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| ISBN-13: | 9781450224482 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | iUniverse, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 05/13/2010 |
| Pages: | 228 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.48(d) |
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At Least One Balcony
Learning to Live in GranadaBy Boyce Quinn
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Boyce QuinnAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-2448-2
Chapter One
Dawn of a New LifeOur First Hours in Granada
Kay and I arrived at the Estación de Autobuses in Granada at four-thirty in the morning, October 10, 2003. Our daughter Flannery was waiting at the gate, a wide, sleepy smile on her face. After a quick round of hugs, we counted, for what seemed the twentieth time that day, our seven bags, then made our way through the station, up the ramp, and outside into a surprisingly balmy predawn. It was very quiet. Still a bit groggy from the long trip, we waited at the taxi stand, trying to give our daughter far more information about our journey than she, who'd had little enough sleep herself, was prepared to absorb. After a ten-minute wait, a taxi arrived and we loaded our bags. "Plaza Nueva," Flannery instructed the driver, and off we raced through the dark, empty city streets. We'd been up for a day and a half and were exhausted, so I have only shadowy memories of our first views of Granada. We made it, I remember thinking. When can I lie down?
Fifteen minutes later we piled out of the cab, counted our bags again, paid the driver, and looked around. Dominated by a large, noisy fountain in its center, Plaza Nueva was lined with dark, shuttered cafés and shops. Scattered here and there were stacks of chairs and tables chained together. Across the plaza a circle of young people stood laughing and talking and drinking beer, the tips of their cigarettes glowing in the dark. Flannery led us across the plaza and along a narrow cobblestone street toward our hotel. The walk was short, no more than a hundred yards, but we must have passed at least another half-dozen café-bars, all closed. Along the street young people strolled or stood leaning against the walls, drinking beer and shouting to each other. No one seemed to be drunk, but then no one seemed to be completely sober either.
"This is where the young people come to party," Flannery said. "Two hours ago it was hard to make your way through the crowds."
Although the name suggested otherwise, the Hostal Antares was not a youth hostel, though according to Flannery, who'd been staying there for a week, most of its occupants were young travelers on limited budgets. A hostal, as best I could gather, is a hotel which offers few if any services.
Flannery had informed us that she'd upgraded to a room for three. What she hadn't told us was that our upgraded room was up a steep grade of four flights of stairs, two flights and a landing per floor. Among the many services that the Hostal Antares did not provide was an elevator. Seven bags divided by three people equaled one extra trip down and back up for me. The room had three single beds, two small bedside tables, and a wardrobe. Our seven bags, along with Flannery's two, took up more than half the available floor space, leaving just enough room to move around. The room was lit by a lamp and one dim lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The bathroom, whose thin plywood walls suggested that it had been a recent addition, contained within its five-by-five-foot space a toilet, shower stall, sink, and bidet. But our bathroom was-and this is not to be dismissed-not down the hall, not on the landing, not on another floor. It was within the confines of our own room, "en suite," as they say in Europe. Knowing that I would not find myself in a dark hallway without any idea of how to get back to our room was comforting.
These were modest lodgings indeed. But with any luck we wouldn't be needing the hostal's limited comforts for very long, so it was, at least for the time being, sufficient. At that moment, five-thirty in the morning, many, many hours after leaving San Francisco, any reasonably soft, horizontal surface was welcome.
We hung up our coats, dug through our bags for our toiletries, brushed our teeth, and fell on our beds. Through the window I heard what I hoped were the last of the revelers shouting to each other in the narrow street. I was so tired I couldn't get to sleep right away, and my thoughts drifted back to the beginning of the day. It seemed days ago since we'd boarded the airporter bus at its Mill Valley stop. It was a ride we'd taken many times before, especially Kay, who'd made the twenty-five-mile commute to San Francisco International Airport a couple of thousand times.
