Our little home in Granada.

On Monday, the day after we returned from the beach, we contacted the friends of a friend about the little house they were renting.  It turned out that they were moving out on Wednesady!  The house was in the Sacramonte, the gitano (gypsy) neighborhood just above the Albaicin known for its Flamenco schools and restaurants.  We arranged to meet with the young Australian couple who were living there later on that evening.

The Sacramonte is a family neighborhood and is known for the cave houses located there.  These cave house are really quite incredible, some have been around for a few hundred years.  There is a very specific method that has been developed to properly excavate a cave and if done correctly, the rooms created will be safe and long lasting.  Caves also have the advantage that they remain at a constant temperature (about 25 degrees Celsius) so they are cool in the summer and warm in the winter.  Today, cave houses generally have a more traditional looking house built in front of the actual cave itself so many of the houses in the Sacramonte are much larger that they initially appear.

Unfortunately, the house we went to look at did not have a cave but it was charming nonetheless.  The house was small, around 80 square meters, the plumbing was not ideal, the water heater leaked, the oven hadn’t worked in years and the small second bedroom above the garden appeared to be an addition that had been built without permits. 

The stove worked well and it and the water heater required bottles of propane gas (another learning experience).  Of course, we fell in love with it right away, primarily because of the little private garden.  Private outdoor space is at a premium in the Albaicin and this looked perfect for us.

What now ensued was the most unusual lease arrangement I had ever been a party to.  The owner was living elsewhere in Spain, the young Australian couple were leaving the following day and their deposit covered more than the utilities but there was no way for the owner to give them their remaining deposit back because they had no Spanish bank account (neither did we of course).  To further complicate matters, we did not yet speak Spanish well enough the complete a transaction like this.  The woman who owned the house had left many of her personal belongings behind in the house.  This was not a sterile apartment rental but rather we felt that we would be moving right into a completely Spanish home.

Using the Australian lady’s Spanish we negotiated a rental rate for three months, paid in advance and that we would make up the deposit difference and buy out the Australian’s unused deposit from them.  Sound complicated?  All this based on a discussion we only partly understood but confirmed in an email in a language we couldn’t, at the time, read.  We also arranged to purchase linens, towels and pillows from the Australians for a discounted price since they weren’t going to need them in Spain anymore.

On Wednesday morning we met with the Australian couple one last time.  They had loaded their belongings in a taxi and over a quick cup of coffee we gave them the money for the share of the deposit and the other items and they handed us the keys.  We had been given the landlady’s bank account number in order to pay the rent and the rest of the deposit which we did a couple of days later.  All that was left for us to do was to move; easier said than done.

An hour later a taxi dropped us off at the bottom of the long, narrow and very steep stairs leading to our new digs with our 120 kilos of luggage.  Four hot, sweaty trips later I exhaustedly collapsed into a chair in our new garden.  We had done it.  We had found our own place to live in Granada, it had everything we were looking for, the price was right and the location ideal.  Now, we just had to learn to speak the language.

Weekend Getaway

The last Saturday in May was beautiful early summer day.  It was supposed to be moving day for us and our large duffel bags were all packed and standing in the common area where the house manager had asked us to leave them.  We threw swimsuits and a change of clothes in our backpacks, made sure our trusty towels, in their net bags were attached and headed out into the early morning to walk down to the bottom of the Albaycin where we were meeting our friends Diana and the irrepressible Kelsey at the bus stop.

We caught a bus for the short ride to the train station where Diana who had been acting as our travel agent, had arranged to rent a car.  In Granada, it is far more expensive to rent a car with an automatic transmission than one with a stick shift and Diana was a little uncomfortable with the vehicle for a little while.  To be fair, none of us wanted to drive under any circumstances so Diana was the brave one and thankfully, the vast majority of the one and a half hour trip was on the autovista and not complicated.

As we neared the beachside pueblo of Nerja we were faced with a series of roundabouts which were complicated by the fact that we didn’t have an appropriate map and had to rely on Kelsey’s smart phone for navigation.  After circling a couple of these several times in first gear looking for the proper exit and with only one wrong turn we found ourselves passing through this lovely town full of tourists.

We were staying just outside of Nerja however, and we continued to the Hostal Avalon located in Punta Laura and just across the street from the beach.  We were immediately impressed by the friendly staff, incredible restaurant and rooms, each with an ocean view and after a wonderful late breakfast (complete with beers) we changed into our suits and headed for the beach.

The beach was not crowded and consisted of a grayish sand; very different from what we were used to in the US but we spread our towels, acquired beverages from one of several cafes along the beach and began doing our Spanish language homework.  About an hour of this and we needed a change of location and activity so we moved down the beach to an upscale resort where we appropriated lounge chairs without any arguments and settled in for an afternoon of reading and sipping beverages.

