Man, THAT was a long, strange few days. Everyone seems to be feeling the weirdness that's walking the world right now 'cause vibes of all kinds shot off in all directions all week long.
In particular, the vibe in this week's classes got a little complicated, especially the classes taught by Rocío, an instructor I've previously spoken well of. The details aren't important; suffice it to say she was on a tear and it wasn't pretty. She's on vacation for the next two weeks, so the end of today's session saw general celebration all the way around.
Classes with Pablo remained absorbing in that he's a good instructor, and is also a complex, distinctive enough individual that observing him is interesting all by itself. His classes, the session after the morning break, are 30 minutes shorter than the morning session, so he moves at a faster pace, pushing us harder, possibly trying to fit two hours' worth of material into 90 minutes.
There were only three of us in class for most of the week -- myself; Megu, the 20-something Japanese woman who's headed to Sevilla to study Flamenco dance until June; and the 30ish French guy, Javier. Both good souls, both interesting people.
Apparently, Megu is not an isolated instance of a Japanese woman studying Flamenco -- she says she encounters many others in her classes. Though there are a surprising number of Asians hanging about Madrid, Japan is not, in general, a country one hears a whole lot about here, so this bit about Japanese women and Flamenco came as news to me. I've been told the Japanese do well with Castellano because the Japanese vowel sounds are identical to those in Spanish. That at least is what Pablo once said in class -- for all I know, he could be lying through his slightly goofy teeth (keeping in mind that I'm not one to talk when it comes to teeth that, as a group, are a bit off their axis). All I know is that I've enjoyed the Japanese students I've met here. They're intelligent, with active minds and lively senses of humor. Megu herself is a sweet, smart, pretty individual, and I'm glad to have had a couple of weeks in her company.
Likewise with Javier. I've enjoyed the French folks I've met here. To a person, they've had a great sense of humor, and, they speak, it goes without saying, an outrageously beautiful language. I won't even get into the subject of French women.
Likewise, by the way, re: the Italians I've met here. And the Canadians. (For that matter, I think I've enjoyed virtually every single Canadian I've ever come across. Don't know what that means, but there it is.)
But I babble.
The landlord came by for the rent Tuesday night, at which time he also put some shelving up in the hallway closet here.
Yet another interesting character, my landlord -- an American married to an English woman (both English teachers, both living here for nearly 30 years). Gray, tousled hair, glasses, a great smile and laugh which can disappear with disconcerting suddenness, then reappear just as abruptly. Probably in his late 50's, in good physical shape -- verging on, though not quite, burly. Old enough to have two kids, both 20-somethings. When I first called about this piso, I spoke to his wife via her mobile phone, an intelligent, friendly woman who talked a lot. When I arranged to come see the place for the first time, it was he who was to meet me. I arrived, rang the buzzer -- nothing. Did it again. More nothing. Waited across the street for five or ten minutes, people passing by, neighborhood life going on all around. But no one matching the description his wife had given me entered the building. I called the Mrs., she couldn't tell me anything -- far as she knew, he was up in the flat. For the hell of it, I tried the buzzer again. More nothing. Finally, after twenty/twenty-five minutes, just as I was getting ready to leave, I heard someone calling from the small, tinny speaker above the apartment buzzer buttons, a crackling, disembodied, trebley voice repeating, "Hello? Anyone out there? Hello?" I answered, he let me in. When I arrived upstairs, he told me that immediately before I first hit the buzzer, a huge, spraying water leak had erupted in the kitchen. He'd found himself wrestling with that when the buzzer sounded. Between trying to locate the flat's water shut-off and cleaning up a small inland ocean in the kitchen, he didn't even try to answer my summons.
Once inside, I looked around the place, getting good feelings, but felt the need to make a slow, deliberate decision, even if that meant the flat went to someone else. The landlord was not only fine with that, he took a bunch of time with me, didn't press me to hurry, and gave me no heat whatsoever about wanting to take time with a decision. Promising.
When I called back, it was to ask if I could see the piso again. They were working around the space and let me come up, spend at least an hour, feeling the place out and bothering them with questions of all sorts (them showing huge reserves of patience). And then they let me leave AGAIN without coming to a decision -- the kind of behavior that should make one eligible for sainthood. Next time I called, I took the place.
During that process, the wife offered to put some shelves in a large hallway closet (more accurately, she made the offer that her husband would put the shelves in), something that sounded better and better as I transferred my life here, began dealing with the reality of storage space. They regretted making that offer, I think. But damned if the guy didn't say he'd act on it when we spoke at the beginning of this last week. Tuesday night, he showed up with his son, a phys. ed. instructor at the same school in which the father teaches English. Next thing I know everything's out of the closet, they're in there whaling away with an electric drill, a process that seemed to shake the entire piso. After a couple of hours of molar-loosening racket -- them managing to drill through the living room wall only one time -- I had some sturdy shelving, which eliminated a couple of piles of dreck that had been lurking in different corners of the bedroom.
The downstairs neighbor met them on their way out with a stream of unhappy Spanish, spewed at such velocity that I could only pick out the occasional few words. Venting, maybe, about the unexpected festival of construction noise.
And that was the week: classes and new shelves. Life seems so simple when boiled down to its cardinal events like that, doesn't it?
~~~~~~~~~~~
A t-shirt seen near here today: a picture of Moe's bar with the caption TWO BEERS OR NOT TWO BEERS.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Two mornings ago, I woke up to find that the wall across the narrow street from my building had been stripped of posters once again by the City of Madrid. By the time I returned from class that day, the repostering had commenced. By yesterday morning, the wall had nearly been covered over again. ("En concierto: O'FUNK'ILLO, Sabado, 6 Octubre"; "En concierto: BARON ROJO (Red Baron)"; etc.) Today, post-classes, the second generation of ads were well underway, someone with a bucket of paste and a roll of posters smearing some up over some of the first generation of ads.