Cultural exchange

A few years back, a friend of mine told me about a neat online community called Couchsurfing. Essentially, the concept behind Couchsurfing is that it connects travelers with other people who are interested in travel and cultural exchange in such a way that they can safely meet up and share what they know about an area. The crux of the entire network is real contact and the option to host a traveler if they are traveling through your city – meaning that you actually trust another human being to come in and sleep in your home.

It sounds pretty sketchy, I know, but there is a reference and verification system that keeps out people who aren't Couchsurfing material and allows hosts to pick and choose their surfers. So it's really quite safe.

Growing up, we are always taught not to talk to strangers, not to trust people that we don't know well; it makes sense because of course they could be rapists or murderers or thieves or drug addicts. Then again, what we fail to realize is that there are a lot of really wonderful people in the world and the person you are hosting in your home is infinitely more likely to be interesting, kind, talented, wise, or fun. The wonderful thing about Couchsurfing is that it allows people – no, forces them – to break the mold of the things we are told in life not to do. It makes people step outside of what may be comfortable and easy for them and look to the world of incredible people who have something to offer in exchange for a little hospitality.

Here in Almeria, we have had one of the best Couchsurfing experiences. By chance, my housemate, John, had searched in Almeria to see who was on Couchsurfing in the area, and came up with a guy named Alex that was very cool and eventually offered to sort of show us around the city.

Last night, we met up with Alex and a Canadian traveler that he is currently hosting and went to a rooftop barbecue at one of his friend's apartments. There were several Germans there who are living in Almería while working on their theses on solar energy, a few Spanish people, two Americans, and a Canadian there, and it was a wonderful time filled with good food and drink.

Today, we went out to a bar in the night life district of town with a few of the same folks, and had a great time at a bar that was for some reason Chemistry-themed. They had a periodic table of elements hung on the wall, loud music, cheap drinks, and horse races playing on a television. C'est la vie, as the French say.

Anyway, just goes to show you that sometimes meeting strangers isn't all panel vans and roofies. Sometimes, it can actually be quite rewarding.

Signing off,

Blake

Less than a week in Almería, and we already made the news.

Yep, it's true. We got featured in the newspaper.

Here is the link.

Use Bing translator if you don't speak Spanish.

Much Love,

Blake

Una loncha de jamón

We've been all kinds of busy here in Almeria. While in Spain, we are doing as Spaniards do: walking around the city, feeling the nightlife, eating tapas, going to the beach.

One thing that is very popular here in Andaluz (for those of you who don't know, Andaluz or Andalusia is the southern region of Spain which includes the cities of Granada, Malaga, Murcia, Cadiz, and several others) is a cured ham leg that is sold pretty well everywhere that comes bone-in, still looking about like it did when it was attached to the pig. Our wonderful host family brought us a truck load of groceries today, including one such leg of ham (quite a generous gift, actually, as they cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 125 euro.)

Anywho, after watching an informational video on how to prepare el jamón, we began to slice away at it to make some really wonderful tapas. We ate it with some local cheese, bread, olives, and our homemade sangria. I could get used to eating like this.

Here are a couple of pictures that I have managed to snap around town. Disfruten!

The picture at top is my housemates and I sitting under our new sunbrella at Playa Ciudad Luminosa.

Some street art near the beach. Most of the graffiti in town is just people tagging buildings with their names, but there are a few places, like this one, where someone has actually put some work into creating something nice.

A view of the beach at Playa Ciudad Luminosa.

One of my housemates, John, chilling on the beach.

A view from the bridge that crosses over the train tracks in the center of town.

El estación de tren in Almeria.

July 1, 2011

After going out for some late tapas last night and walking about the city a little, we spent the last parts of the evening relaxing on our third-floor balcony. The view of the Mediterranean is somewhat obstructed by another building and the fact that our balcony faces the wrong direction. So, basically we can’t see the sea at all.

This morning we woke up early and caught a bus up to campus. After aimlessly wandering about the campus in search of a room which we were not sure existed, we found where we were supposed to be and met the other ISEP students for orientation. We had an orientation ceremony, complete with a local news crew to film us, a desayuno of bread with tomato juice and olive oil, and a meeting with the people in charge of our program. We spent the morning on campus touring the facilities, seeing the sights, and finally taking an extremely hard Spanish placement test to find out which classes we should be taking. After being ravaged by the test, the lot of us got on the bus and headed back to the hotel that several students are staying at, which we have made sort of the headquarters of the whole group.

