It is the little details that strike you most when arriving in a new place.  When I arrived in the urban pueblo of Velez-Malaga after two weeks in Madrid and Granada, the first thing that struck me was the smell of the sea.  The town is two miles inland from the Mediterranean, but the fresh salt sting in the air was verbose.  The sun was scorching, and when I would cross the street into the shade the temperature would drop 15 degrees.  These are the small but obvious details, the ones that you must notice because they are fairly obvious.  There are less obvious, but no less potent, endemic tellings: the softer sound of a woman's heels on cobble stones versus a cement sidewalk.  The more yellowish glow of streetlights.  The signs are never-ending once you are in a new place, and every new road you walk down, every tram you take, each climb into the mountains to look out over the sea towards Africa reminds you that you are somewhere else. 

For me it was the old men.  In Velez, a town of 50,000, the old men dressed in brown and black and white and grey sat all afternoon and into the evening in the center of town.  In weathered groups of ten or twenty, their faces golden and hard from the Latin sun, they sat relaxed on park benches and gossipped quickly.  A few were in the ubiquitous cafes playing dominos and drinking anis.  These men never failed to remind me of where I was, perhaps because in America we usually hide our old men and women in apartments and nursing homes; sure, bringing them to dinners and family gatherings, but when was the last time you walked through Bolder or San Francisco or El Paso and witnessed a chattering throng of old men controlling the center of town?