A Culture Shock

My first sighting of Marbella (pronounced Mar-bay-a, which I’m sure most people know, but which may be worth putting in for those who thought they knew right up until the point they embarrass themselves in polite company by getting it horribly wrong) was from the bus that had brought me the 190km from Granada.

As we trundled along the motorway towards the town, I was immediately struck by the differences: the January sun, which hadn’t even attempted to pierce the cold damp gloom of Granada’s winter, toasting my arm to almost uncomfortable levels through the grimy windows of the bus.

From the bus station perched high up the hill behind the town, a rash of off-white apartment buildings could be observed making their stately way down to the edge of a glittering Mediterranean. It reminded me vaguely of Puerto Alcúdia in that it was clearly home to a holiday resort, but there the resemblance ended: this appeared to be an entirely more sophisticated operation.

I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the cheapest hostel he could think of, before totally exposing my ignorance of the area by asking him whether he thought that Puerto Banús would perhaps be cheaper that Marbella itself – I quickly discovered that this is rather akin to asking a Londoner if Chelsea would perhaps be cheaper than Hackney.

But as Marbella was the name I associated with the glitziest and ritziest part of the Costa del Sol, I assumed that it would be positively crawling with the rich and infamous, and thus way out of my budget. At that point I wasn’t yet aware that Marbella the town, and Puerto Banús the rich boys’ playground, were as different from each other as, well, as Mayfair and Walthamstow.

The taxi driver kindly spared my blushes by not roaring with laughter, and instead transported me directly to what must have been far and away the most affordable lodgings in town. So affordable were they, that I couldn’t wait to leave them; hurriedly dumping my luggage on the cracked tiles before making my way out into the veritable maze of ‘callejuelas’ (ca-yay-huelas – small streets) that constituted the old town of Marbella.

Coming out into Plaza de los Naranjos (Pla-tha-de-los-Naran-hos) or Orange Square, as it is known to many an Anglophile; I was more than pleasantly surprised. The square was filled with the fragrant orange trees after which it is named, and the tables and chairs of the surrounding restaurants sat invitingly at the centre of it, hemmed in by a large rectangle of riotous plants and flowers leaving a sizeable walkway around the edge.

The old town of Marbella is remarkably quaint; with cobbled streets and pretty little shops. It was only as I began to make my way down towards the sea that I really started to have the feeling that I had stepped into a vastly different word than that which I had previously inhabited in Granada.

Narrow, cobbled streets quickly turned into wide, marble-inlaid avenues and I was enchanted by the amount of greenery – Granada having been a particularly arid city with even the parks devoid of all but the most pitiful-looking shrubs.

Here there were trees lining every street and jardinières of plants on every corner. I crossed the busy Avenida de Ramón y Cajal (named after the 1906 Nobel Prize winner of Physiology) and made my way into the shady Parque Alameda on the other side.

For a few minutes I just sat on one of the tiled benches taking in my surroundings. Children ducked and dived through the immense rainforest of foliage and scrambled up onto the rim of the large central fountain, to a chorus of disapproving shouts from their parents and minders. Around the edges of the park, vendors were selling newspapers, postcards and plastic beach toys from their tiny kiosks.

There was even a gentleman selling hot chestnuts from an ancient dustbin filled with coals, but despite it still being January, the sun was shining far too brightly for him to sell very much.

From the park, it was only a short walk down to the beach and the long Paseo Marítimo that ran along it; jam-packed with restaurants, estate agents, travel agents, shops and businesses of all conceivable descriptions.

What endless possibilities!

Now fluent in Spanish, with several years’ experience in the catering industry, an administrative course under my belt and a smattering of German lurking in the depths of my right hemisphere; finding my feet in Marbella in January 2000 looked set to be a considerably easier task than setting up my new life in Mallorca had been all those years previously…

I spent the entire week in Marbella depositing my now well-travelled CV with restaurant managers and hotel receptionists. I even braved the previously unthinkable option of approaching more serious concerns – was a gloriously air-conditioned office finally within my grasp?

With a local business pages at my fingertips (swiped from some hotel reception or other) I was also able to post my begging letters even further afield – up and down the coast from Estepona to Benalmádena they flew, until I was satisfied that my name was a source of irritation in enough personnel departments that somebody, somewhere, would give in and employ me.

And just ten days later I found myself back in Granada packing the last of my belongings into kindly Anja’s car in readiness for the final journey to this hopefully more financially viable new life.

The trip was undertaken with my two nameless goldfish bobbing around nervously in their bowl, which was in turn precariously perched on my knees: a rather nerve-racking undertaking given that Granada’s motorways were in dire need of maintenance and prone to some quite astonishingly large holes. Not withstanding, it was with goldfish almost certainly nauseous but thankfully intact that we finally reached our destination just over two hours later.

Having found some very affordable accommodation in Avenida de la Fontanilla (fon-tan-ee-ya), a surprisingly spacious studio-apartment awaited me. It boasted a separate bathroom and kitchen, and a large balcony overlooking a garden complete with swimming pool, which sadly belonged to the building opposite.

Despite the lack of aquatic possibilities, I nevertheless felt that Lady Luck was cheering me heartily on from the side lines.

And indeed, within only a few days I was called in for my first job interview.

A firm of Spanish business supervisors – una gestoría – was looking for a bilingual someone or other to help them extend their services to the vast English-speaking population that had taken up residence along the coast (but somehow neglected to pick up any but the most rudimentary Spanish along the way).

Unfortunately for me, they were only prepared to pay someone to work four hours a day – offering a salary that would barely even cover my rent, let alone keep me in arroz a la cubana now I didn’t have Abel’s monthly allowance to plunder.

Without exactly declining, I requested some time to “think” about it, whilst madly chasing up the many recipients of my previous applications to see if any other possibilities were forthcoming.

And at long last I got the much-awaited phone call back.

It was from one of the swarm of British-run real estate companies peppering the coast, and was requesting my presence at a preliminary interview to be held in one of their eight offices.

So a few days later, and in the grip of alarmingly jittery nerves, I caught one of the large, and disconcerting, ‘concertina’ buses that ran up and down the towns scattered along the Costa del Sol.

Its bendy, lumbering bulk took me out of Marbella towards Puerto Banús and Nueva Andalucía, and then on through the small town of San Pedro de Alcántara before eventually depositing me at the side of the main road in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, but turned out to be precisely the area I was looking for  – Guadalmina.

It was a rather odd location, with a solitary parade of shops and businesses running  right alongside the main thoroughfare, but not a lot else.

I later discovered that there were actually quite a number of apartment complexes and villas hidden behind the trees on the beach side of the road, constituting Guadalmina Baja (Lower Guadalmina). The colourful apartment buildings that were springing up almost daily around the Guadalmina golf courses slightly more inland, proceeding to make up Guadalmina Alta (Higher Guadalmina).

Some most excellent news was imparted in a telephone call only a matter of hours after the interview – the following week I would be starting my job as Marketing Assistant in the international office of one the largest real estate chains on the coast.

What had qualified me for such a position would for ever remain a mystery, but can perhaps be put down to three things:

– A now uncommon state of affairs where employment experience was actually given by employers rather than simply being demanded.

– An also long-abandoned world where people could be hired on the premise of their natural potential as opposed to the weightiness of their formal qualifications.

– Last, but by no means least, was the undeniable fact that the financial boom of some aspects of ex-pat life, and real estate in particular, saw even the most otherwise unemployable suspects growing fat on the  riches that were to be had…

…something I would sadly come to experience first-hand.