johnny b. goode.

At nighttime, we used to put on Otis Redding and Chuck Berry and dance and dance with all the windows and doors open in the top floor apartment so the whole neighborhood could see what what it looked like to be joyful.

three glorious days in washington.

No work. All play. Three days of my favorite kind of travel-- at home, with people I love.

Poulsbo and Port Gamble with dad. Coffee, books, and laughing like we used to when things were a little different... a little time capsule of being happy and simple together.

Oh, yes please.

Seattle dinner with three of my favorite girls. Lots of wine, lots of food, lots of love.

Mukilteo with my best friend at his new condo. Big windows with nothing but water and mountains and the ferry behind them. Ice cream like in elementary school. Diamond Knot brewery growlers. Magenta sunsets. Picking out midnight constellations from the hot tub and late night poached eggs before bed.

Puyallup with the boy. Sunny day reading in the park, Mexican cervezas at dinner, and tricking him again into antiquing with me.

I am so, so home and it feels so, so good.

south american games.

We're lucky to be in Medellin when Pablo Escobar is NOT here and when the South American Games ARE here. We stayed extra time with new friends because the lure of every summer sport ever invented was too much to resist. Plus, the Brazilians and Colombians are specimens of creation and we're not even mad about being in the one South American city that's filled with the continent's best athletes.

Horseback police, military men, and RoboCop riot patrol. All in an average Medellin protest.

you give an inch, they take a mile.

That title is straight from Marlo's mouth, and I'm ready to throw down some more important observations on cultural divides at you guys. Who's ready?

We found ourselves on the beach in Barranco last night, drinking Cuzquenas and listening to Jeff and Christian, our two new musician friends, try to sing the English words to Pearl Jam and Nirvana (I seriously think they thought we'd feel "right at home" with them playing their entire grunge repertoire. We kept requesting Jay Z and Justin, but they ignored us and stuck with Alice in Chains). Now these two guys are nice individuals, but not nice enough for Marlo to let Christian rest his head on her shoulder and keep his arm around her waist the whole night (we're ice queens, we know). We were sitting three in a row when we first got to shore, and I looked over half an hour later and poor Marlo had scooted, inch by inch, towards the water. Christian hadn't gotten the hint and had followed her, scoot by scoot.

It got to the point where we just had to abort the entire mission and head home. During our nightly pillow talk, we rehashed the situation: Marlo was smothered by an overly affectionate, clueless musician while I dealt with the diva-esque sensibilities of his friend, who was upset that we weren't going salsa dancing and tried to coerce us to go by being emotionally manipulative. Overall, a great way to end a night! But unlike at home, where we would have told the guys to scram and they would have understood why, we were dealing with the biggest gender-relations difference between the Americas.

In North America, guys will refrain from affection until they specifically are told YES. In South America, guys will be as affectionate as possible until they are specifically told NO. Which means that nights like last night will keep happening until we learn how to lose our passive-aggressive Seattlite personalities and start being more clear with our dislike of premature physical contact.

almost famous.

Ok, before I begin this blog entry, I want to announce that I no longer sit down on my surf board, and am now able to catch entire waves by myself. By noon, my arms and shoulders feel like "fallopian tubes" (thank you, Graham Snead) and I'm starving. So we were relaxing (ie. feeling like I could eat a horse) and having some coffee at Cafe Z today when two guys invited themselves over to our couch to chat.



I'm going to make this story brief: these two hilarious gentlemen were the Peruvian hosts of Lima's version of SportsCenter. "We're on channel 5! Sundays at 7 pm!"


"Ooh... about that. We don't have tv," we announced disappointedly.


And this is how we got invited to come to the filming of Spanish SportsCenter in the studio on Sunday night. We're trying to figure out a way to get some kind of "speaking role" so we can practice our Spanish on national television. I don't think they were really into that idea. However, they are taking us to Barranco tomorrow to go surfing, so we are feeling pretty happy with the adult field trips coming up this week.


And now for the bizarre closer: as we walked home, a lady who looked suspiciously like a heavily plastic-surgeried tranny slowed her car down, leaned out the window and called us "Goddesses of Olympus" as she rolled by. Now that's just good clean fun.

time, time, time.

