Day 2-I wake up with no idea where I am. A woman is handing me a hot towel. She is beautiful. I look around. There are several beautiful women handing out towels. I remember I am on a plane. These women are lithe, Teutonic beauties that might have just stepped off a runway in Milan. I wish I remembered more of my college German. Well, it is tacky to flirt with flight attendants anyways.

We land in Zurich, deboard and run through the terminal to make the final leg of our trip. Our plane was slightly behind and we have under 10 minutes to make our flight. While we are running, I am thinking that at least I would be happier stuck for a day in Zurich rather than Syracuse of Newark. We make our plane.

The flight to Madrid is uneventful, and finally we are on Spanish soil I have come to this country with absolutely no idea what to expect. I thought about reading some things beforehand, but decided to arrive with a mind unsullied by preconceived notions(read: ignorant). I speak their language poorly, have no idea of climate, geography, topology, or customs. I am, in theory, the worst kind of tourist.

We stand at the baggage claim and watch the bags circle, fewer and fewer each time around, but no sign of ours. Finally, the conveyor is turned off, and we are left standing with nothing more than what we carried on the plane. We are not surprised.

We go to file a lost luggage claim. The woman asks us questions about where we flew in from, what do our bags look like, etc. She is obviously very appreciative of the fact that Hugo speaks Spanish. I hope this will help get our case expedited. We file our claim and head to the car rental counter. Hugo has forgotten that my manual transmission driving skills leave a lot to be desired and gone and rented a stick shift. This means he will be doing all of the driving. This is fine by me. We find our car out in the lot. Hugo programs the directions to our friend Daniel�s house into his GPS. Daniel was an exchange student at our high school. He and Hugo kept in touch. He and his family have graciously offered to put us up while we are in Madrid.

Hugo�s driving in America makes me nervous. Hugo driving in a foreign country has me hoping we won�t spend our two weeks here in jail He is very aggressive. His driving is predicated on his belief that he can know, 99 percent of the time, what the other drivers are going to do, and that the 1 percent of the time he is wrong, his superior skills can compensate for his error in judgment. I am not quite so confident.

We don�t follow Daniel�s directions exactly, but with the help of the GPS, we make it there. We are about 8 hours late. We dial up his apartment and he comes down to greet us. I have not seen him in 6 years, but he looks about the same. He takes us up to meet his family. We are given his brother�s room. The brother will sleep in Daniel�s room. Hugo recounts for them our flight(s) over while Daniel�s mother makes us a snack. We eat, wash up and take a nap.

Hugo is smart. He has packed a change of clothes in his carry on luggage. I am not so lucky. I have only the clothes on my back. We eat dinner with the family. I stumble through conversations with Hugo�s help. After awhile they start politely relaying any questions for my through Hugo, who translates, and then I look at the questioner, and do my best to give a semicoherent answer in Spanish.

It is time to go out. Having nothing to change into I am ready pretty quickly. Daniel asks to see my socks. I pull up my pantlegs to reveal the white athletic socks I had worn on the plane. Daniel says this will not due. I will not be able to get into any nice bars which socks such as these. Proper footwear is very important in Spain. This is probably something I would have learned if I had spent any time looking into it. Fortunately, Hugo has an extra pair of grey socks which he lends me.

We meet Daniel�s girlfriend downstairs. She is a nice girl. We ride the subway to a small neighborhood Bar/Deli where we meet a few more of Daniel�s friends. We eat some meat and drink some beers. Daniel speaks English well, but none of his friends do. After the long flight, my brain is already overloaded so I just sit back and drink my beer, unable to follow more than a few words of the conversation. They are asking questions about America. Mostly about money. They are struck dumb when Daniel tells them that a person can make $8US per hour working at McDonald�s! Oh yes, the streets of America are paved with gold!

We go to the Puerto del Sol, where we meet friends of friends, Americans studying abroad. They are nice, but pretentious in the way that only 20 year old American college students in Europe for the first time can be pretentious. One of the Spanish girls suggests we go to a "ricky" bar. I don�t know what a "ricky" bar is. It turns out a "ricky" bar is a "reggae" bar. We sit at a table in the nearly empty establishment while the Americans pass around a joint and start discussing Nietzsche. This is not why I came to Spain.

Everything starts to become a whirl of lights and noise. I have been awake far too long. I wonder what time it is in America. Adjusting for the time change, I figure that all my friends and relatives are on the way to work right now, and I can�t help but feel smug.

