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Published: April 18th 2012
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The life!
Sunsets in beautiful Cádiz So I got to Málaga finally. So far, so good. No major catastrophes.
I met my host family who I'll be staying with for the next two weeks and got stuck into my next book, "The Pilgrimage". Another of Paulo Coelho's titles. Well actually I started that a few days ago when I was back in Cádiz.
Cádiz was great. I suspected I would like staying there after stopping for the afternoon in the car on my way to Sevilla. In fact I'd got to Cádiz a couple of days earlier than I'd originally planned as Semana Santa in Sevilla just became a little to difficult for me to digest and finding places to stay was always a pain. Plus, I had really wanted to couchsurf my way through Sevilla, but that didn't happen at all despite all the requests I sent in the two weeks beforehand.
Rocked up at the backpackers in Cádiz just in time for the 6:16pm sunset tour (no they really are not that particular about time. It wasn't until sometime after 6:30 that we actually got going). So I said "sure, sounds good". It's easy to walk the length of Cádiz old town in about half an hour, but naturally we meandered a bit, making the obligatory cathedral stop, town hall stop, old cathedral stop and recently discovered roman theatre stop.
We visited the narrowest "street" in Cádiz (about 700mm wide I'd say at a guess. If you can call that a street). At one end of this street is a tavern which used to be a pub-cum-whorehouse once upon a time. A cloaked individual would come out of this narrow street and visit the whorehouse on a regular basis for a drink and/or some relaxation in one of the rooms upstairs. Another patron followed this cloaked individual one time and discovered that they returned to the bishops residence which was located at the other end of this street. Not wanting to imply what they did not know for sure, the people of Cádiz simply referred to this person as "The Goblin" and so the name of the street became known as the goblin's street.
We made it to Caleta beach, the great talking point of Cádiz where Halle Berry's "famous" (I don't remember it) scene leaving the water takes place in the Bond film, "Die another day". It was just before 9pm on a spectacular day and we got to see the sun set into the Atlantic Ocean. Perfecto!
Back to the hostel via the supermarket for a quick dinner before taking off on the Pub-crawl. (Bad idea just quietly. Next day was a write-off).
Did some surfing in Cádiz. I'd always wanted to, but my board in Newcastle was way too difficult to learn on. Stood up once on my own by the end of the first lesson, so was feeling pretty good about myself and went back for a few more goes in the following days. Can stand up semi-regularly now, just need to work on being faster, steadier and more consistent.
Great nights chatting with people from all over the world over a few drinks. Kept the rooftop terrace open past the usual closing time of midnight a couple of nights so we could say "Happy Birthday" to some people having birthday's while we were there.
On the Saturday night the night before leaving for Málaga, I couldn't help heading out on the pub-crawl once more. Some people are in the slow-learners group. I'd said I'd take it easy, but was having a good deal of fun and before I knew it, I was getting back to the hostel at 7am again with a train to catch at 11:30am and having not set an alarm. We played some team games at the first couple of pubs we visited too and on this particular night, we actually had enough to make a team of Australians. Some Sydneysiders currently living in London had rocked up and bolstered our hostel numbers to seven. We killed it!
Got woken up by the cleaner at 11:15am wanting to change my bed since I was already meant to be checked out! Still in my clothes from last night, so no worries there. Toilet stop. Fastest packing in my life. (No I hadn't already packed). Clothes, shoes, power cords, camera, passport etc. Forgot some food that was still in the fridge. Fastest checkout ever known to man out the door at 11:22 and running to the train station with one big backpack, one small backpack and two plastic bags with everything that I couldn't quickly fit in my backpacks because I hadn't packed properly. Fortunately I HAD bought my train ticket the day before, so no worries there. On the train with 2 minutes to spare. Perfecto!
Sleep.
And so when I arrived in Málaga and had done a bit of walking to get to my host family's house, I was once again a little weary. I thought I just needed to sit and rest, maybe read a little, but apparently my body had other ideas and I drifted to sleep. But I did make it to dinner at 9pm. That by the way is normal dinner time here.
Up at 7am the next day. Breakfast at 7:30. School by 8am.
I'm hoping my time at this school will help me get a little more out of my time in Spain. It is such a strange and sometimes frustrating feeling when you cannot talk with someone and for some reason I tend to feel a little arrogant for coming to another country and not really being even vaguely conversant in the language. I'm still trying to work out what importance language has in communication. Everyone always says that communication is more than just words and I believe this. Nevertheless, it is really hard getting to know someone without words. Perhaps unless you have quite a long time with that other person.
I was sitting on a wall back in Cádiz a few days ago with a wetsuit on and a surfboard beside me. I'd been out surfing and was getting tired and lazy and so wasn't concentrating and was struggling to catch waves. It was about 6:15pm and time to call it a day. The owner of the shop "Willy", closes his shop in the afternoon as many shops in this part of the world do. He was due to re-open the shop at 5pm, but for some reason the shop was still closed. A girl in her 20s arrived and started asking me questions. In Spanish. Often I will try to see if there's anything that I can understand from the person speaking to me, but if they don't speak English, they will normally quickly give up and walk away as soon as they realise I don't speak Spanish. But this girl hung around and we talked. She asked me if I spoke French and I asked her if she spoke German. My German isn't very good, but it's a whole lot better than my Spanish and I prefer my chances of carrying a conversation in German. Failing this, we returned to speaking in my broken Spanish and her broken English. Initially it was very difficult, but as we both came to terms with the situation and began to be patient with ourselves as well as with each other, we discovered we could remember some words and could actually find out some things about each other as well as talking about surfing and Cádiz. But ultimately, there was an end to what we could say without repeating ourselves and we had to contend with looking out on the Atlantic Ocean until Tamara finally decided to give Willy a call. She's a surfer herself and needed something from the shop. Willy, still having a siesta, apologised profusely and quickly made his way down to the shop so I could have a shower and get changed, by which time Tamara was gone.
Looking back, that was a very cool moment. Perhaps there will be more if I can just get a little bit of a grasp on the Spanish language.
¡Adios!
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