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)