I like to dancing

The week in La Alberca on the exchange program went by quite quickly and, strangely, also felt like an eternity. We spoke in English, ate ham, drank wine, danced, played, went on excursions and napped. The group of Anglos consisted mainly of retired people but they weren´t all without their particular brand of charm. There was the alcoholic newscaster from the Maritimes, an old lady with a tatoo who turned out to be a little dim upstairs, the woman who lived in Bahrain for 25 years and never learned Arabic, the man with a prostetic arm, the lady traveling with her mother who was not only a monologuer but also a chain smoker who, every once in a while, would start a hacking, phlegmy cough without covering her mouth. I really thought I was going to get a slimy substance propelled at me from her side of the table a few times. Sadly, there was also a woman dying of cancer. This I didn´t learn until after the program ended from Maria Jose, one of the Spaniards. On the non-retired end of things we met Michelle, a wacky Australian, who in a past life had worked on some ´dicey´movies and also done a few episodes of Neighbours, Liam who was as proud a Scotsman as any and Doug.

Everyday someone would come up to me and speak rather slowly. It always took me a moment to catch on that they thought I was Spanish. At the end of the program an exceptionally old woman came up to me and told me she didn´t get a chance to speak to me. I told her I wasn´t Spanish and she just kept speaking slowly to me, so I repeated myself and then she just stopped talking mid-sentence when she realized what I had just said. Cathy was on the market for a Spanish stud and said ¨I haven´t done him yet¨ pointing at a rather young man and then to me ¨and you, of course.¨




The schedule for the week was busy. Days started at 8:15 with a wake up call and then 9 with breakfast. Attendance at mealtimes was mandatory. We went straight into one-on-one conversations at 10 through 1pm and then had a group meeting until 2pm. Lunch started at 2 and we were given free time until 5pm. More activities followed in the afternoon until dinner at 9pm. After the first day most Spaniards were wiped out. They had to speak in English the entire day without stopping.

The program coorinators Jez, Erika and Sabela had it pretty hard. Their days ended after we went to bed and began before ours. Peter, the Dutch bartender, was happy to have a week off partying. Apparently the other groups for this program are party animals. Usually the median age of the English speakers isn´t 70 as it was this time around.

My first one-on-one was with one of three Rafael´s. I don´t remember if it was Rafa H or Rafa B or Rafa S. Rachel nicknamed him Movie-star Raf. We chatted for a bit about his bike trip in the States and he proudly showed a picture of his kids and his bike. The hour went by quite quickly and then it was on to Carlos, a rather unusual Spanish engineer. He seemed a bit grumpy and sarcastic. He hinted that his wife was a mama´s girl. He told me he hated Madrid, a city he had lived in for the last ten years. Upon arrival at the venue he had threatened to leave immediately when he saw the group of elderly Anglos I was told. Over the course of the week it became quite evident that the man was completely unhappy in his marriage. Any jab he could take at his wife he would. We´d say something like ¨Do you think Spanish women are beautiful?¨ He´d answer ¨All Spanish women are beautiful except for my wife.¨ One evening at the bar he just blurted out ¨All Spanish men have 2 women. They have a wife and they have a girlfriend. I do.¨Rafa, the man that made me touch his golfclubs in the parking lot, disagreed. Most of the other Spanish men I asked also didn´t agree with Carlos....

Isabel was a rather, uhm, butch lady. Her hobby was collecting American army vehicles. She fixed them up with her son, the only good thing to come of her marriage. She hates her son´s girlfriend of five years intensely. She hasn´t seen her ex-husband in 10 years but is still married to him. She said she refuses to get divorced because she wants to make sure that she never gets married again. After all, you can´t marry if you are already married. She also hates Muslims. All of them. In one of the exercises we had to choose people to come on our ark. Among the list was a man named Abdul Bedouin, a medical doctor. She just flat out refused to get on an ark with a Muslim man even if he was the only medical doctor on the list. That was charming. She was funny though in her own flannel shirt, straightforward no bullshit way.


I soon figured out that most Spaniards don´t look kindly upon Muslims (or Moroccans) and Gypsies. It seems to be sort of universal for the Spanish people of this program to dislike these two groups. I thought Isabel was strange but I guess she was just less PC about the whole thing.

On the second day of the program word got out that Chris was nearly impossible to understand. We had a few accents in the group. Even the accents that I thought were understandable, like the Boston accent, threw some of the Spaniards for a loop. Chris asked Javier about some photos and after repeating himself three times Javier just turned to me and asked me to translate. Javier had a few stories from his university days. He was a political prisoner who fought against the Franco regime. His wife was a diplomat who had also been jailed several times in her early twenties.


The cutest of them all was Andrea, 22 years old, tall, beautiful and completely lost in the English language. Andrea has a job interview in June. In English. She couldn´t even keep a story about Harold´s Chicken straight. Doug explained to her that there was 2 inches of bullet proof glass between you and the person behind the counter from whom you ordered your chicken. Andrea looked at Maria Jose completely confused. He explained again. Then I tried. Maria Jose was in tears laughing. In the end we let Andrea believe that in the States you go to Harold´s, choose a chicken and the lady behind the counter then shoots it with a semi-automatic before deep frying it for you. I wish her luck on the interview.