Solamente necesito un kebab de doner...

There’s nothing like a weekend trip in a foreign country to teach you a few things about yourself.

Mom, I hope you’re happy.

You’ve successfully done it.

The nervous twitch, the obsessive mental list-making, the excessive allowance of extra time, the compulsive desire to check my ticket, then re-check it, then take it to the ticket booth and show it to the man at the counter just to see him nod in approval. Well actually he just looked at me as if to say, “That’s great honey, but this line is for people that still need tickets…so MOVE!”

You just never can be too sure.

Hannah, my roommate, might argue that one with me. “Tranquila, Jessie”

Logistically speaking, our trip was a paranoid traveler’s nightmare. Not only did we take a plane from Valencia to Sevilla, thus making it necessary to get to the airport by metro (and honestly, who can feel confident about the metro. Things happen. Haven’t you been on that earthquake ride at Universal Studios?), but then we took our first bus of the trip from Sevilla to Granada. Our bus left at 8 a.m., meaning a very alert me felt the need to start speedwalking toward the station at 7 on the dot. Not even the Starkbucks (yes, there are Starbucks in Spain) are open at 7. No people = no possibility of asking for directions = minor panic attack. Once in Granada, we decided to top off our transportation sampler platter by taking a train back to Valencia. This is where I stood in the ticket line to play a game of show and tell with the not-so-enthused ticket man. Lo siento for being seguro.

After our adventure by plane, train and automobile, I feel as though I’ve picked up some traveling street-smarts. For instance, I now know that only couples travel by bus. Everyone seemed to get the “bring-your-significant-other” memo but me, Hannah and one random Spanish man. Had there been two random Spanish men, perhaps we could have worked something out…

Another new-found fact: all three forms of transportation are equally uncomfortable. That said, I continued to prove my roommates’ long-time suspicion that I can sleep anywhere. Siesta on plane: 1 hour. Bus: 2 hours. And drum roll please…my snooze on the overnight train home: 7 horas. Not only that, but I conked out in spite of the creepy man sitting behind me with his shirt off and white-socked feet propped on my seat and nearly resting on my head. No shirt, no shoes, and in my delirious state at the end our journey—no problem.

A final revelation—despite my paranoia, planning does not always prevent getting lost and/or forgetting something. In the case of our trip, it prevented neither.

This first truth dawned on Hannah and me at the bus station in Granada. Our bus rolled into Granada and pulled into the station. We got off, stopped by el baño, walked out of the station and...stood. Frozen. Silent and slowly turning our heads as if some giant hand was going to drop out of the sky and declare “Your hostel this way!”

That didn’t happen.

Instead, we looked at each other with identical faces of bewilderment and then doubled over in sobs of laughter.

The second verification of this fact came when we got ready to take much-needed showers after a day of touring in Sevilla, then realized we didn’t have towels. Minor detail. True, there were alternatives, such as renting a towel for 3 euros. It may not sound like a lot, but 3 euros can go far in a pasteleria (bakery). Thus, I fully intended to embrace my griminess. For those of you doing the math right now…yes three days of traveling without showers=smelly. But thanks to Hannah’s wooing abilities, she finagled a towel for free at our hostel in Granada, and I took the best shower since coming to Spain. Hannah also deserves thanks for remembering shower shoes, another item I forgot and had to borrow. No me gusta fungus.

As riveting as our journey probably sounds at this point, I feel it necessary to note that we did more than take public transportation. We had cathedrals to see and palaces to go to and in general jam-packed days. There are a few milestones that stand out in my mind.

Doner Kebabs. Doner Kebabs are Whopper of Spain (technically I think they are a Middle Eastern food). In just about every city I’ve visited so far, you can smell the meaty, greesy goodness of Doner Kebabs wafting from one of dozens of small little shops with German lettering. Sometimes I feel myself getting fatter from the smell alone. Inside these shops, a less than appetizing slab of meat roasts on a rotating spike much like gyro meat, only it’s not lamb. Might be chicken. Reminds me a bit of meatloaf-on-a-stick. I prefer to believe it’s chicken.

Once tenderness has reached its prime, a man shaves the kebab causing tantalizing morsels of mystery meat to rain down on a plate below. Add tomato, lettuce, onion, secret sauce, pita bread and Viola!—you have a Doner Kebab. Take a few bites and you also quite possibly have clogged arteries. Eat two kebabs in one weekend like I did in Granada and then you’re looking at heart attack. In fact, I’m lucky to be alive right now because not only did I eat two kebabs in one weekend, but in the same sitting I gorged myself on lemon and chocolate cookies, potato chips, diet coke and fruit (health first). This binge session left us in a kebab-ified stupor that took a few hours of lounging in the sun to shake off...Needless to say, I’d do it again. I’d eat three. Death by Doner would not be a bad way to go.

