Making Friends Abroad

Making Friends Abroad. Living in Spain this year has made me wonder about this a lot. My assignment here is long enough that it was either make good friends or bust--8 months is too long to skate by with provisional friends who you like enough to go out for drinks with here and there but then get your real sustenance from Skype sessions and funny facebook interactions with your 'actual' friends back home. Establishing solid friend relationships was one of my top priorities when moving to Spain and is one of the several reasons why I elected to live in Huelva capital rather than Lepe, where I actually work.

There are many different perspectives for this topic. On one hand, someone may say that the friends they made abroad are the closest friends they have. There are certainly a lot of reasons for this. One of the more logical reasons why someone may feel this way is the principle of having things in common. It is indeed more likely that persons who seek out working opportunities like teaching English abroad may have a set of personality traits in common that can facilitate friendships between themselves; maybe they are more adventurous, creative, uncertain about their future, curious, academic... Another dominant reason why someone may feel as though their closest friends are those they made while being abroad has to do with the condition of living abroad. For most, taking a job abroad is to uproot oneself. Uprooting is an act of severance, severance from a working and living environment that is easier for us to become part of the fold of. It's an act of severance, but for all us working abroad, we have all severed and now we are all together in this severed state. (Let's see how many times I can say variations of "sever.") This connects back to having something in common, I suppose. But the point is somewhere a bit different. The point is more that those of us who chose this lifestyle (for however short or long) are all put into this strange situation together. It's a classic movie plot: usually two people, however unlikely they are as friends, are put in an extenuating circumstance (they are forced to collaborate to win a championship, to appease a friend, to defeat an evil guy, etc...) and by the end of the movie, through all of their trials and tribulations, they are friends and probably lovers too (because romance sells--I don't mean to take the comparison so far as to say that you become lovers with most of the people whom you meet aboard haha). It's not difficult to imagine my point, as it's certainly not original to my mind; people put in a situation that may be a little bit strange and uncomfortable are bound to make meaningful connections together. Perhaps vulnerability has a role here: (I can't speak for everyone but..) we all made ourselves vulnerable by leaving our comfort zone to be abroad, most of us are starting from scratch in a new place, and we all want friends and don't want to be lonely. It's an understanding from the plane that we are on and we are all eager for meaningful connection...and with so many people around each other who are eager, connections are bound to be made.

And yet.....there are some things that make these connections a bit weak. I know that I have made great friends here, ones that have taken care of me and seen me in some of my ugliest states. The only little thing comes to mind as evidence to a possible weakness in my friendships here (abroad) is what happened before Christmas break. All my closest friends and I were feeling homesick, we all were succumbing the the wintertime slump of work and we were all notably anxious to get home to our family, friends and familiarity. We (mentally) checked out of work, we checked out of taking care of ourselves, and in some ways, I feel, we checked out of each other. We hung out, but partially as a distraction to last us those last hours before returning to our 'other lives.' This may have been an isolated circumstance though...I don't know. Vulnerability rears its pretty head again...Are you willing to open up and expose yourself to those whom you know your time with is fleeting? Is the authenticity of our friendships jeopardized by the very thing that may have

been the reason we are friends, that we are in this extenuating situation together? Does that make our friendship less organic? Would we be friends if we met each other in a different life situation? Can one even measure the 'authenticity' or 'organic-ness' of a friendship? Does one even give two shits about that as long as one has fun and someone to hand them a tissue when their crying and their nose betrays them with endless running snot? I must say that I don't know...

Little Day Trips: El Rompido

One Sunday a few weeks ago a friend of mine who grew up in Huelva suggested that we get out of the city for a few hours. He said he was going to surprise me with where we were going. We ended up driving through El Portil, a small beach town that gets really crowded in the summer. A lot of Spanish families (including Miguel’s) have two apartments or houses—one inland in whatever town they work and one in some beach town for the summer. The effect is that these towns are very empty and quiet in the winter and crowded and lively in the summer.

We continued on a beautiful scenic road that runs along the coast to an even smaller beach town called El Rompido. We stopped here, checked out the lighthouse, walked through town, wandered onto a dock and had a café at a little bar that was on the beach. There is a string of small restaurant/bars along the quiet beach. A lot of the chairs and tables are actually on the sand, which I thought was pretty cool. 

