The Three Gay Spaniards that weren´t

We had the best Saturday night.

My roommate and I told our señora that we were going out for dinner, and we bought some bread and cheese along with some cheap wine to enjoy by the river. We were meeting three other girls from our group, and so we staked out a spot, dangling our legs over the edge.

So here's the deal on drinking in public in Sevilla. A law was passed about a year ago mandating that drinking in the streets is no longer allowed. As was explained to me, kids as young as 12 were drinking in the streets, making lots of noise all night, and leaving poor impressions on tourists. So the law was passed. But it only applies to places where people live, or in front of open doors and business, etc. So there are certain areas where you can still drink legally. And, I was told, one of those places is by the river.

So we're doing just that, and then a party arrived. About 20 Spanish kids - they looked like they were in high school - show up and start drinking and hanging out by the river. One of them tried to talk to us, but he was too intoxicated to even speak Spanish well. Ooooh geez.

Well, those guys left after finishing their pre-gaming, and two other Spanish guys came along and said hola. I started making small talk with them (in spanish, of course) and they asked if they could sit down. Sure, I said. We chatted for awhile, they were from Granada but are working as mechanics in Sevilla now. One of them, Jorge, started to explain to me the differences in flamenco dancing between Sevilla and Granada. It was really interesting.
Then one of the girls from our group called Jorge "Jorge Curioso el mono" or Curious George the monkey. I don't really know why, but it was hilarious. And she called his friend "El hombre en el sombrero amarillo" or the man in the yellow hat. And they thought that was great, the two of them laughed so hard. And then the man in the yellow hat wanted to know if this guy from the Curious George books was handsome.
"Of course he is!" I told him.

We moved on, saying goodbye to our new friends..."¿Besos?" (Kisses?) Jorge asked me. (In Spain, friends, even new friends, great each other with a kiss on each cheek)
"¿Besos de amigos, verdad?" (Friendly kisses, right?) I responded and took on the Spanish tradition.

Then we went to an Irish pub that we like on Calle Betiz, which is a street with bunch of clubs and bars where Spaniards hang out.
There, we met up with three Spanish guys we had met through our university. One of them, David, had been our tour guide, and he and I had exchanged numbers during orientation. (He is leaving to study in England this year).
Well, at orientation, he introduced his friend Samuel as his partner. So it gets around our study abroad group that he's gay, he's got a partner, right?
We just weren't sure about his third friend, but he said something about hitting on guys or something, so we just figured.
They took us to another area where there are several discotecas (not clubs, because in Spain that means brothel) and we split up into two groups to get in (for some reason big groups have to pay to get into discotecas).
And it was PACKED. It was great, but so many people! At about 2am!
But we danced and danced - we were having a blast. Slowly the group splits up into the crowd of people, and I find myself dancing with David's partner.
And then he tried to kiss me.
Oh geez, THEY'RE NOT GAY!!!!
I back away and say to him in Spanish, hey, I haven't had enough to drink for that nonsense, buddy.
Poor guy. Gave him the shut down.
Then I spot one of the other girls I was with, Kate, dancing with David's other friend, and I make my way over to her. We look at each other and say, almost in unison, "They're not gay!"
Apparently the guy that Kate was dancing with also wanted to plant a big one on her, even after she told him that she has a boyfriend in the States. Then she told him that, all along, we had thought they were gay.
And so it all unravels...
"You thought we were GAY?!" the two friends exclaim with shocked expressions.
One of them told us it was the first time that anyone had ever called him gay. Probably not the best time to use the phrase "there's a first time for everything"!
"You think I was gay?!" David asks with wide eyes after walking up to us.
Well, yes kind of - that's what "partner" means in the US...we just didn't know.
By "partner" David had actually meant "classmate." The Spanish word can be translated either way.
They were embarrassed, and we were embarrassed, but everyone was laughing. Not long after that, we decided to call it a night...or a morning, being that it was about 5 am.
The guys were good sports about it though, and at the end of the night they hugged each other and said in English, "Goodnight pard-ner."
And altogether, I have to say, it was a very good night.

La vida española

So, what´s an average day like in Spain?

Wake up in the morning, no shower, because our señora preferes us to shower ¨por la tarde¨ or in the afternoon. And we only get one a day, so we better make it special.
For breakfast we get two slices of cold bread with butter and strawberry jam, a cup of decaf coffee with milk, cookies to dip in the coffee, and fruit. Not bad.

