Sidewalk detours...

A Londoner and a Canadian were walking down the street when...
Sounds like the beginning of a joke in this week's Camino a Ítaca which looks at sidewalk blockades that often take place here on the streets of Extremadura. Click over to read the original published piece in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF abajo)

The look on my companion’s face went from slightly bemused to near complete exasperation in about the same amount of time it took for the people walking behind to start bumping into us. He had just been explaining to me that he grew up in London and was living in Scotland before deciding to move his young family from the Scottish moors to the dehesas of Extremadura to teach English when our way forward was blocked by an immovable local phenomenon.

It's a circumstance that rarely occurs in the congested, fastmoving streets of cities like the British capital, but is a quotidian occurrence on the streets of Extremadura. The pedestrians in front of us had run into people they hadn’t seen in a while and in the blink of an eye, the world came to a standstill.

Our situation was dire. To our left, a rock wall rose up three meters, while to our right we were hemmed in by cars parked at an angle and then others that were double parked behind them. This barrier of vehicles blocked our only escape route, to the street, where we would have had to take our chances in the fast-moving traffic. Behind us, snapping at our heels, frustration grew as the queue quickly grew longer. Our biggest saving grace was that it wasn’t raining and we weren’t in danger of either losing an eye or being skewed from behind by inexpertly wielded umbrellas.

“That’s one thing that I can’t understand about this place. Why don’t they just move over to the side?” he said through gritted teeth as the shuffling feet behind us made our space slowly smaller. “Even in Madrid in the metro they stand to the right on escalators to let people pass, but here it’s like they become completely oblivious to the world around them when they meet up with someone.”

And he was right. No attempt was made to clear the way for those passing by. Kisses were exchanged, greetings and enquiries were made and the conversation then settled into families and the recent cold weather. The blockade of the sidewalk was complete. Neither crying children, anxious dogs nor even a bomb going off could distract them from their congenial dialogue.

However, as the Londoner became more frustrated, I found my admiration for the interlocutors in front of us grow. They weren’t fretting about where they needed to be, inflation, rising mortgages, Chinese spy balloons, COVID, the war in Ukraine or the next invented crisis. Their attention was one hundred percent focused on the conversation and the people they were talking to.

Rather than an act of selfishness, as my colleague saw it, I started to realize that it was an indicator of the level of quality of life that existed out here in this elbow of Spain. To these people nothing was more pressing at the moment than to exchange a few words with their neighbors and in the act grow the community and strengthen bonds. 

And really, was it so annoying? Would it matter if we were a minute or two late? And if it did, maybe it was us that should have left a few minutes earlier.