Wet Laundry

Just a Song Before We Go

2009-02-08T04:07:38-08:00

(Our sincerest apologies for not having blogged in forever. Here are the excuses: 1) We've been busy with travels & family/friend visits; 2) We've been very focused on planning said things PLUS our imminent exit from Spain; 3) Facebook ate our homework. We may or may not go back and recap our trips to Barcelona, Oxford and Morocco and our visits from Dad & Arelys, Brian & Christina and Autumn. That's life.)

Fast forward to 2009. We have four days left in Granada! People have been asking us how we feel about leaving, moving back, etc. Here's my take.

No plan is perfect and no real choice easy. When we moved here, our plan was hazy, based as much on a desire to get away as one to go somewhere new. Spain was a lark, a compromise based on nothing more than a couple of guiding (and misguiding) principles that put it in an easy crosshairs; our trip built on an abiding faith that the universe would provide, regardless of which way we turned. And it did, in ways we could not have anticipated before we started.

I had a romantic notion of the expatriate life informed, I must admit, in large part by the expat literature—'A Moveable Feast,' 'A Year in Provence,' and so forth. The reality is not quite as glamorous. In fact, as anyone living in a foreign country can tell you, it can be quite hard. And Spain is not France, which it turns out makes a difference. Lesson number one.

Lesson number two, as you might infer from above, is: have a plan. In hindsight, it's a measure of my ambivalence about immersing myself in the international trade of wine that the idea fizzled before it even started. I consider that a blessing in disguise as much as a disappointment. The reality is that we needed—and got—a sabbatical, but if we had been planning for one from the get-go, we would have made a lot of different choices. Like, for starters, not picking a country whose currency was strong—and getting stronger as the year progressed—against our dollar savings.

It's necessary to say all that to put into context how I feel about leaving. I loved our experience in Granada and will miss what we've had here for many reasons. It is an amazingly beautiful city with the Alhambra as its crowning jewel. The second is lesson number three: it takes (at least) a year to settle into the groove of a place. As we're leaving, we're finding the folks that in time could have become our community and our friends. I will miss these people and the experience of staying, which would certainly be easier than leaving, and more rewarding in a lot of ways. Having figured out the basics, I've had the humbling realization that I'm just scratching the surface in getting to know a culture I thought I had pegged months ago, and an area with so much history and ecological diversity. Of course, it turns out there is always more to know and explore—a lifetime's worth, but that borders on cliche.

I will also miss the way life is conducted on the street here in Spain: the tostada and coffee breakfast taken standing at the bar; the bustle of the markets in the morning; the leisurely approach to meals, especially the lunch break; and the way people stroll about in the evenings and overflow from cafes and bars into the sidewalks to socialize after the heat of the day has passed. I would have liked to have had the disposable income to participate in that more frequently, but relish the times that I did. It made me feel alive and uniquely Spanish.

Our farmhouse existence, though I hope to replicate it in Vermont, was also really special. You've already read about our garden and tree harvests. Those of you who were able to visit know what a quirky, special place it was.

There are also things I am eager to be experiencing for the last time, some of which are universally Spanish, others particular to Granada: dismal customer service; the (relatively) provincial attitudes and cuisine—at once charming and exasperating for a former city mouse; the too-hot summers and the uninsulated winters; the shameful disrespect many a Spaniard (not all!) has for they have here at this moment, joined with an unhealthy pride in what they no longer do; and the absence of a Jewish community with which to pray and celebrate, indeed the wiping out of which still makes me mourn 500+ years later. If you'd caught me on a bad day a few months ago, this list would have been much longer, but I've been in a fairly benign mood lately, and frankly don't remember my other beefs at the moment!

Mostly, though, I'm feeling impelled to move on and move back by the decisions and plans we've made since we've been here, which is why I am so grateful for the time & space to do so. Had it not been for self-imposed exile (both from home country and city center), we would not have had the emotional and mental space to decide to adopt our future family or to embark our family on the journey that will be my rabbinical education and subsequent rabbinate. Which is to say our reasons for leaving wouldn't have become obvious if we hadn't come in the first place. Lesson four: the universe provides in unexpected ways.

For the first time in a while, I feel like I'm not just moving forward, but moving forward with a plan. Which makes leaving, overall, a positive, exciting prospect. Undoubtedly rough times lie ahead as we choose town, community, and work in the coming months. I'm looking forward to finding the right combination so we can put roots down in an intentional way and embark on those journeys mentioned above. We've always been, individually and together, wanderlust, but as I think about what I want in my life, I realize it comes from rootedness and sense of place. That's not to say there aren't more traveling adventures in store—we can hardly wait to have our first infant so we can take her or him galavanting before toddlerhood sets in—but now with a firmer foot planted home.

