Lands of the Setting Sun: ¡Yeísmo!

You’ve got to love Ibn Battouta. A Moorish explorer, he made it all the way to the Philippines, served briefly as a minister in the Maldives, and fought in the Battle of Gibraltar, spent the overwhelming majority of his life abroad, and when he wrote it all down, he made sure to let the reader know he wasn’t having any fun. The man abhorred any culture with topless women. On the other hand, he is on the 5dh coin.

Ibn Battouta Airport was on the windward side of the point of Cape Spartel, in howling wind, and accessible only by a dirt road, though that may soon change. Tangier was neglected under the bad king Hassan II, but it’s experiencing a revival under his son Mohammed VI. It’s still a messy place, but it’s also the fastest growing city on the African continent. This king is popular enough to have his picture in every room in the country, and every kiosk at Ibn Battouta.

First thing I did was get my mom some tea. As soon attendant at the cafe poured it, I picked up the paper cup, rapidly scalding my hand, but keeping my composure long enough to return to the counter and get a second cup for insulation. What I liked most about TNG (besides being one of the few remaining airports where you walk onto the tarmac) was the airline employees. All Moroccan, all pretty girls, all wearing djellabas, the traditional hooded robe of the Moors. We’d seen people wearing them around; it was a bit like seeing a Native American in full shaman gear walking down 42nd Street, except that here it was normal. I stopped in a tiny souvenir shop looking for a flag and they had it: giant, thick and woolen, a real flag like those getting shredded by the wind outside. You could have used it as a blanket. I ponyed up my last 40dh and packed it into my suitcase with the others.

Our flight plan resulted in a two-hour layover at Madrid Barajas, which was creepily identical to Heathrow, built in a style consisting mainly of glass and chrome which my mom likened to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

“Would you be interested in watching all of Terry Gilliam’s films?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “there’s an insanity risk.”

I grabbed as much food as humanly possible from Medas, mostly ham, and devoured it as quickly as possible before queueing for the connecting flight. “So what are the differences between Castillian and South American Spanish?”

Annoyed by Britons who seem to think anything south of the Potomac is “South America,” I turned around to see a girl of about 15 travelling with her brother. “New World Spanish lacks distinción. There’s no th-sound, though that’s also the case in some parts of Spain.”

“That’s right,” she said approvingly. For the next two hours on the plane, I would catch her staring at me several seats ahead, then pretending she wasn’t, trying not to grin.

But now we were in England, and we had two hours to get to our hotel near Heathrow, catch a bus to the Picadilly Line, thence to the Northern Line, and get off at Camden Town. From there, we made a beeline for Regent’s Park, briefly got lost in some mud, and arrived at the Regent’s Canal. We barely made it, and not only because my mom couldn’t stop laughing at “Cockfosters.” I’d simply forgotten how huge London is.

I’d first heard about this restaurant from David Mitchell’s Back Story. Feng Shang Princess is a fancy Chinese restaurant on a double-decker canal boat, and though Mitchell walked by it all the time, he had never gone in. I was worried it would just be a novelty restaurant but the food was terrific. We were particularly taken by the crispy chicken in mango curry sauce. My mom decided that even though her birthday was in April, this would be my present. A £60 dinner at a restaurant on a boat, from a book, in London.

I never ate the chorizo. It got seized at customs in Los Angeles. You’re not allowed to bring ham in here.

Lands of the Setting Sun: One Step Beyond

I paced through Córdoba station uneasily. There were no high-speed trains where we were going. Only a slow, winding railway taking us through the Cordillera Antequerana to the southernmost part of Spain. Our journey took us off the electric rail system, past military bases and endless forests to arrive 20 minutes late at San Róque, which looked frighteningly like Orange County. From there we took a cab all the way to our hotel in La Línea de Concepción. We were going to Gibraltar.

