Skipping Town

(I’m about to write a post that, if I weren’t me, would make me hate me. Nonetheless, I’ll proceed.) I am tired. July has called my wanderlust bluff. You want to travel? July sneered. Fine—let’s see you travel. I went to Paris for three days; London for two days; Krakow for five days; and Rome for three days. That’s four countries, not counting Spain, where I’m based, or the U.S., where I am right now. Counting those, July has seen me in six countries, maneuvering in four different currencies and saying “hello” and “thank-you” in five different languages (six, if you count Catalan). The day I returned to Barcelona from Krakow, I had three different currencies in my wallet: euro, zloty, and pound. Buying a pack of gum at the airport proved to be an awkward juggling of coins. Writing this, I see that it’s a bit insane. Now, I’ve skipped town again—but this time, back to the United States. It’s my first trip home since coming to Barcelona, and I’m undeniably excited to be here. For the n...

In Philadelphia, when we finally arrived, there was an exorbitantly long wait for our bags to come through into baggage claim. Everyone was already travel-weary, and everyone had tight connections to make; yet there we were, waiting together as a group once again, all of us looking like zombies. Andrew and I stood by a cart trolley, one of those where you pay a few dollars in order to get a metal cart to pile your luggage on. The trolley had long since been empty of carts, and Andrew and I and many others idled near the empty rails. Nonetheless, an exhausted man walked wearily up to the trolley and inserted three dollar bills into the slots, just as the instructions stated: “1. Insert money.” When he moved on to the next instruction, however—“2. Remove cart”—he waited, puzzled, seemingly confused at why no cart had appeared. Andrew and I watched him curiously. Did he think a small inflatable cart would pop out from the change slot? The man eventually realized his mistake, and, disguste...

This weekend, my flight from Barcelona to Jacksonville was thirty hours late. For sixteen of those hours, I sat on the filthy floor of the Barcelona airport among thousands of other stranded, angry passengers and their thousands of hulking suitcases in the unairconditioned check-in area of the airport. On Friday, Andrew and I sent Mom and Dad off to the airport for their early-morning flight back to the United States; a few hours later, we went to the airport to catch our own afternoon flight to Philadelphia, where we’d connect to Jacksonville. When we arrived, we walked into a mob scene. The Barcelona airport often has long, chaotic lines at its check-in counters, but this was a new kind of chaos. Even stranger, there were no airline employees at any of the check-in desks, and on the departures board, we saw that every single flight was marked as delayed. “Is everyone on strike or something?” Andrew joked, marveling at the ghost-town-like expanse of counters. Indeed, we found out quic...

We became Tourists in Rome. We should have realized when we planned the trip that Rome in late July was not a good idea. But travel time is limited by Mom and Dad’s school year; and we wanted to take a side trip halfway through their visit to Spain. So the three of us set out for Italy for a whirlwind three-day trip. Living in Europe, I’ve gotten spoiled by the feeling of not being a tourist. Even when I go someplace new, there’s a sense of having a base, of belonging, of being somehow different from those who travel a long distance with pristine passports and voluminous, unscuffed bags. Rome, however, with its insanely twisting streets and unfamiliar language, rendered it nearly impossible to blend in, especially since tourists basically replace locals entirely in the summer and take over the city with maps and sunhats. I, too, had a sunhat in Rome. We waited in line for the Vatican museum one morning in scorching sunlight, and when a vendor walked by peddling sunhats, I asked the pri...

There are two layers to any city—the tourist layer and the real-life layer—and it’s hard, if not impossible, to get a sense of both at once. The first Orlando Parents visit is currently underway, and I’ve realized in the past few days that a ten-day visit isn’t nearly enough time to peel away the layers of this strange city and show what our life here is really like. A visit to a new city must involve exploring the tourist layer, since it’s underneath and around those tourist sights—the museums, the statues, the architecture—that our real life takes place. If we ignore the tourist layer, then we might as well live in Kansas or Iowa or Minnesota; the structure of real life, with its groceries and errands and other everyday tasks, doesn’t look much different from one place to the next. It’s the backdrop that changes. So, we’ve done our best to see the famous Barcelona, and we’ve done an excellent job so far. On Thursday, when Mom and Dad arrived, we walked down La Rambla—the essential fi...

Besides the salt mine, the main market square, and the Wawel castle, Krakow guidebooks and tourist kiosks feature one more excursion: to Auschwitz and Birkenau, which are located approximately an hour outside the city. On Thursday, I took a city bus to the camps. I decided against an organized tour—I wasn’t sure how long I’d want to stay—and had a minor adventure not only finding the city’s main bus station but also finding the bus itself. Nothing was in English, no one spoke English, and like a true tourist I bumbled for a while around what I thought was the bus station, only to finally be informed that it was the train station. The ride to the camps was deceptively pleasant, and even the town where the camps are located—Oswiecim—is deceptively charming. It’s difficult to imagine living in such close proximity to history—yet there were houses and apartment buildings, cars and shops, within close walking distance. I joined a guided tour when I got to Auschwitz, and suddenly I was stand...

