Banks.

Due to upcoming Halloween craziness, and an increase in my work hours, I've had the past two days off. Yesterday, I decided to go in search of a bank account. "Search" is probably not quite the right word, given the fact that there are seven banks on every block in Spain. I think the number of banks in this country may even rival the number of pharmacies in Chile. The confusing part, then, becomes which bank. Katharina had told me that Santander was one of few well-known banks that doesn't charge a quarterly fee for the privilege of letting them poorly lend out your money. Given that I have very little money to begin with, this seemed like a good idea. When I arrived at the bank, I was greeted by Santander's version of the TSA air-puffing chambers that are relatively new additions to airport security. There was a cylindrical portal I had to buzz my way into, and then I was sealed inside while I awaited permission to exit and enter the bank. Unfortunately, Santander didn't want me to enter. Three times in a row a Spanish recording came on to inform me that I had to turn around and step outside. I stepped out and, looking quizically at the contraption, let two women go ahead of me. They were both allowed to enter the bank. I tried again; the chamber told me no. Finally, I took my folded up umbrella out of my backpack, set it by the door, and tried again. The voice rejected me again, but a man standing behind me told me to stay inside; I waited a second, and then the door to the bank opened. It was very bizarre.

After waiting for a surprisingly short ten minutes or so, I sat down at a woman's desk to open my bank account. I sat there, staring at her computer screen, as she slowly and painfully typed and then retyped my information, not seeming to care about the veracity of certain details (such as whether or not I was a man, and whether I was separated or divorced), as she chatted on the phone with a friend. I grimaced a bit, and tried to point things out when they seemed a little too important to get wrong, but mostly I just sat there, not sure of what to do. When I went back this morning with my original passport in tow, she was once again on the phone with her friend, continuing to talk even as she told me where to sign my name.

I managed to get myself out of the cylindrical tube with a freshly minted pin number for my enroute atm card. Tonight, when I turned on the BBC, I found out that Santander is forecasted to go through some rough times. Awesome.

On not being German

Some updating seems to be in order.

I spent an extended weekend (Thursday to Sunday) in Córdoba, about a two hour's drive (or an inexplicable 4 1/2 hour's bus ride) from Vélez. Córdoba is where Ferdinand and Isabella bade farewell to Columbus; it was also the heart of the inquisition. Both of these notable characteristics are paid homage to in the city, the first with a flower-surrounded monument in the middle of the Alcázar's (fortress) gardens, and the second with torture museum complete with a shorts-wearing skeleton standing guard at the front door. The old part of the city, referred to as the judería, or Jewish quarter, is a beautiful jumble of cobbled streets that seem to wind inside out and upside down, with veins splitting off and then joining back again, all lined with patios and planters spilling out still-blooming pink and red flowers. It's home to the enormous La Mezquita, one of the most important Islamic sites in Spain, which is the size of several city blocks and today used for both Catholic and Muslim services. About ten minutes away stands a centuries-old building with a plaque announcing that Don Quixote himself had mentioned it as one of the best posadas in the world. It's all very pretty and steeped in history; unfortunately, about three-fourths of the way through day two, I'd run out of things to see. Still, the weekend was fun, and it was a nice change of pace.

For awhile now I've been thinking about how funny it is to walk down the street with my German roommate Katharina. She winces and laughs uncomfortably, sometimes letting some of her frustration escape through a string of angry words in Spanish (always in Spanish). Andalucía--our portion along the Costa del Sol in particular--is overflowing with foreigners. In cities like Córdoba, Granada, and Sevilla, tourists seem to ooze out of the cobble stones. Everywhere you turn, there are menus translated into five different languages, double-decker tourist buses navigate their way down narrow streets, and gypsies corner unknowing vacationers with sprigs of mint. In the small towns along the Costa del Sol, such as our nearby Torre del Mar, German, English, and Belgian expatriates constitute a large portion of the population. German, more than any other non-Spanish language (and sometimes even more than Spanish), pervades this region. You get on a bus headed toward Nerja, and eight out of ten people who board along with you will mispronounce (in a way that Katharina hears much more acutely than I do) their intended destination when asking the driver for their ticket.