Gibraltar is one of the Pillars of Hercules, two mountains on either side of the strait separating the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, and as such, it’s been much fought over. The site of eighteen historical battles, it was finally captured by the British in Queen Anne’s War 309 years ago and it’s been theirs ever since. On the African side of the strait is the Spanish outpost of Ceuta, most famous in the 1970s for a surly border guard who wouldn’t let hippies into Morocco. But that’s a story for someone else to tell.

I wanted to go to Gibraltar because it was on our way, because it was going to be completely different from Spain, and because it afforded me the opportunity to cross an international border by foot, which never happens. The two-mile walk to the border was astonishingly ugly, the road along the beach dusty and unkempt, although the buildings were covered by flocks of giant shearwaters. Between Spain and Gibraltar is a no man’s land a hundred meters across. Naturally, this is where people park. When I passed through the border checkpoint, I excitedly held out my passport, but the guard didn’t even look up. It’s that kind of attitude that’s fostered Euroscepticism is Britain. From the checkpoint we walked across an airstrip, over a drawbridge and through a tunnel, and we were in the heart of Gibraltar.

For a place that’s so hard to get to, Gibraltar was totally packed, and packed with Britons. Suddenly everybody was paler, fatter, and the women were all wearing makeup. After being in Spain for so long, this was like home. Gibraltar is very proud of its pirate motif; the Gibraltarian pound coin has a skull on it! It’s the skull of a Neanderthal uncovered on the rock, but still! My mom and I had fish and chips– comfortably eating lunch outdoors for the first time in nearly a month. But we had business to attend to on top of the rock.

After procuring a Gibraltarian flag from a souvenir shop, we made the trek to the lift. Nobody shopped here, this is where people lived. The Gibraltarians truly became a people when the area came under threat from the Germans in the Second World War. The caves inside the Rock served as Allied headquarters for the invasion of North Africa, and when the war ended, there was a nation here. Most of the people we saw were from England, but the locals were immediately identifiable by their borderline-unintelligible Rosie Perez-by-way-of-South-London accents.

We weren’t expecting to see many monkeys. I mean, why would they show up for people? But monkeys are not like other wild animals; the moment we got off the lift, there was a monkey and her baby, looking through a poor man’s bag.

The place was full of monkeys just sitting around, not minding us at all. They were climbing all over the old bunkers, grooming each other, having sex and generally lazing about. After a while, it was time to go, and I had to pull my mom away. She was nearly crying.

The walk back was tortuous; we couldn’t catch a bus to save our lives. By the time we arrived in No Man’s Land, the two miles back to the hotel seemed impossible so we took a cab. My mom was exhausted, but I was composed enough to eat dinner in the hotel. However, I still didn’t have clean clothes, and it looked like I wouldn’t for the remainder of the trip.

Lands of the Setting Sun: Stuck

In addition to being one of the oldest cities in Europe, Córdoba is also the hottest city in Europe. And while it wasn’t warm on New Years’ Day, it wasn’t cold enough to snow; it had rained early in the morning when we made way to La Mezquita, a block from our hotel.

La Mezquita was formerly the Great Mosque of Córdoba, with its striped arches and beautiful garden. We hung around there for a while, waiting to be let in. The inside of the building isn’t as big as it looks in pictures, and it’s still in use as a religious house. When the Castilians arrived, they built a cathedral inside it, so when you see it from the outside, one building appears to have grown out of the other like a parasitic wasp.

Inside the cathedral was quiet. Finally a priest showed up. My mom, who is not accustomed to seeing priests outside of movies, was enthralled. I was less enthralled by the prospect of being stuck there for an hour, so I convinced her to bail for lunch. As the bells rang for noon, we looked through the streets.

After searching for restaurants we found the kind of place where kings and presidents and prime ministers ate when they visited. Casually wondering really how often Tony Blair made it to this particular city, I noticed that one of the past visitors had been the current King of Morocco. He was a distant descendant of the Sultans and Emirs that would have ruled most of Spain and Portugal from this very city. I later discovered that the restaurant didn’t open until 13:30, so we got the hell out and ate somewhere else while planning the remainder of our trip. We were going to keep going south, beyond even Spain. And I still hadn’t done laundry.

