Spinach Soup for the Walls by Lynne Harkes

Author:Lynne Harkes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gabon, jungle, Africa, elephant, monkey, Nigeria, Oman, travel, Scotland, South America, art, painting, nature
ISBN: 9781907203565
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Spanish Lessons and Evacuations

The following day, my mind, still six years back in time, churned over events. “I got the job,” my husband had told me excitedly. “As usual, they want me to start as soon as possible”. I’d been with him in the room while he had his telephone interview via a Nigeria to Amsterdam link-up. His future boss had invited him to Holland for two days for a follow-up face-to-face second interview.

And so, after family discussions we began weighing up the pros and cons of being posted across the Atlantic to South America. My husband seemingly passed the face-to-face interview and accepted his new and promoted position. We left Nigeria with a half-empty container, after selling the bulk of our house contents to willing camp residents there, unable to buy such European choice. Such was the demand for these locally unavailable items that at one point we’d had three eager DIY-ers biting nails in the living room while the earlier bird was making decisions on the contents of my husband’s tool box in the kitchen. Due to the differences in voltage there was going to be in the next location, we’d also decided to sell all our electrical kitchen goods, even our trusty ice cream maker which had churned and frozen a delicious pot of vanilla ice every Friday, without failure or complaint.

The formalities for visas for this location required us to attend the country’s London embassy in person and present our passports for elaborate hologram stamping. We began our course of specific injections needed for protection in this new location. Meningitis was a must, like the Yellow Fever stipulations for Gabon, which require vaccination certificates to be handed over along with a passport, or sometimes in preference to pass-ports, on every arrival through Customs here.

Some three months after telephone interviews and excited map searches to locate our new home, my husband and I arrived in a Spanish speaking country with one single word of Spanish between us, but clutching a dictionary and enough enthusiasm to master this new language.

Almost from the minute my weary feet touched down from ‘plane steps, heavy from months of the usual pre-preparation exhaustion, I’d sensed a pervading and ominous presence in our new country and a feeling of myself as some sort of square peg that would never fit into the place. We were, as is customary, housed in a hotel for the first few weeks until we managed to negotiate ourselves a flat to rent. The hotel, marble-lobbied and grand, gave no indications that the bedroom accommodation would be less than the standard we’d grown to tolerate in Lagos, Nigeria, where I’d learned to carry in my suitcase my own plug to ensure a bath in the orange tap water on arrival.

The room was shocking, easily the worst hotel room I’ve stayed in and we spent the first night awake listening to the heavy breathing of the occupants in the neighbouring room, whose open ceiling adjoined our open ceiling and blocked nothing.

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