Letsgoloolala with Lily Anne
The experience of living with Salvador on a quiet street was a good incentive in itself to get out there and join in activities that lend themselves to meaningful conversations. I head out almost daily to make contacts and memories.
I signed up early on to The English Speakers of Valencia and as I suspected there was ample opportunity to do some intercambio particularly on the bus to and from the chosen location for the day. My first event was Isla de Tabarca off Alicante. I sat beside Ignacio from Patacona who was proficient in English but also willing and able to encourage me to speak Spanish.
We had no sooner arrived on the island when it was a show of hands to return early at 15-45 or take our chances and return at 18-45. Ever the optimist and in spite of the now soggy sandwiches I had prepared, I voted to stay later. Some of us took shelter in a restaurant as it was pretty dismal but like the song ‘island in the sun’ the heavens opened not to torrential rain but to blue skies and sunshine requiring a hurried application of sun-cream in this now idyllic setting. As happens on these events, groups form and disperse and reform sometimes with an overlap from a previous group. In any case walking the pathways always seems conducive to a mix of people and varied topics of conversation. By the time we reconvened on the boat five of us, Ignacio, Anita, Lilly and Saafa and I became a sub group with a plan to meet again.
My most memorable English speakers of the Valencia day out was the visit to Guadalest and back through Alicante. Nini the organiser had returned from home leave in India. His patter was quite comical as he pretended on handing out buns that he’d baked them that morning for the entire bus crew. The big connections made that day began very simply for me. On the way there I sat beside a young girl called Nasya who was from British Columbia and staying for the summer with a local family. I realised that she had lived close to an area in Canada I had read about in a chapter in a book called Women who fight back (author Stacey Dooley a 32 yr old journalist living in the U.K, daughter of an English mother and Irish father.) Nasya seemed of such an upbeat happy disposition that I hesitated to raise a subject as dark as young women going missing while hitching. Little did I know that she would initiate another deeply disturbing topic speaking very naturally about her Dad and his thoughts on Christopher Columbus as a young boy of American Indian origin whose grandmother warned him not to speak his native language as a way to protect against brutality, institutional and otherwise. We covered a lot of topics and by way of an interesting coincidence I realised that young Nasya was that girl with the banner I had observed just a week previously in Plaza del Virgen.
Typically after the bus tour, different groups formed and this time I was with locals Davinia,Yolanda, Josef and Miguel and Erica from Japan. I often scratch the surface to get a bit of a reaction. Well it certainly worked on this occasion when the six of us were seated around a table in a pub cluttered with bric a brac and with a country music theme. I was stirring things up a little hoping to encourage the young singles to let their hair down, smile, enjoy, take in the beautiful human scenery as well as the physical surrounds in this mountainous area of Marina Baixa in the province of Alicante. Well it worked.
By now Davinia had chosen a nickname for me –Granny no less! She did utter some words in Spanish and even blushed a little and smiled a lot when I asked what she had said. It was obvious it was something about me. As I coaxed it out for her she asked me straight up ‘Is It difficult to flirt as you get older?’ I assured her 100% that in my experience it just comes naturally. The fun never stopped from that point on. That was one of the many days I was wearing my green skirt with the larger than life comical characters, one that was recognised later by Davinia from inside her place of work as I passed by on a busy street in Colon. Another day, another story.