A Return to Spanish Time: Canary Islands Tour Diary

A Return to Spanish Time

Though we sit just north in the tropics, it is not a very warm evening. Much warmer than where we came from, but brisk nevertheless. I tug my blazer tighter over my shoulders and bring my tea cup to my lips. Amy bears up under the cold relatively well, however. She hates cold, which is why we’re here. We flew to Gran Canaria to escape February’s dregs. An upgrade from daytime freezing to evening briskness makes the briskness that much more bearable.

In the air another attraction floats upon the breeze. The vacation we’re taking commemorates Carnival. Carnival marks, hypothetically, the last gasp of hedonism before Lent and the aesthetic run-up to the Catholic Easter. The U.S.A. only finds Carnival in full form in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but across the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and scads of other places, it offers parades, street parties, dancing, booze, and purported joy. I have never been through a Carnival (skipping out on New Orleans a couple weeks before Mardi Gras hit last year), but Amy has years of experience from her time in South America. I feel like I’ve been through several of them myself, having heard Amy’s stories and (sometimes fuzzy) recollections many times over. 

We sit at a café in Parque San Telmo in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, and wait for the Carnival to roll in. My cell phone reads 8:30. The Parade is due to make its final turn at our corner at 8:30, finishing just below the second-floor balcony of our hotel room. When we checked in earlier that day, our initially taciturn receptionist could hardly contain his excitement over how perfect our spot was, looking over the park and the grand finale. We feel contained excitement as we sit and wait for our waiter to bring us the bill; I am the retiring, boring type and so don’t imagine I’ll make it through much of a Carnival if it goes late, and Amy is conditioned to believe that Brazil > everywhere else, especially regarding Carnival, the country’s finest annual celebration. The parade is tardy; Spanish time is usually an approximate thing, biased towards the later side of any announced time. The parade’s tardiness doesn’t surprise us so much as reassure us, the warm embrace of an old friend.

We walk out to the corner. The sound of synchronized drums draws us closer. The crowd at the corner is relatively insignificant, no more than one or two deep at any given point on the road. The first group marches through, a group of drummers and instrumentalists, almost like a group from your small-town Memorial Day Parade, except all dressed in green. After them came a few more dancing Krewes (the New Orleans term, meaning the dancing group that marches in the parade), a few tawdry floats carrying the Queen, 1^st through 4^th Ladies, Grand Dame, and Drag Queen of the Carnival, respectively, and then a couple semi-trucks.

At last Amy feels excitement, as the trucks recall Brazil’s Carnival. The trucks are probably an evolution from the floats and walking krewes of yesteryear Carnivals. They operate like themed-party buses, everybody on board dressed in a matching costume – Flintstones, Superheroes, Cats – while a DJ bumps the tunes to a thundering level. Everybody on the truck is meant to be dancing and merrymaking, though most of the truck people are drinking and yelling instead. 

A few trucks pass and at 9:15 a lull sets in. We decide we’ve seen enough.  We return to our room, still dressed but at least freed of the burden of other people. I stand out on the balcony and watch the crowd of people below. Earlier, there was a preponderance of Superman and Wonderwoman outfits, mostly of skimpy nature, as well as a lot of men dolled up in women’s costumes, also of a skimpy nature. Now, I cannot pick out any specific dominant theme, mostly just stragglers from the krewes and trucks that have already passed.

As we stand out on our balcony, Spanish time reasserts itself with a vengeance. The parade hit a lull, a delay, but resumes beneath our eyes. The semis roll one or two down our street at a time. The truck turns the corner 200 meters away from us, its melody reaches our ears a truck length after that, and then the truck crawls past our balcony, stopping at the intersection 50 meters to our left. If lucky, the truck can soak in the spotlight and play its music for another 15-30 seconds, but as the night wears on, the cops instructing them to cut the sub-woofers and move it along get there quicker and quicker. Meanwhile, the next truck or two has already reached our point on the street, the sound systems overlapping, waves falling atop one another, us locked beneath those waves, struggling for air.

Or dancing. Mostly dancing. So we dance. We dance along together, the most we’ve ever danced together, the most Amy has ever allowed me to dance in her presence. That’s because my dancing is rhythmic but uncoordinated, unreasonable and uncontrolled, imagined fluidity replaced by spastic movements and rigid meandering over the 4/4 time signatures. The sort of thing I’m not to do in public in her presence. But here, it’s Spanish Time, it’s Carnival, we’re up on a balcony, and all we can do is take pictures and laugh about it. No one can see us anyway.