We walked back to our apartment from the hotel and took lunch and a siesta. Since we had no means of communication with the rest of the group and we wouldn’t be seeing them for class again until Monday, we made plans to meet up with them later that night.

These plans were interrupted when John’s wife came into town via bus, but we went over to the hotel a little later but found no one there. So the four of us (John, his wife Melissa, Jackie, and myself) decided to explore a little. We found a tapas bar on the waterfront and had cervezas and tapas there. We had planned to find a corner store, buy some wine, and drink it on the beach, and that is exactly what we did. Eventually, I decided that I really wanted to go swimming, because, let’s face it: how often do you get the chance to swim in the Mediterranean? So John and I stripped down to our skivvies and jumped in the water. Before long, the warm water had enticed Jackie and Melissa to follow suit. The four of us walked back to our hotel soggy and a little barracho.

When we got back, we got a facebook message from the group at the hotel saying that they were ready to go out, so John and I left the girls to sleep and headed that way. We left the hotel with a group of nine and walked through the streets looking as American as possible, eventually stopping at some sort of underground nightclub. We left there in search of more relaxed and inexpensive accommodations and and eventually found a tapas bar that allowed us to eat and drink on the street in the company of a large band. We had a good time there, but then parted ways and headed back to our housing.

Tomorrow is Saturday, and we don’t have any kind of excursions planned. We may head to the beach with the others or we may go to a region called Cabo de Gato, a sort of wild beach about 15km away for a day of hiking and swimming. Who knows?

It is now 3:20 am here, so I should probably be headed to bed before too much longer. Buenas noches!

June 30, 2011

Arrived today in the beautiful Spanish city of Almeria. Everything went surprisingly quite smoothly, considering that my plans began with “Fly out unprepared to a foreign country with an unfamiliar dialect of a language that I don’t fully comprehend… be sure to switch airline carriers somewhere along the way so as to add confusion and possibly even a taxi ride to a different airport…”

Somehow, things seemed to work out just fine, though, and I arrived in Almeria on time and with a couple of new friends. I met a woman named Faith on the flight from Evansville, still a little misty from the goodbyes of the day and struck up a conversation there on the plane. She was a nice older lady with a wonderful story to tell and a dream to write a book. At the Atlanta gate, I gave her a hug and my business card and told her to look me up if she ever felt like it. I then enjoyed one of Nathan’s famous hot dogs during a multiple-hour layover in Atlanta.

Our flight out of Atlanta was delayed two hours after we had already boarded the plane because of some mysterious defective part that had gone awry. While replacing it, they were forced to turn off the air conditioning so we got to sit there steaming for a while before we got on our way. People were getting pretty angry but they finally cleared us for takeoff and served a late dinner in the air before everyone settled down to sleep.

Eventually, we landed around 11:00 in sunny Madrid and disembarked there. I had a few adventures in that airport, but nothing that kept me from making my flight. Most notably, I was outsmarted by the door to the bank trying to get money changed into Euros, so I now am walking around with something like two hundred dollars of useless American dollars which I like to call my “emergency fund.” I’m going to try to get it changed at a bank here in Almeria. In the meantime, I came prepared with a little bit of viable currency, so I won’t starve while I am here.

From Madrid, I boarded a Ryanair flight to Almeria, and sat next to two other Americans on vacation to some sort of arts retreat or something, but they seemed to be pretty engaged in one another, so I went ahead and let the jet lag take me under. I woke to look out my window and see the beautiful Almeria coast line coming up at us, and a few minutes later we were on the ground wishing we had already joined the group of people windsurfing in the Mediterranean in the distance.

I met one representative of my host family at the airport and she drove us back to our apartment while speaking thick Andalusian Spanish. I mostly just nodded my head and occasionally would ask a random question when I thought of one. Jackie, another student staying with us was raised bilingual in Spanish and English, so she is handy to have around when the Spanish gets to be too much. Then we also have John, who has been traveling around Spain with his wife for about a month now, but is a part of the same program that we are in.

I later found out that we are not as much living with a host family as we are living in an apartment, and we have a family that comes and hangs out with us. They are fantastic, although I haven’t caught all of their names. Maria del Mar was the one that picked us up from the airport. Her sister (whose name none of us seem to be able to pick out) is married to Jose Maria, and they have two sons, Jose Maria (who is about two), and a quiet little baby who goes by “Na-na.” Maria’s mother also spends time with us.

Things are going well so far. We’ve got some sort of class in the morning to give us an orientation to the city and the program. Should be good. I’ll keep you posted as much as possible.

With Love,

Blake