This is the retroactive diary of days 5-9 of my time in Spain, which mostly took place in Barcelona. It was awesome! The trip, that is. You can read the diary and decide the rest for yourself.
You can also check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them the first time.
Day 5:
We move slowly on our last morning in Madrid, as the four days of non-stop activity are finally taking their toll. We're catching a train to Barcelona in a couple of hours, but I could sleep the rest of the day.
We haven't even left yet and I'm already tired, but I remind myself that I'll be meeting up with my sister and her family soon and looking at Gaudi's masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia, and that makes it better.
I run to the supermarket two blocks away to grab a few things for lunch. As I check out, the cashier asks me in Spanish whether I have a grocery store rewards card.
Just as I'm starting to feel like I belong here, it's time to go.
As we arrive in Barcelona, I realize I need to figure out where we're going once we disembark. I map out the subway system and we're ready to go. There's just one thing wrong.
I'm having an unusual amount of difficulty reading the signs. They seem sort-of familiar but still indecipherable. After a few puzzling minutes I realize that the signs aren't in Spanish but it's French-influenced cousin Catalon. This is going to be an adventure.
In Madrid, only three people spoke English in the entire city. We had read in the guidebooks that English was more prevalent in Barcelona. This turned out to be true. In Barcelona, 12 people in the entire city spoke English. Of course, five of them were members of my family, but let's not get overly technical.
We get to the apartment and check in. It occurs to me that amidst the activity of the last week, I didn't double-verify what time my sister is supposed to get here. She had originally told me 10, and then 6, but I didn't reconfirm that before she left for Spain 3 weeks ago.
Regardless, we have at least an hour, so we make the 15-minute walk to the local public market, which is called La Boqueria, but would more accurately be described as Heaven. It holds the largest collection of fruit, meats and seafood the world has ever known. The fruit is colorful and cheap, and you could devour it all on the spot if only people weren't bumping into you all the time. (Weird thing about Europe: no one says "excuse me" when they bump into you or block your way, because it happens so often. I never got used to that. I kept saying the Spanish equivalent of excuse me when I bumped into people, and they looked seemed more offended that I apologized than that I ran into them in the first place.)
But there isn't too much time to get lost in the sea of colorful fruit, so we take a quick walk through and come back.
There's still no sign of my sister, so we pass the time with a 2-Euro bottle of wine from the grocery store, where I'm again asked if I have a customer loyalty card. I'm picking up right where I left off!
On my way back to the apartment I'm also asked for directions. Weirdly, the signs are predominately in Catalon, but everyone seems to speak Spanish.
We pass the time looking out from our balcony with our wine and the evening turns into night. By about 8, we assume that my sister and her family must have been on the 10 o'clock flight after all, so we make the 15-minute trek back to the market.
It was closed. So were most of the shops we passed on the way to it. I guess Barcelona doesn't stay open as late as Madrid. The guidebooks didn't mention that either. If I ever meet Mr. Fodor or Mr. Frommer (assuming they're not actually the same person), we're going to have a serious talk.
We walk La Rambla, Barcelona's long tree-lined pedestrian walkway, and head back, where my sister, brother-in law and their 8 year old daughter have just arrived. A celebratory glass of wine and some conversation later, and we all turn in early.
Day 6
"We have to go," my wife says as the alarm sounds at some ungodly time like 7:30. "The guidebooks say if you don't get to Sagrada Familia early, the line gets crazy."
"I don't know, maybe it would be better to get a good night's sleep and then deal with the line?" I suggest.
"We can sleep when we're dead."
Touche.
So Liz and I walk the 8 blocks to Sagrada Familia while my family sleeps in. The adrenaline takes over the fatigue as we walk. If there's one thing in Spain we wanted to see, this is it.
We turn the corner to find it, and expect to behold majesty. Instead, we see scaffolding. Lots of scaffolding. The cathedral is open, but still unfinished, and the construction on the front overwhelms the church, which also looks surprisingly small.
Even worse, we get there by 9:15, but it's already too late. The line wraps around the entire building, and a guide is telling people not to bother because it's a four-hour wait.
Rick Steves and his cohorts have failed us again.
Between the construction on the city's signature landmark, the early closing times and the ubiquitous Catalon, Barcelona was not off to a good start.
But at least the guide didn't issue her wait-time warning in Catalon, or we would have wasted our whole day.
We take the walk to a couple other Gaudi architectural sites, which both surpass our suddenly lowered expectations. We met my family, go back to La Boqueria, wander the streets and take in the Picasso Museum.
Everyone else went to bed while my sister and I stay up late discussing Life, the Universe and Everything, and what life might look like if all our dreams come true.
It's what we do. And by the end of the day, Barcelona seems like a wonderful place to be.
Days 7-8
Friday and Saturday in Barcelona are a blur. There was so much to see and we did it so quickly, that it all runs together.
We went to the Barcelona Cathedral, which was beautiful and reminded my brother-in-law and I both of Notre Dame. I tried to light a candle for my most fervent prayer request, but the wicks were so short that I extinguished four before I finally got one to light. I like to think that the one new flame I eventually lit burned with the energy of my prayer and the prior four combined. We took the elevator up to the roof and had an amazing view of the city.
We had a tasty dinner of fresh squid and spicy potatoes, we wandered, ate some churros and went to the Museum of Chocolate. We told inside jokes and delighted my eight-year-old niece with stories about the craziness of all her other family members. Like the time her granddad put catfish in our swimming pool.
I stuck my arm in the Mediterranean, and I rammed unsuccessfully into the base of two more orange trees, hoping one would fall. I ate a killer paella, sat on shaded tables in beautiful squares, and got lost more than a couple of times.
Finally, in a last gasp effort, we dashed to Sagrada Familia to take one more shot at getting in. Amazingly, late Saturday afternoon was quiet and we got inside after a 25-minute wait. The interior was striking in its simplicity. From an architect known for his outlandish designs, the inside was surprisingly and beautifully plain.
The building doesn't look that tall from the outside, but on the inside, the undecorated brown columns seem to rise to just short of Heaven. The windows are stained and beautiful, but the rest of the cathedral is overwhelming mostly for its for its sheer simplistic magnitude.
A viewing area was fenced off on the backside of the church, which was blessedly scaffold-free. It was amazing in its detail, as seemingly hundreds of scenes were carved into the surface of the cathedral. The door of the cathedral looked like a yawning mouth swallowing unholy tourists that by the dozens, and spitting them out forever changed by the majesty of the inside.
