a visit to the Canadian Embassy and some exploration of the capital city.

On Thursday, the day of our scheduled departure, the crucial documents Levi’s parents had UPSed to him had yet to arrive. I called the Spanish office of this disastrous company and was told that the driver had come to our house and no one was home and now the package wouldn’t come till Tuesday. I put up the best fight I could manage in Spanish and was eventually connected to the driver himself, who screamed at me that this was my fault because no one answered when he rang the doorbell. When I informed him that we don’t have a doorbell, I could practically hear him throwing his hands up. He told me he’d call me on Tuesday and I could come meet him in the Plaza because he simply couldn’t find my house. So we cancelled our trip and spent the weekend in Zafra, putting together a little Christmas tree and hiding out from the endless rain.

On Tuesday, a long conversation with the UPS office revealed that the documents had been delivered to a place where we don’t live and signed for by a person we don’t know. I tracked them down at the knife shop around the corner and Levi took a midnight bus to Madrid. He came home exhausted at six the next evening, having been turned away by a self-important bureaucrat for being short a form.

On Thursday night poor Levi got back on the midnight bus. I tagged along this time. We stumbled into the cold morning at 5:30 and found an all-night café, where we chugged some coffee and listened to the angry ramblings of a group of drunk thirty-somethings on the tail end of a dramatic evening. When the sun finally came up, we found a Starbucks (oh, how I’ve missed that chai) and waited for the embassy to open. Levi’s meeting went smoothly this time, and we celebrated with a soon-regretted Burger King binge (the fries suck in Europe, too). Back on the bus by 3:30pm, passed out in an uncomfortable vertical contortion by four.

Maybe if we had stayed longer or been in better spirits I would have come to a different conclusion, but from what I observed in those brief hours, Madrid sorta…sucks. It’s Chicago without the culture, Barcelona without the architecture, Buenos Aires without the charm; there’s nothing unique or surprising there. It just felt like a huge, dirty city. I was happy to be back in friendly little Zafra.

As the school year has gone on, I’ve realized more and more that I am a point of real interest to my littler kids. I catch wind of strangely specific rumors about myself and my life; some of these are surprisingly accurate and others are truly baffling. There seems to be a hilariously intense curiosity about Levi. He’s at the school fairly frequently giving private lessons, so all the kids know I have a novio. Last week, a few of my bilingual first-year girls (my favorite students) swarmed me with questions about him—is he American? Does he speak Spanish? How long have you known each other? Do your parents know you have a boyfriend?? They giggled uncontrollably at every response. One of them went on to inform me that I should have two boyfriends, because the actor from the new Narnia movie is really cute and about my age and speaks English so of course we should be dating.

I have one little boy, about eleven or twelve, who sits in the front row of all my lessons and raises his hand every time I ask a question, even though he hardly ever knows the answer. His teacher tells me he asks about me every day I’m not there, and one of his greatest concerns is whether I still have that damn boyfriend.

I’ve generally stuck to the little white lie that I speak no Spanish; I feared that if all the kids knew I understood their language, they wouldn’t bother to speak English to me. When I ran into a bunch of my students at the Spanish-dubbed Harry Potter movie, I knew I would be found out. Sure enough, the following Monday, all of my students refused to speak English, and one of my first-years informed that word had spread and I could fool them no longer.

In a Monday class, a first-year boy caught a glimpse of the tattoo on my shoulder. I’ve kept the thing carefully hidden since I’ve never seen a single tattoo in Zafra and figured it would be a bit of a scandal in this conservative place. He wouldn’t let it go, of course, and the class’s interest in my vocabulary lesson was pretty quickly replaced with a shocked fascination with my little bird. I kept my coat on the rest of the day but the damage was done. In an unstructured Art lesson on Thursday, two of my favorite little girls invited me to paint with them, and I soon found myself trapped in a barrage of questions (all in Spanish, sigh) about the tattoo they’d heard I had. Of course I refused to show it to them, and after getting past their disappointment they spent the rest of the class speculating on what it might look like.

In that same class I discovered another strange rumor. In their investigation into my personal life, one of the little girls asked what I did for a living. After a very confused exchange, I realized that these kids all think I teach for free.

They have also somehow figured out exactly where I live. This really is a small town.

On an unrelated note, what the hell is going on over there? Machines snapping photos of travelers through their clothes, the so-called liberal president calling inconvenient journalism “deplorable” as corporations cut off all its resources, and now Congress is denying health care to ailing 9/11 responders while cutting taxes for Bill Gates? I didn’t realize I was fleeing fascism. Doesn’t exactly make a return to the US very tempting.

La vida extremeña

Zafra sits on a rocky, dusty stretch of dehesa (pronounced ‘day-ay-suh), the not-quite-desert landscape peculiar to southern Spain. The people here say that word with love, rolling their tongues through the vowels in a way that always leaves me longing for the low, fog-laden mountains and grayish-green olive groves that lie just outside of town. The centerpiece of these craggy hills is the Castellar, a broad, flat pile of rocks and scrubby farms rising about 2,000 feet from the road and crowned by a series of strange column-like rocks, into which are carved the disintegrated ruins of an ancient fortress. Levi and I spent an afternoon hiking up this strange little mountain, and it was only after a long picnic at their very foundations that we became aware of these ruins, so deteriorated and overgrown are they.















During Moorish rule, Zafra sat on the border between two Arab kingdoms, and it was from this castle that frequent and bloody wars were waged against the neighboring territory. They called it Sajra, the Arabic for “castle on the rock,” which became Safra, Çafra, and eventually Zafra.
The town was seized from Muslim rule in 1229, but only began to come back to life in 1426, when the Spanish king gifted the place to a duke. The man promptly and predictably began the perfectly medieval tasks of building a huge defensive wall, a convent, and a castle. These old city walls have largely been lost, but the original arched entryway still stands, marking for those who walk under it their passage from the modern world into Old Zafra, which I now call home.
The area is a maze of white stucco and crumbling stone where nothing can help but own up to its nearly six centuries of existence. At the center stands a gorgeous (albeit slightly frightening) Gothic cathedral whose bell tower has been steadfastly ringing out the hour since the place was first ornamented with Cortez’s gold. The castle, now a swanky hotel, still presides over a trapezoidal plaza where odd terraces and stairways compensated for the medieval inability to easily level rough terrain. The sisters of the convent still walk the narrow sidewalks in pairs, the only wanderers able to resist the lure of the glowing shop windows of Calle Sevilla. When afternoon siesta clears the cars from the roads, there’s only the hum of café TVs to recall the century.
Living in this place is as peaceful and pleasant an existence as I can imagine. There’s a low but constant buzz here—children playing in the streets as their parents clink glasses in the bars, the click of high heels on the brick roads, the throaty laughter of the retirees as they wander from café to café in their daily wading through coffee and wine. This part of town developed the lively spirit of a big city but forgot to be stressed or chaotic or impersonal. There’s no hurry here, just slow, happy meandering peppered with greetings to every passer-by. Even when the Sisters ring out their fifteen-minute-solid monotone bell solo at 7 o’clock, a nightly event that had me tugging at my hair for weeks, the sense of ease and calm persists. Pot smoke drifts from groups of peaceful teenagers through the plaza and the park even as police wander about in smiling pairs, concerned only with greeting friends and sticking an occasional parking ticket on a tourist’s car. At two in the morning small children play soccer outside the bars, so secure are their parents in this safe little world. It’s idyllic, the kind of place I thought had disappeared, or had only existed in twin-bed fifties sitcoms. Through my work at the high school, however, I’ve started to see some problems in this sort of peaceful, sheltered existence. Most of my students come from happy, traditional families, all of whose members were born and raised in this area and, having seen little reason to peek outside such a paradise, have never traveled, learned a foreign language, and who rarely read anything of international news. But Spain sits at Africa’s door to Europe and has deep cultural ties to the impoverished nations of the Americas, and as is clear with a mere glance at my first-year classes, it’s impossible to shut out this reality, try as they might.