Author’s note: Fellow Bosco alum Jake Hawkes is presently backpacking through Galicia. I didn’t go to Galicia, but we still salute him.

Lands of the Setting Sun: Los Judíos

When the AVE arrived in Córdoba, we fell off the train– we’d come in much earlier than thought, and it hadn’t occurred to me that this train wouldn’t linger in the station very long. We ran right out to the taxi area.

“Hotel Albucasis, Calle Buen Pastor once,” I said to the driver, who may have been the same age as me. Thus began the most terrifying cab ride of my life.

Córdoba is old, it had already been around for centuries when the Romans arrived, and people have been living there ever since. Most of the city, still enclosed by a wall, consists of streets six feet wide with tight curves. The entire street we were on was barely wide enough for the taxi with no way of seeing in front of us, and the guy was driving at 40 miles an hour. But we reached our hotel. This was the Judería.

Córdoba has been a city as long as anyone can remember. The Carthaginians named it Kartuba after a general who was killed near by. The Romans came around in the 3rd century BC, where it was home to the father-and-son philosophers Seneca the Elder and Seneca the Younger. When the Visigoths captured Spain, the Byzantines briefly took it back, but eventually the Moors came and took care of business.

Córdoba under Islamic rule was the capital of Al Andalus and one of the largest cities in the world, much bigger than it is even today. We are told in history class that the Moors were a kind and gentle people who were eventually pushed out by the feckless papists. At least that’s what they said at Barnhart Middle School. In reality, Spain was always a mostly Christian country ruled over by a Muslim minority. Due to the country’s remoteness from the Arab world, it was a pretty lax place: the state of Al-Andalus broke up into several states ruled over by Emirs both Christian and Muslim until they were conquered by Islamic fanatics from Mauretania– the AQIM of its day– who antagonized the country’s impoverished Christian trading partners in the north enough to cause the Reconquista, the western front of the Crusades. Which brings us to La Judería.

For two hundred years, Córdoba was part of the Crown of Castile but still enjoyed religious freedom, and La Judería was the Jewish section during that time. It was a prosperous place with big houses, synagogues; it was Spain’s Upper West Side. It was also home to the Jewish philosopher Maimonedes, better known to me, and to fans of The Big Lebowski, as Rambam.

All of this, of course, was covered up and forgotten when the Spanish Inquisition came, but the Judería was rediscovered by local monks digging around in the 1870s and Spain today is quite proud of their Jewish history. Sam Ettinger told me that Spain was one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe, but I found no evidence of that whatsoever. My mom and I had lunch first, at an amazing Sephardic restaurant tucked away, as I recall, behind some bushes. I had chicken and rice and falafel. It was spectacular.

After that we visited the Jewish museum, really a restored medieval townhouse filled with whatever artifacts people found walled up in their homes or under their kitchen tiles. Because the streets are so narrow, houses in Córdoba are built with gardens on the inside like donut holes, and this one was spectacular. But I looked over at my mom and something had come over her. Something I’d never seen before. Some of my ancestors are from here; they escaped Spain to go to Odessa, which was then part of Turkey. That’s why I looked like these people. We were here.

I spent the afternoon desperately looking for a laundromat. I was out of clean clothes for the first time since Barcelona, but no place was open. I should mention it was New Years’ Eve. In Spain, people don’t come out to celebrate until after midnight, so the streets were dead as we searched for dinner. I settled for a kebab on the high street near the Plaza de las Tendillas, which was lit up with blue LEDs for the upcoming celebrations.

When midnight did come, the bells of La Mezquita rang like hell through the whole city. I was finally over jet-lag, but sadly not enough to go out any later.

Lands of the Setting Sun: The Garden of Earthly Delights

I was going to like Madrid no matter what. I fit in, spoke the language, liked the food well enough, and nobody looked at me funny for wearing a tie on vacation. I also liked it more because I arrived ready to hate the place.

