Two Weeks in Country: Status Update

For a person that planned to write something every day I have surely not met my goal.  Somehow writing a blog post consumes a higher imaginary effort than posting on FB or sending an email to a friend.  I will try and do better.

Plaza España: The Main Square of Astorga

Much of what we do is mundane and the rest is climbing an uncomfortable learning curve. Taking for granted that you can communicate politely with others around you is an example of this dichotomy.

Think about this in a small restaurant at home.  We sit down and a few minutes later a waiter asks what we want.  We order Café con leche (coffee with milk) for both of us and he goes to prepare it.  Then another waiter comes by to take our order, and I want to say "The other guy already got our order."  Simple, right?  Not really.  I could type that string of words into Google Translate and a minute later have some words, but would this be the way this concept is handled in Spain?  Likely not. So I fall back on a smile, glance at the other waiter and gesture.

I'll be asking Maria, our language teacher, about the correct way to handle this tomorrow at our lesson. And this is what I mean when I say I want to learn Spanish Culture and Language. Words are one thing, communicating is another.

But I can report that we are pretty comfortable finding all the places we need to go, no longer walking around with a map and/or phone in hand.

We are recognized at our bank branch now due to frequent questions about how things work and at one of the little restaurants on the square where we have evening coffee and pintxos most days.

It is one of the places on the right in the picture at the top of the page. This plaza becomes an open air market on Tuesdays and I'll try and get a picture for our next blog post to compare sleepy Sunday with fun-filled market day.


Because this town is on the Camino de Santiago, many of the foreign clients are one-day visitors.  So seeing us for many visits a week makes us stand out.  Don't confuse that with outstanding.

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The Other Jew of the Day is Samuel ibn Naghrillah (born 993; died after 1056), who "was a medieval Spanish Talmudic scholar, grammarian, philologist, soldier, merchant, politician, and an influential poet who lived in Iberia at the time of the Moorish rule. His poetry was one area through which he was well known. He was perhaps the most politically influential Jew in Muslim Spain."