The Infamous Saggy Fam

Second, I wanted them to try the most delicious pizza of my life at my favorite Spanish Italian chain restaurant, La Tagliatella. With an interesting crispy, thin crust topped with eggplant, parmesan, honey, and balsamic vinegar, it’s almost nothing like a pizza, and yet incredible.

So we saw the Saggy Fam, then we toodled over for some more Gaudí at Casa Mila and Casa Batlló before the life changing pizza.

Casa Batlló

It was an unforgettable lunch.

But we almost forgot how unforgettable the food was, because before we left Mom decided to prove why the two most important words you should learn in Spanish when traveling abroad are baño and ayúdame.

Best Pizza of my Life

So we’ve eaten and paid and, having learned that free public restrooms aren’t as easy to find in Europe as they are in the ‘Stados, we decide to aprovechar the restaurant baños. Although I need to use the facilities as well, I decide to wait at the table, letting the madre get a head start in case it is a single bathroom. After a few minutes I climb to the second floor in search of the restroom. I try the handle but it doesn’t turn. Or rather, the handle turns, but it’s not releasing the latch. Not quite in a locked-door sort of way, but in a foreboding something’s-not-quite-right sort of way. I hear mom washing her hands so I call to her suspiciously.

Mom? Did you lock the door?

By now she’s drying her hands.

No… Come in. She’s still chipper at the moment.

Uh… At this moment I am figuring out that there is indeed something wrong here. That this bathroom is not, in fact, a single restroom which would cause my mom to lock the door. I am figuring out that the door is not actually locked, but stuck. Which means that my mom is stuck inside the bathroom. But she hasn’t figured this out yet.

Then she goes to open the door. All of the above races through her head.

Panic ensues.

I see a waitress in the hall. Perdona, this door won’t open. She tries to point me to the other restroom. No, you don’t understand. My mom is inside the bathroom. And the door won’t open.

The next twenty minutes consists of a string of four to five different restaurant employees systematically coming to try to jiggle the handle, inspect the handle, mention that there’s no lock and therefore no key, push, pound, throw their bodies against the door, jiggle the handle again, and then go to find someone else. They bring back someone else, who repeats the exact same cycle of jiggling, inspecting, mentioning, pushing, pounding, throwing, jiggling, and going to find someone else. An occasional restaurant patron comes down the hall and gives  me a confused look. I point them to the other restroom without an explanation. I’d like to give them a sassy warning about being careful about the door, just so the dufus employees can hear, but I’m too mentally exhausted to be sassy in Spanish.

Meanwhile, my mom, who may or may not be slightly claustrophobic, is having a minor meltdown inside. As for me, I am rationally calculating a formula that includes the amount of euros we just spent at this restaurant, compounded by the number of people trying the same strategy to unsuccessfully open the door, multiplied by the half hour wasted stuck in a bathroom, subtracted by the number of minutes we have left to get our tails back to the metro, back to the bus station, back to the airport to catch our plane to Italy. As for the padre, he’s still sitting blissfully unaware at our table downstairs.

So I’d like to chew out the restaurant manager, demanding he give us a free lunch and hurry up and figure out how to get the dang door open before we miss our flight. Instead, I reassure the madre that these nice people, even though they’re speaking a language she doesn’t understand, have everything under control. They’re going to get you out, just STAAAYY CAAALM. I’m going to go tell Dad what’s going on and will be RIIIIGHT BAAAACK. It’s OOOOKAAAYY. I’ll be RIIIIGHT BAAAACK. I think her reply is more moan than verbal. I don’t know if the jiggling, inspecting, mentioning, pushing, pounding, throwing, repeating employees understand our words, but I’m pretty sure they get the overall sentiments.

I return with the padre who takes his turn with the door opening strategy cycle and helps me keep the madre from hyperventilating. Meanwhile, employee #27 is the first to arrive on the scene with a handyman toolkit, which all proves worthless because there’s nothing to use a tool on. (No lock, remember?) But Handyman comes back with a drill and removes the handle. But that proves worthless because he still can’t pull the lever out of the doorjamb. He drills holes in the wood around the doorjamb instead. Handyman and Dad take turns throwing themselves against the door. The wall shakes. Debris falls from the ceiling. Mom moans.

More restaurant patrons come down the hall and give us concerned looks. I point them to the other restroom without an explanation. I think about the rest of the restaurant clients enjoying their food, oblivious.