Perhaps just as memorable as our Doner Kebab feast was Elious, the Serbian chef/waiter of Doner Kebabs. Somehow he left a lasting impression, and I don’t just mean the linger of his lips on my cheek after he greeted us with besitos. Nor am I talking about the imprint of his finger on my forehead after he outlined the words “Los Estados Unidos” to make the point that I look unavoidably American. No, it was his answer to a question I ask almost every shopkeeper I meet that I will never forget.

“Which is the best, in your opinion?” I asked of the various kebab options.

“Well,” he started, “the one with chicken, lettuce, tomato and…mi corazon (my heart).”

My response—“Huh, didn’t see that one on the menu.”

He didn’t stop there with the unexpected answers. The typically safe, “How was your day?” question elicited a 10-minute monologue about his education background and future academic goals. Elious is working on his Masters in geography. I have no idea how his day was.

Those two responses alone where enough to win Elious a permant spot in my memory, but he didn’t stop there. In fact, he was just getting started. Warming up his vocal chords one could say. Why? All the better to serenade me with.

I don’t remember how it started, but suddenly Elious is looking into my eyes and singing sweet nothings about, well, my eyes.

“I can see into your eyes,” he crooned off-key and in a thick Serbian accent. That’s about all I understood before he lapsed into bad a Spanish/Serbian/unidentifiable language combination.

Unfortunately for Elious, I only had eyes for one thing during his serenade—my already-packaged Doner Kebab. He sang; I stared longingly at the plastic bag dangling from his hand. Apparently I did a poor job of masking my lustful desire, because every once and a while, Elious would pause in his serenade as if finished and hold out the kebab in offering. The moment I reached out my hand to receive, he’d pull the kebab back across the counter and continue his solo; a new meaning to the term playing hard to get. After about four of these faked finales, Elious must have seen not just my eyes but the crazed look of hunger, because he finally ended his song and handed over my dinner.

“Good luck with life, with love, with school, with me,” he yelled after us as we made quick get away.

Oh poor Elious…you’ll need more than luck in love if you continue to ransom the dinner of starving girls.

Elious was the only tone-deaf foreigner to serenade us that weekend, but we did meet a few rythimically-challenged Italians with whom, you guessed it, we danced the night away…terribly.

Meet Davida and Fabrizio…two petite Italians (Italian men make me feel gigantic) who were staying in our hostel. We met over paella on the roof and bonded over stories of me crashing into cars with my bicycle (if you’re confused here…see my blog about biking and failing miserably). Nothing like recounting humiliating stories of yourself to make a good first impression. Worked on Davida at least—we feared he would fall out of his seat from laughing. Probably also had something to do with the fact that telling a story in Spanish requires extensive hand motions.

After making fast friends, we went out in search of free tapas (a tradition in Granada with purchase of a drink), flamenco shows and of course, dancing.

Davida assured me that he was a horrible dancer.

This seems to be a universal cop-out. Everyone says they dance terribly…even me. And not to brag, but my air chop turns heads often…let’s be honest here.

Well turns out…Davida is very honest. At least about dancing. Never have I seen such a horrible dancer in my life who was at the same time so very committed. Davida’s favorite move involved waving his arms above his head as if he was at a country music concert. All he needed was a lighter.

Fabrizio, like me, has one move. This involves tucking his arms in, looking at the ground, and swaying back and forth. Rock on, Fabrizio.

Hannah did the Charleston; Erika reeled people in with an imaginary fishing pole; and I—big surprise—chopped the air like it was a cutting board and I was iron chef.

Needless to say, we were a sight. Even more so when you factor in the general lack of other dancers in the discoteca. Lack as in none. It’s questionable if the discoteca was even a discoteca. May have been a glorified bar with DJ…and as it turns out, entertainment in the form of two Italians and three Americans.

Aside from singing Serbians and jiving Italians, there are many more random moments worth remembering.

For instance, the best cup of tea in my life thus far at a tea shop in gypsy land. It was called Winter’s Dream, and a dream it was.

Also, there was the time our friend Joe thought it would be funny to sneak up behind me at night on the sketchy streets of Granada, grab my back and say "Give me your money!" in a low, raspy voice. He apologized profusely after he saw the look of terror on my face.

