Things I Will Desperately Miss

And thus, of course, here’s the follow-up list:

1. Patra’s knee-slapping jokes (I think there were 3 or 4 this year, and they were all gems)
2. Taking flamenco lessons in a bar, ie, doing as much drinking as dancing
3. Our terrace. Our terrace on perfect days, meals on the terrace, hanging laundry on the terrace, drinking sherry on the terrace at sunset
4. 300 children
5. Seeing one of my 300 children on the street and feeling like a star
6. Saying hello to all the old men taking their morning, afternoon, and evenings walks
7. Living in a cubist’s dream
8. Being halfway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean
9. Taking Sevilla for granted since it’s just an hour away
10. Hearing Spanish every day, especially the awesome accent the old men have here
11. Being constantly inspired by the beauty of this town
12. Cheap tickets to everywhere else in Europe
13. Being serenaded by an incredible flamenco guitarist
14. Doing yoga in an old Spanish patio
15. The Friday market
16. Olive oil, organic eggs, fruit in season all year round
17. The cliff
18. Flamenco parties every Friday and Saturday (and spontaneous flamenco in the street)
19. The fact that everyone knows how to clap in rhythm here

This list is actually harder than the last, because many of the things I will miss aren’t as concrete as the things I won’t miss. That is, I will miss all the smells of this town, all the strange and beautiful things I see every day, I will miss the sounds in the streets of the old men talking, of bands practicing for Semana Santa, I will miss the feeling that everyone welcomes me in. And I will miss hundreds of people—Patra and Adan, Emma and all the Brits, Santi and the women we danced flamenco with, my co-teachers, the choir members, the shop keepers and café owners, all the townspeople I’ve become accustomed to seeing…and, as I said above, the hundreds and hundreds of children who I love more than I thought possible. But the year has come to an end and I don’t belong here anymore. Such is life. On to the next adventure.

Things I Will Not Miss

I leave Spain on Friday. Though I will be glad to see my family and friends again, leaving Arcos will be like ripping out a small piece of my heart. Thus, to make myself feel better, I’ve compiled a list of things I will NOT miss.

1. Having to wait for a day that is warm, sunny, and dry enough to do laundry (this day having to correspond to a day I wasn’t in school).
2. For that matter, the laundry machine and the long process of getting its door open (this involved a small silver spoon—the laundry spoon—that we used to jimmy the catch)
3. The ants that have taken over the apartment floor, coupled with the fact that I now sleep on the floor due to a broken bed-frame.
4. Relying on a small and inefficient gas tank for hot showers—and then hoping they’re not TOO hot.
5. Dubbed movies.
6. Trying to avoid bird poop while passing underneath the flying buttresses of St. Mary’s on the way to school (thereby avoiding being the object of ridicule)
7. Not understanding people a lot of the time.
8. Having a terrible internet connection.
9. The creepy guy.
10. The gray cat upstairs and how he’s always on the terrace when I’m wearing black clothes.
11. The piercing bark of the dog downstairs (and his young owner calling out “Blanky!” at all hours).
12. The construction that started just outside my window.
13. Feeling like an outsider.
14. Carrying groceries up the hill.

Um, I think that's it. Meaning that everything else currently in my life I am either slightly indifferent to or will desperately miss. Writing this list has only made me more aware of what I WILL miss. Shoot.

Getting ready for Semana Santa: Part 3

Since our apartment is on the parade route, Patra and I have had the pleasure (?) of witnessing parade rehearsals. These occur on Thursday nights around 11 pm, due to the fact that a parade rehearsal means closing down the street entirely so that dozens of burly men can haul a gigantic unadorned platform downhill at the pace of snails. Perhaps this wouldn't be such a problem if the one-way street in front of our apartment wasn't the ONLY way to exit the town. Recently, we heard the approaching semana santa music emanating from a tinny little radio (which, actually, doesn't change the overall quality of the music) and rushed to the window to watch. Rushing, of course, was unnecessary as it took the men ten minutes just to turn a corner. We watched their slow progress, their feet moving a few centimeters with each step. They passed our window and we went back to what we were doing. A few minutes later we heard a car rumble downhill, apparently unaware of the street blockage. And then, a few minutes later: the same car backing uphill on our narrow street, moving about as quickly as the men had been going downhill. Traffic jams come in all varieties in this town.

