Skipping Town

Barcelona had been summer-warm and sunny, and we were shocked to find that Madrid was not only rainy but really, really cold. Not the weather for my sandals, or anything else I’d packed—it was my worst packing job ever. Thank goodness for my Sevogia-purchased sneakers. The last two days of the trip were cold but rain-free, however, so we still had plenty of opportunities for lounging in plazas, soaking up sun. Though the Plaza Mayor is lovely, I preferred the Plaza de Santa Ana, a smaller plaza close to our hotel in Huertas. Lively and full of families and couples, it was the perfect place to sit in the sun and drink a café con leche or a cerveza to kick off a tapear or while away the afternoon. An accordion player strolled from table to table; he played some Frank Sinatra for us, singing the words in Spanish. We cannot leave, we kept saying to each other in the plaza. We can’t leave Madrid, and we can’t leave Spain. We ate well in Madrid. We had menus (a set-price three course meal...

On Saturday, we took a bus to Segovia—we wanted to do a day trip someplace that Andrew hadn’t been, since he’d been to Madrid several times before. Once again, it was unbelievably cold, and even rainier than it had been in Madrid. My feet, still clad in sandals, were soaked immediately upon leaving the bus station. Fortunately, there was a chino (the politically incorrect name for a corner store) right across the street, where I was able to buy socks and sneakers—surprisingly cute for just ten euros. Warmth. Segovia w as charming, even in the rain, and we saw the large Roman aquaduct that runs through the main square and visited the cathedral and the castle. At the castle, we made the precarious climb into the tower—precarious because the spiral stairway was narrow, and it was the way both up and down. Of course, there was no castle employee to organize any kind of system; it’s Spain. People were squeezed into the tower, pressed against the wall to let others up or down. Claustrophobi...

As our time in Spain comes to an agonizing close, it’s fitting that our penultimate trip was to its capital. This weekend—finally—I saw Madrid, which I’d vowed not to leave Spain without doing. And the effect it had was that we are more reluctant than ever to leave Spain at all. Everything I’ve ever read about Madrid talks about the “big three” museums—the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza, and the Reina Sofia—so visiting these was at the top of my list for the trip. Andrew had seen them all before, years ago, but he was more than willing to visit them again. Our first stop: the Prado. The collection is simply too large to cover in one visit, so we decided to focus on the big three—El Greco, Velasquez, and Goya. This was more than enough territory to cover, and there was a lot to take in. I hadn’t known, for instance, that El Greco is actually a nickname—“the Greek”—for Domenikos Theotokopoulous. I hadn’t known that Velasquez devoted so much of his work to dwarfs and other freakish figures...

Monday morning was a confluence of disasters. Not only was our terrace door’s broken window still jagged and covered messily with a spread-apart El Corte Ingles shopping bag, but it had poured overnight and the drain on our terrace had ceased to function. A deep, muddy pool had formed in the corner of the terrace. The apartment was also a mess. Of course, this was the day Andrew received a text message from our apartment’s management company, informing him that someone would be coming by today to show the apartment to a prospective renter. This was not good news. Since renting this apartment, we’d learned that the guy who runs the management company is in the habit of bilking many of his renters for as much money as he can take from them, knowing that most of them are international students who usually leave Spain after graduation and have little recourse—or desire—to chase their money down. A couple of weeks ago, we learned that two friends who’d rented from him last year had gotten s...

Yesterday, Andrew and I and three of his friends went to Girona for the Temps de Flors, the annual flower show where the interior courtyards of private homes are opened up and filled with flower displays. It was so nice to be back in Girona—the last time we were there, we got engaged—and I really think that if I had to choose anyplace in the world to live, Girona would be at or near the top of the list. The flowers weren’t what we expected. The displays were more artful than bountiful—one featured plaster hands reaching out from a swath of grass, like they were rising from the dead; another featured single gerbera daisies tied to the ends of giant orange balloons—but it was fun to see these otherwise hidden spaces. On the steps of the cathedral, large balls covered with moss were arranged as though they were cascading from the top; and on the steps of another church, flowers and grass covered the steps from top to bottom in a blocky graphic design, which was more the sort of thing we e...

Earlier this week, as I was closing the terrace door, Andrew observed from across the room, “Every time you close that door, I think you’re going to put your hip right through that window.” Each of the tall French doors that open onto the terrace is made up of three large panes of glass. Getting the doors to latch properly takes a bit of effort. I rolled my eyes. “I’m not even touching the glass,” I said. “I’m touching the frame. I think I know how to close my own terrace doors.” Yesterday, as I closed the terrace doors, I put my hip right through the window. There was a hideous crack and shattering, and huge, wedge-shaped pieces clattered to the ground on both sides of the door. I screamed and froze, waiting to determine if I was okay, to see if I could feel blood trickling from my bare feet or bare arm, and looked to see if my dress was shredded. Luckily, and I’m not sure how, but I was not injured, save for the tiniest of snags in the skirt of my dress. What a stupid pain. As if we...