For the first time, I find myself in a place where Americans are not automatically the majority foreign demographic. When I went to Mexico my sophomore year at Carleton, I was astounded by the amount of North American influence in Puebla. American music often filled the central plaza, I took classes at an international college founded by people from the States, and the Simpsons were literally everywhere. My initial shock faded as American ubiquity became my understood norm, even in far-flung places like Patagonia. So coming here, and being confronted by German grocery stores, German restaurant ads, and German TV channels, has been kind of odd, and also kind of refreshing. And it's interesting watching Katharina react to it. I know how she feels; it's hard to find yourself surrounded by the very thing you were trying so hard to distance yourself from in order to challenge yourself. And it's not to say that Americans are hard to come by in southern Spain, but the relative lack is notable, and I even find myself excited to hear the occasional words of English as I pass in the street.

Color me covered

I am now a proud, card-carrying recipient of Sanitas health insurance. I can travel to Italy, step on a barnacle, and get stitches in my foot for free; I can walk into a clinic in Torre del Mar and receive free lab tests and physical therapy; I can even have my remains transferred from my place of death without undue cost to my family. I cannot get a free prosthesis, but I can ask Sanitas to foot the bill for my hotel stay should I need to care for a loved one being hospitalized away from home. I even got a little booklet with all the names of all the doctors and all the various medical specialities in Andalucía for which I'm eligible with my shiny new card.

I wasn't supposed to get my card today because I'd planned to head east to Nerja to finish a hike Katharina had half-completed over the weekend (we got a little lost, then we stumbled into a cave, then we ate some lunch, then we got found, then it started to rain, etc.), but when I woke up to a rain-filled window, health coverage seemed like a decent trade off. So around late morning I trudged down the street wearing jeans that were a couple inches too long for sidewalks full of water, and flip-flops too slippery for sidewalks full of water, toward the bus station. By the time we rolled into Málaga, I was mostly just damp, but that changed as soon as I left the bus station and started walking through more watery streets and sidewalks. I found my way to the Junta de Andalucía building, and then preceded to visit nearly every floor as I searched for someone who knew where I was supposed to go. Spaniards seem to have this infuriating habit of giving you fake instructions if they don't know the answer to your question, and then get defensive if you start to get a little irritated. In the end, though, I found the little office that had a little package with my name on it--the very last one at the bottom of an impressive pile--just before the looming siesta hour. By the time I left, it was pouring, and my flip-flops kept flicking water droplets all over the backs of my pant legs as I walked back to the station. This time, though, I knew that I'd be covered if I came down with pneumonia after slogging through cold, wet streets in flip flops all day.

In other news, tomorrow I'm headed to Córdoba!

Grocery stores and canvas

Spain really likes grocery stores. My new apartment, situated in the middle of Vélez-Málaga, is within comfortable walking distance of at least 9 very large grocery establishments, each of them different. For me, this is beyond exciting. Slowly but not all that slowly, I've been working my way to each of them, discerning which is best for Golden Delicious apples, which has the good kind of yogurt (though sadly not my favorite kind of Greek yogurt, or anything resembling cottage cheese), and which carries which brand of fiber cookies in bulk. Among my greatest finds to date have been Ecuadorian quinoa, Mexican-style black beans (surprisingly difficult to find), pre-cooked jarred garbanzo beans, Vietnamese spring roll wrappers, sushi-making nori, Ocean-Spray Cran-Raspberry, and bran flakes. Whenever I can, I like to grab my canvas Carleton College bag given to me by the Latin American Studies Department at the end of last year, and go hunting for new and exciting groceries. The other day I did just that and set off for the gigantic Eroski, located about a 30-minute's walk away in the mall that lies between Vélez and Torre del Mar. I spent the better part of an hour wandering up and down the aisles, and then, my bag weighed down with assorted excitement, started back toward my apartment.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the shiny glass outside the grocery store doors, and saw the blue Carleton College lettering glaring back at me. For some reason, it was startling. For the past several weeks--and in some ways since the moment I left Carleton in June--I've been struggling to figure out how to approach my life post-Carleton. I have become hyper-aware of the oddity that is the Carleton campus, of the fact that the people I met there, and the experiences I had, are not the normal things one finds in day to day life. It's hit me especially hard since I got to Spain. I still haven't really found anyone who I can really relate to, or anything that resembles the kind of intellectual atmosphere I've apparently become reliant upon. I'm not quite sure how to make myself fit here, or any other place, for that matter. Just as my canvas Carleton bag clearly doesn't fit here (Spaniards may be somewhat ahead of their Latin American counterparts in the whole "don't use a crap-load of plastic bags everytime you buy a piece of bread" experiment, they're not exactly on the cutting edge of the carbon neutral movement), I don't really either; or, at least I don't feel like I do at this point.