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” --Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Julien showed up at Florin on Sunday night unannounced and asked to share our booth. He had a book in one hand, cigarettes that smelled like open fields, wire-rim glasses and a traveller's beard. He spoke no English, and I was intrigued by his confident silence as he stared at Mike; the foolish, talkative New Yorker in front of him. Mike was waxing philosophical about Nietzche and feeling very drunk and very smart. I enjoyed my place in the corner, smirking at the fact that Julien had told Mike repeatedly that he only speaks Spanish and French (after growing up in Belgium and working for over two years in Peru, English hadn't yet become a necessity) but Mike insisted on continuing in his native tongue, dabbling in Spanglish when he could.

“Who’s winning?” I interrupted. I love a good argument when one person has no idea what he is talking about, and the other is letting him slowly dissolve in his own misguided chatter. Julien looked at me studiedly.
“He is, of course,” he said in Spanish, gesturing towards Mike without a smile. We made plans within an hour to meet up the next day.

Beginning with breakfast Monday morning at 8, Julien and I used los leones of the 25 de Mayo Plaza as our meeting place, often several times a day, as I dodged between the orphanage and teaching and studying. If I had a few minutes between classes, we would dash to a photography exhibit or reexamine the antique mirrors of Bolivian silver that I craved or have espresso dobles in every corner of the city. I quickly grew accustomed to seeing his long legs stretched in front of him as he waited peacefully for me to find him again. Often, he was chatting with a shoeshine boy. Child workers swarm Sucre, and Julien had a gentle way of dealing with them. After a particularly long conversation with a fourteen year old whose hands were black from polish and whose face showed a lot of wisdom, we agreed that letting children shine your shoes (or wipe your windshield, or in general prostrate themselves in front of you for a few bolivianos) was demeaning, no matter how much they needed the work, and while we may share some food or change with them, allowing them to work for you felt quite wrong.

“I don’t like the idea of someone getting on their knees,” Julien shivered. “It’s a position of superiority that I don’t want to take part in.” But besides the personal discomfort we felt at grownups propping a foot up so a child could clean it, we couldn’t decide how to mentally approach a place like Sucre, with the highest child-worker population on the continent. Not permitting a pre-teen to polish your boots might feel superior, but it does nothing to change the reality of his situation. It doesn’t change the system that requires extra income from young children for survival, nor does it alter the course of the kids who are coming after him within that system. Like most things that feel morally correct, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to be done.

At the massive cemetery, we wandered amidst rows of coffins and wondered what etiquette is on photographing other people’s grief. Someday I will have to become less shy when I see a photo I want, but for now I usually prefer to observe a moment and let the actors live it themselves, rather than forcing myself to be a part of it through the camera. We heard noise as we neared the entrance. He thought it was a traffic jam. I thought it was yet another pack of dogs. It turned out to be a thick clump of mourners trailing behind a hearse as it rolled into the cemetery and released a coffin. We sat on a bench watchfully; observing men in dark grey suits linger at the fringes while women in campesino garb did the hard work of vocal mourning. Julien’s dad died in a car accident when he was a year old, and he told me about when his mom had taken him once to visit his father’s grave. He didn’t feel a thing, and didn’t know what to do with himself. “After we stood at his grave for a while, we went and got cake and coffee. That was the only good part. There is a phrase in French that says, ‘A grave is to hold the body of the dead and the heart of the living,’ but I don’t see the point. It’s strange to me.”

After we left the cemetery, exiting under the big Latin sign that says “Today me, tomorrow you,” we found graffiti on the wall that proclaimed, “The walls will stop talking once the newspapers tell the truth.” We got lost. We bought ice cream and sat on a stoop laughing at how ridiculous travel is, how strange life can be when lived in five minute increments, and stopped by a bookstand to see the treasures. “We didn’t read enough together this week,” I told him regretfully. “We only had four days!” he reminded me with a laugh. With so much to do, reading, although a mutual passion, was the last thing to spend time on. We drank copious amounts of mate in Simon Bolivar park, and as I studied Spanish grammar he read novels to me in French. We talked about our wildly divergent views on religion, the fate of the world, on family and how to carry on relationships. We spent most of our moments together, and at 3 am on Sunday night he walked me home, kissed me goodbye, and walked away without turning around. I preferred it that way.

