Skipping Town

This afternoon, a man from an internet company came over, ostensibly to install internet and cable TV in our apartment. Not surprisingly, he wasn't able to do it; perhaps we'll work it out next week. After this had been established, I walked with the man to the apartment door. There's a small "foyer" area outside our door, which you have to exit by way of another door before you get to the hallway, and I stepped into this foyer to turn off the light after the man had left. My apartment door slammed behind me. I was locked out. Thankfully, I was wearing shoes. But I had no cell phone, no money, no glasses, no reading material. Andrew, the only other person with keys, was at school. The woman who serves as a doorperson a few hours each day had already left. I had things to pack for Marrakech; I had things I had to do. I went to a cafe next door and explained--in Spanish!--that my keys were in my apartment and I had no phone or money. I asked to use their phone. They...

Tomorrow, Andrew and I are embarking on a true travel adventure: we’re going to Morocco for just over three days. Though the title of this post would suggest our destination is Casablanca, we’re actually heading to Marrakech, where I’ve wanted to go for a very long time. Andrew had actually planned this trip as a birthday surprise; however, a poorly timed walk down Andrew’s hallway in Jacksonville resulted in my overhearing Andrew discussing the trip with his father. But no matter: knowing the destination meant we were free to talk about and anticipate the trip together, and I’ve spent the last several days scouring our guidebooks, trying to imagine us fending off aggressive vendors in the souks, drinking mint tea, eating tagines and couscous. And I’ve realized that my fledgling Spanish has pretty much supplanted my fledgling French. Gracias. Merci. Hola. Bonjour. It’s going to be a memorable trip…

It’s a bit unsettling to realize how fully reliant we are on the internet here in Barcelona. I need email to do my freelancing work; we need the internet to plan our trips and flights; I need it to read the New York Times. We do not yet have the internet in our apartment. Andrew can use the computer lab at school, and though I can check email at my language school, I can’t send documents, download anything, or spend a leisurely time writing emails, since there’s usually a line of people waiting to use the computers. And there are lots of things Andrew and I need to look up together, such as riad selections for our upcoming trip to Marrakech or flights home for Christmas. To survive, we’ve made ourselves regulars at Hotel Omm, a cushy hotel just around the corner from our apartment. The lobby of Hotel Omm is full of plush couches, ambient lighting, and a bar; more importantly, there’s free wi-fi. We don’t have a computer that is wi-fi capable (Andrew’s computer crashed irreparably sever...

On Saturday, we rounded out a long day of walking around the city with a few stops into cafes for sustenance. We were determined to try bittenballen, a kind of fried meatball that’s the Dutch bar-food equivalent of jalapeno poppers or wings. At our first stop, we had the requisite Heineken, bittenballen, some Dutch cheese, and some olives (though Spain definitely does olives better). At the next charming café—they seemed to be everywhere—we had only Heineken. We’d been in the Jordaan, and we then wandered back to the canal area, thinking we’d get tickets to a movie. Instead, we found ourselves craving more bittenballen. What followed was a long, arduous search for the perfect café in which to spend the rest of our evening. There were lots of cafes, but not all had bittenballen; not all had the vibrant crowd we were looking for; not all seemed quintessentially Dutch. We peeked into café after café; an hour passed, maybe more. Finally, we found a café that met our requirements, more or l...

When we arrived in Amsterdam on Thursday, it was very late. By the time we’d walked from Centraal Station to our hotel and dropped off our bags, it was almost midnight. The streets of Amsterdam were quiet, but we set off with our map, intending to find a café where we could welcome ourselves to the city with a beer and some food. It’s disorienting to arrive in a new city at night, with no idea what sections or streets we should seek out or avoid; my three-year-old memories of a charming, lively Amsterdam didn’t mesh with the eerie, dangerous-seeming streets around us. We bought some food at a snack stall—a hamburger and Vlaamese frites—and went back to our hotel. But the days that followed were, happily, more charming and fun than those first few hours seemed to promise. We went to the Rijksmuseum, which is mostly closed for renovations but has its most famous works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others on view in one section. We took a canal tour by boat and floated under bridges and past...

On Friday night, shortly after darkness fell, we set out for the red light district. We weren’t alone. The quiet streets of the eastern and central canal belts soon gave way to a Vegas-like swath of neon lights and coffeeshops, filled with tourists. We turned down a side street lined with the red-lit windows of the prostitutes’ quarters; the street was so narrow we couldn’t have stretched out our arms. Around us, the lingerie-clad prostitutes stood idly in their windows, seeming unfazed by the early-hour tourists who were obviously there simply to gawk. One woman was checking messages on her cell. We emerged back onto the main street and were confronted by two things: a large Japanese tour group, led by a guide holding a large flag, winding their way into the narrow streets; and a brass band playing rallying songs more suited to a parade than the red light district. This part of Amsterdam is like a carnival gone wrong—a confluence of all things normal and strange, shocking and ridiculo...

