Today (29th March at time of writing), I woke up, had a shower, went to my lesson, sat in the plaza sunbathing, went for tapas and drank tinto de verano (a mixture of red wine and lemonade). And I am exhausted.
The old me would have been hugely unimpressed with this lack of productivity, but my new Spanishified self is quite content with a life where the only thing on my to-do-list is ‘go to Whelan’s’ (the Irish pub around the corner) or something along similar lines. I don’t know why I still bother setting alarms when there’s nothing to get up for other than the odd lesson and a spot of sunbathing – maybe to exercise some form of control over my increasingly lazy lifestyle – although I generally sleep through them anyway.
When I took a recent ten-day trip back to England for my birthday, on my second day I got up at 8am, dashed into town to pick up a few things that I needed (two new bikinis were definitely necessary), rushed into a nearby town to buy my mum a gift for mother’s day and to hit Tesco, finished making and wrapping presents for my friends’ 21st birthdays, sorted out student finance and went through my bank statements, leaving enough time to chill out in front of the TV before bed. In Spain, there is no such thing as ‘dashing’ and ‘rushing’ – in fact, I think the only word in that whole sentence that can be applied to Spain is ‘chill.’ The difference in the pace of life between two countries just a two-hour flight away is quite astounding. I originally thought that this had something to do with the sun absorbing the Spaniards’ energy, leaving drowsiness in its wake, but they go about their business in just as leisurely a manner in the winter, so that lays that theory to rest. We don’t often have the sun and energy-stealing problem in England. We tend to get so bewildered on seeing this glowing white ball in the sky that we shake it off as some sort of illusion, thereby not giving it grounds to absorb a single morsel of energy - and if we do naively let ourselves believe for one minute that this glorious, heat-emitting device is actually real, it only serves to disappoint when it gets swallowed up by an angry black cloud shortly afterwards, enraged by the fact that this foreign object has momentarily invaded on its territory. And with that, England is once again plunged into obscurity (when I went to Egypt during the summer, I was asked by one of the hotel attendants where I was from. “England” I replied. “Ah yes”, he nodded, “the country of darkness.” According to the same man, my friends and I were also “white as cheese” from lack of sunlight).
Anyway, having digressed on a tangent yet again, I want to go back to talking about my stay in England. The whole reason I’d gone back was because it was my 21st birthday – and I spent the entire ten days denying it. I went to a model village which I used to frequent when I was five, the giant toy store Hamleys where, bar the shop assistants, we were the oldest people there, and instead of doing grown-up things when I went to go and visit a friend in London, we went on a search i.e. a treasure-hunt, for the seven noses of Soho (apparently there are seven life-size noses stuck on the walls of various streets in the square mile that is Soho. We found four, so three to go in the summer, and according to a myth, finding all seven brings infinite wealth which would be quite handy). I’m also planning on going to the zoo next week. All in all, I think I’m doing a fairly good job, although in the end I may as well not have bothered, as the whole world seems to be denying it for me. I went to get a manicure at my local beauty parlour and the beautician asked if I was getting my nails done for any particular reason, to which I replied that yes, there was an occasion – I would be 21 on Saturday. To which she looked me up and down, then in the eye with disbelief and came out with “You’re 21?!” An excellent start. Later that day, I was in Sainsbury’s with a friend just looking at the Malibu, trying to decide which size bottle to buy (the cute baby ones or the mammoth ones – it was more a question of what instinct to follow: the girly, maternal one or our instinct as rum-obsessed alcoholics) when a shelf-stacker came up to us asking our age. We said 20 (truthfully!) but with a certain hint of scorn in his voice, he repeated “Twenty?” and asked to see our I.D. For being in the alcohol aisle! However, despite feeling a little indignant at his attitude, mission Peter-Pan was going very well. Furthermore, in my birthday card from my brother, he wrote something along the lines of: “And even though the digits should probably be reversed to more accurately reflect your age, happy 21st birthday.” Lastly, turning 21 is when you’re supposed to symbolically receive the keys to the door. The keys to my Spanish flat have stopped working. And only when I use them – when my flatmates try, they work perfectly. Either I actually am a complete retard, as many people have suspected for years, or someone out there really is trying to tell me something.
I also took advantage of being home by getting a haircut. I’ve been too scared to get one here in case I get a word wrong and they cut it all off or something equally horrifying. However, as it turns out I may as well have braved it in Spain, as the language barrier also seemed to exist between me and my English-speaking hairdresser – having said I wanted a “trim”, she somehow interpreted this as “Please take five inches off my lovely long hair that I’ve been growing for three years.” ¡Joder! Once I had returned to Spain, any relief at being a safe number of miles from my hairdresser and her ruinous scissors quickly dematerialized as I experienced my first embarrassing moment since being back (within about half an hour of landing). I couldn’t find the slot in which to put my train ticket to make the gates open so had to stand there like an idiot waiting for someone else to come along to see how they got through. Not only did that someone turn out to be an 80-year old couple, it also turned out that the gates were automatic and to make them open, all you had to do was walk up to them. Duh. I think all the drinking must have killed off the majority of my brain cells. It doesn’t help that I already know that this was just one embarrassing incident of many more to come in the next two months. However, with the recent glorious sun racking up 30°C and cloudless blue skies, I find it very difficult to care!
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