"Hosery"

I had a friend two summers ago who, like myself, had decided to prolong his stay in Cortona, Italy by finding work beyond the UGA study abroad program. He worked as a landscaper that summer while I worked as a nanny. Often, when we would get together to hike or watch the events of the World Cup unfold, our conversations, like two fledgling ex-pats, would venture into reminiscing, comparing or complaining about the differences between the culture in which we were living and the one from which we came.
“Hoses,” he said. “Italian hoses are so much better than American hoses. Why do America have those crappy hoses that always kink and dry and crack.” “The Italian hoses are made of light, flexible rubber that doesn’t kink and doesn’t crack.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you should write your first book about it.”

Italy has come and gone and now, so has Spain. But with Spain in much more recent memory, I’d like to share with you all some of my observations since my return back to the states and how being away from familiarity really opens up a new perspective on even the simplest of things.


Grass.
I forgot how much I missed grass while I was living up in the “outstanding crag” of the Sierra de Cádiz. I also forgot about the American phenomenon of “lawn obsession.”


People.
I forgot that so many people in the states live their lives and base their actions on fear and frustration.


Toilet water.
The amount of water in American toilets is astounding.


Wine.
Can anyone tell me if there is anywhere in the whole of the United States where I can find a good bottle…I mean good…of red wine that is five bucks or less?


Underground.
Madrid subway system: anyone is up for conversation, ride is smooth, color and lighting aesthetically pleasing. Also, at some point, you are guaranteed to be pick-pocketed.

New York subway system: everyone maintains personal bubble and avoids any personal contact or connection at all times, ride is violently jerky, color and lighting aesthetically depressing.


Left Foot Disuse Anxiety.
Happened when I came back from Italy too. Me poor little left foot has phantom clutch depression urges while driving America’s automatic vehicles.


Public Transportation.
Ubrique: What’s that?
America:What’s that?

Business and business hours.
Ubrique: Guess I took for granted the fact that I could leave the house and in 1 minute or less, get fresh bread from the bakery, fresh produce from the fruit stand, and/or fresh goat cheese and eggs from the butcher.

America: Guess I took for granted that you have the option of functioning between the hours of 1pm and 5pm and that you don’t actually need 4 hours do digest your food before moving on to the next task.


Exercise.
At least in America, women are seen moving at a faster pace than a high-heeled strut and do not get disapproving or incredulous looks and comments from passersby when attempting to have a leisurely jog.


Medical Treatment.
America: Ridiculous amounts of money are spent on prescription drugs that are prescribed for conditions and illnesses that didn’t exist before the existence of said prescription drug.

Spain: Universal health care. But, for some reason, the first question I am asked upon entering into the clinic is: “Do you want bread?”

Noche de verano

Es una hermosa noche de verano.
Tienen las altas casas
abiertos los balcones
del viejo pueblo a la anchurosa plaza
En el amplio rectángulo desierto,
bancos de piedra, evonimos y acacias
simétricos dibujan
sus negras sombras en la arena blanca.
En el cenit, la luna, y en la torre
la esfera del reloj iluminada.
Yo en este viejo pueblo paseando
solo como un fantasma.

Antonio Machado

Great Expectations

Every coin has two sides, every sword has two edges and the pendulum swings.
I came into this country inevitably with preordained expectations. Expectations that I felt were reasonable, but entering into a foreign situation with any expectations is always dangerous because one can always depend on being greatly disappointed by his or her own expectations. The opposite, however, can also be true and one can be pleasantly surprised by what a place and its people have to offer.

I am leaving Spain in 1 week.
Every morning, I walk to school alone but along the way, I am hardly alone. If my timing is right, I am greeted by a timid little dog, name Curro who inches irresistibly towards me so I can give him a few good scruffs for which he invariably performs a sprightly little dance of excitement and gratitude. And if not Curro, it is the peacock who greets me, looking like some great cobalt and emerald seraph for his utterly disinterested and plain looking lover. And if not the peacock, it is the little goat herder with whom I see eye to eye. His skin is a perfect weathered caramel from the sun and his eyes always glisten out of the depths of his profoundly carved crows feet. I am always met by his smile and some emphatic and incomprehensible greeting before he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a fistful of candies and shoves them in my hand shouting, “Caramelos!” No rules against taking candy from strangers here, though he is hardly a stranger at this point.

