Ireland: sidetrip to Spain

In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .

What do I know about Spain? Virtually nothing. I know sangria, bullfighting, and flamenco. The bullfighting we can deal with right away: it’s a barbaric blood sport in which a guy dressed like a figure skater wearing floppy Mickey Mouse ears tortures a cow to death. Not my thing. As for sangria and flamenco, well, my Uncle Justin introduced me to those about twenty years ago. Justin and his wife Violet have a passion for things Spanish. Their house is decorated with Spanish-style furniture. This is dark, heavy stuff that looks like it came from a medieval torture dungeon. Anyway, some twenty years ago a flamenco bar opened in Toronto and Justin insisted that all the extended family come out for a night of sangria and heel stamping. So off we went, some ten of us, to drink sangria and watch the show. Well, maybe watch isn’t the right word.

You see, Uncle Justin likes a small drinky-poo now and again. Mainly now. This is a guy who has been pulled off a train by the police for being a little too dinky-pooed. This is a guy who disappeared on a Mexican beach for three days, wearing only a bathing suit (no shoes, no wallet, no shirt), because he met some other drinky-poo aficionados. Well, sangria is a Spanish drinky-poo. And after a few tubs of it, Justin turned the flamenco show into an, uh, inter-active event. Who needs lessons when you’ve had sufficient drinky-poos?

Anyway, Lithuanians were banned from that bar from then on.

So, that’s what I know about Spain. But hey, we got a really cheap flight to Barcelona so last Saturday we were on our way.

Now, I had hoped to learn Spanish in the days before the trip. Unfortunately work interfered and I had to leave the language lessons for the plane ride. No problem, or should I say, no problemo? By the time we landed in Barcelona I could say the following in Spanish: hello, please, thank you, one beer, Merry Christmas. Fully armed, I got the family on the Aerobus to the center of downtown Barcelona, the Place Catalyuna.

On a Saturday night, this place was rocking. There were people everywhere. There was dancing in the streets, musicians playing, street performers doing their thing. Many of the people were drunk English. The English love to whip over to Spain for the weekend to soak up sun and cheap wine. The first people we saw when we got off the bus were a gaggle of sloshed English secretaries looking for another night club to shake their pale Anglo hinnies in.

We caught a cab. Barcelona has millions of cabs and they’re cheap. Not only that, but most of the major streets have special lanes for buses and taxis only. Brilliant. Anyway, I showed the cabby an address. This was the apartment of a woman named Saskia. She’s the agent who booked us an apartment.

A travel tip here: when travelling with more than one child and staying in one location for more than a few days, book an apartment instead of a hotel room. Most hotels in Europe don’t accommodate four, or if they do they’re very expensive. An apartment is not only cheaper but it gives you room so that you can get away from your children (no small consideration). It also gives you cooking facilities, which saves money and hassle, and often has laundry, which is a life saver.

But Barcelona is such a popular destination that we had trouble finding an apartment for the days we wanted. The agent, Saskia, had one for the day after we arrived, but not for the first Saturday night. So she told us we could have her apartment for the first night at a very cheap price.

Fine.

Her address was in Barcenoleta, a residential area south of downtown. The cabby dropped us off on a narrow, dark street and took off. We looked around. The street was deserted and, well, a bit creepy. We rang the apartment doorbell. No answer. Great. We ran again. No answer. Thinking we had the wrong number we tried another and an English voice answered and told us that, yes, we had been pushing the right button for Saskia.

Great. So here we are, with our children, standing in a deserted creepy street in a county we don’t know anything about and the only sentence I can form in the language is "Merry Christmas! One beer, please."

Just then a taxis pulled out and Saskia jumped out, gushing apologies. She had been handling an emergency at another apartment. She let us in, took us up to her nice little apartment, showed us around, and then went to bed.

Dig it: she stayed in the apartment with us. In her own room. We hadn’t expected that. We thought she was going to give us her apartment for the night, but no; she was sharing the apartment for the night.

Strangely disconcerting. Also disconcerting was the fact that the boys were sharing a bed. Since they were wired from a day of travelling, this didn’t work too well and Max ended up coming into our bed for the night. He managed to keep Karen awake most of the night (I slept fine) and she woke up exhausted and crippled with a sore back. The joys of traveling with children.

