Tours have their good and bad points. The worst bad point is that they always leave early. We got up at 6, after staying up until midnight to get our laundry done. I was exhausted. I’m almost useless when I first wake up, uncoordinated, pokey, distracted, confused, and likely to stumble into walls. Being married to an extreme lark is a classic comedy setup. Somehow we managed to be ready at the city bus stop on time. We made it to the tour bus, Starbucks tea in hand, with five minutes to spare. Our tour guide spoke (at least) three languages: Catalan, Spanish, and English. He would alternate sections of banter. We learned later that the collapse of the Spanish economy in 2008 led to a lot of highly educated people being forced to take jobs for which they were seriously overqualified. This guide was more than just a docent. He had read biographies of the major figures in his tours; he did the Dalí tour as well as the Montserrat/Gaudí tour we were taking. It reminded me that “docent” is one of the few jobs in my field for which my BA in History qualifies me. Could be fun. Maybe I’ll try it one day. Maybe that would be an entry point to working somewhere overseas. Busing from site to site is a significant chunk of our experience of a new country. It’s part of how we get a sense of the geography of a place. It’s a chance to see outlying suburbs and agricultural areas. Otherwise, it’s a way of limiting ourselves to the company of other tourists, rather than hanging out with locals. Due to the fact that we had chosen a Monday, our only real option was a (more expensive) extended tour that included a couple of extra sites. The first was a factory town where Gaudí had spent time as a young designer. We visited an unfinished church. He had set aside his work on this building and wound up working on La Sagrada Família, which we had seen the day before, never realizing that he would depart this world without finishing either. I spent most of this part of the tour thinking about my own unfinished projects and kicking myself really hard. One of the most fascinating things about Gaudí was the way he modeled his buildings. They called it a funicular model. He would suspend chains to make the shapes he wanted – UPSIDE DOWN – and then put a mirror under the bottom. His father was a coppersmith, and this made me wonder where he came up with the idea of these hyperbolic paraboloids. He was ill as a child, a very common trait of major geniuses, and I thought perhaps he had spent time with women in the family as they sewed clothes. Just a guess. Or maybe he liked to hang his head over the side of his bed and play with the blankets. Gaudí was ahead of his time. He used a lot of recycled and reclaimed materials, and he made a special effort to make this particular church blend into the natural surroundings. It was easy to see how the exterior had been made to match the local palm trees. He had this rainbow batik thing going with the stained glass windows. The holy water fonts were made of massive bivalve shells. I hadn’t realized how far back the roots of this eco-friendly architectural ideal extended. We had a funny linguistic moment during the lecture. The guide was talking about how Gaudí ordered “slock” from England for one section of the church. At the same moment, my husband and I realized what he meant, and we both blurted out, “Oh, slag!” The guide agreed, repeated our American pronunciation a couple of times, and said he would have to remember it. The Spanish language only has five vowels. It’s debatable how many occur in English (which English?), but we have closer to 20, and non-native speakers can’t always hear these distinctions, much less reproduce them. We got back on the bus and headed toward Montserrat. This day would turn out to be a buffet of alternative transportation, as we transferred to a train that took us to the higher elevation. Montserrat would be a fascinating and beautiful place even without the history. We learned that it had an irresistible allure for climbers, and half the rescues in the Pyrenees happened here, as the rocks are like super crumbly. I saw three young women in climbing gear walking briskly, and I had a moment of curiosity about what it would be like to carry that mindset. There’s plenty to do on solid ground to keep me busy. Tours are usually a combination of structure and limited freedom. I found this out that one time when my youngest brother almost got left behind at Chichen Itza. We had the option of either staying with the tour or going off on our own, and there would be a break of roughly two hours before we headed back. The options were the scheduled tour of the music school with a choir concert, going up the funicular to the top of the mountain, visiting the art museum, and eating at the cafeteria. We stuck with the group during the tour, figuring that if we watched the clock, we could do both the museum and the viewpoint after lunch. The music school was interesting enough, although it was probably included as much for a fundraising opportunity as anything else. These young boys spent most of their time separated from their families, with the advantage that they got to travel to far-flung corners of the world as they trained their voices. A few got to learn the pipe organ. When it came time for the concert, out they came, clearly still so young that walking in line and standing in ordered ranks was really challenging. Their voices were pure and sweet. The music was in a minor key. Then the pipe organ came in, with a dissonance straight out of a climactic scene in a horror film. Awe was not the word. This was the boss level. Suddenly you could understand how an entire congregation could come to believe in a literal Hell. The church itself had some great Mucha murals, interspersed with some mediocre representational art. Then we got to walk up in a line and see the Black Madonna. She was in an acrylic box with a cutaway so everyone could touch her sovereign’s orb. We walked to the cafeteria. I had brought a jar of chickpeas with mixed vegetables just in case. It turned out that there were plenty of veg-friendly options and the food was great! That always puts me in a good mood. I was starting to pull it together after my rough night. Then we had a decision point. These are always better when everyone’s glycogen levels are restored to full functioning. It was a Gift of the Magi moment. He wanted to make sure I got to see the museum, which had works by at least half a dozen artists I knew and appreciated. I wanted to make sure he got to see the viewpoint, even though, as I have probably mentioned, I FREAKING HATE funiculars. We looked at the time and decided that if we were quick up at the top, we could still manage 40 minutes for the museum. When I saw the steep angle that the funicular car would ascend, I balked. “I changed my mind.” I was entirely serious, but he thought I was joking, which is how we wound up on a Ferris wheel together on one of our early dates. (“Why are there zip ties on this thing?”) Somehow, once again, I found myself locked into a tiny can that was about to be vaulted far higher than human beings are meant to go. It was okay, though. It’s true what they say about repeated exposure to anxiety-producing situations. I got over my thing with revolving doors, and now I guess I’m over my thing with funiculars. The view really was everything it’s cracked up to be. We could see fluffy clouds cruising along below us. We looked down at the earth-tone patchwork that was the agricultural area in the valleys below. It was obvious why people had been making the effort to come here for centuries on end. We headed back, only to find a long line that wasn’t going anywhere. A car came up and went back completely empty. (This type of funicular has two cars that rely on each other being on opposite ends). A group of young Americans chattered about whether their tour bus would leave without them. When we made it back to the bottom, we had only 20 minutes left, and as a consequence would have to forego the museum. There really was too much to see up here in half a day, a situation custom-designed for FoMO. It’s better to recognize and acknowledge FoMO and beat it down, with a crowbar if necessary, because there are a billion billion things in this world and we’ll never see all of them. At some point on the bus ride back to Barcelona, I nodded off. We pulled into downtown fairly early. My husband made the executive decision that we should buy our train tickets, first so that we had them in hand, and second so that we were completely sure how to get to the train station on time the next day. This took an extra hour due to some kerfuffle in the Metro. I saw men in emergency services outfits, running, with BOMBERS written on their backs. I freaked out a little, to my husband’s amusement, because he knew that it meant ‘firefighters’ and they weren’t actually a bomb squad. I got to try out my Spanish at the train station ticket counter. Astoundingly, I got it right, and the ticket agent found us a significant discount a couple hours later in the afternoon. We’d be going to Valencia, we’d have time for lunch in Barcelona before we left, and we’d be saving a chunk of cash. Well played, Polyglot Girl. Never underestimate the additional courtesies to be earned by attempting the local language. Now I dug in my heels. “I’m not leaving Barcelona until I see Park Güell.” A more organized person would have understood that this would have been a better match with our trip to La Sagrada Família the previous day. We could easily have walked there and taken our time. We took a cab. Regional place names are the hardest, am I right? I’m from the Pacific Northwest, and good luck to you if you don’t know the “correct” way to say Oregon, Willamette, or Puyallup. So, when I asked the cab driver, “Va a Park Güell?” and he replied with a laconic “Sí,” I could hardly believe it. I’d listened hard, but I never thought I could reproduce it intelligibly. I was starting to feel the beginnings of linguistic competence. We got there 30 minutes before the park closed. This was my husband being magnanimous. I knew there was no point buying a ticket, but I’d read that there was plenty to see outside the official enclosed area. He asked what I wanted to do, and I said I’d be satisfied if we just walked around the perimeter. It was great. There was a terrific view, and from the back you could look down on the area inside the wall. There were all sorts of runners and dog-walkers. I knew that if I lived in Barcelona, I’d be here at least a couple of times a week on my own training runs. It was only half an hour, but it was a fantasy bubble in which I felt I was experiencing the city in the way I’d want to if I lived there. We walked back downtown, making another 11-mile day out of what had started as a butt-in-seat tour day. We’d taken two kinds of bus, train, funicular, Metro, and a cab. We had a late dinner and spent a bit of time organizing our gear in preparation for the next day. We’d be pulling up stakes and preparing for more frequent location changes.