Except that some of the people on the trucks are taking our photos. We’re creating quite the little scene, it seems. Some of those drunks down there are cheering, waving, snapping. We wave back. We dance. I add a bounce or two to my moves. We laugh. Carnival roars.

This goes for an hour, and then it things peter out again. No more semis. We stop dancing, stop sweating. The noise in the street and in the park below persists but on a lower level, without the foreground clamor of the music. We stay out on the balcony and watch and glow. 

On the edge of the street below us, a girl kicks a bottle. She is maybe 10 years old and dressed in what looks like a “traditional” costume; long purple skirt and white shirt, her black hair flows down her shoulders even as it is tied in a knot. She kicks the glass bottle along the street curb. The bottle rolls, banks off the curb once or twice, giving way to her soft power. She kicks it one time too many, and it shatters.

The girl retreats across the street. Her mother and other relatives are talking in a circle there. They don’t pay much attention to her, don’t notice her. She flits in and out of the group, walks behind a tree in the park, and then returns to our side of the street. She’s found another glass bottle. She’s kicking it again. Predictably, after a few paltry efforts, she breaks it again.

We are too far away and too foreign besides to say anything as the girl starts kicking her third bottle in the same area. People stand on the other side of the curb railing with the glass breaking just below them. At the 3^rd, pattern-confirming bottle, they speak up, sharing our shock. They tell the girl to stop kicking the bottle. She stops. The bottle remains intact. The girl scurries back to her mother’s circle. The mother stomps over to the scene of the crime and yells at the people who spoke up to her daughter (the mother stands conspicuously closer to the middle of the street, away from the broken glass). The people, an older couple and another older man, yell back. The man peels off and finds a police officer. The mother gives not an inch. Her husband, dressed in a washer woman’s outfit with the top of a Christmas tree or a really funky hat on top of his head, acts as a moderating presence and also speaks to the daughter. No one takes him very seriously.

The police officer arrives. Some sort of resolution is reached – your daughter can’t kick any more glass bottles tonight, you need to leave this family alone, none of you can call one another a stupid puta, etc. No arrests are to be made in this situation, and there’s not much else to do. The plaintiffs, or else the street’s defenders, leave their post along the curb to try to revivify their Carnival joy. The cop and the girl’s parents continue to talk with much more laughter. The tumult dies down. The night and the Carnival continue to flow, softly.

And then, as we sleep, Spanish Time rears its head twice or thrice more; the semis circle back through the park once and again, just as loud as the first time. The noise threatens our sleep. I, exhausted from the flight, sleep through most of it, though I swear that at quarter to 4 I’m awakened by the thumping tunes one last time. Amy sleeps fitfully through the Carnival iterations, perhaps suffering for her Brazil-based hubris. She says that I’m wrong about the last cycle taking place that late. 

Spanish time, ladies and gentlemen.

Beeping into the Blind on the GC-200

The thing about it is, the more dangerous something is, the more thrilling. The more we have to risk to achieve something, the more it appears worth it. Life is founded on the principle of efficiency, arbitrage, and that idea; we will risk only as much as a reward merits. So, for a greater reward, we will risk more.

With risk come fear and a chance of failure. Amy – cowering and half-hyperventilating in the passenger seat, picturing us crashing through the fragile guard rail and plummeting over the cliff into more rocks and chasms and eventually the ocean, telling me to go slower, laughing at my beeping, and squeezing in dramatic scenery photos with her new camera all the while – decided the mountain drive only deserved to be risked once.

                “San Nicolas isn’t much to see in and of itself, but this trip is about the journey, not the destination. A 30km drive through the coastal mountains is one of the prettiest settings you will ever go through.”

So said our guide (I’m paraphrasing). The drive began at the foot of the hill where we were staying in Agaete, on the Western coast of Gran Canaria. We had been there for a day and already were succumbing to island fever. With nothing else to do, a beautiful drive down to the touristy but picturesque Puerto Mogan struck us as a winning proposition.  (San Nicolas is about the halfway point between Agaete and Puerto Mogan).

We left around noon. Google Maps told us it would be a 1h20m trip, which would have us in Puerto Mogan in time for a late lunch. Our car was a Toyota Auris, a small 4-door with an incongruous 6 gear manual transmission. On the highway driving to Agaete two days earlier, I hit 6^th a couple of times, coasting at 100 Km/Hr, until the dashboard light quickly suggested I shift down to 5^th as we hit a hill. There might be a use for the Toyota Auris’s 6^th gear on flat highways and long stretches, but it would be completely unnecessary on this trip.