And I can’t forget the bus ride we took at warp speed down the side of a mountain. I’d like to…just can’t.

But of all the people and crazy situations over the weekend, there is one person that deserves a special shout-out.

Hannah, my roommate. Woot woot.

We bonded that weekend. Literally it seemed as if we were joined at the hip. It started in Sevilla when we ate dinner together in silence, sitting on the same side of the table and reading from the same book. I was page-turner.

The bonding continued in Granada when we sat shoulder to shoulder, butt to butt on a windowsill, putting on makeup the sliver of natural light.

Then there was the electronic guided tour of Alhambra. We thought we could both listen to the recording at the same time and thus save money. Essentially, we could. We just had to stand cheek to cheek to do so. Made walking nearly impossible.

Finally our bout of bonding ended in the dark on the stairs outside our apartamento at 5:30 a.m. Sunday. That’s where Hannah and I sat after realizing we were locked out.

At the time, we assumed someone changed the locks. Little did we know that Pepa, our madre de espana, had decided to play a cruel joke on us. The kind that involved her putting a key in the door from the inside, thus making our keys obsolete. Funny, huh? Not so much.

As you may have guessed, there’s another explanation for Pepa’s sudden decision to become a practical joker. Sadly, the true explanation makes even less sense.

Regardless, at 5:30 on that Sunday morning, I feel safe in saying that no explanation would have made sense to Hannah and I. Not wanting to disturb the household, we decided to spend the wee morning hours on the steps in the dark.

We started out optimistic, looking through pictures of the weekend on my camera. That was great until, “Warning: Battery exhausted.” And darkness.

We were intrepid. We moved to Hannah’s photos and got about halfway through her camera until Duracell failed us again.

My iPod…dead.

Our last resort--Hannah’s iPod. So there we sat, sleep deprived, listening to Savage Garden, one ear bud for each of us, mouthing to the words in the darkness.

"Eww I want you, I don't know if i need you. Eww i gotta find out."

Mmhhmm...we're lucky no one walked down those stairs.

Lost taxi drivers, gay old men and Edu--chalk it up to a good night!

I’m starting to consider my tendency to fall into bizarre situations a talent.

Enter taxi driver from the other night.

If you ask me, it takes some skill to flag down the one taxi driver in all of Valencia who is 1) Pakistani and 2) a resident of Valencia for a whopping 15 days.

I have been in Valencia for 17 days, and I can assure you, you would not want me as your taxi driver.

I can also assure you that after about 5 minutes in a car with said Pakistani, my roommate, Hannah, and I did not want him as our taxi driver either.

“Where are you going,” he asks in Spanish.
“36 Poeta Mas y Ros,” we respond in our best attempt at a Spanish accent. We were meeting our friends there at a bar.
“Donde?”
“Po-Et-Ah Mass E Ross.” Why do all streets in Spain have impossibly long names?
“Que?”
“Pooo—eta Masy Ros” “Poeta MAS y ros” “Poetamasyros”

Nada.

No problema, we had plan B ready and waiting just in case of such and occasion: written communication. I reached forward and handed the now scowling taxi driver a scrap of paper with the street name written in large, neat letters.

He looks at the paper, looks up, looks back at the paper—blank stare.

Crap.

Plan B had never failed. Come to think of it, Plan A had never failed before either. Welcome to uncharted territory.

Hannah and I exchanged shoulder shrugs and crinkled foreheads as our little taxi jutted blindly through Valencia’s midnight traffic. Our driver looked annoyed with his two clueless American passengers and fumbled for something in the front seat.

“So…what brings you to Valencia?” I ask, trying to ease the mounting tension.
“Work,” he snaps.
“Oh, well how do you like it so far?”
“I don’t.”

OK, not a talker. Poeta Mas y Ros remains a mystery as I watch the red digital numbers of the taxi’s meter climb: 3.10 euros, 3.20 euros, 3.30 euros…

Mr. Jolly finally stops fumbling and next thing I know he’s handing me a 2-inch thick manual of the streets of Valencia and instructing me to start looking.

Me as navigator in the US—bad idea. Me as navigator in a large foreign city with an atlas written in Spanish—estupido.

Frantically, I flip pages as our taxi makes costly U-turns. At a red light, Mr. Jolly grabs for the book, and I hand it over willingly.

Green light—the book is back in my lap and it’s game on.

Red light—I sit still and watch my money disappear.

Green light—I’m flying through the pages and miraculously, wait, could it be…

“Aqui!” I exclaim marking the street with my finger and thrusting the book to the front seat.

