Our Spanish Villa
©Ken Harris 2008
I was surprised when we moved to Spain because I thought they spoke Spanish there. You know. Spain? Spanish?
Not in Torremolinos. Torremolinos is in Andalucía (ahn.dah.loo.SEE.yah) where they speak Andalú (ahn.dah.LOO), a Spanish version of Hillbilly. To properly speak Andalú you must drop the first and last syllables of all the longer words and shout out the remainder. Adiós becomes “JO!!!” Part of the Andalú accent is volume, the louder the better. Earplugs help.
We were certainly in no way qualified to go out and rent our own house and so Honey Pettis enlisted the aid of her Spanish teacher, Carmen Wooten-Reyes. Carmen spoke English well, but rapidly and with a heavy Spanish accent. If she was emotional about something, I could hardly understand a word she said. Just what we needed. Someone we couldn’t understand in two languages.
The situation was not quite so dismal, though, because in short order we understood her well enough to go house hunting. We found a place north of town, Urbanización (oor.bah.nee.sah.see.ON) Colómbia (ko.LOM.bee.yah). The urbanización consisted of four homes, each one named for a city in Colombia. Our house was named Villa Medellín (VEE.yah may.day.YEEN). If our mail had been delivered to the house, that would have been the address. No street names or numbers.
I promise you, by the way, that I will only offend you with spelling for pronunciation the first time you encounter the word.
Our urbanización fronted the highway connecting Málaga and Cádiz (KAH.dees). Built by the Phoenicians to connect their two sea ports, it was the busiest road on the Iberian Peninsula in Phoenician times. In 1974, our time, it was still the busiest road on the Iberian Peninsula, and what with a nationwide epidemic of poor ignition and faulty mufflers, it was also the noisiest and smelliest.
When you see the Spanish word urbanización you think of the English word “urbanization.” Nothing of the sort. Our urbanización lay next to our noisy, smelly, loud highway to the south and vacant fields to the north, west and east. They were nice vacant fields, though, with wild asparagus in season and chamomile.
The houses themselves had rubble walls plastered over and built right on to the ground without benefit of even a mud sill. This method of construction had some curious consequences for us in winter. When the ground was wet, the walls acted as a wick with the result that the inside of the house was colder than a teacher’s wit.
Also in the winter it never got completely dry in the house. Clothes tended to mildew and we had to procure some hot rods for the closet, heating rods you could plug in to at least keep your closet dry. We had the same kind of rods on Guam, but the weather was much warmer.
We had heavy wooden shutters controlled by pulleys and cranks from indoors. It kept out intruders and also noise from the highway. Since in the two years we lived there we were never bothered by either, it must have done a good job. A tile roof completed our architectural ensemble.
We had one green feature to the house that we really liked, a passive solar water heating system. Coils of copper pipe lay in a shallow box, glassed on the side facing the sun most of the day, and with a black interior. The low end of the coil connected to the domestic water supply. The high end fed into a 60-gallon water tank on the roof that fed scalding water by gravity. And the whole thing operated without computers. Just the laws of science and nature. What a concept.
However, the water functioned through another force, this one national rather than natural. The mordida (mor.DEEdah). The “little bite.” And we weren’t fond of that at all. Mordida is a Spanish custom that predates the Romans. In America we call it bribery and we do it secretly. In Spain, and maybe the rest of the world for all I know, it is done without secrecy or compunction. Grease for the wheels of commerce.
Our urbanización owners, Mr. and Mrs. Boli, lived in Algiers. Once each month they would cross the puddle to Torremolinos to collect the rent and pay the mordida to the sanjero (sahn.HAIR.o), aka the water guy, to make sure we received the water that had already been paid for by conventional means. But just to make sure, we paid another small mordida to the man who lived with his family in the tool shed-sized building behind the four houses. (Come to think of it, they may have lived in the tool shed.) He was the Boli’s “full time” maintenance man. Although the Bolis didn’t pay him much, he didn’t do much either. If we really wanted something done, we had better come up with 100 pesetas (about $1.34).
You couldn’t run a household without mordida. I remember the garbage men coming by on Christmas day to collect their gift. There were two of them and I gave them 1000 pesetas (about $13.40) to split between them because I didn’t want them to suddenly start making deliveries.
I’ve been off topic here with my rant about mordidas, but I’ve always disliked them, primarily because no one ever saw fit to give me any.