Spanish companies– engineers mostly– do a lot of business in Los Angeles, and all of them are based in Madrid. I’d spent my childhood looking at pictures of their headquarters: soulless glass towers on barren modern streets. I later discovered that that is a new area of Madrid north of the old city– a sort of Castillian Courbevoie.

If Barcelona was Chilly, Madrid was well into the next ice age, a fact my mom and I discovered as soon as we went out the front door at Atocha station. A mile high and 200 miles inland, the city is subject to Europe’s hottest summers and Spain’s coldest winters. During our stay, the temperature hovered around -1º C, and it was only December. But who cares? I love the cold.

Madrid was also unimaginably crowded. It’s the size of Chicago, but instead of a grid, the entire city radiates out from the Plaza del Sol, where we got off the subway to find our hotel, which I understood to be on the Plaza Mayor. Struggling through packed sidewalks, we found ourselves in a vast rectangular marketplace, awkwardly placed in the medieval cityscape in 1576, and just as impassable as the city streets.

As it turned out, our hotel was on the Plaza Santa Cruz, a block away. We checked in and immediately I fell asleep. When I woke up, I was half-asleep and terrified of missing our dinner reservation, but got straightened out and we went to Sobrino de Botín, the world’s oldest restaurant and haunt of several historical figures. I don’t remember what we had for dinner, which is not the best of signs, but I got a picture of dessert:

Briefly getting lost in the winding streets, we returned to the hotel and, still suffering from jet-lag, attempted to sleep. It would have been easier if there hadn’t been dozens of drunken men singing in the plaza until 4 AM.

The next day, Mom and I took a stroll around the city, and everything looked oddly familiar. “This looks just like West London,” I said. “That’s exactly what I was thinking!” said my mom, who had never been to London. That isn’t a coincidence: in the mid-19th century, Queen Isabella II had all of Madrid rebuilt in classic Victorian style, with big townhouses and rigidly landscaped parks. Atocha Station was built during this time. Isabella’s reign was very similar to Queen Victoria’s, except that she was overthrown in 1868, replaced by an Italian King, who was replaced by a republic, who was finally replaced by Isabella’s son. It’s worth mentioning that all of this happened in the span of eight years. Spain had four civil wars in the span of a single century.

After visiting the outside of the palace, we took the subway to El Retiro, the massive park on the east side of the city. El Retiro was a welcome relief from the claustrophobia of the rest of the city; it’s a popular place for joggers and dogs, and every few meters there’s a massive monument to some element of Spanish history, a queen or an admiral or the War on Terror. It’s an excellent way to memorialize great national figures; Washington DC could learn a lesson from this place.

From here we had planned to visit the Prado museum, but it wasn’t open yet, so we repaired to the Reina Sofía, a newer museum named ostentatiously after the current Queen, and home to many of the great cubist works, culminating in Picasso’s massive Guernica. In addition to the paintings, the museum was full of articles and books from the early 1900s, detailing the birth of the cubist movement, including Picasso’s early sketches, The Dream and Lie of Franco, which seems to have inspired Guernica. I liked The Dream and Lie better. It was seeing these that made my mom a little weepy, but we were just getting started.

“Are you getting tired?” I asked my mom as we had lunch in a café with a door that kept blowing open.

“We have to see the Prado,” she said.

“I know,” I said, “I just need a little break. After a second coke I was ready to take it on.

All I knew about the Prado was that it had the works of Francisco Goya, but upon entering I discovered that that was but a footnote. My mom was overwhelmed. Fra Angelico? Bosch? Velazquez? All here. I’d seen hundreds of these paintings in my high school art textbook, but my mom had majored in fine art. She later told me, “I’ve been looking at these paintings my entire life and never thought I’d see them in person.” While I struggled to comprehend the massive c.1500 prog rock album cover that was The Garden of Earthly Delights, she stared longingly at the modestly-sized self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer.

“I had a crush on Albrecht Dürer,” my mom said. “I used to carry a wallet-sized version of this painting in my pocket.” My mom’s emotional roller coaster was just beginning.

