Interlaken: The Gospel According to Mark

Our usually reliable guidebook described our hostel in Interlaken as a loud, nonstop party amidst an island shipwreck. However, reality - as you learn again and again while traveling - does not necessarily bend to the will of guidebooks. We arrived to find a quiet, beautiful hotel, our room opening to a wonderful balcony with a view of a slowly melting glacier and the breathtaking, towering, jagged peaks of the Swiss Alps.

The man who checked us into the hostel was unnecessarily nice and helpful. He immediately convinced us not to go whitewater rafting - since there was apparently much better rafting elsewhere, and, by his own argument - we could do it at home. He was more in favor of ice climbing or canyoning, the latter of which is illegal in the United States. Canyoning involves a day of rappelling down rock faces, jumping off of huge cliffs into freezing water and riding rapids over slick rock faces like water slides. This sounded like brilliant fun to me, but unfortunately, with my ribs still pulsing from the Barcelona incident, there was no way my body was going to be able to withstand that sort of abuse. We picked up a pamphlet on paragliding.

Our first dinner in Interlaken consisted of Thai food, both because we were craving a dose of Asia and because the international foods in Switzerland are by far the most affordable. (Which isn't saying much.) At dinner we ended up speaking to the couple at the table beside us, discussing the relative heat of the peppers in this Thai food compared to what gets served up on the streets of Bangkok. We eventually found out that this couple was not only from our own city, but that we also shared some personal connections. The world is infinitely smaller and more connected than we often convince ourselves it is.

In a rare American moment for us, we realized that a bar across the street from the Thai restaurant sold Sam Adams beer and we immediately resolved to partake in a little bit of patriotism. Strolling confidently through the door, the first thing I noticed was that the bar was packed. With women. Only women. In fact, we were the only two men in the entire establishment.

Now, I realize that as two single guys, this moment should have been a revelation, a gleaming light shining through the clouds to bless our weary souls. A decisive victory. Standing above the battlefield, swords in hand while the soldiers we have been leading gather to sing our praises.

But, it turns out, that is not at all what went through my head. All I could think was:

"We have just walked into a lesbian bar."

I stared in bewilderment.

Sensing our unshakable confusion, a worldly blonde with a wry smile took pity on us and chimed in.

"Ladies night. We're all watching Sex and the City II. These are all the local girls."

She was a Canadian base jumping instructor. Like so many residents of Interlaken she'd left home to pursue a life of risking her life daily with no better goal in mind than to make sure she'd milked the maximum amount of excitement she possibly could from that same life she loved to hurl from the towering cliffs. (The more I travel, the less crazy that goal sounds.) Ladies night was her vacation from impending tragedy. She mused to us that some people want to do something crazy for a vacation, but when your job is to strap yourself to a stranger and jump from a mountain, you long for a movie night with the girls.

We didn't stay for the film. No one actually asked us to leave, but it was clear that we would be unapologetically ignored as soon as Carrie graced the screen. I'm sure it was a lovely piece of cinema.

The next morning we took a small train further up into the mountains to a little village called Grimmewald. From Grimmewald we took a gondola ride for twenty minutes up the side of the mountains to a place called First, with a population you could probably count on your fingers (with fingers to spare.) First is situated at about the same elevation as the clouds over Switzerland. That is not a metaphor.

It's worth noting how disastrously unprepared we were for Interlaken. The city was a bit of an afterthought on our part, and we certainly hadn't packed any appropriate equipment for serious hiking. I was wearing one of my two sweaters a pair of jeans and my thin, canvas Vans. The only thing a pair of Vans has in common with hiking boots is that they encompass your feet.

Regardless, we came to this mountain to hike and that is what we were going to do. The clouds shrouded the area in a thick white fog that pushed up the mountain like waves washing on the shore as the tide moves in. We stepped to a ledge and a flock of black birds swarmed past us, coming from nowhere and flying away into more nowhere.

As we walked we could often only see a few yards ahead, surrounded by the eerie ringing of bells around the necks of grazing cows and goats that would have been infinitely lost in the mist without them. It felt a bit like being in Purgatory, walking the mountains for eternity along a beaten path, never able to see where it leads, never able to see where you came from. Staring at the forks in the road with no idea what the next road will offer. No choice but to keep walking on.

The path we chose was not easy, but we pushed ourselves upward, showing our inappropriate shoes no mercy, eventually making it high enough to be above the soupy clouds. The view of the valley opened to us and we sat for some amount of time that may have been brief or may have been hours, just staring. Blinking was not an option.

We still climbed up further from there, finally stopping to have lunch on a waterfall, at the line of the mountains where only the hardiest lichens could grow. My legs were jelly and the air was noticeably thin. I took my empty water bottle and filled it in the pristine water cascading down the mountain. The snowpack water instantly numbed my hand.

