DONDE ESTAN LOS TODOS CHICOS AT, part 2

concha vargas -- you did your research, right? -- gave a free class at flamenco de sur a sur on saturday evening. la estefanía knew about it, and she was visiting from jerez, where the festival de la bulería was happening, but so, per her telling, were demonstrations for the rights of the trabajadores which threatened to shut the festival down. (i should really start trying to pretend to read el país.) concha was concha, also per stephanie's telling, and i probably should have just participated in the forty-five minute teaser class without my boots, because asking to sit and spectate seemed to put her at disease, and she was much warmer with the ladies who followed who through the introduction to a choreography that concha will be teaching at sur a sur over the next three months. that introduction was just what i would have expected -- and what, in fact, i had hoped to see -- after having seen videos of concha vargas online, my fascination with which concha seemed completely uninterested in listening to if i was just going to steal space from her dancers by sitting in the back of the studio.

so it was nice to have a familiar companion, at sur a sur for the teaser class and to find out if the flies on the alameda really only harass non-sevillanos (or if some lingering odor of the old country just draws them to me); but stephanie even learned us a few simple gitano recipes and introduced us to another good-to-know expat who was gracious enough to wait over an hour for us to arrive on the other side of the puente isabel ii in triana as we leisurely finished our dinner and walked our way through town. miriam might have liked to stay out later -- although she'd also tied a few the evening and night before -- but i used stephanie's early morning departure as cover for my own flagging energies and suggested that we forgo another glass of wine and walk home. we may not have been leaving as early as stephanie, but the plan was to spend the next day at the beach, and at one thirty we still hadn't decided on a beach or a way to get there.

we arrived in cádiz ten hours later having spent one and a half of those on the train from santa justa station, which of course presupposed our successful purchase of tickets for the nine forty-five train -- which had been in very certain question when we'd left for the station twenty minutes before. we'd opted for cádiz over málaga and el palmar for its proximity (and the relative cheapness of the tickets to which that proximity corresponded) and because we hadn't the courage to figure out how to arrive at the latter by bus. but we could have also pretended historical importance: cádiz is the oldest continuously inhabited city in europe...and something about hannibal and christopher columbus and sir frances drake and the spanish armada. it's probably much less faggy than málaga -- or at least torremolinos -- but as it's still almost impossible for us to make confident calls one way or the other, cádiz presented a much better opportunity to practice the game. and whatever, it looked like sunshine and there are miles of beach.

and the water at the beach was still relatively warm (particularly for the atlantic), and even if we didn't have much interest in the cathedral when we passed through the square in front of it trying to find our way to the beach from the train station, the view of its dome and its bell towers in the distance made for a magnificent backdrop for our camp on the sand. the parade of other bathers in front of our picnic on top the duvet cover we found in one of the closets in the apartment was good for the rest (although admittedly bad for studying at any of the materials we'd carried with us -- and with such good intentions -- on the train).

come two thirty we decided to head up the beach to find another spot. there wasn't reason to expect that there would be any fewer rocks in the shallows of that other spot than at the one where we started, but i did want to get back in the water to rinse out the cut i'd gotten on my foot the first time i swam and which had since been filled uncomfortably with sand. plus, there was the opportunity for new adventures in leering, and that alone seemed worth a relocation.

it might be that we're simply stained by the experience of american prudishness, but both of us were made uncomfortable by frequent sight of the middle aged so closely hugging the girls who seemed to be too late in their preteens to be running around with the children without their bikini tops. still, the parents at the beach at cádiz were admirably affectionate with their children, and if we had no problem with the nakedness of the torsos of the adults, then it must have just been that prudishness that caused us to bristle at the rest. perhaps, however, we were at our most american when on our relocation walk we laughed out loud after a father who had been chasing his son of maybe nine years old down the beach pushed him face forward into the shallows. that it happened at all was funny enough, but that the push was strong and seemed intended to make the boy fall was more than we could ignore, cultural sensitivity be damned. the spanish have a reputation for being fiery and passionate, but we'd had no idea to what extremes.

there were three men sitting under an umbrella decorated with a flower pattern near where we relaid the duvet cover, and if not all of them, then the one in the rolled green shorts seemed especially not just european. i swore that he'd been staring when his friends went to cool off in the water and when i came back up to the duvee cover from the surf after doing the same a little while later. but she swore that he'd had his eyes on her when she'd walked past the flower umbrella both to and from where she'd gone to sleep in the shade while i finished my book. it made sense then that he suggested what he did later, our second invitation in a week, and this one much more flattering than the first. but he lived in cádiz, and we'd already paid to get home on the last train, which for being the last train didn't leave so late. (time to muster the courage to brave the bus.)

we slept almost the entire way back to santa justa station, but that was probably for the better given that all of them on the train were too young or too girlfriended. and despite having no urgent plans for monday morning, the spanish customs that pertain to sundays made it impossible for us to feel anything but that it was one, and the thing to do once dark had fallen seemed to be to just let the day pass. we could let saturday's dishes and the sandy duvet cover be monday's urgent plans.

greetings from europe. the real thing, even if we can't yet figure out which thing that is.