Looking through.

I went to Spain and I don't speak Spanish. While I was there, the spoken word would wash into my ears on a wave, knocking the language section of my brain right off its feet. I love language and all its intricacies and subtle nuances, but I was reduced to the bare bones of sentence structure. A few nouns, their friendly adjectives, and a verb or two if I was lucky, snatched up from a sentence before the next one began. The isolation caused by the language barrier forced my brain to switch its attention to the visual.

I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. -Ansel Adams



Being an observer and photographer can be a wonderful thing, and this area of Spain provided a new vocabulary, but the disconnect from the people made it feel like a not fully fleshed-out scene. The people were characters in sets, but without descriptions or backgrounds, there to be recorded but not fully understood.

I picked up some Spanish and took many pictures while I was there, but it was a true/strange joy to be stuck in the airport surrounded by fellow travelers, all stranded there by an Icelandic volcano. We traded stories with a college Spanish instructor from Virginia who was hoping the volcano would not interfere with a student backpacking trip he was supposed to lead back in Spain in just a few short days, a Québécois ex-pat pop opera singer/nutritionist trying to make his way home to Orlando for a singing engagement, and an audiologist from Mexico City who travels to Paris every year to purchase tools for her practice, among others. It was a good way to end the trip, just letting the words flow, feeding each other's hunger for familiarity.