I just had the best idea! I wrote this at 10 PM last night, while in the middle of something else. Why not take a day traditionally associated with bad luck and use it as reverse psychology? I’ll get to what I mean after a brief digression. I learned about the supposed Mayan prophecy about 2012 when I was around 10 years old. It freaked me out. I mean, it really freaked me out. I hate to admit this, as a university-educated person, but I didn’t really breathe a sigh of relief until after the date had passed. Okay, the Mayans evidently couldn’t predict the end of their own society, so how could they predict anything else? What we know rationally doesn’t always manage to burrow its way down into the core of our irrational legacy as humans. We’re swinging back in the direction of superstition, anyway, having reached a place in which we are rejecting the very concept of expertise. We want to go with what works for us, and we can generally find a blogger, celebrity, or news source to support what we like to hear. Myself included; nobody is immune to cognitive bias. That’s why I can still spook myself by thinking about Nostradamus, even though I have a history degree. Back to my Friday the 13th thing. What if we used this “unlucky” day as a sort of backup excuse? What if we finally turned the ignition on something we’ve been hesitating to do, knowing that we have something totally obvious to blame if it doesn’t work out? “Of course I didn’t get the job – it was Friday the 13th – but I figured I’d send in my résumé anyway.” “Of course I didn’t finish clearing that square foot of space. What would you expect? It was Friday the 13th!” “I knew it was going to be a bad day even before I finally looked at all my accounts and totaled my outstanding credit card debt. Screw Friday the 13th, I need me a cookie.” “Friday the 13th is the worst. All I did all night was go through a stack of mail.” I have an email relating to a possible new project hanging around in my inbox. I have a tendency of hesitating and delaying on this sort of thing until the deadline passes, which is a way of dealing with uncertainty. It’s like having leftovers you’re not sure about, and waiting another few days until they grow visible mold just to confirm. The worst that will happen with an inquiry email is that it doesn’t pan out, which is much less scary than some of the stuff I’ve found in my fridge. Ah, but gross expired food is predictable in a way that human communication is not. Unfinished tasks are a major drain on mental bandwidth. When it’s something important but not urgent, it can also be an emotional drain. It is not fun to have to admit that you’ve let yourself down – again. All the talk about self-esteem that is going around in our culture, and it really comes from one thing: keeping promises to yourself. Knowing you can trust yourself. Living up to your own standards, according to your own value system. Not keeping promises to yourself is a sure path to depression and low self-worth. The ability to do it, to set a goal and go after it, is a super power. I can write an email! I can pick up the phone and make appointments, even when they’re scary! I can clean out my fridge! I can face the truth about my retirement account balance/credit cards/weight/blood glucose/cholesterol/blood pressure/whatever! Whatever is the thing I dread the most, that’s the thing I should do. Face it in the clear light of day. Tackle it, seize it, dominate it, and throw it out the window. We can’t let anxiety rule our lives. We can’t walk around with little gray clouds hanging over our heads, sprinkling thoughts of all the things we haven’t done. We can’t think of ourselves as failures. Please, please, not that. Failure should be a minor thing that happens a thousand times a day as part of the learning process toward pursuing something new. We can’t believe in bad luck, because that’s a way of getting suckered by fatalism. No matter what life throws at us, we have the power to determine everything else. I determine my attitude, my response, my words, my actions, and my personal environment. When “bad luck” comes my way, I deal with it, adapt if necessary, and proceed with my plan. Plan A? Plan B? I know more than one alphabet, so bring it on. All right. Let’s make the least out of this day. Whatever is that dreaded task, let’s confront the fact that it doesn’t really matter what we do, because we were procrastinating anyway, so if we screw it up, it’s about the same either way. If it’s unpleasant, better to do it today and not have to think about it on Saturday. If it feels all tingly and loaded with mysteriously powerful potential, maybe it is fate? The “wing-it method” took over in unintentional ways on our second full day in Barcelona. We had an agenda. This was the one day of the week when local Catalan people gathered to do some traditional dance in front of the cathedral. There was also an event flyer I’d photographed, a street fair later in the afternoon where we could probably get lunch. We try to have one or two specific places we’d like to see, and let the rest of the day unfold naturally around that. Usually, it even works! The bus into town stopped a mile short of our destination. We thought we’d misunderstood the schedule, and we were racking our brains trying to figure out what we’d misread. As we walked in the intended direction, we kept seeing people heading in our direction and wearing race bibs. Aha! By the lack of exhaustion and relative freshness of the clothing, I deduced that it was probably a 5k, although we never did find out. The race detour is a perfect example of something that could just as well have happened at home. We have to take these things in stride, to coin a phrase. Detours are the best way to see parts of a country that you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. There tend to be official tourist zones where everything is scrubbed up and Bowdlerized. Local people avoid these zones. The prices are higher, there’s no parking, the food isn’t good, and tourist sites aren’t all that relevant to most people’s daily lives (unless they work there). Getting lost or shunted onto a different route is a quick way to peek behind the curtain. We needed cash. This is an area where travel differs from home life. At home, we rarely need cash, but on trips, we’re constantly paying bus fare, tipping, or finding ourselves at restaurants that only take one form of payment. It also turns out that pay toilets are a common feature in Spain, so it’s best to hang onto those 10- and 20-cent euro coins. What is more annoying than a pay toilet? An ATM that eats your card. What’s more annoying than that? Seeing the error message in a minority language spoken by fewer than 5 million people. Okay, there’s also a certain coolness factor, but it was hard to appreciate that at the moment. This was a full 60 seconds in the place of uncertainty, with one foot inching over to the place of panic. Fortunately, there was a customer service number with a live person on the other end, and we sorted out the problem. The card had simply expired. We had other options on hand, and we would have to accept that that old card was never leaving Spain. Oh well. We went on our way, seeing more and more people in race bibs. We cut over toward the Cathedral, but slowed down when we saw a massive crowd in the streets. What was happening? This was one of the all-time great serendipitous moments provided by the wing-it method. We had no idea this was going on, but we happened to be in the right place at the right time, and only because of both the bus detour and the ATM mishap. After a few minutes, we started to understand what was happening. Some kind of acrobatic stunt? We hadn’t seen the first ring of strongmen in national garb, but we did see the men who climbed up on their shoulders. A gang of people climbed up the first two tiers of men and got up on the shoulders of the second ring. Wow! That’s impressive! We were astonished when they kept going, and going, all the way to seven. Lighter and lither young girls climbed up, and at the very top were some spry children. They had barely made it to the top when they immediately clambered down again, using the waist sashes as footholds. We realized it was a timed race, and that there were teams represented by different shirt colors. This was not something I would expect to see anywhere in the US on an average Sunday. It was over in minutes but I’ll never forget it. We were close to the Cathedral at that point. We could hear the music. There was another crowd, and as we walked up, we saw the circle dance, just like it said in the guidebook. I was so excited! I was going to join right in and try to learn the steps. We saw about two minutes of it, the song ended, the dancers disbanded, and that was the end. What the book said lasted two hours was over in one, and we’d missed all but the last moments. This was our main objective for the morning, and we’d inadvertently traded it for the human tower and an infrastructure glitch. Something shocked us. A man had set up a begging bowl on a blanket. He had his shirt pulled aside to display the hump on his back. Genuine kyphosis. Here we had a cathedral with a hunchback for a mascot. Hadn't anyone from the church noticed him? Surely he was on disability? I realized that both of these things were likely, and that he was making the most of his no doubt painful condition. I didn’t begrudge him his