This was what I had been looking forward to for about four months: Spain. The country that I'd dreamed of visiting for so long but which has always eluded me. I mean, I was finally going to see the places I had first set eyes upon in my 7th grade Spanish textbook. I was going to see a much-needed familiar face, a Sarah Lawrence friend. I was going to speak Spanish again, a language I actually know! I was going to have a good cup of coffee again, not to mention tons of other delicious goodies. Oh, to be in a Mediterranean country!
Of course, it couldn't all go smoothly, could it? Thanks to a thick batch of fog in the characteristically overcast Belgian sky, our plane from Charleroi to Madrid was horribly delayed. So we sat, and we sat, and we sat around for hours. Apparently, conditions were different at another airport in this vast country that we could be allowed to leave from a different airport. That meant we all got on a bus destined for an airport one hour away, checked in AGAIN, went through security AGAIN, got our boarding passes ripped in half AGAIN. By this time it was about 10.00 pm, and there was no one in this dinky Liege airport, which sees about 4 planes a week go in and out. The worst of it was Tom and I had been planning to meet my Bostonian-turned Madrileña friend, Anna, at her apartment that evening. Since we arrived in Madrid about 2.00 am, when the metro had conveniently stopped running for the night, we decided that rather than pay through the nose for a taxi and disturb Anna's entire apartment, we would catch some Z's right there in the terminal until daybreak.
[Some of you readers may be aware of Tomi's and my bad luck with at least one connection every single time we travel together - London planes, Czech trains, and now. He blames it on me, but now what can he do. Three times now makes it a tradition.]
After an uncomfortable night in front of Turkish Air, we then hopped on the Metro and without further complications found Anna's apartment, in it's amazing location, complete with a dazzling view of the Almudena Madrid Cathedral. After a big terry cloth hug from Anna, who greeted us at the door in her bathrobe, our Madrid adventures began.
To tell the truth, it was surreal, and surreal in an unsettling way. I think it was because, in contrast to Belgium, I had so many expectations of Madrid which ended up preventing me from enjoying the city for what it is. Don't get me wrong, I loved it all! It is an amazingly beautiful place replete with gorgeous architecture, parks and people :). I think I was just impatient to feel the city, to let it completely absorb me and to belong to it that I didn't slow down. (Then again, traveling with Tom you can never slow down...) More often than not I felt like I was back in Buenos Aires, a feeling which also added to my disorientation. On the other hand, the sheer Western cosmopolitan atmosphere wasn't without similarities to New York. Neither could I believe that I was could be at the Plaza Mayor and El Corte Inglés, places that I first read about in the dog-eared pages of my textbooks of 10 years ago. Surreal. And in many ways magical. The transcendental moment for me was when I went for a walk by myself one afternoon and found myself at the top of the Casa de Campo with a view of the sprawling city below and the rugged landscape beyond. With the city of Madrid at my feet, I finally understood that I was smack in the middle of the Iberian peninsula at 23 years with possibilities on all sides.
There is so much there to go back for! I had an amazing time seeing the sight, and like I mentioned, it was some good therapy to see Anna. (And I know the experience was reciprocal.) Many of the things I had hoped Spain to be and that I had hoped to do I got to check off my list, such as eat tapas and tortilla, drink delicious wines, go out on the town, see the Prado, pay homage to Cervantes, lounge in cafes, wander about parks, and hablar some español.
There were even some unexpected moments that made me so happy to be there: the utterly incredible Picasso exhibit at the Reina Sofia, walking around sin chaqueta in the springlike sunshine, cooking Hungarian lesco in Anna's apartment, the drama that was Anna's apartment in the light of the search for a new roommate, meeting up with a Minnesota friend, watching "Friends" in Spanish, chocolate con churros (!), finding that I retained much of my Spanish (complete with my Argentine accent), realizing that it is diffucult for me to get drunk after after having become accustomed to Polish vodkas, laying eyes upon the original Real Academia Español and Instituto Cervantes, going through the Palacio Real three times (folks, it can be done in just over 9 minutes if you keep a brisk pace)... if I keep thinking I can certainly add more to this list.
And just to make it an even number of nights we would spend at the airport (read with sarcasm), Tom and I ended our Madrid stay back at Barajas at midnight to wait for our 6 am flight. This one, however, we had planned on, and this time we found a much quieter and a minimally more comfortable nook.
En serio, Spain, I will definitely be back. After all, one thing that Tom said to me merely as a passing comment I really took to heart: he said that he has never seen me so happy as when I was speaking Spanish.
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