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...

It’s moving day. After Andrew finishes classes, he’ll rent us a car, and we’ll move ourselves from Montjuic to Eixample in a few packed car trips. Hopefully. As we packed our things last night, it became abundantly clear that we’ve accumulated a lot of stuff. The move won’t be as easy as we thought it would be. Andrew hasn’t been here for that short a time—over a year—and I’ve been here, for the most part, for five months; but the amount of stuff we have is surprising considering that the rest of our stuff—indeed, most of our stuff—is still in the U.S. We’ve accumulated several boxes of books, buying them, receiving them, bringing them over en masse every chance we have; we have (okay, I have) tons of clothes, many of which I’d like to divest myself of but don’t yet know where to donate them; and we have a few boxes of kitchenware. Not to mention a few lamps, a desk, a shelf, pillows, towels, and a random assortment of iPods and hard drives and cell phones and endless wires and cords...

This week will be the last week that we call the Font Magica our neighbor. The Font has been a loyal friend these past twelve months (the first half of which I was only a visitor to the Font rather than a true neighbor), its music thundering into our apartment at exactly 9:30pm every weekend night during the spring, summer, and fall. It shines and dances even now, when the summer crowds have thinned and fewer tour buses clog the curbs. It’s no less grand, no less elaborate, than it is during the height of tourist season. Last Thursday, I watched the Font from high up near the Palau Nacional , sitting with a glass of wine on hard cracked stones. The music is quieter there, the Font a more manageable basin of colored lights on water. But from there it looks even more a part of the city, dominating Plaza Espanya swallowing the headlights from the traffic that flows in front of and towards it. It’s been nice living near the Font, always a happy sight as we walk to dinner or drive in a taxi...

Spanish classes are not the time for introversion. I've always hated group activities of any and all kinds--group work, teams, pairs, and, of course, and kind of interactive group activity, including but not limited to "ice breakers" and other demonstrative and usually embarrassing games. However, in Spanish class, games, teams, pairs--the whole roster--are employed frequently as language-teaching strategies. During my time in classes here, I've had to sing the National Anthem; ask questions (in Spanish, claro ) about what activity was written by another student on a Post-It note affixed to my forehead; and throw and catch a ball to shout out conjugated verb forms. Doing these things is helpful, usually (with the firm exception of singing the National Anthem), but still not fun. However, my preferred method of learning--reading or doing exercises quietly to myself--is obviously not the way to learn a language. So I participate without grimacing (again, the Anthem is t...

Yesterday, we went to Ikea to prepare for our impending move. A few months ago, Andrew broke our coffee table, which, like all our furniture, belongs to our landlord. It was a hideous glass-and-metal contraption, the wide top of it a single sheet of glass, the bottom layer a large sheet of mirror. Though we'd piled books on it without really considering the danger, it finally gave way under Andrew's socked feet. The glass cracked loudly in two, scaring both of us. We put the ruined table by the curb, admittedly happily for the decreased clutter in the room. However, Andrew wrote to the landlord explaining what happened, and we promised we'd buy another coffee table before we moved out. According to the hours on the Ikea website, and the hours printed on Ikea's front door, Ikea is open every day, including Sunday and holidays, with the exception of one or two specific festivals. However, yesterday, Ikea chose to be closed. We don't know why. A few other people trickl...

It’s sunny today. This usually isn’t remarkable in Spain—but after the past four gloomy days, it is. At the beginning of the week, it began raining. Then it rained harder. Thunderstorms—big ones, the really threatening kind that led us to unplug appliances—came and went. There were downpours, sheets of water, rivulets at curbs and on sidewalks. We got caught in the rain the night we saw our new apartment, taking refuge under the lip of a building but still getting splashed and wet. People in Spain are not used to such weather; there’s much stunned running, few umbrellas at hand. Spain itself is ill-equipped for it. Metro lines shut down; telephone and internet service was disrupted. In the course of one day—Tuesday—Spain got 30% as much rain as it gets in an entire year. The towels I unwisely hung on the line during a lull on Monday stayed soaked until just this afternoon. Accustomed to constant sunshine, I felt my energy slip, my spirits sag. I love gloomy fall weather but perhaps thi...

We lost the apartment we wanted. It was an attic space, with high ceilings crossed with wooden beams, lots of light, and use of the large roof terrace, whose entrance was across from our own apartment’s door. It was pricy, but we wanted it. And the landlord wanted us. But when Andrew told him we might be leaving Barcelona after eight months, rather than the one-year lease the landlord wanted, the landlord stopped returning our emails and we found the apartment re-posted online. However, the loss was meant to be, because yesterday our apartment search yielded two fabulous apartments that led to several hours of agonized debate over which one we wanted most. The first, in Eixample, we loved immediately. Unbelievably high ceilings, old, interesting moldings, beautiful mosaic floors, and a large, private terrace—a terrace that shares an interior courtyard with La Pedrera, one of the most famous Gaudi buildings in the city. Both the living room and bedroom have tall, large-windowed French d...

Until this weekend, neither Andrew nor I had ever been to Germany—never seen a German city, never even had a layover at a German airport. We’d tried to go in the past, but we’d always been thwarted by scheduling problems or other obstacles. So when Andrew was invited to the wedding of a friend of his from school, we were excited to finally set foot in this as-yet, for us, unexplored country. When Andrew and I arrived at the Munich airport on Friday afternoon, we were immediately struck by the utter lack of chaos—as well as noise. The airport was bright, new-looking, and clean, and no one was talking. People left the plane quietly; families and other travelers walked through the airport corridors with their bags, quietly; we all gathered at baggage claim, quietly, watching the extremely quiet conveyor belts carry the luggage by. We ran into more quietness later, as we headed to Herrsching, an hour outside of Munich, in our rental car with three other people we know from Barcelona who we...

Last night, Andrew and I went up to the MNAC (the palatial museum on top of Montjuic, just steps from our apartment) for one of the last “Open Doors” nights of the season. A few times each summer, MNAC stays open until midnight and offers free admission along with wine, cava, beer, tapas, and live music on the plaza in front. Last night a New Orleans-style jazz band was performing—an odd but festive backdrop to the spectacular view of the Font Magica and Barcelona at our feet. They sang “The Saints Come Marching In” in English. Inside, young, hip-looking Barcelonins wandered around the galleries. Andrew and I walked through the rooms with Catalonian art from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. So much of the style from that time is distinctive: firmly outlined figures; lots of black, gold, ash-green, and gray; a general aura of hardness or defiance among the street scenes and portraits. Much of it is strange but compelling, like Barcelona itself. I always like museums at...

I’m back in Barcelona, back at my desk, ready for fall in Spain. It will be an exciting time: soon we’ll have a new apartment; soon I'll be back in Spanish class; we have several exciting trips planned; and we have a few visitors lined up as well. In the meantime, there’s jet lag to get over. My trip yesterday couldn’t have been easier: Pittsburgh—Philadelphia—Barcelona. I’ve never flown directly from the US to Barcelona; it made the trip incredibly fast. Even better, the flight was sparsely booked, so after takeoff I moved to a new seat—actually, three empty seats in a row, providing a business-class-type flat “bed.” It was hard to sleep since the flight left at 5:45pm, but at least I felt rested and uncramped when we landed. That said, the strange hours of the flight—when we landed in Barcelona, it wasn’t so far past my regular bedtime in the US—are making me feel particularly slothlike now. To stay awake yesterday, I went across the street to the Caixa Forum for a café con lech...