training

Zafra enjoys a regional reputation and an ideal place for families and thus, despite its relatively small size, it is positively overflowing with children and teenagers. Partially because of its smallness and resulting lack of resources, but primarily due to its utter Spanishness, these hoards of under-18s, organized into their lifelong cliques and bands, entertain themselves by walking. They meet up in the plazas and parks and wander the streets in groups of five to ten kids, stopping at every snack store for gummies and chips. They storm cafes and restaurants, where sympathetic proprietors leave jugs of water on the bar to hydrate the kids in their roving. A few stop for a joint in the park, and some of the older ones dress up and try their luck at the less scrupulous pubs, but most are content to simply pass the evening engaging in that most Spanish of activities: socializing in the street. Groups come together, kisses are exchanged, gossip and small talk traded, and then the groups divide and move to the next block, to the next meeting. They're not going somewhere; the point is just the going, always with the expectation of not-so-chance encounters.

In the winter months, when temperatures occasionally hit freezing late at night and rain is more frequent, this activity loses some of its appeal. The American answer to this quandary is, naturally, to go to a friend's house. The problem here is that the group of close friends of the average Spanish teenager is not limited to the eight or so kids who join him on his evening walks, but rather extends to every one of those dozens of members of groups he meets. I once asked an eighth-grade student why he didn't just have his friends come hang out in his sizable living room. "Well," he said, with a tone that implied that I was missing something very obvious,"there are thirty-five of us."

The solution is the local. These thirty-five thirteen-year-olds pool their allowances and rent an empty office. Presumably borrowing from their parents' houses, they stock it with furniture and spend the cold evenings there with their mob of friends.

My parents would have never allowed this (for good reason), nor would have any other American parent I know. It would never have even occurred to me to request permission for such a thing. And what landlord would open his property to three dozen unsupervised kids?

But all my students insist that although the privilege is occasionally abused, the true purpose is just innocent socializing, and seem honestly confused that I would assume anything different. The mindset is just different here. Socializing with every person you know every single weekend is the normal course of things here, and when the weather prohibits street wandering, why should your social life suffer? They don't seem to be abusing the old-fashioned naivete of their parents, but actually provide it to be sound wisdom. It's Pleasantville.

But I suppose it's a means of feeding that natural Spanish lust for socialization and bonding. From the very beginning, they have their group, and they're not ever to be parted with them, especially not for something so trivial as cold rain or insufficient space. Because later in life they will drift bar to bar with that same core group, stopping for a drink in each place with the same satellite groups, exchanging kisses and gossip and small talk before going for a snack at the next tapas bar.