Skipping Town

Only when living in a foreign country can you be blindsided by a national holiday. Even when you live on a fairly normal day-to-day basis, when you speak (or have someone speak for you) fluently, when you pay bills and run errands and negotiate the minutia of getting around and making it work, you can find yourself standing in the middle of the beach at 4 a.m., surrounded by thousands and thousands of people who are throwing fireworks wildly into the sky and at the sand all around your head and feet. Yesterday was the Berbena de Sant Joan, St. John’s Night, the biggest celebration in Spain—particularly in Barcelona—besides New Year’s Eve. It ushers in the Dia de Sant Joan on June 24, the feast of St. John the Baptist, and celebrates the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year. The day is marked in an unusual way: besides the expected feasting, where people apparently eat a pastry called the coca de Sant Joan , everyone spends the night—the whole night—setting off fireworks the...

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that I’m a Good Student. I’m always done first. I always do my homework. I always get the answer right, or look appropriately interested in the teacher’s correction if I don’t. I sit up straight in my chair, show up on time, take notes, follow instructions to the letter. I always get A’s. In my Spanish class, now two days deep, I realize my native Spanish teacher sees me as a a strange blend of New Yorker and Good Student. Yesterday, we learned vocabulary for character traits, and she started us off with a little game. “Tear a sheet of paper into six pieces,” she said. (She said it in Spanish; it’s all in Spanish; but she also demonstrates her meaning with broad gestures and miming, so I understood what was required.) Dutifully, I tore a sheet from my notebook and, after careful, exact folding, tore it into six perfect squares. I tidied them into a small pile in front of me. I was done first, of course. To my surprise, once the lesson began, t...

Mallorca is not a large island, and in three days we managed to see a great deal of it. On Thursday night, we drove to Cala Figuera, a fishing village, where we walked around the sloshing, stony docks in the cool, damp air, stepping around piles of fishing nets. Small homes jutted from the cliffs around the port, and as darkness fell, small bright windows lit up among the rocks. We had dinner in this sleepy town, sitting outside but still protected from the rain. Afterward, we looked down at the boats and the water, shrouded by fog now, hearing only the spooky knocking of boat on stone. On Friday, we drove north to Arta, where we had a late lunch in what seemed like a deserted village. Our only company was a small white cat wearing a huge collar, who visited our table several times and even joined us on a chair. On Saturday, we drove to Alcudia, then on to Pollenca, where we ate lunch at a café of a charming square. We peeked into a church, ornate and impressive even in this small, qui...

The seawater in Mallorca was, like the guidebook pictures promised, clear, turquoise, and sparkling. We could see the water of Cala Santanyi from our hotel room balcony, intensely blue through the leaves of the cliffside trees. As we drove around the island on perilous mountain roads, we could often see the water far below us, beckoning, deeply blue. The water was not, however, always perfect for swimming. Mid-June, the water was still chilly. At Cala Santanyi and the even more isolated beach at Parc Natural de Mondrago—which required a short hike through a forest to reach—the water at the shoreline was thick with bark-colored seaweed. Beyond this, the water was clear; but reaching it meant high-stepping through the knee-deep porridge, with seaweed strands wrapping themselves stubbornly around ankle and calf. There was no seaweed at Cala Torta, a stunningly beautiful, pleasingly hard to reach cove on the northeastern part of the island. Getting there meant driving down a narrow, unpave...

In Mallorca, we felt we’d dropped off the edge of the earth. This was unexpected: in all our research about Mallorca, we read again and again about the hordes of package tourists and the marring of Mallorca’s stunning natural beauty. When Andrew and his sister visited Mallorca a decade ago, they hated the ticky-tacky shops and crowds in the area where they stayed. But Andrew and I shaped our trip carefully, with all this in mind. We stayed in the southeastern part of the island, in a hotel overlooking a less-touristy cove. And we rented a car, which meant that when we weren’t on the beach we were traveling through the island’s interior—a wild, almost entirely uninhabited expanse of pine trees, mountains, and fields full of overgrown wheat and scrub. On our last day, we started out early and drove around the whole island, first to the north, then down and around toward Palma, the main city and the location of the airport. We did see some of the terrible, package tour havens, but we simp...

Finally, after much talking about how I really--no, REALLY--need to learn Spanish, I've signed up for three weeks of intensive Spanish classes at a language school not far from our apartment. I start in a week and a half, and the classes last for four hours per day. I hope I learn something. I hope I learn enough to at least get by at a bakery or in a restaurant, perhaps even in a shop. I hope, but I do not assume. I've long believed I lack the ability to speak or understand a foreign language. It never clicks; it never opens up to me. In college, I took enough French classes to be one class short of a minor in French--yet I struggled, struggled. I got A's on my written work, but speaking was another story. After class one day, my French professor called me aside, visibly frustrated. "You slaughter the language," she said. Looking back, I see that perhaps this rather counterproductive observation was unwarranted. Regardless, I'm determined this time to actual...