While my wife took pictures, I slipped away to a little prayer cubby facing a stained-glass window. I prayed silently for the same things that I pray for often, but somehow those familiar requests seemed more powerful here. The words echoed in my head, and then seemed to linger in the air, as though this space contained some kind of supernatural microphone. "Whatever might come between now and the next time I'm here," I asked, "guide me through it and show me where to go."
Sagrada Familia had redeemed itself from the scaffolding. There's a presence in the building that feels like the energy of millions of earnest prayers bundled together, even amidst the noise of the gawking tour groups.
I'm glad we came back.
Day 9
If you a flight leaving from the Barcelona airport anytime this decade, you should probably starting heading that way.
We picked up a taxi two and a half hours before our flight.
After a surprisingly long cab ride we got to the airport. I took a right upon entering, as the cab driver had instructed (thankfully, they don't seem to use "apunte" (or whatever that word was) in Barcelona as their vague multi-purpose preposition, as they do in Madrid). But when we looked at the flight screen, no American Airlines flights were listed and all the departing flights were to somewhere else in Europe.
So he were are, an hour and forty-five minutes from the departure of our international flight, in the wrong place, where no one spoke English and the signs weren't even Spanish. Panic began to set in.
There was a long walkway that claimed to lead to another "concourse" (not "terminal"), but that might still not take us to where we needed to be. No signs mentioned anything about American Airlines, so it seemed risky to try it.
Also, we had strategically spent all of our Euro except a few coins, so if we needed to catch a bus to some other terminal, and the fare was more than a couple Euro, we'd be out of luck.
To make matters worse, there were the only two customer service desks in sight had lines that appeared to be at least half an hour long. We wandered around aimlessly, looking for someone to whom I could ask directions, praying I'd be able to understand them.
After a distressing few minutes, I found an agent took pity on me and told me to take the free shuttle on the front corner when I put on my extra-desperate face and used overly formal Spanish.
The Barcelona Airport was apparently two different airports that not only existed completely independently of each other, and didn't even acknowledge the other's existence, and we had been in the wrong one.
After an excruciatingly long shuttle ride across the "same" airport, we got to our 8-person check-in line with over an hour to spare and took at deep breath. Or at least we did until we noticed that our line hadn't moved in the 10 minutes we'd been standing there.
We finally got to the front of the line 45 minutes before our flight, having not yet cleared security. Apparently the check-in delay was because our flight was oversold and they were trying to find volunteers to take another one. He offered us $1200 and a free hotel to stay another night in Barcelona, but that would have meant coming back to this airport tomorrow so no amount of money on earth wasn't worth it.
Instead, we took the same deal to take a connecting flight through Miami that would get us home four hours later.
We gained seven hours traveling back through time zones, so we had a 31-hour day. The 10-hour flight to Miami seemed to take twice as long as the 7.5 hour flight from New York, but we felt ok when we landed.
A few hours into our layover, our sleep-deprived bodies started to crash. I walked to an airport coffee shop to try to find a way to survive the layover.
The menu was in Spanish, and the barista didn't speak English either. My cell phone worked now, but I was still basically in Spain.
It was a fitting end.
We eventually slept our way through the flight home, where a friend picked us up and took us home.
It's weird to be back. I instinctively spoke broken Spanish to strangers for a day or two upon my return, and I didn't feel totally right from the jetlag for about a week. I still miss the free olives that come with every order. I miss the tapas and the two-dollar wine. I miss the beauty of the Moorish architecture and the palm trees, I miss the dinners where the waiter doesn't pressure you out of your table the moment your plate is empty. I miss the fresh, more flavorful food, I miss my sister and her family and I even miss the orange trees whose fruit lay tantalizingly beyond my grasp.
I miss the feeling of to expanding my horizons to the point of almost fitting in to a different culture.
I'll be back here someday. I don't know when. I never dreamed it would take six years to get to Europe after the last time I'd come. I guess you never really know how life would unfold in the future, so all you can do is enjoy the moment.
But I know, barring some unforeseen misfortune, I'll be back again. Part of me was always here, even before I came.
And the next time, I hope you'll come with me. And if you don't, you should make it a point to get here on your own.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Hangin' with Donald Miller
If you enjoy this blog, you can thank Donald Miller.
He's best known for writing Blue Like Jazz, an autobiographical story of how he found God despite his church's attempt to reduce spirituality into a set of arbitrary rules and political ideology. Having lived that story firsthand, I love that book.
But it wasn't the one that changed my life. It was after reading another of Miller's books, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, that I decided it was time to start writing again and do something more meaningful with my life.
The first post I ever wrote on this site took a quote from it:
"The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person's story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don't want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vacuum cleaner, we are living stupid stories."
I decided then to live a more meaningful story. And last night, with this blog within a whisper of its 15,000th hit, the story included a chapter where I got to meet Donald Miller.
Miller gave a lecture at Belmont University last night, and it turns out we have a mutual friend (who is also a writer), so I got to speak with Don for a just a few minutes when his lecture was done.
Sometimes people complain that they feel let down when they meet their hero. Donald Miller was the nicest famous person I've ever met.
I thanked him for inspiring me to start the blog. He seemed genuinely touched that he'd helped change the trajectory of my life. He signed the book I've re-read so many times by now, and he waited patiently while I awkwardly misdirected our mutual friend Mark how to take a picture with my new cell phone.
Miller writes with such strong opinions, that I was a little surprised that in person he was so pleasantly humble and unbound to his own ideas. Of course, I don't agree with everything he's ever written (and I've read it all), but the time to discuss that wasn't last night.
Maybe next time it will be.
In the lecture he gave, my favorite analogy he gave was about how no one can prove a sunset is prettier than camel dung. But if you experience them both, it makes that reality undeniable.
It's the same way with God. I'll never prove God is real or argue you into believing what I do. But if those of us who claim to experience a loving power bigger than ourselves live lives that point toward something beautiful, maybe, just maybe, someone else will take a few steps closer to that beauty as well, and be positively changed for having seen it.
That's actually part of why this blog is here.
It hasn't brought me fame or fortune or even a cent of cash. But among the 15,000 times someone has clicked on this site since Don inspired me to launch it, I hope at least a few of you found something beautiful, something that rang unprovably but undeniably true, or maybe just something funny that made a crappy day, week, or season in life seem just a little tolerable.
And if you did, you can thank Donald Miller.
Just like I did.
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Blogging Through Spain (Part 2 of 3): Holy Toledo!
You've reached the middle part of my retrospective blog diary of my 8 days in Spain. You can read about days one through three, in Madrid, here:
http://www.andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/09/blogging-through-spain-part-1-of-3.html
(I would post a link to part 3 as well, but I haven't written it yet.)
On day 4, we woke up early to catch a train from Madrid to Toledo. But not early enough.
