Wet Laundry

Just a Song Before We Go

(Our sincerest apologies for not having blogged in forever. Here are the excuses: 1) We've been busy with travels & family/friend visits; 2) We've been very focused on planning said things PLUS our imminent exit from Spain; 3) Facebook ate our homework. We may or may not go back and recap our trips to Barcelona, Oxford and Morocco and our visits from Dad & Arelys, Brian & Christina and Autumn. That's life.)

Fast forward to 2009. We have four days left in Granada! People have been asking us how we feel about leaving, moving back, etc. Here's my take.

A Year in Spain

Nov. 16 marked the anniversary of our arrival in Spain, and we passed the day in the same style as a year ago: sick with colds. Had I not been feeling so crummy that I failed to even notice the date, I might have at least appreciated the full-circleness of it.

Fall Recap

Signs of fall around these parts are different but unmistakable. It's less leafy than Vermont or Michigan but more drastic in its temperature swing than San Francisco. The endless evenings Spaniards relish and foreigners envy shrink at a rate that reminds me that we are indeed hurling around the sun in a elliptical path, and on the fast slope toward cold. The general falliness reminds me of—and makes me homesick for—Ann Arbor in a way I haven't felt in a really long time. The garden is yielding the last of its bounty as the remaining tomatoes struggle to ripen between shorter sun hours and increased rainy or cloudy days, the last of the fall lettuce has bolted and the peppers turn deliciously red.

Yom Tov in Sefarad

(Boy, it's been so long since I've written in this thing, I almost forgot my password!)

L'shaná tová from Sefarad. While there are many fewer people offering that traditional New Year's greeting today than there were 500+ years ago, we found some with whom to celebrate Rosh Hashanah this last week, when we returned to Seville for the holiday. Our trip back felt like a homecoming, with all the bad blood between us gone for good. A real teshuvah—the Hebrew term commonly translated as "repentance," but literally meaning "turning back," or "return," to our highest selves and ways of being—that has laid groundwork for introspection about the past year.

Escape from Andalucía

OK, so we weren't really fleeing Andalucía—in fact, I didn't even realize we were out of the province until David pointed it out. However, our trip to Murcia was indeed our first venture outside Andalucía since we arrived in Seville last November.

Vacation in Las Alpujarras

Feeling a desperate need to escape the heat in Granada, David and I did what most Europeans do in August: we took a vacation. Folks around these parts can be divided into two basic groups—beach vacationers and mountain vacationers—and since we both get bored out of our minds after a day or two of lounging seaside, we definitely count ourselves in the latter group. So on Aug. 5 we packed up our camping gear and hopped on a bus to the Alpujarras, a region of mountains and valleys on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada that's been described as the "Switzerland of Spain."