And what about the sausage?

I had a very Jonathan Safran Foer moment earlier this week.

I was eating lunch with Paqui and Jose after class. Jose (my homestay dad) always points at food and tells me the name of it, even if I already know. It’s cute. He had just pointed out to me that Spain was Europe’s #1 producer of oils (olive, sunflower, etc), and assured me that the oil used in preparing my meal was completely vegetarian. So imagine my surprise when I found what looked like a brain or an eye in on my plate. Mixed in with my pasta and vegetables was something definitely…. animal. So I asked.

“Qué es esto?”

Paqui responded with a word I wasn’t familiar with. When I indicated that I was confused she used another word to describe it. “Marisco.” Uh oh. Not good. Not only are mariscos shellfish and therefore, by my definition if not by the Spanish, an ANIMAL, but I am also allergic to shellfish.

Whoops.

I tried to clarify the definition of “vegetariana” to my family. The entire situation was so Everything Is Illuminated. Think, in a strong Ukrainian accent, “And what about the sausage??”

I told them no meat, no fish, no ham, no shellfish, no animals. “Nada con una cabeza,” I said. To which Paqui responded, “Pero atún en una lata no tiene una cabeza.” Wow. Really?

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It is also noteworthy to mention that before I left the States, when I thought I was going to get a chance to go to Africa, I consulted a friend about what to wear in Morocco. The heat, from what I’ve heard, is unbearable, yet Muslim women are still required to stay covered. I’m generally a modest gal (anyone hear remember the “the Lord wants us to be chaste” joke?), but probably not by Muslim standards. I didn’t want to offend anyone or get offered employment in an African brothel, but I also didn’t want to pass out from heat exhaustion in the middle of the desert… and wake up in an African brothel.

My friend’s solution: Hammer pants.

Hammer Pants?

If you’re like me, you thought the fashion police outlawed these long before the turn of the century. Think again, folks. Hammer pants are EVERYWHERE in Andalucía, and get this – they’re actually cute. And practical. I’ve considered buying some on several occasions, but every time I come across a cute pair in a tienda, “Can’t Touch This” starts to play in my head, and I immediately back away with a mixture of amusement and discomfort. I guess that makes Hammer pants kind of like a racist joke, and in a way, I guess they are. Sorry, M.C.

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I can’t believe that today is my last day in Vejer. It’s all been so surreal. Two weeks went by too fast. From the tiniest of the whitewashed alleyways to wide open Mediterranean coast, I’ve really enjoyed taking in every second of it. If you get a chance to come here, please do. But while you’re at it, do me a favor, and don’t tell anyone about it. I’d like to keep it our little secret. The less American tourists here, the better.

In the spirit of last year’s Mexico posts, how about a list of things I’ll miss about Vejer de la Frontera:
-The sunsets.
-All of the Spaniards walking around exclaiming, “Que calor!”
-The cute, little, old Spanish men that meet at the same bench on La Corredera every afternoon to gossip.
-Hearing three different churches’ bells ring the hour at once.
-Gazpacho. Mmmm…. Gazpacho.
-Not having to rely on fossil fuels.

Things I won’t miss:
-Trying to fall asleep when my room is 87 degrees.
-Ice cold showers when I wake up before Paqui lights the pilot light.
-Showing up to school soaked in sweat because it’s HOT and I had to ascend a hill as tall as the Empire State Building to get there (Because you haven’t been here, you can dispute my exaggeration! The truth is, I don’t get winded on the hill anymore. Yay!).
-This creepy doll hanging in the corner of my room.



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The next time you hear from me… I’m not sure where I’ll be. My bus leaves Vejer tonight at 7 PM. I’ll have a couple of hours in Cadiz before heading to Madrid, where I’m supposed to meet Kelsey at 8 AM. We plan to hop a train to Barcelona around 3 PM, but considering my luck with travel plans thus far, we’ll see how that goes. Perhaps, I’ll be in the south of France the next time I have enough time and reliable Internet access to compose a blog. We’ll see. In the meantime, there are some new pictures on my flickr.

I've taken the highs, taken the lows...

…Just, in the opposite order. Now for the good news. Don’t be fooled. Andalucia No Es El Cine. Andalucia Es La Vida. This is seriously the coolest place I’ve ever been in my entire life.

For me, the culture in Spain is like a huge clash of my last two experiences in Mexico and Europe. Obviously the Spanish influence and heritage in Latin America translates back to the motherland, but at the same time parts of it are so much nicer and more vogue because it’s in Europe. The set up of the school is pretty much exactly like ICO. Breakfast is at 8 and then class is from 9:00 – 13:00. Since I’m in the intensive course, I have an extra two hours of class after that, and then I return home for lunch at 15:00. I’m living with Paqui and Jose Manuel Nunez. They were both born and raised in Vejer and have three kids. Paqui bought me apples yesterday because they’re my favorite. How sweet. Last night I watched the evening news with them and we talked about Obama. I much prefer being the only student in the house as opposed to Mexico where there were four or five of us at a time. I didn’t really bond with the family there. The housemaid was the only one there to see me off when I left Oaxaca.

