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.