Later that afternoon, I ran into some Norwegian girls who were also visiting for Christmas break. After a pleasant chat, they took the subway going the other way and I realized I’d forgotten to ask what they were doing that night. It wouldn’t have mattered. I was asleep before dinnertime.

Lands of the Setting Sun: Native Tongues

I was disappointed with Barcelona, but things were already looking up when we got off the L3 at Sants Station. Finding our way from the subway platform to the main station was not easy in a city with few signs and a fierce attachment to an obscure language, but we we weren’t left wanting for long: a little old lady sidled up to us, noticed our suitcases and gave us directions to the platform. I was prepared not to listen to yet another person pointlessly railing in Catalan, but to my astonishment I understood what she was saying– she was speaking Spanish. I thanked her and raced to the main concourse.

AVE is Spain’s high-speed rail system; the line from Barcelona to Madrid is one of their newest, and it is the second-fastest train in the world (the fastest is the LGV-Est in France). One look at a map of AVE makes you wonder how a flat-broke country like Spain can continue to build high-speed rail while America can’t. The United States’ only HSR line is the Acela, which runs from Boston to Washington via New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. However, it runs on shared track and doesn’t go above 200 kilometers per hour (the Barcelona-Madrid line manages 300). Eight high-speed rail systems are in the planning phases across America, but while California is coming close to breaking ground on exclusive track, the rest are based on marginal improvements like concrete ties and grade separation. In 2011, Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida actually shut down projects in their states to spite President Obama.

But I digress. Sants Station is in a hideous building, though my mom was spared the indignity of having to see the outside. Instead we waited. Across from us sat a young, pretty girl with fluffy brown hair, freckles, and a trademark Catalan nose. As far as my mom and I could tell, Catalan women all have short noses. She wore a colourful outfit and pulled out a massive book– a George R.R. Martin book, maybe. Accidentally, I had dropped the bottlecap from my coke between my mom’s seat and mine, and the girl gave me a judgmental look as I struggled to fish it out.

“She gave me a look,” I said to my mom.

“Who cares?” she said. “She’s reading a dictionary.”

Our laughter spun out of control, gathering further looks of disdain.

We arrived in Atocha Station, a place that I’d first heard of under unfortunate circumstances in the eighth grade, when Al Qaeda detonated several bombs on commuter trains here to commemorate 2 1/2 years since 9/11. That day in Spanish class we learned the phrase “¡Al Qaeda no pasajaron!”

In the cold we stumbed to Atocha’s 19th-century concourse, a glorious brick edifice with a glass roof and a massive indoor tropical garden. It was 13:00 as I raced to the nearest café, then to the bathroom, then back to the café. I ordered for both of us in my normal Spanish accent and the waitress didn’t even blink. It was in Madrid that I discovered I have a Castillian accent.

I’ve taken five years of Spanish lessons from teachers variously speaking in Andalusian, Mexican, Chilean and Venezuelan accents, but here in Madrid strangers spoke openly to me as if I were a local. Of course, being thin and wearing a tie helped; Spaniards are possibly the dressiest people in the world.

Even in Spanish I’m a posh spaz, I thought. Compared to Barcelona, this was like being at home. Madrid was going to be fun.

Lands of the Setting Sun: The View from Montjuïc

The Literal View

The Metaphorical View

Author’s Note: This entry was originally intended to be part of the previous one, but it ended up being too long. As these articles have got some attention, I’m curious to know if readers would be okay with longer entries. Let me know in the comments.

Though we had already seen most of Barcelona, it was Montjuïc that took it right out of us.

Before we could do that, I returned in the wee hours to the Boquería. This time I was alone, and on my way up the Rambla I was accosted by three dubious-looking women who reached out to nearly grab me. At first I thought they were pickpockets. Then I notice they alone were wearing makeup and realized they were prostitutes, scampering away as if that weren’t unusual. Barcelona is full of prostitutes.

