Morning in Arriate. Seven thirty AM. A café latte, hot and hot, steaming on the table in front of me. Across the valley, beyond the screen of summer trees and the railway line, the hills of Andalusia, ochre and olive, catch the first light of the rising sun. This is an old countryside, worn and weathered, older than empires, folded into the strata of time.
The café Venta el Choza is full of tradesmen catching a coffee and a cigarette before the Monday work begins. I listen to the indecipherable chatter of conversations, no doubt good-natured complaining about the heat or the price of bricks. Cigarette smoke curls in the breeze, mixed with the strong scent of ground coffee and olive oil.
A farmer speeds past in a John Deere tractor towing a muck spreader. The smell of cow shit mingles briefly with that of the coffee. Two women arrive: their perfume, sweet and floral, weaves through the earthy tang like a sudden breeze through orange blossom. One of them laughs, a bright, silvery sound that softens the low rumble of traffic.
For a moment, everything overlaps: diesel, jasmine, espresso, soil.
Andalusia in stereo.
The sugar sachet that came with my coffee has a quote from Albert Einstein:
TODOS SOMOS MUY IGNORANTES. LO QUE OCURRE ES QUE NO TODOS IGNORAMOS LAS MISMAS COSAS.
“We are all very ignorant. What happens is that we do not all ignore the same things.”
It feels right, this quote. Here at the beginning of the week, deep in a new country, surrounded by a culture I am yet to understand, it is a reminder not of what I know, but of what I am yet to learn.
I finish my coffee and walk out into the long hills.
TravelWriterLife 