As it turns out, Barceloneta is a fine little neighborhood; there’s nothing creepy about it. But the next morning we were off to the apartment we had booked for the duration, so we all bundled into another cab. The cabby, like many Spanish people, was not at all put off by the fact that we spoke no Spanish. Indeed, this encouraged him to speak more Spanish at us. I was sitting in the front with him, and so he directed his avalanche of incomprehensible questions and statements to me. I nodded stupidly and said "Merry Christmas" a few times. Eventually he figured out that I was Canadian and he got very excited. He started shouting "Alaska, Alaska" and then pulled out an envelope full of photos. So, here we are, bombing through insane Barcelona traffic while the cabby is shifting gears and showing me pictures of a vacation he took in Tokyo and Hong Kong. He had flown over Alaska to get there (he had pictures taken out the airplane window to prove it) and Alaska is, of course, the same as Canada, so we were practically neighbors. At least that’s what I think he said. I was more worried about dying in a head-on collision than in fostering international relations.

We got to the apartment and when we rang the bell the door opened immediately. What a relief. This was a classic old Spanish apartment building: there were worn marble stairs leading up a dark stairwell. A lot of stairs. And no elevator. Since our apartment was no. 3.1 I thought it would be on the third floor. Silly me. It was on the fifth. Ah, those wry Spaniards. So that my children wouldn’t feel bad about getting tired on the climb up, I paused halfway up and pretended to be short of breath. Boy, am I a considerate dad.

When we got to the apartment, with me pretending to be wheezing, we were greeted by the young woman who owned it: Madelena, or Magarita, or Manuella, or something like that. She had obviously renovated the apartment herself. What she lacked in skill and common sense she more than made up with in bad ideas. Like using two-by-fours as baseboards and attaching them to the walls with picture-hanging nails. Bad idea! Every time you walked into a room the baseboards fell off the wall. Or having a drying rack for the dishes but no draining board under it. Bad idea! You put the dishes in the rack and the water ran onto the floor. The place was decorated in early Ikea.

But it was an apartment in a very good location. There were shops and restaurants nearby, a serious shopping avenue a block away, and a huge and beautiful park just around the corner. This park houses several museums and Barcelona’s zoo, the largest zoo in Europe. While Karen took a nap I packed the kids off to the zoo and we spent a pleasant afternoon gawking at capybara and dik-diks. This zoo is also famous for having the only albino gorilla in captivity, Snowflake. A bonafide celebrity, Snowflake teases the audience by spending most of the time with his butt turned towards them, only occasionally turning around to let us look at his ugly kisser. And let me tell you, the strangest thing about this critter is not the white hair but the pink, and therefore eerily human, face. He looks a lot like my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Spanitz.

It was a good thing we hit that park on the first full day we were there, because the next day the weather started to turn. Now, as we all know, the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, but the rule is suspended during THE STORM OF THE CENTURY. That’s what the papers were calling it. The east coast of Spain was hit with rain storms of unprecedented fury while we were there. How bad were they? Beach resorts like Costa Brava and Costa Sol were hit so hard that they lost a) resorts, and b) beaches. That is, some resort buildings were destroyed by floods and several beaches were simply washed away by rough seas. No more beach. Bye bye sand. You can imagine that a number of Brits are a bit worried about their May vacations right about now. Apparently thousands of them have prepaid for beach resort holidays in towns where there are no longer beaches or resorts. They’re going to end up in a tent on a mudbank.

It wasn’t that bad in Barcelona but it was windy and wet. Hey, I get that back in Ireland. Who needs this crap in Spain? But we were stuck with it and so we planned a lot of indoor activities. Now, for Karen and I, that means museums. But it’s a funny thing about children: museums entertain them for about five minutes and that long only if the displays include mummies, animals, or mummified animals. So to placate them we had to take them to shops. Now, one of the other joys of traveling with children is that the shops they want to go into sell exactly the same sort of crap that they can buy back home. Like Lego. Why would my youngest son want to buy Lego in Spain? Why should I spend two hours looking at Lego in Barcelona? It’s not different Lego. There’s no bullfighting Lego set, or little brick Lego Flamenco dancers. It’s just Lego. But look at it we did. And my oldest son needed to find Warhammer. For those of you who don’t know, Warhammer is an elaborate war and strategy game that is played with incredibly expensive miniature figures sold by authorized dealers. It is exactly the same in every country in the world and stores that sell it are all exactly the same, but it was the only thing that my son wanted to see in any of the big cities we visited. I now know where to buy Warhammer in Paris, Rome, Dublin, and, you guessed it, Barcelona.