position, but it made me sad, and I hoped he had joy in his life. Meanwhile, he would probably have preferred some money to my privilege-gazing. We set off through a different part of La Rambla, which is really an enchanting place. The goal was to reach the Parc de la Ciutadella. We saw on the map that there was a chain of smaller parks leading from there in the direction of La Sagrada Familia. It was now about 2:00, and we figured we’d stop for lunch first. The closest place that fit our requirements turned out to be down a veritable maze of narrow, dreamlike alleys. Ordering our lunch there was one of my first real experiences with speaking Spanish. I fumbled and missed half of the dialogue – fortunately the waitress was fluent in English and humored me – but I was proud that I understood “integral o blanco?” Lunch had put us in an expansive mood, and we walked out to a beautifully sunny afternoon. We reached the park. What an absolutely stunning place! Central Park has nothing on the Ciutadella park. It was full of people having fun in every way imaginable. People lounging on picnic blankets, blowing bubbles, roller blading, rowing boats, having birthday parties, playing music. We walked around the perimeter, and then my heart exploded. We had been hearing these wild parrots around town, but I hadn’t gotten a close enough look. They were Quakers! I had a succession of these birds over the years, and I have a soft spot for them. As we got closer, we found that there were dozens of birds with numbered tags around their necks. That surprised me quite a bit. They seemed cheerful enough. They were scampering around on the ground and collecting nesting material. I had read that Quakers live in huge communal nests year-round, but I’d never seen them in person before. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t picked up on this information anywhere, that Barcelona has Quaker parrots (and at least six other species of parrot as well). It was a real bright spot in my day; I wanted to plunk down and coax one into my lap. But they are bitey little buggers and I know better, so we kept walking. The park got more unbelievably charming as we went on. Why would anyone ever go anywhere but here? It made me want to pack up and relocate to Barcelona immediately. As we left the Ciutadella, we found that the other parks on the map were not on the same scale. Most were paved, barely wide spaces in the road. What we were seeing was more like a glorified bike path. A nice one, don’t get me wrong, and it would be hard to expect that kind of extravagance to extend for miles. We started to feel the miles. Then the park area ended and we were on ordinary city streets. We saw that La Rambla is a very special, extremely old part of Barcelona, and that the rest of the city is more modern and practical. Translation: not as scenic. This does help to bring perspective and a more well-rounded perception of a city, and it also leads to more reliance on the guidebook, as we realize that these guys know whereof they speak.
We reached La Sagrada Familia, a famous Gaudi building that remains incomplete to this day. The front and back are done in completely different styles. If you stare straight up at it, it appears to be endlessly falling toward you. It’s spooky and kind of atrocious. I found myself spilling forth forgotten Biblical lore, as I was able to explain Catholic iconography that was unfamiliar to my man. It never occurred to me, while I was absorbing all of that in my youth, that it would be useful as reference material. We went across the street to an information booth and booked a tour for the next day, our last. I had three options in mind, and two of them… only ran on the other six days of the week. Guess we’re going to Montserrat then! We took the Metro back downtown, an exercise in WHY U NO RESTROOMS? The Barcelona Metro has to be the only place in all of Spain that doesn’t have continually mopped, gleaming floors. It’s also the only place we went where people were not polite and cheerful. A man in a suit completely shoulder-checked me, then froze in place, not acknowledging me in any way, before walking off. It was one of those moments that could have really sealed my impression of the city, if I hadn’t stayed long enough to know it was anomalous. Spaniards are deeply warm and generous people. Maybe he had a headache, I dunno. Maybe he wasn’t Spanish. When we got downtown, almost everything was closed. Sunday evening is not a rollicking time to be in Barcelona. We had planned on the street festival, which was supposed to run until 21:30. The location didn’t come up on any of our map apps. We found a small grocery store that was still open and picked out things for the next three meals. Then I took the plunge into the ultimate test of my language skills. I asked the clerk if he knew the address. He said no, and called over a young woman to look at the map, but she didn’t know either. Then a customer, who seemed to have had several beers already that day, asked to take a look. He said he knew it and gave me directions. We thanked him heartily and set off. The address was indeed where he said it was; the sign matched, at any rate. Disappointingly, nothing was going on there, and we triple checked the date and time. Impressively, I had totally, totally succeeded at asking for, receiving, and understanding directions in Spanish, even though I have, shall we say, below-average navigational skills. So that was the second of our plans for the day, although the unplanned day we had instead was a pretty darn good trade. We went back to camp, ate dinner, and stayed up late washing our clothes. We didn’t have much choice in the matter, but we were getting up at 6 AM to make our tour. Our first full day in Spain! We wake up to a comparatively sunny morning, only maybe a hundred yards from the Mediterranean. There’s a fence in the way, but you can totally see the ocean from our campsite if you stand in the right spot. The jet lag problem is over and all is well. We’ve been here fewer than 24 hours, and we already know our way around. We have a place to sleep, we have groceries and stove fuel, we know where the bus stops are, we’ve been on the most pertinent routes, we can find the store and the Starbucks, and we have wi-fi and power. This makes a big difference in our confidence and comfort. The only things we have to do today are to eat lunch and choose some interesting activities. Getting ready for the day at a camping is a bit high maintenance. We have to gather up everything we need to shower and change clothes and carry it back and forth across camp. We have to figure out how to dry our towels. After we eat breakfast, we have to wash our dishes and pack them away again. I’m not kidding when I say that you can add a mile to your day in camp just by going back and forth to the restroom and doing basic chores. There’s about a half mile a day involved in going back and forth to the bus stop, also. It’s all part of the trip. We’re learning about how French and Spanish people vacation, feeling the climate, spotting new birds, noticing different/foreign design elements, trying to read signs, hearing various languages, watching how kids interact with each other and their parents, and on and on. For instance, probably ¾ of the dogs we will see during our trip are off-leash, but they are preternaturally well behaved. It defies credulity. There should definitely be a TV show called “Train Your Dog the Spanish Way.” We’re still on the “wing-it method” and we have to come up with a plan for how to spend our day. This is another idea based on our trip to Iceland. We had three weeks there, and most of our stops were very small towns by California standards, so there was always plenty of time to see every single thing on our wish list. Spain cannot be “done” in one trip. Spain is so full of awesome stuff that it makes me hyperventilate a little. I had gone on a planning extravaganza, marking dozens of places on my Pinboard, skimming every guidebook in the public library published this century, and marking favorites on TripAdvisor. This is a guaranteed recipe for FoMO. If you lived in Spain for a year and spent all your spare time visiting museums and historic sites, you still couldn’t see everything worth seeing. In retrospect, it might have worked out better if we had each picked one must-see for each city. We decided to walk around La Rambla because of its high rating in the guidebook. Hands down, La Rambla is one of the coolest places in the world. Everything we see is worth a photo, and as a consequence, I don’t really take any. I had read the advice to avoid taking “postcard shots,” because there’s no way an amateur with an ordinary camera will be able to take that kind of perfect shot. I focus on odd corners that stand out to me. We venture into a bookstore, looking for a birding guide, something I never manage to find during the trip. I find a cookbook I really want, and realize that my Spanish is good enough to get me through most of the recipes without help. Then I picture how beat up it will be after two weeks in my pack, and I pass. We eat lunch at a natural foods restaurant that would fit right in where we live in SoCal. Spain is very much on the cutting edge when it comes to allergen labeling, dairy alternatives, and especially gluten-free baked goods. We both eat wheat all the time, but we notice. What we’re experiencing is the opposite of the picture all the guidebooks have given, which is that Spaniards eat nothing but jamon, sausage, and steak. Special diets can be a real area of concern for so many of us who would love to travel more, but have no way of knowing what we would eat. It looks as though the hospitality industry is alert to this and starting to make serious accommodations. After lunch, we “ramble” around some more and make our way down to the water. There’s a huge monument to Christopher Columbus. We head toward the maritime museum, but never make it inside, because there happens to be a replica 18th century Russian frigate docked there. We pay about $5 for the pair of us to board and take a tour. This is one of those moments when the bucket for the bucket list has to get supersized. It turns out that this ship – and others like it around the