DREAMING OF ISTÁN -- part 5

DREAMING OF ISTÁN Back at the bar, have a little piece of bread with some meat and cheese. Rejoice in the fact that the no-name place has just a few tapas to offer. A Chinese menu-length list of offerings would be suspect, no? Settle up with the barkeep and walk over to Fuente y Lavadero El Chorro, an historic water fountain and washing area that has become the emblem of Istán. Study the large number of irrigation channels that flow through the town. They date back to the ingenious Moors who used them as a watering system for domestic and agricultural use. Stop and look everywhere you go. The terraced nature of the Andalusian hillside village means that there often is a street one level above you and more on the levels below. Gaze up at the rooftops. There is laundry hanging on a line and it isn’t something from a movie set, it’s the real deal. Check out all those TV antennas. Look the other direction, at the street overhead. Kids are playing some kind of game created on the spot that involves a soccer ball and apartment walls in a sunlit crook of a dead end street.