that's mine, that's yours

At 13,420 feet, Potosi is the highest city in the world and, although we didn’t spend more than an hour there, it’s one of the most fascinating places we’ve been to so far. If you get a chance to read a little on about it, it’s worth your time. With a bloody, unjust history and boasting what used to be the biggest (and arguably most important) city in the New World with 200,000 inhabitants, Potosi was run ragged by the Spanish colonizers, who capitalized on the health, labor and natural wealth of the city to take back boatloads of silver and leave behind a trail of black lungs and poor campesinos.

Today, the average miner doesn’t live past 40. As we drove by one of the city’s biggest mines, I couldn’t decide whether to smirk or cry at the name: “Mina Cristo Redentor.” Christ the Redeemer Mine. Thanks, Spaniards! Drop off your strict Catholicism, get rich off the slave labor of your converts, and peace out once everyone who can afford it has bought titles of nobility. Awesome foreign policy; love what you’ve done with the place.

If you want to spend a few dollars, you can see the mines yourself. For a few bolivianos and gifts of coca for the miners, you too can crawl into someone’s hellish workplace to see what it’s like. There is a thriving tourist business (granted, “thriving” is relative. It’s not a beach or a resort town by any stretch of the imagination) in Potosi that allows you to don a hard hat and climb a rickety ladder into the earth.

Personally, the whole concept of mine tourism makes me feel queasy. I don’t think observing a place that is both employment and a death trap is something to be added to the list of “Must-Do in Bolivia,” and I was more than happy to skip straight through the town. Being fully aware that tourism provides jobs and also that exploitation happens in far more industries than just mining, I still feel totally uncomfortable with the idea that people come to Potosi and are “excited” to “do” the mines. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. I’m all for travel that is outside the norm, challenging, and that expands our awareness of the wide stratum of life stories being played out in the world, but this just seems like an eerie, voyeuristic extension of the original Spanish attitude.

Based on conversations with fellow travelers, my opinion is the minority. What do you think? Am I totally off-base with this one?

El Gran Regreso

"No sigas las huellas de los antiguos...
busca lo que ellos buscaron."

-Matsuo Basho


Eleven months after I'd waved goodbye to my family at SeaTac, the impending arrival of the only member I hadn't yet seen (the mater) was enough to make me need adult diapers on the eve of the 3rd, when Anita was to land in Dublin. I had an alarm set for 4:45 am and a suitcase full of dresses, and sure enough slept right through my alarm, got a full 8 hours of sleep, and was 3 hours late to pick her up at the airport. Pathetic daughter that I am, I also forced her to wander in the rain and gloom of Baile Atha Cliath for most of the day (though a highlight was at the pub that night, when she sang 'Que Sera Sera' while waiting to pay, and was backed up by a feisty five year old who knew every song on the jukebox from Toto's Africa to the Irish Call and proved it loudly and off-key). Mother/daughter vacay was off to a rolicking start, and by "rolicking" i mean "so tired the morning we left for Spain that I left all my toiletries and my favorite earrings in the bathroom." Ah yes, a good omen to be sure.

Landing in Alicante was a sunny relief from the nonstop rain that Ireland has been calling summer. When the bus closed its doors on our faces at the airport (I mean, what is the deal with that kind of thing?), Mom and I met Ted and Rory, two hilarious Irishmen who had a deal for us: I use my Spanish to commandeer and direct a cab into Alicante, they pay for it and entertain us with Frasier impressions, Belfast mockery, and heavy sarcasm the entire way. I think we came out on top with that arrangement, and we now have a place to stay in Galway. Good omen #2.

As I found my bearings in Alicante's Barrio (which can only be described as loud, seething with people from all over the world, and one of the places I feel most at home), who leaned out of a window and yelled my name but Kyle, my North Carolinan friend and 1/3 of the reason I came back to Spain (the other 2/3 being Carlos, an Albacete transplant who has been previously mentioned as the Sonnet Writing Spaniard, and Eija, my Finnish roommate and defender of my sanity for Autumn 2005). Finding Kyle within ten minutes of landing in Alicante? Definitely good omen #3.