So that's how I feel: grateful for the experience, a touch melancholy about what we're leaving behind, but really excited about what's yet to come. Stay tuned, perhaps we'll repurpose this blog to document that, as well.

A Year in Spain

2008-11-22T06:12:12-08:00

Nov. 16 marked the anniversary of our arrival in Spain, and we passed the day in the same style as a year ago: sick with colds. Had I not been feeling so crummy that I failed to even notice the date, I might have at least appreciated the full-circleness of it.

We're on the mend now, however, and have been reflecting on our time here. David's been marveling over the fact that we kinda just picked up and moved without much in the way of a definitive plan—and how well things turned out, despite jobs and apartments falling through at the outset. I've been especially pleased to have made friends and established connections here, an achievement that became particularly apparent during the past couple of weeks.

Two weeks ago our old Seville roommate Adam came to Granada for an overnight visit. I was expecting only to spend the evening with him after his visit to the Alhambra, then see him off in the morning, but we wound up spending Friday together roaming around Granada and having a quite a grand time. We visited the Capilla Real to see where Ferdinand and Isabel were entombed, a museum of random Granada-related odds and ends in a Renaissance palace, the old Arab baths, and one of my favorite tapas places. It was a gorgeous sunny day despite the cold, and taking on the role of tour guide, I felt very much a resident of the city, very much like I've grown roots at last.

That evening we went to a memorial service marking the year anniversary of the death of "Cousin" Teresa Curiel's father. She'd stopped by the previous weekend to drop off an invitation to her upcoming wedding, and mentioned we might like to come to the memorial as there would be a concert after the mass. The service was held in the 16th century church of the Monastério de San Jerónimo, the first monastery to be founded after the Reconquest. The mass was in Latin, with accompanying Gregorian chants, and in that 500-year-old church with its gilded glowing interior, the whole thing was quite impressive—a pinch-me-I-live-in-Spain moment.

When the mass was over, a few nuns floated in and cleared away the communion accessories, and a small orchestra set up and performed some marches—namely horse marches—and other pieces that the grandfather liked. At the end of it all, we were introduced to a million other Curiel cousins and invited out to dinner with Teresa, her fiance Gregorio, her aunt Esperanza and cousin Elisa.

During the walk to the restaurant, we learned from Aunt Esperanza (aka daughter of the deceased grandfather) that he had been a cavalry officer in Franco's Nationalist Army during the Civil War. Suddenly, it was clear: the Latin mass, the horse marches; this man was all about God, country and the military. But in a sweet juxtaposition, Esperanza, who's not much older than Teresa, also reminisced about Sunday afternoons when they were kids, going out with a big group of family after mass, and how her dad would pour a bit of sweet wine into their sodas and her mom would always yell at him for it ("Salvador! Are you giving the kids wine again?!") I'd actually met Esperanza some months back, on a Sunday afternoon when I ran into her and Teresa by chance at a museum. When I reminded her of our previous meeting, she told me that she and Teresa often went out together on Sunday afternoons because they missed those family outings.

The following day, the pinch-me-I-live-in-Spain experience—not to mention the hey-look-I'm-growing-roots-after-all experience—continued when we went to a going-away party cum flamenco jam session for our friends and ex-neighbors Juan and Anna, who have had to move to Italy for a while to care for Anna's sick father. We met at a bar by the university, called El Churrasco, that features 1.50 eur beers or sodas with an incredibly generous tapa, which you can choose from a menu of maybe 15 options rather than just getting whatever they hand you. Our favorites were the fried eggplant with honey, shrimp fritters, and spinach with garbanzos.

So we ate, drank, chatted, hung out, and after an hour or two, some tables in the back were shoved against the walls, chairs put in place, guitar (and flute!) cases opened and things got hopping. It was really something, the atmosphere in that tiny packed bar—thick smoke, glasses clinking, Juan belting out songs of ill-fated love, an inspired guy or gal jumping up to dance in the small circle of space in front of the musicians. It was just ... so ... Spanish. And the thing that felt really special to me was that I knew the singer, that I was invited to be there.

That sense of belonging is the hardest thing to acquire in a new place, especially one far from home, and it's so satisfying to feel like I've achieved it at last. It's also bittersweet, though, since we're heading back to the States in March. Still, I feel good knowing that when we leave, we'll have friends to say goodbye to.