Everyday, I cross a wide marble checkered plaza bordered by orange trees and backed by dramatically sheer mountains. I climb 33 marble stairs in a brightly tiled staircase to my brightly tiled apartment which looks out across the plaza and towards the valley. My lunch, always exquisitely prepared by my two roommates, sometimes with my contribution, lasts for 2 hours followed by a siesta for another two hours. I give a private lesson in English or go to choral rehearsal or flamenco class.
Everynight, I close my eyes to the sound of wind pushing hard on the thin glass and weathered wood of my two balcony windows, or to the sound of goat bells tinkling off the mountain behind me, or to the sound of trickling water in the fountain below.

Then I wake up…usually, to the sounds of someone laying on their car horn for more than 30 seconds. That’s never enough, so then they give it another blow. Forty seconds this time. There is always someone parked in the middle of the busy street corner under my window where the fruit shop and the butcher shop receive their daily deliveries and the construction workers must pass with heavy loads. Loud. These people are so loud. And they like to be in your business. But sometimes it’s for the best because whenever there is a downpour and I arrived too late to take my clothes down from the line, rest assured, the neighbor will have already gone to the roof and gathered all my clothes before the downpour.

Elvis Lives

That’s right folks. Elvis indeed continues living upon this earth and he, in fact, lives here in the little town of Ubrique in the middle of nowhere Andalucia, Spain. He, of course, has permed his hair into ringlets and made some changes to his repertoire: he is a professional flamenco dancer and instructor and looks about 60 years younger than he should look at this point (must have traded in his fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches for celery).
But it is DEFINITELY him. I know it because, when he dances, he wears a white suit and has not one pair of blue suede shoes…but two!

Furthermore, Kate, another language assistant, swears she has seen Sadam Hussein at the grocery store and I personally believe there is a whole colony of Yetis living in these mountains because there is just no way the goats around here can leave as much poo as that which is so generously sprinkled all over the mountainside.

A Bird in the Hand

PART I

Pickpockets are the world’s best sociologist and psychologist. They know exactly how to read people, whether individually or in groups according to their actions, ethnicity, the clothes they are wearing and whatever other visual clues they get from a person’s appearance. They have to have this precise understanding, of course, because they make a living off of it. Essentially, they get paid on commission for being experts in the field of other people’s obliviousness.

If there is one thing to know about pickpockets, it’s that they are always looking. They are looking for weak spots, time warps when one person’s attention has fallen momentarily into a black hole, where they can slip in and out in a second and instantaneously extract the most important paper and plastic components of your life from wherever you have them stashed and then swiftly disappear into the surrounding fabric of conventional space and time.

Sunday morning. Madrid metro station. Pockets are loaded with cash for perusing the weekly open market. Ripe for the picking. Supremely juicy. Having warned them about Madrid’s notorious purse and wallet disappearing acts, my mother and my aunt stand conversing without suspicion or worry as the thin subway crowd seems relatively relaxed and unthreatening. I, however, didn’t engage myself in the conversation and, instead, scan the people around us. I come across the gaze of an ordinary-looking, young man doing the same thing: scanning. I watch him, see him give my mom and aunt the “once over” and then make a comment, rather inconspicuously, to an older gentleman who passes by him. My little antennas go up.

When the train arrives, the two get on separately. I see the younger man go to the far end of the car while the older man plants himself rather snuggly beside my mother. My little radar starts buzzing. I instinctively grab my mom’s purse which is hanging by her side and WHAM! Catch of the day, I am holding, rather un-amorously, hands with a pickpocket!

Now, very rarely do I reach my rage threshold, but, with the right combination of fear, surprise, and frusteration, I have found that I can create enough adrenaline to issue forth lasers from my eyeballs and fire from my mouth.
I looked at the man with wild eyes and scream “F%*# OFF!!!” (still clutching the man’s hand) then acusedly, “What did you steal!!! What did you steal!!!”
He looks at me, completely bewildered, I am sure, by the elf-like girl about to pierce the skin on his knuckles with her little claws and quickly retracts his hand before running away to the other side of the subway car.