It had not been an easy trip. From San Francisco, we'd flown on United to Frankfurt, Germany, from where we'd planned to fly on standby tickets to Malaga, on the Spanish coast, and then bus up to Granada. But every flight to Malaga was full, as was every hotel in Frankfurt, due to the international book fair. Fortunately, our standby tickets could be used to fly to Madrid. After waiting almost seven hours for an open flight, we'd flown to Madrid and taxied to the bus station, only to find we'd missed the nine o'clock bus by minutes. There were no night trains. We'd called Flannery with the second revised plan of the day, then waited for the eleven thirty bus. Five hours later we arrived in Granada.
So how long had the trip taken? We'd left Marin County Thursday morning, and it was now Friday morning in Granada; Spain was nine hours east of California. Did I add nine hours to Friday or take it away from Thursday? Was it still yesterday in California? Or tomorrow?
Failing to complete the calculation-sleep deprivation does take its toll-my thoughts moved to the next day, which, I suddenly realized, had already begun. First, we needed to find an apartment. Although the hostal was only 60 a night, staying there and eating three times a day in restaurants would get expensive quickly. I'd done some research on the Web and had an idea of what a furnished apartment should cost, but I had no idea of availability. Actually, what I'd learned was how much apartments cost per square meter. I'd done the conversion, but of course I couldn't remember the formula. How lucky we were that Flannery was returning to the States at the same time we were moving to Granada. She'd been teaching English in Munich for the past two and a half years and had decided to return to California to attend graduate school. She'd lived abroad for four of the past five years, and Kay and I were extremely happy at the prospect of spending an extended time with our daughter before switching continents again. Flannery had not only offered to help us settle in, but was willing to stay through Christmas, by which time, we hoped, we'd be getting around town, speaking at least a little Spanish, and hanging out with new friends.
The second item on my list was to check in with the authorities as soon as possible in order to get our resident visa process going. Supposedly we'd completed the difficult part of the process in San Francisco, so it should go easier now that we were here. I reminded myself that we'd expected that ordeal to be much simpler than it had proved to be; perhaps it would be better to just take it a day at a time.
I heard another burst of shouting and laughter from the street below. If this was how Thursday night ended, what would the weekend be like? I listened for the sounds of sleep from Kay and Flannery. I wondered if it would be difficult to meet people. I knew that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of English lived in Spain. Most lived on the coast, but surely some lived in Granada. Gin and tonics. Tea and crumpets. I'd never pictured myself hanging out in a tea room, but if that's what it took, well, I was ready for anything. But first a place to live. There was so much to do. Our clock's alarm was set for nine thirty. Go to sleep, I told myself. Go to sleep.
I remembered the day when Kay and I had looked each other in the eye and said, "Let's do it." We'd reached across the table and shook hands on it, which we only did when making momentous decisions. The image was surprisingly clear. From a small table in a small diner to this small bed in the small room in Granada. Unbelievable.
Go to sleep, I told myself. Stop thinking. I heard the rasping whine of a motor scooter. More laughter. The ticking of the clock. Then I lost consciousness.
Chapter Two
Balcony DreamsImagining Ourselves Abroad. But Where? And When?
Our journey to Granada had begun almost exactly five years earlier, in the fall of 1998, when Kay and I attended a union-sponsored retirement seminar. There we learned that Kay, who had been a United Airlines flight attendant since 1964, would be fully vested in her retirement pension at the age of sixty. I was working as a freelance writer and was as vested as I would ever be, which is to say that my pension was a bank account with my name on it. I had no qualms about giving myself the rest of my life off.
After the seminar, we stopped at a small diner for a glass of wine to discuss just what this new information might mean. We'd dreamed of living abroad for as long as we'd been together, almost thirty years, and we hoped to do it while still healthy and fit. Until that very day, our dream had hovered in the distant realm of "maybe someday." As we sat there talking and sipping our wine, we realized that we could make "someday" sooner than later.