To finish off our house description, we had three bed rooms, a maid’s room where I set up for writing, a living room and a kitchen with built in scrubbing board riffles so you can wash your socks with the dishes. Actually, the riffles were great for draining the dishes before you put them away. There was no garage, but we were thinking about trying life without a car since we were within walking distance of the school.
And so we began our lives as temporary ex-pats.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Sunnyview School
Sunnyview School
© Ken Harris 2009
In September, 1974, Sunnyview School had around 115 students, kindergarten through 12th grade. For the elementary grades we followed Calvert School’s curriculum. Calvert School, an accredited day school in Baltimore, Maryland, also furnished materials for home study students, and this decades before the concept became fashionable. High school was done by correspondence through the University of Nebraska. In this way a certain continuity of curriculum was established since the instructional staff itself hailed from Finland, Spain, Scotland, England, France, Canada, Northern Ireland and the U.S. Some of us had teacher training while others had only their availability to recommend them.
The main two-story building at Sunnyview School housed classrooms for first- through eighth-grades. The school office sat on the ground floor where director Honey Pettis and two clerks kept things going. Two principals also kept offices in the building, elementary school principal Jane Barbadillo and high school principal David McConnell. However since Barbadillo and McConnell both had full-time teaching duties, those offices were seldom occupied. Otherwise the building had classrooms for first-through eighth-graders.
Kindergarteners had their own small magic kingdom to the south, separated from the main building by a field of monkey bars, rings and slides. West of the main building lay the swimming pool and the high school class rooms.
The buildings themselves were made of el cheapo hollow clay bricks, made so light you could carry eight at a time. You could probably drop one on your foot with no more than an “oh, damn.” Nothing like the humungous bricks we’re used to in the States. And it wasn’t just the school buying the cheapest commodity they could. This was how bricks were made in Spain. Once in place, workmen covered the bricks with a rough, stucco.
The same el cheapo bricks that formed the buildings also formed the walls surrounding the school, but without the stucco. The bricks were set with wide air spaces between each one. In such a way about fifty percent of the wall was pure hole in the wall so that air could freely flow through without blowing over the barricade. It was just the sort of barrier an enthusiastic kid could ram his motorcycle right through. In fact, that is what one student did the year before we arrived. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, since that would have been unmanly, with the result that he significantly lowered his own I.Q. He didn’t help the wall any, either.
We had no central air or heating. Joanne and I never found the heat oppressive, but, man, it got cold. You always hear about Sunny Spain. Nobody talks much about Warm Spain, especially in winter. We would have all frozen if it hadn’t been for Maguire. Maguire was the school cat, black except for a few white markings. He was in charge of maintaining a mouse-free environment in the kitchen and pantry. In winter he doubled in brass as a hand warmer. Kids smuggled him into class rooms and passed him from lap to lap during the long, boring lectures of which teachers are so fond. Whenever a kid looked directly into a teacher’s eyes, expression bland and inscrutable, you knew he or she had Maguire in hand.
It was totally illegal for us to work at Sunnyview School. We didn’t have green cards. None of us on the educational staff did. I don’t think the Spanish government even had any green cardstock on which they could print any. But we had our cover stories. If the authorities were to raid the school one day, we were to sit in the back of the room and claim that we were only parents, there to observe, while the real teacher had just stepped out. Since we had two children at the school, our cover story might have worked. But how impressed were the authorities going to be if they found six rooms, six observant parents and zero teachers?
The situation was silly. But I trace it to the fact that the Spanish government didn’t like foreigners with their foreign ideas and values. They didn’t trust their influence. We were there during the last year Franco was alive and the first year of Juan Carlos’ rule. But if the government didn’t really like foreigners, it really liked foreign money. Lots of it.. So long as we brought in yankee dollars, pounds, deutschmarks, Swiss francs, we weren’t in much danger of deportation. All the same time, they made it almost impossible to live in the country legally. You were always breaking some law, even if it was having three friends over for brewskis. They were setting it up so that it would be easy to get rid of you if they wanted to.
So even though we sensed that the government didn’t really care, Honey Pettis wanted us to go through the pretext of applying for work permits. This led us to one of Spain’s most noble type of citizens, the gestor (hess.TOR, not jester). Although it seems like a joke, the gestor is a fixer. He fixes things between people and their government. Even when they’re not broken, he fixes them.