Needless to say, nothing was stolen.


PART II


The Common Swift is the most aerial species of bird in the world. It eats drinks, sleeps and mates in the air. It never deliberately lands on a horizontal surface. Its wingspan and its short legs make it nearly impossible for the Swift to take off from the ground and I’ve been told that if ever to find one on the ground, I should toss it up to give is some air under its wings so it can fly.

Unexpectedly, I found one on the ground. She was on her back, awkwardly struggling to right herself. So I picked her up, wished her well and launched her into the air. She fluttered successfully for a moment and then crashed. I picked her up again and looked at her wings. One wing was not quite right. So, I held her. I kept her close, put her in a shoebox and optimistically did my best to feed her and give her water throughout the day.

But as evening fell, the sky-scraping cries of the swifts outside awakened her anxiety. I realized that I couldn’t keep the poor thing in a box and I knew that without the ability to fly, she was deprived of all things vital and I knew I had to let her go. I decided the best place to leave her was close to the cliffs where she would have joined the other birds if she could fly. So, up the mountain we went. Found a grassy knoll and that’s where I left her. I know she didn’t survive, but I am reminded of my little friend every morning and evening as the Swifts take to the air, their fast jet bodies with their chevron wings sewing wide loops in and out of the peripheries of the plaza.

Feliz navidad

It’s Christmas time and I ‘tis the season to update you all on my latest happenings. I will try to be brief but interesting. I left many of you with my last mass email in the summer of 2006 during the course of a beautiful summer spent in Tuscany as a nanny, enjoying life with a great family with two little boys, Tom and Elliott. After taking full advantage of summer festivities including Italy’s World Cup win, the Palio in Siena and outdoor summer dance parties, as well as visits from the Saupe’s, the family in whose basement apartment I lived back in Athens, from a favorite old friend, Stephen Bailey and from my mom-climber of mountains and sister-climber of Sienese towers, I ventured to Bulgaria for a visit to my friend, David Elden in the Peace Corps. I returned to Cortona in September for a stint working for the same study abroad program of which I was a student the previous year. All went so pleasantly well, topping it all off with a visit to beautiful Switzerland just before returning to the states to find myself completely dumbfounded with what to do with myself. So, for 10 months I remained in this state before being visited by a twist of fate (or rather, a favorite professor of mine) who presented to me an opportunity of which I am currently taking advantage. This opportunity involves teaching English to Spanish high school students and though I made genuine attempts to prepare myself for this tank, it seems that there were a “few” things which I was not prepared to anticipate…

El habla "d'andalu"

I thought I learned Spanish in high school and college. And I thought what I learned applied to Spain and most of South and Central America but apparently, the brand of Spanish that they speak in Andalucia of southern Spain is of a different breed…”el habla d’andalu,” is a distant relative of school-book Spanish. Even more distant, however, is the Spanish spoken in the small town of Ubrique, where I have been assigned to teach. Words are amputated and spoken rapidly and loud enough to break the sound barrier. The Castillian lisp, or “zeta” (pronounced [theta] ) is used profusely, and consonants that I thought were vital to the understanding and pronunciation of Spanish are completely left out. When someone from Ubrique is shown on the national news, for example, their famous bullfighter, Jesulin, he is always given Spanish subtitles for the sake the understanding of all other Spaniards. So, needless to say, I spent my first month in Ubrique smiling and nodding, shedding my former knowledge of Spanish for an understanding of a different version of Spanish. After after a few months, however, my brain has wrapped itself around the sport of listening and speaking Ubriqueno by dissecting and removing certain sounds from words and leaving gasps of air at the ends of my sentences.

The Mullethawk

Another aspect of Ubrique that has baffles me, besides the dialect, are the haircuts. The most common haircut for a male Ubriqueno has come from some unknown dimension between mowhawks and mullets, thus manifesting itself as, what I like to call, the “Mullethawk.” The mullethawk requires the hair on top of one’s head to be gelled to a pointy ridge, while the hair at the back of the head is left to grow longer allowing scraggly curls to dangle from the nape of the neck. My heart yearns for a pair of scissors each time I see this rare quaff.

Kids Rule, Teachers Drool!

There is virtually no use for English in this inverted mountain town in the middle of nowhere. I say inverted because this “pueblo blanco” (white town) of southern Spain is quite possibly the only pueblo blanco to be situated in the crevice of the surrounding limestone-based crag. Beautiful but isolated, the people who live here are very friendly, generous, close-knit and proud of their town, which often frustrates me by its limitations, including my students’ limited interest in learning any inkling of English. Because of its isolation, there are generally no English speaking tourists who bother venturing here to purchase from Ubrique’s famous and over-priced selection of leather goods. Thus, there is very little incentive for people to speak English for utilitarian purposes and furthermore, few consider venturing out of the town in search of opportunity and experience that is different from what they already know. There are, of course, exceptions to this general apathy and these exceptional few keep me sane while the majority of the students keep me inventing new ways to interest even the most disassociated brains. I have a new found respect for all those teachers of my yester-years who wrangled whole classes of hooligans. But on a 10-point scale of hooliganism, if Americans are a 3, Ubriquenos are a 9. I am talking about, running around the room, always shouting, interrupting, throwing things, picking fights, making excuses for consequences that that are deserving of their actions and not doing any assignments that they are given. According to the other teachers, it all stems from problems in the Spanish educational system. Whatever. Nevertheless, I try to do interesting activities…if I can even get around to explaining them, but if anyone has any suggestions…I am open them…really. Wide open.

"If you need anything..."

So maybe I have met with frustration when it’s come to inconsistencies and disorganization in the Spanish educational, transportation and governmental, systems, but the one thing that has been consistent since the day I arrived in Ubrique, is the amazing hospitality. People are genuinely kindhearted here. They are open and trusting and very generous. I also, have had the great luck of being placed here with 6 other girls like me, teaching on a grant given by the Spanish government. We are all very different, but get along well. My roommate, Tessa, from northern California, is very even tempered, an intellectual who loves witty comedy and tea and has a great smile. My soon-to-be second roommate, Candice, is from southern California and also extremely even tempered, laid back, loves to dance and makes delicious pumpkin pie. Kate, from Liverpool, England, is Oxford educated and self-assured, a great story teller and wishes she were from a Jane Austin novel. Dee, a feisty Irish girl, is also a most excellent teller of stories and the most loving of all of us. Irma, our own local “J-Lo,” is Bronx born and bred with Latino heritage and has a real knack for picking up old guys. They are all excellent company especially when it comes to needing to vent our scholar frustrations but also to discuss the stunning generosity of people here. We have all come to the consensus that the most common phrase with which we have all been met by the locals is, “If you need anything, just ask.” And it is meant whole-heartedly.

Dog Days

One of these locals who calls himself my adopted uncle, and indeed is, has absorbed all of us into his family of 1 wife, 3 kids and 30 dogs. Forty years ago, he officially registered a breed of dog known as the Spanish Water Dog. This dog has been around for 1000 years, maybe more, but this friend of mine, Antonio, was the first guy to give this dog a legitimate breed name in today’s world. The dogs are very family friendly dogs, hypoallergenic and non-shedding, love the water (they can swim up to 3 meters deep) and are also great sheep herders. So, as a disclaimer for all the dog pictures, I have spent a lot of time around these dogs at goat herding competitions and international dog shows where dogs and hairspray become one, hence, the shots of puffy poodles and criminally dressed Chihuahuas.

Buon Natale

As for other adopted family members, I have decided to spend Christmas with another adopted family of mine since I couldn’t make it back to my real family for Christmas. I am writing from Italy now from beside a warm fire with the family for whom I nannied last year. Not a whole lot feels different from a year ago except for the added additions to their family of 5 cashmere goats and a Sardinian donkey, but I still get the same kisses from the same two little boys and the same great food and company from their same great parents. I hope everyone is well back home or wherever you are and best wishes to my friends who are celebrating their new babies first Christmases.