The Wild Cats of Cádiz

Another early morning: Patra and I once again try to obtain our residency cards.

We took the 7:15 am bus to Cádiz, the capital city of our province; also, the oldest city in Europe. “Cádiz?” you might say, “But I’ve never even heard of Cádiz! How can that be the oldest city in Europe?”

Perhaps you’ve heard of Hercules? Legend has it Cádiz was founded by Hercules when he parted Europe and Africa at the strait of Gibraltar. No big deal. History would have you believe the Phoencians founded Cádiz in 1100 AC (what does that mean? My map’s information says AC instead of AD or BC. Damn these Brits!) I prefer the Herculean version. Also, a guy on his way to India (known to us as Christopher Columbus) set sail from Cádiz in 1492. Needless to say, Cádiz has had an important place in history.

Back to our own epic journey, though. Just as the sky began to fill with light, our bus crossed the long bridge to Cádiz (surrounded by water on three sides). We stopped at a seemingly random intersection and several people got off. Thinking of last week’s stop in the middle of nowhere, I grew nervous (to quote our prez: “Fool me once…don’t fool me again!”) As we pulled away I saw a street name, Avenida Jose Leon de Carranza, which rang a bell. A few blocks later when the bus stopped again, I looked anxiously at Patra. “I think we get off here,” I said. She frowned, but followed my lead. Only after we disembarked did I remember the actual street name where we were supposed to get off: Avenida Ramon de Carranza. Once again, this burst of inspiration occurred as the bus was pulling away. This time, though, we were no longer on it. Oops.

We reoriented ourselves—luckily we’d both printed maps of the city beforehand—and started walking briskly up a main street. It was only a little after eight a.m. when we began walking, and thus my mistake wasn’t too costly; we arrived at the correct office at a quarter to nine, still fifteen minutes before it would even open. I was feeling hopeful; there were only a few other people in the office ahead of us. Also, in the past week, I made several more copies of just about every document ever given to me having anything to do with Spain: I made copies of our apartment lease, my Spanish bank account information, the page in my passport with an exit stamp from Mexico (what does that have to do with Spain? Nothing! But you never know…). We were Prepared.

At a few minutes past nine, Patra and I sat down with two immigration officers and pulled out our application sheets. They shook their heads. “No,” they said. Wrong sheet. I had a minor heart attack.

They handed us new forms, which we filled out as quickly as possibly in the office. This was fairly easy to do since the new form asked for EXACTLY THE SAME INFORMATION as the form we had first presented. Oh, except we had to check a box on this one indicating that we were the ones studying/working in Spain, not the relative of a person studying in Spain. Which is, I’m sure, extremely important.

Having filled out our new documents, we raced out of the building to find a place to make a single copy (of course, they couldn’t just give us two identical sheets to fill out). Finding the place to make copies closed, we entered a store in which we saw copy machines. The copy machines, as it turned out, were not for the general public since the store was actually an office, but a woman there took pity on us and made one copy each of our application forms. We hurried back to the immigration office and had to wait behind two or three people who had showed up since we’d left.

In that time, I noticed a poster on the wall with smiling people of different ethnicities pointing at the camera. The inscription read “Somos inmigrantes, como tu!” (We are immigrants, just like you!) I have yet to verify this, but I think Spain is fairly lenient about immigration. In the past two decades or so, it has become a popular destination for immigrants now that it’s generally recognized as a first-world country. The sign seemed cheery enough, but I felt a little indignant. “Me? An immigrant?” Oh right, I was at the immigration office…still, it felt strange to be identified with a word that is certainly loaded in the US.

Once again, we sat down with the immigration officers. This time, everything went smoothly. They took one copy each of: our application forms, our two letters from the Andalusian government explaining our work situation, and the information and visa pages of our passports. Five pieces of paper in all. We left the office relieved, but weighed down by the extra hundred or so unnecessary copies we still had.

After a quick croissant at a nearby café to celebrate our soon-to-be legality, Patra and I parted ways. She left for Seville by train to meet up with a friend, and I wandered the streets of Cádiz. Past the ruins of a Roman amphitheater, past the yellow-domed cathedral that you’re sure to see first in a google-image search of the city. Here I was walking along the coastal wall, large boulders on the ocean-side to fend off the tides. The sun was out, palm trees lined the sidewalk, I was feeling successful…and something started to smell fishy. Not a huge surprise, since I was next to the ocean and, up ahead of me, several fishermen cast their lines into the water. But then I looked down: the rocks below the wall were crawling with cats. And just ahead: a man down among the cats, setting out water and food. He left a trail of empty tinfoil—greasy with the remains of fish—and satisfied cats.

As infestations go, this one didn’t seem too bad. Not as cute as an infestation of koala bears certainly, but nothing like rats. I continued down the walkway toward the beach. After the land ends, a path along a breakwater continues out to the ruins of a castle on a tiny island. I took out my camera and framed the shot with cats in the foreground. After taking two pictures, I realize one scrawny black cat was advancing on me with eyes flashing. One black cat might not have been able to do much, but a herd of several hundred? I know what happened to catwoman; I’m not interested in superpowers. I continued on to the beach to stick my toes in the Atlantic once more.

On the way back from the beach, I saw the cat-man catapult himself from the rocks below onto the dividing wall. He walked off as though there was nothing unusual about the company he’d been keeping for the past hour or more. A lone cat sat on wrong side of the wall, the side reserved for people. As he passed it, I wondered if there would be some recognition between the cat and the hand that feeds it, but no. I wondered: does he name them? Does he love them? Perhaps this city inspires men to do to crazy things, things that can be hard from which to divine meaning: to divide land masses, to conquer what’s beyond the horizon, to tame a starving mass of clawed animals into submission.