Now the next incredible thing to happen was that my boys Fernando and Javier, who I tutored/nannied when I lived in Alicante, were having a birthday party and their mom Pilar went out of her way to invite us, so naturally it was a crucial component of the trip. Thanks to Carlos, who led us to the biggest and most miraculous toy store ever, I found a sweet remote control car and dragged Mom, Eija, and her friend Jenni deep into backwater Spain: Muchamiel is serious desert territory, where jolly old ladies joke with you as they lean out of their windows, where the dusty Spanish hills are the only backdrop, and where everyone is just NICE. Just seriously NICE. As I awkwardly followed the map I had sketched and thanked God for my Spanish, limited as it was, to ask for directions, we had serious doubts about our ability to find the place. But sweet relief, we did, and had an absolutely incredible time with one of the best families I have ever met: three adorable boys, two parents who would literally do anything for their friends, and table filled with incredible Spanish food and surrounded by their equally wonderful friends. I'd been nervous that the boys wouldn't even remember me (a year and a half is a long time if you're five) but the reunion was sweet and the party was one of the best things I've done in a long time. Life just keeps rolling along smoothly...


One should never live in wait for the other shoe to drop, but so many good omens had to be tempered by disaster. So I will skip all the parts of the trip where we were utterly relaxed on the beach, eating paella and tapas to our hearts delight, wandering amidst the chaos of the mercadillo, and laughing with really good friends until we peed a little. Those were good times, but they weren't as memorable as the event I like to call: More Proof That Laura Isn't Quite a Grownup.


It all started in Desden, our favorite bar, where we were trying to order our old standby chupito Cuarenta y Tres. However, after an unfortunate incident involving some drunk breezy setting fire to the floor, they don't offer them anymore. Our shot ordering was cut short, though, by a boxing match that was about to break out in the middle of the bar (nothing unusual for the Barrio... close quarters and lots of alcohol don't always bring out the best in human nature) and our denim-vested bartender went out with a baseball bat to see what the story was. Hoping for a legit fight to provide some entertainment, we were instead left with a dispersed shouting match and two loud, sarcastic, and generous Brits Simon and Steve, who, with their grownup jobs, could buy three girls' night's supply of vodka tonics without much thought.

*Right. The vodka tonics. Which brings me to my next point: how we make decisions is dubious at times. Specifically, how spending six hours in Alicante's Barrio with old friends and new boys will lead to a reduced capacity to choose wisely.*

Fast forward to five am, when I finally got to make use of the bikini I'd been wearing under my dress all day. Simon and I took a dip at Postiguet and swam out to a raft 50 yards from the shore to play on the slide and the diving board. Swimming at the pre-dawn lull, when the quiet hum of the beach Zamboni-type machine is accompanied only by the comforting repetition of Mediterranean waves hitting the cooling sand, is definitely a good and pleasant thing. Leaving your clothes, shoes, money, camera, cash and credit card on what you thought was an abandoned beach is maybe not such a good idea. It is actually an extremely unwise and immature move, as Simon and I discovered as we emerged, still slightly tipsy, to discover every single one of our posessions GONE. From cell phone to ID. Unwilling to admit out own idiocy and naivete, we paced the beach a number of times and I grilled the Zamboni man in angry Spanish about our stuff, only to be answered with a blank look on his face: "Robados. Estais robados." I chose to believe him, for the time being, but I really think he held our stuff in the back of his cab (including: 5 credit cards from Simon's wallet, my Mom's card and drivers license, my favorite dress, my camera which was filled with photos of situation that are unlikely to happen again and now must be stored in the amygdala or wherever stores memory, because they sure won't appear on Shutterfly anytime soon, my lucky flipflops, and our wide-eyed trusting natures). Yep, the sneaky beach cleaner told us we'd been robbed and went on his way, but I couldn't exactly split hairs with a man when I only had a swimsuit to my name. Instead, we went home: shoeless, trouserless, relieved of possessions as well as our happy buzz. Joder, digo yo.

