Spain, Part One

Everybody probably has their own approach to vacations. Ours is generally urban: we like cities, and we like visiting new cities (or revisiting old favorite cities). To keep things a little interesting, we’ll throw in a little countryside every few days for variety. Some people like to go sit on the beach for two weeks; I can sit on the beach for, easily, two minutes before going totally insane. Given that the Day Job is fairly filled with reading books that most people save for the beach, I’ve already got that part of the deal covered. I don’t need yet another [insert name of popular fiction author here] on the proverbial two weeks off. I do read, of course, on vacation, but always stuff that I don’t normally get to, like SF or classics, or need some time for. Over the last few weeks it was Snow Crash (too didactic, the exposition overwhelms the action), Anansi Boys (better than I expected), The Longest Journey (a disappointing early Forster), and Dewey’s Art as Experience (which I am still working through). So it’s not that I don’t read on vacation, but I don’t want to spend all day doing it. I can get that the rest of the year, and get paid for it. (I know: it’s a dream job. I don’t disagree.)

The preferred day in one of these vacation cities begins with a lollygagging morning, getting up as late as possible, which for someone trained by decades of waking at 6:00 a.m. is, maybe, 9:00, I’ll take what I can get. Usually we’re on the road around 10 or so, never later than 11. This works well in countries that don’t have breakfast, like Spain. You get up, you infuse some coffee and maybe something little but deviously sweet, you go about some business, you maybe infuse some more coffee, you wrap up your business, then at around 2:00, you eat lunch. Our business these mornings tends to be of the intellectual nature. I love art, and I love great museums, but I appreciate them best when my brain is at its peak, first thing in the day. So on the average day, the first thing we do is take in a museum, or something similarly cultural. To some, this would be the kiss of death, analogous to my feelings about lying on the beach. Chacun a son gout, as no one ever says on the Iberian peninsula.

Spain, as you probably know, still adheres to a siesta schedule. From 2:00 to 5:00 almost everything shuts down, and everybody goes and eats. From everything I had read in advance, one ought to plan one’s big meal for this stretch, and that proved to be good advice. After putting away a large amount of food, we’d stumble back to the hotel for a real siesta. That I liked. I’ve always liked naps, since the day I was born. I take them whenever I can. Come into a tab room at about 2:30 on a Saturday, then you’d better tiptoe and keep it quite, bub. Anyhow, after recharging one’s consciousness, one heads out to walk the streets with every other person on the peninsula, with maybe a stop or two for dessert or tapas, until, FINALLY, it’s time for dinner. Now, I’ve been to countries where they eat late, but this place takes the cake. Unless you went to a restaurant you wouldn’t want to go to, you couldn’t find anywhere that had anyone in it before 9:00. We could stretch it to then, or maybe a little later, but not much beyond that. I gather people really eat at 11:00, and I will vouch that when we were leaving restaurants around that time there were usually people waiting to be seated. Good grief! And why aren’t any of these restaurants open in my home town so the Sailors and I would have somewhere to go on our return from tournaments?

As a general postprandial rule, after more strolling about amidst the teeming multitudes, we’d make it back to the hotel room and have lights out around 1:00 a.m. I have to admit, it did not take long to get the personal system in accord with this schedule. We certainly didn’t always have those big lunch meals (especially in the beginning, when we were still getting used to the place), but we certainly did eat.

As I think of them, more details on some of this stuff to come—the nature of the art and architecture, the nature of the people, the nature of the languages (note plural), the nature of the food, general observances, etc. You may or may not come away thinking Spain is a place for you to prioritize visiting at some point (if you haven’t already). We had a great time, though. You can draw your own personal conclusions over the next few entries.