world – goes out a few times a year for sailing adventures. My husband is well-versed in the history of the Napoleonic Era, particularly naval battles, so I quiz him a bit about life on a frigate. When he tells me how many men would sail on a ship this size, I freak out. Where did they sleep?? The more we travel and visit historic homes, ships, fortresses, etc, the more I am impressed with how little personal space people seemed to expect. Next, we walk up the waterfront to a park. We’re planning to get up to Montjuïc. It turns out there is a funicular cable car involved. Man, I hate those things! It will be such a blip on the trip overall, just a few minutes out of two weeks, but for me it’s a real test of physical courage. I want to jump out and run screaming down the hill. Not only does it sway quite a bit, but a fiendish whistling wind blows through and I start swearing. Then I spot an interesting bird and get distracted. Is that… a magpie? They’re everywhere. I’ve never seen a magpie in nature before. There are no crows in Europe (!!!), so it’s always interesting to spot any other kind of corvid. We’re going to an historic site that has been in continuous use for over a thousand years, and all I can think about are birds. This is why we can’t quit museums. We’ve chosen this particular site because it’s at a high elevation and it seems like one of the more famous parts of the city. The first thing we notice is that the ticket taker is a polyglot. I ask her, and she speaks four languages. Four languages in the US probably qualifies you to be an ambassador. In Europe, speaking four languages is probably equally as common as speaking only one. The next thing we notice is that Montjuïc is obviously a highly proficient fortress. Hundreds of people could survive a zombie attack here. It’s only when we start wandering through the displays and reading the placards that we find out its history is much more complex. It has been a prison and a place of execution. It started as a lighthouse, and was continuously expanded and rebuilt, showing in various incarnations in period drawings and illustrations over the centuries. In the beginning, as early as the 10th century, it was a Jewish cemetery. What we’ll see over and over in Spanish museums is evidence of the overlapping of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim culture, and a frank admission that non-Christians were expelled in 1492. It is humbling to be an American and to know that nothing in our entire nation even remotely approaches the age of so many of the places we visit in Europe. It is also a solemn experience to read over disquieting events from the past that involve only other nations and cultures. We can read about a battle or other event, not have any vested interest in either side, and take it in as sad or unnecessary. We can imagine having written history that dates back to antiquity, as well as corroborating physical culture, and acknowledging that this history includes atrocities as well as triumphs. It’s humbling. It also seems difficult for Americans to do, perhaps because we’re still such a young country. We always know it’s about time to wrap up the day because the temperature starts to drop and the wind kicks up. We spend almost all our time outdoors when we travel, and it tends to induce an early-bird schedule. We decide to walk downhill through the park and head for the Magic Fountain. It’s a succession of lovely smaller parks, fountains, and topiary. We notice dozens of people sitting on the steps outside of a closed museum, and we figure there must be something going on. This is a moment of serendipity, even more so than discovering the replica frigate earlier. About a minute after we sit down, a troupe of young male gymnasts puts on a breakdancing performance. They’re all in matching tracksuits, and it’s plausible that they compete. They pass the hat, we throw in a euro, and I say, “You guys were awesome.” The young dancer brightens and seems about three times as flattered by this as I would have expected. I’m still trying to think of a compliment that would make an American react this way. As we head down the hill toward the fountain, we notice that some very big crowds are gathering. There is a little food booth, and I glance at the menu to see if maybe we should get a snack. Chips, popcorn, nachos, soda, champagne, rum, vodka… I’m tickled by the idea of nachos and champagne side by side. Watching the Magic Fountain is an exercise in modernity. The fountain itself is very impressive, far beyond anything we’ve seen in Las Vegas, and the show is worth getting sprayed a little. The modern part is that about half the crowd are holding up their cameras, phones, and selfie sticks, mostly trying to take video. I can guarantee that none of the videos will be worth watching. There’s no way that a wobbly, blurry video with tinny sound is going to impress anyone at home. It’s a light show, so no photo is going to give the effect of the dozens of colors either. All that’s happening is that everyone who holds up a camera blocks the view of everyone in the back. I wait until a relatively camera-free moment to take a shot, and only realize later that the picture worth taking was the one with the hundred lighted rectangles. How do we know we experienced anything until we’ve seen how we looked while we were there?? We head home and my husband appears to magically summon a bus on command. I’m concerned as we head back to camp; we’ve left all our stuff unattended for over 12 hours. It isn’t so much that we were worried about thieves as about curious children. I have a spooked moment when we walk up and see one of our chairs is tipped over, but it turns out to have been the wind. Everything is fine. We still have a perfect 100% record of safety in Europe, and nobody has ever seemed remotely interested in our gear. I hear differently about hostels, probably because they include travelers from all over the world, while campings are full of local families and people who come to the same spots year after year.
We eat a late dinner and go to bed. We have walked just over 11 miles and seen everything we could see in a day. Four beds in four nights. Well, technically it’s going to be two beds in 3+ locations in four nights, since one of them is a continually moving seat in an airplane and another is a sleeping bag. None of them are in the same country. I woke up in my own bed, spent a weirdly short night in a tin can next to the doppelgänger of Simon Cowell, physically closer than I would be to my own husband the next night in twin German hotel beds, and now I’m going to be an inch off the sandy Spanish soil on an airbed. Somewhere. But where? We’ve spent the entire day on the move. We woke up early. I snapped awake at 2:30 AM Hamburg time, despite the fact that I had slept so little the past two days. There was nothing for it but to decamp to the bathroom, where I could turn on a light and get some work done for a couple of hours. My husband had had a few days to adjust to jet lag, and he slept soundly all night. I managed to drift off again in the lovely soft bed, just enough to be terribly groggy when the alarm went off. Now I’m trying to keep alert. Every single thing we do for the next several hours is important. Any object we leave behind will cause either logistical problems, financial outlay, or security concerns. Any wrong turn we take could lead to missing a transportation connection, plus the fact that we don’t speak the language and we wouldn’t know where we were. We have a lot of ground to cover. We eat protein bars for breakfast, check out of the hotel, and cram our huge packs into a cab to the airport. My husband’s business suitcase and laptop bag are artfully packed together and shipped home. He won’t be needing any suits or ties where we’re going. Airport business takes focus. It’s in short supply for me right now. My boots set off the scanner and I go through secondary search. I have no idea what to expect. The uniforms and the stern language are giving me fantods. All that happens is that I sit down, take off my boots, they go through the scanner, and a distracted guard hands them back to me and wanders off. We keep having to hand over passports and tickets and answer very basic questions, like where we’re from. This takes much more concentration on my part than it should. I say “Huh?” a lot. Being on a plane where every announcement and sign is in another language makes this whole enterprise feel both real and unreal at the same time. I think I’m going to get away with “Wasser, bitte” but the questions keep coming and I have to revert to Anglisch. German women have the most devastatingly translucent complexions. It’s like a dream in which beautiful people fade in and out of your awareness, asking incomprehensible questions, and suddenly you’re in a totally different country with totally different weather. We’re in Barcelona! Now what? Check it out. We’re standing in an airport with 75 pounds of backpack between us. We have: No place to stay No friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, or social networking referrals No transportation No dinner Weaker language skills than a parrot who sits near a TV that plays telenovelas all day This is what middle-aged suburbanites do for fun. Pull the carpet of comfort out from under yourself and test your powers of resilience. Start by squabbling over who has to walk up to the Tourist Information booth, and resort to the internet instead. It really only takes about ten minutes of focused effort to figure out what to do next. This is because we’ve done a certain amount of advance research and we believe we can travel through Spain the same way we did through Iceland four years ago. We’re going to a camping. We find one on the map but we can’t immediately figure out how to get there by bus. We look for campings on a map app, but one campsite symbol turns out to refer to an outdoor store in a huge mall. Good thing we didn’t head straight there! We search to see if there are other campings, read reviews for the three in the vicinity, and see that the blog we’ve found includes bus directions. Hallelujah! We have to get downtown to catch that bus, even though it’s the opposite direction and we’re only three miles