Montjuïc allegedly means “mountain of the Jews,” though that may be a folk etymology and the name may be corrupted from something else altogether. It is a mountain overlooking the center of Barcelona atop which is built an old fortress and most of the city’s Olympic Park, left over from the 1992 games.

To get there, we had to walk down the Nou de Rambla into a nondescript neighbourhood that resembles nothing so much as Shepherd’s Bush, although in reality we took the Subway. Allegedly the L3 station connected to a funicular railway running up the mountain, though to our great misfortune we went out the wrong way and ended up in a residential area a stone’s throw from the mountain top, but unreachable nonetheless. It was here we saw Spain’s only cat: massive and golden, like a cheetah but bulkier. He sat idly on the tiny balcony as I sat and figured out how to get up the hill.

I don’t know what made Montjuïc so appealing except that we had another day to burn off, but the main attraction is the view. Barcelona’s skyline isn’t very vertical, but you do get some enjoyment from the novelty of seeing every building you’ve visited, even if, like me at the time, you need glasses but don’t have them. We rounded a corner to catch a lift across the harbour. This part of the mountain was marked by a very Louis XIV-esque rose garden; sitting alone there was a woman taking in the sun and I saw her hairy armpits.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem whatsoever with hairy armpits on women, but I’d never seen any before in person, and that more than anything else it was a sign that yes, I was in Europe, and yes, overzealous body grooming had never caught on south of the Alps. Doubting I could express this to my own mother without sounding like a complete pervert, I kept this to myself, feeling very smug, if a bit uneasy as we rode the very tall, very old, very rickety lift off of Montjuïc.

We were deposited then in La Barceloneta. Previously a compact village for fishermen, La Barceloneta has become not unlike a Catalan Venice Beach, full of skaters and weekenders in cafés.

“I’m sorry,” said my Mom. “I can’t walk anymore.” Strangely, neither could I, so we took a bus back to the subway, and after briefly getting lost made our way back to Liceu and the Gaudí Hotel.

As Catalonia is in the throes of a nationalist movement, I impulsively decided to buy my own Estelada, the Catalan independence flag. On the off chance that independence would be ratified in 2014, I thought it would be cool to have evidence that I had visited the country before it existed. In fact, I thought, It would be pretty cool to get the flags of every country we go through. So as my mom rested, unable to stay awake to eat dinner, I returned to the Rambla to find a suitable vendor. It cost €14, a reasonable price for a flag, though I did find some difficulty explaining myself to the vendor. Nearly every vendor on the Rambla is a South Asian immigrant, and some speak neither English nor Spanish. In such situations I find it’s best not to say anything at all.

2012 Catalan Independence Rally

Lands of the Setting Sun: No Makeup

Typical Catalan Woman

Spain should really be considered New Europe. Until recently, it spent centuries as a geopolitical backwater, pitied and mocked by such minds as Alexandre Dumas, who famously wrote “Africa begins at the Pyrenees.” Like the Eastern Bloc, it spent the bulk of the 20th century under a dictatorship, emerging to become a cheap vacation spot and plentiful source of immigrant labour throughout the continent. Overall, Spain just doesn’t feel like Western Europe.

But despite being attached to Spain in one way or another for 500 years, Barcelona does feel European; and aggressively so. Most of the city was planned from scratch in the 1870s by Ildefons Cerda, in the form of perfectly sculpted avenues, endless octagonal city blocks built in exuberant Art Nouveau by architects like Antoni Gaudí, and a smattering of parks. For this, my mom and I made two circuits of the city.

Unable to sleep, we began at La Boquería, the city’s main market, for breakfast. Before leaving, I made sure to buy some Manchego and Chorizo, the latter of which was shrink-wrapped.

“How are you going to get that open?” Asked my mom. “You don’t have your knife.”

“I’m sure we’ll figure something out,” I replied. “I only bought it to snack on the train.” Our ride to Madrid was not for another two days.