Handyman leaves. Oh no, he’s going to get someone else to repeat the cycle, I think. Dad picks up the drill and drills more holes in the wood. Handyman comes back with an axe. He hacks at the doorframe. The wall shakes. Debris falls from the ceiling. Mom moans.

Restaurant patrons come down the hall and give us horrified looks. I point them to the other restroom without an explanation.

Finally, we can all tell that the door is ready to be pushed open. Either that or the wall around it is going to collapse or the ceiling is going to cave in. Handyman lifts his leg to kick the door in, then stops himself and tells me to warn the madre to get far away. I translate.

Handyman kicks open the door, becomes hero.

Mom comes out and cries. Moans that she thought she’d be stuck in there forever, and what would have happened if I hadn’t come up looking for her, and how would she have gotten help without speaking Spanish, and the like.

Restaurant patrons come down the hall and give us worried looks. I point them to the other restroom without an explanation.

Handyman begins to clean up the mess. The padres hug. Handyman gives us an I’m-sorry look. I wonder what happened to the string of dufus employees and why they aren’t bringing us complementary dessert. We leave. We make the plane to Italy on time. Mom doesn’t completely shut the door of a bathroom for the remainder of a trip.

Danger: Madre on the loose

I told you, unforgettable. Lunch in Barce was unforgettable.

Hilarious is what this is.

Sometimes I get to help them dress up like planets and Roman gods and draw a giant map of the solar system on the school courtyard! Sometimes I get to go on field trips to nature reserves, museums, and even the beach!

But sometimes I’m bored to tears in classes that seem to perpetually be taught through straight-out-of-the-book lessons. So when I’m given a little freedom with how (or even what) to teach my students, I make sure to aprovechar with my favorite games…

Continue reading my recent post at the CIEE Teach in Spain blog.

Bougainvillea

The Costa Tropical always has blue skies. Except for that one day I had to buy an umbrella.

Blue skies and chirimoya trees

Traveling in Europe has proven to me that I could never live too far north of the equator. I hear about the winter blues that people up north experience – the real, medical, scientific lack-of-vitamin-D depression – and I believe it. I suffer from it. Every time I spend a few days away from the Costa.

Window to my soul

I crave the sunshine and blue skies. They make me happier. They make my winter runs warmer. And goodness gracious, they make my photos prettier. I was a little put out at Florence and Rome for diminishing my chances at decent pictures with their overcast skies.

Arno River in Florence

Well, I guess the sun cooperated a few times in Italy.

Kindergarten classic

I have quite a few lovely memories from kindergarten. I remember sitting in a circle playing the chanting game, “Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?” I remember listening to “Chicka chicka boom boom” (will there be enough room?) at the beginning of nap time and I remember the one and only day I fell asleep during nap time. I remember when a classmate brought her Life Size Barbie to school for show and tell after Christmas (I remember being incredibly jealous) and I remember the Jewish kid that taught us about dreidels. I remember riding on an old train for a class field trip and, as it was my birthday, the whole train singing happy birthday to me.

But these happy moments are overshadowed by the unforgettable, life-altering, unjust tab-pulling incident.

Wall of Doom

Primary school teachers will be familiar with the use of color-coded behavior charts for managing the behavior of unruly rug rats. It usually looks like a wall of pockets labeled with the students’ names, each filled with several different pieces of colored paper.  When a five year-old is disobedient, the consequence is that he must change his color. Moving from green to yellow, for example, merely serves as a warning, but unchecked behavior sends a child into the red zone and elicits some type of punishment.

At my elementary school, the buzzword for this system was “tabs.” In my kindergarten class we actually had quite a few layers of colored tabs in our pockets (not just green, yellow, and red), so if a student was commanded to go “pull a tab,” there was a definite cushion before he got to the serious, in-deep-trouble colors. But I already alluded to my perfectionism, and I’ve told you before what an obedient child I was. (Minus the meatloaf.) So one can imagine how potentially catastrophic it might have been to my five year-old perfectionist soul if I had to pull even one tab.

Another well-known characteristic of early elementary education is the use of activities like “share time” to practice effective communication and prepare rug rats to survive in a culture that places a high value on extraversion. Nowadays education experts like to call this an invaluable 21^st century skill. I like to call this the reason more and more people are flocking to the world’s few remaining silent refuges (yoga, for example).

Anyway, we had a rotating share time schedule in my kindergarten class, with four or five students assigned each share time day. Well, one fateful morning, I paced around my house stewing over what on earth I could say for share time. I thought and thought and thought. I racked my brain, I asked my mom, I worried my lip to death. I got to school with nothing in mind except, “What am I going to say? What am I going to say? WHAT AM I GOING TO SAY?!?!”