When we weren’t looking at crap that we could buy back home, we were eating. When you live in Ireland for a few months, you think a lot about eating: about eating things with "taste" and "texture"; about eating things that aren’t deep-fried or served with chips; about eating in a restaurant without having to mortgage your house.

This is how Spanish eating works. You get up bright and early and have a coffee and a bun. Then you go to work. At 10:30 or 11 you take a break and have a snack, usually a sandwich. This is also the time when you start drinking. It is a little disconcerting to see airport traffic controllers and cardio-vascular surgeons polishing off a bottle of wine this early in the day, but it doesn’t phase the Spanish.

Then you have lunch at 2. This is the main meal of the day. Most stores close from 2 to 5 so people can have lunch. Lunch is so important that all but the most expensive restaurants are required BY LAW to serve a set menu at lunch, the "menu del dia." This is a three-course meal that costs between 6 and 9 euro. The restaurant by our apartment put one on for 7 euro. One day I had a chick pea soup, veal and potatoes, and a crème catalana (a local specialty) for that price. And let me tell you, it was a bargain. They give you crippling amounts of food, Brobdignagian portions. The soup alone was worth 7 euro. Hell, it was worth twice that since it was a meal in itself; it would have fed a whole family of non-Lithuanians. And if you ask for wine with your meal, as Karen and I did, they don’t bring a glass; no sir, they bring a bottle. At 3 euro, who’s going to argue? Not me.

When you finish your lunch you are pole-axed, stuffed, beyond bloated. You want someone to shoot you, to pump your stomach, to induce vomiting. Standing, let alone walking, seems theoretical, something you were capable of years ago but no longer. All you can do is look around warily for a whaling ship that might be baring down on you, the harpoonist screaming "Thar she blows!" as he prepares to launch a ten-foot barbed spear into your blubbery side. With help from a passing forklift you make it to your feet, and all you can say is "I’ll never eat again," as you roll home to take part in that other Spanish tradition, the siesta. The siesta, then, is not an option; it IS going to happen. You ARE going to pass out so you might as well have a cultural excuse for it. See, after that pig-out, consciousness is painful since all the blood in your body has left your brain to circulate around your distended gut. So you sleep till four. When you wake up, you’re still stuffed from lunch. Six o’clock? Still full. Seven? Not hungry. It’s not until 9:30 at night that you realize you could, maybe, have a bite to eat. So you go to a tapas bar.

Now, tapas bars have been appearing all over the world. There are a dozen in Vancouver. And they suck. They get it wrong. And the reason they get it wrong is because non-Spanish people on non-Spanish schedules in non-Spanish cities don’t eat at 10 at night in preparation for going to a nightclub at 1am.

How do they work in Spain? You sit at the bar and there are heaps of different types of foods before you: chicken wings, clams, seafood salads, different vegetables, sausages. You point at what you want and if it’s a cold dish, it’s thrown on a small plate for you right away. If it’s hot, it’s whisked off to the chef who warms it up for you before it’s put in front of you. You order a couple, then eat them while you talk and drink. A while later, you order a few more. And so it goes for hours. Because you had that siesta, you’re not tired; because you’re Spanish, you can talk forever; because the food and drink is cheap, there is no reason to leave.

And what to drink? Well the favorite drink in Spain is cavas, which is Spanish champagne. It is very good and very cheap. It’s so good and cheap that after finishing a bottle you may be tempted to have another. And perhaps one more after that. They you’ll wake up the next morning with a throbbing headache.

Or so I’ve read.

Now, Barcelona is not only an exciting cosmopolitan city full of museums, nightclubs, and restaurants, it is also a city of architectural marvels. And the main marvel is this: how did the Barcelonians decide to let a lunatic be their architectural guru? The lunatic was, of course, Antoni Gaudi. Born in 1852, he started practicing as an architect in the 1880s. He doesn’t seem to have liked things like "right angles." Nor did he like wood or brick. No, he like swooping, curvy buildings made of ceramic bits and abstract mosaics. He liked to decorate things with statues of drooling lizards and broken tiles. He liked pillars that branched off in eccentric directions and towers shaped like trees. His work became so complicated that the church he designed, the Sagrada Familia, IS STILL BEING BUILT. People have been working on it for 115 years! And I mean working on it. We went there; there are crews of people banging away at this thing, but it is nowhere near finished, not even close. I predict that our grandchildren will not see its completion, it is that bizarre and complicated. What has been built looks like a cross between one of the elf sets in Lord of the Rings and Disneyland’s Adventure Land covered in concrete. It’s the only church I’ve seen that has turtles and geckos worked into its design. Geckos? You know, I’ve read the bible, and I don’t remember any mention of geckos. Have I been reading the wrong one? Is there a Gospel of the Lizard?