We soon realized that this particular section of the beach accommodated many topless sunbathers…..ooops!  Most of the sunbathers were northern Europeans in Spain for a spring vacation so there was quite of bit of pale pink flesh; quite a bit if you know what I mean.  I mean really, people of a certain age (surely older than me) should know better.  This did not ruin our afternoon however and after a couple of hours we realized we were getting a little more sun than we should and we packed up and walked further down the beach to a seaside restaurant recommended by our hotel named Pepe’s. 

Pepe’s featured close to one hundred tables and was obviously very popular although our timing was perfect and the comida crowd was just finishing up.

  We ordered  a salad and a bowl of mussels to share as an afternoon snack since we had dinner reservations for later in the evening.

They were incredible and a much larger portion than we expected, so we stuffed ourselves and left a large pile of empty shells behind . 

 We were very impressed by the quality, especially since the prices were very reasonable, much less than we expected,  The sunburn, adult beverages and food caught up with us and we decided to walk back to the hotel for a siesta.

Dinner in the hotel restaurant much later in the evening was a very pleasant experience, as was our breakfast the next morning, great food, friendly people, and reasonable prices. 

We loaded the car and headed inland on a very steep, winding road for a visit to the nearby pueblo of Frigiliana.

All of us were immediately enchanted by this lovely village and we hiked up and down the steep and narrow but clean cobblestone streets simply looking around and doing a bit of window shopping.

After climbing a series of switchbacks we found ourselves atEl Jardin, a restaurant our friend Tony had recommended to us. 

We were not very hungry having eaten a very large breakfast late that morning and we were saving our appetites for an expected Thai food extravaganza later, but we stopped for a drink and to chat with the manager before our next stop on our way home in the Valle de la Crin.  Next time we will definitely fit a meal at this restaurant into our plans.

 The view was extraordinary!  Yes, that is the Mediterranean down there.....

Diana has some close friends who run a restaurant called the Thai Elephant in Restobal,

a quiet little pueblo in the Valle de la Crin, which just happened to be on our way back to Granada.  It is a lovely place set in a huge garden,

run by a Thai woman who just happens to be married to a Spaniard.  We all loaded up on the green and red curry and we were very happy to eat some great food with a little spice and heat.  We all emptied our plates several times and left for Granada with our bellies full and our craving for spicy food satisfied for the time being.

All of us look forward to returning to the Hostal Avalon and both El Jardin and the Thai Elephant in the future.  Great food, sun, beaches, a little exploring in new places…what more can you ask of a weekend?

Learning to live in an entirely new way.

At least a couple evenings per week we would travel to one or more of the other barrios in Granada (Realejo or Centro for example) and visit some of our other favorite places. 

We had specifically budgeted for the breakfast “fry up” offered by Hannigans in Centro and we have rarely missed these weekly or bi-weekly events even though we really feel like we’re cheating on the cultural experience when we do.  Rationalization: the Irish culture, in Spain, is still a new and different culture….yeah sure. 

Our friend from TEFL, Tony, had a birthday during our second week in Granada and we met up at the Mirador San Nicolas

 then the party moved to Taberna 22 in the lower Albaicyn and soon ended up in one of our favorite places in Realejo, the restaurant Casa Lopez de Correa. 

This restaurant is run by a British couple, Miles and Sue and features, among other great things, a tapas menu of seven or eight items that you can choose your tapa from when you order a drink.  All of them are great as Sue is a fabulous chef and Mike insists that they serve the best lasagna in Granada.

The party moved on as first one bar then another closed for the evening until we found ourselves in the lower part of Realejo in the wee small hours of the morning….a forty minute uphill hike home for us.

On another evening, with Tony not long after we again went “a tapeo” and during our wandering on this special evening we picked up a few more people at every stop until we were a group of nearly twenty people. 

Two of the people that joined us were Chessa and Renee, both lovely ladies from New York traveling in southern Spain for a few weeks.  Before we knew it we had adopted them both and Chessa, after completing the TEFL course, is still in Granada and has been in a relationship with our dear friend Tony.  We loved being able to see them both on a regular basis.

A few days later we passed through the Puerta de las Pesas with Diana and Jose called to us by name, remembering where we were from and inquiring how are classes were going.

  Wow…we were very surprised and impressed that he remembered us from our brief and difficult conversation a few days before.  We decided to stop again and after our meal he brought out a brochure they had just produced and asked us to check the English, it was a Google translate version and was terrible. 

We offered to try to translate it for them in order to get the practice with the Spanish, so he gave us a copy in the original Spanish.  This was the beginning of a friendship that we treasure.

