First Night in Torremolinos

First Night in Torremolinos
©Ken Harris, 2008


Welcome to Spain. Bienvenidos a España. Give us $400, por favor. It was the overage from Los Angeles come to haunt us all the way across the Atlantic. Joanne got steamed all over again. She’s still steamed, come to think of it. But it’s early days yet. This happened in 1974 and it’s only 2008. Anyway, we showed the kindly TWA representative our receipts and he released us just in time to make our flight to Málaga.

All my benighted life I had been mispronouncing the name of this city, putting the accent on the second syllable rather than the first. Perhaps it’s because I had never seen it spelled properly before, with an accent over the first “a.” In the States we aren’t given to tildes, umlauts, or other accents. Anyway, I had misgivings. I wondered how many other words I was going to have to learn to pronounce over again.

Our future boss, Honey Pettis, met us at the Málaga airport, piled us into the Sunnyview School van and drove us to our new home, Torremolinos (tor.ray.mo.LEE.nos). Honey was French and her first name was Huguette, but she despaired of her American husband, or any other American for that matter, learning to pronounce her name properly, and she said she preferred “Honey.” Since she was running an American school and many of her parents were Americans, the nickname just made things easier all round.

Honey took us to an apartment on the first floor of a beachfront apartment building. We rested for a bit and then walked to the Pettis residence, also beach front, where we met the entire Pettis family, Chuck Sr., Mike, Chuck Jr., John and Sultan, the German Shepherd who liked to carry large rocks in his mouth.

On returning to our apartment we were briefly confounded by the buttons on the elevator. If we were on the first floor, why did we need an elevator? Because in Spain, and in all of Europe from what I understand, the first floor is on the second floor. The ground floor is the piso bajo (pee.so BÄH.ho) and is clearly marked on the elevator button with a PB. The floor above the piso bajo has to be the first floor, doesn’t it? You could start numbering with the second floor, but that wouldn’t be very logical now, would it?

We unpacked enough stuff to get to bed and I don’t think it took anyone longer than thirty seconds to get to sleep. It had been a long day. We slept soundly until around 2:00 in the morning when a drunk began serenading the neighborhood with music from Jesus Christ, Superstar. Well, not the duet and chorus numbers, but the solos. And the man had a magnificent voice. Badly as we needed our sleep, Joanne and I were glad that nobody interrupted him until he was through with his concert.

Old habits die hard, and Joanne and I were awake as the sun rose. Somehow coffee, bread and butter had materialized in our apartment and, as the sun came up behind our building, we sat on our balcony overlooking the Mediterranean taking our breakfast and thinking, “You know, this could work out.”