Day 4:
We're taking a day trip to Toledo. It's a 30-minute ride and it's the city where the expression "Holy Toledo" originated. As we leave our apartment, that's about all I know of our destination, except that Toledo is holy.
We had decided to come here because, prior to its present incarnation as the spiritual center of Catholic Spain, the city was previously ruled by the Islamic Moors and also had a huge Jewish presence. Because of the three cultures that have influenced it, it's filled with buildings that have alternatively been mosques, synagogues and cathedrals.
As we sleepily wobble out our apartment at the break of dawn to catch our train, I'm already regretting the trip. I'm enjoying Madrid so much. I'd rather just sleep in and eat more tapas and olives and leave the religious diversity and cultural encounters for some other day, when I'm not so tired.
The situation isn't helped by the fact that we miss our train. Our apartment guide claimed we were a 20-minute walk from the train station. About 25 minutes into our walk, we begin to freak out. We should have been there by now. We gave ourselves 35 minutes, but it still wasn't enough.
We ran the last stretch of the way, but it still took every minute of the 35 just to get inside the door of the station. It took another 15 to figure out where in the multi-level train station we needed to go once we got there.
By then, our train was long gone.
Thankfully, there was another one a hour and a half later. We had hoped we could use the same ticket for the next one, but, as with every other transaction, I would have to ask in Spanish.
The answer was clearly "no," although I couldn't decipher the specific details. I was then directed to another window ("apunte" from the customer service desk) where I could buy new tickets.
After an extra hour's wait, we boarded for Toledo. When we arrived at Toledo's beautiful Moroccan-style train station, we couldn't even see the city, so we decided to take the $2 bus into downtown.
It would be the best decision we made all week.
The large, overfilled bus whizzed uphill through the winding mountain road, coming inches away from colliding with both passing traffic and hanging cliffs, taking turns to ensure that its passengers on each side were equally terrified. But the alternative would have been to walk up the functional equivalent of the stairway to Heaven.
Or the stairway to Holy Toledo.
Toldeo is at the peak of a mountain, overlooking a river and valley on all sides. The city isn't really a city in the normal meaning of the term. Instead, it's an old medieval fortress that thousands of modern people happen to live and work in. There's a river at the base of the mountain that serves as a natural moat.
The "streets" are winding cobblestone walkways that appear to have been unchanged for 600 years. There isn't enough room for cars and people to coincide, so when a car comes by, pedestrians must cling to the fortress walls and pray for their lives to allow room for the car to pass. Thankfully, the city is reputed to be holy because of the numerous houses of worship it contains, so the pedestrians prayers are generally answered.
Aside from the occasional passing car, it looks like we've traveled back in time to before the Renaissance. It's brutally hot and the winding medieval alleyways ("streets" are too strong of a word to describe them) are impossible to navigate or even map, but it's still impossible not to love Toledo. It's hard to imagine something like this still exists.
I stand in awe. I've never seen anything like this.
"Holy Toledo," is all I can think to say.
We are in a living castle, right down to the moat surrounding us on all sides. I keep looking up at the fortress towers, expecting to see a princess, or a dragon, or perhaps a dragon princess. The noise from the occasional second-floor tv destroys the illusion, but somehow increases the surreal nature of the vibe.
We wander to a couple of former synagogues that look like mosques, but are now cathedrals. The Moorish architecture on the inside and outside of the buildings looks like a scene from Casablanca. I had always wanted to see Morocco, but I can't imagine this isn't the same thing, only prettier and with a language barrier more easily navigated.
Holy Toledo.
The Islamic African Moors controlled this area for 700 years. When they were finally driven out of control in the 1400s, their architects stayed over, because the pre-Renaissance Europeans couldn't build things this pretty. As a result, even the cathedrals and synagogues built inside the old fortress in look like Mosques. Toledo has eight or nine of these, all beautiful, and they all look straight out of Arabian Nights.
It's hard to imagine how a fort/town this small every supported so many houses of worship. But that's why the city is considered so holy.
After visiting the two synagogues, we go inside a monastery. It was beautiful like everything else in Toledo, but what I remember most is that it had an orange tree in the courtyard. The courtyard was blocked off to prevent people like me from stealing oranges. This made me mad because it seemed like a religious institution like this should have been on the honor system. And more importantly, the fence kept me from stealing a fresh Spanish orange that I'd been dreaming about for months.
We grabbed lunch in a break between architectural wonders. Predictably, the waiter/owner/manager who ran the little shop we ducked into spoke very little English. We did just fine, at least until the clueless New Yorkers wandered in just behind us.
When they struggled to order, I tried to fill in the gaps from the table next over. The waiter had recommended three specific dishes, but they wanted more details, despite the fact that neither had a clue how to communicate.
Somewhere along the way, they heard the word "tomate," which they recognized to mean tomato.
"Oh, so is that like spaghetti?" one of them yelled to me, sitting at the next table over.
I struggled to find a way to answer their question in a way that both the waiter and these clueless customers would understand. It didn't help that I hadn't even heard what dish they were talking about, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't be spaghetti. This was Spain, after all not Italy.
After they finally clumsily and painfully ordered an appetizer ("chicken") using English entirely, I introduced myself.
I offered to help, telling them (in English) that while I wasn't fluent in Spanish, I knew enough to communicate.
"Oh, we do to," they said. And then they began asking each other if either knew the Spanish word for "chicken."
They didn't.
In fact, the two of them knew a grand total of six words between them, and that's only if you double-counted the three words they both seemed to know. That would have been fine, had we not gotten dragged unwillingly into their constant attempts to grab the waiter's attention ask obscure, inane questions.
We ate a fantastic meal and left, interrupted occasionally by our waiter's requests to translate the bizarre requests of the tourists beside us.
No, the restaurant doesn't have "ranch" salad dressing.
Yes, the papas bravas are "kind of" like French fries, but why did you come here if you want to eat French fries?
No, they don't have hamburgers.
"Carne" means meat. "Calamari" means "calamari."
Yes, I can translate the word for "bathroom" but why did you come here without even knowing that?
And why couldn't you have at least asked me these questions beforehand, instead of forcing the waiter to turn to me when he showed up and couldn't answer your questions in English?
Two hours after we left, we happened to wander by the restaurant on our way to catch a taxi out of town. Our "friends" were just leaving the restaurant. I can only imagine what happened in the meantime, but they looked pleasantly clueless, oblivious to the fact that they'd probably just erased 5 years of the restaurant owner's life. It was an 8 hour flight to get here. Couldn't you have opened a phrasebook for half an hour of that?