At the Sagrada Familia we took a break to watch the people and their dogs. Catalans seem to prefer big, fluffy dogs, though I can’t imagine where in those apartments they sleep. And everyone was incredibly well-dressed, not just because it was winter. Europe as a whole is way more formal than America, which was very pleasing. We took the Metro to the eastern section of the city, strolled through the Parc de Catalunya to França Station.

Although not as busy or important as the main station Sants, França is really beautiful; a gleaming Victorian masterpiece of marble and bronze linking two great nations. I looked around, considered that I could go to Paris today, and had some manchego. Hardly anyone takes trains out of França anymore, and it will probably be even more forgotten when Sagrera station is completed on the city’s northern outskirts, but it’s a damn shame.

Following a visit to the Picasso Museum, a sudden encounter with Roman ruins, and the discovery that Catalans put tomatoes on everything, we took a rest before heading out again. The Rambla erupted with the cries of protesters boycotting big banks. We continued towards the Metro station when a random man barked at my mom.

“I think that man barked at me,” she said. Instantly she realized she was the only woman in Spain wearing makeup. No man would ever have drawn that conclusion, but she was right. Well, almost, but we’ll get to that later.

North of the Old City is Gràcia, a small village that was enveloped when the Barcelona expanded in the 19th century. I had read that Gràcia was a quieter, more easygoing place than we had experienced, and both my mom and I desperately needed that. After struggling to find a restaurant, we settled on an old, fancy place whose name escapes me. The dinner consisted of yet more fish, but the dessert was excellent.

Lands of the Setting Sun: Knowing de Rambla

“This is plane travel!?”

The last time my mom had flown across the Atlantic, it was 1975, when she came to the Netherlands to rescue her friend from a cult. Her middle seat on the 777 from Los Angeles to Heathrow came as a total shock.

Of course the flight was horrible. It was supposed to be. The seats are tiny, the food is terrible, and people lose their minds. When smoking on planes was outlawed, airlines began recycling air from the inside of the plane rather than replacing it, spreading bacteria, causing things like deep vein thrombosis and even air rage. But how did she not know this? How had she missed the entirety of 1980s stand-up comedy?

After a short stopover in Heathrow, we took a more comfortable but also more turbulent ride to Barcelona. It was late when we got there, and my Catalan pronunciation was not great.

“Doce noo de Rambla,” I said to our cab driver.

“Know de Rambla,” he replied.

The Catalan language is a mystery to me. It’s more closely related to French than Spanish, though not really intelligible with either. It’s fared better than other minority languages in Europe because the place where it’s spoken has always been fairly wealthy. Serra and Portola, the founders of California, were Catalan, and frankly it’s weird that the language never caught on there, because technically Spain didn’t exist until 1715. For 250 years, the Spanish Empire had been governed by a personal union between the crowns of Aragon and Castile; only in the 18th century was the country politically united. When that happened, Aragonese began to die out, yet Catalan continued.

This was going to be a bigger problem than anticipated. Catalonia is in the throes of a nationalist movement, and at the time of my visit there was a great antipathy towards the both the national government and the Spanish language. Signs in the airport came in three languages: Catalan at the top, English in the middle, and Spanish in small print at the bottom. For this reason I never became comfortable in Barcelona. That and the food, which tended to focus on chewy fish and tomatoes.

We arrived at the Hotel Gaudí, a wonderful hotel off the Rambla across from the Plaça Reial. The elevators are lit up with little LEDs, and it speaks in an English voice not unlike Matt Berry. I’d highly recommend it.

“Hey, English! Manchester United!” shouted a young passerby who may or may not have been a pickpocket. My training kicked in. “Not English, American!” I had never wanted not to be British so much in my life. I swerved to avoid getting to close to him. “Ah, my American brother!” he said. What exactly was I supposed to say to that?