from the camping right now. There’s a bus directly outside that only goes to the city center. We board it, figuring that we can solve our next most immediate problems before setting up camp. Those are groceries, a propane canister for our backpacking stove, and a replacement bottle of melatonin, since everything I brought was saturated by my leaking deodorant bottle. We’ve spent ten minutes in the place of uncertainty and emerged with a plan. This is one of the sacred mysteries of the nomad. It’s what makes experienced travelers so charismatic. We build an emotional tolerance to having absolutely no idea what to do next. Just a few minutes ago, we were exhausted, stressed out, and annoying each other. Now we’re still exhausted, but we have a sense of purpose, and we’re outside the airport drinking in our surroundings. Hello, lovely nice Spaniards! Hello, bold Spanish architecture! Hello, sign in Catalan that I can’t read! Riding a bus through a famously beautiful city never loses its novelty. Every single thing we see is fascinating. There are familiar elements: young people interacting with their cracked phone screens, people riding bikes and pushing strollers and walking dogs. This is what sharpens the eye. So much is familiar but so many small details are unfamiliar and surprising. For instance, we notice right away that one of the most common breeds of dog in Spain either is, or is closely related to, a rat terrier like our own Spike. Almost nobody uses a leash. Also, there seems to be a trend of wearing shirts with motivational sayings in English. The first thing we do when we reach the Plaça de Catalunya is to find a Starbucks. You either love them or hate them. We love that they have soy milk, wi-fi, and reliably clean bathrooms. Soy milk turns out to be pervasive throughout Spain, available in even the tiniest convenience store in the smallest town. Wi-fi is easy enough to find, although you have to ask for a password with your purchase, and the restrooms have a combination lock. We sit at a table, drink tea, and start mapping destinations. It turns out that we’re only a short walk from a grocery store and an outdoor store, where we can get everything we need. We pass a pharmacy on the way. The melatonin is a huge relief to me, because 20 years ago, apparently its sale was restricted in at least parts of Europe. I had read some rumors that were stressing me out. It’s about 4x as expensive as the stuff I buy at Costco, but I’m not going without it. We have to leave our packs at the front of the grocery store, where there are lockers and chains for packs like ours. We have no idea what to expect of the grocery situation; there were two occasions in Iceland when I bought the only can of beans in an entire store. We wander around for a while, looking at what’s on the shelves, confused by the lack of proper food, until we realize the produce and canned goods are on a basement level. We’re eating breakfasts and dinners in camp and looking for lunches near our activities in town during the day. We get breakfast cereal, cooking oil, curry powder, lentils, an onion, and the absolutely biggest chard we’ve ever seen. Then we get our packs back on and walk another quarter mile or so to the outdoor store. I spot a Fodor’s map on the sidewalk, marked with a partial boot print; it’s getting hit with a few light raindrops, and I don’t see anyone looking for it, so I snag it. We dub it “la mapa de basura.” This is a moment of complacency. We’ve found everything we needed, immediately, centrally located, with convenient hours. Wow, this is so easy! Spain is made for backpackers! Let’s just take our loot and bus on out to our camping like champions! We will be reevaluating all of this a week down the road. It starts to rain really hard. We’re chugging along the cobblestones, not really used to the weight of our hefty packs yet, and we’re carrying shopping bags. Fortunately, it’s at that moment that I realize we forgot to buy a lighter or matches for the camp stove. We really want to catch the next bus, because they don’t run all that often, and just in time I spot a newsstand and figure they’ll have lighters. This is another fortuitous moment that comes much too easily. Serendipity brightens a lot of moments for every traveler, but again, it can lull one into a false sense of security and dull the blade of cognition. We’re on the bus again. It’s heading toward evening. We’ve spent the entire day on logistical concerns, and we’re not done yet, but we have a sense of optimism. We’ve succeeded! We’ve made it from plush order in Hamburg to reckless disorder on the streets of La Rambla. We have everything we need from now until our first official sightseeing venture. The “wing-it method” is working out perfectly. We get off the bus at the proper stop, which unfortunately is about a ten-minute walk in the mud along a busy highway, but it’s stopped raining. This is important. We’ve counted on the fact that it may well rain on us every single day for the next two weeks, and we’re determined to have fun either way. We sign in at the camping, get the wi-fi password, and wander around, since we’re allowed to choose from any open spot. We find a grassy spot with electrical outlets, and we locate the restrooms. It takes about 20 minutes to pitch the tent, blow up our air mattresses and pillows, lay out our sleeping bags, assemble our folding chairs, and pull out the cooking gear. I wash the chard in the kitchen sink area, then tear half of it up by hand because it’s too outsized for our tiny backpacking cutting board. We eat our nice curry, feeling very pleased with ourselves, and check into the Hotel Denham, where I finally sleep a full night. When I wake up, we’ll be on Barcelona Time. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be sharing my experiences in traveling to continental Europe for the first time. I’m a nervous traveler and I like to pre-plan and organize as much as possible. My brain is always boiling with what-ifs. Indeed, I always manage to get myself into some kind of shenanigans because I misunderstood something. This trip was no exception! The first thing to know about Europe is the distinction between the continent of Europe, the European Union, and what is known as the Schengen Area. Young people, you may not have noticed this yet, but world geography and political borders will probably continue to shift over the next several decades, aka: “your lifetime.” This will affect any bucket list or checklist you may have. Take notes; there will be a test! You can go to a country like Germany without ever learning that distinction, but it does affect what currency you can use and whether you need a visa. If part of your travel fantasy involves collecting passport stamps, alas, they don’t give out as many as one would hope. Okay, so I was preparing for this trip by prematurely inducing jet lag in myself. This worked out well during the trip, but it did make me a little dopey and inattentive at home. I woke up at 4:15 AM and never stopped moving for the next 12 hours, getting my house and pets ready for nearly three weeks of absence. I wound up packing without using a checklist or triple-checking everything like normal. I forgot a micro-USB cable, of which I have at least half a dozen, and had to pay 15 euros for a new one. I also left without locking the dog door. On backpacking trips, I protect my pack by zipping it into an enormous canvas duffle bag, or “hockey bag.” It keeps any straps from getting caught or torn off. It also simplifies things. I know from experience that there will be between 30-42 pounds in my pack, so my luggage won’t be overweight. There is so much extra room in the hockey bag that if I forget anything, I can just toss it in and pack it more securely later. Extra socks? Zing! Nothing but net. (Mixing sport images…). I make sure this bag is waiting by the front door the night before I leave, so I don’t have any last-minute freak-outs. I also bring two folding nylon bags for the flight: a small day pack for my laptop and other essentials, and a shopping bag for my emergency food stash. I brought, in weight and volume, significantly more food than clothing. That’s clothing for the entire trip and food for the flight over.
I have used a shuttle service several times, and I hate them. The quality of the same brand is highly variable from one city to another. In my area, they always come early and they will try to leave without you, even if they’re 45 minutes ahead of schedule and they didn’t knock on the door. I wish I was making that up. This is the main reason my luggage is ready the night before. I don’t have to feel quite as sorry for the next passengers who miss their flights because the dispatcher assigned too many distantly scattered pickups to the same van. Don’t blame me, I’m an hour and 15 minutes ahead of what I originally booked! We use a car service because it’s still cheaper than the long distance parking lot at the airport. It’s the kind of expense that seems like a splurge, until you find that you can amortize it by booking a cheaper flight and/or cooking your own dinners during the trip. (Or only owning one vehicle). If you have a friend or family member who will even consider giving you a ride to the airport, even one time, treasure this person as a demigod. I’m a Trusted Traveler, which means I applied for a special program, paid the fee, got fingerprinted, had a full criminal background check, and went through an in-person interview. For this opening of the kimono, I get to go through the same short line as the first-class passengers, who could be felons for all we know. I can often keep my shoes on and I don’t always have to take out my laptop or my shower bag. At some airports, I still have to go through the same line as everyone else. At others, I also get secondary search and a body scan anywhere from 50-80% of the time. Outside of the US, my “trusted traveler” status means nothing whatsoever. The upshot is that it wasn’t really worth the time or the expense, even though I fly all the time. I get secondary search significantly more often now that I go through the “short line.” When I’m traveling with anyone else who isn’t in the program, I have to wait for them anyway. When you cross international