I have two different teachers. Alejandro is my morning profesor. He’s really awesome. Yesterday our topic of conversation was music. GeorgeMy class consists of nine people, and here’s the cool part. They are all from: England, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand, the Netherlands, or California. In the afternoon, I work with a woman named maria Jose, who turned out to be the niece of my homestay dad. In that class I’m with 4 other people from the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, or Switzerland. And every one of them speaks English. HAH.

Tuesday evening I went exploring in the city. It’s really not that big of a town. The population is smaller than that of Cookeville, but it’s constrained to this tiny surface area atop a mountain. I think it’s funny because last year I used to stare at the Sierra Madre from my bedroom window and tell my housemate (the one that looked just like Bill Nye the Science Guy) about how much I wanted to go climb up one of those mountains. I never did make it up one of those (but I did survive a terrifying bus ride through them!), but I’ve definitely topped that by living on atop on one now! I tried walking the entire outer edge of town yesterday, at least where there wasn’t a wall or building blocking la vista.

Time for a tangent. Vejer is not outlined on a grid system. I guess the Moors were just like “to hell with that.” For that reason, I can’t just head east with the knowledge that my school is not the east side of town and hope it get there. No, sir. What this map doesn’t show are the physical aspects of Vejer, as in the fact that I climb like 3 mountains to get to school each day. One second you’re ascending the steepest hill ever, and the next you start going down and have to walk funny, toes-first, like you've got a stick up your ass just to avoid face planting on the descent. It’s then that you realize walking down isn’t much of a relief… it just means you’ll be going up again soon.

Anyhow, I tried to conquer as much as I could on my first full day in Vejer. If the pictures (still to come) look like I had to do some serious climbing to get them, it’s because I did. And you’re welcome.

As it was getting close to 8 or 9, I started walking southwest so I could try to get a view of the ocean. I found a pretty awesome path leading out of the city towards some of the new wind turbines and what looked like water in the distance. The path ran parallel to a road. After a while of having the path narrow on me as I listened to all of the rustling going on in the bushes next to me, I started to worry less about stepping in donkey shit and more about getting bitten by a snake. It was worth the risk, considering I got these pictures. On the way BACK UP THE HILL into town, I decided not to try my luck con los serpientes so I walked in the middle of the road like a badass. Or a dumbass. You’re call, really. The point is I lived.

Finally I decided to sit down and navigate my way back home. It was here, seated on the ground, that I took a moment to appreciate the little things in life. Like a chorus of children singing “Feliz Cumpleanos” somewhere in the distance while a donkey brayed and a dalmation sneezed in my general direction. Andalucia es la vida.

When I got home that night, my luggage had arrived. YAY!

Yesterday I bought a bus ticket for Algeciras for this Saturday. I’m going to go check out Gibraltar while I’m down there (technically owned by the UK while still in Spain), but I don’t have enough money to take the ferry over to Africa. I’ll just have to stare at that dark, mysterious continent from across the Strait and hope that next time I’ll be able to venture into it.

There’s a big festival going on tonight. The 90th anniversary of something. I was hoping to catch up on sleep, but it seems to be the Spanish mentality that you can sleep when you’re dead. So anyway, I hope to post another for you on Monday, but this is it for now.

Ciao!

Talkin' Spanish Transportation Blues

This is long, boring, and you’ll hate it. Actually, if you’re Brittany Wilkey, this is a lot like a Bob Dylan song. Hence the title.

I hate to be one to bitch and moan in a blog, but I wrote this at a bus station in Sevilla before I had access to the internet, and I feel that it is absolutely necessary to post it. I hope -promise- that even if things go wrong for the rest of the trip that this is it for the whining. There’s humor spattered through intermittently through the rant, and I assure you it has a happy ending.

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Literally NOTHING has gone according to plan yet. Let’s start on Friday.
Friday was the last good thing that happened to me. Thanks to everyone who spent what I thought would be my last night in America with me. I had a really great time with all of you.

Saturday morning I arrived at BNA exactly on time, had a wonderfully cheerful lady help me at the baggage check-in for once, and practically walked straight through security because the airport was so dead. I didn’t even get frisked or randomly searched like usual! I stopped wearing Obama shirts to the airport, too. Maybe that helps. All the redneck Homeland Security officers aren’t staring me down like I’m some secret muslim. Or maybe it’s because they work for him now that they have to me nice to my granola-eating, hippie-dancing ass. Who knows.

Anyhow, The flight from Nashville to Dallas-Fort Worth was great! I sat next to a cute little old man who is a native Forth Worth-ian, so he pointed out the window at everything and basically gave me a window tour of the Lone Star State as we flew over.

My flight from DFW to Madrid changed gates twice and then was late to board. I pretty much forgot about all that once we got on the plane. I had planned a 3.5 hour layover in Madrid, so things like that wouldn’t throw kinks into my plan.
Except something went terribly awry. After just crossing the East Coast border into the Atlantic, we made a sharp turn northeast and the pilot alerted us that we would be making a pitstop at JFK before crossing the pond.

WTF.