We had a little Barcelona adventure today when we went to FNAC, a giant electronics and media store, to buy a television. Having gotten by so far without one, we finally decided to make the purchase since we want to watch the World Cup matches here at home; and Andrew’s upcoming birthday made it perfect timing. At FNAC, we passed up the attractive, thousand-euro, flat-screen televisions, which make up almost the entire FNAC TV department, and headed to a dusty, neglected corner where the non-flat-screen TVs sit, abandoned, on a few feet of shelving. We chose a TV with a nice-sized screen and began the elaborate process of buying it, which involved, first, leaving the store, since FNAC requires a passport to make credit card purchases; my passport was at home. Then we paid, showed our receipt to a person in another part of the store, and were then directed outside and down the block, where we’d pick up our TV from the cargo-loading area. The box was huge. The TV hadn’t looked that big o...

Our weekend in Santiago de Compostela was littered with charm. We slept in the attic room of the Hotel As Artes and had a view of a Cathedral spire through our skylight-window. In the morning, we woke up to music from church bells and bagpipes. We had our café con leche and breakfast of tarte de Santiago at the Café Literarios, on a plaza nestled between the Cathedral and a monastery-turned-convent. Bar-covered windows dotted the wide, plain wall of the convent. Some of the bars had rose vines entwined around them, so I think these windows indicated the rooms where the nuns live and sleep. Vagrants loitered and slept on the steps near the Cathedral during the shady hours of the afternoon; they looked like they should be on La Rambla in Barcelona. But they were harmless, part of the town’s interesting mix of tourists, pilgrims, and locals, passing the time with devil sticks, idle chat, and bongo drums. Lunch was caldo gallega , a soup made of cabbage and potatoes, and Galician empanada...

We ate barnacles in Santiago de Compostela. We didn’t mean to; we didn’t know. By the time we’d figured out what percebes were—the only explanation our waitress had given Andrew when he asked what they were—we’d eaten them. Though they looked like chopped-off lizard legs, with what looked like thorny, clawlike toes and leathery lizard skin, the meat inside was soft and briny-sweet. In Santiago, restaurants along the cobbled streets display fresh seafood and regional foods in their windows, including percebes , huge purple pulpo (octopi), gigantic fish, heaping platters of shrimp and large shrimp-like creatures, mesh bags of fresh clams in their shells, and teardrop-shaped Galician cheese. All include on their menus a mariscada de casa for two people. On Sunday night, Andrew and I chose the most charming of the restaurants, one with a garden in the back much like the gardens in New York City restaurants, and ordered the mariscada and a bottle of wine. We were impressed with and, bri...

On the streets of Santiago de Compostela, in northwestern Spain, pilgrims crowded together with their backpacks, floppy hats, and high-tech walking sticks, sharing tales from the road. Most of them still had scallop shells affixed to their walking sticks or backpacks, which identify pilgrims as they make their way, town to town, across Spain. El camino de Santiago , the pilgrim trail, begins in southern France and is approximately 500 miles long. The route was established in eleventh century as a way for religious devotees to reach the Cathedral del Apostol, in Santiago, which is where the remains of St. James the Apostle are believed by many to be housed. Not everyone does the whole camino , but from the looks of the bandaged, blackened feet of some of the pilgrims—newly relieved of their hiking boots now that they’d reached their destination—they’d traveled quite a distance. Andrew and I pointed pilgrims out to each other as we made our own pilgrimage from café to café. The pilgrims,...

To celebrate the end of Andrew’s term as well as his upcoming birthday, we’ve booked a flight to Mallorca for a weekend in mid-June. We debated for days whether we should go to Pisa, Dublin, Sardinia, or Mallorca, just a few places on our long list of places we want to visit, feeling smug about how obnoxious we’d sound to anyone listening in on our discussions. We read guidebooks, looked at websites, and even did a complex, multi-round, blind-selection process with crumpled-up Post-It notes. Mallorca won. After booking the flight today, we began looking for a hotel, trying to find some possibilities in our TimeOut guide to Mallorca. It’s not the most useful guidebook; what it has going for it, however, is honesty. Mallorca is a huge holiday destination, particularly for Northern Europeans—so much so that one area, according to TimeOut, is called “Blackpool with sun”—and Andrew and I have no interest in spending our weekend amidst large crowds of families and young children. Many of the...