Update from Mama!

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A mama update!

So much has happened since we left Bexley in the wee hours of July 14!  I have plans to write more about our trips to Portugal and Switzerland, and to add to Cyrus’s colorful descriptions, but it feels most urgent to share our initial impressions of Spain and the small city where we will be for the next 12 months: Almuñécar (see more here).

This city is on the south coast of Spain, in Andalucía, in the province of Granada (see this week’s NYT travel section – excellent timing!). We arrived tired and anxious and hot at about 2:30p on Sunday July 29, and were collected at the airport by Uncle Joe. By that time in the afternoon, I had already been awake for many hours, waking about 3am from nerves. Both Piers and I spent the flight from Zurich to Malaga silently reviewing our travel vocab in Spanish and wondering what words were still buried deep within our brains given the 15 years since we moved back to the US from Mexico. After leaving the mostly cool and cloudy mountains of Switzerland, the heat of Spain was a shock to all our systems. Charlotte remarked that it looked like a desert, and some parts of the ~1-hour drive from the Malaga airport to Almuñécar really did – dry hillsides, cacti, red dirt, hot haze, and signs warning drivers about what looked like reindeer (although we spied none).  

Some of you know, we have moved into the 4-bedroom flat most recently occupied by Joe’s family, so we had an easy welcome and introduction into the building. Joe delivered us right to the door of the apartment, where we briefly saw Jess moving out her last load of boxes. Joe gave us the keys and a map of town, and gave us a quick tour. The flat is fully furnished, which we knew, but we were surprised to see how fully stocked it really is: not just plates and pots and silverware, but also sheets, towels, pillows, a rolling cart for shopping, dustpan and broom, trash bin, etc. Charlotte and Cy ran through the place and negotiated a settlement about who would get which bedroom. We admired the view of the plaza below from our terrace, and of the Mediterranean Sea (just a sliver! But definitely a view of the sea - look just below the horizon in the second picture here) from the back bedroom. We locked up and went for a walk, just the four of us in this new place. We were all very excited and nervous.

First stop – ice cream shop. (First direct anxiety about Spanish, too. Sure, I remembered that ice cream was helado. But cone? Turns out to be cucurucho. Scoop? Bola. Mint? Menta. And so began the cycle of learning and re-learning in which we’ve been continually engaged for almost 2 weeks now). On Sundays truly nothing other than food establishments is open, so although we were interested in buying fans for our flat, it was not possible. My first impression of the town is already fading a bit, but initially my sense was that Almuñécar was a combination of Dubrovnik (quaint, hillside city with plazas and fountains; narrow, winding, cobblestone, pedestrian-only alleys and walkways with shops and restaurants; mothers and children walking with grocery carts; old women hanging colorful laundry out their kitchen windows) and Ft. Lauderdale (perpetual party; unexpected shouting at all hours of the night; cheap and readily available beer; people cruising to meet, chat, dance and drink on their vacation). The main thing we did after our first night in the apartment, aside from buying fans (which also double as white-noise machines) is to move our bedroom from the side facing the plaza with the Ft. Lauderdale-type action to the room which Jess had previously used as her office, which faces an interior, undeveloped lot and the back of other apartment buildings. We’ve been much less aware of the noise – and the party scene – ever since.  

After our solo wandering, we went back to the apartment to begin to unpack and then met up with Joe, Dominic (age 8) and Eva (age 10) for dinner. This proved just a little complicated because we were very much on “normal” US dinnertime - say 6 or 7p - whereas almost no restaurants in Almuñécar are open for dinner until 8p. Eventually we found an open-all-day kitchen and while searching, got another, more organized tour of Almuñécar. Dominic especially has a keen knowledge of the city streets and shortcuts and it was great fun hearing him describe how to get around using the landmarks and descriptors that seem obvious to the 8-year-old mind. More awkward Spanish from Piers and me in ordering our drinks and meal, but at this point we were slowly getting warmed up. 

Photos: eyebrow raising demonstration from Dominic and Eva.

This restaurant was also our first lesson about the tapas situation in this part of Spain. When you order a drink in a restaurant, the restaurant brings you a snack. You don’t ask for it, and you usually don’t choose the snack from a list (unless you are Joe and his family and you want to request a vegan option). But if you hurry the process, as we did that night by ordering food at almost the same time that your order your drink, the restaurant skips the tapa. Lesson learned.  

After dinner, more walking, more ice cream, more delighted cousins walking hand-in-hand (“I can’t believe you are going to live here for the WHOLE YEAR!”). Joe took us to the beach where the kids played on the playground right on the sand, placed conveniently between the surf and the bars and dance clubs (think Jersey Shore boardwalk) in this part of the town. It was close to 9p at this point, but the beach was still full of families, including with small kids. This has been another big change from the US – kids are everywhere, including little kids, including very late at night. Almuñécar is a vacation destination, and whole multi-generation families reunite here for one or more weeks together every August. Big groups may sit down to dinner in a restaurant at 10 or 11p, including with toddlers. Sometimes the littlest kids fall asleep at the table, sometimes they snooze in a stroller, but often they are awake and at least as well-behaved as toddlers anywhere else.

After the playground, we continued our walk along the paseo (thoroughfare winding along the bottom of the hill, separating the hillside from the beach) to walk up the stairs of Almuñécar’s most notable landmark, El Peñon – large rock formations from which you can get a marvelous view of the city and beaches on both sides. More on the history at some future point, but for now, some photos of the view from below, and the kids on top.

At this point, after this very, very long day, I was ready for bed (and admittedly kind of losing it. Things happen slowly here. People are not rushing. Partly Spain, partly most people here being on vacation, partly heat. It’s a stop-and-smell-the-roses place. I am not, constitutionally, a stop-and-smell-the-roses person, although I am hoping that this year will lead to some reconditioning on this front). I felt thrilled, truly thrilled, to be in this beautiful spot with my brother and niece and nephew, and of course my own family, and to think about the exciting year ahead of all of us. The kind of happiness where you feel bursting with anticipation about all you and those dearest to you will learn and discover about themselves and the world, and where the time – 12 months! – feels endlessly stretched out in front of you. I was exhausted because of lack of sleep and heat and trying to remember words in another language that I hadn’t felt super comfortable speaking even when I did it every day. I was anxious (always moreso when tired) about whether it was the right decision to pull Cy and Charlotte out of their comfortable midwestern life and thrust them into this completely unfamiliar world where they speak almost none of the language and will miss their friends all year. (In the nearly 2 weeks since, I’ve continued to cycle through these three states of mind ...). Finally, we got back to “our” house and found the sheets and made the beds and found the toothbrushes and WENT TO BED.