Noon that day saw us in the lobby of the boys' hotel, on Simon's Blackberry with Visa USA, cancelling our main source of expenditure for the next month through a woman whose retainer continued to disconnect with her teeth, making the verval transfer of a Belfast post-code nearly impossible.
But this is also where the story that was just your typical "idiot in Spain whose luck was up" tale to that point, began to shift. As we shook our heads and laughed together over the night we'd left behind us, a middle-aged woman in a knee-length skirt hovered, wandering back and forth through the sliding doors and murmuring something about a "crisis of her own." My mom, ever the willing party to befriend a stranger, asked "Did you lose something as well?" The woman's answer was not the "room key" or "passport" or "Fendi purse" I expected. It was heavier, and much less fixable than a lost credit card: "Yes," she said, "My husband. He left me this morning. Actually, no. I left him." And that is how we met Barbara, who had, just minutes before, discovered her husband texting his girlfriend yet again and had walked out of their hotel room for good. As one would expect from someone who was on the verge of a broken marriage, Barbara was out of sorts. So this is why, our third day in Spain, Mom and I ended up out to lunch with Simon and Steve, random thirty-something bachelors, and Barbara, fresh off her 50th birthday and facing singledom once more. It was an unexpected yet totally welcome meal, one which allowed a random group of people who were strangers twelve hours earlier, to commiserate over what it actually means to "lose" something and, in Barbara's own words, begin to restore her faith in humankind.




I was so thrilled to leave the chill of Ireland for the balmy bliss of Espana, I didn't think much about what it would be like to return to a place that I had once called home. Coming back to Belfast was a firm reminder that cities, like people, are not static, and it's impossible to come back to the same place twice. However, this proved to be a huge benefit in the case of Alicante: all of my former frustrations and annoyances seemed to have become minor in the year and a half since I left. Even the creepy men who follow you home from the beach and try to coerce you to sleep with them right then and there just seemed funny, rather than the horrendous and misogynistic nightmares they had once appeared to be. Spain and I were friends again, and I left happy.

The return to Northern Ireland for the 12th has been an experience like no other, but description will not suffice unless I have pictures to coincide with the words, and at this point I don't. More to come, but for now we are heading on a little jaunt around Ireland (I'm driving again after a year of being a passenger, and actually think the lefthand side of the road is more familiar than the right, which scares me) and then on to Croatia for a wee dander. So many more thoughts and wonders at this point but will have to save them for a time when my word count isn't already through the roof...

No Me Comas, Te Amo! : Alicante, Nov. 2005

So it's been another month and I will sum up what's been going on:
Nights are usually pretty interesting, but one of my favorites was when we went out for my friend Brent’s birthday and somehow ended up at a botellon with half of Latin America. Botellons are Spaniards’ favorite tradition, after bullfighting that is, and are basically a bunch of people drinking together somewhere in public. In Alicante they are usually near the beach or on the side of the mountain, where hundreds of high schoolers through 30-year-olds get together and basically demolish this entire street. Overall it is a really accepted part of Spanish culture and as long as you aren’t playing music extremely loudly in residential areas past 4am, the Policia don’t care. We were minding our own business in the Barrio and all of a sudden there I was, salsa dancing with some Ecuadorian in a back alley. The night could only topped by the Halloween party my roommates and I had a couple weeks later, which could accurately be described as a mini-meeting of the UN, minus all the serious discussion.
The botellon night also included the discovery of the Spanish boyfriend Carlos, a little gem of a boy who doesn’t smoke, drink, or really have any vices whatsoever. I was pretty excited when I survived my first date conducted entirely in Spanish (even managing to get in a discussion on Spanish vs. US immigration policy… in the words of Shauna Sperry, ‘not to toot my own horn but TOOT TOOT!’); however, Carlos thinks it appropriate to send me texts that include poetic references to stopping time, keeping memories in his heart forever, etc. The first time this happened, I used my most polite Spanish vocab to explain that a Shakespearean sonnet was better suited to a Golden Anniversary than a coffee date. Now he has toned them down to saying things like, “the time change is tonight, that means we have one more hour to be together.” I am chalking this up to cultural differences and getting excited to come back to the States wherethe guys act like they don’t care.
But the Spaniard who brings the most joy to my heart is my intercambio partner Vicente (described my roommates as having “an endearing rabid-dog quality about him”). Vicente likes to go on adventures so a few weeks ago we went to this park across the street from the university because they have giant ducks that are UA legends. Apparently the rumor is that the ducks eat meat, because there has to be some reason they are so freaking big. I was like, ok ok, I'm sure they're decent sized ducks. Well, we went over to the lake and I almost crapped myself... these ducks are literally the size of a golden retriever. Vicente was like, hey, go ahead and show them your hand, it's fine! I was like, get me the hell away from those ducks!! Is there a nuclear plant around here somewhere? So I am trying to muster up the courage to go back and take pictures to prove the freakiness of it all. Another highlight of the last month was getting compared to the pig face that I got tricked into eating by a 60 year old man at the market. Luckily he meant itin a complimentary way (the word for beautiful and the word for delicious are the same, but I tell you… getting compared to a hairy snout is kind of iffy).
Well I love you all and I hope that this included enough use of the word“Spaniard” for those of you who requested to hear it more often. You guys are the gems in the crown of life. I just blacked out and tried to make up a profound statement, but you get the idea. Os echo de menos, nos vemos pronto!
Besos,
Laura

