Shortness

Dear readers,

Two days a week a vibrant, crawling market opens in the streets around my apartment complex. The air smells of vegetables, pastries, and fresh fruit, and the happy tones of hundreds of conversations float around in the spring breeze. Walking through the market today I noticed something that, while having seen before, I had not really considered.

Nearly everyone in this part of Spain over the age of 40 is very, very short. I saw this because I was able to look from one end of the market to the other, over hundreds of people, without any real trouble. There are for the most part only old people in my market, and it appears that the average height is around 5`2`` or lower.

I briefly asked my host mother about this, and she agreed on the fact, mentioning that in many other parts of Spain the people are older, but did not seek to explain why. I have no idea either. More interestingly, the younger children in this part of Spain are substantially taller than their parents. Maybe the nutrition in the Spanish adolescent diet has substantially improved since the time of Franco?

At the least I get to feel like Tom Cruise probably did with his Japanese cast in the last Samurai for once,
Tim