A couple days ago a couple appeared. A young couple, an Israeli and an Englishwoman. They both play Irish music and the Israeli talks with a very Irish accent. They have been travelling without a fixed home for something like 6 years. She has come here to study flamenco. They met a girl from Vancouver in Turkey, who previously lived in Jerez. They are staying with us till they find a place.

I have been working a little bit in David's shop. He and Carmen are very generous people.
It is such a romantic type of place to be - a luthier's shop - with violins old an new (currently being constructed). He's making a viola right now, and stops to explain what he's doing. The other day I watched him re-hair a bow. He even explained about the type of horses they get the hair from - they are not just any old horses. They live in a northern climate and eat a special diet. You have to get the hairs to all line up and not cross over each other. Then you wet them (well you comb them, while wet). When they are stuck in the ends, and they start drying, some of them seem looser than others. That is because some are more stretchy than others. They all have to be equally tensed when the bow is tightened. He took a lighter and held it under the wet hairs and the ones that were looser tightened up.

I am learning to sharpen knives. David has let me use his stones, and I ordered some along with some other supplies he got from Germany, from an instrument maker's tool supplier.

The shop has a skeleton key that closes the door. It is on the ground floor of the house. Immediately outside the door is the interior patio that is open to the sky, like normal Andalucian houses. There are some plants in pots there.

Gordo or Gorda, depending on whether you are a man or woman ("fatty") is a term of endearment in Spanish. You significant other or your pet is called Gordo/a regardless of whether they are actually fat. They may be skinny as a rail, but they can still be called "fatty". It is like saying "sweety" or "honey". They also have "dear", which would be cariño (there is only one form, no masculine/feminine for this one). People might answer the phone "Hi, fatso, how are you, dear?" Or, "oh, come here my fatty".

I have been practicing Alegrias, (out of the most well known flamenco forms, the only one in a major key). It is quick and happy. I have been working a guitarist friend, who is learning to accompany dance. It is a lot of fun and a big challenge. It is one thing to practice the same footwork over and over without music and get it really fast, but another thing entirely to make sure it actually works and fits with the music, which is not simply a 4/4 beat, but a complicated 12/8 (three twos and two threes).

The other day we were fortunate enough to have Maria join us. Maria appeared a while ago in Jerez. She is an aspiring professional singer, from Dos Hermanas, the place just south of Sevilla that saved me from missing my international flight (trains split off there to go either to Cadiz or Malaga). Maria is in her 30s and used to work in a gas station in a nice stable job, that most people would be happy to have in this economic crisis with 40% unemployment. She quit it to sing flamenco. This is not so unusual for spoilt North Americans who have the idea that they can do anything they decide they want to do. But for the Spanish, for whom life and the economy have always been more difficult than for us with the American Dream, I'd say it takes way more guts. Anyways, despite her father being an excellent flamenco singer, her parents think she's crazy. She took off for Italy with 10€ in her backpack and just knocked on doors of dance classes asking if they needed singers. She ended up with a gig singing for 400 people, and was interviewed by some kind of media, which asked her how long she had been singing for. She sounds like somebody who has grown up with it (which is true), however, this is overused to get people recognition. Foreigners and Spanish alike love to hear that a good flamenco singer has been steeped in is from the cradle, with famous flamenco people of olden times hanging out at house parties. She told them she had been singing for 3 days and used to work in a gas station, which was more or less true (she had only been attempting to sing properly for that long). It doesn't sound very impressive but she wants to get by strictly on the merit of her singing.

This morning at 7:30 am I rode my bike out to Hipercor (Hyper-cor) which is half an hour away and where a lot of my students live. I have a class with Encarni, a woman whose son lives in Toronto and wants to be able to communicate with her daughter-in-law's family and generally survive in Canada. She is an esthetician and a personal image consultant. She is a lively character who seems to have a busy mind. Her and her husband seem to have a lively and happy life. Both mornings so far, they have offered me fresh made juice after the class, while her clients are arriving for facial or other bodily treatments. Her husband is in his 70s, about 15 years older than her, and a very lovely gentleman, who insisted on bringing my bike into the apartment and then locking it in the electricity room, afraid that it would get stolen outside.

In the dark this morning, with stars still out, I looked up at a huge palm tree and felt like I was in a foreign place (which I am, of course) - I felt out of place. But the sky was completely blue when I finished class at 9:30, and as I rode back it felt amazing to ride past myriads of oranges on the trees lining the roads and scattered on the ground. When I got back home, I decided to check if Pepe was in the bar below our house. He told me he eats there every morning, but so far has been reluctant to call me in the morning. Today I went in and had a coffee and met his friend Paco and a woman my age called Maria, a flamenco singer. The bar is narrow and everybody squishes in there. It is outfitted in a modern way, without any nice old fashioned plaster or wood. It seems to be frequented by several flamenco people, as I've seen Paco Cepero there before too. The bar tender says as he pours more milk into someone's coffee "this blonde here, it's her birthday", and everyone in the bar claps. People bump into each other with plates of jamon on toast and in general talk across tables.

The other day Carmen explained the naming system in Spain. Anyone of her or my age or older (born during Franco's era) normally has Maria as their first name, if they are a woman. Priests in small towns would not allow people to be christened (which is when their name would be officially, legally recorded) unless Maria was their first name. So literally almost every woman is Maria something, often shortened to Mari (emphasis on the first syllable "Ma" MA-ree). Men were normally called Juan, Jose or one of only a few other names, followed by another name to distinguish them from the other Juans and Joses (Johns and Josephs). In fact, you were not legally allowed to name a child anything that wasn't in a list of saints names. David's grandfather was allowed to name his mother Lisabet (like Elisabeth), which was very unusual and frowned upon because it stank of foreign influence, only because the priest eventually found it in the book of saints names. Sometimes, if country bumpkins had a lot of kids, they would get tired of thinking of a new name (the second name, or first name, if it was a man). In this case, when the priest saw that another child was already called Juan, he would force the parent to think of another name for the next child. Previously, there had been families full of children all named Juan. At times, if the parent wanted to call the child the same name, or one that was prohibited (for example, in Basque country during Franco, you could not name your child a Basque name) the priest would choose a name for your child. A friend of Carmen's is called Isabel. Her mother wanted to call her something non-Castillian (something Basque), and went to christen her child with this name. The priest said no, this name is not allowed. You have to choose something else. Since he was there waiting with the water to splash over the child's head, the parent had to decide on the spot, and so the priest just chose the name he felt like.

I have met various men called Juanma or Josema, JuanLu, JuanJo ("wan-ho"), JuanPe or JuanFra. They would be Juan Manuel, Jose Manuel, Juan Jose, Juan Pedro, or Juan Fransisco.

I told Carmen some typical English names and she thought they were all really great. She was not familiar with Dorothy, Wendy, Kimberlee, Jill, Margaret, though she knew Jane and really liked it. She said Spanish people her age all know the names Peter and Mary, because they learned those names in children's books in English.