Un Buen Rollo: Alicante, Oct. 2005

Hey lovers,
Well, it is has been a month and a half since I began my torrid love affair with Spain. If we are being completely honest, it is more like a warm friendship, but you know, poetic license and everything. Sorry I haven’t written something sooner, but I have been really busy listening to Shakira and watching trashy Spanish Love Connection shows. So getting here was basically the scariest thing I have ever experienced. I hung out in London for a night with a bunch of Australians from my hostel, but that was the only good part, because I learned firsthand the hell that is RyanAir getting from London to Alicante. For brevity’s sake, I will put the highlights in bullet form:
• Learned mid-flight that Murcia, the city we were landing in, was nowhere near Alicante, and had no bus system or train from the airport, which is an abandoned airforce base. Further learned that RyanAir has been sued a number of times for misleading the public about its destinations.
• Met a Spanish guy on the walk in from the flight, who proceeded to dismantle his bike and cram all my luggage into his brother’s car, drop me off downtown and help me find a hostel. Yes, I realize it could have been an Unsolved Mysteries kind of thing, but I was pretty desperate.
• Spent a day braving the elements between the time I got kicked out of my hostel and when I could move into my apartment (which, until the day after I got here, had a landlord with a disconnected number, ie. possibly didn't exist), during which creepy Spanish men invited me back to their places without understanding the phrase HELL NO (I thought it translated fairly directly, I was wrong).
So the university here is gorgeous; I have to frolic through palm trees to get to class. My profesoras are hilarious, and we spend most of the class time discussing important things, like how European toilets are better than American toilets and how obnoxious Spaniards are. One of my profs is from Spain but takes every opportunity to make fun of it; she also teaches us the crucial phrases (Tengo ni puta idea= I have no f-ing idea). That one comes in handy frequently. The best thing about my class is the Japanese boys in it who are so lost, but when I mentioned Seattle one of them was like, “OH! ICHIRO!” Yeah buddy! We’re on the map!
One of my favorite things here is the market every Saturday, which has TONS of clothes, shoes, fruit and veggies, etc. They have huge barrels of a million kinds of olives, pickles, every kind of nut possible, and other random foods that you could never find at home. Everything is so yummy and so cheap, and I can eat kiwi and avocado and almonds all day long. My apartment is amazing, it is one block from the beach and is right in the middle of the Barrio, the area with all the bars and clubs and restaurants. Nothing starts until midnight here, so people eat dinner at about 11, go to the bars from 12-3, and then head to El Puerto, this peninsula on the water that has about 10 clubs in a 3 block radius, until like 6 or 7 am. There are literally thousands of people from all over the world crammed in the Barrio and Puerto on any given night, so it is an awesome place to live. I have one Finnish roommate, two Irish, one Canadian and one British lady who never leaves her room. I love having the Irish girls around so I can finally use the phrase “that’s good craic” again, and Eija, the Finnish girl, is my best friend in Spain. Most of our time is spent drinking sangria, figuring out how to get Europe to take a shower, and wondering what food we just ordered when we go out. We have a pretty interesting group of friends… including Lebo, a Botswanan girl studying in Canada; Angelo, an Italian guy who doesn’t speak English OR Spanish but seems to always show up no matter where we are; Ariel, an ex-pro soccer player from Argentina who is dying to learn English and tells me I get more beautiful every time he sees me (who WOULDN’T be friends with a guy like that?); Andrea, an Italian guy studying in Sweden who wants to marry me for Green Card purposes only; Nelson, a Lenny Kravitz lookalike from Brazil; and Randy, an MBA from Houston who owns a promotions company in Alicante and knows every bartender in the province, ie. I haven’t paid for a drink since I got here.
