Welcome back to Europe

After three days of visiting every single daycare, school, and kindergarten in Frigiliana and Nerja we have declared defeat and given up. Welcome back to Europe where rules reign supreme, exceptions are never made and flexibility is something that is attributed to stretch-pants, and stretch-pants only. The vicious cycle goes like this: “we don’t have room for one more child and even if we had we would a) not accept anybody for a few weeks only because that constitutes a major disruption to everybody involved and b) your child is too old anyway for our institution and should go to public school. Public schools, as we learned on Monday are the definition of inflexibility and short of petitioning local politicians, which might yield a result by the time Max is ready to go to university, the answer is and will always be “NO” (as in: no way who do you think you are showing up here and trying to disrupt this well-oiled machinery called public school with your completely and outrageously inappropriate and ridiculous demand). So no school for Max and no necessity to speak Spanish, which he still completely refuses to speak with us or kids on the street. I can just hope that Paco will get him to say a few words when we see him and Sabine next. Else we’ll go back to Sunnyvale with a child who has completely forgotten all his Spanish> The only comforting thought is that he learns as fast as he forgets, something I can’t claim for myself, I seem to forget about three times as fast as I learn with the rate of forgetting increasing with every year and the speed of learning slowing down. Since that really sucks I bought myself a Spanish grammar book the other day in Malaga – now I just have to open it because the times when I learned by osmosis are over as well (if they ever existed).

We took a trip to the surrounding villages up in the mountains today and I am not exactly sure how and why but the trip turned out to be profoundly depressing to me. The landscape is seriously affected by urban sprawl, or maybe rather village sprawl. Unlike Tuscany where building permits are hard to come by Andalucia seems to have (or have had) a free-for-all. There isn’t a hill, mountain, mountain-side, gopher-mount without a house on it, an access road to the house and whatever other conveniences of modern living seem to be necessary these days (garages, pools, huge fences, etc.). The little towns once where probably the forgotten backwaters but that was before the Brits came in force and in their wake the real estate developers, real estate agents, speculators, nouveau riche, and not so riche. Whatever little town we drove into the first and last thing we saw was a real estate agent’s office. The whole town, the whole state for that matter seems to be for sale. Unlike Merida, where this was true as well, this here is the tail end of a real estate boom with the smell of desperation typical for such situations (and as Californians by choice we know this smell all too well). Every village or town is home to several largish developments of 1 and 2 bedroom condos with communal piscina, phase 1 and 2 completed, phase 3 still under construction and the sale of the units not going as well as one has become used to. Whereas Merida still had the feel of opportunity and a new beginning to it here it feels like a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money and many are trying frantically to get out of a bad situation. It is one of the situations where, whatever property I might see I would think: If I was seriously interested I would just wait a few months and would get it much cheaper, but then, why would I be seriously interested?”

By and large I have to say the developments in the villages, here in Frigiliana as well, have been done sort of in style so they won’t stand out like eye-sores but still, they are late and somewhat foreign additions to the old villages with their steep roads and narrow, small stone houses. Every ground floor in every town center was turned into a restaurant, tapas bar, souvenir shop or real estate agency, the locals are predominantly old and venture out only during off-tourist-peak hours, in every town, wherever you look you’ll see “se vende” and “se alquila” signs. I needn’t have bothered with finding us a house before coming here, we could have just driven into town, any town, and could have rented something within hours. I am still glad I did find this old house in Frigiliana. It’s old and small, cooking is like cooking on a boat, everything has its place and it better be there else the place is seriously crowded, but its comfy nevertheless and is located on Calle Alta, which as the name suggests is high up in the village and so steep that it requires stairs to climb which also means no car traffic (and means that we have to haul every single purchase up 49 steep steps – a great work-out, really).

So every evening we are sitting in our small, internet-less living room in Calle Alta listening to “Coastline Radio” – a radio station for British expats which plays enough Neil Diamond and Chris deBurgh to qualify as serious torture – while Max sleeps in the big bed below, totally covered by a huge fluffy duvet and seriously exhausted from a day of climbing the 49 steep steps. By now I can probably recall half a dozen web addresses for Brits looking for love on the Costa del Sol by heart and sing “Lady in Black” without even thinking about it– but as long as we have a bottle of Faustino or Baron de Ley vino tinto go with it that’s just fine, though.

Tomorrow we’ll take a trip to Granada and are planning to stay a night, maybe we’ll get to see a few sights between lunch, playground, nap time and dinner.