Today, for the first time this week, I walked through the plaza and there was no Julien waiting for me. Although I knew he was gone, I still scanned the benches for his dark beard, for his gangly legs, for his knowing grin. All gone; and I felt a sweet loneliness. It’s a quiet surprise when a few valuable days sneak up on you, change you, and whisk themselves away before you even know what they are or how to hold them in your hand. Travel is such a microcosm of life in that way: we cannot hold onto people, or make them into something they are not, but enjoy brevity and joy where we find it.

la felicidad

Buenos Aires is not an aptly named city. As soon as your plane lands, the "New York of South America" hands you a fine film on your lungs and a halo of smog, like getting lei'd on Oahu. The grime follows you around (save for brief respites if you can get to a Palermo park) and relentlessly reminds you that you are trading being clean for being in a place that is always alive. Last weekend, the two of us welcomed with open arms the rolling clouds of a three-day storm that blanketed the city with cool rain, kept us up at night with pounding thunder and brought lightning that criss-crossed the sky with astonishing frequency. We put on our jackets and happily took advantage of an October weekend that felt like home (except that people don't have rain gear here. They still wear their pretty clothes and just carry an umbrella).

You always expect to be happy when travelling, but sometimes dirt wears you out before you're ready. And other times, an endless summer storm comes along and makes you feel peaceful again.

Other things that have cleared the smog the first two weeks:

• Last Thursday, I found myself at a tiny restaurant eating pancetta out of a pumpkin and discussing politics and religion with a bilingual socialist revolutionary. I met Diego at Cafe Victoria (this is the view, which I will never cease to be delighted with) and we met up for coffee/dinner not long after. Diego is a fascinating character with the energy of a kindergartner and the drive of Eugene Debs, who went from being "a Christian militant to an atheist" because he couldn't justify the world he saw with the world Christianity presupposes (I'll have to write about that conversation another day). As we chatted in the corner of the tiny restaurant, a pinstriped and graying man walked in with a gorgeous blonde and belted out a perfect note, which was promptly matched from behind the bar by a dusky voiced woman with long hair and a massive grin. The warmup notes then turned into a full-fledged tango show for a restaurant that was empty... besides us. My Malbec swirled in the glass, the music filled in the cracks between the bricks, and I realized again what a lucky girl I am. "Para ella!" the woman called out, gesturing to me, la americana, and the guitarrista struck up a folk song to wrap up. Yep, nights like this are how I can justify quitting my job...
  
  
• Marlo and I got cool again when we stayed out till 9 am. No one needs to know that it was an accident, or how excited we got when we left the party to discover a light sky. Our throats scratchy from smoking hookah, our ears ringing from the Colombian band that changed our lives, we got so energized from our all-nighter that we dragged Martin across the city on foot to go see the Floralis. GREAT PLAN, ladies. We were so tired by the time we got there that we had to taxi home. So much for being 19 again.
  
• I was wandering the side streets in San Telmo for some quality time with my camera when I glanced up and got a wave from a guy standing on his front porch, a wrought-iron jut peeking out of a wall full of flowers. It was such a beautiful building but I was too shy to take his picture, so I just grinned and kept walking. Halfway up the next block, I heard someone calling to me so I turned around to see the same fellow jogging towards me. Picture a young, Argentine version of Cosmo Kramer and we are on the same page with Esteban. He ended up walking me back to my neighborhood (don't worry ya'll, we took main streets to avoid creepstering) and I was pleased to finally meet someone who didn't speak English. For a mile or so, we had the most pleasant, unexpected chat about the relative merits of working vs. travelling ("Pero no tiene ritmo!"--"Without work, there's no rhythm to life!"). I told him how much I loved the architecture in the city right when we hit a block surrounded by bland, terrible apartments, and we laughed at how 1970s architecture was nothing to write home about. "But it's also a sad city," he explained. "All of our beautiful buildings are just imitations of the same ones in Europe; we are always trying to copy other people." How nice it was, to take a walk and have a chat with someone I'd never met before and would never meet again, and not worry about places to be or time to be spent doing other things.

Another week and a half left in this massive city of dirt, and I can't wait to see what little storms await us next.

toby, give her strength

I don't care what country you're from, this man is a douchebag.


