Staying in someone's home while visiting a foreign country is a lovely way to get to practice your newly acquired language skills, get to know locals in their native habitats, learn the customs, cuisine, and culture in a more intimate way than is possible in a classroom.
However, it is the luck of the draw as to what KIND of family you might find yourself housed with. After all, think about your own family . . . Jesus who would want to live with THEM??!!
So I shouldn't have been at all surprised that the Spanish family I found on the internet was a couple who had split up 2 years ago, the kids had fled the nest for their very lives, and the fragile Spanish lady, my 'mum,' the sweet lady above, was having a major mental breakdown.
The first 4 days of my stay she spent crying in her bed. I was paying for half-pension but soon I was buying food and cooking for HER to ensure that I would get fed at all. As for practicing my Spanish, well I did somewhat: I learned lloron was crying, antidepressant medicamente was mood enhancers, and BOO HOO HOO!!! meant no dinner.
Once I realized that she probably wasn't going to slice her wrists or jump from the top storey, life was good although a bit dark. Literally. The blinds and shutters never got raised all day unless I did it. After awhile, I started to live in Calle Ecuador 20, I went food shopping, pondered what to cook us for lunch (served at 2:30 or 3 pm), discovered a fine TV show that we watched at 4:30 pm almost everyday about the Franco Days, called Amor en la Revolucion. A wonderful series on life in the 1950's in Spain with the Guardia Civil skulking around every corner, women yearning to get out of the kitchen and work, and men unsure of who to trust.
If I came out the front door and took a left, a small calle deposited me onto Avenida Dilar, a shopping district of clothing stores (mostly polyester), mucho shoe stores (WHY do they need so much choice in cheap shoes??), panaderias, fruterias, pastellerias, big chain grocery stores, and lots and lots of bars. And a Moroccan hallal butcher. This is also where I could catch a bus to downtown or to switch to get to the bus station.
If I took a right out my front door, I was deposited onto Avenida Cadiz and into a completely different neighborhood than Dilar. Dilar was solid middle-class Espanoles while Cadiz was immigrant -- home to brightly dressed and robed African men and women, Latinos who have been brought to Spain to work in the bars, as cleaning ladies, and construction workers. Here in Cadiz, you can find Latino groceries, kebab houses, and tons of locutorios -- places to call home from a cabine or buy a phone card or use the internet.
I spent my days in Granada walking, sometimes for 4-5 hours. I would walk from my neighborhood, down Dilar or Cadiz, past Avenida Americas to the Palacio de Congreso, along the river, over the bridge, and on into Granada proper. My walks took me through the Jewish quater, up toward the Alhambra but where small casitas straggle just below the gardens of the Alhambra forming their own derelict community, up to the Albaicin and its Moorish neighborhood of stairways, alleys, minute plazas, and roads so narrow the sun never shone there at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment