Lluvia

Rain, rain, go away,

Come again another day.

Little Johnny wants to play;


Rain, rain, go to Spain,


Never show your face again!

-Unknown, England 1533-1603

The rain has returned and no one is happy about it. In the States when you visit cities like Portland and Seattle they tell you they know tourists when they see umbrellas. Now is the time in Granada when no one is an obvious tourist, because everyone is hidden under umbrellas, some so big they can fit three people under it easily. I don’t understand how a city that hardly knows rain is now getting more than they’ve seen in years. It doesn’t make sense to me.

The last two weeks have felt like a fuzzy dream because that’s what I was spending the majority of my time doing. I have slept more in the last two weeks than I have in a long time. On our last day in Rome, no, our last 45 minutes, Caroline and I ate gluten on accident. Gluten screws up my stomach/body/mind for a while, so I was thrown for a loop from that. We only had a three-day school week since we missed Monday and we never have class on Fridays. Then this weekend I stayed home while Caroline went to Ireland and others went roaming around Spain. That is when the rain really began, and that is when I got sick.

Not that my weekend just consisted of sleeping and being sick, but it did mostly. I spent a lot of time with Mari (Frenchy) since neither of us wanted to go outside. I was able to practice a lot of Spanish since this was our only form of communication. On Saturday we finally chose to get out in the afternoon because it was the last day of rebajas. Rebajas is a nationwide sale that goes on for months. Almost every store has rebajas and prices are cut up to 60%. So we left our piso for the first time in awhile and…every store was closed. We walked down deserted streets with metal panels covering doorways and lights turned off. The restaurants and cafes were open with people eating and drinking, but everything else was dark. “Que pasa??” we wondered. “No entiendo…” I said over and over. Finally after we had walked by store after closed store, I had to ask. Three young men walked towards us, and I stopped them.

“Chicos!” I called, and they came close, ears facing me as if what I was about to say would be very interesting. “Perdonme…que paso hoy? Por que todas las tiendas estan cerrado?” I asked.

“Pues, porque es el dia de Andalucia! Hoy es el dia para comer y beber,” they answered. “No sabia??”

“No, no sabia. Pero, no para comprar?” I asked.

“No, solo para beber y comer.”

We all chuckled, I thanked them and they walked on. Apparently, the day was a day all around Andalucia, the providence we live in, to celebrate and eat and drink. Only in Andalucia, though. How was it that we weren’t informed the entire city would be shut down to celebrate? And what was worse, Sundays are also days the city is always shut down. This meant an entire weekend of everything except restaurants being shut down. I couldn’t go to the mercado, I couldn’t try to nab a last second rebajas item. Mari and I didn’t know what to do, so we walked on.

“Los marruecos probablamente estan abierto,” I said to Mari. The Moroccans never shut down their stores.

“Ah, si si! Por supuesto. Dinero es dinero!” she replied.

The part of town where the Moroccans have their shops is one of my favorites. It is further away from my house and can be a little peligroso depending on the time of day you go. But it is a part of town that reminds me why Granada is so different from the rest of Spain. The sights, sounds, and smells pull you away and introduce you to a culture rooted somewhere else.

The area that the Moroccan shops are at have very narrow streets, splitting off into random areas. It can be difficult to navigate through. But once you hear music in the air and chatter, you know you are close. The stores are full of colorfully patterned tapestries portraying large trees and elephants and donkeys. The clothes are loose, relaxed, and seen on every hippy in town. Incense fills the narrow street, and it is impossible to tell from which store it is coming from. The street is very narrow, very compact, with stores so similar you can’t tell if they’re separate or one in the same. Teashops break up the stores, where you can see people sitting on pillows with lights low, sipping tea or smoking hookah. Stands lean against the outside walls of stores with an array of silver jewelry, tea pots, and scented oils. Music is being played by someone at all times, normally a hippy guitarist who lives in the cuevas above, and there are a few people standing around, clapping their hands, laughing and or dancing. Dogs wander the streets unaware they have lost their owners. Everytime I walk down this street I breathe in deep and let my eyes land on every sparkly and colorful cloth and I think, “I want it all!”

Saturday was different though. Everyone and their abuelita were in the narrow street. I held tight to my bag, and even though I saw items I liked I was either swept along with the crowd or chose to not make that moment the moment to look at it. Everyone’s voices bounced between stores, incense could hardly be smelled with the masses of people, and the guitar was just a faint background noise between the children, families, and groups of shoppers bored with the dead town.

Mari and I walked down wasting no time, moving as the crowd allowed us, and moved on. The cold humid air and lightly sprinkling rain, along with the failed rebajas excursion left us tired, so we returned to the apartment empty handed.

The next day was when I got sick. It has been a long time since my body felt as if I had fallen down a hill. In my sleep I dreamt of a boiling hot day in the park, eating watermelon so hot it burnt my tongue, and hot water flowing out of the drinking fountains. I woke up sweating, realizing I had a fever.

When I informed Nati, she brought me six oranges. She also recommended I drink hot milk before I go to bed. I appreciate her concern for me, but I am glad she isn’t staying with me to make sure I follow through with these home remedies. I did however go to my program office to have someone take me to the doctor.

My trip to the doctor’s office reminded me just slightly of my trip to the doctors in Costa Rica. In Costa Rican it was just a lone doctor in an office with a desk and an examining table with equipment to the side. The place I went in Granada was a clinic with each individual doctor having their own office equipped the same way. I sat at the other side of a desk with Maria, an employee from my program. The doctor was a woman and she said, “Digame,” so I told how I felt. She escorted me to the back of the office where I sat on the examining table, she looked in my throat (tentatively, as if she were disgusted) and then walked back to her desk.

“Umm….am I done?” I asked Maria.

“Yeah. She said your throat is swollen.”

“Yeah, I caught that…” I said, and walked back to the chair.

She then wrote me a prescription for amoxicillin, and told me to pick up ibuprofen (which is much stronger here) and aspirin. She didn’t weigh me, take my temperature, my blood pressure, ask me about any other drugs I was taking…just if I had any allergies, and that was that. I have insurance through my program, but I have to pay upfront and then make a claim afterwards. With medicine and the doctor’s bill I paid a total of 52€. Not bad, not bad at all.

So, I’m feeling a lot better now, minus the rain. Everyone looks ragged with hair affected by the humidity or frazzled from hats pulled down tight. In fact, I haven’t taken my hat off at all. My friend Nicola made a hat for me and gave it to me Friday, and I haven’t taken it off yet. Mari makes fun of me for it, but what can I say? It came at the perfect time.

(Okay, you can call me a hippy now)