We have class Monday through Thursday, and so I leave an hour before class starts and walk about 10 minutes to the bus stop. From there, it´s about a 15 minute ride to the university bus stop, and then I walk the rest of the way to campus.
Interesting bit of info - while riding the bus to campus, we pass a place called ¨Tres mil viviendas¨ or 3,000 livings. It´s basically the projects of Sevilla. So our program coordinator told us never to walk to school - not that we could, because our bus takes the freeway.
Another interesting bit of info - our university used to be a jail. It reminds me of Pinnacle High School, one road in, one road out, surrounded by desert.

Depending on what day it is, I either eat bocadillas (sandwhiches) made by my señora on campus, or I return home for lunch.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, I finish by noon, so I ride the bus back home and wait until 2:15 when the family usually eats. Sometimes we´re joined by our señora´s daughter, who lives with us, and her oldest son and brother have even stopped by during lunchtime.
Lunch is huge. And delicious. Usually we have some kind of soup, a salad, and a big plate of fish. The other day our señora made fried calamari, fresh clams, and fresh tuna - all for one meal. My roommate and I were so full.

The city literally shuts down starting at 2 pm until around 5 pm. It´s incredible to see the difference walking around in the morning, and then again in the afternoon. The only places that stay open are restaurants, some grocery stores, and a big department store in Spain called El Corte Inglès. But, then restaurants shut down until dinner time, which - at the earliest - begins at 8.

At my house, we eat dinner at 9 pm - and our señora says that she eats early. But after having a big lunch, we are hardly ever hungry again for dinner.

Our ¨house¨ is what Americans would call an apartment. It has four small bedrooms and two bathrooms, and then a small kitchen and a living room. But here, it´s considered a house.

Our showers have to be quick - 5 minutes or less. Before we shower, we have to turn on the gas to get warm water. And once our señora turns on the gas, we better be running and jumping into that shower.
To save water, we rinse, water off. Shampoo. Water on, rinse, water off. Conditioner. Water on, rinse, water off. Shave, if necessary. And that´s our shower. In the afternoon, of course.

If we want to go out, it´s better to be ready before 11 so we can catch the last bus into town. Otherwise we have to pay for a taxi. But a taxi ride isn´t very expensive - only about 5 euro.
It doesn´t sound that difficult, but when dinner is at 9, and we use our one shower to shower after dinner, things can get a little tight. And, Spaniards usually don´t go out until midnight or so. The discotecas don´t get crowded until 2 or 3 in the morning on the weekends. It´s great.

Sevilla doesn´t have a metro, so you either have to walk, take a taxi, or take the bus. No problems yet with transportation - it´s refreshing not to be so dependent on cars.

My roommate is great, she´s from California and is super nice. We get along really well and have enjoyed exploring the city together and getting to know Spanish cultures. And listening to little lectures from our señora - I know she means well. =)

I am loving Sevilla, the city is beautiful, and we haven´t even scratched the surface!

Make your luggage disappear!

I took a train from Paris to Irun, in Spain, and had no problems. Granted I almost broke my back hauling my luggage everywhere, but I definitely got them on and off the train safely, leaving them on the luggage racks.
Well, intercity trains in Spain don´t have luggage racks. Only overhead compartments that are smaller than the in-flight airplane storage.
I had no idea what to do with my two, very large, suitcases. Not to mention my backpack. I ask the woman manning our compartment what I should do with them.
She yells at me, in Spanish of course, that finding a place for my luggage is not her problem, but that I can´t leave them in the area where people board the train.
Okay.
So, with the help of a nice guy sitting in front of me, I pile them onto the empty chair next to me.
When the woman comes back, she yells again, telling me that each passenger is allowed 2 bags no more than 20 kilos each. She says something about eating them - I´m guessing she was telling me to eat my clothes to get rid of them - and then she says I need to make them disappear.
Shoot. I forgot my magic set at home. Can I take a rain check?
Unfortunately at the time, I hadn´t slept much, so I actually felt more like crying than joking around.
Well, a nice man in the middle says ¨Aquì, amiga,¨ and points to a table surrounded by empty seats. So we hide one of my suitcases under there, and then I put the other one in front of my seat and prop my feet up on it.
So then a family boards and wants to know whose enormous suitcase is blocking their feet. So we move it back out of the compartment to where the passengers board again.
Well the woman working for the line comes by again and yells at me...again. She can´t open the door to let people on, so I can´t leave my suitcase there.
I apologize, defeated and tired of being yelled at and put the suitcase in the seat next to me. She says that´s fine for now, but if anyone needs to sit there, I have to stand.
Okay, that´s fine with me. I wish she would have said that the first time.
Luckily, the seat stayed empty and I made it to Madrid with all of my luggage and shared a taxi ride to the hotel with a boy named Wil that I had met before boarding the train, who was also studying abroad.