As for the present, we were living a most enjoyable life on the outskirts of Mill Valley, in Marin County, California. Our house was three miles from the Pacific Ocean and five from the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco. Both kids were doing well. My son Baxter, who also lived in Marin, had recently met Renée, a fabulous woman we were crazy about, and we had high hopes for their future together. Our daughter Flannery had just begun her senior year at the University of California at San Diego. We were rich in friends, in good health, and had enough discretionary income to finance our annual, sometimes semiannual, trips. So why leave? Why give up such a full, rich life for an adventure that could prove to be a nightmare?
The question we actually asked ourselves was: Why not? We'd read about people in their fifties, our age, who'd made life-altering decisions to follow their dream-to live on a boat, open a restaurant, raise organic vegetables, become potters-so why shouldn't we? Our dream, to live abroad, had been born in travel, and that's the dream we needed to follow. We'd been traveling together since before getting married; fortunately Kay's job made getting there and back, wherever there and back might be, affordable. We had shelves of slide boxes (that certainly dates us) documenting our journeys. In addition to at least a dozen trips to Mexico, we'd trained over much of Europe, ridden the dirt tracks of Kenya and Tanzania on photo safari, shivered in snow-covered temples in Japan, stayed on a cattle station in Australia, and bused across Iran back in the Shah's day. We'd learned that we thrived in foreign places, that we didn't get homesick, and that we reveled in the unfamiliar. We'd also learned that we traveled well together, and that we didn't hit the crisis button when plans went awry, as plans often do. These were not insignificant lessons. Traveling has its stressful moments, moments that can turn even the jolliest of Jekylls into Mr. or Ms. Hyde.
A love of the foreign wasn't the only reason we wanted to live abroad. Putting in the garden for the twenty-fifth time, painting the dining room for the sixth time, and going to the same supermarket for the two thousand five hundredth time was absolutely not the way we wanted to spend the next couple of decades. We were ready for something, as Monty Python said, completely different. Something dramatic. Something far more exciting than living on automatic pilot.
Our first decision, that we were going to do it, was made that day before we'd finished our wine. We clinked glasses, shook hands on it, and somehow suppressed a powerful impulse to stand on our chairs and announce our plan to the entire place. The second decision, when to go, was made that evening at home. The target date: July 2004, when Kay would turn sixty. Deciding where we were going to live and how long we'd live there could come later. Making a six-year plan had already stretched the time boundaries of our imaginations.
As time went on, we began to discuss destination. Where did we want to live? That discussion, we discovered, led to the place where fantasy and reality collided, where visions of a Paris walkup or a Tuscan farmhouse crashed into the number of digits between the dollar sign and the decimal. So the discussion turned to where could we afford to live? That list was short. There was Mexico, which we knew we could afford. We like Mexico, we really do. We'd spent time in the Yucatan, Puerto Vallarta, Matzatlan, San Miguel de Allende, and Oaxaca, and we had visited Mexico City a number of times, particularly while Flannery was studying at the university there. The problem with Mexico was that Mexico was all you got-traveling north put you back in the States; traveling south was a variation on a Latin American theme. Whereas in Europe, you board a train and in a few hours, or even less, you're in another country, seeing a different culture, hearing another language, and eating different food.
European Day Dreams
Europe had something else going for it: we could imagine ourselves living there. This is not to be underestimated. You've heard the phrase, "I can't even imagine myself eating dog or living in North Dakota or having the map of Tasmania tattooed on my back, or __________;" you fill in the blank. If you can't imagine it, how can you do it?
