September 14, 2005 - 7:39 p.m.
Learning Spanish in a Hostile Situation
I just woke up from a nap that was recovery from a busy day. My first activity upon waking was to recount to Rob my crazy dream. He told me to write it here, and since I hadn't written recently, here it is.
Background:
Back in 1998, I studied Spanish in Granada, Spain. It was one of those experiences where I was too shy to really get a ton out of my host family situation. My host mother was a slightly overbearing single mother of four adult children who still lived with her (as is typical in Spain). I did learn some good recipes from her. She knew how to feed a crowd cheaply!
The Dream:
Inga and I decide to go to Spain to brush up on our Spanish. We go to Granada and end up placed with my old host mother. Instead of timidly working through a sentence, I was rattling them off right and left, bemoaning my vocabulary losses in the 7 years since I had been there. One of her sons came by and we chatted. Meanwhile, Senora fed Inga and me an omelet for dinner, not terribly satisfying, but in true Senora tradition, cheap!
After dinner, Inga and I decide to take a walk. This is where reality and my subconscious really take divergent paths. We walk to the center of town then turn right around and walk back to the Senora's. There's a weird flat-faced lizard (like a Persian cat has a flat face) in a fountain in front of the Senora's apartment. Inga and I stop to check this thing out. It seems to have a pleasant personality at first, but it doesn't take to having a camera shoved in its face, and it then turns nasty. I have to throw it up into a tree to get its jaws unlatched from my arm. We continue our walk.
A few blocks down, we come to a market. The market looks like the vendors didn't do much to secure things for the night. Vegetables are still in their bins. Jewelry is out and cursorily covered by plexiglass for protection. Tapestries still wave in the breeze. Things are getting strange. We pause at an intersection to get our bearings. Two men rush up to us with complex flashlights that initially resembled guns. They shout at us that the Senora is worried about us and that we have to always let her know where we will be. Terrified, we walk back to the Senora's. She's not that worried. Things are amiss.
The next day, I get online with my laptop to look into car rentals. While I'm on, a virus wipes out all my files and replaces them with mundane things. I'm pissed.
We determine that all the language schools in Granada are a front for a drug-smuggling ring. My dream ends with a sense of panic that Brokedown Palace seems to evoke. I've never seen the movie, but the end of my dream had that Southeast Asia-smuggled pot into the wrong country-now sentenced to 5 million years in a bad jail-sort of feel.
That's all. I hope Inga reads this and gets a kick out of it. Back to reading 17th Century British Lit for me.
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