Sunrise

This is the story of a young woman getting her bearings in a new country where the language is unfamiliar, the meal times are out of sync, and the climate is uncomfortably hot.

I arrived in Guardamar at night. The air was warm and heavy with moisture; the sea breeze was a welcome relief. Little did I know that this would be the norm, and it would only become hotter and stickier during the day.

The first morning, I ran across the city in search of the sports center, hoping to see something familiar--but without internet access, I couldn't look up which way to run. I didn't know which way was North, South, East, or West. The thick air in the morning was new to my lungs, so I ran with heavy legs in a direction I did not know. The beach boardwalk became a sidewalk next to empty houses. The street ended abruptly at a huge pile of sand and a sign that said "Camping."

I stopped and stared at the sea. Where the hell was I? And why are there so many stray cats in Guardamar?

After many more runs, I realized that the sun rises over the sea; the sun sets over the sea in California. People here stare more than they do back at home, but every morning walker or jogger or sunrise-watcher has been happy to say "hola." The 6:30AM beach boardwalk cleanup crew do a great job of wiping up the mess that tourists create the night before with a system of trash-collecting, street-sweeping, and sand-combing. The old men who sit outside of the Pension at 7AM drinking brandy and coffee are loud and rowdy. Mornings are a relatively peaceful time in Guardamar, before the streets are filled with people and before the heat is exhaustingly intense. It's my favorite time of day here.

At the end of June, I met a woman whom I had seen for a few consecutive mornings. She took the initiative to speak to me in English, gesturing at the abnormally pale and obscure sunrise. The heat wave is caused by the air from Africa, she explained, which makes the particles in the air gather in such a way that it obscures the sun in the morning. It's not fog, it's not pollution. It's an unusual occurrence.

I told her I was disappointed that the sunrise was so weak this morning. She reminded me that there is always tomorrow to look forward to because every sunrise is different.

I'm beginning to realize that every sunrise is different, yet every place in the world shares this cyclical phenomena--the spectacle of a great glowing ball of light climbing slowly but steadily up from the horizion every 24 hours, revealing itself bit by bit, starting its long path across the sky. The sunrise in Guardamar is different from the sunrise in Madrid, Granada, and Cordoba. It is different in California. It will be different when I travel later to Rome, Berlin, Paris, and London, but I will know that though its colors and character may not look like yesterday's, its essence and beauty remains the same.