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.