¿Nomad?

Gallery: Walks around Úbeda

tk — Sat, 3 Mar 2007 08:57:00 GMT

Gallery: Amigos de Úbeda

tk — Sat, 3 Mar 2007 08:53:00 GMT

Gallery: Carnaval Lights

tk — Sat, 3 Mar 2007 08:49:00 GMT

Gallery: Castle

tk — Sat, 3 Mar 2007 08:45:00 GMT

Snowy City

tk — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 13:39:00 GMT

This week was my first of six weeks of intensive study at The Abadat School of Language and Culture http://www.abadatescuela.com in Úbeda, Andalucía (southern Spain). There are only three other students here right now, and only one other person in all of my classes. I have grammer class in the morning with Toni, a new teacher, and conversation class after that with David, one of the founders of the school. Those go from 9:30 to 1:00, and then twice a week we go on a walk to visit places around Úbeda, and David explains the history and significance of those places. Then I have a Spanish History class from 4pm to 6pm. I really like David, he is a great teacher, and he makes history really interesting and explains it really thoroughly. I´ve noticed my Spanish improving some this week, but it has been hard because I´m learning some grammer rules that I had never learned before. I think of my Spanish as a building that I keep adding on to, and there are some fundamental gramatical concepts that I should have put into the foundation that I didn´t. So now I am going back to the foundation and carefully removing my habitual ways of talking and replacing them with the correct ones, and making room for new ones. It´s a challenge to say the least. Another challenge is that the accent here is very different from the Latin American one that I am used to hearing both in Central America and in the States. The province of Jaén where we are is known among Spaniards as having an especially thick and hard to understand accent. The accent includes the dropping of the ´s´ at the end of words that end in s. Thus instead of saying ´gracias,´ or ´adios,´ or ´mas o menos,´ or ´buenas noches,´ they say gracia, adio,ma o meno, and buena noche. These are just the most common examples, but there are many more words that I have heard before, and that I know, but that I can´t always understand when they come out of the mouth of someone from here. Luckily my teachers don´t do this since they aren´t from here.

I´m living in a third floor city apartment with Clea, my friend Marie, and a girl named Jackie. We all go to, or used to go to Evergreen. I have a nice room with a balcony that looks over the city and out to the surrounding olive tree orchards and mountains. Look at the Úbeda photo gallery to see the view. We have a small kitchen, which is nice because then we can save money by cooking all of our meals with food that we buy at the local market, including great sausages and cheeses (Manchego..mmmm). The only thing that is not ideal about the apartment is that all of us tend to speak together in English, thus limiting the amount of time that we could be practising Spanish. We do talk in Spanish some times, but I would like to do it all of the time, but it is hard because we can´t talk as fast or clearly as we can in English. I thought of changing to a homestay to remedy this and immerse myself more, but the only one that they have is a family of people that smoke inside their house, which is not appealing to me, especially for my health. I don´t think that it would be worth it, and I also like living with friends, and it would be much more expensive to do the homestay...

It snowed more than 6 inches here this week, but most of it has melted off. It only snows here once a year, so people aren´t prepared with proper shoes, and they don´t know how to drive in it. I laughed when I saw many cars with chains on in very little snow because I am used to driving without chains in a lot of snow. I guess it all depends on your experience and perspective. I had a few snowball fights, which was fun, and I liked the way that everything looked so different covered in snow.

I was feeling a little alone last week because I hadn´t met anyone from Úbeda yet do to spending all my time with my roomates and at school. So I was happy to go out to some bars with my roomate Jackie on Friday night. Jackie has been living here since September so she has quite a few friends who she introduced me to. Most of them are between 18-20, and very nice and fun, but some of them are really hard to understand. I am slowly taking in this small city, and letting it take me in as well as I explore, meet people, and learn more about the Spanish language and culture. I´m still not used to kissing women on the cheek when I meet them or say goodbye, and I have instinctively shot out my hand in greeting many times, which only made them feel awkward because they are so used to kissing on the cheek. And when we do kiss on the cheek I feel awkward because I´m not used to doing that with strangers nor friends.

Gallery: Úbeda:Town, School, Snow

tk — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 06:16:00 GMT

Snowing in Spain

Gallery: Úbeda: The Apartment

tk — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 06:13:00 GMT

where I live now

Gallery: Son Rullan: The People

tk — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 06:10:00 GMT

New friends from around the world

Gallery: Son Rullan: Landscape and Monastery

tk — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 06:05:00 GMT

La isla de Mallorca

Gallery: The Faces of Megan

tk — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 05:42:00 GMT

an artistic study

Sunny Island, Mountain Paradise

tk — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 07:49:00 GMT

I haven´t updated this page in so long due to being busy working, traveling, studying, and having fun. But now after my first week of language school I have the weekend off, and thus time to upload photos and write. I´ve added photos from my visit to the Island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean, funny pictures of my friend Megan, who I was travelling with, and photos of Úbeda, where I am now, and where it snowed a lot the past two days. I never thought that it would snow while I was in Spain, but alas it has, and I quite like it, despite not being completely prepared clothing wise. It was hard to adjust to because I had just been on sunny and warm Mallorca wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and swimming in the mediterranean the week before.

