"Touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home."
Shaking off the travel lows. |
I must have repeated it a thousand times in the few weeks leading up to departure. "What are your plans?" they would ask. My reply would always be the same. "I'm flying into Madrid and spending a week or so there before making my way to Valencia. And that's as far as I've planned." There's a reason for this. At age 20 I went to Mexico for what was supposed to be a 6 month trip with a very rigorous schedule along a specific route designed to coincide with various holidays, festivals and seasonal happenings. The annual monarch butterfly migration to San Miguel de Allende. Day of the Dead festivities in Patzcuaro. The Cervantes Festival in Guanajuato. This required much planning. On the bus ride out of Tijuana on Day 1 I met someone from Cabo San Lucas who convinced me to modify my plans, and from there, for many reasons, I changed course entirely.
You can't predict all the external influences you'll encounter that will sway you in one direction or another, and even less so can you predict the internal forces that will cause you to choose one choice over the other, or others. I've always been one to go with my gut, and I've learned that I can't plan for trips of this length. People, weather, newly discovered information, changing motivations. I'm not much of a wuss when it comes to weather, but when it's 47 degrees celsius in all of India besides the "hill stations" and the Himalaya, I'm gonna sit that one out until the heat subsides. So I'm in Madrid. I know that I want to meet up with my friend Daan that I met in Singapore a few years back, but that's the extent of my plans here. After that the plan is to walk to Valencia. I expect this will take about 10 days. I have the basic route mapped out in my head, but I still need to do some research. Part of my plan included going to a store or meeting up with a hiking club that had information on the routes I was thinking of taking. If such an entity exists, I did not find it.
At the last moment, Daan suggests I check out WikiLOC, an online hiking resource with GPS routes. This gets me part of the way to Valencia, but by the time that I am to depart I still have only a partial route mapped out. No big deal, I kind of wanted to do some backcountry hiking anyways, and I've downloaded topo maps for the areas that I intend to hike. Per my usual habit, I spend a lot of time walking the cities I'm in, camera in hand. I might dip in to a museum or building of note from time to time, but I'm most interested in feeling out the flow of a place. And there is definitely a different flow to Spain. The "mediodia" - when seemingly all shops in Spain have closed- has caught me off guard, and has likely prevented me from spending money needlessly. But these last couple of days I've been on a mission, and with the mediodia cutting into, well, the midday, it's a race against the clock to get to my destinations. Bar culture is not what I expected, either. Most people have a (1) drink during mediodia, and spend their post-work, pre-party hours in cervecerias and other sidewalk terraces drinking small glasses of whichever beer the establishment has on tap (usually just one), copas de vino or stiff cocktails in goblets that are often poured tableside. en't fully tasted the nightlife yet as I've mostly spent time with English speakers living here a wide range of time: Daan, a friend I met in Singapore a few years back, is a Dutchman living in Spain 7 years now; Paul, a friend of a friend from the States, is married to a Spanish woman and has 2 kids and twelve years here; and Todd and Bilye, two good friends from Seattle who have made Valencia their home for over a year now. It's been a nice, easy transition, but perhaps too easy. My Spanish is better than I thought, but there's always more to learn. The inevitable questions about Trump and gun control pop up and I struggle to find the vocabulary to have an intelligent conversation about it.. But I met a oenologist ( fancy word for wine-maker) and master distiller and I definitely didn't lack the vocab for that conversation. One thing is certain, though. The more frequently I use it, the more fluent I am. One thing the siesta has luckily prevented me from getting, day after day, is a SIM card. I've gone back and forth about it, but I don't think it's necessary for the amount of time I'll be here. Already I find myself staring at my phone too often, looking at a map instead of asking for directions. When I was 20 I naively navigated my way around Mexico with nothing more than a basic map of the country and good-enough Spanish. Asking for directions got me where I wanted to go. The last thing I need is a full time internet connection to further isolate myself behind my Facebook wall. . |
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