And I just knew from the way the carried themselves that if they ever met a tourist in America would was equally unprepared, they would turn up their noses.
No wonder so many people hate Americans.
After lunch, we see an old mosque that had been converted into a church, and an old church that had been converted to a museum. It was somehow even more beautiful than everything else we had seen.
There are other sites to see, most of them religious, but after the six of them we've seen, we've reached the point of diminishing returns. It's time to move on.
We catch a taxi across the bridge to the hotel on another mountain across the river. It overlooks the city, so we sit under a tent on the patio and have drinks (and olives) while we absorb the last bit of this crazy place. I still can't believe it actually exists, why they let cars drive on the medieval roads, or why anyone chooses to live in this old fortress. It's magical, but it can't make for an easy life.
But I'm glad they do.
I wasn't excited to come here, but it's the most astounding thing I've ever seen. Three cultures live in one city. Which is a 15th Century fortress. On the top of mountain surrounded by a moat, and blossoming with orange trees that the monastery won't let me steal.
Holy Toledo.
If you ever get a chance, you have to see this place. It was my favorite day of the whole trip, even with our obnoxious entitled friends from New York who drove both us and our waiter crazy.
We take a taxi to the train station, which itself looks like an Arabian Palace, where Liz takes a final round of pictures, and we board the train to head back to Madrid.
After another wonderful round of showers, we head back out into the Madrilleno night, but we're hot and tired and we've already been to the restaurants that look the best, so we head back a little earlier than the night before.
"What did you think of our day?" I ask.
"It was wonderful," Liz says. "What were your thoughts?"
I pause. Only one phrase comes to mind.
"Holy Toledo."
We reluctantly go to bed again around midnight, sad at the idea of leaving our apartment the next day, but intrigued by what awaits in Barcelona...
To be continued..
http://www.andrewsmithsthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/09/blogging-through-spain-part-1-of-3.html
(I would post a link to part 3 as well, but I haven't written it yet.)
On day 4, we woke up early to catch a train from Madrid to Toledo. But not early enough.
Day 4:
We're taking a day trip to Toledo. It's a 30-minute ride and it's the city where the expression "Holy Toledo" originated. As we leave our apartment, that's about all I know of our destination, except that Toledo is holy.
We had decided to come here because, prior to its present incarnation as the spiritual center of Catholic Spain, the city was previously ruled by the Islamic Moors and also had a huge Jewish presence. Because of the three cultures that have influenced it, it's filled with buildings that have alternatively been mosques, synagogues and cathedrals.
As we sleepily wobble out our apartment at the break of dawn to catch our train, I'm already regretting the trip. I'm enjoying Madrid so much. I'd rather just sleep in and eat more tapas and olives and leave the religious diversity and cultural encounters for some other day, when I'm not so tired.
The situation isn't helped by the fact that we miss our train. Our apartment guide claimed we were a 20-minute walk from the train station. About 25 minutes into our walk, we begin to freak out. We should have been there by now. We gave ourselves 35 minutes, but it still wasn't enough.
We ran the last stretch of the way, but it still took every minute of the 35 just to get inside the door of the station. It took another 15 to figure out where in the multi-level train station we needed to go once we got there.
By then, our train was long gone.
Thankfully, there was another one a hour and a half later. We had hoped we could use the same ticket for the next one, but, as with every other transaction, I would have to ask in Spanish.
The answer was clearly "no," although I couldn't decipher the specific details. I was then directed to another window ("apunte" from the customer service desk) where I could buy new tickets.
After an extra hour's wait, we boarded for Toledo. When we arrived at Toledo's beautiful Moroccan-style train station, we couldn't even see the city, so we decided to take the $2 bus into downtown.
It would be the best decision we made all week.
The large, overfilled bus whizzed uphill through the winding mountain road, coming inches away from colliding with both passing traffic and hanging cliffs, taking turns to ensure that its passengers on each side were equally terrified. But the alternative would have been to walk up the functional equivalent of the stairway to Heaven.
Or the stairway to Holy Toledo.
Toldeo is at the peak of a mountain, overlooking a river and valley on all sides. The city isn't really a city in the normal meaning of the term. Instead, it's an old medieval fortress that thousands of modern people happen to live and work in. There's a river at the base of the mountain that serves as a natural moat.
The "streets" are winding cobblestone walkways that appear to have been unchanged for 600 years. There isn't enough room for cars and people to coincide, so when a car comes by, pedestrians must cling to the fortress walls and pray for their lives to allow room for the car to pass. Thankfully, the city is reputed to be holy because of the numerous houses of worship it contains, so the pedestrians prayers are generally answered.
Aside from the occasional passing car, it looks like we've traveled back in time to before the Renaissance. It's brutally hot and the winding medieval alleyways ("streets" are too strong of a word to describe them) are impossible to navigate or even map, but it's still impossible not to love Toledo. It's hard to imagine something like this still exists.
I stand in awe. I've never seen anything like this.
"Holy Toledo," is all I can think to say.
We are in a living castle, right down to the moat surrounding us on all sides. I keep looking up at the fortress towers, expecting to see a princess, or a dragon, or perhaps a dragon princess. The noise from the occasional second-floor tv destroys the illusion, but somehow increases the surreal nature of the vibe.
We wander to a couple of former synagogues that look like mosques, but are now cathedrals. The Moorish architecture on the inside and outside of the buildings looks like a scene from Casablanca. I had always wanted to see Morocco, but I can't imagine this isn't the same thing, only prettier and with a language barrier more easily navigated.
Holy Toledo.
The Islamic African Moors controlled this area for 700 years. When they were finally driven out of control in the 1400s, their architects stayed over, because the pre-Renaissance Europeans couldn't build things this pretty. As a result, even the cathedrals and synagogues built inside the old fortress in look like Mosques. Toledo has eight or nine of these, all beautiful, and they all look straight out of Arabian Nights.
It's hard to imagine how a fort/town this small every supported so many houses of worship. But that's why the city is considered so holy.
After visiting the two synagogues, we go inside a monastery. It was beautiful like everything else in Toledo, but what I remember most is that it had an orange tree in the courtyard. The courtyard was blocked off to prevent people like me from stealing oranges. This made me mad because it seemed like a religious institution like this should have been on the honor system. And more importantly, the fence kept me from stealing a fresh Spanish orange that I'd been dreaming about for months.
We grabbed lunch in a break between architectural wonders. Predictably, the waiter/owner/manager who ran the little shop we ducked into spoke very little English. We did just fine, at least until the clueless New Yorkers wandered in just behind us.
When they struggled to order, I tried to fill in the gaps from the table next over. The waiter had recommended three specific dishes, but they wanted more details, despite the fact that neither had a clue how to communicate.
