Spanish sabbatical, with a side of bread

Today, I’m interrupting the week-by-week roll out of Princess’s adventures (as well as mine and Ana’s) through Baja because I want to talk to you about Spain.

Or, more precisely, bread in Spain.

Try as I might, I cannot escape it. The smell of fresh baked bread wafts through the streets each morning as I make my way to my rented desk at Arcadia, the co-working office where I spend my days. (Yes, I know. Now you want me to talk about the desk. We’ll get to that. I promise, but right now—bread.) It permeates the air around the almacén (bodega) that I pass by as I return home each night. And even when I try to escape it, when I purposefully make a light dinner—salad, chicken breast, water—avoiding all inclusion of the mega carb, there’s Dani, looking at me like I’m nuts. (Yeah, I know. Now you want to know about Dani. We’ll get to that as well.)

“¿Y el pan?” he says. “¿Dónde está el pan?”

“We’re eating too much bread.” I reply.  

Again, the look of “¿TÍa, etas loca? (No, I’m not crazy.)

And finally, the inevitable “Voy para el pan.” (It doesn’t matter if he gets the bread. I will not eat it I think; I will not eat it.)

But then it’s there, warm and toasty on the table, tempting me to abandon the light fare and indulge in what, at a minimum, will be my fourth piece of bread for the day.  Surprise, surprise. I always eat the bread.

What’s important about the bread, however, is not the pounds I’m piling on with each bite. What’s important is that I forgot about it.

***

Spanish life surprises

Despite previously living in Spain for two years and a handful of visits since then, I forgot that in Spain bread is breakfast—tostada con aceite y tomate (toast with olive oil and tomato). It is the required compliment to your sizable lunch. And you would never leave it off the dinner table. Obviously, I’ve tried.

It turns out that living abroad, even in a place I’ve lived before, even for just a few months, is just as surprising and humbling as it ever was.  

For example, this Saturday there was my mad rush to the supermarket when Dani reminded me that it would be closed on Sunday. There was not much food in the fridge. “Huh, cerrado?” was my reaction. Again, no response from Dani. Like el pan, he just put back on his “¿TÍa, etas loca?” face, because why would the supermarket be open on Sunday?

Then there was the chicken. Walking into the house after brunch on Sunday, I was overwhelmed by the smell. Acrid, rotting. Something in the fridge was bad. I sorted through the vegetable drawer, checked out the cheese, and then it hit me. The dates are written differently in Spain—day/month/year not month/date/year. So no, the boneless, skinless chicken thighs that I was going to cook for lunch didn’t expire on the 10^th. They expired on the 8^th. In a matter of moments, the fridge was poultry free.

There were Auxi’s—a coordinator at the language school where I’m taking classes—profuse apologies for contacting me at “estas horas” last Friday to verify that I was good to go for class on Monday. Of course, it was fine to contact me that time. Why would I care about the hour? It was only 2 p.m., not midnight. Oh, exactly. It was 2 p.m., the start of siesta. The sacredness of which has apparently been lost to me over the years.  

These little moments and a million more like them are punctuated by the sheer difficulty of expressing my thoughts and needs as I’d like to. While I’m better off than I was the first two times I came to Spain, I’ve had years to forget so much of what I once knew. The result is a seemingly unending string of referring to everything as “la cosa” (the thing). Asking whoever I’m speaking with if “me entiendes” (do you understand me), and then stopping mid-sentence, asking for a minute or 10 to think, because there’s always some way to say what I want that is just beyond the tip of my tongue.

So, with all this humility and these mini shocks, I suppose the logical question is why am I here? Why, after two months traveling around the country, confronting something and someplace new every day, am I in Spain shocking my system all over again? And, while we’re at, for goodness sakes, I’m on sabbatical. Why am I also in an office?

Why Spain?

There’s the easy answer to those questions and the hard one. Easy first. I’m here about a boy. As we established back at Glacier, it’s always about a boy (or, more broadly, significant other). His name is Dani, and he lives outside of Seville. We’ve spent the last 16 years as ex’s, friends, long-distance correspondents, and the last year wondering what things would be like if we were in the same place. So here we are, in the same place, seeing how it goes for a while. That’s its own little adventure. A whole blog unto itself.

Now for the more complicated answer. The one that’s rooted in why I took a sabbatical and what I’m hoping to accomplish with this year in the first place.

Once this year is over, I need to go back to work. And while I’m not sure what work looks like (Will I go back to law? Try something different?), I am sure that working is the easy part. It’s easy for me to lose myself in the priorities and demands of a project, a purpose, a litigation schedule. It’s far harder to balance that with anything else in life. So, I took a sabbatical to get some rest, see and do some new things, but also to reset my ability to balance, which had flown way-way-way out of whack.  

Spain, with its sacred siestas and supermarket-less Sundays, is not a bad place to do that. In fact, I’ve spent a couple of well-balanced years here before. So here I am, testing out the Spanish life as I try to work my way back from complete highway vagabond to reasonably balanced working adult. That’s also part of why I have the office. I have personal projects that I need the space to work on and think about; job research that needs to be done; and a visceral need to feel like I’m not just on another sightseeing trip around Southern Spain. (Don’t get too worried though, I will be doing only that next week. Balance.)

Why now?

It was always my intention to spend the first part of the sabbatical learning new things, seeing new places, and traveling my head off. And then to use the second part of this year—let’s call it Sabbatical Phase 2—to stay home (wherever I chose to make it). Sabbatical Phase 2 is about the more mundane things like cooking dinner (and not over a single propane burner or on the back of the Jeep); reading books; going to the gym; using a planner (there’s a long story here, but I really enjoy using a planner, and I haven’t in years); cleaning out my personal email Inbox (I have over 40,000 unread messages); being bored; and thinking about what comes next.

Why not?

That I get to do it in a place where my midday, morning, and nightly walks take me past hidden and not so hidden corners like these:

Or might involve a flamenco show . . .

And not one, but two, excellent glasses of wine, cheese, and some limoncello that the waiter “invited” me to (e.g., glass 2 and the limoncello were free).

Well, olé!

I’m excited about Sabbatical Phase 2 and all of its surprises, indeed.