So I was kind of starting to freak out because I kept seeing all these adorable little Spanish kids and couldn’t hang out with any of them, so I found a job working with these two AMAZING little boys from Muchamiel (the little town about40 minutes out of Alicante). Javier is 7 and Fernando is 5, and I think they are karma payback for putting up with the little punks I nannied this summer, because they could not be more perfect. Pilar, their mom, wants me to speak English with them and just hang out at the park and read and play. Humbling Spain Moment #578: the 7 year old I tutor speaks better English than I do and translates when his mom and I can’t figure out what we are trying to say to each other (she doesn’t speak any English, and is just about the sweetest thing ever). I call them my little Guapisimos and get to hang out with them every day. It is especially cool to get out of the city and into a little town that is, in my humble opinion, real Spain. Pilar grew up there, the boys’grandparents live just around the corner, and she has friends from childhood all over the place and has never left or lived anywhere else.
So despite being broker than one of Schlossmo’s appendages after a night out, I have been able to travel a little too. Sometimes we just hop on the train and see where it ends up and have adventures in a random city on the coast, but we also spent a weekend in Valencia and a couple days in Granada. Valencia is amazing, we got a map and just spent the weekend running around and looking at as many museums, cathedrals, and parks as humanly possible. We are going to try to head back in a couple weeks for a UEFA Champions League game and a bullfight. Granada was quite possible the most wonderful city I have seen since leaving home, and I got to spend some time with Haley Beach (for those of you who don’t know, she’s my long-time lover and is studying in Granada). It physically pained me to leave that place, but at least Alicante is warm.
Ok I am willing to bet that half of you aren’t even reading this anymore, but I am going to throw in a bonus story about Juan, the owner of the hostel I was in the first few days. Juan is a crazy old guy from Murcia who doesn’t know a word of English, and I decided I loved him, and went to his place to say hi. He was eating dinner, and told me to sit down and ran into his kitchen. A few minutes later he plopped a plate in front of me with a fish on it. A whole fish, with just its head chopped off. And a piece of bread with hard cheese, a bowl ofvegetables in vinegar, and a bottle of Spanish wine. I wasn’t sure what protocol is with eating whole fish, and asked him how to start, and he was like,“ehh, eat it however you want.” Then he poured me a glass of wine into a cup that had obviously been used, as it had some interesting backwash in it, but who am I to be rude? But every time he left the room I poured some of it back into the bottle or into his glass. The problem with this was that every time he noticed I had an empty glass, he refilled it and made a toast. As sneaky as I tried to be, my host was a step ahead of me. So Juan was starting to get a bit looped, and kept talking and talking and talking… for an hour and a half. Hecovered a number of topics during his monologue, including Hurricane Katrina, religion, sex, and his illustrious career as a ¬¬___ (fill in the blank. I’m still not sure what he did, but I have a feeling it was the Mafia, based on thenumerous pictures of him with random men and copious amounts of wine. Oh wait, that just means he’s Spanish). I could tell when he was done with one topic and moving on to another when he would pause and give me the hugest, goofiest smileI have ever seen, which made me laugh, and then made him laugh, and now Juan andI are best friends, and every time I peek my head in to say hi he says, “Heyyy, it’s the model from Madrid!” This nickname indicates to me that Juan is drunk ALL THE TIME, but he sure made life interesting my first few days in Alicante.
Love you guys, miss you so much
-Laura
PS. Though my stance is still firmly anti-European boy, I saw firsthand how weaker souls might fall for their charms when this Parisian waiter at Havana pulled my tank top strap down with his teeth and kissed my shoulder… how do you react to such a situation when you are a naïve American girl, is my question to you?!?