borders, you get a little paper slip to fill out on the plane. “Anything to declare?” “Yes, I declare that it sure is muggy today!” You’re supposed to state whether you are bringing more than a certain dollar amount of cash or valuables, whether you are smuggling antiquities or exotic animals, and whether you’re unintentionally unleashing an ineradicable agricultural pest that will cause famine in nine nations. I took off from LAX, an airport that seriously deserves a makeover in a city known for them, and made my first stop in Heathrow, after awkwardly sleeping between both halves of a married British couple. This is one of those great travel technicalities. I’m in jolly old England! Except not! I didn’t get my passport stamped or leave the terminal. Do I “count” England as a place I’ve been? It’s something to consider, because they have anomalous electrical outlets, and with a three-hour layover one may need to charge a device or two. It’s a weird airport because I walked about a mile of hallways, motorized walkways, and escalators before reaching the line for security. I got my stuff scanned again, even though it had been through security in another highly secure area immediately before I got on the plane I just left. At this point, I had slept about 7 hours over two days. Jet lag is something you only intellectually understand until you’re caught up in it. Then you don’t intellectually understand much of anything. It is distinguishable from garden-variety drunkenness only in that it doesn’t come with little paper umbrellas and also is not fun. I wanted to participate a little and test out some of my nice fresh German language skills. On a plane, when you are so loopy from exhaustion that you can’t even calculate how many hours you’ve been traveling, which will add up to 19, is not the best place to do this. The next worst place is in going through Customs. So I’m standing in a line at the Hamburg Airport. The sign is blue with gold stars and it has “EU” and “CITIZENS” on it. I live in Southern California and I’m like super tired, okay? I read and understand this as “Estados Unidos” and I stand there. It takes me a full five minutes to realize I’m in the other line, the “All Passports” line. I go over there, get stamped, and then get completely confused by the gate. It looks like a railing to me and I turn around and start to walk back. “Hallo? Hal-LO!” calls the irate border guard. I’m turning in circles and about to make an international incident out of myself. My dog could have figured it out sooner than I did. Now I’m alone in a foreign country where I don’t have the verbal skills of einen kindergärtner. I have 50 pounds of luggage balanced between three bags. I make the mistake of collecting my pack before going to the ladies’ room, where I have to take it off and put it on again in an enclosed space, alone, like a camel dancing the hornpipe in a phone booth. I’m so cognitively impaired I could lose a trivia battle to someone who had been sniffing glue. It’s about to get dark. The goal is to get across town and meet my husband at the hotel. He’s already anxiously texting me to make sure I made it. This is one of those beautiful moments of trust in altruism. I simply write down the address of the hotel on a post-it, walk outside, find a cab a few yards from the door, and hand the note to the driver. We have a peaceful 20-minute drive, listening to Mark Knopfler, an artist I respect and whom I now realize has a Germanic name. We pull up and I pay him in the euros my husband gave me before he left. I do my best to convey my thanks. Usually, I like to interview/totally annoy cab drivers, asking them about their most memorable fares, what happens when someone barfs in their cab, etc. Riding with someone in a comprehension-free zone is a different kind of experience. I check in with completely fluent desk clerks, all of whom most likely speak at least three languages. I am told that my room is on the first floor, and I walk down the hall, seeing nothing but conference rooms. Now, I know the “first floor” in Europe is what Americans call the “second floor,” but hearing colloquial English (and being jet lagged) made me think they had made the cultural translation as well. I walk back, feeling sheepish and provincial, and take the elevator. I find our room, which is empty. My poor husband has gone downstairs to meet me. He comes in, looking like I have just been saved from drowning, and lifts me off the floor. I’m equally glad to see him, after nearly a week apart, but I’m self-conscious about my clothes and the 27 hours since my last shower. Guess what? In fifteen minutes, we’ll be going to a business dinner with his boss’s boss. Truth in advertising. Rachel Jonat’s minimalist book is minimalist. Do Less: A Minimalist Guide to a Simplified, Organized, and Happy Life is a great primer on the concept. Her own minimalist lifestyle only comes up on her blog: her family downsized and paid off $80,000 (Canadian) in two years. This stuff works! I flagged several pages as I read. I’ve been pursuing minimalism since before I knew it had a name, and ‘simple’ tends to be self-evident. Not always, though. There were some things that I hadn’t thought of before. Jonat starts with the kitchen, and that made me squirm a bit. My kitchen is the least minimalist part of my life. I love cooking and entertaining, and I’ve been known to spend three days cooking for dinner parties for 20 or more guests. We garden, can our produce, make jam, dehydrate our own backpacking food, and make a lot of large messes beyond what most people do in their kitchens. Jonat points out, however, that the famous chef and cookbook author Mark Bittman has a list of 25 items for cooking gourmet meals. That includes the knife sharpener. I have no idea how many individual doodads are lurking in my kitchen drawers; it’s about half of what it was when we first got married, our kitchen is small, but… It wouldn’t surprise me if I have closer to 250 cooking tools and appliances. That might or might not include canning jars, plates, cutlery, drinking glasses, serving platters, and let’s not even get started on the tablecloths. This really made me wonder whether having the constraint of fewer tools would lead to more creativity in my cooking. I still have more than 25 cookbooks. All right, Rachel: you caught me! Does it get used? How often? Am I using it just because it’s there and I feel obligated? Is more of my focus spent in the kitchen than I realize or intend? The introduction to Do Less harks to Steven Pressfield’s concept of “the unlived life.” This is the dream life, the life we wish we lived, as opposed to our actual life. This is the core of minimalism. Nobody else will come to the door and hand us an instruction manual, permission slip, or application for our unlived life. We have to make it happen ourselves. We fill up our homes with stuff and our schedules with inertia or random, unplanned “opportunities.” Then we envy other people who are going places we wished we were going or doing things we wished we were doing. The difference is that people with a plan get to follow the plan. People with no plan get results determined only in reaction to outside influences. Do Less is about evaluating and cutting away the inessential. What are we doing that isn’t really important, according to our own standards, values, and desires? How much are we being held back by our physical possessions? How much of our mental bandwidth is being eaten up by screen time and sleep deprivation? I can attest that the principles in this book are sound. The discipline of minimalism works. After evaluating and paring down the inessential in life, you can always add things back. There’s no requirement to live like a monk, although you can if you find that appealing. Having more time, physical space, money, and sleep is the kind of luxury beyond what most modern people can imagine. It is so, so worth it. Why would anyone choose to live in a rush, with clutter, debt, and exhaustion? Maybe we don’t choose because we don’t realize there is an alternative. Supernerds, this is a story for you. What happens when an academic sets out to rectify the vast imbalance between book larnin’ and practical skills? I became obsessed with foreign languages in grade school. I used to carry home stacks of foreign language dictionaries from the public library. I could hardly believe these books were allowed out of the building! When I took my first language class in seventh grade, I talked so much about “M. L--- this” and “M. L--- that” that my parents thought I had a crush on my teacher. Uh, I’m 12 and he’s 30 and has a beard? My crush was on the French language itself. You never forget your first… Oh, but there were others, so many others. I took Japanese in high school, and Spanish, Latin, and Attic Greek in college, to name a few. It wasn’t for many years that I realized my years of classroom study had not led to any proficiency in speaking or conversing. I mean, that’s the case for almost everyone in the US who has ever taken a language class, sure. What’s true for the majority has never mattered to me, since I think of myself as belonging to the 90th – 99th percentile. Unfortunately, that sets me up for fixed mindset problems. If I’m a “smart person” and I fail at something, then I must simply “lack aptitude.” It’s just not for me. Better to focus on something else where I can excel, right? We don’t like putting ourselves in positions where we’re awkward, where things don’t come naturally, where we might not be the best performers in the group. A new language puts us in the spotlight like nothing else. We literally can’t perform as well as diapered toddlers in using speech to communicate. It is really tough on the ego to go about with what feels like 1% of a complete vocabulary. I learned recently that about 90% of Americans self-identify as shy. That tidbit induced in me an epiphany of grand scale. I have been wrestling with what I thought of as shyness, to the point that I’ve been in a public speaking club all year, and I still struggle to force myself to stand at the podium for more than 30 seconds. I have felt a similar issue with signing up for Skype language exchange or lessons. Being on video is an emotional experience for