portañol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

busysorta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

••••

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

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

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

altered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where ya from?”

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

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

Not here.

"What the fuck're ya doin here?"

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

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

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

“Umm…how?”

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

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

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

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.

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