{"product_id":"spanish-lessons-isbn-9780767904162","title":"Spanish Lessons","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn the shrewd, comical spirit of Peter Mayle and Bill Bryson, Derek Lambert discovers  the charms and idiosyncrasies of Spain as he experiences the rewards and frustrations  of beginning a new life there. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As Lambert and his wife set about  restoring their moldering \u003ci\u003ecasita \u003c\/i\u003eon Spain’s Mediterranean Costa Blanca and learning  to live the life of Spanish villagers, he introduces us to a nation far removed from  the matadors, \u003ci\u003etapas\u003c\/i\u003e bars, and sangria swillers.  He uncovers the “real” Spain–a nation  of passionate, eccentric, often contradictory, but always enchanting people.  Unpredictable,  often hilarious, and animated by colorful characters, \u003ci\u003eSpanish Lessons\u003c\/i\u003e presents an  intimate and delightful portrait of off-the-tourist-track Spain.“Lambert makes for an affable companion as we follow his first tentative days in a new country. It’s an entertaining yarn, and for anyone with a love for Spain and Spanish culture, an essential item to add to your bookshelf.” –\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e “In the tradition of \u003ci\u003eA Year in Provence\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eUnder the Tuscan Sun\u003c\/i\u003e, [Derek Lambert] provides vivid descriptions of an entirely unique cultural landscape. [A] delightfully wry narrative…chock —full of breathtaking comical escapades and authentically colorful characters, this affectionately humorous memoir will appeal to both seasoned and armchair travelers.” –\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003eDerek Lambert has contributed to newspapers and magazines worldwide. He is also the author of several novels. He lives in the province of Alicante, Spain with his wife and son.ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA Taste of Oranges\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe two civil guards wore black tricorn hats, capes, and olive-green uniforms. And although mounted on angular bicycles, they looked as sinister as their predecessors had in the civil war that tore Spain apart in the 1930s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was late December, and the citrus trees that covered most of the plain separating the Mediterranean from the mountains on the Costa Blanca of Spain were heavy with oranges, lemons, and grapefruit. The trees looked so beguiling that Diane and I stole a couple of oranges. We were eating them, juice trickling down our chins, in our venerable, chocolate-brown Jaguar, when the two Guardia Civil stopped beside us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMaybe pinching oranges was a heinous crime in Spain. Tales were still rife after the death of the dictator General Francisco Franco of foreigners being imprisoned for years without trial for unspecified offenses. I imagined us lying on straw mattresses in fetid cells miles apart, while rats snatched food from our eating bowls.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr perhaps we would be deported and declared persona non grata, a preferable scenario but nonetheless depressing, because it would mean that the vision we had shared when we first met in Africa would be aborted before it even got off the ground.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDiane, a Canadian airline stewardess with blond hair and eyes the color of the sea before a storm, had told me on our first date in Nairobi that having experienced a couple of scary landings, she wanted to quit flying and start a new life. So did I. I was a journalist in my forties, a foreign correspondent, and I wanted to become a novelist: our meeting was convened by the gods.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut supposing the gods had now turned against us, snitched on us to the Guardia . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDiane offered the two of them a brilliant, please-fasten-your-seatbelt smile while I stuffed incriminating orange peel into a plastic bag. \"What can we do for you?\" she asked. She had been brought up in Paris and Rome, had studied Spanish, and in any case picked up languages as easily as children catch measles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the Guardia, young with a downy mustache, dis-mounted. \"Are you lost?\" he asked in English, peering into the aristocratic but doddery old Jaguar as I tried to back-heel the plastic bag under the driver's seat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"No,\" Diane said, \"we're just admiring the view.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was worth admiring. Lizard-gray mountains on one side of the citrus plantations, the sea beckoning in the cold sunlight on the other. Here and there a field of leafless grapevines; almond and olive trees and carobs with trunks like fairytale witches.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Guardia, who seemed to have exhausted his English, produced a creased booklet from beneath his cape and read from it: \"I am so pleased you are admiring our territory.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDiane tried a few phrases in Valenciano, the regional language that confuses tourists who have studied orthodox Spanish, but he held up one hand and again consulted his phrase book. \"Please, I do not understand, I am from the north.\" His colleague, a sad-looking cabo, a corporal, who looked like a long-ago Hollywood actor, Adolph Menjou, joined him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Do you have any papers?\" he asked—\"papers,\" a disturbingly general term that could embrace anything from a visa to a last will and testament.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDiane told him in English: \"We might settle in the area.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTrue enough—we were looking for a village so ordinary that it would bring us into contact with people remote from the clichŽs of Spain—flamenco, sangria, and bullfights—and would define the changes that had taken place since Franco's death in 1975, so that I could write about them one day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer statement perturbed the cabo. He spoke with one hand, flapping and clenching it. Endless complications, his hand said. Bureaucracy, papers . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDiane searched for some sort of ID in the chaotic contents of her purse. Ballpoint pens, lipsticks, coins, a comb, a chocolate bar . . . The cabo suggested that we get out of the car. A preliminary to being frisked, handcuffed?