I shared these thoughts about growing roots with my longtime friend Charles, and his response was, "I don't think all roots are complex systems tying us to a single place. Some, like beets or rutabagas, were meant to stay in the ground only a few months and to be relished while they are tender."

I'm looking forward to the next three months of relishing those tender roots.

Fall Recap

2008-11-03T11:49:07-08:00

Signs of fall around these parts are different but unmistakable. It's less leafy than Vermont or Michigan but more drastic in its temperature swing than San Francisco. The endless evenings Spaniards relish and foreigners envy shrink at a rate that reminds me that we are indeed hurling around the sun in a elliptical path, and on the fast slope toward cold. The general falliness reminds me of—and makes me homesick for—Ann Arbor in a way I haven't felt in a really long time. The garden is yielding the last of its bounty as the remaining tomatoes struggle to ripen between shorter sun hours and increased rainy or cloudy days, the last of the fall lettuce has bolted and the peppers turn deliciously red.

We have been enjoying our fruit trees immensely, spoiled by the seemingly never ending supply of jello-soft persimmons and juicy, tangy pomegranates. The figs, alas, have all dropped for the most part, but the olives are starting to ripen, and we picked a batch of green ones to cure. We left enough to do a black (ripe) batch, too!

We've had a fairly active itinerary so far, and it doesn't show signs of abating. Barcelona and Girona were great, for the physical locales, higher Jewish content and access to amazing food, as well as for the personal connections we made there. The congregation we spent Yom Kippur with was lovely and very welcoming. In Girona, we stayed with parents of a friend we've made here, and they were very gracious hosts as well as good company. We also met up with a friend of my mom's from her Venezuela days who is nothing less than a character out of an atmospheric book on Barcelona—an older artist with an amazing collection of art and artifacts surpassed only by her compendium of fascinating stories that she is not shy about sharing.

Unfortunately, we left the camera at home. Sigh. But being without a camera around our necks (in our pockets, really, but the neck imagery is more apt) let us appreciate the city in ways we just could not have otherwise. We'll be back, and really, you'd just see a lot of pictures in front of the monuments you've already seen in other people's photos...

Last week, we took a midweek hike in the Sierra Nevada, out of the town of Monachil and up the river through a gorge that's known as Los Cahorros de Monachil (Mom, Nora, where we started to go last spring). There are some pictures up on Flickr. I felt really good to explore such a beautiful place virtually alone.

In between, we've been keeping a close eye on the US elections, at times obsessively, I'll admit (I'm going to have to find something to do with that time after tomorrow!), and squeezing in enough work to get by.

We're already planning out our final trips before heading home, including a week in Oxford for Thanksgiving with Brian and Christina, a Christmastime jaunt through Morocco, and our February tour of Italy with part of the Polidor clan. A visit or two will also be coming our way, as my dad & step-mom and possibly Autumn make their plans to see us before March comes.

On the homefront, today's oven acquisition (traded from an empty apartment for the microwave we barely used) means pie will be coming to Spain! Along with my newfound obsession with perfecting vegetarian chili and our new ceramic spaceheater, we'll be keeping warm in ways comforting for both body and soul.

After sequestering ourselves away during the summer, we are more actively getting out and doing the things we've been meaning to do all year, mainly like getting out. Amberly has been busy organizing the Democrats Abroad chapter in the city and planning tomorrow's return-watching party; next week will bring my distant cousin's wedding, which will give us an excuse to wear the dress clothes we schlepped all the way here; the Jazz festival is in town this month; and our favorite Flamenco season has started up again.

And that's fall in Granada.

Yom Tov in Sefarad

2008-10-06T10:43:31-07:00

(Boy, it's been so long since I've written in this thing, I almost forgot my password!)

L'shaná tová from Sefarad. While there are many fewer people offering that traditional New Year's greeting today than there were 500+ years ago, we found some with whom to celebrate Rosh Hashanah this last week, when we returned to Seville for the holiday. Our trip back felt like a homecoming, with all the bad blood between us gone for good. A real teshuvah—the Hebrew term commonly translated as "repentance," but literally meaning "turning back," or "return," to our highest selves and ways of being—that has laid groundwork for introspection about the past year.

