The Bad Times

The last you heard of me was mid-July, en route home for a much-needed vacation. Really, you hadn't heard much of me before that, either. The last true update came from the end of June, a lovely span of time for teaching, relaxation, exploration, and enjoyment of a Palencia summer just starting to show its most beautiful blossom.

Except that then it all went to hell.

There are very few travel blogs (or at least very few I've read) that address the darker side of travel. It makes sense, of course. Unpleasant travel experiences are negative enough the first time around for the people living through them-- why would a traveler want to subject him or herself, or his/her audience, to a review?

But bad experiences, and even bad streaks, are of course a very real part of traveling. Buses are delayed, plans fall through, weather changes for the worse, important items are stolen, sickness pounces. Hell, just off the top of my head, drawing from my own experiences I can think of, I've: dropped my camera in the English Channel off the coast of Cornwall, got dysentery in Nujiang (Yunnan) during my thesis research, accidentally offended the Muslim sensibilities of my Palestinian host in Jordan, showed up late at night in a tiny Normandy town in the pouring rain and no host in sight for more than an hour, and (most infamously) spent four hideously cramped, hot days shuttling around the hellish North Indian bus system, from one incorrect town to the next.

So: July 2012. I had been hired to work in a summer camp in Cantabria, in the Spanish northern interior, for the last two weeks of July. I decided to give up my Palencia apartment on the first of the month in order to use my rent money to travel. I planned a beach-and-culture vacation across Asturias, Cantabria, and Basque Country (Pais Vasco). I spent a desperate several days packing up my apartment and departed for Oviedo, where I had exactly one day to enjoy my new Asturian surroundings when the proverbial first shoe dropped: the director called me bright on Sunday morning, while I picked through antiques and cheap clothing at the market, and told me that the camp had been suddenly and unceremoniously cancelled. I found myself suddenly out 500 euros (more, really, given how much extra I'd paid for a flight home that coincided with the camp schedule) and homeless for the next month.

I spent the next day panicking, then decided to plow ahead with my couchsurfing adventure along the Cantabrian Sea/Bay of Biscay. Unfortunately, the sudden implosion of my summer plans was just a preview of the way things would go until my departure for the US. Just within the ensuing 2.5 weeks I suffered through bad weather (unseasonably cold and wet even for usually cold and wet Asturias), suddenly unavailable hotels or hosts, a brief bout with fleas or bedbugs in the hostels I shared with pilgrims on the northern Camino de Santiago, a sprained ankle, a stolen credit card, and general loneliness and increasing discouragement.

It was an incredibly stressful period that sometimes felt unending-- just when I was recovering from one physical or emotional setback, another seemed to be on the way. But despite all that the bright spots were intensely bright. I slipped in a peaceful beach weekend in tiny Luanco (just before I slipped again, this time on rain-slicked cobbles and suffered the aforementioned ankle injury.) I marveled at the stunning Llanes cliff-and-ocean vistas (before fog descended and obscured them completely.) On July 4, I purchased digestive cookies, chocolate, and a bag of the weirdly-chewy-pink-and-white creation that pass for a Spanish marshmallows and taught my couchsurfing host to make s'mores using tea light candles. I used some of my extra time in Basque Country to eat my weight in delicious Basque pintxos (incredibly intricate mini-meals) and hike an unbelievably scenic seaside monastery, balanced precariously on top of dramatic sea cliffs. I was determined to surmount my itching legs, lost money, illness, and anxiety. It got a lot easier to do that after one evening in particular, which changed my perspective on "the bad times" of travel.

I didn't mean to spend as long in Ribadesella as long as I eventually stayed. I'd traveled through with my parents during their Easter visit-- we'd wanted to visit the 25, 000 year old cave paintings there but, due to bad weather and timing miscalculations, missed our appointment. I had resolved to return, and return I did. But, as sometimes happens with nomadic travel, I seemed to be caught in some strange magnetic storm around the town, and I couldn't seem to leave. I saw the paintings (which were breathtaking, especially one particular 10, 000 year old horse's head that looked like it had been scrawled the day before), then went to the previously discussed July 4th celebration in a nearby town.  I came back, then left again to go to a cider festival (where it rained all day, I missed the major festivities due to train schedules, and my host had to suddenly cancel on me). Another return-- this time to attempt a canoe trip which was unpleasantly rained out. An ill-fated hostel misadventure later, I decided it was worth it to stay around for the town's Patron Saint celebrations.

I was feeling decidedly fed up, I'll admit it. The rain was unremitting, and I was disappointed about my cancelled canoeing trip and stressed about finding somewhere to stay in my next stop and how to stretch the money I had left to fill the time until my flight home. Tempted to pout in my hostel, I instead walked across the narrow bridge over the mouth of the river and joined in the festivities. The rain slowed to a trickle, and the statue of the Saint, Maria Magdalena, was carried out of its shrine on the shoulders of priests, follow by a line of solemn musicians playing an Asturian instrument heavily reminiscent of bagpipes.

