The middle of nowhere

There´s no nice way to say this: Ademuz is pretty crappy. It has some nice scenery, red hills like in Teruel, but that´s it. A lot of the houses are literally falling apart. But, I wanted to see small towns so here I am. I got in around 5pm on Saturday and went to buy some fruit to supplement my recent ham and bread diet, but everything was closed. It felt deserted, and as I walked around I imagined giant cartoon arrows flashing and pointing at me: “She´s not from around here! Outsider! Foreigner!” (Does contemplating how self-absorbed you are make you more self-absorbed or less?)

Luckily the one other person on the bus from Teruel to Ademuz made friends with me. He´s from the Canary Islands and really likes Ademuz and had never met an American before. He likes the scenery and the quiet and the people here. (It continues to amaze me that sometimes I can have entire conversations in Spanish but buying bus tickets still trips me up sometimes. It is getting easier, though.) I´ll keep being honest: We probably wouldn´t be friends if we lived in the same town and/or spoke the same language. But we don´t and we don´t, and he made what probably would have been an insufferably boring weekend kinda fun. Ademuz has a pool with a little outdoor cafe and the whole town seems to spend the weekends there. It´s a little bit of a walk down an unmarked road and I never would have found it by myself. The people here are nice and friendly and nonthreatening now that I´ve gotten over the town itself (says the girl from the rural midwest). The people are nice BUT. I missed the second half of the Germany-Portugal game because they switched the bar TV to coverage of the pope´s visit to Valencia. The friggin´papa. He looks like Hannibal Lecter.

And my hotel reminds me of the general store from Little House on the Prairie. It´s a hotel, bar, restaurant, banquet hall, and store, all in one big building with a huge front porch. There´s a little river that runs through the town and the Ayuntamiento (city hall) stocks it with fish so people can go fishing. I think that´s cute (I know they do it all over the place, but it´s still cute.) The river turns red from the dirt when it rains.

So Ademuz was okay. I wanted to run like hell when I first got here, but I´m glad I didn´t.