We entered GC-200, the road that would take us the 65 kilometers to Puerto Mogan, unsuspectingly. The road began with a slight incline and a few lazy bends. There was a white line dividing us from the other side of the road. All was calm. Amy began taking photos out the window of Agaete below, of the coastline coming into view, of the mountains in front of us. Gran Canaria is considered something of a “mini-continent”, with a varied landscape; the coastline features quaint towns and pebbly or coarsely sanded beaches, while the interior has more of the rugged look, with mountains stretching up to 5,000 feet and the reddish-brown visage of the barren hills that can be found in Spain, Morocco, or New Mexico.

Rugged mountains and narrow “highways”. After a few easy kilometers, we were climbing up and down the mountain, driving through blind curve after blind curve, and finding that there was no more dividing line painted on the road. The beauty out the window, plentiful, was now obscured. Blocking our beauty was not the scenery, not the mountains getting in the way of anything else, but the fact that I was driving and couldn’t look too much at the scenery, and Amy was panicking because I was driving.

The GC-200 offers an ideal setting for car commercials. There are car commercials that take place in green rolling hills on roads with hairpin turns and endless switchbacks; there are car commercials that emphasize the open road and the plains and the thrill of adventure – the GC-200 offers neither of these. It provides a third possible setting: rugged coastal mountains with frequent turns and undulations, with the promised land of water and sun and fun just around the next (blind) corner. It is really a beautiful drive.

The problem is that I am no car commercial driver, and no commercial for the Toyota Auris will feature such driving. I have never been confused for a good driver. Amy has never been confused for a person who relinquishes control in such crucial circumstances easily. The Toyota Auris does not handle uphills very well, and on this drive I rarely achieved even 4^th gear, let alone 6^th. We were also tourists, and obvious ones, not sure where we were going and ignorant of which way the road would curve when.

"At least if we crashed, the ocean would douse the flames..."

All of which led to the scene I began with: Amy panicking at my side while I tried to maintain a balance between cool consideration and competence. When going up, I would get the car up to about 40-50 km/h (roughly 25-30 mph) in 2^nd or 3^rd gear; when going down, I would let the car coast at about 50-60 km/h, riding heavy on the brakes. As we were tourists, and timid ones, we would often get passed. Passing on a narrow mountain road isn’t easy; there’s hardly space for two cars on the road as is, and then if a foolhardy driver tries to do it on a curve, they risk getting smashed by a car coming the other way. We found a way to be passed, though, because there are few trivial things worse than having someone riding on your ass on a narrow road where you can’t help but feel sorry for them since after all you’re the one going half as fast as everybody else: I would pull on to the rare shoulders or to the little bubbles on the road where a car might stop to get a picture of the view, or else edge towards the right on a stretch of road where we could see no one was coming the other way and wave my hand so that the car tailing me started heading me instead. We were passed by bolder tourists, by eye-rolling locals, and even by runaway buses who handled the curves like they were so many city streets, with abandon. “Those poor bus passengers,” said Amy time and again, thinking of how bad she felt just sitting in our car.

"And if we crash, at least this photo will be evidence that I didn't have a heart attack first..."

We learned a technique from the cars that passed us. Some of the drivers, at least, when nearing a curve, would begin to beep. At first I thought the beeping was directed at me, being sensitive to criticism. Then I realized they were short, staccato, friendly beeps. Warning beeps. Beeps to announce one’s presence on the road, bursts of noise and self-affirmation.

This being a trick that could only help our safety, beeping quickly fell into my arsenal on the GC-200. As we approached a curve, I would beep once sharply, then twice more for a follow-up. Some of the curves kept going, with no end to the blindness in sight, and so I kept beeping every couple of seconds. I felt like a satellite drifting out in space, sending signals out to alert other intelligent beings of my presence. The scariest thing, of course, would be to receive a signal in return.

Nothing scarier happened to us than almost running into one pickup truck barreling around a curve fairly on (going 40 km/h allows for a fair deal of reaction time, at least). We also stopped towards the end at “El Balcon”, a scenic viewpoint. A man ran a concessions stand there, and he found my initial parking job unsatisfactory, requiring me to back out on the road across both lanes of traffic and straighten up. I had visions of rolling backwards forever. Amy was so flustered she spoke with the man in English first as she got out of the car; when she switched to Spanish, he in turn grew flustered, saying “Coño, hablas español?”  And yet, we survived.

We survived the whole drive, of course. The 1h20m stretched into two hours, what with the crawling speeds and the stops. We received very few beeps in return, but we made it to Puerto Mogan, where our finest meal of the vacation awaited us, with smooth vegetable paella and the best croquetas I had all trip. We took nice photos. Somehow, it was all worth it.