One month. We’re leaving Spain in one month. No more dithering; no more idle half-planning. We’ve booked our tickets back to the US, and we’ll be there in exactly one month. The exact “where” is still uncertain. We’ll make our US debut in Pennsylvania, for a friend’s wedding, a family reunion (the Littells will meet the whole Orlando clan), and a whirlwind week of dress-shopping and other wedding planning. And after that—who knows? Either (very) north or (very) west. If we go north, we have a house to live in; if we go west, an apartment search will have to begin. In just a few weeks we’ll be true nomads, our few belongings slung in bags over our shoulders, booking last-minute plane tickets to wherever it is we need to be. We consider it an accomplishment (of sorts) simply to know a date when our feet will hit US soil. The accomplishment is bittersweet. We stared at the “purchase” button on Orbitz as we booked our tickets, unable to click it for several long moments. And at the beach t...

Today, preparing to host a little poker night at our apartment, Andrew and I reluctantly walked down Passeig de Gracia to the Plaza Catalunya outpost of El Corte Ingles, Spain’s gigantic department store chain. Though you can find pretty much anything at Corte, both of us dread going there, for two main reasons: first, because everything is ridiculously expensive; and second, because everything is impossible to find. Superglue; power surge protectors; bath towels; a CD player; sun-dried tomatoes—we know that they are in the store, somewhere. But there’s no guarantee we’ll find them (or can afford them if we do—two years ago, when Andrew needed bath towels, the prohibitive price meant he had to make do with the two he’d brought with him from home until I could bring him Target-bought towels during one of my visits). As a side note, after two years, we have yet to find a hardware store. I had to bring picture-hanging nails from the US when I returned after the holidays. Anyway, our searc...

Last night, Andrew and a friend who is also his business partner had an evening conference call with a potential website builder who lives in Greece, and we planned to have dinner together here at the apartment afterwards. We set the table on our terrace, adding a new element: a bed sheet draped over the metal rods that arch over the terrace in a kind of nonexistent canopy. After finding—for the second time—that a large piece of heavy iron from an upper balcony’s railing had plunged down to our terrace, we’ve grown alarmed at the prospect of someone getting clocked in the head with falling debris. Hence the bed sheet. In a way, it looks almost Mediterranean-beach-cabana. For dinner, Andrew made a pasta with chicken and sun-dried tomatoes. “Where’s you find the sun-dried tomatoes?” the friend asked, having searched fruitlessly for them himself in Barcelona. We always get them at the mega-grocery store at El Corte Ingles, though it’s always an adventure: they usually only have one or two...

Yesterday was a strange day weather-wise: blue-skied and sunny in the morning and afternoon, then dark and pouring-rain from late-afternoon on. Andrew and I set out on a long walk at the tail end of the niceness, then found ourselves pursued by threatening rain clouds midway down the Rambla. Fortunately, our destination was close: the Columbus monument, a tall column with a statue of Columbus perched on top that serves as a kind of exclamation point at the bottom of La Rambla, just before the port. It’s possible to take an elevator to the top of the monument, which we’d never done before; and we set out yesterday determined to cross another item off our ‘things to do before leaving’ list. The rain held off as we rode the elevator to the top of the monument, accompanied with a long-haired man who operated the elevator with a key. Andrew spoke a few words to him in Spanish, and the man asked where we were from. We established that we were from New York but had lived here for two years. “...

It’s official: Spain has the slowest mail in the world. I knew it was slow—a birthday gift sent to me by a friend took almost two months to arrive—but slowness has now been taken to a new level. Yesterday, Andrew went to campus to clean out his mailbox one final time, and he found a letter—a letter I’d been waiting for since last September . It was an ATM card that had been sent to PA to replace my expiring ATM card, and which my father had mailed along to me here. Not receiving that card was a huge fiasco, requiring many phone calls to Citibank to have a new card issued, as I was on my way someplace—Amsterdam? Marrakech?—and really needed to have access to cash. That story’s long over. But it seems the little letter was still, all this time, making its snail-slow path across continents—or simply sitting in a bin in a Spanish mailroom. Something tells me it had lots of company.

In high school, I played Jack’s Mother in Into the Woods . I love the show (somehow, still, after our production of it; it’s a resilient show, one could say that much), and one of Cinderella’s lines has always stood out as a favorite: You know what your decision is—which is not to decide . With graduation now past, and with Andrew’s classmates heading off around the world to start the next stage of their lives, I feel very much that we’re in Cinderella’s state, flummoxed by decisions about what to do now. The most dreaded of all questions—“So, what’s next for you?”—comes our way many times a day here. Though it’s a difficult question to answer, it’s not an angst-ridden kind of difficulty; instead, it’s difficult because it’s just so unbelievably complex. Our answer depends—will depend—on a series of If this, then this…If that, then this other thing . The this’s and that’s, which will become clearer in the weeks ahead, will determine coast; home; path; landscape. Northeast or West Coast...

The thing that brought us to Barcelona—Andrew’s MBA—has, unbelievably, come to an end. This weekend was graduation, and Andrew processed with his classmates to receive his diploma, applauded by me, his parents and sister, and a family friend. It was such a huge life decision for Andrew to make—whether to do the MBA, and where to do it—and it has all been such a great success. The next chapters are going to be very exciting. Graduation was a very nice affair, with families there from all over the world. Now many of Andrew’s friends have left the city, on their way to other places to begin their post-MBA lives. We’re still here, for now, and in no way ready to leave. We had a lovely few days with Andrew’s family, even fitting in a concert at the amazing Palau de la Musica Catalana, one of the most ornate Modernista structures in Barcelona, which had been on our “to do before leaving” list. We sent back three enormous bags of stuff with his family, feeling sad to make even this gesture—a...