The good part about moving to the new hostel a week ago was an Argentinian real estate agent named Martín, who has eyelashes that could sweep your whole house. Martín got us our little apartment and has been entertaining to hang out with/ fun to look at ever since. We cooked for him and his Uruguayan/vegetarian roommate Urux in what could be called the ultimate bachelor pad (not in a positive way) because these fools have NOTHING besides a bean bag chair, a table and a photo of Che Guevara. I thought Marlo might lose it when she was trying to light the stove with crappy matches and had to pray to the gods of Americana for the will to continue (“Toby Keith, give me strength”). Our tune changed preeetty quickly after dinner, though, when the boys asked if we wanted
a) More wine*
b) Ice cream
OBVIAMENTE. Martín then picked up the telephone, made a couple of calls, and within 15 minutes we had a massive tub of helado and two bottles of Malbec at the front door for less than twenty bucks. “We are NEVER LEAVING this blessed land!” Marlo whispered, her eyes getting watery as we tried to control our emotion. Es la verdad: one’s tune can change about a new country with just a well-timed bike delivery.



*This wine business is no joke. I can’t decide if it’s a problem that we are consuming half our body weight in vino every night, but if the situation calls for it and you are surrounded by $2 bottles of the world’s best Malbec, it’s really hard to remember what they taught us in DARE.

Committed

He was tall, kind, gentlemanly but not in an overbearing-please-love-me kind of way (just enough to come pick you up but you can open your own car door, this is the 2000s you know). He got my jokes, knew enough about when to just be quiet and look out the window, he was introspective. He had an ex-wife who I had graduated from high school with, a fact that bothered me until he told me the whole story, and then I never thought about it again. I hate secrets. He taught me how to drive a stick in a red 1960s British sports car in the pounding rain. He liked reading, knew how to build a fire in three minutes flat, chopped his own wood, and had the deep baritone of a real grownup.


Our second date was at my favorite Ethiopian restaurant where I gulped glasses of Gouder ('French wine is good, Ethiopian wine is Gouder') as he told me about his marriage (too soon! my brain screamed, losing all inhibition with itself as the wine flowed and my severe attempts to avoid judgment fell by the wayside), his divorce (she's an idiot!-- lips still silent as neurons fired furiously), and the six month hermitage that brought him to the chair in front of me: happy, well-adjusted, having life lessons under the belt and a clean conscience to rest next to him on his pillow every night. He was unbearably attractive.

We moved further west and found ourselves drinking IPA at a tiny British bar in Post Alley, nestled into a leather loveseat as the aproned waiter gently complained about Seattle and I read him poems by Oscar Wilde.

He closed his eyes from first verse to closing, a half-smile resting on his face. This pleased me, and I stole glances in between lines, ostensibly for poetic effect but actually to watch the words had as they filled the air between us and settled themselves into our laps.

He kissed my forehead and I was entranced, my fingers intertwined with his as I twirled through the soft glow of wine in my stomach and Christmas lights clouding my vision.

When I woke up in the morning, I knew that it would never happen again.

What kind of girl do you think I are? No. Really. I should be committed to some kind of asylum.

In Portuguese Time, I'm Still 19!

Three years ago on my birthday, I called my mom at midnight to lament, in a panic, the loss of my teenage years. This year, in order to prevent a similarly ugly scene from taking place, Marlo and I packed up and headed to Portugal to take the sting out of the transition to old-ballsdom.

Let me preface this travel tale with the fact that, as we stood at our door, backpacked and ready to go, we made a verbal checklist of necessary items: bikinis, check. Skirts and dresses, check. Money? No check. Right before we walked out the door we realized: WE HAVE NO MONEY. But we left anyway, armed only with our charm and our willingness to eat bread and cheese for days on end.

After a brief stint in Dublin, during which we met a couple of awkward Canadians who explained to us why Guinness is not, in fact, a friendly drink, we spent an agonizing morning coming thisclose to missing our flight to Porto. In the past six months, I missed a flight out of Paris and Marlo missed one to Dusseldorf, so we were appropriately freaked out that we’d repeat the mistake and have to invent an entire week’s worth of adventures so no one in Belfast would ever know we'd never left the island. Fortunately, the travel gods smiled upon us and we were first on our flight. This gave us plenty of time to make friends with our extremely groomed and delightfully feminine “air host” Fergal, whom we took as a good omen for our trip (side note: the other guy was named Fabio. This is not a joke, people are actually named Fabio!).