The second farm that we went to didn´t end up working out for very long. Kate, the farmer had said yes to too many people, and thus felt overwhelmed with the amount of workers she had, and asked us to leave if we could. We wanted to leave anyways because we weren´t working harvesting olives, just clearing out blackberries and a plant much like Scotch Broom that I started calling ´Spanish Broom.´

I broke up with Eliza at that second farm. I could go into more detail aboout my reasons, and my feelings, but I don´t feel like this is an appropriate place to do so. This was a very difficult ending to a relationship, especially since we were travelling in a foreign country, which is a situation that can make or break a relationship, and I believe that it was one factor that led to us breaking up.

After leaving the second farm Eliza went back to the first one, and Megan and I flew to the island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean to wwoof with our friend Clea at a farm at an old monastery. We were going to take a bus all the way to the farm/monastery, Son Rullan, which was about 30 minutes north of Palma, but Henar, who works at Son Rullan, happened to be doing some errands in town and she picked us up at the bus stop. Megan and I drank really strong coffee at the cafe in the bus station while we were waiting, and got really cracked out. Look at the photos of me with a sign that said ´Henar´ that I made out of a napkin. Right when we were about to give up on waiting we saw a beautiful Spanish woman wearing dark sunglasses enter the bus station with a cute little dog in her arms, and it turned out to be Henar. Her dog is named Linda (spanish for pretty) and looks kind of like a chihuahua, but is actually a type of dog that is native to Mallorca. Henar took us to her car, helped us shove our backpacks in, and we zoomed off on the streets of Mallorca talking a mix of Spanish and English about Son Rullan, Mallorca,nature the language of Catalan and it´s Mallorquin dialect that is spoken there in addition to Spanish. We went to the Spanish version of Home Depot, bought some gloves, and then escaped the city and headed for the mountains.

Once Megan and I arrived at Son Rullan our jaws were dropped for about two days due to the beauty of that place. It is an amazingly beautiful monastery from the 15th century with many floors, rooms, decks, windows...and the best of all was the fireplace. Instead of having a fireplace that has a fire in it, while you sit outside of it, at Son Rullan the fireplace is a room with benches around the edges, a giant chimney for a roof, and a campfire style fire in the center, surrounded by stones. It was amazing, like an indoor campfire all of the time. I don´t have any pictures of it to show you, but I´m going to aquire some from Clea to put up her. Check out the other pictures that I put up of Son Rullan, I made one gallery with photos of the surrounding land, views, and house, and another with pictures of all of the people we made friends with who lived or worked there. Like Alex, a film director from Madrid who is renting a room in the house while he works on writing two scripts. And Oliver a funny chap who lives in Copenhagen, but was born of German parents, and had an English accent. Oliver is living at Son Rullan and doing work trade. It was fun hanging out with both of them because they were both very funny, and nice to us.

The woman who owns the house is named Sybilla, but we never met her. She is apparently one of the most famous fashion designers in Spain. Her niece Monica, and Henar are the people that work for her to take care of the house, organize everything, arrange events like weddings, and manage the work traders and wwoofers like us. Our work boss however, the guy who told us what work to do was a really tall Nigerian named Everest. Everest was awesome, and super relaxed. He showed me how their small olive press works.

Most of the days we were there we worked moving stones from an inside storage area to piles outside. It was hard manual labor, but it felt so good to give back, and to trade my energy in exchange for being able to stay there and eat good food. We usually worked 5 hours in the am, and had lunch at 2pm, and then the rest of the afternoon off. The food there was really good, and included meat which gave me more energy than the food of the previous farms. Even though we weren´t harvesting olives since the harvest had been finished in November, it was still an amazing wwoof farm, the best of the three that we worked on.

In the afternoons we would hang out, go on walks, read, nap, talk, and relax. Our first night Henar took us to a bonfire party in the center of the nearest town, Deia. There were tons of people of all ages there, free food including many varieties of sausage that we roasted on barbecues made of kegs cut in half. There was also bread that we would smother with olive oil, toast on the barbecue, and squeeze and mash tomatoes onto with our hands, mmmm... And free wine too. It was a great way to end a long day of travelling and celebrate our arrival to Mallorca.

On our last day Henar took Megan and I to a secret nude beach on the mediterranean and we went swimming. It was the first time that I had seen the mediterranean up close, and swam in it. It felt so good to immerse myself in that cold water that I had been looking at all week from up on the mountain, and then to lay out on the rocks in the sun, in January! That night Alex made a great risotto dinner, we drank wine, laughed and enjoyed the company of new friends that we might never see again. It seemed like we all became close very fast, and I felt like we were a little community for that week. Son Rullan has definately been the highlight of my trip so far, and I plan on going back to work there for a week or two in April before returning to the states.

On the day of our departure Clea and I sadly packed our backpacks and reluctantly hoisted them onto our shoulders as we walked away from one of the most amazing places either of us had ever been, and from some great people that we would never forget.

