For a girl who has lived her whole life in Wallingford, CT, spending seven weeks in a Spanish city with 25,000 people is quite an experience. It is always a shock for me to remember that I am on a different continent, where people speak a language I am still not entirely comfortable with. While I listen to my iPod on the bus to school, half-asleep after eating an incredibly large meal for lunch, I will see a store advertising ¡Muebles y Alfombras! Soon I realize that all the signs are in Spanish, and I remember that I signed up for term abroad in Spain.
One of my most colourful experiences is taking the bus for half an hour, four times a day, because school is divided into a morning and an afternoon session. I never appreciated the proximity of my Wallingford house to Choate. In La Coruña, bus riders are not just people your parents told you to never talk to but a diverse group of people, from mothers going to the market to buy bread, to university students with mullets and piercings. The true challenge is catching the bus and finding my way to and from the stops. Locating the Plaza de Pontevedra, where I catch the return bus, can be difficult from a different area of the city. One time, I was buying jeans on a shopping street, Calle Real, when I realized that I had to catch the 8:30. I asked for directions and hurried off, making a few daring street crosses. This caused me to feel like a true La Coruña resident, since most will not cross the street unless ten cars are bearing down on them. Sprinting toward the bus as the driver had already started to close the doors, I managed to catch the 8:30. Although exhausted, (my flats and huge bag were not exercise apparel) I felt content that I had managed to follow directions in Spanish in order to get to my bus in time.
Deciding which stop to take for my house and then actually arriving there can also be an unnerving experience. I live in a Spanish version of the suburbs, in a spacious red house attached to a row of other spacious red houses. The problem is that no bus-stops are convenient for residents. I can take the stop that is closer to the city, by the yellow houses, but that entails a long walk uphill. What I generally elect to do is to take what I fondly call the “chicken-wire” stop, because just past my house, a stop I fondly call the “chicken-wire” stop because of the hole on part of the sidewalk covered up with wire. Yet the only path to my house is one that I like to believe has been forged by generations of frustrated, red-house-living bus riders (Although it is probably just a drainage system). The narrow, dirt path across the street from the bus-stop cuts between the forest of grass behind the red houses and the fence of one lone, large house, which distinctly resembles a castle. The path is fine when it has not rained for a few days, so long as one avoids the various types of pricker bushes; however, the benign trail turns into a roaring stream after a bit of rain, as my flats, which have been wet for three days, can attest to.
Last Friday, I decided not to ruin another pair of shoes but instead to take the chicken-wire stop and find an alternative route to my house. The grass was too tall for me to walk through, so I took the road for a few minutes. However, the shoulder on the road is almost non-existent, and the speeding Europeans driving their miniscule cars were making me uneasy, so I hopped into a ditch by the side of the road and kept walking. Finally, I spotted a red house. Looking carefully for any angry Spanish drivers that might come speeding around the corner, I dashed to the other side. Not desirous of walking the loop home, I began looking for shortcuts. The houses on both sides of me had large, locked gates and tiny dogs that seemed to believe they were incarnations of the three-headed Cerberus—I quickly ruled out those routes. But, if I just walked through some grass that had actually been mowed in the last five years, I would come to the parking lot playground. Though I may have been befuddled earlier by the idea of having a playground on the top of a parking lot, I now praised the ingenuity of whoever had constructed this architectural masterpiece. I raced down the hill, squeezed through the trees, and jumped over the short, stone wall meant to prevent people like me from doing precisely that. I landed in the glorious playground. Ignoring the bewildered looks of a couple of Spanish children (definitely genetic because it was the exact look their parents had given me from their cars), I raced down the stairs and finally found myself at the correct row of red houses.
Despite my frequent misfortunes, I think that bus riding is an important cultural experience. I enjoy listening to the conversations of my fellow riders and admiring the views of old houses and rolling green hills. I never seem to notice in a car. From making sure that I remember my bus card to trying to find my way to the stop, bus riding is another form of independence. It is a key part of the confusing challenge of living in Spain.
