My Stay in Barcelona
My stay in Barcelona is one I always will remember as unusual. I’ve quite a lot of experience traveling. My favorite thing to do is to put my bicycle on an airplane and go somewhere foreign and spend a few weeks going from city to city. The lovely thing about countries that have been around longer than the United States is that the cities are never more than one day apart on bicycle because they were all founded long before motorized traffic.
Thus my first divergence from my normal travel. When I traveled to Spain I still took my bicycle but I planned to stay within a single city for the entire stay. Always before I rarely stayed in the same place for more than a few days. Having been to Ireland, Japan and Australia cycling from hostel to hostel after a day or two in the local hostel had always been lovely but I had determined that I would stay in Barcelona for the entire trip. My bicycle still came with me because my grandmother’s German streak of conserving money didn’t run deep enough to deter the purchase of the airplane ticket but still encouraged me to save on cab fares. Plus when flying internationally a bicycle counts only as a single piece of luggage because it falls under the “sporting goods” classification. And finally I just love biking. I had ridden my bicycle along the coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and figured that it was time to add the Mediterranean to the list.
The second difference is that for the first time in my life I was going somewhere foreign to me not only in nationality but also in language. Speaking English is absolutely the best skill to have when you travel because there’s always someone somewhere nearby that you can communicate with. Especially in Ireland and Australia. When I went to Japan I had the advantage that I studied the language in college so despite my lack of fluency I was still able to say what I needed to with a little aid from my compact dictionary. But in high school I had taken French so to this day the only Spanish I know is what little I have learned from Sesame Street and various restaurant menus.
The third difference was that I was not staying at a hostel at all during my trip. Up until then I always did. They are wonderful places to stay and given a choice I will usually choose to stay at one. The biggest difference in my mind is that if you stay in a hotel at the end of the day you end up in your room watching TV. In a hostel at the end of the day you sit in a common room with a dozen strangers from a dozen different lands and tell stories about yourselves. That alone is worth the price of admissions. But on this trip I decided to stay in a holiday rental. Hostels are a lovely place to stay for a few days at a time and I would even consider them for a longer stay but I had never done a holiday rental before and wanted to try it if only for the sheer novelty.
For all those differences though I still wouldn’t recall that trip as unusual. The thing that makes it unusual happened on the first day I was there. I had arrived at the airport and after getting lost twice managed to get to the rental. I unpacked quickly mainly because I travel lightly and then went to the nearest market. When I got back and began to prepare dinner things were normal enough but as I set the pasta to boil and went to set the table I found that the dishes were Noritake Colorwave.
Suddenly my mind was sent back to my Grandmother’s kitchen for Thanksgiving dinner. I, being the tallest of the grandchildren, was always chosen as the one to pull down the nice plates from the high shelf. My grandmother loved those plates and to this day I couldn’t name any other plate maker or style I might see but after years of being asked to, “…get down the Noritake.” that’s something I’ll never forget.
I’ve traveled a lot and usually I would be away from home for four or five weeks at a stretch. Sometimes in the third week I would get a little nostalgic for the people back home but not what I would call homesick. Though I may have had a fleeting longing to be with them again it was never deep and moving. But my grandmother had just passed on eight months earlier and I can still remember being homesick for the first time in my life and on the first day of my trip. After that night I went on to have a wonderful two weeks in an amazing city but that feeling I got that first night still amazes me when I think about it.