The school bell rang. We started our morning routines. They didn’t last long enough. We moved to the carpet for share time. What am I going to say? What am I going to say? One student began. I didn’t hear a word she said. What am I going to say? Another student. Another. How could time be going so fast? What am I going to say? And suddenly all my thoughts were interrupted and all my worst fears came to fruition when I realized my teacher had been calling my name.

Rachel? …Rachel?

She’d been calling on me to share something and I hadn’t even noticed because I was so worried about coming up with the perfect thing to say. I was still thinking and hurrying my brain to formulate something when-

(Cue the doom music.)

Rachel! GO PULL A TAB!

The next moments were a blur. In a daze I walked to the board to move my perfect green tab to reveal some other horrible, scarring color. I tried to make sense of it. Of all my worries that morning, I never saw this coming. I had counted myself a failure enough for not having something valuable to share, but now on top of this, perfect little student that I was, I would have to live with the knowledge forever on my conscience and Personal Perfection Record that once I had to pull a tab. And why? I had been trying really hard to perform perfectly for share time. I had thought all morning! I had worried myself to death! It wasn’t my fault! What kind of world are we coming to when students are punished for thinking and disturbing no one?

A few years later I found myself in a boasting competition with my friends. We bragged to each other about all E’s on our report cards (because when you’re that young they don’t use the ABC’s but rather ESU’s: Excellent, or – heaven forbid – Satisfactory, or – may the underworld freeze over – Unsatisfactory). But when the tab-pulling records were brought up, I had to hang my head in shame. I couldn’t say that I had never pulled a tab.

I’m not sure whether the cause of my silence at the time was due more to perfectionism or more to introversion. I was definitely shyer when I was younger, but while I may have often been quiet, I didn’t have stage fright. I was often quite willing to perform the role of clown and storyteller, especially among friends and family.

Even today, I surprise people when I “come out of my shell” to entertain a group with a story.  But I’ve always had a regard for valuable things and a disregard for small talk. As an introvert I think a whole lot, and I’m rather protective of my time and space because I need it to think. I like to weed through all the things I write in my head and try to only spit out what is worthwhile, which is how it relates to perfectionism. I’d rather only say it if it’s perfectly said.

For example, I have a million blog post drafts sitting around waiting to be perfected and published. I hammer them out when I’m in the writing zone, but then I reread them and thoroughly dislike them. I set them aside for a few weeks and when I feel guilty for not having written a post in a while I take a look at one of the drafts. To my surprise, I find it – aside from one or two changes – perfect for publishing that instant and I ask myself why I didn’t publish it weeks ago. In fact, that is exactly what happened to this post. As an introvert I needed to stew on it and make sure it was valuable and as a perfectionist I couldn’t risk publishing something imperfect or unworthy of praise. Now you realize that my excuse for being a blogging renegade for the past month is clearly not that I didn’t have time to write; I just wanted to wait to offer you my very best. I hope it doesn’t disappoint, and I really hope you don’t make me go pull a tab for being silent for so long.

So, that fateful day back in kindergarten, that single mar on my Perfect Behavior Record, that horrible day of injustice, I didn’t have a story for share time. But now I do. Can this absolve me of my tab-pulling and lack-of-blogging sins?

Christmas lights at Plaza de Catalunya in Barcelona

Continue reading my recent post at the CIEE Teach in Spain blog.

Jarabacoa

But now the Costa Tropical has grabbed my heart as well, and when I need a mountain moment I hike it up to the northernmost part of the city to soak up the sights.

Motril

Over Christmas break my parents and I ventured further north – not quite to the snowy Sierra Nevadas – to the Alpujarras. We winded through the terrifying roads that linked the small mountain towns frequented by hikers and hippies, and when our stomachs weren’t turning, we enjoyed the view.

Las Alpujarras

Sorry, Texas, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to settle for your prairies again.

Our neighbor welcomed us into her living room and delivered our presents. My brother opened his first, tearing away the wrapping paper to reveal a game. Not just any typical board game, mind you. It included a blow-up globe and stickers and bright-colored miscellany that was sure to be a riot. What fun! The prospects were looking good for what was hiding inside my bag.

Hardly able to contain my excitement, I whipped out the tissue paper and pulled out the present inside to reveal…!

A book.

A stupid book. I cut my eyes towards my brother who was giddily investigating all the parts of his intricate, never-seen-before adventurous globe game. He got a game, a fun toy. And all I got was a book.

