Granada, and the final day of a three month vacation
On Saturday morning in Madrid I said goodbye to my brother, gave him a hug and dashed off into the early morning metro in hopes that I would have sufficient time to catch my train to Granada. Of course I made it and had a fairly uneventful six hour trip through the hills and mountains of southern Spain until finally arriving in Granada at 2:00 PM. It felt good to be returning to a city that I knew, and was confident in. It felt even better to retrieve my stuff from the school and to be reunited with a large selection of CLEAN clothing, my laptop, and free wireless.
Tonight I will catch the last bus from Granada to Malaga, and then head to sleep and hang out in the airport until my flight leaves tomorrow morning. I find it hard to believe that in less than 24 hours I will be reenter the Anglophone world, where I will be returned to a completely different type of struggle with communication. One that is centered on subtleties and shadings rather than on verbs, adverbs, nouns, adjectives, and conjugation.
It is very surreal for me to be sitting in the same little classroom in the same little language school in Granada that I was sitting in six weeks ago struggling to learn about the uses of haber, the various tenses, tricks, and basics of Spanish, or more precisely Castellano. In this moment it is clear to me that my perception of time is anything but linear. It is as if the last six weeks of my life have occurred simultaneously in six years, and in six seconds. In that time I have spent four days in Barcelona (which I hardly remember), and walked from Roncesvalles, in the Pyrenees, across 800 kilometers of northern Spain to Finisterra, literally "The End of the World," on the Atlantic coast. Faulting about 26 kilometers from the Spanish border with France I have walked all of the way east to west across a European country....
When I first told my brother that I was going to be blogging about my adventures in Spain he was very encouraging. He told me about how he had always struggled to tell people about his experiences abroad and that perhaps with this blog I would have an instrument to help tell my friends and family about what I had done. I am not exactly certain if I have accomplished this or not. In the last several weeks I have found it extremely difficult to type anything at all. I think that the last three months, and especially the last six weeks of the Camino have had a great impact on my life, but how am I supposed to communicate an experience that is so important to me to anyone else? It is not something which I can translate into any sort of equation, and is definitely beyond my meager skills of composition. My brother has also written a blog about his time in Spain with me at http://kevinmtrowbridge.blogspot.com/ Personally I think that he is a much better writer than myself, and if you choose to check it out I think it gives an interesting perspective on traveling in Spain, and on traveling with me :-D.
Wish me well for my greater than 24 hours of accumulated travel time to return to K-zoo. I will see all of you soon.
Besos y abrazos,
-Jason
Tonight I will catch the last bus from Granada to Malaga, and then head to sleep and hang out in the airport until my flight leaves tomorrow morning. I find it hard to believe that in less than 24 hours I will be reenter the Anglophone world, where I will be returned to a completely different type of struggle with communication. One that is centered on subtleties and shadings rather than on verbs, adverbs, nouns, adjectives, and conjugation.
It is very surreal for me to be sitting in the same little classroom in the same little language school in Granada that I was sitting in six weeks ago struggling to learn about the uses of haber, the various tenses, tricks, and basics of Spanish, or more precisely Castellano. In this moment it is clear to me that my perception of time is anything but linear. It is as if the last six weeks of my life have occurred simultaneously in six years, and in six seconds. In that time I have spent four days in Barcelona (which I hardly remember), and walked from Roncesvalles, in the Pyrenees, across 800 kilometers of northern Spain to Finisterra, literally "The End of the World," on the Atlantic coast. Faulting about 26 kilometers from the Spanish border with France I have walked all of the way east to west across a European country....
When I first told my brother that I was going to be blogging about my adventures in Spain he was very encouraging. He told me about how he had always struggled to tell people about his experiences abroad and that perhaps with this blog I would have an instrument to help tell my friends and family about what I had done. I am not exactly certain if I have accomplished this or not. In the last several weeks I have found it extremely difficult to type anything at all. I think that the last three months, and especially the last six weeks of the Camino have had a great impact on my life, but how am I supposed to communicate an experience that is so important to me to anyone else? It is not something which I can translate into any sort of equation, and is definitely beyond my meager skills of composition. My brother has also written a blog about his time in Spain with me at http://kevinmtrowbridge.blogspot.com/ Personally I think that he is a much better writer than myself, and if you choose to check it out I think it gives an interesting perspective on traveling in Spain, and on traveling with me :-D.
Wish me well for my greater than 24 hours of accumulated travel time to return to K-zoo. I will see all of you soon.
Besos y abrazos,
-Jason
posted by -J at 3:24 AM
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