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDiane found her passport and handed it to him. Fishing rights in international waters hadn't yet exacerbated relations between the two countries, and a Canadian passport still commanded respect. He flicked through it, handed it back, and saluted.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe stabbed a finger toward me. \"Your husband does not speak too much.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eConceding that Diane was better at placating irate policemen, I had kept out of it. Not only that; she was much more fluent in Spanish than I was, and although I was studying manfully I preferred to converse in English even with any Spaniards who spoke only on the level of  \"Me Tarzan, you Jane.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"He's very shy,\" Diane said, and burst into helpless laughter. Reticence had never been my strong suit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe younger officer, thinking perhaps that she was weeping, laid a hand on her shoulder. The cabo, suspecting that he was in the presence of an unstable neurotic woman and a deaf-mute, took a step back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In the orchards,\" he said in English, \"one person one orange is allowed. More\"—he cut across his throat with one finger. \"If you want to eat a good meal this place is very pleasing.\" He handed Diane a grubby visiting card and both men pedaled away, capes flowing behind them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe embraced, our visions of a home here still intact. We drove to a village perched in the hills and gazed beyond the citrus trees to the sea, fishing boats perched on its rim. The church clock tolled and the chimes rang through narrow streets that smelled of whitewash and grilling sardines. Hunger stirred. We each drank a glass of rough wine in a bar so dark that I couldn't tell whether I was being served by a man or a woman—at five pesetas a glass, who cared?—and headed for the restaurant recommended by the cabo. In my experience, policemen anywhere in the world knew the best establishments in which to take on ballast.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen we reached the address on the card, a shack with a cane roof beside a sandy beach ankle deep in seaweed, it was shut. We decided to hang around. After a while a door opened, a bead curtain parted, and a woman in black, wearing slippers, bunched cheeks squeezing her eyes, confronted us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat did we want? She had already paid her rent and she didn't want to buy a carpet or an encyclopedia from traveling salesmen, her tone implied.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"We're very hungry,\" Diane said in English.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe woman's face softened. The period after the Civil War and World War II, when Spain was ostracized by much of the world because it was ruled by Fascists, was known as the Years of Hunger.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Are you American?\" she asked Diane. So many families had fled to the United States and Britain after the Civil War ended in 1939 that, happily for me, a grasp of English was not uncommon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Canadian.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe woman shrugged. What mattered was that we were foreigners and could not be turned away. \"The restaurant is closed for the winter,\" she said. \"But I can give you lamb chops and rice.\" My stomach whined.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter she had poured us a pitcher of beer at the bar, she rolled up the slatted blinds. Sunshine lit a faded photograph of a football team and a statue of a madonna with a chipped face. A skinny black cat wrapped itself around my legs. White plastic tables and chairs covered with a patina of dust stood where they had been abandoned at the end of summer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the smell of the chops grilling reached us, an orchestra played in my stomach and I drowned it with beer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWatched through slitted yellow eyes by the cat, a canary sang in a cage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe woman placed hunks of toasted bread on the table and we fell on them, spreading them with alioli, a thick sauce made from pounded garlic cloves, egg yolks, olive oil, and lemon juice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFaintly we heard the swish of modest waves unfurling on the seaweed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter we had wolfed the chops and saffron-yellow rice, she served coffee and walnut cake.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen a middle-aged man appeared in the kitchen doorway behind the bar. He looked familiar. \"It was good?\" he asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis voice sounded familiar, too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs we nodded vigorously, the woman said: \"This is my husband, Pepe. He is a cabo in the Guardia.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd suddenly I realized that the corporal who had stopped us was a man of parts. Policeman, tout for his own restaurant, and chef.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI peered into the kitchen: the Guardia with the downy mustache was peeling potatoes, presumably for a private meal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePepe winked and began to clear our table. Diane and I ex-changed glances. Such devious charm was difficult to resist.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe paid the bill, linked hands, and walked toward the Jaguar. An old man wearing a hat with spaniel ears was collecting firewood on the beach; gulls floated on the milky sea; behind us the mountains were beginning to retreat into the winter night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe found the rest of the walnut cake on a paper plate in the front of the car. I squeezed Diane's hand. She squeezed back. Without speaking, we knew we were in the area to stay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe found the sort of unassuming village we were looking for inland from the apartment blocks, hotels, and beaches of the Costa Blanca, the White Coast. It didn't possess any historic landmarks, unless you counted the bubble-blowing public wash house; no castanets clicking, not a pitcher of sangria in sight.