We went to the gestor and presented him with our teaching credentials. He was very impressed with Joanne’s. He admired the quality of the paper, the impressive seal and signatures. After much praise, he put both certificates in a folder and kept them. I thought Joanne was going to swallow her tongue.
We never got green cards, and maybe that’s why I can sympathize a bit with the plight of the illegal alien here in Arizona, working without a green card and hoping he can lie or run fast if he gets caught. Oddly enough, the gestor got us Spanish social security, which qualified us for government funded medical treatment in Spain. Since the United Kingdom had a reciprocal agreement with Spain, we were also entitled to government health care when vacationing in England as well. We got our credentials back from the gestor when we were about to leave Spain, almost two years later.
In Spain it’s not so much what you achieve as the motions you go through.
© Ken Harris 2009
In September, 1974, Sunnyview School had around 115 students, kindergarten through 12th grade. For the elementary grades we followed Calvert School’s curriculum. Calvert School, an accredited day school in Baltimore, Maryland, also furnished materials for home study students, and this decades before the concept became fashionable. High school was done by correspondence through the University of Nebraska. In this way a certain continuity of curriculum was established since the instructional staff itself hailed from Finland, Spain, Scotland, England, France, Canada, Northern Ireland and the U.S. Some of us had teacher training while others had only their availability to recommend them.
The main two-story building at Sunnyview School housed classrooms for first- through eighth-grades. The school office sat on the ground floor where director Honey Pettis and two clerks kept things going. Two principals also kept offices in the building, elementary school principal Jane Barbadillo and high school principal David McConnell. However since Barbadillo and McConnell both had full-time teaching duties, those offices were seldom occupied. Otherwise the building had classrooms for first-through eighth-graders.
Kindergarteners had their own small magic kingdom to the south, separated from the main building by a field of monkey bars, rings and slides. West of the main building lay the swimming pool and the high school class rooms.
The buildings themselves were made of el cheapo hollow clay bricks, made so light you could carry eight at a time. You could probably drop one on your foot with no more than an “oh, damn.” Nothing like the humungous bricks we’re used to in the States. And it wasn’t just the school buying the cheapest commodity they could. This was how bricks were made in Spain. Once in place, workmen covered the bricks with a rough, stucco.
The same el cheapo bricks that formed the buildings also formed the walls surrounding the school, but without the stucco. The bricks were set with wide air spaces between each one. In such a way about fifty percent of the wall was pure hole in the wall so that air could freely flow through without blowing over the barricade. It was just the sort of barrier an enthusiastic kid could ram his motorcycle right through. In fact, that is what one student did the year before we arrived. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, since that would have been unmanly, with the result that he significantly lowered his own I.Q. He didn’t help the wall any, either.
We had no central air or heating. Joanne and I never found the heat oppressive, but, man, it got cold. You always hear about Sunny Spain. Nobody talks much about Warm Spain, especially in winter. We would have all frozen if it hadn’t been for Maguire. Maguire was the school cat, black except for a few white markings. He was in charge of maintaining a mouse-free environment in the kitchen and pantry. In winter he doubled in brass as a hand warmer. Kids smuggled him into class rooms and passed him from lap to lap during the long, boring lectures of which teachers are so fond. Whenever a kid looked directly into a teacher’s eyes, expression bland and inscrutable, you knew he or she had Maguire in hand.
It was totally illegal for us to work at Sunnyview School. We didn’t have green cards. None of us on the educational staff did. I don’t think the Spanish government even had any green cardstock on which they could print any. But we had our cover stories. If the authorities were to raid the school one day, we were to sit in the back of the room and claim that we were only parents, there to observe, while the real teacher had just stepped out. Since we had two children at the school, our cover story might have worked. But how impressed were the authorities going to be if they found six rooms, six observant parents and zero teachers?
The situation was silly. But I trace it to the fact that the Spanish government didn’t like foreigners with their foreign ideas and values. They didn’t trust their influence. We were there during the last year Franco was alive and the first year of Juan Carlos’ rule. But if the government didn’t really like foreigners, it really liked foreign money. Lots of it.. So long as we brought in yankee dollars, pounds, deutschmarks, Swiss francs, we weren’t in much danger of deportation. All the same time, they made it almost impossible to live in the country legally. You were always breaking some law, even if it was having three friends over for brewskis. They were setting it up so that it would be easy to get rid of you if they wanted to.