On Friday morning, we got up at the crack of dawn to catch a bus for Aalsmeer, a tiny village about an hour outside of Amsterdam. We wanted to see the flower auction, held daily in a huge commercial pavilion, where billions of flowers are auctioned off every year. Flowers come to Aalsmeer from all over the world, including Africa and Asia; are auctioned off; and are immediately transported to whatever country has claimed them—within hours, they could be in France or Spain or even the United States. Not many tourists make their way to Aalsmeer, but the auction complex has a catwalk system set up so the tourists that do come can watch the action from above. Below us were millions of flowers, arranged by type and color on carts. It’s all very industrial—the flowers are held in plastic containers; the carts that hold the containers are metal; the floors are concrete. The carts hitch together and are pulled around the complex—the size of 160 football fields—by powerful scooter devices. The ...

My Spanish has progressed to the point where I can carry on a basic, rudimentary conversation and, usually, make myself understood. This is, of course, progress. But the progress is frustrated by a wild array of verb tenses which make saying anything a laborious process of figuring out what tense to use and then considering the many irregular verb forms I may confront. Flashcards are in order, pronto. Despite my developing confidence in trying my Spanish in the real world, my brain still short-circuits regularly. Leaving my apartment building last week, I ran into a neighbor coming into the building. Amiably and boldly, I said, “Hasta manana!” which, since it means “See you tomorrow!”, makes no sense whatsoever. “I mean, hola,” I said. “Hola. Buenas dias.” She gave me a pitying, though indulgent, smile. In class, predictably, my textbook Spanish is quite a bit ahead of my marble-mouthed American pronunciation. My teacher told me on Friday that my vocabulary and grammar are good, but th...

Our first fall visitor, Matt, a friend and former co-worker from New York, arrived last week and, so far, has seen an admittedly interesting slice of our life in Barcelona. On Thursday, we took Matt to a dinner celebrating the upcoming and very small wedding of a Swiss friend from Andrew’s class. The dinner was outside of Barcelona, but what we expected to be just a few tram stops away turned out to be further out into the Barcelona hinterlands than we’d expected. Once there, it was a lovely event, with drinks first and then a sit-down dinner for all the couple’s friends from Andrew’s school. After dinner, unplanned and unexpected, several people volunteered to sing wedding songs from their home countries—a cappella, in a roomful of eyes, basically my worst nightmare. We heard songs in Finnish, Nepalese, Russian, and Japanese. Later, the Japanese singer admitted that he hadn’t known any wedding songs and so had chosen a song schoolchildren sing. Obviously, no one knew the difference. T...

It’s October in Barcelona, a perfect time of year. It’s still warm—the days start chilly and dark but by noon the sun is out and hot—but there are cool gusts of wind and fluffy clouds that make the days more pleasant than they were in high summer. Yesterday, the wind was so intense that the tall winged doors of the apartments in this building and around the courtyard slammed loudly open and shut, unsupervised and unsecured, so violently that I heard crashing glass above me and, later, disgusted sweeping. Most of the tourists are gone now, though the Bus Turistic still sails around the city with sun-glassed travelers on the open top and La Rambla is still (always) bustling. However, it’s a slower bustle than summer, and there’s an impending sense of the city settling in, shoring up for the coming fall and winter. I feel settled: unpacked and getting my bearings in a new apartment and neighborhood (a stroll brought pleasant surprises, including a Nine West store, a beautiful church with ...

We’re moved! We actually did it. In three days last weekend, we managed to get all our stuff from one apartment to the other (five carloads); to clean and turn in the keys to our old apartment; and to go to Ikea to buy few essentials, such as an armoir and a bed frame. Actually moving was tricky. At the old apartment, we sent elevator-loads of boxes and bags downstairs, then carried them out to the car; at our new place, there’s no street-side parking, so Andrew parked on the sidewalk, flashers flashing, while we ran everything inside, loaded yet another elevator, and finally pushed everything into the new apartment before running back downstairs and doing the whole thing over again. It was an exhausting few days, but things are finding their way to their rightful places, and we have a real bed now rather than a mattress on wooden pallets on the floor. Sunlight is streaming onto the terrace. The place is feeling like home, even though there are a few small problems. We won’t have inter...