I really liked El Rompido. It was quiet and quaint. Miguel said before it became a more popular beach getaway, the town was only fishermen. People still live in the old fishermen-style houses; they are small, simple one story houses all attached in a seamless row. The beach is very calm because the waves are blocked by a narrow strip of land called La Flecha that comes off of the mainland and curls back around some distance out, stretching along across the length of the coast around El Rompido. La Flecha is really pretty and I was told it is a great place to hang out and camp, as the small beaches are more secluded. The beach of El Rompido is littered with little fishermen’s boats turned over, as they are not in use.  As we sat having our café con leche, some little kids lumbered up over, stood atop and slid down the sides of one of these boats playing some imaginary game—extremely peaceful. I think out of the ones that I have visited El Rompido is my favorite little town around Huelva.

Today in Mazagón

I had an inspiring day in a little seaside Andalusian town called Mazagón. Two friends and I who didn't have to work the first half of the day wanted to make a little excursion. It's about a forty minute bus ride from Huelva.

Upon arrival we tried our best to locate the tourism office, which due to nonsensical Spanish signs it took us a good few minutes even though we were standing right in front of it. We were given a map and some information. The map showed the center and there were 5 sights noted on the map as things to check out in Mazagón. The first was the faro (lighthouse) but it was small, plain and underwelming. The second was a military barracks. We had some trouble finding it because actually all it turned out to be was a cement block covered in graffiti in the middle of an abandoned, semi-wooded lot. A homeless person or two had obviously claimed it as theirs. The third "site" we went to visit was a house built along the beach some ways away from the center. It's over 100 years old (quite young in the European sense of old) but it was fenced in and locked up. So really, not much to see. The cultural highlights of the town were pretty bleak...however, I did start this post off by saying I had an inspiring day in Mazagón so I should get to that part of the story.

The best part of the day was the long walk we took along the beaches to the right of the town to get to the house. These beaches were almost completely deserted. Some rough chaparral flower bushes dotted the beach close to the coast line and there were a lot of cool sea shells that had been stuck and cemented together in layers with other shells over time. They looked like little sculptures. I took a few. My favorite thing about the port and the beaches was all of the old boats. They were scattered about turned over and tied up haphazardly about the beach, their paint faded and chains and anchors rusted. Some were clearly abandoned as they were moss-covered old wooden boats rotting away and filled with sand. These made for some great photographic material. There was also other nautical junk like splitting ropes and lonely buoys scattered around. The whole scene had a grungy, old-rustic nautical feel that I love.

At the beach in February

Even some of my Spanish high school students have stopped to ask me about the crazy weather that is happening in a lot of places in the US this winter. Mom and Dad have not been enthusiastic about how often they are shoveling the driveway these days. However, here in Huelva, the winter has been extremely mild (at least for my standards). Of course no snow. It has been off-and-on overcast/rainy and clear skies. We had a few cold weeks in the fall in which our non-heated apartment was pretty nippy. That being said, save for a few isolated cold nights, it hasn't been bad at all this winter, I rarely feel really cold. At night it drops to low forties and in the day it gets into the high sixties sometimes (even into the seventies this week!) Needless to say, it has been a pretty good contrast from what's going on in the US--at least from my side of the globe. This is a picture I took from our balcony on a particularly clear day.

Anyways, the weather was nice enough that some friends and I could enjoy the beach while wearing a few layers. We packed up a picnic lunch and headed off to a secluded area of the beach on a February Sunday. To get to this section of the beach you have to walk on a boarded sidewalk that winds through a sandy woody area and then the dunes. It was beautiful. 

We had a lovely time lounging and drinking wine on the beach until the wind became cold enough that we retreated to a more sheltered spot in the dunes. I actually liked this best--we still got to hear the constant pulse of the crashing waves and feel the sun but we were tucked into the dunes. Dunes are really cool places. Limbos between land and sea. Though it was only a silly little excursion with friends, I had a faint feeling of being somewhere exotic and uncharted. No one was about and we stayed chatting, sipping on wine and relaxing until after the sunset. 

A Me Date

The other day, I took myself on a me date to a small town outside of Huelva called Palos de la Frontera. It is another one of the small towns around here thats claim to fame is how Christopher Columbus spent time there and sailed out from around there. I knew there wasn't much to see in this town, but I wanted to take myself on a little trip and walk around leisurely, and that's just what I did.
The town was quaint. The center was very small, I walked around for almost two hours, wandering random streets and sitting to rest in small squares and plazas here and there. Like most small Spanish towns, there were a lot of pretty balconies with hanging potted plants and cool tile decorations. I am still charmed by the white and beige geometry that is the architecture of Spanish towns in Andalusia. All of the houses and apartments are painted white to reflect the sun and keep the insides cooler. Generally, everything is rectangular and palm trees sprig up in plazas and along streets. Some people find this monotonous, but its so different from what I'm used to that it seems exotic and interesting to me.