And on the 30th day, we rested.

Lesson learned from our return to Paris: remember which train station you leave your luggage at.
We went to the wrong station, and had to turn around and get back on the metro to go to the right one - which we weren´t sure about anymore. Ha. Oh geez.
But we pick up our mounds of luggage and hail a cab to get to our hotel. We had booked a nicer hotel in the middle of the city and planned to just relax for a day or two.
And that´s exactly what we did.
There was a cafè just across the street from our hotel, and on our second day their I ate duck for the first time from their menu. We savored freshly baked pain eu chocolat (chocolate-filled croissants) and enjoyed our hotel´s breakfast buffet. We dressed up our first night and went to an Italian restaurant for a late dinner and just sat and talked for hours.
Paris was cold - like Phoenix winters - but it was nice to have to bundle up for a change.

And we were done, our trip was over, there was no more.
I don´t think that really hit me until I got into a cab to go to the train station, and I was alone. I was alone for the first time since we had left the US.
I was leaving my partner in crime behind, the girl with whom I had shared my August. With whom I had done everything, seen everything, and traveled everywhere. And I was sad to have to say goodbye to our long discussions - about politics, life, religion, love - and our times together in silence, reading, journaling, drawing, and observing.

But Spain and other adventures awaited me ahead.

Like Paulo Coehlo quotes in his book, ¨We´ll always have Paris.¨
We´ll always have Paris, Leslie!

Ciao, Venezia!

Gondola rides cost about 80 euro, so we walked up and down the waterside looking for two people to share a ride with. We found two girls from South Korea who were also looking for two more passengers to make the ride cheaper.
The ride was beautiful. We went under the Ponte dei Sospiri and wove through smaller canals, admiring the colorful architecture of the tall, Venecian buildings.
And the girls were really nice. They were traveling for a couple of weeks, on their way to southern Italy, and - having already been there - we gave them some good pointers.
It was a short ride, only half an hour, but it was something we just had to do while in Venice.

To finish our day, we sat down at a an alleyway restaurant that offered a ¨tourist special¨- which is a flat price for a 3 course meal and includes service charges. The meal begins with an appetizer, then a delicious pasta dish, and ends with a meat dish. It was great.

And then we just wandered around a bit more, admiring the city at night. We got gelato by the Rialto Bridge and then sat down with our feet danging over the canal to enjoy our dessert. While we sat there, it actually started to rain, and we watched as various types of motorboats pulled over one by one to the side of the canal and docked while the drivers put up their rooftops. And then we strolled home through the empty streets in the rain, soaked by the time we finally got to our hotel, but loving our leisurely pace.

When it rains like that in Venice, the shops close down and outdoor restaurants bring in their chairs and tables from outside. The city gets quiet except for the soft patter of the rain. It´s beautiful.

Our Japanese roommate had moved on, so when we returned, we were sharing a room with a guy from Finland who spoke very broken English. We didn´t talk a lot, he was on his way back out to smoke and get a drink, but the next morning we sat in the hostel kitchen with him and chatted.
He had come for the art festival that goes on in Venice every four years, which we knew nothing about. He told us a little about his previous travels...how he had gone to Spain, but no one spoke English, something we never noticed as Spanish speakers. He too was traveling alone and just enjoying his vacation.

So, our last day in Venice, we left our luggage at the hostel and had a relaxing day in the city. We got an early lunch and just wandered for awhile, until we found a good place to sit down and have cafè lattes. I read and Leslie drew, and after a few hours we got up and continued on until it was time to collect our monster backpacks and head to the train station.

Our train ride to Paris was basically just horrible, but an experience nonetheless. The car was FREEZING, and we only had a sheet for covers. Leslie and I ended up with the lowest two beds, crammed in between the seat armrests (the train has chairs during the day that convert to beds at night) and the flat cushion we were sleeping on. What was worse is that I was sick before we boarded, but after that ride, I felt horrible. Just awful.
I think we slept about a total of 2 or 3 hours the entire night. Ugh.
But, we did meet a guy from Barcelona, and it was nice to chat with him for awhile, though I could barely understand. He was speaking so softly that I kept leaning forward and trying to understand a language that I´m not quite yet fluent in. Good times.

I LOVE THIS WOMAN!

We woke up our second day in Venice and decided to start the day with a jog through the city to the port.
Not as easy as we thought. We had to weave through people and around stands, and we couldn´t find the port. But we got to see the city wake up - it physically comes alive every morning.
Vendors pull out their carts and uncover their valuable items. Fruit stands fill up with vibrantly ripe fruit. And slowly, more and more people crowd into the street. When we left, there were people walking along here and there, but when we returned just over an hour later, intermixed masses of tourists and Italians crowded the streets.
It´s amazing.