According to Rick Steves, the Rambla is the most likely place in Europe to be pickpocketed, though beyond this encounter, I never saw any further evidence. While my mother slept from an unprecedented jet-lag, I went out to dinner. The Plaça Reial is home to many youth hostels, so most of the people eating at the restaurants around it were foreigners, Americans and Canadians in particular. But it was the other people who fascinated me the most: families out for after-dinner strolls at 22:00, children playing and shouting in a language I’d never heard before. I finished my disappointing haddock and returned to the hotel.

What excited me most about Barcelona were the women. Whit Stillman’s Barcelona is one of my favourite films, and from that and sketchy reports from the US Navy, I’d formed the impression that this was the loosest port in the Mediterranean. I’d meant to meet some people at a local indie club, Sidecar, but ultimately fell asleep, woke up at 2:00 AM, and whiled away the wee hours of the morning watching Long Way Round.

Anyway, further reading online seemed to imply that Barcelona was actually quite a poor place to get laid. If experience is any guide, the loosest port is probably in Israel.

Lands of the Setting Sun: Getting Ready

Bella Hispania

Bill Bryson has never written about Spain, nor has David Sedaris. Michael Palin and Charley Boorman both went through Spain, but only a little bit around the edges. I was beginning to worry. I had planned this trip meticulously for months, and with only two days to go, I’d run out of ways to prepare.

In England didn’t need any book or travel show; the country was omnipresent in English-language media. And in Israel I’d been in a Birthright group with a guide. My impending journey into Spain seemed somehow lacking.

Months earlier, trapped on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles, I decided to read the Oxford University Press’ history of Spain. Somehow, they managed to turn the story of this country, the product of endless cultural invasions, wars, and political intrigue, and make it dryer than the winter rash that had developed just in time for the trip. My only option was to talk to my friend Sam Ettinger, who had spent a semester there.

“When you go, are you going to use an American or British accent?”

I ignored his bizarre conceit. “Why don’t I just speak Spanish?”

“I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”

“Remember that time I was on the bus in San Francisco, and that old racist lady sat next to me and went on a rant in Spanish about how the Mexican kids in front of us were shaming her ethnicity by acting black?”

“No.”

Actually, my Spanish was shaky. Despite growing up near towns where Spanish is the first language, taking five years of Spanish classes, and understanding the written language, I faltered embarrassingly when trying to hold a conversation. On the other hand, it seemed to be only Northern Mexican Spanish that gave me trouble; I chatted for hours with some Argentine girls in London who didn’t speak any English, so my luck in Spain was anyone’s guess.

“My point being,” Sam continued, “you don’t want them to think you’re English. They really don’t like the English right now, what with all the vomiting on the beach.”

I was well-acquainted with the English in Spain through television. Spain– Valencia and the Balearics in particular– is full of wintering British who hole up in their own community with no interest in the country around them, and queasy students yakking all over the place, berating the locals for not serving chips. It’s a problem. On the other hand, Spaniards love the Duke of Wellington and Joe Strummer, so I came out of the conversation having learned nothing about what English-speakers face in the country.

I’ve wanted to go to Spain since I was ten years old, and thought it might actually be the inspiration for Hyrule in the Legend of Zelda games– particularly Ocarina of Time, which has lots of Moorish and Islamic influences going on there. And because California was settled by the Spaniards so much later than the rest of Latin America, their influence was much more recent; the people of 18th century Los Angeles probably spoke with Castilian accents, but since the original Spanish-speaking community was effectively eradicated by the influx of Americans, we’ll probably never know.

In either case I planned meticulously. I was taking my mom; despite growing up in a Spanish-speaking region, she never learned the language well enough to speak in a foreign country, and there were some things I knew she would want to see, though I had no idea how much.

Compared to other European countries, Spain is huge; bigger than California, and not long and narrow like that state. Seeing the whole country would be impossible, but I decided on a few locations that were important to me: Barcelona, Madrid, and Córdoba. I also made arrangements to visit Gibraltar and Tangier nearby, and our plans included an overnight stop in London on the way back. All apologies to the Basque Country, Galicia, the Balearic Islands, Valencia and Granada. Next time, I promise.

To be continued…