me, something I really only do with people I’ve known for at least 20 years. These specifics may be unique to me, but the feeling of shyness obviously is not. Suddenly it felt like a cop-out. Feeling shy is like not wanting to wash dishes, put away laundry, or stand in line. Almost everyone feels the same way. I don’t let “not feeling like it” or “not wanting to right now” stop me from cleaning my house. I’m not going to let those aversive feelings stop me from speaking my beloved languages, either. What happened, though? What happened when I went to Spain and had to speak Spanish? Blame my husband. He told me he had me all figured out. He’s a more or less completely fearless extrovert with an extremely high pain threshold. If he wants to do something, he does it; if he wants to say something, he says it. He’s not particularly strong on grammar, spelling, or pronunciation, but he’s an aerospace engineer, so he doesn’t have to care. He has nothing to prove. His identity isn’t built around language proficiency. Alas, I’m more of a Hermione Granger type. He knows I can’t sit and listen to him mangle a question or conversation if I know how to get the point across. It’s not that I’m correcting him; I despise that characteristic in other nerds and I find that the “correctors” are incorrect more often than not. It’s just that the interlocutor is left hanging, putting in extra effort and politely trying to understand. It’s more efficient for me to take over. He was right about me, which is maddening, but helpful. Once he primed the pump, I would find that I was able to speak. He created a monster. Once I got over the initial speedbump of addressing a stranger in a foreign tongue, it wasn’t a big deal. I would quickly rehearse what I wanted to say. I went from “me Tarzan” level to confidently buying train tickets in just a couple of days. The first week, I was astounded that people clearly understood me, understood my accent, and responded the way I had hoped. This actually works?? Then I realized that this was one of the few areas where I had the advantage. My husband and I are both strong alpha types. He’s older, better traveled, has an advanced degree and a significantly stronger résumé, and seems to be good at everything. I asked him once if he could build a space robot that shot lasers out of its eyes, and, after confirming the specs, he said, “Yes.” Aha, but. Here we were in an unaccustomed role reversal. I could read all the signs. I mean, not to brag, but I once figured out whether a tub of margarine met my dietary requirements by reading the ingredients in Greek, because that was the one out of six languages on the package that I understood. He got nervous when we were physically running for a bus and the Catalan street signs didn’t match our Spanish map; I hadn’t even realized I was already mentally translating. I figured out the instructions for a German ticket scanner at the Munich airport. I read the French signs at Charles de Gaulle that got us to the tram. Suddenly, I was the natural leader with the unshakable confidence. This could get interesting. There are, as you know, four areas of language proficiency: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Most people perform at different levels in each of these four areas, even in their mother tongues. I have always been strongest at reading because it’s always been what interested me the most. I’m fair at speaking. I was fortunate to grow up in a multilingual neighborhood where I heard three or four Southeast Asian languages on a daily basis. My school also had music classes. I have a good ear and I’m a decent mimic. I’ll always have an American accent, obviously, but I have no problem pronouncing words and emphasizing the correct syllables. I can make a fair approximation of vowels and consonants that don’t occur in American English. What I found in Spain, though, was that I really, really need to work on listening comprehension. The trouble with speaking intelligibly, even at an A1 level like I was, is that the other person has no way of knowing how much you can understand. The better you sound, the more likely you are to find yourself suddenly drinking from the firehose. There is a proportional mismatch between the conversation topics we’d like to explore, and the conversation topics we will confront in an immersive experience. My first experience of this was going through secondary search at the Hamburg airport. Okay, I can read and understand a bit of German, but I had never covered security-ese. I was scared and I felt really dumb and useless. Almost all of the vocabulary I needed on the first several days of our trip had to do with safety and security regulations, luggage, maps, directions, and buying tickets to specific locations. We were also hit a few times by waves of commercial speech, such as a store greeter who gave up on us only after about four sentences of advertising jargon. There were times when the conversation I wanted to have, such as whether a store carried a specific style of propane canister, was beyond my abilities. Sure, I can look up the vocabulary to say what I want to say, but the response often turns out to be only 10-20% intelligible. I feel like I’m imposing on people and wasting their time. Sometimes we understand exactly what they said, but due to cultural context, we don’t understand what they meant. For the bar. For the bar what? Oh, you mean we can’t sit at this table unless we buy something. *facepalm* We found ourselves in a couple of surreal situations. We went on a tour of the Pileta Caves to look at Neolithic cave paintings. We were on a tight schedule and we just wanted in. We agreed to go with the Spanish-language tour that was just leaving. I was almost completely unable to understand the simplest instructions about using the lanterns, walking in single file, etc. There were entire sections of academic talk about geology, material culture, paint composition, artistic techniques, etc, that I understood perfectly. There were a few 7-year-olds in the group, and the Venn diagram of our comprehension probably had almost no overlap. A few days later, we went to the General Archive of the Indies, and I was able to translate the display text line-by-line with up to 80% accuracy. It’s much easier to confront text, because you can pause, re-read, and go at your own pace. Listening to a human means you have to keep up, even if someone coughs and you miss a word, even if that person is also a non-native speaker like you. When you’re shopping or buying tickets, the clerk may not be a native speaker, either; every person in the transaction may be using an unfamiliar language. The complications are amplified. Language study can be practical altruism in action. What I’ve found from being forced to speak is that it’s much easier than it seems. People anywhere other than the US tend to be really gracious and patient about listening to beginners speak. They will almost always correct your pronunciation or give you the word a native speaker would have used. If you attempt so much as a single word, it can often turn out that this person is perfectly fluent in English, and the transaction will be much warmer than it would have otherwise. Politeness formulas FTW. I’ve also found that listening to formal speech, such as a movie script or radio announcement, is a completely different skill than listening to spontaneous conversational speech. Conversation can be much easier, because people will slow down and accommodate you, but formal speech can be much more useful. “This is your captain speaking. Mumble bumble fumble.” I’m diving into language study in a different way now. Now I understand how useful it is to drill down on those transportation chapters. I also believe that once you’ve nailed down the six basic verbs, it’s best to learn nouns. It’s easier to be able to say “smurf me a [propane canister]” than to use perfect grammar and vocabulary and have to try to sketch that vital object you need. I felt pretty dumb when, after sleeping in a tent for a week, I realized that I didn’t know what a tent was called. I felt validated about all the time I spent reading when I was in my familiar stomping grounds (museums, signs, brochures, academic lectures), but there was this big glaring gap when it came to activities of daily life. I’ll keep studying. I’ll keep forcing myself to use the language abilities I have. I’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what I can do in a language: what I can communicate, rather than what I can consume. In ten to twenty years, I’d like to be pretty good. Turning dreams into reality can be equal parts exciting and disappointing. The reason for this is that we don’t account for all the externalities when we’re working on the fantasy aspect. I always throw myself into the deep end of the research pool when I become curious about something new, and this gives me a better chance of anticipating and eliminating some of the hassle. Not all, never all, but at least some. The truth is that traveling with a backpack is freeing in some ways, and difficult in others. I am fortunate that I have built a fitness level that allows me to carry my pack and sometimes forget I’m wearing it. Let’s talk a little about those pesky little laws of physics. I am 5’4” and I weigh 122 pounds. My pack is 65 liters in capacity. Don’t let that little yellow flower fool you. I had 35.5 pounds in there on our trip to Spain. That’s 29% of my body weight. My husband is 6’2”, a hockey-playing former lumberjack, and he was carrying 42 pounds. That’s 18% of his body weight. If he were carrying proportionally as much as I was, he’d be schlepping 70 pounds. I’ll tell you what else: I can carry 42 pounds as well. When I go backpacking without him, I still have to bring the tent, the stove, the pots, the food, and the first aid kit, even though the capacity of my pack is smaller. I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the fortitude of a freight train. It wasn’t always this way, not for either of us. We’re both fitter in our 40s than we were in our 30s. Like every last individual athlete I have ever met, we each have our story of illness, injury, and/or low fitness level. I had fibromyalgia and thyroid disease, I’ve dislocated a rib and a