It’s
always hard to leave home. I have now
done this twice in the space of only a few months. Christmas was great, and I will probably
write a little about this at some other time.
I was so happy to be home and I did fall into the swing of it so it was
another wrench to come back to Spain.
Following
the hectic and unfortunate flight/delay/having to stay overnight in a random
hostal in Barajas and shell out another 25 euro for a train ticket let’s just
say I was not in the happiest of mind-sets.
I was at a low point with Spain, I didn’t want to be there and here were
more problems that I had to overcome just to get back to the place where I was
pretty sure I didn’t want to be (this was just the stress talking of course).
The
hostal was actually really nice. And it
included transport to and from the airport.
The guy who drove the minibus started asking where I was from and all
the usual stuff. We ended up talking
about the Loch Ness Monster and whether or not I believed it existed. “Pues si, claro”…then I asked whether they
had monsters in lochs in Spain, to which the answer is no but he told me about
the “caras de Belmez”. In a house in the
small town of Belmez, about an hour from Baeza, faces have appeared and disappeared
since the 1970’s. The man told me that
they were apparently the faces of souls trapped there who are screaming because
they want to be free.
On the
Tuesday I went back to the airport to get the train to Atotcha and from there
the train to Linares-Baeza where Geni was waiting to pick me up. I got back to my flat, unpacked, skyped and
then slept because I had my 8.15 start.
Being
back was a bit lonely. Leaving a house
of four people and coming back to my little flat was strange. But thankfully on the Thursday I bumped into
Anna, one of the Americans. We went for
some tapas and talked about our holidays and made arrangements for the
weekend. Mat was to come down from La
Puerta and Leah and Adele from Ubeda.
On the
Friday I ended up going out with two of my teacher friends and some of their
other friends to Da Vinci’s which is one of my favourite places because it is
normally quiet enough to have a conversation and like most places here the
drinks are cheap and the tapas is good.
Except I don’t understand the obsession with gambas, even if I didn’t
have a really bad allergy. I mean, you
have to pull off their little legs and the shells. And I thought that being hundreds of kilometres
from the sea meant that I wouldn’t encounter seafood often, but it is so very
Spanish and I am starting to like some of the fish that they serve, or at least
I can eat it without gagging. I have
always liked salmon, I like proper fishy fish but it would never be my first,
second or even third choice. That night
was really good, conversations were interesting and I got to bust out my
Spanish which has, I feel, improved so much in the past few months. I still lack vocabulary but it is coming, all
part of the process.
And
then it was Saturday. Time to celebrate
Dave’s birthday! Mat had indeed made it
down and brought his new room-mate, Candice from New Zealand although she has
recently moved to Adelaide (where my Aussie relatives live). She has just recently graduated and was
pleased to find that she wasn’t the youngest person there (she is 21, most of
the Americans are turning 23 or 24 this year, so I’m the baby at 20). After
the cake, which Candice brought with her, and the weird whiskey, gin and lemon cocktails…we
went to our usual haunt, Café Najera. I finally
completed a time honoured tradition and drank part of (I won’t even say most
of) a Jarra (1litre) of beer, I hate beer…a good time was had by all.
After
Najera we went to Café Central and danced…now this is an area where I’ve made a
lot of progress…I still feel awkward dancing, but I can usually relax into it
nowadays…I mean other than my friends I won’t see any of these people again so
what does it matter if I look like a tube.
And sometimes it is even quite fun…I think my Scottish friends would be
quite proud of me and hopefully I can transfer these skills to Glasgow. Spain is so relaxed though, the atmosphere is
one of “if you want to dance then dance”.
The UK has much more pressure.
Anna
and I were dancing the opening part of “strip the willow” to Rhinna’s “Love in a
hopeless place”. I think that was the
most random part of the night. On the
way home we went into Rango, another club, but it was a bit dead.
All in
all that first weekend served to remind me that whilst I love being at home
with my family and my friends, most of whom I’ve known for years and years, I
have good friends here. People that I
know for a fact I will miss like crazy when I go home. I’m determined to travel back to Spain if
they are still here next year, and eventually I will realise my dream of
travelling the States and I now have a couch to stay on in a few of them.
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