So even though we sensed that the government didn’t really care, Honey Pettis wanted us to go through the pretext of applying for work permits. This led us to one of Spain’s most noble type of citizens, the gestor (hess.TOR, not jester). Although it seems like a joke, the gestor is a fixer. He fixes things between people and their government. Even when they’re not broken, he fixes them.
We went to the gestor and presented him with our teaching credentials. He was very impressed with Joanne’s. He admired the quality of the paper, the impressive seal and signatures. After much praise, he put both certificates in a folder and kept them. I thought Joanne was going to swallow her tongue.
We never got green cards, and maybe that’s why I can sympathize a bit with the plight of the illegal alien here in Arizona, working without a green card and hoping he can lie or run fast if he gets caught. Oddly enough, the gestor got us Spanish social security, which qualified us for government funded medical treatment in Spain. Since the United Kingdom had a reciprocal agreement with Spain, we were also entitled to government health care when vacationing in England as well. We got our credentials back from the gestor when we were about to leave Spain, almost two years later.
In Spain it’s not so much what you achieve as the motions you go through.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
The Paseo
The Paseo
Copyright Ken Harris 2009
Torremolinos opened my eyes to an entirely new lifestyle. Nothing in our past lives had prepared us for this raffish and entertaining tourist town. It reminded me of Venice Beach in California. When the sun went down, people just turned on the lights and partied on. Amazing. Remember, though, that we were staying at a beach front apartment. It was a lot like renting digs on a carnival midway.
A word on why Joanne and I could be in our early 40s and still have a “Golly Gee” reaction to the nightlife we saw. We were and are basically country people. Up until we moved to Guam, we had always kept horses, chickens, cows, and other livestock. The horses didn’t care if we had partied until 3:00 a.m.. They wanted their breakfast on time and were not above being vocal about it. This makes for an unpleasant dawn on New Year’s Day. Trust me on this one.
And Guam was not a frenetic experience, even though we lived in the heart of the capital city. We lived near the cathedral. Cathedral areas the world over are never noted for their swinging night life.
So if you could have seen us on our first night, you would have thought we had just come into town by burro cart and were trying to figure out how to work the light switches.
Torremolinos was a swinging town. Somehow in the 1960s it had become a Hippie Haven for disaffected youth on their Grand Tour, so much so that James Michener wrote a book about the place, The Drifters. Other Americans and Europeans of any age looking for vacations with most fun and least expenditure found their way to Torremolinos.
We had recovered from our previous day’s flight to where we could go walking in the evening and observe the paseo. The paseo is a justifiably world famous custom where in the evenings girls dress up in their finest and walk up and down the streets with their friends, never alone, while the boys, also dress in their finery which consisted of skin tight trousers and shirts with the top four buttons undone, scope each other out. The girls pass in review while the boys review them, audibly and appreciatively.
Besides the paseo, we also observed the singularly civilized habit of tapa hopping. This activity was for men and women, not boys and girls. A tapa is a small snack one has with his glass of wine, for it is not civilized to drink on an empty stomach. As I understand the matter, the abundance of flies in Spain made it undesirable to leave your glass of wine untended for very long, so some inspired bartender put a small dish on top of the wine glass, a tapón. But the empty dish looked inhospitable just sitting there, and so the custom developed of putting something in the dish, an olive perhaps, or minced garlic and olive oil into which one could dip a slice of bread.
Some bars began to develop their own tapa specialties and now, well, maybe not now but thirty years ago, Madrid was famous for their tapas. Some bars specialized in lobster, others in shrimp, and it became quite the thing to go tapa hopping, going from bar to bar for a glass of wine and a chat with friends. Sometime a tapa hopping expedition might take three hours and was done instead of supper.
Torremolinos bars did not aspire to Madrid standards, and some of the beach front bars just offered commercial pretzels. My favorite tapa was calamari a la romana, deep fat fried squid rings. I can hear some of you in my imagination saying, “E-e-e-w-w-w-w!” But with a squeeze of lemon, calamari was delicious. Fried in lard really helps the taste of sea food. Lard helps the taste of everything but ice cream.
But enough thoughts of cuisine. Joanne, Pat and I were still very tired and so we returned to our apartment while Eric went off with John Pettis and other newfound 13-year-old live wires. But he soon came running into our apartment, took off his clothes and began to put on mine. He got on the pants and suit coat, although they were a little big for him. Give him a cane, a mustache and a derby and he could have been Charlie Chaplin. Eric was half way through tying my necktie when it occurred to him that he didn’t know how to do that. That’s when he sought my advice.