Last week they were learning family vocabulary and the verb construction of “I have got” (it’s all British here), so the teacher had me do an activity with the kids where we went around the room and everyone said, “I have got a sister name Laura, I have got a cousin named Juan” etc. I get to Sid Ahmed Mohammed, and instead of describing his family like the rest of the class, he bursts into tears. He’s so beside himself he can’t speak. He buries his head in his sweater and sobs silently on his desk until, completely baffled, I move on to the next student. After class I ask the teacher about it and learn that Sid Ahmed isn’t from here; he grew up in the war-torn Sahara region of Morocco and, unable to ensure a safe future for him, his parents sent him to Spain, where a refugee program placed him with a host family. He doesn’t even know if his family is alive. I was horrified. Why the hell, with this information, would this teacher let me do an activity like this? The teacher shrugged. “It’s fine, he’s just sensitive.” In the next lesson, I insisted on talking about the Simpsons family instead of the students’ families to avoid further traumatizing this poor kid, and the teacher was annoyed and confused.

In another class, I have a little girl who came to Zafra from the Dominican Republic a year ago. The other students tease her for her accent (ironically, I understand her perfectly while struggling to understand them) and her teachers allow her to entirely check out in class. Since she’s a little behind in skills, coming from a different education system, and a little slower at understanding classroom discussion because of the accent hurdle, no expectations are placed on her and she fades into the background and is completely ignored. She’s so sweet; one day Levi and I were eating lunch in the cafeteria and she came to sit with us and told us all about herself and her move from Santo Domingo to Zafra. She disappeared for a couple minutes and came back to give us some candy she had bought us. She doesn’t talk to anyone at school—she tends to hide out in the classroom with a book at lunch and recess—and I think she was thrilled to meet another outsider. She’s clearly highly intelligent, and because she a foreigner she’s being left behind by her teachers and classmates.

Obviously, xenophobia and ignorance are not unique to Zafra, and I mean this in no way to be a condemnation of the place. It’s generally a very hospitable and welcoming town, and maybe the wonderful peace here is due in part to this resistance to the outside world. It’s just been very revealing to get to know these kids who don’t quite fit into the perfection of this town and to see the kind of consequences that has.

On a lighter note, we recently had another Couchsurf couple, this one from the Czech Republic. They were on a bike trip through Spain and planned to only stay one night, but heavy rains came through town and they ended up staying for four days. We ate Czech food (potato salad, fried pork tenderloin, and strawberry dumplings) and drank so, so much beer. Apparently the Czechs drink more beer than anyone in the world, and our new friends are pretty solid evidence of that. They also brought a homemade pear-based spirit called slivovice and, horrified at our lack of shot glasses, bought us a set so we could all have a few tries of it. We had a great time, really good people.Winter break is approaching and Levi and I are planning a couple weeks in Morocco. Flights are bafflingly cheap (€12 per person round trip) and complicated immigration issues require us to briefly leave the EU, so we decided Christmas in Fez sounded pretty good. I really want to ride a camel.

Check out my facebook and Levi's Flickr page for more photos

career?

I’m starting to get into the swing of teaching. I’m learning how to draw responses out of the shyest students and how to keep the attention of twenty twelve-year-olds for fifty minutes, and I’m increasingly able to recognize what’s working and what’s not and improve on the lesson as I go. I’ve developed a slow, deliberate, half-British way of speaking that most of the students can understand but that doesn’t admit of any Spanish-accented mispronunciations; my goal is to be comprehensible while demonstrating a correct accent, and I seem to have found the balance. I’m learning how to make a classroom fun without completely losing control of it (although this one is still a bit of a challenge).

The only real problem I’m still running into is with my two fourth-year classes. The teacher is just impossible—this week she spent the duration of both my lessons socializing with the students, who obviously ceased to listen to anything I was saying, focusing instead on her all-Spanish conversations about the drunken weekend escapades of the too-cool-for-this crowd. I discovered this week that until a few years ago, English classes here were, as a rule, taught entirely in Spanish. Students didn’t study it as a foreign language, but as a science; it was something to take classes in so that you could say later that you took classes in it, but there was never any intention of actually speaking it. This teacher is clearly a remnant of this ridiculous system and these kids are happy to play along with this lazy method. They can’t even construct sentences; I spent twenty minutes explaining that a sentence needs a verb to be a sentence (obviously true in Spanish as well), and discovered that they had no idea what I was talking about (even after I broke down and explained it in Spanish).

Each of these classes also has the obligatory back corner of smartasses, a group of spiky-haired boys and heavily made-up girls rolling their eyes at everything I say and talking and laughing through all my lessons. Frankly, and maybe I’m terrible for this, but I’ve mostly given up on trying to help these kids. It’s more important to them to show off than to learn English, and most of their questions are intended to just fuck with me and eat up class time. I only have fifty minutes a week with these kids, and I think it’s unfair to the hard-working ones to waste any of that time helping a jock stroke his ego.

In future teaching jobs, I think I’ll be avoiding teenagers.

But my first years are amazing, even the ones in the larger, non-bilingual classes. They’re happy to put forth some effort, which is so encouraging. I’ve only been at work six weeks and I’m already hearing American English from these kids! They’ve stopped saying “jes” and “joo” and I’m hearing “yes” and “you,” something I can’t even say for most of the English teachers here. I mention a new word off-hand at the beginning of a lesson and they’re using it in sentences at the end. They remember pronunciations of strange words like “cupboard” and “Greenwich” after just one repetition. I accused my bilingual group of “giggling” too much in Art the other day, and five hours later they were (between giggles, of course) telling their Social Studies teacher about this funny new word they learned. They actually enjoy this.