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLocated at sea level deep inside the citrus groves halfway down the Mediterranean coast, La Jara was equidistant from the cities of Valencia to the north and Alicante to the south, sixty miles or so either way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe came across it by chance when our decrepit car broke down with a sigh and a hiss on the road skirting its boundaries. It had transported us in its dotage across France from England and limped around Spain for five days while we inspected prospective homes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile a mechanic in a small garage coated with black grease examined its engine, we wandered around streets lined with nondescript terraces of whitewashed cottages and hole-in-the-wall stores. The streets were flat and paved, and yet I imagined them in a turn-of-the-century painting, rutted with mud. Perhaps it was because the people seemed still to be lodged in that epoch, scowling women in darned black dresses, men wearing collarless shirts and tight jackets, faces engraved by sun and wind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat we didn't yet know was that on the outside, Spanish villages smile only in the mornings and evenings and we had arrived just before lunch. Inside, they laugh most of the time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe found seven bars, a church with a spire like a space rocket, an open-air cinema, four groceries, a bank, three hairdressing salons, a school, and a combined newsstand and tobacco shop becalmed in eternal dusk. All this for a population of one thousand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the village possessed a few delicate attributes as well, brass door knockers polished wafer thin, courtyards where old ladies in the ubiquitous black weaved lampshades, roses painted on ceramic tiles outside doorways to keep summer a prisoner of winter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFinally we adjourned to the Bar Paraiso into a wall of noise—the steamy roar of a coffee machine, the bark of impassioned debate over coffees and brandy, tobacco coughs, the smack of dominoes on plastic tabletops.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA dusting of last night's cigarette ash lay on the pool table, which bore a stain the shape of Australia. A diminutive barman was fanning a smoldering vine root in the grate. The hands of a wall clock that, we discovered later, occasionally went backward, stuttered erratically.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe ordered a couple of beers and sat at a table. We were joined by a balding priest, his soutane hemmed with dust, and a carpenter who said: \"My name is Emilio.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEmilio had arms as thick as most people's thighs, curly hair threaded with silver, and a voice as rough as the rasp of a saw. Like many Spaniards whose families had fled to the United States in 1939—he had been born there and didn't need any prompting to volunteer his family history—he spoke English with an American accent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis father had reopened the family's toy factory in the nearby town of Denia when he came back from New York, but the market for wooden toys had declined and he had retired. Emilio had been left to make doors, window frames, and coffins in an annex here in the village.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Are you going to settle here?\" he asked. When we said we might, he thumped the table with a mallet fist. \"Let me be the first to congratulate you. I know just the place for you to buy.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI assessed him cautiously: in my experience, back-slapping extroverts were often con men, and I'd learned to be wary of the twinkling gaze, the knuckle-crunching handshake. But Emilio's hustling was so outrageously transparent that it was disarming.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"First,\" I told him, \"we'll look around by ourselves.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe nodded understandingly. \"In your position I'd do the same. But it doesn't matter, because nothing you'll see will compare with the property I will show you. It only came on the market this morning, God must have guided you to me.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe adjourned with Emilio to the garage to find out what was happening to the Jaguar. Its body was raised on a ramp; parts of its engine lay on the greasy floor like the components of a stripped gun.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA voice issued from the pit. We were lucky: the fault had been located. \"When will it be ready?\" I asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Ma-ana\"—tomorrow. A bowlegged mechanic, his cherubic face daubed with oil, climbed out of the pit. Meanwhile, he could lend us a Seat 600, Spain's ubiquitous little workhorse in the 1970s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe left Emilio behind and drove the car, little more than a battered toy, to the village bakery, where we bought four big crusty rolls for bocadillos, jaw-straining sandwiches stuffed with fillings such as tuna, cheese, chorizo (a relative of salami), or ham. In a grocery we bought Manchego cheese, strong as saddle soap, smoked ham, tomatoes and olive oil, plastic knives, forks, and cups, and a bottle of red wine from Navarra.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe purchase of these small items made us feel proprietorial toward the village, like pioneers in an undiscovered outpost.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe drove along a dirt road to a clearing in a citrus grove where orange pickers had left the remains of a fire, the hub of their almuerzo, their mid-morning snack. We stirred the still-hot ash and pale flames danced in the embers. Diane slit open the rolls, spread them with olive oil, and crammed them with cheese and sliced tomatoes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn one side of us, grapefruit lay rotting on the red earth beneath the trees, no longer a fashionable fruit, we had been told.","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300856778981,"sku":"NP9780767904162","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780767904162.jpg?v=1767737033","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/spanish-lessons-isbn-9780767904162","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}