I spent next to nothing on food in Krakow. Each morning, my hotel set out a breakfast spread of breads, rolls, cheeses, meats, jams, fruits, yogurt, cereal, and potted chicken terrine (that tin’s label required a few flips through my Polish-food dictionary). For lunch, I ate at “milk bars”—cheap Polish cafes where you order at the counter and pick up your food when it’s called. I wasn’t prepared for how cheap the food would actually be: a plate of pierogies, for example, was 4.80 zloty—less than $3. A plate of potato pancakes smothered in mushrooms was roughly the same amount. For two dinners, I had a huge, delicious gyro from a storefront—about $2. One night, I ate in a restaurant recommended by a friend of a friend of Andrew’s. I had borscht (served in a mug) and a big plate of pierogies for less than $10, in a charming atmosphere. The bread I was served before the meal came with a small pot of lard. On my last night, I ate at another charming Polish restaurant and had fried ewe’s mi...

According to all the guidebooks and websites I read about Krakow before my trip, the Wieliczka salt mine is a Krakow attraction not to be missed. So on Tuesday, after a hearty breakfast at my hotel, I set off to explore it. I’d opted against an organized tour: the price seemed high, and the estimated length of the trip was much longer than I anticipated wanting to spend at the salt mine. A woman at the tourist office had told me how to get there on my own, so I made my way to a local “mini-bus”—Krakow’s version of a city bus—and paid just 2.5 zloty (about 50 cents) to get to the mine. I didn’t really have an image in mind when I planned to visit the mine. That’s a benefit to planning a trip fast to an unexpected place—no preconceived ideas to support or refute, even in the back of the mind. At the mine, I bought a ticket then waited in a holding area with hordes of other tourists for the English-language tour. A French group entered the mine; then a large Polish group; then a Spanish g...

Tonight, Andrew and I will go to London for the weekend; on Sunday, when he flies back to Barcelona, I’m going further afield: to Krakow, Poland, for four days. I chose Krakow for a variety of reasons, most of which are visa-related and too dull and convoluted to recount. More importantly, Krakow stood out because of two dreams I’ve had over the past year or so. In both, I was traveling to Poland—a place I’ve never had any real reason to explore. In the first, I was at an airport without a ticket, overwhelmed at the prospect of choosing to fly anywhere in the world. I chose Poland. There was some distress in the dream: just before boarding the plane, I realized I hadn’t bought a guidebook; it was late at night, and the airport shops were closed. In the second dream, I was on a wooden boat, sailing toward Poland. I was on a canal of sorts rather than an ocean, and voluptuous, elaborately-roofed buildings loomed ahead. That image of the rounded turrets and deep colors of the buildings ha...

On Saturday night in Paris, crowds began gathering outside cafes whose televisions were visible from the street to watch the World Cup match between France and Brazil. Rachael and I sat at a sidewalk table to eat dinner—moules frites—and watched the French go crazy at every turn of the game. After dinner, we wandered around St. Germain, occasionally joining a crowd to check the status of the match; we were near the Pont Neuf when France finally won. The crowds charged down the streets, gathering near a grand fountain, cheering and waving France’s flag. Boys scaled the statue in the middle of the fountain, dancing with their shirts off in the streaming water and wrapping themselves in soaked flags. It was, just as in Barcelona, a happy riot (though, like Barcelona, we learned it had turned more destructive as the night wore on). A souvenir shop near the Pont Neuf did a brisk business that night selling flags to tourists and Parisians who wanted to celebrate in style. They whipped the fl...

Going back to a place I’ve left isn’t one of my favorite things to do. I always feel like a trespasser, intruding into a life I’m not a part of anymore. Once I leave, I like to be gone for good. Of course, this can’t be true for New York, since I want to go back one of these days; but I’m not ready to go back quite yet. The finality of my move away—with the boxes and the cut ties and the UHaul—made it temporarily permanent. I left, and I need to be gone for a little while. This weekend, I went back to Paris for the first time in three years. In that time, I was certain my memories had made things different from what they actually are. I couldn’t even remember the name of my favorite used bookstore, and my internet searches suggested that the store had closed or moved. As this visit approached, I didn’t think I'd recognize the city at all—it would, surely, be too different. I knew I'd be just another American tourist, but I was afraid I'd also feel like one. Paris had change...

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...