Knowing that we would need to work through the translation over several days we decided to bring it back the following week after we found a new place to live and got settled.  We had been talking with a wonderful couple from California, Allie and Andrew, friends that Diana had made previously, who were actually living in Spain, and had an apartment that they wanted to sublet for the summer.  They were going home to get married in June and would not be back until September or October, perfect for us!  There was only one catch, they had four cats.  The cats were part of the deal; we thought long and hard and came to the difficult decision that part of our whole process had been to free ourselves of that type of responsibility, so we would have to find somewhere else.

We got a call from another friend, a teacher at the TEFL school who suggested that we get in touch with some friends of hers.  They had been renting a small house and were scheduled to leave sometime “soon” and possibly their house would be available.  Sadly, we discovered that they were out of town for a few days so we could not talk to them until after the weekend.

It was Friday and by Saturday our stay at the residencia was scheduled to end so instead of stressing out and working diligently to find a place to live like we would have a few short weeks earlier, we decided to embrace the southern Mediterranean lifestyle, refused to worry, extended our stay at the residencia for a few days and went to the beach with Diana and Kelsey for the weekend.  

New people, new friends, new language.

In these early days at Castila, we met Diana, an attorney from Baton Rouge who had arrived just three weeks before we did and Kelsey a vivacious 18 year old from Colorado doing her “gap year” in Spain and who, damn her, spoke Spanish fairly well.  

From Australia we had a classmate Lesley and a couple who were both physicians, another couple who had just spent 9 months in Nepal as observers in the electoral process were originally from England.

 We met university students from both mainland China and Taiwan, a woman from Singapore and a travel journalist from Hong Kong.

  Ricardo, a 22 year old from Florida who had just graduated and was headed back in the fall for grad school joined our class, and we got to know Ethan, a 16 year old high school student from Chicago whose Spanish was several levels better than ours and those are just the people we got too know in the first couple of weeks!

On Friday afternoons, after classes, the school would get everyone together for an afternoon tapas hour, occasionally it was hosted at the school with Victoria cooking but most often they would pick a local restaurant and off we would go “a tapeo”.  Most of the restaurants and bars in the Albaicin and many all over Granada are family owned and have been for several generations.  After our experience in the market at Plaza Larga we started going up there regularly to shop and also to grab a drink after class or to enjoy “comida” (traditionally the large meal of the day eaten in mid-afternoon) in one of the several restaurants in the area. 

Puerta de las Pesas (also known as Puerta Nueva) is actually a very special gate in the wall of the original city that dates from the 11th century.  It was a strong defensive position and the place where the people who came from inside the city would leave to go out to the markets that built up outside the walls and then return with their purchases.  As they passed through the gates the weight of the items that had been purchased would be verified by the authorities for the payment of taxes.  If it was found that a merchant had cheated someone (shorted the weight) then the merchant’s weights would be confiscated and hung above the gate, effectively putting him out of business.  Puerta de las Pesas in Spanish means Gate of the Weights. 

Every time we would go up to Plaza Larga we would pass through this beautiful reminder of what a wonderfully historic place we had chosen for this new beginning.  One afternoon, on the way to the open air produce market we stopped at the restaurant named Puerta de las Pesas, a family owned restaurant just beyond the gate itself.  We needed a drink and a tapa to ease the after school headache and they were offering a great “menu del dia” special of the day, for comida; an appetizer, main course, dessert and bread for 8.50 euros.  We chatted with Jose, the waiter, in our very broken Spanish and learned that the restaurant had recently changed ownership and had only been reopened for a month prior to our arrival. 

The school had activities of one kind or another almost every evening.

 We took a long beautiful hike above the Alhambra and got some of the most spectacular views of Granada, the Albaicin and the Sacramonte we had ever seen. 

This old city was really starting to capture our hearts.

We tried “movie night” and although we do understand that listening to Spanish is a great way to try to train your ear, we were so far out of our depth that we decided movies would be much more enjoyable after a few more weeks of lessons. 

Our interest in and fascination with the history and culture of this area was increasing daily, what a great choice Granada was for a first try at living overseas.

Early days in our Spanish school.

During our first month back in Granada we were busy trying to figure out a new language, new schedule, new culture, new people and we really wanted to enjoy the whole experience.   We are relatively self-motivated, not afraid of working hard and had expected to be able to learn these new skills in the same way we had mastered new tasks in the past.

WRONG!  Learning a new language for the first time, as an adult, is one of the most difficult things we have ever tried to do.  The culture in a new environment grows into a feeling of normalcy over time and the people grow into friends and acquaintances in a similar way everywhere we’ve been.  Time and fording the language barrier are the most important components to a real understanding of new people and places.  The language requires the commitment of time and energy; it is not enough to want to speak it and to take classes and study, you also have to spend hours every day listening and trying to participate in conversation.  Before we embarked on this journey we had been told to expect to be somewhat comfortable and able to get along in the language by the end of the first year and not to expect fluency until we had been living and speaking exclusively the new language for two years or more.   With the benefit of partial hindsight, we probably agree with this timetable.