Putting the "blanco" back in the pueblo

Arcenses take the designation of their town very seriously: as the quintessential "pueblo blanco" of Andalucia (as some guidebooks describe Arcos), townspeople take great care in keeping up appearances. Spring cleaning for inhabitants of the old town means scraping off the last year's layer of whitewash and reapplying bright new coats of the calcium-based cover. And what better way to remove an entire wall of paint than with a butter knife? And why not reapply with a paintbrush best suited to fine detail work in small watercolors? These seem to be the tools of choice for my neighbors...

Painting with a mini-paintbrush:

Because chipping paint off with a butter knife requires supervision:

Carnaval Caroling

One of the most popular parts of Carnaval in Cadiz is the caroling done by costumed choruses. As our guide around the city on Sunday, Jose attempted to explain what was going on. The songs are, in general, supposed to be funny, but we often missed the jokes (as is common not only for foreigners but even Spaniards who are not from Cadiz). After laughing particularly hard, Jose would turn to us and translate what he'd heard, which would only make us more aware of how much we were missing ("So the punchline is...I want a sandwich? Hmmm....")

We stood in one plaza for about an hour as choruses on flatbeds were pulled past us by utterly bored-looking tractor drivers. After listening to the Indian group (my PC self cringing, though it was already weakened from the previous night's costumes), and a group of sailors, a tractor pulled up with a flatbed full of men in short wigs and overalls with pastel T-shirts and thoroughly Spanish scarves. Patra and I ventured a guess: cross-dressing Spanish hill-billies? No, we found out, they were "lesbians." Ah yes. Obvious.

It's a small town after all

My friend Hilary, who teaches English in Paris, is currently visiting me. Our worklives are similar, our homelives not. She has constant access to internet, constant access to English bookstores, constant access to foods from around the world. I: do not. I felt a little country-bumpkin as I eagerly pointed out the features of Arcos: "Here's the bakery--it's fantastic" (I bought a croissant; obviously biased, Hilary decided not to sample something her own town is renowned for, though I swear these croissants are just as good), "This is the main street...well, the street," "Here's the Italian restaurant. Italian! Can you believe it?" In truth, Arcos--at 30,000 residents--is not such a tiny town. And it has everything I need: organic vegetables, yoga, flamenco classes, a fantastic bakery and an adorable wireless cafe. Sometimes, though, it's small-town character is more obvious.

Hilary, Patra, and I had just exited the adorable wireless cafe en route to a flamenco class when we saw a familiar face: Antonio, our landlord. Although Antonio is a little crazy, spits on us unintentionally, is difficult to understand, and keeps asking about our marriage prospects (still thinking we're going to settle in Arcos indefinitely), we were glad to see him. Our shower hasn't been the most trustworthy when it comes to hot water, and we wanted to ask Antonio to check it out. After a few awkward minutes of spittle-filled communication, we reached an agreement about when Antonio would come by. We continued walking. To Patra and me, this sort of meeting is unsurprising, almost necessary for getting business done (we originally got our apartment by unintentionally running into Antonio's wife Angela in the street an hour after she'd shown it to us). To Hilary, the chance encounter was nothing short of extraordinary. "Wow," she said. "This really is a small town."

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Christmas in Arcos: Celebrations start over a month in advance. Sometime in mid-November, Patra and I wondered at the "Felices Fiestas" sign that had just been hung over the entrance to the old town. We weren't sure if we'd missed notice of a November party. But no, it was just early felicitations for the late-December holiday season.