The second-years are great too, despite the fact that they are entering their teen years and developing little attitudes. They took bilingual classes last year too, so they’ve had practice in this, and I’m constantly amazed by their abilities (especially when comparing them to students two years older than them who can’t form sentences). Their first-year math class has left them able to rattle off long numbers easily (as anyone whose learned a foreign language can attest, this is quite a challenge) and they speak beautifully about biology and art.

Last week we had a meeting with all of the teachers and parents of the bilingual program (first and second year) to explain to the families what’s going on in these strange half-English classes. Predictably, this was a group of parents highly interested in their kids’ educations and eager that they should learn English. I had to speak a bit (in Spanish, eeee), just introducing myself and talking about what I’m doing with the kids. Afterward a bunch of the parents were telling me that their kids like me and are enjoying my classes, which was really great to hear.

I didn’t think I’d like teaching so much—I was sort of looking at it as a means to the end of living abroad. But I’ve been surprised every day by how much fun I’m having with this. I think it’s something I could do for quite a while.

La Chaquetía

Monday was All Saint’s Day (Día de Todos los Santos), naturally a national holiday here. Everyone visits family members’ tombs to lay flowers and then goes out to the country for the Chaquetía. Levi and I had no idea where we were going or what we were doing, but we accepted an invitation from Antonio Juan, a teacher at my school, to tag along with his family. He and his wife Monica both speak good English and use both languages with their children, two boys of four and seven and a little girl of less than two. The kids don’t understand much English but they speak it fairly well, and we had a good time on our drive out of town listening to a bilingual treatise on the wonders of Playstation and Pokemon.

We drove about fifteen minutes out of Zafra through the lovely Extremaduran countryside and parked in a field between two farms, both marked by ancient stone walls, from behind which horses and cows observed us curiously. We unloaded folding tables and chairs, soccer balls, frying pans, and a feast of roast chicken and fries. After a good long while and an impressive quantity of matches (and quite a lot of help from Levi), the little boys finally got a fire started and we all sat down for a really absurdly large meal, washed down with plenty of wine. Later on, Monica’s parents, sister, and brother-in-law joined us. The frying pans, it turned out, were for roasting chestnuts over the campfire until they puffed up and burst open enough to be shelled and stuffed into dried figs to make casamientos, a regional snack. I ate approximately 893789 of these. We passed the afternoon kicking a soccer ball around, petting the horses, and enjoying the last of the summer sun.

Later in the afternoon, Levi and I went on a little hike with Antonio Juan and the kids through one of the farms. This is the kind of farming you don’t see much in the United Stated anymore. Cows, sheep, and goats roam open pastures and enormous Iberian pigs are given free run of large pen and sty complexes. No factory farming here; free-range is the norm, and these animals are afforded comfortable and open-air (albeit ill-fated) lives. The whole tranquil scene is ornamented with Spain’s ubiquitous stone walls and grayish-green olive trees and set against the backdrop of the low, misty extremeño mountains. It’s a truly beautiful place, this strange, lost-in-time corner of Europe we’ve found ourselves in.

settling in

I’ve spent the last couple weeks just trying to get into the swing of life here. It’s a tough adjustment, trying to build a life from scratch in place where I can’t communicate with people on a native level. But I’m off to a good start—getting settled into work, getting to know the town, starting to meet people.

I’m really enjoying work. It’s true; teaching really is gratifying and satisfying and everything they say. But my two classes with the older kids are a real challenge; they really aren’t interested in learning English. It doesn’t help that the fourth-year teacher is just awful. She only speaks Spanish to them—she even teaches English grammar in Spanish. She talks over me and interrupts me to translate for them, so they know they don’t have to listen to me or even try to speak English. They ignore everything I say and just turn to her for translations. I don’t like to just give kids translations when they don’t understand a word; they remember it better if I explain it in English, spend a little more time on it. She refuses to let me do this—she just throws out the translation so they understand what’s going on in that exact moment but forget the meaning of the word two seconds later. This leads to them asking the meaning of the same vocab word five times in one lesson. They’re just not getting anything out of my lessons because of her interference. I talked to my advisor about it and apparently this is a perennial problem with this teacher, but since she’s one of the oldest people on the faculty no one wants to say anything to her. Apparently a girl a few years ago left the class in tears once. I’m working on creative ways to get around her negative influence and hopefully spare my own sanity as well.

But I love working with the younger kids, especially the ones in the bilingual section. Last week I did Halloween lessons for all my classes—I taught them some Halloween vocabulary and we read a story about a Halloween party. The bilingual first years did a better job with it than any of my other classes. They’re eager to learn and practice English, and that makes a huge difference. In their art class on Thursday we took a break from lessons and they worked on Halloween decorations to surprisingly accurate results, considering that they don’t really celebrate the holiday here.


Levi and I have been trying to explore every inch of Zafra. Last weekend we hiked up one of the little mountains on the edge of town, the Sierra del Castellar. At the top of it are the remains of the thirteenth-century Arab fortress that once guarded Zafra. It’s completely in ruins, barely recognizable as a building at all. The place is scattered with bleached animal bones and in one case the rotting wool of an unfortunate sheep whose corpse was discovered by some fortunate vultures. It would have been a truly eerie spot if it hadn’t been so beautiful. To the east lay Zafra, a tiny cluster of stucco, spires, and parapets diced up by an irregular web of zigzagging streets and paths. To the west lay rolling fields, a tree-lined lake, and in the distance, the ranges of imposing mountains blocking Portugal from view.

This weekend we met up with two of the five or so English speakers in this town, a young couple from Belfast. She was in my position three years ago and had stayed around to tutor, and he works odd jobs around Zafra. It was great to be able to speak English with people who understand everything we said, without the circuitous explanations and complex games of charades we find ourselves using to break that language barrier. We also met a friend of theirs who said she could connect us to some students for Levi.

We’ve also had two guests this weekend, a young couple from Lille, France who found us on Couchsurfing. They’re traveling through Spain and Africa on their sabbatical year and are sticking to the off-the-beaten-track spots, a form of travel rare for people my age and certainly admirable. I’ve gotten the feeling that there is more Spain here in Extremadura than we ever would have encountered in Barcelona or Madrid. We’ve had a great time hosting them; they’ve both been practicing English with us and Levi’s had the chance to pull out some long-neglected French skills. We also got a delicious French meal of poached salmon, mushrooms, potatoes, and crème fraiche out of the deal. I love Couchsurfing—it’s the only reason in the world two people from northern France and two from the middle of the United States would ever be eating dinner together in southern Spain.

Monday is All Saints’ Day, so it’s another four-day weekend. Spain is great.

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school days

Columbus Day is—and I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by this—a really, really big deal in Spain. They go ahead and take Monday and Tuesday off, shut down all the shops, and just party in the Plaza for the weekend. Since I have no lessons on Friday, that weekend became a five-dayer for me. After our unsuccessful day trip to Almendralejo, Levi and I spent Saturday and Sunday enjoying the holiday buzz in Zafra and getting settled in our apartment. I’ve been eating better in the past week than I have since I moved out of my parents’ house; Levi’s a great cook and I’ve been trying to learn to help out. It’s not pretty, but no lost digits so far, so that’s a win.