Somewhere along the way, they heard the word "tomate," which they recognized to mean tomato.
"Oh, so is that like spaghetti?" one of them yelled to me, sitting at the next table over.
I struggled to find a way to answer their question in a way that both the waiter and these clueless customers would understand. It didn't help that I hadn't even heard what dish they were talking about, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't be spaghetti. This was Spain, after all not Italy.
After they finally clumsily and painfully ordered an appetizer ("chicken") using English entirely, I introduced myself.
I offered to help, telling them (in English) that while I wasn't fluent in Spanish, I knew enough to communicate.
"Oh, we do to," they said. And then they began asking each other if either knew the Spanish word for "chicken."
They didn't.
In fact, the two of them knew a grand total of six words between them, and that's only if you double-counted the three words they both seemed to know. That would have been fine, had we not gotten dragged unwillingly into their constant attempts to grab the waiter's attention ask obscure, inane questions.
We ate a fantastic meal and left, interrupted occasionally by our waiter's requests to translate the bizarre requests of the tourists beside us.
No, the restaurant doesn't have "ranch" salad dressing.
Yes, the papas bravas are "kind of" like French fries, but why did you come here if you want to eat French fries?
No, they don't have hamburgers.
"Carne" means meat. "Calamari" means "calamari."
Yes, I can translate the word for "bathroom" but why did you come here without even knowing that?
And why couldn't you have at least asked me these questions beforehand, instead of forcing the waiter to turn to me when he showed up and couldn't answer your questions in English?
Two hours after we left, we happened to wander by the restaurant on our way to catch a taxi out of town. Our "friends" were just leaving the restaurant. I can only imagine what happened in the meantime, but they looked pleasantly clueless, oblivious to the fact that they'd probably just erased 5 years of the restaurant owner's life. It was an 8 hour flight to get here. Couldn't you have opened a phrasebook for half an hour of that?
And I just knew from the way the carried themselves that if they ever met a tourist in America would was equally unprepared, they would turn up their noses.
No wonder so many people hate Americans.
After lunch, we see an old mosque that had been converted into a church, and an old church that had been converted to a museum. It was somehow even more beautiful than everything else we had seen.
There are other sites to see, most of them religious, but after the six of them we've seen, we've reached the point of diminishing returns. It's time to move on.
We catch a taxi across the bridge to the hotel on another mountain across the river. It overlooks the city, so we sit under a tent on the patio and have drinks (and olives) while we absorb the last bit of this crazy place. I still can't believe it actually exists, why they let cars drive on the medieval roads, or why anyone chooses to live in this old fortress. It's magical, but it can't make for an easy life.
But I'm glad they do.
I wasn't excited to come here, but it's the most astounding thing I've ever seen. Three cultures live in one city. Which is a 15th Century fortress. On the top of mountain surrounded by a moat, and blossoming with orange trees that the monastery won't let me steal.
Holy Toledo.
If you ever get a chance, you have to see this place. It was my favorite day of the whole trip, even with our obnoxious entitled friends from New York who drove both us and our waiter crazy.
We take a taxi to the train station, which itself looks like an Arabian Palace, where Liz takes a final round of pictures, and we board the train to head back to Madrid.
After another wonderful round of showers, we head back out into the Madrilleno night, but we're hot and tired and we've already been to the restaurants that look the best, so we head back a little earlier than the night before.
"What did you think of our day?" I ask.
"It was wonderful," Liz says. "What were your thoughts?"
I pause. Only one phrase comes to mind.
"Holy Toledo."
We reluctantly go to bed again around midnight, sad at the idea of leaving our apartment the next day, but intrigued by what awaits in Barcelona...
To be continued..
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Blogging Through Spain (Part 1 of 3)
The bags are packed, the cats are fed. After a whirlwind of productivity the likes of which the world has never before seen, all my deadlines are met for the next 10 days. So for the first time in six years, Europe is just a flight away. It's time to go to Spain!
Don't worry. You can come too. Just keep reading.
Day 1:
Late last night my friend Jason offered to drive us to the airport. He's probably regretting that by now, but I took him up on his generous offer. So he dutifully arrives early this morning and exudes pleasant energy while my wife, Liz, and I triple-check our house for forgotten items, and drives us to the airport. Starting a trip with positive energy is an underrated bonus.
Thank you, Jason.
We arrive Saturday morning at the Nashville airport two hours in advance, like all the experts advise.
Of course, the airport is completely empty. But had we given ourselves an hour, we'd be still be in line as we speak, 9 days later. But as it was, we arrive at our gate in 15 minutes.
This is going to be a long day.
We stop in at the airport bookstore to kill some time, and have the following exchange with the sales person:
Clerk: So, where are you headed?
Us: Spain
Clerk: Oh! Usually I hear something like "Toledo."
Me: Well, we're taking a day trip to Toledo, Spain.
Liz: I just need to buy a watch since my cell phone won't work while we're there.
Clerk: Why do you care what time it is if you're in Spain?
Touche.
A few hours later we board and take off on our connecting flight to JFK. As the connecting flight circles New York, it hits me: New York is one of my favorite cities on earth, and I've never been this unexcited to be here. The vacation doesn't really feel like it starts until I'm actually on a plane that's landing at my destination. And I have a three hour layover until then.
My throat is feeling scratchy already. Maybe staying out late with my visiting out-of-town friends last night was a bad idea.
Liz and I make a round of phone calls to pass the time and taunt everyone we know with our travel plans. I stare out at the skyline.
That building in the distance towering over the New York skyline must be the Freedom Tower, at Ground Zero. Its 1776 feet are sobering to view, but I just want to be in Spain.
Before long the flight will board...
Day 2:
I move my watch forward six hours, which means its already midnight. The flight will last seven-and-a-half more hours. I really hope I can get some sleep, eventually. But in the meantime, I'm going to read that Skymall magazine to check the going rate on a life-sized statue of Bigfoot and some artificial grass that my pets can pee on.
I read a book, eat some airline food, and take a nap, occasionally stopping to translate for the teenage Spanish kid beside me who speaks as little English as the flight attendants do Spanish. I know we're flying American Airlines and all, but how do they staff an international flight without bilingual flight attendants? That's insane.
No wonder the rest of the world hates us.
A few hours later and finally, Madrid is in view. We walk off the plane with dry mouths, crunchy contacts and that groggy but exhilarating feeling that comes after an east-bound Transatlantic flight. We go into the bathrooms to wash our faces and brush our teeth. Bringing the toothpaste was a good call. The Madrid airport even has a tube of toothpaste already stocked.
It's nice to be here already.
