I’ve had my share of rough times while abroad in Spain – tearfully attempting to explain my vivid yellow diarrhea to doctors who openly mocked me after spending a horrific night hallucinating on the toilet; being guilted into eating ham that was sliced off a pig leg in our pantry – a pig leg that that was still covered in a fine coating of PIG HAIR, mind you; eating what can I only assume what was a bowl of sea creatures and worms which my house-mom masqueraded as “pasta;”  I’ve even had to see my house-mom’s cleaning lady naked….and well, my house-mom parading about in her birthday suit too for that matter… and those are sights that I can NEVER unsee.  But at least I didn’t wake up in a hospital bed in Morocco after the typewriter salesman I fled Spain with disappeared with my fortune, leaving me high and dry with an unborn baby and an unpaid hotel bill  for thousands of dollars.  Of course my house-mom in not so many words banned me from visiting Morocco… so maybe she saved me some trouble.  Thanks for that María Jose.  But anyway, that is the situation we find our main character Sira in shortly after beginning The Time In Between  by María Dueñas. [Read more...]