Idyllic Days: Another Perspective

Eating tapas
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When I stepped off the airplane and onto scorched pavement of the Jerez airport, my body involuntarily responded. Like the morphing car of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (a wonderful children’s movie, for those who haven’t seen it) or a seventh Power Ranger, I felt an undeniable reformation in response to the new environment. My skin tingled and my fingertips hummed. My pores were sucking up fresh, honey-colored sunshine, and I could almost sense the black bikini in my suitcase lifting a strap in interest like an antenna. Within seconds, I had entered full vacation mode.

The place I cut my hair
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I’ve never been anywhere exotic before. My family never takes vacations, and my closest encounter with palm trees was the deformed willow in the backyard of my childhood home. Thus, when the headmaster of my Welsh boarding school announced a period of time without classes – a ten-day stretch called “Project Week –“ I was elated. The sun hadn’t yet set on the summer season, and if I was clever, I could end up with fairly respectable sunburn at the end of ten days.

"We inhaled Cådiz like foreigners, but felt far less guilty about it than we had tanning on the beach."

The beach
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The day after the announcement was made, my friend and I booked bargain airfare to Jerez de la Frontera in Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain. We justified it by enrolling in a fledgling language school, Campus del Sur, for five mornings of semi-intensive Spanish and then began ticking off our supply list: towel, sunglasses, flip-flops, tanning oil, etc. We imagined ourselves perpetually stretched out on a seashore in a distant somewhere, flipping through magazines (en español, if we were feeling especially ambitious) and scanning the horizon for cute, Spanish surfers. We took a bus to London-Heathrow Airport and exuberantly boarded the tiny airplane with only the clothes on our backs and a shared duffel bag.

In what felt like a blink of an eye, we landed in a new country. A short bus ride later from the city center and we arrived at our final destination – a youth hostel in Cádiz, España.

It took a total of two hours to realize that laying on the beach when in Spain was about as fulfilling as eating soup with a grill spatula. You couldn’t surround yourself in a culture that rich and expect to be content with doing banal, stereotypically “tourist” things. So, we didn’t. We folded our beach towels and tucked them in the closet for “sensible” use (two afternoons of our visit, we did pull them back out) and covered our bikini tops with T-shirts. We walked out into the city center of Cádiz and began to explore.

They say Cádiz is the oldest city of Spain, or even maybe of all Europe. It was settled by the Moors coming from Africa (Morocco is just across the water if you look south), and continues to retain vestiges of that long-ago colonization. For example, despite its reputation for being a thoroughly “Catholic” country, many residents of Cádiz are practicing Muslims. Their food reflects more of the Mediterranean diet- oils, grains, fish, and olives- than of general European cuisine. (In fact, I flipped idly through a grocery store advertisement while waiting at a bus stop, and found five pages out of eight showcased variations of olive oil.) The people even retain a depth of skin tone, a bronze-cast on medium complexions. Spain, particularly its southern region, feels a bit like Africa in Europe.

The first few days, we followed the brochures. We obtained advice from a bilingual woman in the information office (which, I must report, was located conveniently in the center of the city, portside) and then acted on it. We trekked to the cathedrals and the towers, the free admission museums, and the dock of bustling activity. We inhaled Cádiz like foreigners, but felt far less guilty about it than we had tanning on the beach.

By the third day, we had made the acquaintance of some of the local people. Antonió, offered to take us for tapas in the evening with his brother, sister, and friends. We starved until ten in the evening (the typical dinner time) in anticipation of what Antonió promised would be a feast. He did the ordering for us, and I found myself quite content snacking on “picos” (little sticks of bread) and sipping carbonated red wine. I was, in fact, nearing saturation when the waiter approached with a stack of ten white plates. He set one before each diner, and then retreated back into the kitchen. When he returned a final time, he brought with him an entourage. The tapas seemed to sprout from the tablecloth and expand into all crevices- between my elbow and my neighbors, stacked on top of the near-empty bread bowl. There were anchovies soaked in vinegar, ham slices drizzled with salsa and mayonnaise, fried tuna fillets, potato cubes stirred in a thick, rust-colored sauce, and moistened red pepper slivers stretched out horizontally. I waited a moment for Antonio to demonstrate the proper etiquette- at home, we would have lifted one plate at a time and passed clockwise in this formal environment. Instead, Antonio initiated the meal by plunging his fork into the closest platter and dragging an anchovy sloppily onto his dish, leaving a trail of vinegar across the tablecloth in its wake. The rhythm thus established, I moved my hand and the fork attached from one platter to the next. My plate was never occupied with more than two bite’s worth of food. When the tapas were gone, I could feel their solid mass in my stomach. I took a final sip of my wine and leaned back. Antonió had mentioned the regularity of this type of eating, but I wondered: who could do this every night?

Fortunately, we ate a smaller dinner the following night – and in a slightly different locale. We had walked to the new town, the strip of Cádiz where the tourist concentration began to thin noticeably and the nightclubs to thicken. Far fewer signs were in English.

We ventured into several bars before we found one that we felt comfortable in. It seemed vaguely British in layout, which I suppose shouldn’t seem that remarkable. There was a horseshoe-shaped counter in the front and a line of three pool tables in the back. We witnessed the game of a self-pronounced “pool champion” through the frosted glass of beer mugs (the drinking age is eighteen here, as in most of Europe). We chalked the purchase up to a cultural experience- while in Cádiz, we have even seen fathers walking the streets with one hand balancing a small child and the other encircling a can of Cruzcampo. The beer was served chilled and with an inch of head. I nodded approvingly, although I didn’t have the slightest idea as to how beer should arrive at your table.