Since then, decorations have gone up all over town, and different restaurants have sponsored parties almost every Friday and Saturday night. These parties feature flamenco singing in the streets, free anise, and bunuelos, which are little heaps of fried dough, basically doughnuts but less wholesome (seriously--they're just sizzled fat; even the smell of them gives a normally healthy person heartburn). Based on the number of these parties we've frequented, Patra and I could be said to be fanatics. Last night we went to a party in our neighborhood, one that didn't even seem connected to a restaurant. Just a neighborhood block party with someone frying dough and other people shaking tambourines in a circle, clapping hands, and chanting the Christmas songs of Arcos. We were given "hot chocolate" with our bunuelos, which had the consistency of a thick soup. Sore stomachs for all!

And although the weather has been temporate lately (usually mid 60s during the day), just as the calendar was turning over to December, a midnight thunderstorm turned into hail, which collected in small white piles in the street outside my window. I can't say I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, but it's fun to pretend...

Andalucian Christmas carols in front of an old convent

Who knew eggs could be so vicious?

This is a menu from a restaurant near my apartment, Meson Don Fernando. There's Spanish on the left and English on the right to cater to tourists..once again, I doubt a native English speaker was used as an advisor. Here are some of my favorite translations:

"Table of bread with tomato"
"Cheese of sheep old man"
"Croquettes of the grandmother"
"In a mess (untidy) of pudding rice"

AND the winner:
"Attacked of fantasy of mushrooms of ham Iberian"

Note: the dishes, respectively, are a bread basket, aged sheeps' cheese, croquettes (done, I'm assuming with a recipe from someone's grandmother), something like a stir-fry, and scrambled eggs. Scrambled=attacked? I'm not sure where the fantasy comes in...

Que vistas mas bonitas...

In the absence of news, I give you views:

A view of the Arcos cliff from down near the bus station

The castle and Cathedral of Santa Maria in the background

View of the Cathedral of San Pedro from my terrace

View of the lake and mountains beyond from my terrace

Practicing my buleria steps on the terrace

All Souls

Once again, the whole town congregated in one place today, so Patra and I naturally had to be there; this time we convinced Erika to go along. Under forbidding gray skies, the three of us made our way down from the old town, up past the new town, and into the municipal cemetery. Families were flocking through the gates with flowers in hand, or purchasing bouquets from the extensive supply being sold outside.

Inside, the space around the white tombs burst with color and noise. Hundreds of Spaniards had come to clean the headstones of their ancestors and leave red, white, purple carnations, lilies, roses. I felt a little guilty at being a tourist of sorts at this personal ceremony of remembrance, and the camera I had brought with me certainly did not come out of my bag. However, the general atmosphere seemed more joyful than sad—I saw three of my students, and they all waved at me and grinned hugely. We felt somber at the far end of the cemetery, though, where hundreds of spaces wait for bodies to fill them (caskets here, as in most of Europe, are stored aboveground). We noticed that a few of the slots had been very recently filled—as recently as October 23rd—and the families who came to visit were understandably more freshly grieving. The rain started then, and we left that quiet part of the cemetery to once again enter the bustling aisles of the dead—people pushing and praying and saying hello to neighbors and cleaning and arranging flowers. We didn’t exactly belong, but we felt lucky to be accepted as part of the mass.

Halloween at the Cathedral of Peter, the Mother of God

Patra and I went to a concert tonight held at once of the two main cathedrals, La Catedral de San Pedro. We tried to convince Erika, Patra’s friend who has been visiting this past week, to go with us.

“What kind of concert is it?” Erika asked.
“We don’t know,” we responded.
“Oh…then why do you want to go?”
“Because it’s a concert! And it’s happening here! An event in Arcos AT NIGHT!”

