Pamplona

So, here's the story about Pamplona.


When I graduated from Marblehead High, Class of '69, I was directionless and had pretty crappy grades. The guidance counselor told me my only choice was to go to a junior college somewhere to try to get the grades acceptable for a 4 year college down the road, but really, why bother when I would probably just get married anyway? It was bleak. Since I had received great training in typing and shorthand from Mrs. Homan at MHS, I ended up working as a Kelly Girl (a temp agency from back in the day -- do they still exist?) and as a waitress (the "worst waitress in the whole world" according to the chef). After a year of this nonsense, my father found out about a course for foreigners offered at the Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. I was a naive 18 year old who thought it would be "fun." I had had two years of Spanish, getting an A the first year and a D the second. Imagine how much Spanish I spoke. Basically, nada.

I spent the first semester in a dorm run by Mexican nuns with a 10 PM curfew. I remember trying to register for class and being asked to bring in 4 ID photos and I burst into tears! Where and how was I supposed to get those?? I cried myself to sleep for the first two months -- it was so hard to be in a foreign country where I couldn't do ANYTHING most American college kids were doing!!

One of the things people do a lot in Spain is barhop. When I'd go out with a group of kids, I'd order Coke because I didn't know anything about the little shot-glasses of wine the Spanish kids drank. After several of these outings, one of the guys took me aside and got me to understand that my ordering Cokes was killing them -- the Coke cost about a dollar and the little wines cost only five cents!! Who knew?

Of course the 10 PM curfew was killing me. One afternoon I noticed a door with a key in it, so later that night another girl and I snuck out. This wasn't easy, because the dorm was about 2 miles from town, surrounded by nothing but tilled fields of mud. We managed to find my friend's boyfriend, who promptly drove us back to the dorm! The next morning we were asked to move out. So there I was, 18 and never having looked for an apartment, trying to find one by speaking ridiculous broken Spanish!

Fast forward a couple of years. I became so fluent in Spanish that, when people on the street stopped me to ask directions, they would note a slight lilt to my speech and ask me if I were Basque! I lived for 5 years under the dictator Generalisimo Francisco Franco, and then another 4 years as that beautiful country found its way to social democracy.

More stories to follow, as they come to me.