We grab a quick lunch on our way out again, and just start wandering. Venice isn´t very big, and we had three days there, so we figured we might as well take a more leisurely approach to our touring. Reading different histories from our guide book as we went, we strolled by shops, stopping in now and again to take a closer look.

And eventually we stumbled across the Piazza San Marco.

I knew exactly where we were the minute we caught a glimpse. I had a poster of the piazza hanging in my dorm all last year, and I could not wait to get there. (Though, after my Versailles experience, I was a bit apprehensive about all of those pigeons. Hence the extra cleaning wipes).
And it was exactly as I had imagined...better in fact. Pigeons cover the ground everywhere. Saint Mark´s Basilica is absolutely amazing - the color and grandeur of the building forces you to stop and take a moment just to look. We admired the bell tower high in the sky, and watched people feed the pigeons.

¨This is the commercial,¨ I said to Leslie. ¨The diamond commercial where that guy stands in the middle of the plaza and yells at the top of his lungs, I LOVE THIS WOMAN!¨

I wanted to yell, ¨I LOVE THIS PLACE!¨

We walked with the crowds along the water, past the government building, Doge´s Palace, and the famous Bridge of Sighs (Ponte dei Sospiri) where prisoners were marched to jail from the interrogation rooms in Doge´s Palace.

We sat down by the water, docked gondolas swaying in front of us, and wrote. We had made it to the end of our trip, and I could not believe it.

Cafè lattes and fruit and postcard writing. It was great.

Our next goal: a gondola ride.

Venezia, di dov´e lei?

After our arrival in Venice, we took a water bus to our little hostel in the middle of the city. We picked a perfect location. The room had three beds, a small, round table surrounded by three chairs and two fans, which I was thankful for.
The bedspreads were brown, and each bed had a night stand draped with pink fabric and a stylish lamp sitting atop. It was quaint.
We got settled, showered after our long, dirty ferry ride and set out to find food.
We ended up walking into this little pizza joint with the hugest slices of pizza I´ve ever seen. It reminded me of New York for some reason. I ordered a slice of cheese, and they took an already-cooked slice and threw it in the oven for a few minutes.
It tasted like heaven. And I was so hungry.
We walked around for a bit, to the train station to make reservations, through the shops lining the streets, which where packed with tourists.
And then we decided to nap.

We awoke again in time for dinner and walked in the opposite direction we had gone earlier that day. Spotting a cute restaurant with an even more attractive waiter, we sat down for some pasta and salad.
It´s funny ordering Italian food, because the Spanish language is so similar to Italian, so it´s relatively easy to pronounce the names of the dishes correctly.
Well, this got the waiters speculating where we were from. We thought we´d have a little fun with them.
So we started speaking in Spanish instead of English. Now they were really intrigued. We sparked their interest so much that one of them actually came over and asked where we were from. He asked Leslie, and she answered Mexico, and I watched as his inquiring expression quickly changed into pleasant surprise. ¨Oh, Mexico!¨ I didn´t bother pointing out that I was American. Sometimes it´s just better to be silent.

We strolled into the street again, admiring the amazing nooks and crannies of the city.
As we walked, we saw some necklaces we liked and I drove a hard bargain with the vendor. ¨Twenty-five¨ he told me in Italian. No thanks, I told him in Spanish, ¨I saw a similar necklace in the same box marked at 10, and I´m not paying more than that.¨
So he gave us two necklaces for 20.
Honestly, I wasn´t that sold on the necklace anyways, that´s why I wouldn´t take it for 25, or even 20 or 15. But I´m glad I got it for 10.

We walked to the Rialto bridge, over the Grand Canal and were awestruck. It´s just so beautiful.
We sat down at one of the high-end restaurants right next to the water for some wine and cheese.
We ordered two glasses of Sauvignon and two plates of cheese. I have never tasted wine that good. Our eyes widened as we took our first sip. It was delicious. The perfect complement to the array of assorted cheeses that our waiter brought out.
One of my favorite memories in Venice.

Deciding to call it an early night, we returned to our hostel and were about to go to bed when our roommate came in.
Earlier that day, when we had come back to nap, we had seen our roommate´s clothing drying and tried to speculate how old she would be.
The clothes were pretty plain, the small shirt hanging up was a light pink, and we concluded that she must be a little older to be traveling alone.

We were so wrong.

Our roommate was a guy from Japan, traveling after his studies in Europe. He was nice, on his way to Greece, and so we gave him some tips on where he should go and what he should see. He really appreciated that.

What a day.