On Monday we went back to Almendralejo to give the police station another shot. The skinny mid-thirties paperpusher who invites us into his office has me in tears by the time I’m finally escaping—he’s spent the last half hour mocking my pronunciation, berating me for my lack of understanding of Spanish bureaucracy, and shouting at me when I ask him to repeat himself. It isn’t until later, after Levi and some fresh air have calmed me down, that I realize that this charming fellow, in his eagerness to treat me like shit, has overlooked the portion of the meeting where he was supposed to charge me €20 and take my picture, so it looks like I’ll have to go deal with him again. This time I’ll be ready with a tougher skin and some good insults.

Wednesday I found myself back with the same group of ten twelve-year-olds, and I take back what I said about their hesitation to speak English. After warming up to me a bit, they happily participated in a 50-minute lesson about American culture, throwing out adjectives to describe famous cities and forming simple sentences to discuss the careers of Hollywood celebrities and the qualities of hamburgers and hot dogs. One of the girls, although reluctant to speak English aloud, provides shockingly perfect Spanish translations whenever I accidentally go over their heads. They’re a sweet group of kids, too, really friendly and eager to please. I have them three times a week, which should be fun.

I also gave a lesson on Wednesday to the non-bilingual first years, a much bigger group who have the same eagerness to participate but largely lack the skills to do so very effectively. It was fun though, despite the utter chaos of managing a shouting, giggling group of twenty-five preteens. They seemed to enjoy it, and I had the hilarious opportunity to instruct them in the correct pronunciation of “Jonas Brothers.” It was a successful day.

Today was a little rougher, but I think I’ll be able to improve on it for next Thursday. Or at least I hope. Jesus, I hope. I had my little bilingual first years, who are by far my faves, for two great classes. But wedged in between those lessons was an English class with the fourth year non-bilinguals, a surly group of pimply fifteen- to seventeen- year olds who spent the entire hour staring blankly at me as I begged for participation. The “English” instructor occasionally screamed a translation at them in Spanish (and occasionally interrupted me to berate them for one thing or another), but the most I got out of them were the incredibly mispronounced names of a few celebrities (Brad Pitt = Brahpee, etc) and the English names for the seasons. It was pretty bad. I really have no idea what I’m going to do with these kids—they clearly aren’t interested and I’m not sure I have the patience for it. I have another fourth-year group of the same level next week, and I can only hope it won’t be quite so brutal.

Levi came to the school for my lunch break today, and after meeting a few of the teachers, he had some potential students lined up. Through the school, we’ve also found him a small group of eleven-year-olds, kids who will be starting secondary school next year and are working to improve their English in preparation. There’s an obvious dearth of quality English instruction here, so I think he’ll have luck finding work so we can continue to fund this bar habit.

Ps-Canned Guinness in Spain is REAL GUINNESS!

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.

Culture shock

Having been through it once before (and in a Spanish-speaking country, no less), I fancied myself immune to, or at least well prepared for, the ugly confusion and loneliness of culture shock. As you can probably glean from the structure of that sentence, I was mistaken.

I spent months working on my Argentine accent, perfecting their unique verb forms and the strange way their teeth sink into their double “L”s. I spent years learning the harsh consonants of Mexican Spanish and the peculiarities of the vocabularies of Chicano and Central American novelists and of the poets of the Southern Cone. But nothing in my years of practice prepared me for the mysterious and complete disappearance of the letter “s.” Instead of biting this crucial letter, the people of this region push it through parted teeth on a lazy tongue, or forsake it altogether. I can’t understand a damn word. I can’t distinguish the plural from the singular, the second person from the third, the past from the future. This has been unexpectedly crippling. Every conversation I have withers into confusion and futility, eliciting a sympathetic shrug of surrender from my interlocutor and leaving me feel stupid and helpless.

Then there are the simpler things. I don’t know how to get a waiter’s attention; the casual wave of the US is ignored and the wagging index finger of Latin America elicits such irritation that I can only assume it’s a Spanish faux pas. I’ve observed other patrons and cannot for the life of me understand it. I can’t figure out which side of the sidewalk to walk on; both have earned me that awkward left-right dance and irritated sighs and stares. I get cut in lines and have no idea why—is cutting common and you have to fight for you space? Should I have been standing closer to the person in front of me? Am I supposed to let older people get in front of me?

Then there’s the one issue I was expecting: foreigner fascination. Even on the crowded streets of Buenos Aires, where varied European and South American blood creates a reasonably diverse scene, my orange hair and pale skin called attention. So in a small, monochromatic town like Zafra, I am unsurprised to find people staring. But God, they really stare. Maybe I’m missing something here—maybe eye contact lingers longer before it’s considered rude, maybe people-watching is less subtle and more acceptable here. And maybe I’m oversensitive. But I have yet to venture outside of my apartment without attracting blatant, undisguised stares. It’s exhausting to always feel this exposed.

In the face of a language barrier, confusion on daily customs, and my obvious status as an outsider, I’ve lately felt that creeping loneliness I first felt in Argentina. I spend more time in my apartment than I should, hoping to avoid these awkward moments, and I find myself feeling very alone.

But I’ve been here before and I know that there is only one cure for culture shock: fearlessness. You have to have those awkward conversations and be unafraid to ask for endless repetitions of the same phrases. You have to lose your concern for blending before you can blend. Fuck-ups are constant and unavoidable when you’re in an unfamiliar culture, and the best thing you can do is shed your fears and just keep on fucking up until you learn.

This is the burst of logic I experience today, and it prompts me to drag myself off my couch and walk to the Feria Internacional Ganadera de Zafra, a nationally-famous agriculture fair currently taking place a few minutes’ walk from the town center. Ironically, the scene I encounter entirely cures me of my homesickness and reminds me why I left the States in the first place. This deep-fried, beer-soaked, inflatable plastic nightmare may as well have been cut out of the fairgrounds of Springfield, Illinois and pasted into the Spanish countryside. A livestock tent occupies the center of the grounds, releasing a familiar stench that blends with those of the deep fryers, sugars, and meats of the food vendors to create that uniquely nauseating aroma of a state fair. Preteen girls in truly impressive amounts of makeup wander through the masses popping their gum as their pimply male sidekicks clumsily grope their bare midriffs. The ground in littered with half-eaten chunks of meat, churro wrappers, plastic cups and discarded raffle tickets so thick I have a hard time getting my flip-flops through it. Beer tents pour out drunken teenagers and twenty-somethings accompanied by the choking blend of tobacco and pot smoke. Small children fling themselves around in enormous moonbounce structures shaped like SpongeBob, Shrek, and Homer Simpson, while mullet-rocking carnies operate rickety little rollercoasters and bumpercar pavilions. I feel right at home.