A prime role of parents in public is to remind their children of their manners. For example, when kids are preoccupied with the destruction of shiny wrapping paper and the investigation of newly-obtained possessions, it is generally the parent’s responsibility to remind them to be polite and express gratitude.

My mom gave the prompt. Rachel, what do you say?

Before I continue this tale, perhaps some background information would be helpful in predicting what comes next. As a child, I was an obedient daughter except when served meatloaf or Mexican goup soup, a self-driven student who loved reading, and a tender-hearted cryer preoccupied with everything’s feelings, both living and inanimate (hence the sobs during Black Beauty). Even if I was fairly dissatisfied with my gift, one would expect me to offer a half-hearted thank you at the very least.

But something monstrous had been building up inside me- jealousy, disappointment, probably all the seven deadly sins combined- because what happened next was about as ugly and unexpected as, I don’t know, the eruption of a dormant volcano.

Rachel, what do you say? was the trigger.

Thanks for nothing! was my explosive response. And then I stormed home, bitter about my lame present.

Needless to say, the following hour involved sulking, a talking-to, tears, and an apology.

Four years later, I found myself sulking over the same situation. Although this time I wasn’t upset that I got a stupid book, I was grieving over the words I said to a beloved neighbor about what became one of my favorite books. (I told you I was sensitive to others’ feelings.) Full of regret and shame, I cried to my mom, who gave me another talking-to. Why was I carrying around this remorse? My neighbor had forgiven me, and years later, it was about time to forgive myself.

The book I didn't want at first

Even now, I can tell the story with a laugh, but honestly I still feel a little bad. I don’t remember ever playing the attractive globe game with my brother, but I do remember reading The Magic Locket, and wearing the included necklace, over and over. I still wish I could tell my old neighbor how special it became to me and apologize again for my initial lack of gratitude.

Padres at the Alhambra

This Christmas, I actually asked for nothing. Well, I asked the padres to visit me in Spain and let me accompany them to Italy- which is actually a rather significant present. But on Christmas morning we didn’t have any gifts to open. Instead of toys and clothes and miscellany that would be forgotten in years to come, we have mountains of pictures and memories from our European Christmas escapades. This year, I am thankful for “nothing.”

Granada's Moorish fortress, the Alhambra

I arrived in Sevilla at the end of September. I traveled to a handful of places this fall, spending many bus layovers at the station in Granada. Yet somehow I made it all the way to December without ever seeing this city I’ve been dreaming of since January. Once I finally ventured outside its bus station my only thought was, What took me so long?!

Palacio de los Cordova

The charming thing about Granada is that it is completely different from everywhere else I’ve been in Spain. Due to its elevation and proximity to the Sierra Nevadas, it’s much cooler. (Which is what instigated my purchase of a thick winter coat, sweater, and boots!) While aspects of the city look Andalusian, much of its architecture is marked by its historical Moorish influence.

Plaza Nueva

What stood out the most to me, however, was its hippy vibe and mix of cultures. Whereas Sevilla embodies the stereotypes of Southern Spain and Madrid has the feel of a typical metropolitan city in Western Europe, the atmosphere and sights of Granada are completely unique: Gypsies handing out rosemary (to scam tourists into handing them money), small shops filled with Moroccan and Middle Eastern arts and crafts, sidewalk stands selling special teas and herbs, students and backpackers and people from all walks of life.

For Tea Sippers

I’ll definitely be back to Granada- for several reasons. My trips tend to send me to its bus station, the air is cooler, the restaurants serve larger tapas, it has an H&M, there’s a certain cafe there that I’m fond of, and I haven’t been inside the Alhambra yet. But mostly, I’ll be back because it’s different.

Delicious postre at Cafetería Rey Fernando

So I’m stealing the slogan from my home state’s capital city and giving it to my Spanish province’s capital city: keep Austin Granada weird!

Fall in Granada

Suddenly, it occurs to me: I could live here forever…

Continue reading my recent post at the CIEE Teach in Spain blog.

Andalusian Flowers

I returned from a chilly, overcast day exploring Granada happy to be welcomed by the sunshine of the coast. I enjoyed my first trip to Granada (outside of its bus station, anyway) but I was looking forward to soaking in some vitamin D on my chirimoya running route.

Bright Bougainvilleas

I’ve noticed this happens every time I travel to a different part of Spain; I’m always anxious to get back to the sunny Costa Tropical. Jaén has olives, Granada has the Alhambra, Madrid has its museums, Barcelona has Gaudí. But if I had to choose, I’d stick with Motril.