One day last week I was leading an English session with four teachers at my school. They were working their way through the New York Times article I had printed out and annotated with vocabulary explanations and grammar points. When they got to my discussion questions at the bottom they sudden grew quiet and looked slightly alarmed. "So professional and complicated?" one asked. I looked at the questions I'd typed out the night before about the ailing economy and its relationship to the EU and to daily life in Periana, and had a flashback to the soundbytes of my college search days: "Carleton (replaceable with any of dozens of schools I looked at) will teach you how to think critically and ask questions." What I think they may have left out of that tempting promise, however, was that my learning how to think differently would result in my feeling considerably isolated from the people around me. I don't mean that in an elitest sense; it's more that I think I've become dependent upon a certain way of communicating, and on the presence of a lot of young, studious, weird individuals. Without those structures in place, I'm kind of at a loss.

So that's what I felt while I was walking back from the grocery store, passing half a dozen other grocery stores enroute to my apartment. A beautiful clear blue sky was plastered above me, contrasting with the earth brown of the mountains and the dull grey of the highway. Old men with canes and old women chatting socially walked past, cars wooshed by, and I clutched my canvas Carleton bag wondering how I'd gotten here, and what exactly I was supposed to do about it (other than eat a lot of digestive biscuits).

October 9 (retrieved from my laptop)

I sat in the bus as it wound its way up the hills, the sun melting down to the jagged horizon as night came nearer, though slowed by our ascent. The sky began to blaze orange, interrupted only by a pair of scarring clouds. The valley takes on a gauzy, painted quality at this time of night. The flat light makes the houses perched on top of hills glow, while the greenish-brown below disappears into haze. Tiny lights begin to dot the landscape, and the mountains take on a starker silhouette.

The sunset reminded me of a sunset I saw from the window of a bus similar to that one as I crossed the Andes from Chile to Argentina. There was a mostly-full moon, and the barren desert landscape had practically glowed until the final spurts of orange gave way to a purple, inky darkness. Months later, by then in northern Chile, I had seen an even more impressive sunset while perched on top of a rocky outcrop at the far end of an enormous sand dune. As the sun sank, and a full white moon rose from the opposite side of the earth, the desert turned yellow then pink then purple, until finally settling into a relentless, heavy black. I had taken a bus to get there as well, and remember sitting with my face plastered to the window to see the billions of stars explode into the dark night sky.

I seem to often be in buses. And I seem to see a lot of sunsets while I’m in them. I like seeing the world as it passes by my window. It lends itself well to introspection, I’ve learned, but it can also have a sort of anesthetizing effect on over-analysis. For me, at least, my eyes tend to take over for my brain as I contentedly pore over an endlessly unfolding groundcover of things to look at. I stop planning and anticipating and cataloging, and let myself just look. The movement of the bus lets me believe that it’s not entirely passive. Even when it’s dark, when the rest of the valley seems to have sunken into sleep, I’m still moving, for some not-entirely known reason. Depending on the day, this notion is either exhilarating, a mixture of frightening and depressing, or kind of boring. Today, I think it leans heavier toward the first, but it isn’t exactly cut and dry.