After getting the hell out of there, I stop by the pizzeria across the road from my apartment. I’ve come to love this little place, not only because the pizza is delicious and ludicrously cheap (€2.50 dinner), but also because it’s run by an Italian family who blend in in Zafra about as well as I do. They spend their days shouting at each other in their own language, watching an Italian news station at incredible volume, and laughing more boisterously and honestly than I’ve ever heard in Spain. The three kids, all in their late twenties, seem to speak solid Spanish, but the father tends to stick to Italian, turning up the volume and slowing down the pace in hopes that the close relationship between these languages will carry him through. The first time I talked to him he seemed surprised when I said Spanish was my second language, a compliment I took, given his lack of familiarity with the language, with a grain of salt—but I took it nonetheless. I can’t cook to save my life (please get here, Levi!) so I’ve already become a regular at this place, and they are endlessly welcome and friendly to me. It’s been a real help on my rougher days, just a little thing I for some reason find comforting.

I have three more days to kill, and on Wednesday the lethargy and loneliness will finally break. I start work that morning. My first task is to tell a group of Spanish teenagers all about America (where do you start?). Afterward I’ll race home and wait for Levi, who arrives in the late afternoon! And life in Zafra begins!

A new home

In the chaos of the last couple weeks, I haven’t found a moment to write. Sorry, Mom. Now I’m here in sleepy Zafra with all the time in the world.

Barcelona was wonderful, aside from the beach robbery incident. We met some great people in the hostel and spent a week in noisy expat bars. One night Lindsey and I and a British friend went to an aggressively English pub to watch a soccer match. We ate paella, drank coffee and wine, and explored the enormous plazas, parks, and avenues that make up this lovely city. One this we found a to be a bit of a turn-off was the general attitude of the people. It’s the case in every big city, and I suppose you have to live in a place for a long while before you’re able to dig past those hard urban exteriors to the rational human beings within. It was frustrating though, to encounter such hostility. Waiters were rude to us, shopkeepers ignored us, and one barista refused to serve us for twenty minutes. It seems that the massive swarms of tourists that occupy every block of the city have fostered a general animosity towards outsiders, a logical but nonetheless discouraging fact of life here.

Deciding we had had our fill of the Mediterranean (an impressive feat in such an unendingly beautiful region) and acting not a little impulsively at the suggestion of our hostel’s manager, Lindsey and I decide to skip Valencia and head inland to Sevilla, a gorgeous little city in the southwestern part of the country. It’s my favorite stop on my journey with Lindsey and although it doesn’t offer the wild fun of Dublin, it easily surpasses it in beauty. It’s a bustling tourist hub at its center, where tapas bars and cafes line an ancient, uneven cobblestone road. Our hostel is at the center of this charming madness, and Lindsey and I spend most of our three days here drinking Spanish beer (not the best) in these fun little places.

On our second day, we venture beyond the center to the “tourist sites” our hostel has recommended. The tourist map they give us, which advertises a series of “impressive monuments,” turns out to be a terribly proportioned, cartoonish insult to cartography that leads us in circles through unmarked streets to decidedly unimpressive churches and monasteries. By the time we reach the fifth single-story, run-of-the-mill chapel, we’re rolling with laughter and go for a beer instead, deciding to stick to the center from now on.

Lindsey’s caught the cold that had me down for a while in France, and she seems to have been simultaneously hit with a vicious sinus infection. For my part, I’m dangerously low on money and beginning to panic a bit at the prospect of an apartment security deposit. So we pass on the long nights out and the €6 beers we splurged on in Barcelona. There’s a cute little café/pub right next door to our place with €1 beers (although we’re soon to discover that a Spanish beer is an American sip) so we settle into a booth. Lindsey and I stand out in Spain—blondes and redheads aren’t exactly common sights here—and the all-male bar staff immediately takes notice. After a couple beers we’re in a noisy political debate (a common occurrence throughout the course of our four-year friendship) and they’re laughing to each other, unaware of the conversation topic but clearly amused by our volume and obvious passion. They start bringing drinks before we request them, each time insisting that we stay after close to hang out. Our ‘maybes’ seem to give them confidence, and they keep them coming. At midnight we’re tired and drunk and Lindsey’s illness is starting to drag her down, so we split. Irritated, the bartenders charge us for every “free” beer they bought us.

The money situation is gradually turning into a crisis. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars more than I had budgeted, since Couchsurfing failed to come through (people are hesitant to host two people at once) and we’ve had to pay for hostels every night. Regretfully, I decide to leave Sevilla two days early and skip Madrid altogether, instead going straight on to Zafra to start the apartment hunt and hopefully save some cash. So Lindsey and I part ways and I take a slow, mostly-empty train through the unpopulated countryside to Zafra, my new home in the untouched reaches of western Spain.

When I first read about Zafra, I was terrified. It’s a tiny place, 15,000 inhabitants and a dot on only the most detailed of maps. There’s a train station, but none of the main rail companies bother to go through it. It attracts tourism for its classic Spanish beauty, but it’s mostly tourists from its own province, and only because it’s the only town of reasonable size for miles. I’ve lived in a state capitol, an overcrowded college town, and a sprawling metropolis of nine million people; nothing in my experience has prepared me to live in a place where the year’s most exciting event is a cattle expo.

But, as I should have known, Wikipedia is not a reasonable source for the formulation of an opinion. This town is lovely. At its center is a complex of two stone plazas, one large and one small, surrounded in which stucco buildings boasting dozens of balconies and lined with surprisingly large palm trees. A graceful, quiet fountain serves as the centerpiece of the Plaza Grande and the two combined have enough bars, cafes and restaurants to keep Levi and I busy for eight months. There’s a beautiful park, a dangerously tempting shopping street, and a movie theater. The people are friendly and welcoming and slightly less apt to stare at my hair than they were in Sevilla. This is a good place.

Trying to avoid more hostel fees and hoping to meet someone in my new town, I find Remedios on Couchsurfing. She’s a veterinarian in her mid-thirties who was born and raised here, and is just an incredibly sweet person. I couldn’t have found anyone better. She picks me up at the train station, offers me a comfy bed in her lovely house, shows me around town, and takes me out with her wonderful friends. One of those friends happens to be the owner of an apartment on the Plaza Grande. Because I am a friend of his friend, he promises to hold off leasing it to an interested party until I see the place.