Mr. Jolly takes the book and stares. He turns the map clockwise a quarter and stops. Another quarter turn. And another. Then to my horror he shakes his head, closes the book and throws it on the seat next to him.

5.50 euros, 5.60 euros, 5.70 euros…

We make another U-turn, and I feel the car slow to a stop. For a brief moment I thought we had arrived, but then I realized our driver was rolling down his window to ask two Spaniard guys for directions.

As luck would have it, they had never heard of Poeta Mas y Ros. And judging from their snickers as we pulled away, they had never seen a taxi driver with two wide-eyed American girls in his back seat pull over to ask for directions either.

That’s when Hannah and I saw our salvation standing obliviously on a street corner. His name is Mark. Mark is in our program. Mark speaks English. I have never been so happy to see Mark as in that moment.

Without even needing to ask each other, Hannah and I screamed at the taxi driver to stop, willingly paid 6.70 for a taxi-ride that should have been free, and jumped ship.

We burst from the taxi with fluttering hands and bulging eyes and thus thoroughly confused Mark who thought the taxi was stopping for him and as such, was doing everything in his power to shoo it away.

Hannah and I break into uncontrollable laughter. Mark is looking at us like we just beamed in from a space ship. We get it together enough to fill him in and take the next few minutes to regroup.

Then it’s back to the situation at hand. Poeta Mas y Ros. Bar. Friends waiting.

Mark recognizes the street name (for the first time that night) but unfortunately can’t remember how to get there. To his credit, he sends us in a general direction, and we set off on a mission.

After about five minutes of wandering down the road, Hannah and I realize we better enlist some help. She flags down an elderly Spanish man to ask for directions.

The old man wants to help but says he needs a minute to orient himself. He turns in a full circle, stops, and then looks side to side as if he’s taking in the scenery for the first time.

Turns out Hannah shares my talent for getting into odd situations.

“Just go straight ahead and then take a left,” the man says pointing right.

Hannah is not ready to give up on this one.

“So is that a left or right?” she asks.
“Uh…”

Time to back-pedal. We both start saying “gracias” and backing up but the old man is having none of it. Reaching behind him, he snatches two unsuspecting club promoters who were walking past and pulls them into our little circle.

“These people will help you,” he says without asking “these people” if A) they will in fact help us or B) they know where the street is. The old man walks off and we are left standing face to face with “these people”—a guy and girl that looked Spanish and about our age.

Before we can even begin to explain ourselves, the old man turns around and pops back into our circle as if he forgot something.

“I’m gay,” he declares in English. “But this man,” he says pointing to the young Spaniard, “is very, very…sexual. He is very sexual.”

Satisfied, the man proceeds to give us all besos before leaving again. I stand like a statue with my face stuck in a scowl as he plants to large kisses on both of my cheeks.

With the man gone, our circle stands stunned and staring at each other on the sidewalk.

“Uh…loco?” the apparently very sexual Spanish guy says pointing in the direction of crazy old, gay man.

I like this guy already.

He introduces himself as Edu (short for Eduardo) and the girl as Mirella. They ask where we are trying to go and for what seems like the millionth time we respond, “Poeta Mas y Ros.”

Maybe it was the lost looks on our faces or perhaps the possibly of getting a group of Americans to come to their club, but for whatever reason, Edu and Mirella gave the best answer we had heard all night.

“Okay, we will walk you there,” Edu says.

And then, completely breaking the trend of the night, he did. He walked us there. I probably wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen the street sign for myself. “Poeta Mas y Ros,” it said. It exists.

That simple street sign would have been enough, but Edu didn’t stop there. Before parting, he gave us his number and about 30 little coupons for free drinks at his club—coupons conveniently printed with a map on the back.

I wish I could say that coupon was the turning point of the night; that we went into the bar, handed out coupons to our friends and danced the night away with Edu and Mirella in their discoteca.

Not exactly.

There was more walking, more hidden streets and even a pair of lost keys thrown in the mix. But between Mr. Jolly, the gay old man, and Edu, I chalk it up to a good night.

Air-choppin' it like it's hot in Spain

Since there was much talk of a possible Spanish prince before I left, it only seems fitting to start off by telling you about Vladimir and Semo.

My first encounter occurred on my flight from Philadelphia to Madrid. A sufficiently tired, massive backpack-lugging version of me took my window-seat in row 8A (conveniently situated in the gap between windows, therefore more appropriately referred to as a wall seat) and anxiously awaited the arrival of seat-holder 8B, my soon-to-be companion for the duration of our 7-hour flight. In my mind, person 8B could have been many people—another student from my program, a bullfighter traveling the world and finally returning to his hometown in Madrid, or just maybe, my Prince Felipe.