One of the benefits of taking formal classes in an accredited language school is that you meet a whole bunch of other people from all over the world who are trying to accomplish the same thing you are.  During the second week of our classes the school hosted a big paella dinner and we had a chance to meet a lot of the other students.  One of the professors Antonio, “sin gafas” (Antonio without glasses, not to be confused with Antonio, “sin pelo”, Antonio without hair) was the chef, and our class, all three of us, were given the opportunity to help by accompanying Antonio sin gafas to buy the ingredients.

We had a class to familiarize us with the vocabulary of paella ingredients and basic question and response phrases useful in the market so that we knew how to ask for things, then we each took part of the shopping list and walked up to Plaza Larga.  We spent a wonderful hour meeting the ladies who run the Pescaderia (fish shop), the “gitano” (local gypsy) lady who has the best fresh fruit and vegetables in the Mercado, the family that runs the Panaderia (bakery) and the man who cuts the meat however you want it in the Carneceria (butcher shop).

We returned to school with all the stuff and with a bit more confidence; everyone had been helpful and patient with our attempts at speaking their language and it made us want to learn more so we could actually carry on a conversation with them.  We helped prepare the food coached by both Antonio and the beautiful Russian girl Victoria who runs the kitchen at school.  Speaking only Spanish, of course…..

First time language learners, here we go.....

It’s a beautiful Monday morning and the first day of Spanish classes.  We arrived ten minutes early which required we wait for forty minutes (our first Spanish lesson).  We had chosen to take classes at Castila for a several reasons.  Our TEFL training had been located at their beautiful facilities, we had previously spoken with several of the staff and the school had the certifications we were looking for.  Importantly, Castila came recommended by several other people we knew, and we had already corresponded with Allison, the administrative assistant, through InterNations.

It wasn’t the cheapest school but we were comfortable with the quality of education we would receive for our money.  The classes were guaranteed to have 6 or less students each which we thought would be a very comfortable learning environment.  We had arranged for a 12 week intensive course thinking that would be the minimum we’d need to obtain a decent grasp of the language basics.

A group of 6 or 7 of us were finally herded into a room and given a 3 or 4 page multiple choice and fill in the blank test and told not to answer any questions we were not absolutely sure of.  Needless to say, we were done very quickly and found ourselves sipping coffee, waiting for those who could actually answer some of the questions, for an hour or so.

It turned out that there were three of us beginners, we were joined by a lovely lady from Perth, Australia and our first professor decided he would conduct class under the fig tree in the garden.  For the two of us and our new friend Leslie it was a wonderful environment for a language class.  We were supplied with our books, all written in Spanish of course.  When they say immersion, they mean immersion.  It was a very interesting experience to be given a text book and course guide for the class and not be able to read a word of it.

The first couple of weeks our Spanish class was not too bad, they stuck to the basics.  Early on, the focus was on vocabulary acquisition, with a bit of pronunciation.  Verb conjugation began but only with the most common verbs in present tense.  Our class schedule was 9:30 am to 2:00 pm Monday through Friday, under the fig tree, with optional cultural events every evening and on weekends.

Every other Monday evening at 6:00 pm they would have a “Copa de Bienvenidos” or welcome cocktail with a discussion of all the activities slated for the following two weeks.  We would have a printed copy and they would explain everything in detail.   Everything was written and spoken only in Spanish, of course. We spent a lot of time with our Spanish/English dictionary, which by the way, we were not allowed to use in class.

Tuesday was movie night, Spanish movies with Spanish subtitles.  The idea is to see and hear it as much and as often as possible so your ear becomes attuned to the language.  What it really means for rank beginners is a serious headache from listening so hard and trying to process so much. 

Other activities like seeing some of the historic sites, taking hikes and even weekend trips to other parts of Andalucía were all on the program and you could do as much or as little as your brain and budget could handle.

During our third week of class the school enjoyed an influx of thirty very young students from France.  Leslie had moved on to enjoy some vacation time before heading home to Australia so we were on our own.  We were bumped up a level and spent an entire week learning food vocabulary and trying to keep up with the group we had been moved into.  We had not yet learned several key components of the language (like past tense) that this class had already learned and we were definitely out of our depth.  By Friday we were completely frustrated and decided to spend a couple of hours in the residencia with our wonderful friend and house manager Mercedes.  She doesn’t speak English but is very patient and worked through some of our lessons with us at the dining room table.

The following week with the youth group back in France, and we were back in business.  They reshuffled all the classes based on current level, a couple of new students had arrived so our group expanded and we went from being classified as “beginner” to “elementary”.  We were becoming accustomed to the Spanish schedule at this point and were were really beginning to enjoy our everyday life in Granada.