Vuelta a Madrid — Back to Madrid

What the south leaves you with

Block A took Alex from a plan in Madrid to Seville, Granada and Córdoba, and the honest summary of what a first trip through Andalusia gives a learner is three things. The first is that the language on the street is not the language in the book, which lesson 56 covered and which no amount of preparation quite prepares you for. Andalusia is the best place in Spain to discover that early, because the gap is at its widest there — and discovering it in month four is far better than discovering it in year two, since the response is simply more listening rather than more study. The second is the layered history, which Alex reaches for in his mezcla. Andalusia was under Muslim rule for longer than it has been under Christian rule since, and what survives is not a set of monuments but a substrate: the Alhambra and the Mezquita, certainly, but also the courtyard house, the irrigation vocabulary, the azulejo, the four thousand Arabic words including ojalá, and the whitewashed towns. Layered on that is the Catholic reconquest and then the Atlantic wealth of the sixteenth century, which is why Seville has a cathedral the size of a small district. None of this is background to the language; a good deal of it is in the language. The third is the schedule, and this is the practical one. The south runs late because of the heat, lunch is the main meal, and nothing social happens in the afternoon. Adapting to that rather than resisting it is what turns a visit into a stay — and it is the reason Alex's remark about the siesta changes over the block from a cliché to a piece of logistics. What is ahead is deliberately the opposite. The north is wet, green, cooler, and in four of its regions the first language of the person serving you may not be Spanish at all. The grammar goes with it: the hypothetical, which is what you need to talk about a journey you have not taken yet, arrives at 71 with the imperfect subjunctive and the conditional side by side.