Important thing to note at this point: Marlo and I, stubbornly insisting that our week would be a 5 day beach holiday during which we predominantly drank sangria in our new bikinis and allowed muscle-bound men to fan us with palm leaves and feed us peeled grapes, were in for an abrupt and unkind awakening when a hostile rain greeted us in Porto. Unfortunately our stubbornness had translated into a ridiculous insistence in packing only “breezy” stuff, meaning we had to sludge around in long dresses and sandals when the weather called for super-traction boots and waterproof tents. We slid around over Porto’s polished tiles for a while before hopping on a bus to Lisbon, crossing our fingers that the beach dreams would not be dashed in the City of Seven Hills...

Interesting Randomer #1: Mar and I commandeered the entire backseat of the bus to sleep on and silently breathed death threats on anyone who would dare join us, the tallest African we had ever seen sat down between us and gestured that his long legs wouldn’t let him sit anywhere else. Fair enough. Joao was from Guinea Bissau, spoke three languages (none of which was English, but one of which was Spanish luckily), worked for USAID, and currently runs a reconciliation program in Guinea Bissau from its base in Lisbon. Our chat was grounded by my limited Spanish vocab related to conflict work, but Joao was our second good omen and kept us good company for the longest bus ride in the world.

(I need to add at this point that whenever I travel, I imagine myself teleporting from city to city rather than taking normal human transport options. A couple of four hour bus rides will nip that habit in the bud no problem and force a girl back to reality: you can’t leave Dublin in the morning and end up on a Portuguese beach by evening. Scientists have proved it impossible. Don’t ask what kind of scientists, it’s just a fact, ok?)

Landing in Lisbon was a test of the kindness of Portuguese strangers (just like any place where clueless American girls pop into… we’re sorry about our politics, but we’re just here to hang out) and they really pulled through in the clutch. Half the city aided in our hostel-location scheme and as soon as we put our bags down, we decided to find the beach for the last few hours of sunlight. The good news is, we found water. The bad news is, we also found Lisbon’s shantytown and had our dinner on the three-inch stretch of “beach” along the river with one bum peeing on a rock behind us, one sleeping in a box, and another getting wasted out of a paper bag ten feet down the line. Needless to say, we felt right at home and jumped into our newest plot for how to save the world: opening a halfway house, preferably in Portugal. When we got home we found a half-nude Australian on our deck, who turned out to be Nick, our new travel buddy. Nick had just returned from hiking to base camp at Mt. Everest, his buddy Dylan just finished a volunteer stint at a Millennium Village in Kenya and they’d decided to meet up in Egypt. The four of us bonded the first day, and our breakfasts in Lisbon usually involved a few hours of drinking coffee, dancing to the Rolling Stones (the middle-aged guy working at the front desk: “Mick Jagger is my adopted father!”), and finding out the life stories of every single person in the hostel.

Interesting Randomer #2: As we wandered the glorious castle overlooking Lisbon, we met a guy selling those little wire toys that monks supposedly make to tell the story of the universe. Henry from Germany was more than happy to delve into an intense conversation with us, focusing heavily on Brazilian domestic policy, Austrian/German/Dutch linguistic idiosyncrasies and cultural anomalies, Hitler’s secret occupation of the castle and how happy he was to find friendly faces. We rediscovered our dreams of busking on European sidewalks until age 40… or at least painting and writing about every city we go to and selling our “art” to survive in rundown hostels.

Our Aussies cooked us dinner the last night in Lisbon (core ingredients: garlic and eye contact), and we made a vat of sangria (really good wine for €1? We’ll take four) and ran around the Alfama*, listened to jazz, and met Eduardo, the most aesthetically appealing Italian/Portuguese guy currently in creation. Drunk Marlo, when realizing our friend Ashley from St. Louis had swooped in for the same kill, launched a tirade verbalizing the “glaringly obvious” fact that Eduardo liked men. Whoever requested sour grapes, your order is up!

*THE ALFAMA: Lisbon’s major earthquake in 1755 destroyed most of the city, aided by the fires that followed it, but a decent-sized area just below the castle survived the destruction and is now the oldest surviving part of Lisbon, and one of the most unreal neighbourhoods I have ever seen. It’s all jagged brimstone, broken down shops, and unique sights and smells. Not to mention the most killer view in the city.