We're going to hit the ground running in Madrid. We have no choice.
Our plane landed at 8 a.m., and we can't check into our apartment until 3 this afternoon. In the meantime, we have to get to the train station to drop off our luggage in a storage locker. I hope my Spanish is good enough to direct our taxi driver there.
"Hola. Necesitamos ir al estacion Atocha," I say to the first cab driver we see, mangling the pronunciation of Madrid's train station. The cab driver asks me a clarifying question, and we're good to go. As I ask a few questions in bad Spanish along the trip, it quickly becomes clear that he speaks no English whatsoever.
This would become a theme.
At the train station, no one speaks English either. I don't know the Spanish word for storage locker, but I can ask for a place to leave our suitcases.
Or rather, I can ask that question in perfect Spanish, but I can't actually understand the complicated directions the customer service agent gives me, which prominently involve the lockers being "apunte" (Or something like that. I never understood the word well enough to even look it up) from the front of the train station. I've taken 5 years of Spanish classes, but I've never heard that word before.
I ask her to repeat herself, but she just keeps telling me to go "apunte." We just wander in the general direction until we find it. Which we eventually do.
We drop off luggage and wander "apunte" toward the big Sunday flea market that all the guide books told us to see. We get there and find it consists of women's clothes and a bunch of cheap, crappy trinkets that no normal person would actually want. I bargain with two or three vendors for a dress my wife likes, but no one wants to give the confused-looking American with broken Spanish a good deal.
My Spanish is getting us by, but we're amazed that we haven't heard a word of English yet. Paris, Venice and Amsterdam weren't like this. There, you never forgot you were in a foreign country, but you always had the sense that the locals were a perfunctory native-tongue greeting away from resorting to English to make your life easier, even if they weren't very happy about it.
Here, the people are glad to repeat themselves more slowly if you ask, and even glad to teach you Spanish words, but that's the only tool they have to offer. You get the feeling from the smiles on their faces that they would gladly fill in the conversational gaps with the proper English word if they knew it, but since they can't, they have to wait patiently for my Spanish to come through. And unless I'm trying to follow directions involving the word "apunte," it generally does.
There's something weirdly awesome about the whole scene. I'm terrified and was unprepared for the scope of this challenge, but I've never soaked in a culture that's this authentically different from the one I know. At any given moment, we're one Spanish-language brain fart from me away from being helpless.
If only there weren't a KFC on the corner, I could blog about this.
We "flee" the market (you see what I did there?), and head to the big public park. It's beautiful and perfectly landscaped and there's a big lake in front of one of those monumental sculptures they only have in Europe.
We get a nice table by the lake and order tapas and horchata, the local morning beverage of choice. I order a waffle with strawberry ice cream. I actually wanted vanilla ice cream, but I felt the need to show the waitress that I knew the Spanish word for "strawberry." I thought about asking that she put it "apunte" to my waffle, but I still haven't figured out what that meant, so I don't get too crazy.
A couple hours later, we were ready for a nap but still had an hour to kill before our check in. So, in the time-honored tradition of homeless people everywhere, we napped in the park, and hear American music playing in the background while a roller blading troop practices. It's the first sustained English we've heard all day.
Eventually, we make it to our apartment and took the world's most fantastic shower, followed by the world's most fantastic naps.
We look for a little market where we can buy the world's most fantastic picnic dinner, to be eaten on our balcony, which is also fantastic. We end up settling for the grocery store 2 blocks away, but somehow get hopelessly lost on the way back. Those wine bottles start to get heavy after about 30 minutes of aimless wandering.
After we wander long enough to get frazzled, an old man finally takes mercy on us, and starts giving us directions without even asking where we're going. I tell him we aren't trying to get to Puerta Del Sol, to which he's trying to direct us. So instead, he gives us directions to where I ask. But I can't really understand what he's trying to tell us, except that we need to go "apunte" from the main street once we reach it.
I realize that I need to demand a refund on my Spanish classes.
But when we get there, we finally figure it out. Not what "apunte" means, of course, but how to get to our apartment.
But a few tapas and a cheap bottle of wine are consumed on the balcony, and day 2 turns into:
Day 3:
I'm still exhausted, but Liz wants to get moving. Our agenda is purposefully limited today, but we were hoping to get to the Reina Sofia (the Modern Art Museum) before the line gets long. We failed.
The line is long and it's already hot, but there's really nothing else on our agenda for the day, so we suffer through. Some people are walking straight in, though, while a long line of people wait in the line in which we find ourselves.
Liz asks that I investigate further, but I feel stupid and intimidated by the idea of asking what's going on, for fear that the conversation will go something like this:
Me: (in broken Spanish) what is this line for?
Other person: For the museum, dummy.
So instead, I walk to the front of the line hoping for a sign I can read. The signs have English subtitles, but the translation is so broken that it's just confusing, and it seems to contradict the Spanish version above it. All I know for sure is that there's a museum, I'm standing in front of it, and I have no idea what I need to do to get in. My wife waits in line in front of the museum, or possibly "apunte" of it, while I stand dumbfounded.
This would also be a theme.
An hour later, and three fruitless trips to entrance doors in hopes of talking to a roaming customer service agent, we finally get to the front of the line and figure out how to buy tickets. In the meantime, a roaming homeless woman asks us for money.
When we ignore her, she doesn't move down the line, as would happen in the US. Instead, she starts yelling and attempts to steal my wife's water bottle. I finally manage to tell her to go away, but we created quite a scene in the meantime. I guess one manages interactions with beggars differently here.
Interesting.
We hit the museum and see Picasso's famous Guernica, but we can't get into the Dali exhibit until two. In the meantime, we have amazingly good tapas at a café across the street and the best sangria I've ever tasted. While we have leisurely and ridiculously cheap lunch, a Spanish guy introduces himself to a pretty blond woman who walks by.
She agrees to an impromptu date, but her Spanish is bad. The Spanish guy is suave and appears to have done this before--he even speaks English. And then for the first time in three days, I hear a conversation in English, albeit a cheesy one where some random dude is attempting a cross-continental pick-up. I guess it's romantic, in a certain way, even though it seems obvious this isn't going anywhere.
We see the museum and head back for siestas. Early mornings in Madrid are cool and beautiful, but the temperatures are near 100 by about 11. By 2 or 3 p.m. your body literally gives out. I understand how siestas came to be. It's a glorious tradition.
After long naps, we wander back out for maybe the best meal of our lives.
As it happens, true to Spanish form, we would eat it at six different restaurants.
