Sometimes behave so strangely

This last week has likely been the hardest week yet this summer. I cannot exactly determine the exact perimeters of the difficulty, nor can I map its whereabouts. It’s like dark matter… exerting a pull of gravity and affecting my life but invisible and wholly unknown.
The best explanation comes from a small but frightening incidence the other day. I’m in Alemeda, a large open rectangular forum lined with large trees but open to the sky in the center. I walk under one of the gigantic trees and make my way across the square. Standing in the center of the square, I suddenly hear a crack. Then a crash in the place I had stood only twenty seconds before. A gigantic limb of one of these trees fell right where I had been walking.
Yes, this could be construed as lucky, and in all likelihood it was. However, it’s as if I’ve been in a race against catastrophe. It’s always twenty seconds behind be, leaving constantly anxious, perennially paranoid, and emotionally out of sorts.
Set within this mental stage of insecurity and ill omens, I’ll relate to you a most interesting Thursday and Friday.
(**)

I am with Elise as usual. Elise, an economics-industrial engineering major from Penn State, has become my day to day companion frequenting all adventures and most dull afternoons. We get a call from a group of friends inviting us to a concert “near to the Futbol Stadium”. With nothing else to do, Elise and I plan to get dinner then head out.

After a delicious tapas meal and a glass of tinto, we’re ready for the concert. We were in for disastrously long journey. Near the Futbol Stadium was either an outright exaggeration or complete lie. We walked and walked, and got lost, and walked and nearly cried and got lost some more. Hours later (and I am absolutely not exaggerating when I say hours), we arrived. I myself had walked at minimum 3.

Imagine walking, enormously fatigued, and suddenly finding yourself in a Franco designed industrial wasteland of a suburb. Then, after a few more turns, you are in a bustling commercial center, however this is no ordinary retail strip. The entire place used to be self storage units. You must pass first through a security gateway patrolled by a uniformed rent-a-cop. Then passing a wired fence and a few boxy cement walls, there is a graffiti city of music venues and cheap bizarre restaurants.
Dazed, we met our friends at a tapas bar with a clown motif, populated by children and old men. We drank lemonade-beer, a close kin to mikes hard lemonade in spain… We wandered an alleyway filed with brown boxes slept in by stray dogs. All this, under fatigue in duress at 11 o’clock at night in a dimly lit industrial self-storage cement mess…
It was a simultaneously haunting and magical place. The concert was a blend of flamenco, Arabic music, and Seu Jorge (the Brazilian singer). It touched on just about every genre and then twisted it into a danceable emotive rhythm. Needless to say, it was worth the journey….

***)





Its Friday, I had received a call from my intercambio (local exchange language partner). He wanted to meet the next day. He asked me to invite a few friends and their intercambios.
This was a bad weekend for get-to-gathers… everyone took weekend trips to Portugal, Madrid, and the coast. Because of some of my bad luck, Elise and I were left in the city. So it ended up being Elise, the intercambio, and I sipping tea at a local coffee shop and catching dinner.
Brawny but short (like most Spainyards), he dressed every-bit preppy American. I, on the other hand, was dressed top to bottom in clothes I had bought in Spain… It was as if he were from America and I from Spain.
It was a good time, though my Spanish was aweful. As of late, my abilities have been diminishing rapidly. Elise commented to him that my Spanish was typically much much better… I think its part of my general unease I’ve had of late. My temperament has without a doubt effected my Spanish and in many ways effected even my English. He was completely gracious and wonderfully nice, but being with him put me in the most depressed of moods. Then again, I think it wasn’t him. It was more a trigger. My sudden meeting exacerbated my paranoia… my malaise worse than it previously had been…
To counter this, Elise and I went to the “Clam”… our usual hang out in Alemeda and drank our favorite coffee-alcohol mix drink topped with nata (whip cream) and butter cookies. Still not relieved… we made an oath instead to stay out all night….
Equiped with whiskey, we went into the forum of Alemeda where on weekend nights youth and hippies drink, smoke, dance, and jam in the streets. Tonight, unexpectedly, it was busier than we had ever seen it. Apparently the weekend was a gay-pride weekend in Sevilla and this was the first party of the weekend. A live band had set up stage and people were doing congo-lines through the streets. Beer was 75 centimos and there was kissing and dancing for all. We, of course, joined in, and soon were having a splendid time… meeting people, mixing it up. Despite my malaise I felt a bit better… I felt like “it was like the 60s, only with less hope”…
The worst hour was between five and six. Alemeda was emptying out and the all-nighters were headed to overly priced clubs…. We contented ourselves to people watching on park benches and street corners… That hours was perhaps the longest hour of my life…. As the sun started to creep up out of the clouds we made our ways to a churro breakfast place… a reward for our patience..
We dipped the crispy benet-like goodness into a thick warm chocolate and smiled. We parted ways content with our all night decision… I climbed to my little boat on the roof. Green key got me inside. Red key up the stairs on to the roof. And yellow in my room. I looked out on the city, the sun finally truly revealing itself, closed my eyes and breathed in the new morning….

In the end, despite all anxiety, ignoring all bad temperament, I was for a moment at peace.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers

Sunday, June 17, 2007

I feel drained. So much and little has happened this weekend. Everything is a haze of hookah smoke, embellishment, and loss. We left for Granada on Saturday morning… I threw my bag under the bus – stopping momentarily to take out my wallet and journal – and we took a three hour journey to Granada.
When I arrived in Granada, my bag was mysteriously missing. There was no explaining it. People claimed to have seen it under the bus, the drivers claimed that they had stood guard. Whatever the case, my bag – along with its contents disappeared. My only real losses were my tarot cards and my camera… I refused to be upset by it though. I was in Granada, I was in Spain, and I wouldn’t let bad luck destroy the weekend.
Granada. Awash with hippies and Moroccans. A city of artists and craftsman. Of life, and youth. It felt… like Austin. Where Sevilla is my District of Columbia, Granada is my Austin. The night was spent quietly bonding with people amidst hookah smoke, Arabic tea, and shwarmas…. Oh dear god the shwarmas. They were among the best I’ve ever had in my life and the people the most friendly. Fitting for the second largest college town in Spain, the city of an intellectual, free spirited, crazy adventure. Perhaps my bad luck of loosing my bag granted me good luck in areas of my life.



I was given gifts of falafel by street venders, baklava by bakers, tea by tea sellers. People were stopping me in the street asking me if I was from Granada. My Spanish was excellent. My Arabic was reemerging. My social skills blossoming. The trip was a reprieve from reality. It was as if I was fasting, pardoned from material things – clothes, a clean shave, contacts.
And again… the city. I cannot even begin to explain how much I loved this university town nestled in the mountains. Streets taken from Arabian nights. Ancient tea houses smelling of Arabic philosophers. A populace awash with youthful energy. Cheap and delicious food. It was an oasis.
Granada in Spanish means pomegranate. Like this delectable fruit, the city was sweet and juicy. It was exotic and a luxury. It was filled with a thousand pits of lost bags and bad luck but sugarcoated with a personality that made all pessimism vanish.
Above all places I have visited in Spain, in Granada I could live forever.