You know the weirdest part about traveling within Europe? The complete lack of jet lag.
I wasn’t prepared to hit the ground running in Barcelona, especially when airport delays meant that we woke up at 7am, and only finally arrived in our hotel at 4:30pm. But we weren’t especially sleepy at all, and it felt exactly like 4:30pm. In other words: we weren’t jet-lagged. We were, however, hungry.
Ever try to get a decent meal in Barcelona at 4:30pm? Not going to happen. There were those sketchy-looking all-you-can-eat places with some wilted tourists out front, but I remember my mother saying she got food poisoning from one, and my stomach has enough trouble traveling as it is. After a good twenty minutes of walking, Nick found a pizza place that calmed the raving psychotic that is me with no food, and we were ready to wander into the Old City.
Having already discovered that my Spanish is a bit rusty (I told the cab driver a whole long story involving “There was I be here three years visit“) and my Catalan is even worse (although “rebaixes” is, quite possibly, my favorite word ever), I was a little wary, but we had a guide book at the ready, and “sangria” is the same in any language.
Actually.
About the guidebook: it just feels wrong, and I blame Nick. I mean–you should hear the way he scoffs at poor innocent tourists in Paris, even the ones who aren’t being especially obnoxious. And yet there he was, stopping every two feet to snap pictures, dragging out the maps at each turn, and asking for the English menu. I, on the other hand, am somehow left with the residual guilt that leads me to try to order food in Catalan, which–have I mentioned that I don’t speak Catalan? “Go, linguist-girl,” he says, gleefully shoving me into the fray before nearly being run down by yet another bicycle that he was too busy gaping at the architecture to see coming.
Anyway.
It’s lovely to be in decent summer weather; I had almost forgotten what it was like. And today Nick’s colleagues have arrived, so we have some experts to steer us away from places like the horrific tapas restaurant that we went to last night.
I get European service, okay? This was not that. This was our waitress bringing us our wine and then disappearing for an hour-long break without letting us even order food. And, of course, none of the other wait-staff would come anywhere near us once they saw the bottle of wine and realized that we were, technically, someone else’s table. It’s probably the only time I’ve ever not tipped at all–even after we finally got our first round of food, it was so impossible to get anyone else’s attention that we lost patience and demanded the check, going home with our three meager tapas rattling around in our otherwise empty bellies.
Nick eventually started making phone calls during one of the interminable waits–I tried to, as well, but my parents’ number now blocks unidentified callers, in a blatant attempt to keep me from calling while sitting beside the sea sipping rioja in Barcelona.
Oh…Mom? Ben? Um…we kind of went to Barcelona. I’m not sure that I mentioned. Be here ’till Sunday, tried to call, will send you a postcard. Sorry about that.