She wasn’t convinced. Patra and I shrugged our shoulders. We were still extremely excited that something was going on in our own little town and, what’s more, it was happening five minutes from our apartment (no hike to the side of town for us!) We wandered over to the cathedral in the light rain, orange light brightening up the dark old buildings; the town was certainly Halloween-atmospheric.

Inside the cathedral, Patra and I recognized at least a dozen people. Teachers from both of our schools had showed up, and the other English language-assistants in town were there. After waving and giving double-kisses all around, we felt suddenly that Arcos was indeed our town, that we were no longer foreigners. We took our seats and gazed up at the ornate ornamentation of the nave, this being the first time we’d been inside the cathedral. Inside gold-leaf embellishments were paintings of saints and angels. Near the ceiling a statue of Jesus stood helping a small child. Below this statue, and directly above the altar, was a statue of Peter, looking perhaps somewhat perplexed and abashed at his central location in this cathedral. I’ve heard that the two cathedrals in Arcos once asked the Vatican which would be recognized as the official cathedral of the town. The Vatican sent its response: La Catedral de Santa Maria. The parishioners of San Pedro were so upset that they removed any signs of Mary from their own cathedral (contemplate that for a second: Catholics without Mary!) and to this day they pray to Peter, the Mother of God.

The concert, to my disappointment, had nothing to do with Halloween. Of course, this shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise, but I was hoping the music might be in a more minor key. The good news, though, is that it turned out to be a choral mass, mostly Mozart, which meant that I had sung at least one of the pieces before. I talked to the director afterward and he invited me to join the choir right away, overjoyed at the thought of one more alto. I happily accepted; while Arcos was masquerading on Halloween as a happening town, and Saint Peter stood uncomfortable in his eternal costume as the Mother of God, I was finally able to imagine myself in a role I’m already familiar with: a singer. So, if you’re in Arcos on the night of December 16th, hit up the choir concert! It’s gonna be hopping…

To the beat of their own drummers

And even more perfect: a flamenco class is held Tuesdays and Thursdays in the same school building as the yoga class. The class is mostly middle-aged women, who start dancing and moving their hands however they want when the mood strikes them. During breaks, one will start snapping and stamping her feet and move to the center of the room to perform who-knows-what steps. Then she’ll move back to cries of “ole!” and the next will move forward to do her own dance. Either that, or the instructor will put on “sevillanas” music at the breaks, which is a dance that the Andalusians learn from infancy (there are sevillanas classes at my school for children aged five and older). It is not a difficult dance, but, since all the women know the steps already, I have not yet seen it broken down into its separate parts and therefore do not know how to do it. The women seem to consider this a moral shortcoming of mine. They drag me into the dance at every break, ignoring my refusals, thinking that I’ll get it if they just keep yelling numbers at me and pointing at their right or left foot while stomping away, or yelling at me to turn a few seconds too late every time so that I always run into someone. Luckily, I pick up the flamenco steps pretty quickly so I feel decently competent the majority of the time.

And, what’s more, little Maggie-the-Brit comes to watch us; the Spanish women adore her, pinch at her cheeks, pull off her little pink sandals and exclaim about their cuteness and slip them back on her feet. If only I could be as unfazed by this gaggle of Spanish women as Maggie is…

yo-GA, yo-GA, yo-GA

I have found a yoga class. What’s more, it’s right across the street from my apartment. It’s held in an elementary school, a gorgeous old building with a small square plaza in the center surrounded by white arches. The school is an awesome combination of old and new; a basketball hoop hangs in the corner of a corridor bordering the plaza and bright plastic desks are enveloped in white-tiled halls.

The instructor is a British woman, Emma, who moved here with her husband and now owns a guesthouse nearby. She led the class in a combination of English and Spanish, refreshing my vocabulary for parts of the body. A dove flapped by as we were in the warrior pose, the poetry of which was not lost on me (Spain never ceases to present poetry as reality, or vice versa).