Still okay, still thinking things would work out, I told myself that I’d rather be stuck in NYC for what turned out to be not a quick pit stop, but a FOUR HOUR DELAY, than finally getting a chance to utilize my seat cushion as a floatation device in the mid-Atlantic. We were told that some part of the plane was inoperable and would need to be switched out or we would need to find ourselves a new airbus. The folks in Nueva York gave us free food and booked a new connecting flight for me from Madrid to Sevilla. The bad news? The bad news is that we left JFK at the time we should have originally been arriving in Madrid, so my final flight was not due in until 9:10 PM Sunday (Spain time) in Sevilla. That’s an hour after the buses to Vejer de la Frontera stop running. Since I didn’t have access to internet that wouldn’t suck my bank account dry like airports do, I had to call mi madre in the middle of the night and have her research every other possible option (Cadiz, Jerez, Malaga, etc.) that could get me to town in time for class on Monday. Finally I realized that I would just have to miss my first day of class. Which sucks.
Furthermore, after finally re-boarding our Madrid flight at JFK at 3 AM, we were without a captain. We sat idly on the runway for an hour while the flight attendants tried to distract us with cheese and crackers. It wasn’t working. After our captain remembered that we existed and came to the rescue, the rest of the flight to Madrid wasn’t all that bad.

Madrid’s airport is really cool. It allows you to get a complete panoramic view of the area, which I did by walking the complete length of it while listening to the Talking Heads during my layover. Then I headed back to my gate where to my surprise I encountered two guys from the ill-fated DFW flight. One was a scraggly looking psuedo-Andrew Bird guy from Indiana that I’d had my eye on all day. The other was the guy I’d been sitting next to on the flight to Madrid and flight to Madrid Strikes Back. I’m pretty sure I drooled on him and probably snored. We hadn’t said more than two words to each other in the entire 20 hours that we’d essentially been sharing the same 5 foot space, until we stood in line for our flight to Sevilla while it was delayed not one, but two times. That sucked, but I got put in business class for the flight, which lasted all of fifty minutes, I guess as a “sorry we’ve been fucking you over” gesture.

Also, I feel it’s necessary to mention that “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” played by a tenor sax is what was playing on the plan as we boarded. I was really confused by that. Abort tangent.

When we finally landed in Sevilla, at 10 PM and during a breathtaking sunset, I felt as though the three of us, all students coming to Spain for language immersion in different schools, had really accomplished something. I felt that in the past 24 hours we had all conquered the odds and really made a good hustle at being slightly-perturbed-but-still-civil airline passengers. I was ready to give them both high fives and a round of “FELICIDADES!”

Then I noticed that we were the last people left at baggage claim. With no luggage.
Lucky for them, they were actually staying in Sevilla so they had a place to go last night, and their luggage won’t have as far to travel when it turns up (still hasn’t). I, on the other hand, had to spend the night in the Sevilla airport. It’s about as boring as Nashville. I felt very Tom Hanks-esque (and also got deja-vu from Lolla 07!) when I was washing up and changing clothes in the airport bathroom. I found a nice quiet place to study my spanish flashcards and maybe sleep, and when I got bored with that and started to wander around, taking pictures of privatization protest signs throughout the airport. An employee then caught me and told me that the airport closes at 1:30 AM and reopens at 4:30 AM. Whatever, I can sit on the bench right outside the door for 3 hours. No big deal. Everyone was doing it. I was going through my flashcards and minding my own business when they decided to shut off the lights.

Great.

Fast-forward to 5:45 AM when I hop on the first bus from the airport to downtown Sevilla, because anything would by more fun than sitting at that airport. I arrived in a beautiful part of the city at exactly 6 AM. It was still dark.
Let me digress about how if my experience thusfar has been any indication, Spain is totally my kind of country. The sun sets and 10 PM and the sky doesn’t even begin to hint at a chance of light until at least 6:30. This is perfect for a my lazy, nocturnal ass. Nothing was open at all and the only people roaming the streets were the ones still borracho from last night.

I wandered around and took pictures, bought a ticket for the first bus out of Sevilla to Vejer, and the wandered around and took more pictures until my buses departure time arrived. I watched and watched for my bus, but it never came. I kept thinking that maybe it was just late. I would expect such from a Mexican, but not a Spaniard. Thirty minutes after the scheduled departure time I went and asked about it, and the woman told me that I was supposed to be on the bus to Algeciras. Gee, thanks for telling me when I bought my ticket. Thanks for printing “Algeciras” on my ticket. Thanks. Now I’m stuck in Sevilla for another four hours until the next bus. I would sightsee, but I already did that for three horus. I have missed one day of class, lost my luggage, and have been running on no sleep, no food, and no shower. This is supposed to be Europe, not Bonnaroo. WTF. All I could do to not lock myself in the bathroom and cry was chant that I’m a strong independent woman while staring at Lindsey Lohan’s latest nip slip on the cover on some magazine at the stand across from where I was sitting. Luckily, it worked.

The shitty part is, even when I do get to Vejer, I will have no shampoo, no outlet adapter, no towel, no toothpaste, no underwear… (sings “Free Ballin” to the tune of “Free Falling”).

Bienvenidos a España, Kassi.