As soon as I walk into the place, I know it was ours. It’s two steps from the Plaza Grande, with two balconies that overlook the plaza and a small street that leads to it. There’s a terrace in the back, open to the stars. A spare bedroom (everyone come visit!!), a nice kitchen (that I’m unlikely to use at all but where I’m sure Levi will make some magic), and fully furnished with surprisingly nice pieces, all for €350 a month. Unbelievable find. Jose Carlos even lets me sign the lease before I manage to come up with the money (“No worries, you’re a friend of Reme’s”). He brings over a big plant as a housewarming gift when I sign. Later on he comes by with a friend and a bottle of wine and welcomes me to the neighborhood. (After an evening of comparing travel stories, I discover I’m dying to go to Cuba)

I spend the next two days cleaning and organizing the place and just relaxing in it—after a month on the road I’m relieved to have a place to call home. I spend hours lazing in the living room with the balcony doors flung open, listening to the shouts of the Italian family at the pizzeria and the cheerful chatter of patrons at the café. As lovely and cozy as the place is, it feels a bit empty—it’s five weeks to the day since I’ve seen Levi, and I’m more than ready for him to arrive. This separation has been good, in a way; about a week into it we realized it simply couldn’t be permanent or indefinite, and a week after that we made the leap—he bought a plane ticket and I started searching for an apartment for two. We’ve both had a month of self-exploration and experiences to call our own, and that’s great etc etc but now it’s time. He gets here a week from tomorrow and I couldn’t be happier! Staying true to her role as my fairy godmother, Reme has been suggesting to all her friends that their children would benefit from the English lessons of an American boy, so once he’s settled in here the prospect of work is bright. I really can’t believe our luck.

Photo uploads are tedious on this site, and my connection is weak. Check my facebook for photos, coming soon!

Addendum

I love Europe except for its thieves.

Lindsey and I are having a perfectly lovely day on the beach in Barcelona—sea air, sunshine, a good book etc. etc. We both doze off for a bit and when we wake up, Lindsey’s bag, which contained her camera, some cash, our subway pass and our room keys, is history. After a few conversations with the sunbathers around us, we piece together what happened.

The beach is swarmed with vendors. Women offer massages and hair braiding and men peddle cheap beer, snacks, and gaudy sarongs. One of them notices that neither of us have moved for a while, and a couple of them begin circling us, making sure we’re asleep. Once they’re certain we’re both out, three men come by with sarongs, waving them in the faces of the people sitting around. One of the “masseuses” slips Lindsey’s purse into her bag while everyone’s vision is blocked. Lindsey’s carrying a small purse, but I have a large tote—not so easy to snag. So she kicks Lindsey, shouting that her purse has been stolen, waking both of us up. She and another woman are pointing across the beach, insisting that Lindsey chase down the culprit. Once Lindsey has taken off, the woman starts screaming at me to go help my friend. When it becomes clear that I am not leaving my bag alone with these people, they suddenly dissipate, completely gone from sight.

Luckily, nothing irreplaceable was taken, and Lindsey had wisely left her passport, credit cards, and the bulk of her cash back at the hostel. The irksome part is not what they got, but that they got it. I’m also highly irritated that none of the people in our vicinity thought to mention something, since they all admitted afterward to noticing the suspicious behavior.

After walking around two and a half miles back to the hostel (no subway card, no cash) we discover that two other girls staying here have been robbed today.

Country #3

After adding a day on to our stay in idyllic Nice, Lindsey and I have finally decided it’s time to move on to Spain. We’ve spent an incredible four days wandering beaches, shopping districts, and historic sites and now Barcelona, the centerpiece of our month-long journey, is waiting for us. We spend four hours on a train from Nice to Montpellier, an hour in a station, then another four on a rickety, battered, poorly-matched collection of railcars that pulls us slowly along the tracks to Barcelona. At the border, we wait for half an hour while the police forces of two nations search the car, checking passports, and confronting a series of dark-haired guys about our age, before finally discovering the Spanish twenty-something they’ve been seeking. He gathers his fedora and guitar and calmly exits the train, an officer on either flank. Lindsey and I spend the rest of the ride speculating.

Over the last week, we’ve been subjected to a never-ending stream of horror stories about the masterful pickpockets in Barcelona. They’ll distract you on your left and grab your money from your right, we’ve been told. They’ll create a diversion on the street and slip cameras away from all the tourists naïve enough to look, we’ve heard. So as the train rolls into the dark station, the sun setting, all of our worldly possessions on our backs, we’re a little nervous. We find no comfort in the station; there is no tourism desk, just an enormous map on which we can’t locate our hostel and an incredibly unhelpful staff who respond only grudgingly to my Spanish questions. Catalán, a bizarre soup of all the Romance languages, is the unofficial but overwhelmingly dominant tongue here, and these people are loath to be considered Spanish, let alone to use the cursed language of the kingdom. Conversation proves a fruitless effort, and we instead dedicate a half hour to scouring the map and wading through shoddy wifi to track down more info on the hostel. True to form and despite lessons supposedly learned, we’ve written down nothing more than an address—no phone number or directions. Seeing no other options, we dip into the subway and head in what seems the most likely correct direction. Every minute we’re looking behind us, around us, keeping an eye on each other’s packs and refusing distraction. Stress and scary stories have made us jumpy.

When we reach the somewhat arbitrarily selected metro stop, we discover that pickpockets are no longer the greatest of our concerns. We are nowhere near where we’re supposed to be and, predictably, have not considered researching bus lines. So we walk. Twelve blocks. In one giant freaking circle.

Long story short, I bumble us through some very strange Portuguese/Spanish/Catalán conversations, none of which I’m sure I fully understand, while Lindsey keeps us on track with the map. See, they don’t exactly believe in street signs in Europe, so you sometimes have to walk blocks before discovering what road you’re on. Makes using a map a decidedly more complicated process than it is in the rigidly gridded and marked streets of Indiana. At one point, we desperately ring the doorbell of a building at the correct address (wrong street), only to hear a confused “Uhh, nooo…?” when I ask her if she’s a hostel. We take a long break to contemplate our conundrum before finding a shopkeeper who steers us in the right direction. When we reach the hostel, we throw down our things and barrel for the nearest café, where we devour a pizza and some questionable lasagna and learn never to ask a Catalonian for the baño.

I wake up early Wednesday morning to skype Levi, a ritual that has been an indispensible comfort during our weeks apart. We’re eight hours apart, so the bulk of our conversations are carried on while I’m groggily watching the sunrise and he’s losing consciousness over his keyboard after hours of lectures. Sometimes we can’t make it work—there are days when the Mediterranean wine or miles of walking have me sleeping late. It’s a delicate balance, keeping in daily contact with a love in Denver while living a surreal existence scattered across Europe. There’s a constant struggle to keep your head in the winding streets and stony beaches while a part of you keeps flitting back across the Atlantic. But we’ve done what I feel to be an impressive job, maintaining separate lives while remaining integral to one another. He’ll be in Zafra with me in three weeks, and sleepy mornings will certainly prove worth the trouble.

We spend Wednesday exploring the city, walking the Ramblas, photographing the port. I love this city. There’s a spirit, a vibrancy to it that I’ve only ever felt in the Latin world, where trilling Rs and rolling laughter convey an impression of homey comfort even as trains and buses fly by. We make a ridiculous but yummy meal of salad, mashed potatoes, and pan-friend turkey lunch meat (don’t scoff until you’ve tried!) We’re headed tonight for a club on the beach, where a password whispered to us by our trendy hostel host will save us from the pricey cover charge. I love Europe.

