Saturday, April 18, 2015

Prostitutes, police, and my very own apartment (very late April 2015)

When I'm in Jerez, I live on a short, quiet (well, kind of quiet) residential street called Benavente Bajo.  It is within sight of a big, shoe-box shaped building that at one time was the olive oil manufacturing center.  Had the olive press and all that.


the former police station

Next, it became the local police station, then it fell into disrepair to be restored as a museum to flamenco - which had no patrons - and is currently the home of a flamenco club, the Peña la Buena Gente.  (Peña la Buena Gente means "the Good Guy's Club.")

Peña la Buena Gente logo on the building

In the days when it was the police station, my street, little Benavente Bajo, was home to whore houses.

This couldn't have been too terribly long ago because when I moved in, my neighbor downstairs on the left was a prostitute (who never paid her bills, by the way) and the woman downstairs on the right, mother of two sons of the same age (but apparently with different fathers) worked for the city government but moonlighted as a prostitute.

My street.  I'd planned to dress up with a
very short mini-skirt, etc., and hang out of
my door for this blog post, but ran out of time.

I, myself, got a couple of knocks on the door the first year I was there from men looking to see if I'd like to turn a trick.

I told them "Gee, thanks, but no thanks."  After all, we must have our standards.

Thought you might like to know this...about my neighborhood (which now is very middle class and has a couple of really church-y families living on it), plus of course, about my standards.
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Until very, very recently, Eve A. Ma was in Spain, working on a documentary about flamenco that she is co-directing with Antonio de la Malena.  She is now in France attending a film festival where one of her documentaries will be presented (on May 2 at 8pm;  drop me a line for details if you'd like to attend).

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