I have only been in Spain a matter of hours, but it seems like days. I remember getting on a bus. The bus ride was very long and dropped us at a field somewhere near the airport. There was a festival. There was a band, and lots of people, and dancing. I succesfully completed my first transaction in Spanish, ordering some kind of sandwich and a beer. For some reason, Daniel was no longer with us. He had left us with the keys and gone home by himself. It was late and it was time for us to go home. We somehow managed to find our way back on the proper buses. It was about 4 am Spanish time, but we weren�t quite ready to go to sleep. We sat outside on benches sky and wondered if we would ever get our luggage back. We were pretty sure we wouldn�t. I tried to guess how long it would take for the airlines to reimburse us, and started to plan my new Spanish wardrobe. We marveled at the fact that we were in Madrid. The stars seemed brighter here, space more infinite, time a hazy memory.

When we finally went inside, we ran into trouble. Daniel had showed us which of the 10 keys on the chain unlocked the door, but now they all looked the same. Hugo tried them all. None of them seemed to work. Some of them didn�t fit, some of them fit but wouldn�t turn. Some of them fit and turn but nothing seemed to happen. Of course there were two locks. For all we knew, we were unlocking one and then locking the other. Having limited our choices to the 3 or 4 keys that actually fit in the lock and turn, Hugo set out to try all the permutations of keys and turning till we succesfully opened the doors. All this while trying to be quite so as not to wake up our hosts at 5 am. Our troubles compounded by the fact that the hallway light was on a timer, and went out after a couple minutes, so while Hugo tried the keys, I stood by the button and hit it often enough to keep the lights on. Once, tantalized by the sounds of tumblers clicking, I stepped away from my post, expecting the door to swing open triumphantly. But success was not ours to be had, and before I could return to my watch, the light went out. Hugo reached up to hit the switch, but instead found the doorbell. We doubled over laughing while we waited for one of the family to come to the door and ask us what we were doing ringing the doorbell at 5 am. But no one came. Finally we hit on the right combination and opened the door. We snuck into our room and went to sleep.

Day 3-We wake up in late afternoon. Daniel chastises us for wasting the day. We opened the door and he was holding our luggage. A miracle! No Spanish wardrobe for me after all. No wandering the La Raza market searching through the piles of clothes for a matching pair of shirt and pants.

No one had heard the doorbell ring. They all think it is all very funny. We sit down to lunch and Daniel�s father gets out a sheet of paper and helped us plan our itinerary. We will go South, to Andalucia for a week, before returning to Madrid, where we will go North with Daniel and his girlfriend, who would then be on their break from university, and visit his grandmother. Daniel�s father offered to drive us up to Segovia that evening. There was a castle, a nice church, and an old aqueduct there.

It was a pleasant drive. Hugo sat in front and discussed politics with Daniel�s father and I sat in back with the window open and breathed in the foreign air. Daniel�s father pointed to a cross atop a mountain ridge, and told us it marked the spot of a very important battle of the Spanish civil war. I knew what I knew of the war from reading "For Whom the Bell Tolls." I had forgotten, or really never known, that Spain was still a socialist country. Daniel�s father would retire with a nice government pension in a few years.

Segovia�s church, castle and aqueduct were all the Daniel�s father said they would be. I was still in to much of a whirl to remember much. On the drive home we almost hit a donkey walking around the bend of a dark mountain road.

Hugo and I meet Daniel in Plaza Mayor. It is a large, cobbled stone open plaza, enclosed by restaurants and cafes. The older people sit at the tables enjoying the dinner, while the young people buy their food and sit in small groups on the ground. We are hungry. Daniel takes us to a restuarant and recommends the bocadillos calamares. Bocadillos are sandwiches, two piece of a French roll with something in between them. Hugo does not know the word "calamares" and asks Daniel what they are. "Seafood" he tells us dismissively. But what kind of seafood? "Just seafood."

I may not know what calamares means in Spanish, but I know that in French, it means "octopus." I have an inkling it probably means the same in espanyol, but I am game. We get our sandwiches. The calamares look like onion rings. They are fishy tasting and rubbery, but edible. (Hugo looked up "calamares" later that night in our Spanish dictionary and proved my suspicions correct.)

Daniel asks us what we want to do. I tell him to show me where I can get absinthe. I am pretty sure this potent alcohol, which some blame for Van Gogh cutting off his ear, is legal in Europe. I am not a drinker, but like the calamare, I would like to try it once. His face darkens. "That is not a good idea. I will show you where they places are, but I will not go myself." I decide to heed his advice. We are, after all, guests of he and his family. Page 3or Home