Bumps in the road

“Maybe we don’t need an itinerary,” I yawn as Lindsey pours over the hundredth Barcelona tourism website. After all, we’ve been at it for hours and are still unable to decide what we want to do with ourselves during our three weeks together in Europe.

“We could just get there and see how we feel,” she answers, a sympathy yawn drawing out her syllables. I mean, The Hangover is on TV, and really, all this planning is just starting to seem obsessive.

“We’ll have fun whatever we do, right? Maybe we should just let the road take us where it will.”

She puts the computer aside and rises from the couch. “You’re right, it’ll be fine,” she says with a wave of the hand. “Want a beer?”

The story I’m about to tell is long and convoluted but it has one very simple moral: PLAN AHEAD.

Tuesday
Six hours spent fighting sleep in the Dublin airport. The French transportation workers are on strike, and there aren’t enough air traffic controllers to keep watch on the sky. A very limited number of planes are allowed in the nation’s airspace at any given time. All flights are delayed, many cancelled. I feel lucky to get on the plane 3 hours late. I arrive in Marseilles and find my hostel largely due to the kindness of strangers. They seem to take pity on me and my 10-word French vocabulary, which sounds suspiciously Portuguese.

I check my e-mail and discover that Lindsey won’t be arriving until tomorrow. We’ve booked for two at this hostel tonight. She had suggested another Skype date for finalizing plans. “It’ll be fine,” I had responded nonchalantly with a wave of the hand.

I spend an hour arguing with a confused French twenty-something at the front desk. It’s out of sheer irritation and exhaustion that he finally cancels Lindsey’s booking without charging her.

I take a walk around the city. It’s beautiful, unlike any place I’ve ever seen. We’re right off the Vieux Port, a gorgeous harbor full of glittering sailboats and lined with cafes, restaurants and bars. A fish market occupies its end, offering some of the largest and strangest specimens I’ve ever seen, and a towering fortress looms over its mouth, bearing a WWII monument and stunning views of the Mediterranean. I’m standing at a corner of the port, admiring a huge yacht, when a tiny dark-haired man starts jabbering at me in French. “Je ne….français,” I mumble. He switches to a broken English. “Are you from America?” He’s beside himself as he begins listing off things I have to see in Marseilles. His name is Magid, a remnant of the Arabic influence here. He was born here and sees himself as an ambassador of sorts. He grabs my arm and drags me into a tourism office, demands a map from the clerk, and starts frantically circling his favorite spots and marking huge Xs on the dodgy areas.

“I’m going to be late for work,” he says, laughing as he glances as a diamond-encrusted watch. “Oh well, I’ll show you around.”

For the next hour we’re racing around the port, darting through traffic and weaving through pedestrians as he rattles off his surprisingly extensive knowledge of Marseille’s history, gesticulating wildly to the buildings and monuments that correspond to his stories. He’s checking his watch every five minutes, muttering desperately that he’s going to be late for work. He flags down a five-car, open-air sightseeing trolley, driven by a friend. The guy’s on his way to lunch, so he has no passengers. My friend offers me the first seat and hops into the cab with his buddy. It’s just me and twenty rows of empty seats as we wind through the bustling streets, Magid narrating the scenery through the loudspeaker. Pedestrians laugh and point, men whistle from passing cars.

The trolley takes us to the mouth of the port, where the tide crashes against huge boulders and fort walls. Across the water an enormous palace overlooks to horizon. Napoleon III built it for his wife, who had demanded a seaside home but never actually moved in. “Such is the caprice of a woman,” Magid says, the most well-constructed and cringe-worthy English sentence I’ve heard him utter.

We’re racing back to the port’s end as his phone rings. Suddenly he’s in a shouting match. “They want to fire me,” he laughs as he hangs up. “I suppose I should get back.” He kisses me on both cheeks and disappears into a subway station, leaving me on the crowded street wondering what the hell just happened.

An hour later I remember that we’ve only booked the hostel for one night.

“You’ll have to switch rooms,” the poor reception guy says, literally pulling his hair as he tries to understand the messy calendar before him. His eyes are a bit bloodshot. “You’ll sleep in Room 4 tonight, then bring your bags back downstairs at 10am, then put them back upstairs in Room 3 at noon.” I decide not to tell him that my bags weigh as much as I do; I’m concerned any objections may cause an aneurism.

Wednesday
I relax on the port most of the day, taking in the sunshine and fresh, salty air. Lindsey arrives on schedule after nearly 24 hours of travel, impressively conscious but visibly exhausted. Her eyes are starting to droop as it’s dawning on me that we have no place to stay tomorrow, and no plans whatsoever about the next three weeks. Our CouchSurf requests have all been rejected or ignored, since we’re newbies to the site and people are hesitant to host us. The hostels are all booked since the weekend is approaching. I ask Lindsey if she wants to go talk to the reception desk.

“In the morning.” She stretches, collects her things, and starts for the stairs. “It’ll be fine.”

Thursday
“Sorry, we just can’t make room for you,” the stoned receptionist mumbles, turning away from the computer screen and rubbing his eyes.

We’re starting to panic. It’s 10am and we have no idea where we’ll be sleeping tonight, or any night for the next three weeks, for that matter. We send out about ten frantic CouchSurfing pleas and investigate every hostel in a 100-mile radius. Nothing. Two hours later we meet the miracle that is Remy, the gorgeous gay man who takes over when the confused wreck goes home. He seems amused by our utter lack of organization and is eager to take care of us, probably because it’s embarrassingly clear that we’re in need of rescuing. He makes a half dozen phone calls, rearranges beds and bookings, and voila! We have a home for one more blessed night.

“But what about tomorrow?” Lindsey asks. But the city is out there! There’s a cathedral on a hill with 360 degree views of the city! There is a cheap bus ride to the end of town where huge cliffs and hills bear long, beautiful trails to one of the world’s top beaches! We can’t waste a day in this wonderful place hunched over our laptops. I take a deep breath, steady my nerves, and push the lodging predicament from my thoughts. “It’ll be fine.”

It’s a perfect day—gorgeous scenery, friendly people, a long rest on a stunning beach. Lindsey sketches the cliffs and the water it as I try to capture them in words. On the bus home a bunch of teenagers stumble through their English textbook phrases to tell us how much they love Obama. By sunset we’ve forgotten all about the issue at hand.

In return, we spend the next five hours in blind panic. Nothing’s available. None of the cities we’ve wanted to see are options any longer. We’ve just waited too long, at this point we would have to get a hotel, an option far outside our budget. There are no trains, no buses, no hostels, no Couchsurfers available, and nowhere to go in Marseilles. We’re investigating places miles out of our chosen path, far from our interests and desires, just a bed, anything, anywhere will do. We ask Remy if we can sleep on the couch. His generosity doesn’t extend quite that far.

