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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