It helped that it was warmer than the time we spent there, although I'm glad we weren't there for summer, which is much hotter than Granada! We spent some time walking about our old haunts, eating at some of our favorite joints and checking out ones we hadn't gotten to before, including Seville's famous ice creamery, Rayas. (It still doesn't hold a candle to our favorite, Casa Mira in Malaga.) It also felt especially sweet to return to the tiny congregation with whom we'd spent time last winter. In a year where socializing hasn't been the highlight, it was nice to be around with familiar faces, even if they were outnumbered 3-1 by the US exchange students that filled the seats for the eve of Rosh Hashanah services. It made for a lively gathering, though, and the seder that followed was a nice affair, catered by an Israeli woman who happened to be in town for the holidays! We even made a new friend—Daniel, from Sao Paolo, Brazil—who is in Seville for the year studying finding himself a bit. We had lunch together at Bar Manolo after services.

Since our adventure started almost at the same time as the Jewish year 5768 did—we left San Francisco just after Sukkot last year—going back to our old neighborhood in Seville, where we first landed, made for nice symmetry and an easy transition into the work of "spiritual housecleaning" which this season demands of us. Among other things, we realized that all the colds we had those first few months were our bodies telling us, "stop! too much!" And yet, we persevered. Amazing to think about all we've done in the space of that year—a road trip across the US and so many adventures in Sefarad, the name Jews had for Spain.

Celebrating Jewish holidays in Spain feels like an act of defiance, even if the Inquisition is long gone, and sweet (it's apples'n'honey season after all!) at the same time. Sefarad was long idealized in Sephardic (see the connection!) Jewry as a second land of milk and honey, a homeland to pine for. My ancestors left in 1492, but I'm not aware of them having held the traditions some still do, like carrying around the key to their front door in hopes of one day returning. The fact that we did return, nonetheless, is a vindication in the humblest sense. While I still feel like a stranger in a strange land in many ways, these holidays have given me a more profound sense of rightness that's hard to put into words.

As I type, we've packed our bags to go to Barcelona to celebrate Yom Kippur with another congregation and Girona to see one of the storied centers of medieval Judaism, among other things. We'll have pictures to post, I'm sure, so stay tuned!

Escape from Andalucía

2008-09-10T09:57:37-07:00

OK, so we weren't really fleeing Andalucía—in fact, I didn't even realize we were out of the province until David pointed it out. However, our trip to Murcia was indeed our first venture outside Andalucía since we arrived in Seville last November.

It was a spur-of-the-moment thing: a week ago I found out that Jeff Tweedy, front man for our most favorite band in the world, Wilco, was doing some solo shows here in Spain, and the closest performance was about 175 miles away in Murcia, capital of the province of the same name. Our Lonely Planet guide devotes a scant nine pages to the entire province—compared to 130 pages for Anadalucía—so I can be excused for forgetting that Murcia is its own province.

As you might imagine, given its diminutive guidebook presence, Murcia is not a tourist hotspot. But we found the city (population 400,000) to be easygoing and absolutely charming. The Rio Segura—lined with parks and promenades and crisscrossed with pedestrian bridges—runs through the middle of town. Murcia's cathedral, which was built between the 14th and 18th centuries, boasts the tallest bell tower in Spain and a gorgeous baroque facade. The city's annual fair was going on, so there were food, wine, music and other entertainment events going on in various parts of the city. We arrived on Saturday afternoon and spent a few hours exploring before heading to the show.

As expected, Jeff Tweedy's performance was fantastic; he played the standards we were hoping to hear, along with a few surprises. It was especially cool to discover we have fellow fans in Spain, and Jeff went out of his way to accommodate their song requests. "I don't why I have a reputation for being a curmudgeon," he said after obliging yet another Spaniard's request, this time for "eempossible chairmany."

As a special bonus, the show was held in a concert hall right next to the fairgrounds, so afterwards we dined on fair food. David had a hotdog—which, according to a looped announcement blasting from the stall, was the truly authentic *German* hotdog, Oscar Meyer—while I had the midway standard, meat on a stick, along with some honest-to-goodness choclo (South American corn-on-the-cob with really fat kernels) grilled up by a posse of Peruvian women.

On Sunday morning, after enjoying an especially good tostada con tomate, we took a stroll by the river, encountered a youth symphony setting up for a free concert, and decided to take a seat. They opened with a pasodoble, "Cielo Andaluz," and I was hit by a strange gush of emotion. The music somehow brought to life my romantic pre-trip image of Spain and made me long for that imagined place, while at the same time making me realize, as I heard the clicking castanets and admired the elegantly dressed Spanish ladies, fans aflutter, all around me, "It's real! I'm here!" (You can listen to a performance of the song here.)

We forgot our camera, so—sorry!—no pics. We'll make up for it next week, though, when we hit the Sherry towns and the Serranía de Ronda with our San Francisco visitors Charles, Peter and Kathryn.