And then we went back around the island the other way, taking the highways. It took less time than the trip through the mountains. The drive was not worth a second trip through the mountains, and anyway, Amy’s heart and my ears wouldn’t stand it. Coño, indeed.

This was supposed to be a party...Oh, wait...

Call this an odds and ends post and then let's get on with it, shall we? Today's pictures are brought to you by the hills en route and near Jerusalem, right before my camera went on the fritz as we drove to the Old City, or as we say, "Right on time."


Party Party
Being as I and my roommate live in a fairly large apartment, one with an ample living room that has two separate couch seating areas, a long dining table, and a full kitchen, and being as we don't use all that space very often, we decided that the being in the apartment needed to grow. So we threw a party.

Now, for all my antisocial traits, I have had a little bit of success with past parties. In fact, most anybody reading this here blog has likely been at one or another, whether in Massachusetts or in North Carolina. And if you weren't there, you missed out.

This party took place Saturday night, which is as previously mentioned a weeknight out here (so the party had something in common with almost every party I've thrown). A small gathering of 10-15 teachers and school personnel made for lots of catty remarks about students and potential inter-department showdowns. But, thanks to the ready presence of homemade sangria, potato salad, and foods people actually liked, we had other fun things happen. Such as...

- One of my bosses decided that we needed a little bit of help around the house. To be expected, considering that we're men in our 20s who don't really care about how clean we are. At least not that much; we did tidy up before the party, but nothing out of the ordinary. So what was expected was that something in our apartment might not be quite up to snuff. No major issues, just little messes here and there.

Our boss disagreed. From my vantage point at the end of the table closer to my roommate's bedroom, I noticed her bustling about quite a bit, with regular stops to the cleaning supplies closet we had more or less ignored (I checked it the next day; I found an iron and toilet paper). Finally, she gave me the "come hither" finger gesture. From there she led me to the bathroom. Specifically, to my toilet.

There I found that all the dull stains on the porcelain had more or less dissipated. She had taken to the task with bleach and an iron will, and all of a sudden we had a clean kitchen sink, I had a clean toilet, and I learned a great tip for how to get blueberry or strawberry pie stains out (not that I like either of those foods, but the thought is nice, no?) Soon her help became a running amusement, as she noticed our quite-neglected plants and decided the neglect should end there. Which it did. Only, it picked up again the next day.

It was quite a time, actually, and every so often she would motion to me to come over again and explain her latest act and the reasoning behind it. Meanwhile, as each successive guest learned about what was going on, each successive guest made a, "I'm going to have a party at my house next!" joke. The sort of shared humor and experience that builds a community and makes parties worthwhile.


- We had an Israeli boyfriend of one of the new teachers talking politics in the wee hours with a couple of our more politically astute new teachers. As teachers at our school at least have a wide range of political views, from the current president is the devil to the current democratic candidate is the messiah, with a little leeway in the middle, and as Israelis can tend to lean towards the republican candidate a little bit more, it was an interesting debate. Or rather, it was interesting to see that it was happening. As the debate was in English, the unfair edge went to the Americans.

Somewhat before this debate, by the way, we got yelled at about the noise. Door goes closed, speakers for my sweet party playlist go off, party goes on.

- Did I mention there was potato salad, two (slightly) different types of red sangria, and a large bowl of white sangria? That might explain...

- We finished the night with a silly card game. "Apples to Apples" it's called. Each player is dealt five red cards with nouns on them, some proper, some common. One player (the player rotates) draws a green card that has an adjective or a descriptive phrase. The other players submit a red card they think best suits the green card drawn. The idea is that there will be some funny juxtapositions when, for example, a green card of "Hot and Heavy" draws a red card of "My memories".

Not too complicated of a game though, right?

I say this because one of my lovely colleagues, in fact one of my two or three favorite people involved with the school, struggled with this concept. She struggled with this concept for two reasons: 1. She has a tendency to make mountains out of the proverbial molehill. 2. She had her fair share of sangria, or wine, or beer, or the gross liquor somebody else brought. This affected her despite the fact that she has often bragged on her ability to throw 'em back and tolerate pain killers and the like, to the point where she says she can't get knocked out in the dentist's office.
Regardless, any good party needs a performance like this. She slogged through the game, adding to our collective knowledge of the game, since after all, when you have to teach something, the process allows you to understand it better. Later, she gave me the most intimidating, "I really care about you," speech I've ever had in my life, considering I did nothing wrong to spur it on. And she left her forks. And couldn't remember how she got home. You see? That's how to throw a party.