Most patron saint festivals include a parade through town, but Ribadesella is a fishing port, and the citizens choose to honor their saint in their own way. I watched in the watery twilight as Maria Magdalena was placed carefully in a fishing boat, festooned with flags and flowers and filled with adoring locals. A second boat held the bagpipers, and the two led a solemn parade of at least 60 boats (pleasurecraft, fishing rigs, and local police/navy alike) out into the open ocean, where a bouquet of flowers was tossed into the water in honor of fishermen lost over the year.

Santa Maria Magdalena starts her voyage into the Cantabrian Sea outside Ribadesella

The maritime parade ended with a brief terrestrial procession to the saint's shrine, where the crowd paused to sing a hymn to her. The shrine was at the edge of the carnival portion of the festival, so the harmonies of voices raised in song mingled with the beeps and booms of the spinning tea cups and bumper cars, while the saint's halo was set aglow by the oranges and greens of neon lights from the Ferris wheel. I wiped the fog from my glasses and took a moment to appreciate this beautiful intermingling of old and new traditions, writ small in the few moments the Saint spent raised against the sky. A string of bad luck and a bad attitude couldn't take that away from me, and that knowledge carried me through the bad times to come, all the way back to the US.

You might ask why I've waited until now to tell you about this. It's mid-October now, and Maria Magdalena has been resting in her shrine for almost 3 months. In between, I spent almost seven weeks recharging my batteries and reconnecting with my family, friends, and beloved city, then returned to Spain for my second year on the Iberian peninsula.

Well, the Bad Times come in many forms-- that's the short answer to "Why now?" Of course I remember having a difficult time getting used to Palencia last year, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that 8 months of subsequent happiness have colored those initial times a bit rosier than than they really were.

I'm living in Andalucia this year, in a small town called Linares--more on that soon--and I'll be honest with you: my first few weeks here have been pretty difficult. The language is spoken differently here, and everything is even newer and more overwhelming than I anticipated. New friends are hard to come by, the apartment hunting process was much more difficult than I had hoped, my new apartment is presenting several stubborn issues, and I am struggling with my expectations and hopes for this year and the D word (disappointment. More on that later, too.)

But last night one of my first Linares friends, a gym teacher at the elementary school where I am working, took me to a local "feria" (what patron saint festivals are called here in the south.) In a small, out-of-the-way plaza crowned by palm trees, an enthusiastic rock band pumped out covers by the likes of KISS and The Cranberries, while under a white tent neighbors drank beer and ate tapas together. The lead singer launched into an impressive version of "Zombie," and I watched grandmothers and grandfathers nod along in rhythm with a group of faux-bored teenagers perched on the fence off to the side. The tang of roasting meat and fresh beer floated on the breeze, and a motley crew of parents and children and twenty-somethings swayed with their hands in the air, caught up in the music.

For a minute I forgot my anxieties and remembered, instead, that night in Ribadesella and the potential for the bad times to be... not so bad after all.

Use Your Words

One of the most well-loved stories of me as a baby finds me in the kitchen with my mother. She is at the counter fixing me some kind of soft baby something for dinner; I am in my high chair babbling away--I've just started talking. Of course I don't remember any of this, but in my mind's eye my mother spoons out the soft what-ever-it-is and fixes me juice in a plastic sippy-cup. I start to fuss, waving my arms and crying in that nasal toddler whine. My mother can't figure out what's wrong -- are the high chair straps too tight? Do I need changing? But she remembers what I don't, that I now have tools to express what it is that is so upsetting me.

"Alissa, use your words!" she implores. I stop crying almost immediately.
"Oh," I say. "I want the orange cup."

Of course, that was almost a quarter of a century ago, but I've been thinking about it a lot recently. Gaining fluency in a language feels a lot to me like that Orange Cup moment. There were moments of extraordinary frustration when I first arrived in Spain in September, of course, but I don't think I realized exactly what I was missing out on until I found it again. It's been a long time since my Chinese was at the level my Spanish is now.

Two weeks ago I took a long-weekend trip to Basque Country in the north. It was a fantastic trip-- the weather cooperated as much as almost-constant-rain can cooperate, the countryside was gorgeous and green. Friday brought me to Bilbao, vivid and gritty; Saturday through Monday to San Sebastian, equally as exquisitely delicious and cultured. And through it all ran a ribbon of newly-discovered communication.

I.
Friday night I stayed with Thomas, a fellow American teaching at the city language school. After a night roaming the city, we went on Saturday morning to an event called Arrozes del Mundo-- Rices of the World. It was a paella cook-off in the immensely diverse neighborhood of San Francisco, where virtually all of the immigrants that flock to Bilbao for its industry settle. Thus, the "del Mundo" portion came from the twist each entrant was supposed to add to the paella, a little something from his or her own country.

Thomas and I arrived via a long, straight street lined with Caribbean grocery stores, halal butchers, and African produce stands to find a crowded plaza filled with the most amazing smells. We threaded our way through rickety tables piled high with chopped ingredients ready for the flame-- everything from couscous to mango to pomegranate--and watched as a group of Moroccans danced and sang in the space between the swings and trapeze in the plaza's small plaground. We'd brought breakfast with us, but there didn't seem to be anywhere to eat. Finally, we found a seemingly empty table to one side of the festivities-- there was only one man sitting toward the end. After some inquiry, it became clear that the man was waiting for his group, but we could sit and eat our pastries and drink our coffee in peace for just a little while. And so we did, savoring the colorful chaos in the plaza. Finally, Thomas turned to me. "It's pretty amazing that we can do that," he said.