The Spanish make an event of their tapas. It's not a meal: it's a lifestyle. You order one tapa at each restaurant, and then move on to the next. At each, you get a free serving of olives, or maybe some other little appetizer. Or maybe you just have a palate-cleansing drink, which is also accompanied by, as everything in Spain is, a free serving of olives. And you continue accordingly until the wee hours of the morning, when you finish the evening off with a serving of churros and hot chocolate.
It's a fantastic way to live.
From 8 until 11, we stroll, eat, drink, stroll, and eat some more. It was the best six-restaurant, three-hour dinner I've ever had, even if I don't know the word for every tasty-looking tapa we encounter. We dine and stroll, and walk through the big public plaza full of street performers and families and happy children, even Monday night at midnight.
Two musicians are singing by the square. Their voices and rhythms are brilliant, but I can't quite decipher their rapid lyrics. As I sit, with my mouth savoring tapas and olives and a pleasant afterglow from a few glass of 2-dollar wine, with my life's troubles a continent away, I suddenly wish my friends were here too.
We will meet up with my sister in two days in Barcelona, and she'll understand why we loved it here as much as she did. My oldest niece had wished she could have come. She would have loved it here too. My friend Andrew would have delighted in the cultural idiosyncrasies. Chris would have raved about the nuance of the red wine. Michelle and Donnie would revel in the food and the fun. Daniel would make inside jokes from that Spanish 1 class in high school where we first became friends. Kelsey would notice something about this scene that I'd completely overlooked, but that would make it seem even more meaningful. Corinne would keep us up past our bedtime to squeeze in a little more fun, but we'd be glad the next day that she had. Cameron would amusingly critique the interpersonal vibe and wardrobes of every group we passed.
It's just so pleasant here. I wish I could share this picture with a larger percentage of my world.
But you guys were all somewhere else. Possibly "apunte." And we had big plans the next day, so we reluctantly cut the night off at midnight, which is early by Madrid standards. We have one more night in Madrid anyway, but tomorrow morning we have a day trip to "Holy" Toledo.
And what the next day held was outside of our wildest imaginations...
(Read all about it in tomorrow's blog)
Don't worry. You can come too. Just keep reading.
Day 1:
Late last night my friend Jason offered to drive us to the airport. He's probably regretting that by now, but I took him up on his generous offer. So he dutifully arrives early this morning and exudes pleasant energy while my wife, Liz, and I triple-check our house for forgotten items, and drives us to the airport. Starting a trip with positive energy is an underrated bonus.
Thank you, Jason.
We arrive Saturday morning at the Nashville airport two hours in advance, like all the experts advise.
Of course, the airport is completely empty. But had we given ourselves an hour, we'd be still be in line as we speak, 9 days later. But as it was, we arrive at our gate in 15 minutes.
This is going to be a long day.
We stop in at the airport bookstore to kill some time, and have the following exchange with the sales person:
Clerk: So, where are you headed?
Us: Spain
Clerk: Oh! Usually I hear something like "Toledo."
Me: Well, we're taking a day trip to Toledo, Spain.
Liz: I just need to buy a watch since my cell phone won't work while we're there.
Clerk: Why do you care what time it is if you're in Spain?
Touche.
A few hours later we board and take off on our connecting flight to JFK. As the connecting flight circles New York, it hits me: New York is one of my favorite cities on earth, and I've never been this unexcited to be here. The vacation doesn't really feel like it starts until I'm actually on a plane that's landing at my destination. And I have a three hour layover until then.
My throat is feeling scratchy already. Maybe staying out late with my visiting out-of-town friends last night was a bad idea.
Liz and I make a round of phone calls to pass the time and taunt everyone we know with our travel plans. I stare out at the skyline.
That building in the distance towering over the New York skyline must be the Freedom Tower, at Ground Zero. Its 1776 feet are sobering to view, but I just want to be in Spain.
Before long the flight will board...
Day 2:
I move my watch forward six hours, which means its already midnight. The flight will last seven-and-a-half more hours. I really hope I can get some sleep, eventually. But in the meantime, I'm going to read that Skymall magazine to check the going rate on a life-sized statue of Bigfoot and some artificial grass that my pets can pee on.
I read a book, eat some airline food, and take a nap, occasionally stopping to translate for the teenage Spanish kid beside me who speaks as little English as the flight attendants do Spanish. I know we're flying American Airlines and all, but how do they staff an international flight without bilingual flight attendants? That's insane.
No wonder the rest of the world hates us.
A few hours later and finally, Madrid is in view. We walk off the plane with dry mouths, crunchy contacts and that groggy but exhilarating feeling that comes after an east-bound Transatlantic flight. We go into the bathrooms to wash our faces and brush our teeth. Bringing the toothpaste was a good call. The Madrid airport even has a tube of toothpaste already stocked.
It's nice to be here already.
We're going to hit the ground running in Madrid. We have no choice.
Our plane landed at 8 a.m., and we can't check into our apartment until 3 this afternoon. In the meantime, we have to get to the train station to drop off our luggage in a storage locker. I hope my Spanish is good enough to direct our taxi driver there.
"Hola. Necesitamos ir al estacion Atocha," I say to the first cab driver we see, mangling the pronunciation of Madrid's train station. The cab driver asks me a clarifying question, and we're good to go. As I ask a few questions in bad Spanish along the trip, it quickly becomes clear that he speaks no English whatsoever.
This would become a theme.
At the train station, no one speaks English either. I don't know the Spanish word for storage locker, but I can ask for a place to leave our suitcases.
Or rather, I can ask that question in perfect Spanish, but I can't actually understand the complicated directions the customer service agent gives me, which prominently involve the lockers being "apunte" (Or something like that. I never understood the word well enough to even look it up) from the front of the train station. I've taken 5 years of Spanish classes, but I've never heard that word before.
I ask her to repeat herself, but she just keeps telling me to go "apunte." We just wander in the general direction until we find it. Which we eventually do.
We drop off luggage and wander "apunte" toward the big Sunday flea market that all the guide books told us to see. We get there and find it consists of women's clothes and a bunch of cheap, crappy trinkets that no normal person would actually want. I bargain with two or three vendors for a dress my wife likes, but no one wants to give the confused-looking American with broken Spanish a good deal.
My Spanish is getting us by, but we're amazed that we haven't heard a word of English yet. Paris, Venice and Amsterdam weren't like this. There, you never forgot you were in a foreign country, but you always had the sense that the locals were a perfunctory native-tongue greeting away from resorting to English to make your life easier, even if they weren't very happy about it.
Here, the people are glad to repeat themselves more slowly if you ask, and even glad to teach you Spanish words, but that's the only tool they have to offer. You get the feeling from the smiles on their faces that they would gladly fill in the conversational gaps with the proper English word if they knew it, but since they can't, they have to wait patiently for my Spanish to come through. And unless I'm trying to follow directions involving the word "apunte," it generally does.
