Skipping Town

There’s an edge-of-the-earth feeling here in Galway, pressed up as it is against the ocean; there’s the sense of being separated from normal life. The fact that it’s (mostly) English-speaking only adds to this strangeness: it’s both familiar and unfamiliar; I’m a tourist but, at the same time, would be perfectly able to nestle inside the city if I had the time. Being a tourist feels different when I speak the language—that’s the conclusion I’ve come to over the past week in Ireland. I don’t feel like I’m on the outside looking in at a distant, though charming, new culture; but the sense of instant belonging that comes from speaking English is a false belonging. I’m still the lone traveler sitting at the bar with a book, still the American pushing aside the boiled cabbage on her dinner plate. I normally don’t get lonely traveling alone—lonely for Andrew, yes; but not lonely —because I never feel excluded from the conversation, never feel like maybe I should close the book and make small...

It was a rainy, blustery day in Galway. The weather here is capricious: raining one moment, sun peeking through clouds the next, but mostly misty and cloudy. This morning, I set out on an ill-advised walk along a river pathway; the beach isn’t far, and I wanted to see the ocean. There are few guardrails along the walkway, and as the wind whipped around me, nearly tearing off my jacket’s hood, it occurred to me that I might easily be swept into the water. I did reach the ocean, and the wind was so strong there I nearly fell over. But the view was beautiful—violently churning water, the wet stone walls, and, as I walked back, crowds of large white swans in the river. Galway is a lovely little town, with one long pedestrian street that is the city’s heart. My B&B is a ten-minute walk from there, over the Wolfe Tone Bridge, over the churning water of the River Corrib. It’s run by a young couple with a tiny baby, and the family is a true picture of Irish coziness; in the morning, as I e...

We spent the weekend in the city of Ulysses , in the city that countless writers—Joyce, but also Samuel Beckett and Edmund Spenser and even Bram Stoker at some point called home. It was my first time in Ireland, so all my impressions were firsts: the difficulty I had understanding the Irish brogue of our taxi driver as we made our way from the airport to our B&B; the abundance of pubs and the even greater abundance of men in those pubs, with a stark minority of women (noticeable even by the standards of Andrew’s school, where having a handful of women at a party is remarkable); the bright signs for “off license” stores, the exact meaning of which still remains a mystery; the painstaking process that is the pouring of a Guinness. We’d planned this trip—part of an extensive trip that I will continue on my own—as the final Trip of Exile that will render my passport flawless to even the most dutiful of border control agents. It gets increasingly ridiculous to be so deliberate about thi...

This weekend I dove head-first back into my Spanish practicing. Since my return to Spain, I’ve made a few token steps toward regaining my footing—perusing my verb-form flash cards, declaring that I’d never learn Spanish at all, the usual ritual—but have shied away from actually speaking. There have been challenges: two repairmen spent an afternoon on our terrace, fixing a drain pipe, and my interactions with them (Did I have a large container for water? Like a mug? No, bigger. Like this big pot here? Si, si…Did I have a broom? Si, si…Que? You mean this electrical outlet here by the door? No, a broom. This object here? etc) relied quite heavily on mime. Plus, they may have been speaking Catalan. And earlier in the week, we were invited to dinner with a Chilean couple; yet we spoke in English, for my benefit, the entire time. This weekend, however, we were invited to a party hosted by some of Andrew’s Mexican friends, at which we were the only native English speakers among a large cr...

While family and friends back home are shivering in a winter storm, I feel particularly happy that I’m here in Barcelona, sitting on my terrace, squinting in the warm sun. There is so much sun right now that soon I’ll be unable to sit here at the table. It’s in the sixties, and the sky is clear blue—not a cloud in sight. It is a perfect spring day, and it’s February. Spain is a fabulous, fabulous place.

To celebrate our engagement, Andrew and I went to Venice last weekend—a trip Andrew had planned while I was whiling away the weeks in the U.S. It was a trip we’d been looking forward to for months, and a place we’d both always wanted to go. Just days after I moved to Barcelona, we’d compiled a list of trips we wanted to take during our time here—subdivided into weekend, long weekend, and longer trips—and Venice was close to the top of the “weekend trips” category. And it did not disappoint. We took a bus from the airport to Venice, then a vaporetto (a subway-like boat) toward our B&B. We were instantly turned around when we stepped off the boat into the tiny, winding streets, and getting turned around in Venice poses unique challenges: many streets dead end into canals, with nary a bridge in sight. But even in those first minutes, trying to find our way to the B&B, the timeless, lost atmosphere of Venice was palpable. It actually feels much like Girona—seemingly separated from ...

When I returned to Spain last week, my jet lag was almost imperceptible—I was so ready to return that it didn’t take any time at all for my body just click over, easily back in step. Of course, it helped that Andrew proposed the day after I arrived! Nothing like a little life-changing, giddiness-producing excitement to shake up the biorhythms. It happened in Girona, at this beautiful spot along the ancient wall that surrounds part of the city: It was, to say the least, the perfect welcome back to Spain. And Spanish bridal magazines will be a pretty painless way to practice my Spanish reading comprehension and build some bridal vocabulary…