Kay and I had definitely imagined ourselves living in Europe. Not a country house, mind you. Negotiating the cost of digging a new well, to say nothing of negotiating the narrow, winding road to the village, was someone else's dream. What we imagined was living in a nineteenth-century European building on a narrow, cobblestone street, a building we'd enter through a massive door with a large brass knob in the center, then climb the circular staircase to our apartment, an apartment with ten-foot ceilings and parquet floors, a claw-foot tub so long we'd have to toss the soap back and forth, a gigantic wardrobe instead of a closet, and, most important of all, a balcony. There had to be at least one balcony, a balcony with double wooden shutters that you flung open, scaring the pigeons from the ledge; a balcony that looked out over a café or, better yet, a small plaza filled with old men reading newspapers on ancient benches, mothers pushing strollers, and lovely, beret-topped young girls riding bicycles. On warm days, through the open shutters, we'd be able to hear the tinkle of the bicycles bells, along with the gong of nearby church bells. We saw ourselves standing on the sawdust-covered floor of the central market, rows of chickens and rabbit carcasses hanging just above our heads, as white-aproned butchers hawked just slaughtered lamb and black-kerchiefed ladies loudly declared the freshness of their produce. We imagined ourselves greeting the owner of our local café by name as he served us our "usual." In the evening we'd sit on our balcony, a glass of wine in hand, and watch the sun slowly slide behind the bell tower. That our fantasies were formed by movies made them no less enjoyable.
Europe it would be. Exactly where in Europe could be decided later. As to the question of how long we'd live in Europe, this, too, could be decided later. We'd always talked about living a year in another country. Why not two? Or three? We didn't want to commit ourselves. One year seemed too short, and the idea of becoming permanent ex-pats seemed a bit extreme. Two or three years seemed right; we decided to let our experience there-wherever there turned out to be-guide us.
The next consideration was how to make it happen. We needed to make a plan. We began accumulating information. We filled folders. I even created a timeline-a little compulsive, but it proved highly useful.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from At Least One Balcony by Boyce Quinn Copyright © 2010 by Boyce Quinn. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction....................xiDawn of a New Life Our First Hours in Granada....................1
Balcony Dreams Imagining Ourselves Abroad But Where? And When?....................5
The Spanish Inquisition-Part 1 Establishing Our Worth, Innocence, and Sanity....................16
Upon Waking in Granada Finding Casa Fantastica!....................22
The Spanish Inquisition-Part 2 The Road to Legitimacy Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint....................31
Making la Casa Our Home Our World Grows, Block by Block....................35
The Streets of Granada 1: Tapas. Exploring a World of Unidentified Frying Objects....................47
Moroccan Adventures Pummeling a Robber, Bartering Berber Style....................54
Thanksgiving It's Not Just about the Turkey....................64
The Spanish Inquisition-Part 3 The Marathon Continues....................67
The Streets of Granada 2: Café Afternoons Of Air Kisses and Strolling Minstrels....................70
No Place Like Home for the Holidays Especially When You Aren't There....................79
The Spanish Inquisition-Part 4 Ever Hopeful, We Press On....................87
Drowning in a Sea of Spanish Verbs When a doe is not a deer, when a breast is not a breast....................89
Learning to Live with Elvira To Sleep or Not to Sleep, that Was the Challenge....................97
The Streets of Granada 3: Walking the City Clasp Hands Behind Back, Remain Alert....................105
The Roar of March New Friends, First Visitors, and Terror in Madrid....................112
The Rain in Spain Praise the Lord and Pass the Wine and Tapas....................122
The Streets of Granada 4: Pollo Asado Take Out It Was, Fast Food It Wasn't....................132
At Long Last Spring Mountains, Weddings, and a Pilgrimage....................136
Our First Visit Home Along a Surprisingly Bumpy Road....................145
Now Living High in the Albaicín We Move from Bourbon Street to Casa Tranquility....................153
August on the Hill Surviving the Heat, Listening to the Street....................160
The Streets of Granada 5: Beauty but No Beasts Of Gorgeous Women and Civilized Men....................170
Madrid via the Scenic Route A Tale of Best-Laid Plans Gone Awry....................173
A Village in the City Learning the Neighborhood, Meeting New Friends....................179
The Streets of Granada 6: Fund Solicitations Service Rendered, Wanted or Not, With a Smile....................187
Adventures in Cookie Diplomacy Becoming Goodwill Ambassadors to Spain....................192
Letting the Holiday Happen Santa Comes to the Albaicín....................198
Señora Albaicinera y Señor Albaicinero At Home in the Heart of Granada....................205
Epilogue....................212
Acknowledgments....................215