I didn’t expect Vladimir, the mousy looking man with a scraggly beard and long matted hair that plopped down beside me. My first thought—who let a homeless man on this flight. Second thought—7 hours.

Despite the fact that Vladimir may have been living on the streets, he was a good conversationalist, although a bit hard of hearing. As our plan crossed oceans, Vladimir and I crossed the awkward boundary of strangers on a flight to friends on a plane. I discovered that Waldo (as his friends call him) was a Serbian man living in Santander, Spain. He speaks six languages and he still laments the death of the dog he had in Serbia—they were like brothers. He even told me about the frightening time that airport guards mistook him for a Spanish terrorist and detained him for 3 hours (poor Waldo has no idea how anyone could mistake him for a terrorist).

Apparently our young friendship was not as obvious to some. When the flight attendant handed me a Diet Coke, Waldo jokingly snatched it from my hand yelling “Mine!” and the attendant looked ready to call for back-up.

But alas, after asking Waldo 20 million questions about Spain, reading a few chapters of my book and attempting to ignore the shooting pains in my neck enough to get a few desperately-needed hours of sleep, the plane arrived in Madrid, and Waldo and I bid our farewells. As the first semi-Spaniard I met on my journey, he holds a special place in my heart.

Little did I know that only three days later, at a discoteca in Toledo, another Spaniard would hold my hand.

OK, let me explain.

First, a disclaimer for the padres: said discoteca was very safe. There were many Americans from my program and a few tough-looking Spanish bouncers surveying all activity. Also, being me, I was of course rocking the air-chop in a long sleeve top with jeans—not exactly screaming seductress…for those of you who are unfamiliar with the air-chop, you clearly have never seen me dance. And a final noteworthy factor, there was a miniature apartheid between Spaniards and Americans—possibly my air-chop had some influence on this.

Regardless, at one point the techno musica picked up and a local Spanish boy busted a few moves reminiscent of the contestants on So You Think You Can Dance. Instantly, a cheering circle formed around the break-dancer, and instantly I found myself alone on the far side of the circle and completely stuck. Little me with pony-tail and headband, clutching my bag with white knuckles; Ten or more Spanish boys shoulder to shoulder around me shouting Spanish cheers with their hands in the air pulsing to the music. Excelente. Needless to say, I immediately located my amigas through the haze of smoke in the club and began planning my escape.

The song changes, there’s a deluge of back-patting as the circle converges on the break-dancer and suddenly, a rather handsome Spanish boy is taking my hand and whisking me away from the wall and to the middle of the dance floor. In other words, my plan—not so successful.

The Spanish stranger looked into my eyes, probably about the size of quarters by now, and said, “Tu eres muy bonita” (You are very pretty). If only I knew the word for pickup line in Spanish.

Next thing I know he’s bending to kiss my cheek, and I’m about to do a back-bend in the middle of the floor to avoid it. Again, I’m unsuccessful. Again, Semo goes in for the kiss, this time the other cheek. I make it difficult.

Standing up straight again, he smiles and says, “Me llamo Semo” (My name is Semo), as if his greeting was completely normal.

That’s when I remembered that it is completely normal to kiss someone on the cheek as a greeting in Spain. Breathe out, breathe in…breathe out, breathe in…

Semo has both my hands in his at this point and is waving them up and down while I move awkwardly to my own beat. I’m decapitated without my hands and thus without the air-chop. I figure I may as well introduce myself since this is more of a greeting than I’ve shared with half of my friends in the US, so I mumble a feeble, “Me llamo Jessie.” By now, my friends are swooping in to rescue me and laughing hysterically that I, of all people, was the first to dance with a Spaniard.

Once the invisible line between Americans and Spaniards was so unintentionally yet unavoidably crossed, there was no going back. Language barriers were thrown aside, that fact that Americans have no rhythm, overlooked, and Americans and Spaniards meshed together on the dance floor.

For once, I abandoned my air-chop, and welcomed the Spanish form of dancing. Unlike in America, Spaniards actually dance. I was twirled and turned, spun and swung, and always danced hand to hand- conveniently giving me the ability to push away any personal-space invaders. You could say we danced the night away, and for that I have Semo and his insistent dance invitation to thank. Muchas Gracias!

Thus concludes my first encounters with Spanish men. No princes yet, but a few interesting amigos.