Interesting Randomer #3: Nobuku, a Brazilian Japanese guy who thought Marlo and I were God’s gift to comedy (no, he wasn’t drunk… we don’t think…), laughed uncontrollably at every “joke” we attempted and repeatedly suggested we get our own TV show. I offered Nobuku obscene amounts of money to follow us around as our promoter, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be and we headed out to Porto; having gained two Aussies but not the Brazilian fan club we’d always dreamed of.

*Story paused for a puke break*: An old boyfriend once used the delightful term “vomit chorus” and it has never applied so fully to my life as it did the day we went back to Porto. Food poisoning is a really good way to NOT see a city. On the plus side, however, my stomach has never been so flat. On the down side, our bikini dreams never came true, so no one can verify that. Moving on.

By the time we made it outside, I fell in love with Porto. The four of us went wandering around wine cellars and sampled port, laid in the sun and hiked up and down the steep hills until hunger drove us home. We cooked the boys dinner, discussed African development, and passed out embarrassingly early that night due to our total inability to deal with the heat and early wakeup call the next day. Overall, a pretty anticlimactic ending to the trip that was meant to contain 4 days more beach quotient, 1 day less puke quotient and a freaking ton more muscled men with palm leaves, but what can you do? Our dreams of sun, sand and sangria were only fulfilled by one third, but Portugal… we’ll be back.