And running around us as we held our poses was Emma’s four-year-old daughter Maggie, an adorable little creature with bright blonde hair and a British accent (it should not surprise me that a child of British parents would speak with a British accent, and yet it still seems so unbelievably precious). I thought back to yoga class that I fell in love with this summer, held in a heated studio, blocked off from the noises of Grand Ave by the instructors’ jazzed-up background music. This, completely different, seemed even more perfect.

Kodak Moments

This town likes to take advantage of all the times I don’t have my camera with me. Living in between the two main cathedrals of Arcos, I have now seen elderly people carrying gigantic, ornate silver chalices and purple velvet banners through the streets several times. I suppose they want to get the silver polished before the Christmas season…

Then this afternoon I was in the Plaza del Cabildo, the beautiful heart of the old town, with a gorgeous view off the cliff. I had been sitting in the plaza for a while, reading and writing and listening to the multilingual babble of tourists. I headed back to my apartment down a narrow winding street and, rounding a corner, suddenly came across a group of several dozen Spaniards in their late twenties all dressed up in tuxedoes and ball gowns. None was an obvious bride, the men outnumbered the women at least two to one, and they seemed fairly nonchalant about their dressed-up-ness. I felt as though I’d come across a herd of giraffes, not only because they seemed so out of place, but also because there was nowhere for me to go to escape the incoming tide; I feel like giraffes are a type of animal who wouldn’t go out of their way to hurt you, but would just as easily kick you aside if need be. I found a shallow doorway to protect myself in, and the Spaniards strolled past, seemingly unaware of my presence or my narrow escape from the high-heeled herd. After they passed, I ran back to get my camera and returned to the Plaza del Cabildo not five minutes later. The Spaniards were nowhere to be found, and nowhere to be heard. The party had moved on, and I was left—as I so often am in this town—bewildered and once more reminding myself to always have a camera on hand.

In the street of the vaults

The problem with having built up such a romanticized notion of Arcos before coming is not only that I seek out quintessential—or perhaps stereotypical—Spanish places and experiences, but that the town so eagerly provides (the motto of Arcos, in fact, is something like “Where dreams become reality”). I say this is a problem because, when it comes to apartments, my roommate Patra and I were looking for something very specific. We didn’t just want an apartment, no. You can live in an apartment anywhere. We wanted an apartment building with plants in the entryway, azulejo tile up the stairs, a beautiful view, and a neighborhood that would remind us every day that we were somewhere different. No matter if our daily walk to school is thirty to forty minutes long and definitely uphill both ways.

The moment we walked into the apartment on Calle Bóvedas, we immediately felt at home. There were plants, tile, a family on the first floor with a little white dog named Blanquito, a red roof-top terrace with a stunning view of the lake, mountains, and bell towers of Arcos’ cathedrals. Our apartment has floor to ceiling windows, barred in by distinctly Spain ironwork and uniquely vaulted ceilings that I’m sure my architect dad will appreciate (I’ll send you a picture soon, Dad!)

The benefit of living in a smallish town is that we saw the apartment, went to see another few, and decided that we were happiest with the first. By the time we’d made our decision, Angela, the woman who’d shown us the first apartment, had left her home (which she also showed us). We talked to her son briefly, who gave us Angela's number on a piece of paper from a pad distributed by Viagra. Then we wandered back into town to get something to eat and happened to run into Angela on the way. We pretty much made our deal there, in the middle of the street, next to a cathedral several hundred years old.

Today we met with Antonio, Angela’s husband and our landlord, to sign the contract. He seemed to be delighted by the fact that Patra has dark hair and I have light hair, calling us “la luna y el sol” (sun and the moon) and “la rubia y la morena” (the blonde and the brunette, more or less). Then he proceeded to discuss our marital prospects for the next hour or so (including his disappointment that his son was already engaged, thus making him unavailable to us) before finally letting us start to move things in.

But now it’s ours for the next eight months, our own beautiful piece of Spanish architecture, a home that is both our dream and our reality.