This is Periana

What serves as the town’s main square sits right outside my señora’s front door. This small plaza, complete with gurgling fountain, stone benches, and a view of a church constitutes the principle—and only—ventricle of Periana’s rather tiny heart. At almost all hours of the day, the town’s entire population of 80-year-old men, which is impressively large, can be found milling around, gossiping about assuredly manly topics, and glaring unashamedly at the American oddity, should she pass by. They wear 1920’s-style paperboy hats and sweater vests as they progress from bench to bench, then slowly around the outer rim of the square. In the hour or two that precede and follow both sunrise and sunset, the plaza’s three ample trees become overrun by tiny squawking birds seemingly hopped up on amphetamines. Near that time every evening, children pore into the nearby playground and younger, middle-aged men join in the milling as everyone waits for dinnertime. Earlier in the day, 9-year-old boys careen through street and square on their bikes, disturbing passing dogs and cars. Next door there’s a restaurant called El Verdugo that is constantly open and constantly filled with at least a few chattering townsfolk, be they 80-year-old-men or middle-aged expats. At night when I try to sleep I hear their steady business through the wall. From my window, I have a perfect view of it all, including the gauzily painted mountains in the backdrop. At sunset, pink and orange first sifts and then sears its way through my curtains, skirting the trees and the bars of my balcony. It eventually turns to slate, finally hiding the mountains in black.

My señora is a 4-foot-5-inch woman of about 75 with a limp and missing teeth. Her name is María, and Luís, the bilingual director at my school, considers her the town gossip. She lives alone in a house with six bedrooms all meticulously decorated and tidy. She has nieces and nephews flung throughout Spain and beyond, including one named Emily in the United States. She eats salads almost as much as I do, and is forever stocked with fruit (and fruit flies).

My room is the first one at the top of the stairs. A picture of Jesus that hangs on the wall separates the two twin beds. The bathroom down the hall has a hurricane for a shower. Each morning I fight to see my way to my shampoo, the unrelenting torrent of spray completely encompassing every square inch of space on the inside of the shower curtain. I have to hold my hands in front of my to get back toward the dials. Despite my best efforts, each time I stumble out I find vast puddles of water engulfing the bathroom floor.

I.E.S. Alta Axarquía is a school of about 500 students between the ages of 12 and 19. It sits on top of a hill at the edge of town, about a 15-minute’s walk from my señora’s house. The building, which is encased by a wrought iron fence, is surrounded by spindly olive trees. On days when I have early classes, the walk is mostly dark, with hints of sunrise coming up behind my back. When I arrive an hour later, a flat light sits upon the valley and the mountains, softening the landscape’s contours and the chill. Everyday, I seek refuge in the relative quiet of the teacher’s lounge, along with the other 50 teachers who seem to socialize and dawdle just as much as their students. One wall is lined with wooden locker cubes, of which #47 is now mine. There are several computers, daily copies of El país show up at some point during the day, and there’s a poster about “getting to know autistics.” The English Department, where I take my small groups of students several times a day, is a small room on the second floor that, like everything else, is always locked. There are ruthlessly abridged copies of A Christmas Carol and Sense and Sensibility along with maps and dictionaries and posters. In the basement, there’s a little cafeteria that dishes out pitufos, simple sandwiches of cheese and any of several Spanish hams and doused in the town’s famous olive oil. Students can go down and buy food during the 30-minute break for “breakfast” that happens at 11:15, and the teachers seem to disappear down to there at multiple times each day.

At 2:45, school officially ends and everyone heads home for lunch. This is when I’m usually at loss for what to do. The municipal building has free internet access at certain times during the week, so sometimes I go there to work on grad school applications or update Facebook. I tend to wander repeatedly between the school, which also offers free internet, the grocery store, the (single) postal drop-box, the plaza, and my señora’s house. Occasionally I search out streets that I haven’t yet wound my way down, or I sit on a bench and read or write or plan the next day’s lessons. After awhile, I notice that the birds have gotten significantly louder, the temperature’s dropped, and the sky is turning colors, at which point I retreat back into my room.

Because alarm clocks should die

I just had the single most exciting realization of the last many days--my school has wireless!!! As such, here's a post that I've been waiting a week to put up due to technical difficulties. It's from last Friday....

I had arranged with Jesús, one of the bilingual directors at my school, to meet at 7:15am on Friday so he could drive me and all of my stuff to Periana. I was going to meet teachers and see more of the school than I’d been able to do on Wednesday, and then I was going to find a place in town to stay for the weekend. The night before, I carefully packed all of my belongings, making sure they were all placed in such a way as to make it somewhat possible to walk the 15 minutes it would take me to get to his parking garage with the metric ton I had decided to lug across the Atlantic Ocean. I even packed myself a sandwich and some fruit in anticipation of bizarre Spanish eating schedules that would surely leave me starving and cranky long before la comida. In some twisted spin of karma, though, my alarm didn’t go off, and this time I was the one apologizing to Jesús for leaving him waiting near the Plaza de la Merced. With no buses to Periana until 2pm, I was told not to bother to make the trip, and that I should just plan on showing up on Monday ready for classes.

