I Even Impress Myself

Getting here has been… long. I am in Castuera, Spain, writing from my bed. I can hear the bats outside my window and I swear every twenty minutes Maria comes in to ask if I will eat anything. Apparently I eat like a bird. I consciously think about not being a “typical” American and try to keep the pounds off. Not that it’s difficult with a metabolism that’s always in high gear. Of course, this will change.

Here is where I give my warning about writing. First, I think I will be writing a lot at first, because I will have little else to do until I can get into a routine. But once that routine picks up, I promise to write at least once a month, but not any more than that. Just like Ecuador, which at times was less than once a month, but sometimes more.

Almost a week ago (Monday morning at 8:10am) my plane left Idaho. Saying goodbye was hard, but I have very supportive people in my life. I flew to Salt Lake City and then Atlanta, where I had a couple of hours of layover, which was good, because I could make my last phone calls. My friends back at home have been kind enough to take care of my rat while I am away, which is such an amazing thing, but it was certainly a process working out the details. I made many phone calls ending in the following transactions- my mother took down phone numbers to tape to the cage to keep people in contact with one another, then she took Rae to my dad’s co-worker Evan’s office, Evan took the cage to his little town where I assume he dropped it at Kat’s house, Kat left the next day for Moscow with Rae and the phone numbers, hopefully called John and left Rae with him, or perhaps called Conner when John wouldn’t answer and left Rae with Conner who would call John and deliver her to him later. It was a large scheme with a lot of ifs. I have heard no word of anything going wrong, so my fingers are crossed.

Then I got on the plane after some final phone goodbyes and flew to Madrid. I arrived in Madrid at 10am Madrid time. I found a taxi and went to my hostel (28€ is a little more than the $5 taxi rides across Quito) where they wouldn’t let me check in yet. I went to find my friend Jen in her 14-bunk room shared by strangers. Needless to say, she did not answer the door and the girl who did answer definitely did not know Jen. When I went downstairs to sit and wait, Jen came to the railing saying, “I thought I heard your voice,” with sleep still collecting in the corners of her eyes.

We spent two days walking around, napping, and paying way more for food than we should have. On the second evening we went out after a nap (the ciesta, by the way, is practiced much more by the Spanish than by the Mexicans) once we heard the chanting and singing and drums rolling past our blackout curtains. I didn’t leave on the 29th as originally planned because of the “Huelga General,” or General Strike. I was told at first that it was just going to be transportation that was shut down first, but it turns out almost everything was shut down. Many of the English teachers I would meet at orientation were delayed flying from the United States in to Spain because of the strike and they had to fly in to Lisbon (Lisboa) instead. It also turns out that many European countries were following Spain’s lead and having strikes that day too.

So we went out into the streets of Madrid and joined the strike, which we thought was huge once we got to the first big square a few blocks down. It was peaceful, even though we saw people actively spray-painting surfaces with differing ideas. But then we went into Plaza Mayor and it got so much bigger. People were coming in and leaving in waves. There were opposing views marbled into the plaza and yet the only disruption was when an ambulance had to come in for a heart-attack/stroke victim. It was pretty cool.

At the same time, I didn’t really understand it. Propaganda Spanish is hard to decipher because it’s word play, like English propaganda usually is. I read later that it was against austerity and the big bank bailouts. Some of it was outright against capitalism and seemed to have communist symbols on it.

So that’s what Jes and I did. We even stole flags as mementos.

The next morning I got up rull early to skype with a special lovely man-friend and then I left for the bus station for an 8am bus. I was still carrying around what felt like an obscene amount of baggage, which I hate. It makes me very obviously a tourist. But I lugged it around because I had no choice. I needed to get it all to Cáceres for orientation, which was still not the last stop. Oh, I forgot to mention the Atlanta airport really doesn’t mind if checked baggage gets wet, apparently, because my suitcase arrived wet, which meant that all of my clothing was wet along with my books, one of which bled onto my favorite tank top and my favorite skirt and stained them permanently. But I had to leave all that stuff in my suitcase until I could get somewhere more permanently. It was starting to smell.

