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.