Casual Meetings

For the private English lessons that I teach, I go to the students' apartments. One of my students, Cristina, is in her mid-thirties and guides trips for German and Spanish tourists (she speaks German too). I always enjoy our lessons because her English level is advanced. We sit for two hours a week and discuss whatever we want--sometimes it's about Spanish history, sometimes about the pro's and con's of bilingual education, and the latest, this Monday, was about the TV series Homeland and the media's obsession with vampires. Good stuff.

Anyways, it is about a 20 minute walk each way from her piso to mine. Along the way are numerous restaurants with their tables spilling out into the sidewalks. There is also this little section of metal booths and venders--mostly selling hippy jewelry and leather accessories. After my lesson with Cristina, I was perusing around here when two men who own one of these venders started a conversation with me, because, as the rightly guessed, I am not from around here. One is from Ecuador and the other is originally from Cameroon.

Even though I had no idea who they were 1 minute ago, we passed by most of the standard small talk and went straight into talking about serious issues. Like love. Like happiness. Like belief in afterlife. Like the right to bare arms. Like women's rights (well of course). They poured me out a beer from their storage of Cuzcampo 40s and we debated whether true happiness was possible without a partner, the nature of Latin American men and the best places to live as a woman. The man from Cameroon said that he used to want to move to America, but now he doesn't because from an outsider's perspective, the US is very violent. In Spain, on the contrary, people do not have the right to bare arms and do not have access to guns. The man from Ecuador is a classic romantic. He said he doesn't think one can be truly happy without a partner. He has been single for two years and is in search of a tranquil, strong woman to complete him. I stood outside at their counter for a good hour or so chatting. By the end of this hour I knew I had to get home to have some dinner and it was only then that I found out their names: Victor and Gaspar.