I’m not one who deals well with missing things for which I’m supposed to be present. I also don’t like to walk into situations without being prepared. And I have a serious problem handling the notion that someone might be mad at me (Jesús had not sounded too pleased on the phone). But, with no other choice, I hung around Málaga for part of the day and then hitched a ride to Torre del Mar with Julia, who will be teaching there, who was moving into her new apartment. The owners of the apartment had offered to drive her there, and we managed to squeeze both of us, and our ridiculous amount of crap, into a tiny car that then took us to the doorstep of a beautiful apartment building. Julia is living with Megan, the language assistant who was supposed to be with me in Periana until she was switched to the more eastern town of Torrox at the last minute. The apartment, which is the summer home of friends of Megan’s Spanish boyfriend, is a couple blocks from the beach, has a terrace the size of a basketball court, and is so fully equipped as to have a butcher’s-style meat slicer. The fact that, before I had found out that teachers at my school had suddenly decided that they didn’t want to give the language assistant rides to and from school, as had happened in the past, the apartment was offered to me, doesn’t make me bitter in the least. Julia and Megan have been very nice about letting me stay there, though, and I was able to help Julia inaugurate her new place with a trip to the supermarket, pizza, and the cheap boxed wine mixed with fizzy water. It was wonderful.

Because I'm a producer of spam

It's been awhile since I've been able to post, not only because every computer in Spain seems to be incapable of reading the Word documents that I save onto my flash drive, but also because Blogger has decided that I'm spreading spam throughout cyberspace and has blocked my blog. But since their "review process" doesn't actually seem to be going anywhere, I decided to just go ahead and post, and to try to recreate some of what I've written on my laptop.

To get you up to speed:

Thursday, October 2: Orientation in Málaga
- Woman reads about early childhood education, I almost fall asleep.
- Different woman talks about medical insurance and foreigner identification
cards, I get confused.
- Hospitality students make tapas, I eat lots :)
- End of orientation.

Friday, October 3: Málaga
- I wake up at 8am, realize my alarm, which had been set for 6am so I could meet
Jesús for a ride to Periana, did not go off.
- Spend day in Málaga.
- Later, squeeze into car alongside the four biggest suitcases that have ever
existed, as well as Julia, and get driven to her apartment in Torre del Mar.
- We buy wine (.60€!), we drink wine.

Saturday, October 4: Torre del Mar
- I find spring roll wrappers in supermarket! I buy spring roll wrappers!
- We buy more wine, we drink more wine.

Sunday, October 5: Periana
- We take bus to Periana, bus is windy.
- I find a room with an old lady named María, finally unpack all of my crap (!).
- Julia leaves, I walk around Periana.
- I realize there's nothing to do in Periana.

Monday, October 6: Periana
- First day of school! I wake up freakishly early, it's very dark and very cold.
- I get introduced to my first class of students, they gasp as their teacher
translates the words "lawyer" and "judge" after I talk about my parents
- I play games with toilet paper all day; this works better with some students than with others

Tuesday, October 7: Periana
- More games with toilet paper! Plus games that involve drawing on the board.
- I receive my very own teacher's locker--I'm suddenly official.
- After school, I take the bus to Torre del Mar since Wednesday is my day off. We
buy wine.

Wednesday, October 8: Torre del Mar
- I go running by the ocean, I don't die.
- Megan and Julia find out that getting a phone line and wifi in Spain is
excruciatingly painful.
- I make headway in the apartment search...hopefully.
- I take the bus back to Periana as the sun sets over the mountains.

Thursday, October 9: Periana
- Sending mail to my school works! No more excuses....
- Toilet paper, drawing on the board, and coloring!
- The cheap--though really cute--shoes I put on for the first time today start to
make my feet bleed. A teacher I met for the first time today offers to give me a
ride home. Hooray.