A four-hour bus ride brought me to Cáceres and I took a taxi to the hostel for orientation, laid in my empty room for a while and slept. Then there were drinks, seeing Mattcito, meeting lots and lots of people I might never see again, and a couple hours talking about changing the schedule for the next morning. The meeting that night was pointless, but efficiency seems to be an American thing.

The next morning we had breakfast (I was finishing every part of my meal and no one else was, kinda weird) and packed up to go to Universidad Laboral, which is a school that is basically the second part of their high school. It’s optional where all levels before are required, but it is still high school of some sort. There we had more semi-pointless meetings, but I also got to meet Geraldo, my headmaster, which was good. I am teaching ages 6-12.

After an overwhelming session of Spanish and more Spanish explaining the process of getting papers for being in Spain and how to set up a bank account, I got in Geraldo's car with all my luggage and we headed first to Don Benito (40 minutes from my town- and I might live there) for lunch and then to Castuera.

All the highways seem fake. You know those roadways we used to have as kids with the little play cars and the colorful signs and pristinely painted lines? That seems to be Spain. It all just seems too nice to be real. The US has way too many roads to keep them all in such pristine conditions and the only other roads I’ve really experienced are those in South America, which are either dirt or perilous. Or both. This is a change.

Castuera is beautiful. Geraldo has taken me out for drinks, shown me the top view of the city, and given me a road-map to follow, should I need it. All the houses have little courtyards, everything is so nicely tiled or paved, but not in the cheap cement sidewalk way that America does it. The streets are SO clean. The people know that I’m a foreigner, but thank god I don’t feel automatically hated like I started to feel in Ecuador before leaving. I may have to work myself out of the habit of looking at my feet to avoid heinous looks though.

Already I am lonely. But I want to revel in it. I have this kind of host mother for now and I’m trying to be as polite and friendly as possible, but mostly I want her to leave me alone. I like being solitary because then when I feel lonely, I can submit to it and get it over with. Somehow that isn’t as painful as trying to mask loneliness with social interest. But Maria insists on making an appearance in my alone time at least every twenty minutes to ask if I want warm milk or coffee or to take a shower, or just assure me that I can relax. Yes, I can, but certainly not when there is a high-nerves woman checking in on me every so often!

But she is nice. I appreciate it. Just maybe I am realizing what I like and what I don’t like. Like? Time to think. Don’t like? Nagging mothers. Maybe I have no patience for it because my mother was way cooler. And it doesn’t help that I get exhausted speaking and listening to Spanish all the time. There are literally no other Americans in this town right now. And Maria speaks dirty Spanish… the kind were vas becomes vah and quedado becomes something like que’a’o. It’s tiresome, plus Maria has hearing aids, meaning that when she comes every twenty minutes to ask me if I want something, she can’t hear me respond, meaning that I have to get up and go have a conversation with her before getting back to whatever I’m doing.

Most of my life I haven’t understood my own motivation. I still don’t. I know that when I feel unmotivated, it is useless to push against that, so I sit quietly. When I feel like I can take on the world, I do shit like apply to teach English in Spain so that when I hit a trough again, the application is already submitted. That also can get me into trouble sometimes, evidenced by the hives I gave myself from sheer terror of what I’m doing now.  Yeah, have I mentioned that?  I gave myself hives because I was so anxious. Who does that? Who gives themselves hives because they’re that freaked out? Apparently I do. I just hope that this time the motivation I took advantage of to get here served me well. Otherwise this trough might be very deep and very difficult to get out of.

I’ve found that blind encouragement doesn’t help. I think I would know best that I am a strong woman, since I’ve been with myself during all the bad times when others have not. But right now I’m lonely and tired and afraid. I want someone to be here with me to talk to me in English at the end of the day and to actually fully understand the context in which I speak. I want internet so that in moments of panic I can get a hold of someone to help, but for now I wait. Eight months is a long time. How did I get here? I think sometimes I even impress myself.