The highlight of Palos is definitely the church. It's old, and supposedly Columbus spent time there. The church's steeple bell tower is checkered blue and some storks have made their nests up there. I sat on the stone wall in front of the church for a while. The church is on the edge of town and beyond it the land slopes downward so you get a great view of the fields that surround the town for miles. I usually forget how much a miss farms and countryside until I see them again. Although definitely significantly different, this landscape reminded me of the views of sunny quiet farms back home.

Las Sierra Nevadas

During our stay in Granada, my friends and I traveled out of the city to a small town on the edge of the Sierra Nevadas called Monachil to go on a hike. Monachil was quaint and it's winding streets and houses tucked into the hillsides make you think you could take a romantic getaway there. We walked to the entrance of the national park and in. We first hiked/climbed a steep trail up to a view point where we got to see how beautiful the place is. The rough rocky surface of the mountains is exposed in many places and the foliage consists mostly of stiff bushes and trees. Some of the trees had changed colors at this point, giving the mountain sides and gullies an orange and yellow cover.

We wondered around the sides of small mountains and down through the gully where the path consisted of a thin elevated cement surface clinging to the side of a rock face that rose up and above while a small river flowed by about a story down on the other side. The walkway was so narrow at some points that we had to shuffle sideways and stop and reverse when someone was approaching in the opposite direction. The rock face also leaned over so far in some places that we had to get on hands and knees to crawl along. There was also a rope bridge! A freakin' rope bridge! This was my first time traversing one of these. A small line of people piled up on each side as only 4 are allowed on the bridge at once.

About 3 or so hours in we climbed up another ridge to steal a good viewing spot for our lunch. After this we hiked back down and began a long loop back on the other side of the ridge. Here, the winding path was much wider and we were up high enough to get some impressive views. I made sure to take a rock from the gully below and leave it at the highest point I reached here (a cool habit I picked up from one of my former anthro professors). We wandered through an olive grove and followed haphazard signs back down into town where we enjoyed a drink or two before heading back on the bus to Granada. It was great to be out in the nature as I have found I do not make a lot of time for this in Huelva while I am on my teaching schedule. We didn't last very long in the nightlife that evening with our tired limbs.

Papa Noel y Año Viejo

Most of my friends and I traveled back to our home countries for Christmas. Before left Spain, in several of my classes at the instituto I gave presentations on Christmas in the US and we talked about the differences between that and Christmas in Spain. One of the main activities for Spanish families on and around Christmas is to make a belén, or nativity. The belenes are a very big deal here. One of my students even said that he and his family go to the beach and lug buckets of sand back to their house to make a belén the size of a kitchen table out of it. At all the little Christmas markets you can find nativity figurines.

When I asked most of my young students at the Instituto what they wanted Santa, or "Papa Noel," to get them for Christmas, an IPad was definitely the most desired item. Also, a lot of the older students at the instituto told me that they rented a house together as a class to stay and party at over the break with no supervision! These are 16 and 17 year-olds! My parents would have never let me do this at that age. Lucky kids. Although, it is not too surprising--I have found that, in general, there is a lot less adult supervision over kids and teens in Spain than there is in the US. Also, drinking isn't as taboo (if at all) in Spain as it is in the US--drinking accompanies every major religious holiday and celebration and 'underage' drinking isn't really a thing. Drinking is more publicly sanctioned and in the open, and therefore is not seen as a big deal like it is in the US.

New Years Eve is called "Año Viejo" (Old Year). I talked with one of my adult students at the academy about how he celebrates this in Spain. Most eat dinner with their family and then go to be with friends later in the night. No one really starts drinking until AFTER midnight, which obviously is a huge difference, as here in the US everyone is usually already trashed when the ball drops. In Spain when the bell tolls midnight there are 12 strokes. On each stroke you are supposed to put a grape in your mouth--so 12 grapes. I asked several people "why the grapes?" and each just said that it was tradition. My student said that by the end of the strokes everyone is usually in fits of laughter with their mouths full of grapes. The secretary at my school asked what tradition we usually uphold when the clock strikes midnight. I told her that by then everyone is usually drunk and it is tradition to make out with someone standing near you. Ah well haha. Merry Christmas from the family!