f scott

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

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

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

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

el rollo de los visados

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hablar

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

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

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

At dinner with our cabin mates

The whole group

pre-tailandia

In my experience with movement, particularly of the intercontinental variety, I've learned that it is entirely possible to be in two places at once, and in the case of life-altering relocation, I find it actually quite unavoidable. Three weeks ago, our contracts came in the mail from Thailand, a thick brown paper package with an elephant stamp, and ever since I've had my mind in Surat Thani while my feet remain stubbornly planted on Extremeño soil. Recent days have been full of paperwork and embassy phone calls, exposing me to the tricky animal that is Thai-accented Spanish and reaffirming my conviction that bureaucracy is the most maddening of all human innovations.

During classes I'm talking about my impending move with my students, who tend to think I'm a lunatic for going so far (presumably forgetting that I'm already over 4000 miles from my hometown). Between classes I'm making to-do lists and shopping lists--purchase shoes because apparently Thais have tiny feet and my size 8s will want for accommodation; call the embassy again because of something about visas and probably they want more money; now the airline won't take the credit card and they've made the dubious decision to handle customer service via Twitter, so spend the next few hours darting to the computer every spare moment to see if they've finally chosen mine out of the barrage of 140-character requests. My ever-tranquilo boyfriend is, predictably, relaxed and laughing at my frenzied state. But the truth is, I'm so excited that I'm loving the preparations. 

When not intensely engaged in logistical planning or Google Image Search daydream sessions, I'm making what I will (at the risk of being self-congratulatory) call a valiant effort at getting the most out of the remaining weeks here. My spirits have been only slightly dampened by the sudden appearance of the long-delayed rainy season, and I've been Spanishing it up with the best of them, all wine and campo and four-hour meals with friends. In moments of marinated pork loin, full-volume laughter in the plaza, and sunny walks through the freshly-bloomed wildflower fields, it hits me how much I will miss this place.

pascua

It's Holy Week, the eight-day culmination of Lent and one of the most important of the multitude of annual Spanish festivals. Every morning and evening from Palm Sunday to the day of the Resurrection, lavish, melancholy processions march down the streets. Somber-faced marching bands led by wailing horns and funereal snares are followed by groups of white-robed men in conic hats (who bear an unfortunate but meaningless likeness to an infamous group of American paraders). Children in hooded robes carry long candles, their partially-obscured faces eerily illuminated by the flickering orange light.

But when the procession pauses for a breather, the masks, hoods, and trumpets are lowered and the sinister effect vanishes. Mothers and fathers come forward to adjust robes while grandparents snap photos. Children in the crowd seek out their candle-bearing friends to add a layer or two to the balls of wax they've been creating for years. The atmosphere is noisy and festive for a few minutes until a whistle blows and everyone scrambles back into place. 

As they slowly tread forward, a float appears in the door of the church, at the tail of the procession. The base is about eight feet high and draped in a white cloth, under which shuffle the feet of twenty pallbearers. Atop the base is the image of a day of the story. On Palm Sunday, the carved wooden man of honor rides in on his painted donkey, followed by tiny Jerusalemites, who occasionally wander off course and are redirected by a nearby parent. On Monday, Mary floats above the crowd, surrounded by dozens of tea candles, trailing a fifteen-foot crimson robe, and crying enamel tears from her painted eyes. On Friday they bear Jesus through the streets bleeding from his cross, and on Easter Sunday he's triumphant, his crown of thorns replaced with silver. 

To be honest, the whole thing strikes me as pretty morbid. The pageantry is impressive and there's a certain emotional power in the mournful Mediterranean tunes, but the whole affair could do with less blood and fewer tears. Some of our Spanish friends love it, but others have described it as an annual annoyance that serves only to clog up the bars with tourists. One friend characterizes it as an opportunity for the hypocritical to express their faith in a public show of ostentatious and affected mourning. Having only been through it twice, my feelings on the matter aren't nearly so strong. But since we're all just celebrating nature's annual rebirth anyway, I think it's much more cheerful to do it with painted eggs and marshmallow peeps. 

But after the procession passes the plaza, the crowd disperses and the incense-laden air clears. The devout will follow for the duration of the four-hour procession through the town, but most scurry back to the cafe tables they've saved with scarves and purses, agreeing with enthusiastic nods that the spectacle was beautiful. Children splash up water at the fountain and chase each other around the palms. Little girls run among the tables, their white shoes flashing as they fly, hair ribbons trailing behind brown curls. Somewhere east, the procession is alive again, its tragic trumpets carrying on the evening breeze and mingling with the plaza laughter.

graduation goggles

We're on the cusp of spring. The winter clouds have dispersed to reveal that persistent Mediterranean sun, the storks have returned to their belfry nests, and the mountainside has begun sprouting its carpet of purple and yellow flowers. People walk down the streets dabbing their allergen-assaulted eyes, but not even the pollinated air can keep the heliophilic Spaniards from their plaza cervezas. They leap from bar to bar, chasing the afternoon sun as it slowly abandons the square.

Only eleven weeks left in Zafra. At the end of May we'll set out on the 50-hour journey to Madrid, Moscow, Bangkok, and finally Surat Thani, where we'll be moving into a big house with seven English teachers and enjoying the city life again. Surat's a bit bigger than Bloomington. It has fast food restaurants, shopping malls, and internet cafes. I can't help but laugh at the notion of leaving Europe to move to the modern world of the monsoon-plagued, pit-viper infested southern Thailand, but I guess leaving Zafra for most places in like stepping into the future.

I'll miss this little time capsule of a town, with its cold sunshine wine, its noisy, friendly, musical people, its ancient belltowers and terra cotta rooftops and cobblestone plazas. I'm excited to start something new, but as my time here winds down, I'm beginning to reflect on how wonderful this place has been for me. I'm a better person than I was before I threw away my law school apps and left my comfy Midwestern life, and I've got Zafra to thank for that.

rupestre

In a country as Catholic, carnivorous, and festival-happy as Spain, it's little surprise that Carnival, the four-day lead-up to the Lent, is something of an occasion here. They did what they are wont to do; lights when up on the streets in the town center, a stage was erected in the plaza and an MC hired. Then in they came, from Zafra and from all the quiet little villages, dressed as pirates and hippies and princesses, to shake it to those persistent Mediterranean beats until the cleaning crews moved in at 7am.

It's fun, but the repetition wears me down. When Friday dawned warm and blue, I decided to blow it off and spend my five-day weekend in pursuit of the history of the Castellar. A book I've mentioned before promised cave paintings, and really, you can only listen to so much Shakira.

So Levi and I spent every day walking the paths and scaling the rocks of the ridges, and what we found totally validates my decision to be anti-social.

I know sadly little about this stuff, but I'm looking into it. All of this stuff was found along the mile-long ridge, scattered among 6 or 8 different sites. I'll go back and map it soon. For now, here's some photos.

A pendant and a spearhead, found on the highest ridge of the Castellar. These we (obviously) took home with us.

Series of dots in a pattern I can't make out. Ideas?

Sun on the cliff face

Another sun a few yards from the first, this one with a dot in the center. Below it to the left is a stick figure animal.

Inside a cave on the ridge.The leaf is my personal favorite painting.

In cave 2.

Levi investigating. Above his head is a bull's eye shape and some animals; to the right a leaf?

On the cliff face

In the first cave we found