IDIOMAS = LANGUAGES.
When we arrived here to live we had to learn INSTANT Spanish, because we were
buying our apartment privately from a couple who spoke no English. If we were
meeting Juan and Carmen to discuss our purchase I would write it all down in
advance – that way I could read them my notes if we got stuck.
It was a tense time,
renting in Las Galletas and knowing we’d shot our bolt financially if it all went
wrong. I bought a set of flash-cards that reminded me of teaching my son to
read, and we tested each other in the evenings. Ayuntamiento was our first long
word – it means Town Hall, where we had to go for some of our paperwork.
INTERESTINGLY, it also means sexual INTERCOURSE, according to my dictionary!
Many words have two or more meanings, and often only an accent differentiates
between them. The OH learned the hard way to say “Feliz Año” – Happy New Year –
with the ñ as in
España. Without the
accent, ano means arse! At times we regretted not opting for France, where we
already spoke the language, but we got our Residencias and signed up for our
apartment without any problems.
Old gits we may be, but
when there’s a strong enough motive we can do anything.
Some of our first
neighbours when we moved into our own apartment were a young ITALIAN man and
his Ecuadorean wife. Paola spoke South American Spanish as well as Italian, but
Massimiliano only spoke Italian, so we went through some of the Spanish-learning
process together.
At my 60th
birthday party they announced they were pregnant, amid great rejoicing. When
the date was IMMINENT we discovered that their entire family INTENDED to descend
on them for the birth – Paola’s mother, Massi’s parents and grandmother, and
his uncle and aunt and cousin, and his best friend from Milan. For a whole month!
How would they all fit into a two-bed apartment, I asked. Massi shrugged –
they’d manage somehow for such an IMPORTANT occasion.
So we offered them our
spare room. We got the uncle and aunt. A lovely couple about our own age with
whom the OH and I communicated, in their Italian and our limited Spanish, with
the aid of a ‘Seis-idiomas dictionario’ I’d picked up at a car boot sale. It’s
INCREDIBLE what you can achieve if you set your mind to it.
The baby was beautiful
- an olive-skinned, black-haired dumpling - and how the young mother coped with
such a houseful, and the large dog her husband acquired before they met, I
shall never know. When the family had all gone back to ITALY we became
substitute grandparents. My Spanish IMPROVED in leaps and bounds, discussing
breast-feeding and nappy rash and IN-LAWS with Paola.
Then a year later there
was another INVASION when they all came back for the christening. There were
about twenty children all being baptised in the IGLESIA at the same time, each
of them with their own entourage of camera-wielding family and friends. It was
total mayhem but the priest managed somehow, then we lined up for INNUMERABLE
photos on the church steps, piled into whichever car was nearest, and went to a
restaurant for a party that seemed more like a wedding reception than a baptism.
Roberta’s seven now and
she calls me “Leez”. She makes allowances for my stumbling Spanish and brings
crowds of her friends Trick-or-treating at Halloween - and I love it. She's the one on the left.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION is
a problem that hits the newspapers at about the same time each year, presumably
when the prevailing winds are right for crossing the hundred miles of open
ocean between Africa and here. Desperate people pay large sums of money to be
crammed into pateras (open wooden boats that are far from sea-worthy) and towed
out into the Atlantic. If they are lucky, the owners of the motor boats set
them adrift within sight of land. They are usually picked up by the Coastguard
radar and escorted to a harbour, where the Cruz Roja checks their health and
then they are bussed to a detention centre. Most of them are sent back, but
they keep coming.
I have witnessed the
arrival of two pateras in my time here – one actually came into Las Galletas
harbour while I was shopping. On another occasion we were celebrating a
friend’s birthday in Los Abrigos when, around ten pm, we saw lights
approaching. An orange rescue boat escorted a patera into the harbour, and the
restaurant owners sent down bread and bottles of water for the exhausted people
in the boat. We watched the whole drama from mere yards away – Police,
Ambulances, coaches. The patera itself was a wreck, half-full of water and food
scraps, and brightly painted with a hopeful face and a saint’s name which must
have been the only things that got it safely ashore.
We heard of one patera
that didn’t get here at all. The human traffickers pushed the boat out to sea
with no engine and it missed the Canaries entirely. The passengers wrote
pathetic notes to their families as they died one by one. Weeks later the
patera ended up in Bermuda. I believe it started out with 50 on board – they
found 11 bodies.
ISLAND WEATHER. We live
on an island you can drive round in a day, and the climate is odd. It could be
raining in our village and sunny a kilometre away. We have been standing on our
terrace in the sun and watched a curtain of rain sweep towards us across the
swimming pool. That’s microclimates for you!
I loved the story of your pregnant neighbour - ALL the family!! I got cranky when my in-laws turned up for half an hour when my boys were new-born... a whole month would have had me hiding in the garden shed!
ReplyDeleteHi! I'm dropping in from the A-Z and I'm just down the road to you! (Well, Lisbon - it's not that far, is it? LOL). I laughed at your experiences and can sympathize about in-laws...boy, Latin in-laws...
ReplyDeleteA bit daunting to go and live in a country where you don't reallly know the language well done.
ReplyDeleteI think you do learn a language quicker when it's essential for every day life, and you're clearly a quick learner.
ReplyDeleteWonderful to be a part of such big family celebrations.
What interesting read today Liz. Fascinating - your introduction to Tenerife, new neighbours & cultures. In so many ways Tenerife is a multi-cultural society. I read a couple of years ago that Arona is home to 60 ethnic groupings of people.
ReplyDeleteThe 'boat people' crisis was dreadful at the time but less so nowadays. So many tragegies amongst the unfortunate refugees.