Cats watch me warily...also, the ruins of a castle in the ocean as background

The cathedral of Cádiz...can you spot any cats in the foreground?

The cathedral from the front

The Sea, The Sea!

Today was an early day, as Patra and I set off to obtain residency cards. This must be done at an Oficina de Extranjería (immigration office), of which there are only two in the province of Cádiz. It also must be done within thirty days of your arrival in Spain; I had been here 20 days already and Patra was at something like 23. We chose to go to the office in El Puerto de Santa Maria, a town on the beach with a reputation for being awesome. The bus to Puerto, though, left at 7:20 in the morning so we were up much earlier to get ready and make it to the station on time. Luckily, this time we didn’t have to walk in a downpour. It was somewhat eerie to walk in Arcos while still dark, though, as the white town is awash in an orange glow from streetlamps at night.

Once on the bus, we traveled west toward the Atlantic. The moon was like an overripe winter melon in the sky, rotting at the bottom. Mist clung to the fields; lone farmhouses stood as though without foundations.

From this dreamlike beginning, the industrial entrance of Puerto was a shock. The bus stopped by an unimpressive bus shelter just before a busy roundabout. Expecting an actual station, I didn’t get out of my seat. “Jenna,” Patra said, “This is our stop.” I got off the bus with grave misgivings. We scanned the map at the bus shelter for Avenida de la Constitución, where we were supposed to find the office, but couldn’t find the name anywhere. We asked a woman seated at the shelter; she said she may have heard of the street, but she really couldn’t be sure. We went across the street to the train station and asked for directions there. Following those directions, we ended up ten minutes away at Avenida Diputación. The man hadn’t understood us. We looked at the map in Patra’s guidebook, also lacking Constitución. We decided we would walk in the general direction of the historic part of town, since there was, at least, a tourism office where we could hopefully get a better map of the town.

It was nine-thirty when we arrived at the tourism office, which didn’t open until ten. There were women directly inside the office and we poked our heads in as politely as possible to ask if they could just give us one map. “We open at ten,” they said abruptly, then shut the door. We asked a woman on the street if she knew where Constitución was. Her eyes opened wide. She told us it was possible to walk, but very long and complicated. Downtrodden, we went to a café and ate croissants until ten. Back at the tourism office, a much friendlier man showed us maps of the town and pointed out all the highlights, as well as a ferry we could take to a neighboring town if we wanted. Desperate to get to the immigration office, we thanked him and asked if he could just show us how to get to Constitución. He pointed it out—maybe five or six blocks from where we were. Neither long, nor complicated.

We arrived at the office a little after ten; already the waiting room was filling up. I recognized one girl from our orientation in Sevilla and she told us that this office required you to have a copy of your every page in your passport, as well as extra copies of your information and visa pages, and any other pages with stamps on them. Flustered, we hurried out of the office and to a nearby copy center. Back at the immigration office a few minutes later and several pounds more paperweight in our bags, we found that six or seven people had showed up since we left, thus surpassing us in line. We sat down to wait, like all the rest, for the one woman handling all of our cases.

After about an hour, the girl we knew was called in to the office. She emerged, triumphant, twenty minutes later. We congratulated her, feeling all the more closer to our own eventual success. We did sudokus to pass the time, read up on the news from the US in Spanish, and kept counting down the people until it would be our turn. In Spain, you don’t take a number or sit in line. You enter a room, ask “Quién es el último?” (Who’s the last one?) and keep track of the line in your head. This system, for the most part, works just fine. Also, you become more aware of everyone around you, begin to put them in a hierarchy based on their timeliness.

It was getting close to our turn, when the one woman handling immigration cases decided to take a lunch break. This was deflating, but I still had hope. There were three people ahead of us. If each one took twenty minutes, and the woman came back by twelve-twenty, then we would definitely get a chance to give her our paperwork. I felt bad—but also a little smug—about the people who were showing up just now. They had no chance of getting into her office before two, when she would close for the day. The woman came back from lunch at about twelve-fifteen and we were back in business. One appointment before ours lasted only five minutes. When we were finally next in line, I told Patra that I had been getting nervous, but at least now we had nothing to worry about. No coming back to Puerto for us!

We entered the caseworker’s office, sat down. I pulled out my application form and handed it to her. She looked over it for a few moments, then said, “You live in Arcos?” I confirmed this, thinking maybe she would say something about how beautiful the town is. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t process your papers. You have to go to the office in Cádiz.” I felt slightly comforted by the fact that she used the phrase “Lo siento” for us. This is taught to Americans as the equivalent for “I’m sorry,” but it’s much stronger than the casual way we sometimes use our own apologetic phrase, much more full of regret. At least, I thought, she wasn’t just a jerk.

Patra and I left the office. We’d waited for over two hours just to be turned away. What’s more, we hadn’t been aware that there would be any division between who has to get their cards processed in Cádiz or Puerto.

At least, we agreed, it was a beautiful day. And we were exploring a new town, albeit what we saw the most of was the inside of a government office. Walking past a fruit store, Patra stopped in for a pomegranate to cheer herself up. My consolation was the ocean. It was easy enough to find, just a few blocks from the immigration office. Past hibiscus bushes and dunes, we came upon a wide expanse of beach. We rolled up our pants and took off our shoes and felt the sand give way beneath our toes. We wandered to the water’s edge and waded in. As soon as the first wave slide over my feet, I felt completely rejuvenated. So the day didn’t go as we had planned. So we will have to go to Cádiz next Friday, our last possible day to register for our residency cards. None of that mattered when I realized that I am alive, I am living in Spain, and the ocean is just forty-five minutes away from my cliff-top town. The day once again became dreamlike, and this time it wasn’t interrupted.



(My feet in the Atlantic! At last!)