Gallery: Second Farm

tk — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 02:01:00 GMT

what the hell´s a blog?

tk — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 23:05:00 GMT

Hello Friends and Family,

This here is my first ever blogamajig thingy, and I thought it would be a useful format for keeping in contact with you`all while I am in Spain for four months. In addition to stories I plan on putting photos and audio that I´ve recorded up here. I also want to keep it personal so if you comment, or write me I will make sure to write you back.

I´ve been in Spain for over a week now. I flew from Seattle to London, and then London to Madrid and arrived very tired from not having slept enough. My first night I found a bed in a hostel, met a Mexican guy named Al, and went on various Metro trains underground. Al and I went looking for the three kings parade, which is a huge event in Spain, and is celebrated as the time to give gifts instead of Christmas. The three kings throw candy from their floats. When I saw a bit of it on TV a king was hit in the face by some candy that someone apparently didn´t like.

The next day I took a bus to Granada, and then a bus to Orgiva, which is pronounced or-he-va. Orgiva is a small town up in the Alpujarra mountains that has attracted many hippies, and new-age aficianados. The place is overrun with British people and other ex-patriots, and I´ve come to discover that Spain is kind of like the sunny California, Florida, or Mexico of Europe in terms of tourism and retirement. Many Brits are driven to escape the rain and cold like I have and come to Spain for the warmth and sun.

Mathis, a german who has founded a farm here picked me up on his motorcycle and I rode up with him to his farm to meet his wife Mariane and then to surprise Eliza and Megan who were sleeping in the yurt. Mathis and Mariane met while living at the Findhorn community in Scotland and they decided to move to Spain because it had better weather for farming. They grow olives for oil, and harvest oranges which they sell to CSAs around Findhorn. They have 3 kids, Bierta 11, Milan 10, and Florina 2. Bierta and Milan are already trilingual. They speak Swiss-german with their mother who is Swiss, german with their father, and English with the wwoofers and at their Waldorf school. They are also learning Spanish, and are all blond.

Everyday we would have breakfast at 8 or 8:30, then pile into the giant blue ¨lori¨ or as we Americans call it, ¨truck¨ and we would drive down to a farm closer to town to harvest olives. The couple that owned the farm are British and were to busy to harvest this year since they sell real estate and have a business helping foreigners move to Spain. I quickly learned the trade of olive harvesting, which is basically laying out big screen nets under the trees and then violently whacking and shacking the branches and olive clusters with long (7-15 foot) bamboo poles, thus making the olives fall on the net. One could also climb up into the tree to shake it and whack from a different angle. There were many jokes going around about putting your long stick into the bush and shaking it... Then we would gather up the olives in the middle of the net and sort through them picking out the twigs and leaves before putting them into a crate.

In addition to Eliza, Megan, and Mathis I was working with a multilingual woman from Holland named Anna, who had been a shepard in Israel, and rode elephants in Africa to look for poachers. And I also worked with a couple, Tony from Ireland who does Ear acupuncture, and Vicki who taught us many cool british slang words like ¨Mingin¨ which means someone or something that is very ugly and smells bad. We taught her the word ¨Bangin,¨ as in ¨Man that olive tree is bangin.´¨ They both live in Glastonberry Orgiva´s hippy sister-city in England. Tony gave us Ear Acupunture on our last day.

One hard thing about that farm was that the food was mostly vegetarian, and for breakfast and lunch consisted of thick multi-grain bread with toppings of avocado and tahini. Dinners were usually very good though. I often felt protein deficient though. Another thing that´s been a challenge for me is that I have really bad Hay Fever allergies here, mostly due to the olive trees I think, because it was worse when I was up in the trees amongst all of the dust coming off of the leaves.

Yesterday we left La Jimena and Mathis´s family and went one ridge over to another wwoof farm, where we will be for a week. This farm is owned by an older queer woman from London named Kate. She has been living here for 11 years, and also sells her olive oil in the UK. She seemed a bit gruff and stressed with our arrival, mainly I think because she already had four other wwoofers there. But two are leaving today, and then we have the weekend off and start working on Monday. Kate has already harvested her olives so we will be working on building projects and other things, which should be a nice change. I´m excited about learning different building techniques, especially the stone buildings that the moors built which are still here. I also will be able to take care of Kate´s white donkey ¨Burra¨.

Eliza and I are staying in a small moorish stone hut by a Eucalyptus grove and a creek. Yesterday I heard the sound of many bells ringing, and I thought that it was people playing music, but when I looke out across the canyon I saw a giant hurd of goats! They and their shepard came down to the creek and I went out to greet them. The shepard had an awesome mullet, and seemed like a metal dude. He told me that he had about 100 goats mas o menos, and a few sheep. He also had four dogs. Many of the goats had very full udders....mmmmm goat milk....

That´s all for now, check out my pictures in the photo gallery, and keep checking for updates. I´ll write you back if you write me.

love,

Tyler

Gallery: La Jimena

tk — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 23:02:00 GMT

First WWOOF Farm