"Do what?" I asked.

"That we can ask him if we can sit down. That he can explain to us the situation. That we understand each other." It seemed small at the time, but so did the cup color I preferred so many years ago. He was right-- the ability to understand and communicate with people in another country improves and enriches one's traveling experience to an extraordinary extent.

The next day, I took the bus to San Sebastian. Feeling disoriented, I took a walk in the post-lunch quiet through the narrow streets of the old town. In the distance, I could hear singing, and I walked toward it. In front of a tavern, a group of some 15 men stood in a semi-clump-circle as two others performed some kind of rollicking song and dance, circling around each other, patting each other on the back, and gesturing exaggeratedly. I arrived for the tail end of their song-- after perhaps thirty seconds the crowd broke into applause and started to hug and kiss their goodbyes.

I smiled to myself. walked a few steps away, and pulled out my map to check where to find a nearby hiking path that would take me up to a famous lookout point over the harbor... but then I stopped. There's something about talking to strangers in a foreign language that is both terrifying and freeing. What did I have to lose?

I turned back and, practicing my most polite, formal Spanish, tapped one of the men on the shoulder. "Excuse me," I asked, "Can you explain to me why those men were dancing? What was that about?"

The man I'd accosted interrupted his dancer friend, who was chatting nearby. "This pretty young girl wants to know what you were doing!" he said.

The dancing man smiled broadly. "We were in the army together around 1939 or 1940, and every year since then we get together in the first weekend of June and have lunch at this restaurant. And you know, we've had something to drink now. And when we Basque men drink, well, it starts here [he pointed to his mouth] and travels up to here [then to the top of his head] and ends up here [finally he gestured to his throat.] And we have to sing! So when I saw this other gentleman there, who I hadn't seen for years and years and years... well, we decided to sing an old song together."

We spent some minutes talking before the group broke up for Saturday siesta. At the end of my subsequent hike,  watching the waves far below, I reflected on just how my language skills had served me. Without them, my memory would have held an interesting, exotic interlude of dancing and music,  brief and mysterious and without depth. Instead, the story I took home was so much more nuanced, so much richer-- a piece of these men's lives instead of a one-dimensional tableau.

II.
A week later I found myself in a different part of the country, exploring the ancient university city of Salamanca. The city is known for its stunning architecture, including a beautiful, enormous 500-year-old main square and the gorgeous facades of the university buildings themselves. There's a legend that goes along with those facades: the architect hid a tiny frog among the many elaborate carvings, and it's said that those who can find it are guaranteed luck in love and scholarship.

One evening at dusk I walked to the Plaza Mayor, filled with students sitting on the still-warm flagstones eating and chatting, with tourists snapping photos and old people out for their paseos or watching the world go by. I chose a seat next to an older man who immediately struck up a conversation with me. When I told him I was American, he explained he had lived some years in Germany and so always tried to help tourists and visitors in Salamanca because he knew what it meant to be a stranger in a foreign land. After the initial pleasantries, he started to ask me what I'd seen so far in Salamanca, and I was forced to confess that although I'd stood for some minutes in front of the university facade, I hadn't been able to find the frog.

"You couldn't find it!?" he said horrified. "Coming to Salamanca without seeing the frog is like not coming to Salamanca at all!... Okay, come with me. We're going to find the frog right now." And so it was that I found myself taken firmly by the arm, weaving my way through the crowd following this insistent old man. I chatted with him about his childhood in the city ("Everything is so much bigger and spread out now!") as we walked. When we finally arrived in front of the university, the stone was pink-tinted from sunset. With my new friend's help, I was able to spot the frog within a few minutes, perched precariously on a well-hidden carved skull.


III
Of course, not every experience is enriched by language skills. Rewinding to that same weekend in San Sebastian, I had intended to finish my trip with a blues/jazz concert at a bar near my hostel. Unfortunately, the actual concert schedule was different than the one the bar had published, so when I arrived the music had already finished. Disappointed, I consoled myself with an expensive cocktail and the paperback book in my bag.

As I read, I became aware of a man to my left-- he sat down at the heretofore empty grand piano and started to play around with scales and glissandos. There were people sitting around me in groups chatting, but as the man's musical doodles started to become something more, I noticed a change in the bar. The jazz riffs grew, strengthened, and eventually became a full, gorgeously harmonic improvisation-- and the energy in the room changed, as well. Now, as the music subtly transitioned from one genre to another, I closed my book and noticed conversations all around the bar dropping off into silence.

After a few minutes, a particularly powerful crescendo marked the end of the impromptu performance. The man got up and left without so much as a bow, but it didn't matter. We all burst into spontaneous applause-- the English-speaking businessmen in the corner, the Spanish tourists at the table behind, the Basque teenagers next to them, and me.