At the moment, it's raining and, per usual, there's nothing to do in Periana. Luckily, this weekend I'm going to check out a couple of apartments, one in Vélez-Málaga and one in Torre del Mar, along with their respective inhabitants. Periana is pretty, but I'll go nuts if I stay here.

Periana or bust

I was up pretty early today having planned to meet the director of my school's bilingual program in the plaza near my hostel. He was going to give me a ride to Periana so I could meet people I'd be working with and check out the school. I arrived responsibly early and joined the tourist throngs who gazed at the the pigeon poop encrusted obelisk in the center of the plaza that stood caddy-corner to Picasso's childhood home. I watched some dogs running after each other in circles, shifted from right foot to left, eyed a man who similarly seemed to be waiting to no avail, finally bought a phone card, finally asked a passerby to help me use the phone card, and responsibly left a message for said director. I waited a few minutes more before trekking back to my hostel to look up bus schedules. Old men named Jésus stand me up.

With a bit of assistance, I made it to the Málaga bus station and got into line to buy a ticket to Periana. Unfortunately, something had gone terribly wrong and the mousey figures behind the counter kept appearing and dissappearing through their little door, refusing to answer questions or even to talk to the increasingly irate non-Spanish-speaking man at the front of the line. It was finally disclosed that something was broken and the company couldn't print out any tickets. Those of us with soon-to-be-leaving buses were told to buy tickets on the bus, so I headed off to platform 39 since my bus was scheduled to leave in 15 minutes. The bus wasn't where it was supposed to be, though, so in trying to track it down I struck up a conversation with a woman looking for the same bus. I told her why I was going to Periana, and she assured me I'd fit right in.

When the bus finally arrived, the two of us went to buy our tickets from the driver, who promptly started screaming at us. Apparently the sky falls down if you try to buy a bus ticket from anywhere other than a ticket window. It didn't really seem to matter that we'd just been screamed at by the mousey woman at the ticket woman who thought my questions were not only inane but also offensive; this man was convinced we were out to kill his children. Somehow, though, the similarly ticketless woman managed to scream her way back, managing to get us onto the bus a few bizarre minutes later. Perplexed, I sat down. Fulminating, she kept screaming. She had considerately placed herself two rows behind the driver, and continued her shrill tirade to "no one in particular" as we pulled away from the station; as we rolled down the coast; as we wound our way into Rincón de la Victoria, the next town over; and even then she didn't stopped. In one of the most obnoxious voices I've heard in recent months, she fumed about the break down of public services, the mean-spirited driver, the personal blotch this created on her life trajectory. After awhile, I half tuned her out, at least until I heard her move into new territory, this time talking about the innocent victims harmed by such transportation travesties--victims such as American girls who have received scholarships to teach in small Andalucían towns, but are barred from actually carrying out their task because they aren't allowed on the bus. I sunk down in my seat. About twenty minutes later, after another short period of quiet, I heard the woman again, this time on her phone, complaining to some acquaintance. Raising her voice, she retold the story of the poor American scholarship girl, this time accentuating the details, sharpening her whine even more. I pressed my face against the window and wondered why the decidedly unpleasant bus driver didn't pull over and punch this woman in the face.

Two hours after getting on the bus, I stepped off in Periana. The town is beautiful. It's perched fairly high up in the Sierra Tejeda, northeast of Málaga. The region is dry and sparsely populated, except for the hillsides covered with olive trees that contribute to the area's famous olive oil. The road that leads there winds up from the coast, and every once in awhile a small town crops up with its white houses and red roofs clustered together and red flowers sticking their heads out of fences. Periana looks exactly like the town before it, and probably like the one after it, though that isn't necessarily a bad thing. For all it's idyllic charm, though, it's very small and isolated.

I found my way to my school, and was greeted by the "concierge" who ushered me inside to meet Jesús, my no-show ride, and Luís, the other bilingual director. They were friendly enough, but as soon as they'd thrust a schedule and day planner in my hand, I was whisked back out the door and into Jesús' car for the windy ride back to Málaga (school had just ended at this point). Along the way, we broke the ice by establishing that I was decidedly anti-Bush, and that, one way or another, I would be voting absentee.