A First Guest
Also at this party and assisting in its preparation and ultimate success was Dan Fox. Fresh off the Birthright trip, he and a friend stayed at our place, in that ample living room, for a while. His friend left on Wednesday night, and though Dan made efforts to get out of town that night as well (though Lord knows why when he could stay with me), he stuck around until Sunday night.

Besides doing a fine job as visitor, lounger, and party helper, Dan also filled a key role in buying challah on Friday. Challah, the lumpy sweet Jewish bread, is only made/sold in the stores here on Thursdays and Fridays. I always forget on Thursdays to buy it. The Friday before this, I ran to the store after getting dropped off at home (by that same colleague/friend mentioned two paragraphs up, actually), to just make it before the store closed at 4. I bought a loaf and, along with my roommate, we nearly finished the thing that night. This time around, Dan kindly bought us three loaves; two for the party, and one to eat straightaway. The loaves were not a hit at the party, but they did provide me with the carb part of my lunch today, so that's cool.

The other thing Dan did was accompany me to wrestling practice. Boris loved him, though it wasn't clear if Boris realized Dan was an actual, good wrestler or not. Probably because Dan was incapable of athletic gymnastic movements beyond the diving forward roll.

Anyway, on his last night in town, Dan went with me to a practice, with the plan to go straight to the airport from there. As fans of general hygiene and not getting anymore ringworm (though my number is at arba or hamesh these days), we showered after practice. Which led to the following...

Our Man showered in the small toilet/shower stall. It was lit, but not extraordinarily well - it was in the basement of an athletic complex in Israel.
As our man lathered himself up in Selsun Blue, he heard some giggling. Obviously, with a park and a bunch of other sports going on around him, he could expect that youths would be merry. He proceeded to lather and rinse.
As he lathered and rinsed certain areas, he noticed the giggling increased in volume. He also noticed that there was light coming into the shower area from a slatted window. Could there be a connection between the giggling and the light? Nah. But as he turned off the water and bent over to pick up the Selsun Blue container, he did notice that the giggling was female in nature.
In the locker room next to the shower stall, he consulted with his friend. Could it be? "I don't know, dude, I think it might be."
Our Man, getting a kick out of this situation, made sure to go through a long, careful drying process. After all, no one wants to get their clothes wet when driving to the airport in humid Tel Aviv nighttime weather. And to find out whether whatever was going on behind that window (there was one in the locker room as well) was related or unrelated to his actions was also on his mind.
And so, as Our Man and his friend conversed in English, and Our Man dressed, he began to hear words from above that sounded like, "Go, Jeff!" Quite confusing considering no Jeffs were around.
But just as Our Man was ready to leave, the giggling from above coalesced to a question. "Hey, gorgeous," went the cries, dotted by, "What's your name, gorgeous?" Our Man, after a moment's thought, responded, "You guessed it, well done!"

Unfortunately, his friend gave the more correct, less interesting answer, "Dan." And they left, never to run into those gigglers.


Around the ol' Office
There's also a job I'm doing here. If you don't know it, I "teach" at the American International School here. As the intern teacher, I T.A. in a couple of classes (so far the highlight has been teaching the Senior Project class about citing sources, since AIS's school website links to Duke's, and teaching the AP US History class about the Revolutionary War battles, which I muddled a little bit but mostly got right), co-teach a class on Study Skills (a subject I'm less than passionate about, so imagine how 9th graders feel on it), and sit around a lot.

Ok, technically I'm the tutor, which means I make myself available for students who want help in class. Business is slow. The highlight of the business is that I made a sign for my computer that says, "The Tutor is IN" in Lucy fashion. That draws a chuckle from just about everybody. But very little business. Fortunately, I'm not paid by the client.

Four other things to note about school -
1. Most of my students call me "Mr. Schwarznegger," and then feel really clever about it. Sigh. One calls me "Superdude", actually, which is somewhat different.
2. My soccer players have figured out my secret - I'm not very good at the sport. Still, I do push ups with claps behind my backs and beat them in a lot of the sprinting, so I maintain their respect.
3. There was a big fight that rumbled into one of my colleague's classrooms (actually, also the same colleague who amused during the Apples to Apples game - sometimes she is dealt with actual mountains), and it featured one student strangling another. Sounded pretty funny, anyway.
4. Despite the fact that the strangler is on our soccer team, the squad as a whole has proven my long held prejudice - soccer players are generally pretty wimpy. Oh well.


That's all for this blog! But in the weeks to come there's plenty of excitement - a school field trip to go rappeling near the Dead Sea, a five-day weekend for Rosh Hashana that I might use to go to Jordan, a certain stop sooner or later in Jerusalem, and potentially more guests, more parties, and certainly more excitement and stories to tell! Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!
[ /shtick]