I, in turn, was curious about what could have wrought such galvanic activity in my son, the one who didn’t want to come to Spain at all. It seems he had met two Canadian girls, probably in their early twenties and of a mind to toy with a puppy, who told him that if he would dress up he could go tapa hopping with them. I depressed his ambitions first by denying him any money for the expedition and second by demanding my clothes back.
I knew that this was going to be an interesting time in my life.
Copyright Ken Harris 2009
Torremolinos opened my eyes to an entirely new lifestyle. Nothing in our past lives had prepared us for this raffish and entertaining tourist town. It reminded me of Venice Beach in California. When the sun went down, people just turned on the lights and partied on. Amazing. Remember, though, that we were staying at a beach front apartment. It was a lot like renting digs on a carnival midway.
A word on why Joanne and I could be in our early 40s and still have a “Golly Gee” reaction to the nightlife we saw. We were and are basically country people. Up until we moved to Guam, we had always kept horses, chickens, cows, and other livestock. The horses didn’t care if we had partied until 3:00 a.m.. They wanted their breakfast on time and were not above being vocal about it. This makes for an unpleasant dawn on New Year’s Day. Trust me on this one.
And Guam was not a frenetic experience, even though we lived in the heart of the capital city. We lived near the cathedral. Cathedral areas the world over are never noted for their swinging night life.
So if you could have seen us on our first night, you would have thought we had just come into town by burro cart and were trying to figure out how to work the light switches.
Torremolinos was a swinging town. Somehow in the 1960s it had become a Hippie Haven for disaffected youth on their Grand Tour, so much so that James Michener wrote a book about the place, The Drifters. Other Americans and Europeans of any age looking for vacations with most fun and least expenditure found their way to Torremolinos.
We had recovered from our previous day’s flight to where we could go walking in the evening and observe the paseo. The paseo is a justifiably world famous custom where in the evenings girls dress up in their finest and walk up and down the streets with their friends, never alone, while the boys, also dress in their finery which consisted of skin tight trousers and shirts with the top four buttons undone, scope each other out. The girls pass in review while the boys review them, audibly and appreciatively.
Besides the paseo, we also observed the singularly civilized habit of tapa hopping. This activity was for men and women, not boys and girls. A tapa is a small snack one has with his glass of wine, for it is not civilized to drink on an empty stomach. As I understand the matter, the abundance of flies in Spain made it undesirable to leave your glass of wine untended for very long, so some inspired bartender put a small dish on top of the wine glass, a tapón. But the empty dish looked inhospitable just sitting there, and so the custom developed of putting something in the dish, an olive perhaps, or minced garlic and olive oil into which one could dip a slice of bread.
Some bars began to develop their own tapa specialties and now, well, maybe not now but thirty years ago, Madrid was famous for their tapas. Some bars specialized in lobster, others in shrimp, and it became quite the thing to go tapa hopping, going from bar to bar for a glass of wine and a chat with friends. Sometime a tapa hopping expedition might take three hours and was done instead of supper.
Torremolinos bars did not aspire to Madrid standards, and some of the beach front bars just offered commercial pretzels. My favorite tapa was calamari a la romana, deep fat fried squid rings. I can hear some of you in my imagination saying, “E-e-e-w-w-w-w!” But with a squeeze of lemon, calamari was delicious. Fried in lard really helps the taste of sea food. Lard helps the taste of everything but ice cream.
But enough thoughts of cuisine. Joanne, Pat and I were still very tired and so we returned to our apartment while Eric went off with John Pettis and other newfound 13-year-old live wires. But he soon came running into our apartment, took off his clothes and began to put on mine. He got on the pants and suit coat, although they were a little big for him. Give him a cane, a mustache and a derby and he could have been Charlie Chaplin. Eric was half way through tying my necktie when it occurred to him that he didn’t know how to do that. That’s when he sought my advice.
I, in turn, was curious about what could have wrought such galvanic activity in my son, the one who didn’t want to come to Spain at all. It seems he had met two Canadian girls, probably in their early twenties and of a mind to toy with a puppy, who told him that if he would dress up he could go tapa hopping with them. I depressed his ambitions first by denying him any money for the expedition and second by demanding my clothes back.
I knew that this was going to be an interesting time in my life.
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