hip, I’ve broken my tailbone, and I had tendonitis in my ankle just last year. He had two herniated discs and he has some knee problems. What in the Sam Hill would either of us be doing in heavy backpacks?? (Seeing the world, saving money, getting stronger, not wasting our lives in front of a screen, etc). We got better. The other thing to know is that we both used to be fat. We’ve lost 100 pounds between us. Something profoundly interesting about our backpacks is that we used to carry around that much extra weight ON OUR BODY PARTS. The first time I stepped on a scale with my pack on, I freaked out. I realized that I used to see that same number right after I stepped out of the shower. It finally sank in that I had been walking around everywhere with the equivalent of a yard sale strapped onto my limbs. There were dozens of items in that pack. How could I have walked around a grocery store or gotten on the bus every day and never realized how much it was for my joints and spine to have to carry? My hubby has lost significantly more weight than I have. Forty-two pounds is a lot of extra weight for a person to carry. It’s harder when that person is dealing with chronic back pain. Anyone who knew about his herniated discs might try to stop him from putting on a heavy pack. Not a soul ever so much as whispered that he might consider taking off the weight – when it was made of adipose tissue instead of camping gear. We’ve established that we were both predisposed to carrying extra weight, one way or another. We had amply proved over the years that our skeletal structures could handle it. We never knew we were missing out on a different kind of experience, one that was vastly more rewarding. Now that we’ve tried it, it’s self-explanatory. We can go places that are inaccessible to people in cars. We can climb to heights we wouldn’t have bothered to attempt. We can see things we couldn’t have imagined from back home on the couch. I regret all the years I scoffed at hiking, and all the beautiful places of the world I could have seen. I never cared until I knew. Once I knew I wanted to travel the world with a tent and a backpack, I set out on a deliberate training plan. I had been running 5-6 miles a few days a week, often on a steep, muddy trail. I suggested that we go out on a test hike, carrying all our gear, and see how we did. We were bone-tired after three miles. The round trip was 12. My calves were so tight when we got home that I could barely shuffle a couple of inches per step. It was obvious we weren’t physically ready yet, but we had four months. We kept up our running routine. I started doing pushups, starting with two and working up to 100 a day. I was also shooting for a pull-up. I would go to the pull-up bar in the park down the street, jump up, grab it, and pull myself as high as I could manage. Then I’d drop to the ground and do it again for ten reps. Eventually, I was able to get my chin over the bar. On my non-running days, I’d put about 10 pounds of stuff in my trail pack and walk 6 miles. We made the most of those four months. I could barely pick up my pack at the beginning of our trip. I could, though. I could carry it. It got easier each day. I held myself to a higher expectation of physical exertion. I wound up running a marathon. I’m 40, and I plan to be stronger at 50 than I am today. I know it’s possible because we’ve met so many retired couples on the road who are in better shape than we are. In my chronic pain days, I could never have tolerated the conditions under which we travel. It’s not just the pack. It’s sleeping on an air mattress on the ground. It’s being outdoors in the cold and damp. It’s covering miles of cobblestones and uneven ground. It’s climbing endless staircases. It’s running for a train with the pack on. It’s bending and lifting and hauling and crouching and kneeling and reaching my arms over my head. Quite honestly, I often stop and wonder how it’s possible that my physical vessel could be doing all this. How am I not getting a migraine right now? The reason is that solid nutrition, sleep, and hydration can do about a thousand times more than we give them credit for. I ask a lot of my body, but I give it everything in return. My body is my vehicle, and it takes me everywhere I want to go. Packing for a trip is one of the all-time greatest opportunities to get completely spun up and anxious about something. Like anything from dance to public speaking, that anxiety dissipates with experience. The trouble is that choosing what to bring on a trip involves a lot of variables, from weather and rainfall to surprise invitations. I’ll need the gown and court shoes in case I’m invited to meet the Queen, and in that case I should definitely also bring the snorkel, the hard hat, the riding boots, and the sexy anteater costume. Men tend to have an easier time choosing what to wear because men’s fashion includes fewer options. My husband can buy his clothes in folded stacks at Costco. Traditional men’s clothes come in a narrower range of colors. They really only have three sleeve lengths, a few different shapes of collars, and either pants or shorts. I just looked at Utilikilts and even they only come in 8 styles, all the same length. Women’s clothing, on the other hand… I can go out and find a skirt or dress in every possible skirt length, from floor length (with or without train) to micro-mini, in ½” gradations. I can wear a tube top, halter top, tank top, tee, button-down, wrap, peasant blouse, Empire waist, cap sleeves, ¾ length sleeves, long sleeves, angel sleeves, and I’m boring myself at this point so I’ll stop. Every time I go on a clothes-buying expedition, I find at least one garment I can’t figure out how to put on. I’m not always clear on which part of the body it’s designed to cover… The main reason it’s harder for women to pack for a trip is that it’s harder for us to make sense of our wardrobes at home. At home, we tend to get wound around the axle about exactly what message our clothes will be sending. Is this too formal/informal, sexy/prudish, cute/boring, professional/casual? Which of these three pairs of black pumps work the best? Does this make me look fat? The more clothing we keep around, the more combinations, until the total potential number of outfits is simply dizzying. Most of it is like plastic sushi, only there for display purposes and to make the pick of the day look better. Having excess in your wardrobe is a completely different matter when you’re bogarting more than your half of a closet at home, versus when you’re defying the laws of physics by trying to carry it all up a flight of stairs in a suitcase. These are the criteria I have in mind when I plan what to wear on a trip.
I have a different list of reasons why something won’t make the cut.
I lay everything out in complete outfits on my bed. Pants in a row, tops in a second row, socks and undergarments stacked on top of each set. I can tell at a glance if I have enough of everything and if it coordinates. I can also tell whether I’ll want any accessories. Using a checklist has had varying levels of effectiveness for me, because I can sometimes manage to check something off while the item is in my hand, get distracted, and set it somewhere else. Or, I’ll wander off before the checklist is complete and then forget to check it again. Laying out complete outfits is good Kanban, and it often reminds me of other things, like sunblock. We just went to Europe for three weeks, and including what I wore on the plane, I brought two pairs of boots, four pairs of pants, one pair of thick tights, two sweaters, three long-sleeved shirts, a t-shirt, a cardigan, a sleeveless shell, a set of thermal underwear for pajamas, and a bikini. For outerwear, I had a light rain jacket, a stocking cap, gloves, a buff, and a pair of rain pants (actually lined warmups). I only wore the t-shirt on the single day it was warm enough. The sleeveless shell was meant for the plane transition from our hot SoCal weather to Hamburg, and it packed light, but I wound up wearing it during the trip one day when we completely ran out of clean laundry. I panicked, splurged, and packed one bulky tunic-length, cowl-neck sweater for our business dinner in Hamburg. Then I wore it at least three times and was extremely grateful to have it. I really, really wanted to pack a sundress, talked myself out of it, and never for five minutes felt warm enough to have worn it. My experience has been that I always wish I had brought more warm layers and never find an occasion to wear the hot-weather stuff. I figure a souvenir t-shirt would be available almost anywhere if the weather becomes unpredictably hot, and that’s a backup plan I’ve never had to engage yet. Beginners always worry about Not Looking Like a Tourist. You know what makes you look like a tourist? Going to tourist attractions. Riding specialized modes of transport. Using maps. Looking up and around at sights that local people usually ignore. The other thing that makes people stand out as tourists is body composition. By that I (also) mean height. I’m 5’4.” That makes me really short at home and fairly tall in Europe. I’m sometimes a head taller than adult Mediterranean men. My husband is 6’2” and he’s constantly ducking under door frames, hitting his head on light fixtures, or crouching while walking through passageways. The point I’m trying to make is that nobody will notice or care what you’re wearing unless you are truly dressed in an outlandish, surreal manner, and even then, it’s unlikely anyone would bother you about it. We find that we get better results when we dress in business casual, but there are plenty of locals everywhere in the world who go out in jeans, sneakers, and t-shirts, or athletic gear. “Looking like a tourist” helps you meet other travelers. I’m not always happy with what I have to wear on a trip. Sometimes I feel under-dressed and wish I had room for nicer evening clothes. I get tired of wearing the same things day after day. The upside, though, is that you can set up a slide show by outfit and make it look like you had a few really fast-paced, fascinating days jam-packed with activities! |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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