Un Buen Rollo: Alicante, Oct. 2005

Hey lovers,
Well, it is has been a month and a half since I began my torrid love affair with Spain. If we are being completely honest, it is more like a warm friendship, but you know, poetic license and everything. Sorry I haven’t written something sooner, but I have been really busy listening to Shakira and watching trashy Spanish Love Connection shows. So getting here was basically the scariest thing I have ever experienced. I hung out in London for a night with a bunch of Australians from my hostel, but that was the only good part, because I learned firsthand the hell that is RyanAir getting from London to Alicante. For brevity’s sake, I will put the highlights in bullet form:
• Learned mid-flight that Murcia, the city we were landing in, was nowhere near Alicante, and had no bus system or train from the airport, which is an abandoned airforce base. Further learned that RyanAir has been sued a number of times for misleading the public about its destinations.
• Met a Spanish guy on the walk in from the flight, who proceeded to dismantle his bike and cram all my luggage into his brother’s car, drop me off downtown and help me find a hostel. Yes, I realize it could have been an Unsolved Mysteries kind of thing, but I was pretty desperate.
• Spent a day braving the elements between the time I got kicked out of my hostel and when I could move into my apartment (which, until the day after I got here, had a landlord with a disconnected number, ie. possibly didn't exist), during which creepy Spanish men invited me back to their places without understanding the phrase HELL NO (I thought it translated fairly directly, I was wrong).
So the university here is gorgeous; I have to frolic through palm trees to get to class. My profesoras are hilarious, and we spend most of the class time discussing important things, like how European toilets are better than American toilets and how obnoxious Spaniards are. One of my profs is from Spain but takes every opportunity to make fun of it; she also teaches us the crucial phrases (Tengo ni puta idea= I have no f-ing idea). That one comes in handy frequently. The best thing about my class is the Japanese boys in it who are so lost, but when I mentioned Seattle one of them was like, “OH! ICHIRO!” Yeah buddy! We’re on the map!
One of my favorite things here is the market every Saturday, which has TONS of clothes, shoes, fruit and veggies, etc. They have huge barrels of a million kinds of olives, pickles, every kind of nut possible, and other random foods that you could never find at home. Everything is so yummy and so cheap, and I can eat kiwi and avocado and almonds all day long. My apartment is amazing, it is one block from the beach and is right in the middle of the Barrio, the area with all the bars and clubs and restaurants. Nothing starts until midnight here, so people eat dinner at about 11, go to the bars from 12-3, and then head to El Puerto, this peninsula on the water that has about 10 clubs in a 3 block radius, until like 6 or 7 am. There are literally thousands of people from all over the world crammed in the Barrio and Puerto on any given night, so it is an awesome place to live. I have one Finnish roommate, two Irish, one Canadian and one British lady who never leaves her room. I love having the Irish girls around so I can finally use the phrase “that’s good craic” again, and Eija, the Finnish girl, is my best friend in Spain. Most of our time is spent drinking sangria, figuring out how to get Europe to take a shower, and wondering what food we just ordered when we go out. We have a pretty interesting group of friends… including Lebo, a Botswanan girl studying in Canada; Angelo, an Italian guy who doesn’t speak English OR Spanish but seems to always show up no matter where we are; Ariel, an ex-pro soccer player from Argentina who is dying to learn English and tells me I get more beautiful every time he sees me (who WOULDN’T be friends with a guy like that?); Andrea, an Italian guy studying in Sweden who wants to marry me for Green Card purposes only; Nelson, a Lenny Kravitz lookalike from Brazil; and Randy, an MBA from Houston who owns a promotions company in Alicante and knows every bartender in the province, ie. I haven’t paid for a drink since I got here.
So I was kind of starting to freak out because I kept seeing all these adorable little Spanish kids and couldn’t hang out with any of them, so I found a job working with these two AMAZING little boys from Muchamiel (the little town about40 minutes out of Alicante). Javier is 7 and Fernando is 5, and I think they are karma payback for putting up with the little punks I nannied this summer, because they could not be more perfect. Pilar, their mom, wants me to speak English with them and just hang out at the park and read and play. Humbling Spain Moment #578: the 7 year old I tutor speaks better English than I do and translates when his mom and I can’t figure out what we are trying to say to each other (she doesn’t speak any English, and is just about the sweetest thing ever). I call them my little Guapisimos and get to hang out with them every day. It is especially cool to get out of the city and into a little town that is, in my humble opinion, real Spain. Pilar grew up there, the boys’grandparents live just around the corner, and she has friends from childhood all over the place and has never left or lived anywhere else.
So despite being broker than one of Schlossmo’s appendages after a night out, I have been able to travel a little too. Sometimes we just hop on the train and see where it ends up and have adventures in a random city on the coast, but we also spent a weekend in Valencia and a couple days in Granada. Valencia is amazing, we got a map and just spent the weekend running around and looking at as many museums, cathedrals, and parks as humanly possible. We are going to try to head back in a couple weeks for a UEFA Champions League game and a bullfight. Granada was quite possible the most wonderful city I have seen since leaving home, and I got to spend some time with Haley Beach (for those of you who don’t know, she’s my long-time lover and is studying in Granada). It physically pained me to leave that place, but at least Alicante is warm.
Ok I am willing to bet that half of you aren’t even reading this anymore, but I am going to throw in a bonus story about Juan, the owner of the hostel I was in the first few days. Juan is a crazy old guy from Murcia who doesn’t know a word of English, and I decided I loved him, and went to his place to say hi. He was eating dinner, and told me to sit down and ran into his kitchen. A few minutes later he plopped a plate in front of me with a fish on it. A whole fish, with just its head chopped off. And a piece of bread with hard cheese, a bowl ofvegetables in vinegar, and a bottle of Spanish wine. I wasn’t sure what protocol is with eating whole fish, and asked him how to start, and he was like,“ehh, eat it however you want.” Then he poured me a glass of wine into a cup that had obviously been used, as it had some interesting backwash in it, but who am I to be rude? But every time he left the room I poured some of it back into the bottle or into his glass. The problem with this was that every time he noticed I had an empty glass, he refilled it and made a toast. As sneaky as I tried to be, my host was a step ahead of me. So Juan was starting to get a bit looped, and kept talking and talking and talking… for an hour and a half. Hecovered a number of topics during his monologue, including Hurricane Katrina, religion, sex, and his illustrious career as a ¬¬___ (fill in the blank. I’m still not sure what he did, but I have a feeling it was the Mafia, based on thenumerous pictures of him with random men and copious amounts of wine. Oh wait, that just means he’s Spanish). I could tell when he was done with one topic and moving on to another when he would pause and give me the hugest, goofiest smileI have ever seen, which made me laugh, and then made him laugh, and now Juan andI are best friends, and every time I peek my head in to say hi he says, “Heyyy, it’s the model from Madrid!” This nickname indicates to me that Juan is drunk ALL THE TIME, but he sure made life interesting my first few days in Alicante.
Love you guys, miss you so much
-Laura
PS. Though my stance is still firmly anti-European boy, I saw firsthand how weaker souls might fall for their charms when this Parisian waiter at Havana pulled my tank top strap down with his teeth and kissed my shoulder… how do you react to such a situation when you are a naïve American girl, is my question to you?!?