Even though I am actually Danish, I spent my teen years in Spain, after my mother entered a relationship with a semi-retired Englishman who had put down roots in the south of Spain.
The point of bringing this up is that I pretty much "learned to write," when we moved to Spain. At the very least, it was the time when I started being serious about keeping a journal and writing "observations" about what was going on around me. I would buy these big fat red journal books and write all sorts of things in them. I was 14, at the time... and when I think back on those days, one of the primary reasons I would write so much was that I had very little else to do. We lived in a retirement area, and there were very few other people my age around... except 10 miles away.
The Spain of today looks nothing like the Spain of my teen years. I could as well be on the coast in Southern California, as Spain. But even so, it still has the same "deadness" I felt, when I was a kid... this sense that all the people around me were there mostly "waiting to die."
Writing was an "escape" of sorts. It was a ways to visualize-- through words on a page-- and "experience" the kind of growing up I was not experiencing. Maybe that sounds sad or depressing, but I was actually pretty hopeful, in its own way...