How nuts was Gaudi? He spent the last few years of his life living as a virtual hermit in a basement apartment, fine tuning the Sagrada Familia and becoming more and more devoted to obscure theological symbolism, presumably involving reptiles. One day he was on his way to church and he was struck and killed by a streetcar. He was dressed so shabbily that he was assumed to be a vagrant and his body lay unclaimed for weeks.

Yeah, that’s the guy that I want designing my city.

But really, how did this guy get more than one commission? I mean, after he bankrupts his first clients by designing something that will require bizarre building materials and end up looking like a melted birthday cake, who hires him again? Barcelonanians whacked on cavas is my guess.
So it was a good trip. Barcelona is a very hip city, almost too hip. Because it is so cosmopolitan at times you don’t feel like you’re in Spain at all. Of course if the weather was better, maybe you would. Anyway, if I return to Spain I will try to get into a smaller town, out in the country, some place where my incredible command of the language will really come in handy. I shall try to go at Christmas.

But the adventure wasn’t over yet. We landed back in Shannon airport and cleared customs. Once again, we were waved into the country without a second look. I have now entered this country FOUR TIMES and have yet to receive a stamp on my passport from an Irish official. I predict that when we leave this country at the end of June we will still not have received such a stamp and so I’ll have no proof that I was ever here.

A strange way to run a border.

Anyway, we hopped in the car and settled down for the drive back to Galway. It’s a good hour-and-a-half drive but I’m used to it now and the road between Shannon and Galway is, by Irish standards, a superhighway: it has two lanes the whole way. We’re about half way home, making good time cause there’s no traffic on the road, when I see something up ahead. What could it be? Not a car. It’s a person, but surrounded by something else. Crap on a stick! It’s a horse. No it isn’t; it’s eight horses! Eight goddam horses running around on the highway. There’s an old guy who has a rope tied to one of the beasts, but the others are running free. There are two women who are attempting to herd them by waving their arms in the air. This works just about as well as you think it would. The horses ignore them and run back and forth, sniffing at hedges, whinnying at other horses in fields, and generally getting out of control.

Now I have explained in a previous letter that horses make me nervous. They’re big, they’re really dumb, they have sharp hooves, and coffin-shaped heads. And these particular horses were really big and really dumb. And they were starting to gallop. At me. At my car. Anyone of these monsters could climb over the Citroen and reduce it to tinsel in a second, and here come eight of them. At the last minute they veer away and gallop the other way. Then one of the women who is trying to control them runs up to us. I roll down the window and am about to say, in my gentle way, "Get the fucking horses of the road" when she asks for a ride and, before I can answer, opens the back door and climbs in with the kids. The horses, she explains, are out of control.

Really? They don’t normally gallop at cars on the highway? Well imagine that.

She asks us to drive her up a ways so she can get ahead of them and help herd them. Fine. I drive ahead, wait until the beasts are all on one side of the road, then zip ahead and let her out. She thanks me and runs back to deal with horses that still show no sign of being corralled. They’re probably still running on the road. They should be in Galway by the end of this week.
Now, I’m no horseman and I’m no farmer, but I’m going to guess that the most efficient way to move a bunch of horses from one field to another is NOT to put a rope on one and then turn the rest out onto a highway and hope they’ll prance merrily into their pen. Why not rope them together? Not enough rope? Then take them one at a goddam time. But that, apparently, is not the Irish way.

Got home, drank a beer to calm down, and then noticed something very strange. The sun was shining. This happens so rarely on the west coast of Ireland that it enters folklore ("Aye, I remember the time the sun shone back in ’83. Like a great ball of fire in the sky, it was. It lasted almost 15 minutes…"). Apparently when we were in rainy Spain, Ireland had been experiencing full days of radiant sunshine.

The next morning we awoke to rain and wind.

Adios for now.