There's something weirdly awesome about the whole scene. I'm terrified and was unprepared for the scope of this challenge, but I've never soaked in a culture that's this authentically different from the one I know. At any given moment, we're one Spanish-language brain fart from me away from being helpless.
If only there weren't a KFC on the corner, I could blog about this.
We "flee" the market (you see what I did there?), and head to the big public park. It's beautiful and perfectly landscaped and there's a big lake in front of one of those monumental sculptures they only have in Europe.
We get a nice table by the lake and order tapas and horchata, the local morning beverage of choice. I order a waffle with strawberry ice cream. I actually wanted vanilla ice cream, but I felt the need to show the waitress that I knew the Spanish word for "strawberry." I thought about asking that she put it "apunte" to my waffle, but I still haven't figured out what that meant, so I don't get too crazy.
A couple hours later, we were ready for a nap but still had an hour to kill before our check in. So, in the time-honored tradition of homeless people everywhere, we napped in the park, and hear American music playing in the background while a roller blading troop practices. It's the first sustained English we've heard all day.
Eventually, we make it to our apartment and took the world's most fantastic shower, followed by the world's most fantastic naps.
We look for a little market where we can buy the world's most fantastic picnic dinner, to be eaten on our balcony, which is also fantastic. We end up settling for the grocery store 2 blocks away, but somehow get hopelessly lost on the way back. Those wine bottles start to get heavy after about 30 minutes of aimless wandering.
After we wander long enough to get frazzled, an old man finally takes mercy on us, and starts giving us directions without even asking where we're going. I tell him we aren't trying to get to Puerta Del Sol, to which he's trying to direct us. So instead, he gives us directions to where I ask. But I can't really understand what he's trying to tell us, except that we need to go "apunte" from the main street once we reach it.
I realize that I need to demand a refund on my Spanish classes.
But when we get there, we finally figure it out. Not what "apunte" means, of course, but how to get to our apartment.
But a few tapas and a cheap bottle of wine are consumed on the balcony, and day 2 turns into:
Day 3:
I'm still exhausted, but Liz wants to get moving. Our agenda is purposefully limited today, but we were hoping to get to the Reina Sofia (the Modern Art Museum) before the line gets long. We failed.
The line is long and it's already hot, but there's really nothing else on our agenda for the day, so we suffer through. Some people are walking straight in, though, while a long line of people wait in the line in which we find ourselves.
Liz asks that I investigate further, but I feel stupid and intimidated by the idea of asking what's going on, for fear that the conversation will go something like this:
Me: (in broken Spanish) what is this line for?
Other person: For the museum, dummy.
So instead, I walk to the front of the line hoping for a sign I can read. The signs have English subtitles, but the translation is so broken that it's just confusing, and it seems to contradict the Spanish version above it. All I know for sure is that there's a museum, I'm standing in front of it, and I have no idea what I need to do to get in. My wife waits in line in front of the museum, or possibly "apunte" of it, while I stand dumbfounded.
This would also be a theme.
An hour later, and three fruitless trips to entrance doors in hopes of talking to a roaming customer service agent, we finally get to the front of the line and figure out how to buy tickets. In the meantime, a roaming homeless woman asks us for money.
When we ignore her, she doesn't move down the line, as would happen in the US. Instead, she starts yelling and attempts to steal my wife's water bottle. I finally manage to tell her to go away, but we created quite a scene in the meantime. I guess one manages interactions with beggars differently here.
Interesting.
We hit the museum and see Picasso's famous Guernica, but we can't get into the Dali exhibit until two. In the meantime, we have amazingly good tapas at a café across the street and the best sangria I've ever tasted. While we have leisurely and ridiculously cheap lunch, a Spanish guy introduces himself to a pretty blond woman who walks by.
She agrees to an impromptu date, but her Spanish is bad. The Spanish guy is suave and appears to have done this before--he even speaks English. And then for the first time in three days, I hear a conversation in English, albeit a cheesy one where some random dude is attempting a cross-continental pick-up. I guess it's romantic, in a certain way, even though it seems obvious this isn't going anywhere.
We see the museum and head back for siestas. Early mornings in Madrid are cool and beautiful, but the temperatures are near 100 by about 11. By 2 or 3 p.m. your body literally gives out. I understand how siestas came to be. It's a glorious tradition.
After long naps, we wander back out for maybe the best meal of our lives.
As it happens, true to Spanish form, we would eat it at six different restaurants.
The Spanish make an event of their tapas. It's not a meal: it's a lifestyle. You order one tapa at each restaurant, and then move on to the next. At each, you get a free serving of olives, or maybe some other little appetizer. Or maybe you just have a palate-cleansing drink, which is also accompanied by, as everything in Spain is, a free serving of olives. And you continue accordingly until the wee hours of the morning, when you finish the evening off with a serving of churros and hot chocolate.
It's a fantastic way to live.
From 8 until 11, we stroll, eat, drink, stroll, and eat some more. It was the best six-restaurant, three-hour dinner I've ever had, even if I don't know the word for every tasty-looking tapa we encounter. We dine and stroll, and walk through the big public plaza full of street performers and families and happy children, even Monday night at midnight.
Two musicians are singing by the square. Their voices and rhythms are brilliant, but I can't quite decipher their rapid lyrics. As I sit, with my mouth savoring tapas and olives and a pleasant afterglow from a few glass of 2-dollar wine, with my life's troubles a continent away, I suddenly wish my friends were here too.
We will meet up with my sister in two days in Barcelona, and she'll understand why we loved it here as much as she did. My oldest niece had wished she could have come. She would have loved it here too. My friend Andrew would have delighted in the cultural idiosyncrasies. Chris would have raved about the nuance of the red wine. Michelle and Donnie would revel in the food and the fun. Daniel would make inside jokes from that Spanish 1 class in high school where we first became friends. Kelsey would notice something about this scene that I'd completely overlooked, but that would make it seem even more meaningful. Corinne would keep us up past our bedtime to squeeze in a little more fun, but we'd be glad the next day that she had. Cameron would amusingly critique the interpersonal vibe and wardrobes of every group we passed.
It's just so pleasant here. I wish I could share this picture with a larger percentage of my world.
But you guys were all somewhere else. Possibly "apunte." And we had big plans the next day, so we reluctantly cut the night off at midnight, which is early by Madrid standards. We have one more night in Madrid anyway, but tomorrow morning we have a day trip to "Holy" Toledo.
And what the next day held was outside of our wildest imaginations...
(Read all about it in tomorrow's blog)
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