“We just really aren’t allowed to do that,” he says awkwardly when he realizes we aren’t kidding.

The beacon of hope comes from Nice, the playground of wealthy Europeans on the French Riviera. There’s a famous hostel there, a party spot in the hills overlooking the city, with miraculously low rates. It’s the wrong direction, the city is reported to be grossly touristy and overpriced, and neither of us is looking for a party. But it’s midnight and we’ve hiked miles of hills today. We take it, planning to catch the 9:30 train.

Friday
We oversleep. We have planned to get to the station an hour early to deal with what we assumed to be a minor problem. When we ordered our rail passes, a glitch in the online ordering system caused them to be delivered both bearing Lindsey’s name. “It’ll be fine,” I insisted. The pass is just a piece of paper, not even an official-looking card. They’ll just print a new one. No worries. But now we’re running late and have minimal time to handle the situation.

We find an English-speaking teller at the ticket office. She takes a look at the passes and our passports, nods in understanding, then shakes her head in apology. There’s nothing she can do. We’ll have to buy another pass. We insist she investigate further. Thirty minutes, three employees, and an exhausting language-blocked conversation later, the conclusion is the same and the train is long gone. Lindsey can use the pass, but I’ll have to buy a ticket to Nice, and the next train’s not till noon. I eat the €22 to make the day easier and we wait, deciding to deal with this in Nice.

The ride is lovely. We pass vineyards and castles, mountains and beaches. It’s the first chance we’ve had to just sit down and catch up, and I’m relishing the fact that I finally have a travel companion.

The station at Nice, however, is a damn nightmare. Tiny, cramped, and bursting at the seams with tourists shoving, yelling, chattering in a dozen languages. We go to a ticket desk to try to sort out our pass issue. This woman is far less willing to help. She grabs our tickets, waves them in the air, and declares to the line of waiting customers that we are idiots for having made such a mistake, despite our insistence that the error was on their end. “This pass—stupid. Waste. Your travel agent should have told you.” We inform her that we didn’t have a travel agent, and she shouts down our objection, accusing us again of stupidity. We have should have had a travel agent, or we should have booked tickets individually because this pass is hard to deal with. Can’t afford that? Well, then we shouldn’t have come. We are idiot Americans and she won’t help us. As we’ve dealt with two days worth of wonderful, friendly, helpful people in this country, we decide that this woman is sole reason the French have a reputation for rudeness. We abandon the hope of solving this problem and head for the hostel.

We get off at the tram stop the (very sweet) girl at the tourism desk showed us. We’re at a roundabout where six streets meet. We’re looking for Gravier. Two are labeled Baudelaire and four are unmarked. We choose the wrong one twice before meeting a sweet old man who steers us in the right direction. “Up the hill, take a left, then to the summit.”

We look at the 100lb bags we’re carrying on our already weary backs.

Summit?

There’s no other way to describe what we’re faced with after we take that dreaded left. It is indeed a hike to a summit. It’s a winding path curving up a hill at a 45 degree angle. We sit on our packs for a minute, just looking up at the horrible journey we’re about to take. It takes us thirty minutes, three breaks, and the encouragement of a half dozen laughing strangers on their way down the hill, but we make it. We’re panting, sweating, triumphantly throwing our packs to the ground as we approach the reception desk. The staff stares, shocked smiles. A couple of them laugh. One of the guys buys us two waters from the vending machine.

“You two are brave,” he says as we gulp down the water. “Most people just take the shuttle up that hill.”

I turn in time to see Lindsey’s jaw drop to the floor.

Saturday
Nice, it turns out, is wonderful. It is, without a doubt, a tourist spot. But the beaches are gorgeous, the city is clean and lively, and we feel safer after dark than we did in Marseilles. We spent today just walking, and the stress of the week melted away. We'll deal with the rail passes later. It'll be fine.



**Pictures to follow, my wifi here is too weak for uploads

On lonely journeys

Yesterday the loneliness of solitary travel started to get to me a bit. I was tired from the outset and couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with my day. Honestly, the most appealing option was to sit in the hostel or a pub all day. But that seems a waste, and Levi had met someone who recommended a bar in the northern suburbs, so I hopped on a train, feeling proud of my willpower.

I get off at Malahide, among the northernmost stops on the line. I’ve read about a great castle there and I’m eager to get that medieval chill I felt in this country eight years ago. The town itself is beautiful, bustling and quaint. Up the road from the city center is the castle, an enormous, imposing affair on a few acres of immaculately kept lawns and woods. Stone-lines paths wind through the deep green forest, which occasionally gives way to perfectly manicured playgrounds and soccer fields. Nature here exists at the end of the short lease of the Irish tourism department.


The castle itself is lovely, an ivy-covered stone masterpiece with turrets and ramparts straight out of a fairy tale. I take dozen of photos from outside, but pass on the €8 tour through the inside, which was constantly updated until the family left in the 19th century, leaving it more a Victorian mansion than a castle.

I walk back through the town to a rocky, foreboding beach. They’ve left it in its natural state—high grass, moss-covered boulders, and a craggy, unswimable shoreline. It’s uninviting, almost creepy, but gorgeous in a stark, dramatic sort of way. I take some photographs of the crabs, barnacles, and clams inhabiting the tide pools. It should be a wonderful afternoon, but my spirits are low. I’m feeling lonely for Levi, wishing I had a companion in this harsh, beautiful place.

Headed still further out on the train, I find myself in the midst of an Irish postcard. Miles of hilly farmland roll out in front of the station platform, a breathtaking patchwork of a hundred shades of green. A block from the train station, two enormous medieval windmills come into view. They overlook miles of hilly neighborhoods and church steeples in the distance.


When I arrive at the bar that was recommended to me, I find it to be a strange, glittery, would-be posh lounge with mirrored bead curtains and a sparkly red bar. It’s very unusual but great people-watching; I have a pint of cider and spend a few minutes listening to two guys down the bar hurling insults at each other and laughing uproariously at the particularly biting ones. But the cider fails to improve my mood and I get back on the train.

Back in Dublin, I check out of the hostel and lug my stuff to the house of a guy I found on Couchsurf.com. He and his roommates are all Brazilian, here in Ireland to learn English (which has been hard, since I can barely even understand the English here). They’re also hosting two girls from Germany who begged to be squeezed in when they were unable to find other lodging. These are great people. We spend the entire night sitting around drinking beer and comparing our three vastly different countries. Anne, who bears a shocking likeness to the St. Pauli girl, tells me about the candlelight schnitzel dinner she had with a boy she’s been seeing. Bruno teaches me some Brazilian drinking games, and Gabriel forces me to practice some Portuguese, shy as I am about it. Freya, who speaks gorgeous Portuguese, spends the evening translating the confusing bits of this trilingual conversation for anyone having trouble. Not the night you’d expect from an Irish vacation, but a great one. I’m feeling happy again as I climb into bed in the early hours of the morning.