After a lengthy descent we found ourselves in the evening back at our hostel and learned about a happy hour that we were strongly encouraged to attend. The description made it sound like it was just on the patio of the hotel, but was we stepped outside we saw nothing. We heard some faint music and walked further back to a very dark parking lot and still found no happy hour. There were two guys having a cigarette there, so we asked them if they knew where this place was and they said we just had to keep walking.

We weren't convinced that there was anywhere left to walk, but we pressed on and eventually found a yard with a bonfire and a tent, which was opened up to house a small bar. The bar was run by another Interlaken transplant and the patrons were more or less limited to the group of locals that worked at the hotel and a few curious guests.

One of those patrons was a very, very drunk Englishman named Mark. Mark asked me about our trip and our lives back in the States. I laughed and told him that I had recently moved to a new city for love, but the love had since left my life and I was now paying for my trip with a fund of money I had once been saving for that love's engagement ring and future.

Mark got serious as I told him that story.

"Yeah, I really understand that. The same thing more or less happened to me back in London."

He stepped back and thought quietly for a second.

"If there's one piece of advice I could give you - and I'm only saying this because, you know, it sounds like you're coming from a similar place - is that you need to leave on a high note.

And, you won't want to. This is the freedom trip and it's amazing and the more freedom you get the more you want and you never want it to end. But eventually the money runs out and you have to either get a job or go home. And, if you're like me you get the job to try and stay even longer, but the money still runs out.

And all my mates back home, they're all pretty upset with me too, that I've been gone so long, that I haven't tried to come home. Those people are important too, don't forget, and when you leave home you leave them.

End on a high note while you can.

Wow, sorry, that was a bit heavy, wasn't it?"

Mark then finished my beer, smoked a cigarette and explained why any serious bartender should always carry two lighters.

The next day we woke up early and booked ourselves a paragliding trip for the afternoon.

The driver that picked us up to take us up the mountain turned out to be a much more sober, more quiet Mark. In a worn baseball cap.

"If there's any advice I'd give you, it's to not take a job like this. I came to Interlaken because I love to fly, but if it's a good day for flying, I am driving people all day, and if there's no people to drive, it's probably because the weather is no good for flying. Don't choose a job that by definition keeps you from doing what you love. That's probably common sense, but I guess I messed it up, didn't I?"

It isn't common sense, but it makes sense. End on a high note.

Paragliding is essentially skydiving without falling. You go high up on a mountain and strap yourself to a parachute on a gentle slope. As you run down the slope the parachute becomes a much more serious version of a kite, the updrafts of wind lifting you off of the mountain high into the air.

The most terrifying part of this whole process, in my opinion, happens before you ever get strapped to the parachute. As the van jumped a curve turning off of a bridge in town, we knew that the driver (no longer Mark, once we had picked up the instructors) wasn't invincible. The roads we drove on were narrow, barely big enough for our van, and winding. Guardrails do not exist in Switzerland, as far as I can tell. Looking out the window, I couldn't see the road, only the steep hillsides we were careening up. Occasionally we had to stop and back the van back down the hill to let another car pass.

"How are you all feeling, are you nervous?"
"No, we feel good! Excited!"

I wiped the sweat from my hands. The van took a quick hairpin turn. One of the instructors put on some German hip hop music. (I swear, it exists.)

My instructor was nicknamed "Dangerous Dave." Dave made sure we were the last pair to take off. Before we left he made a few adjustments to the parachute lines, shortening them a bit. He laughed and said something in Swiss German to himself and told me that this would make it more fun. Too late to have doubts. Thumbs up.

All the other groups had taken off by walking and lightly jogging in a clean, straight line down the hill. Dave and I started with the chute to our side, taking 3 rapid running starts and stops, apparently waiting for the perfect wind gust.

When we got it, we sprinted and the force of the wind tore us off of the mountain side and hurled us into the air. The ground below seemed unimaginably far down, getting rapidly further as we sailed into the sky.

The flight was surprisingly smooth, we floated around a set of cliffs with strong updrafts of wind that keep pushing you higher into the air, so that you don't have to actually come down to the ground until you're ready. We flew for what seemed like both forty minutes and forty seconds. I have no idea how long it actually lasted. (A common occurrence here, apparently.)

When we finally started to come down, headed towards a landing in a park in the middle of the city, Dave asked in excitedly broken English, "Do you like roller coaster?"

Yes.

We spun to the ground like a carnival ride. I realized that flying the chute was actually incredibly complicated. We found out later that just to fly alone took thirty solid days of lessons. These guys had been flying for 15 years.

Taking off the harnasses, D and I looked across our landing zone park and saw that we had floated down from the wild Alps to land in front of a Hooters. We had chicken wings and beer to celebrate, another rare patriotic moment.

Interlaken is a quiet city, and the locals tend to generally keep to themselves. They will happily recommend bars and nightlife to the travelers, but inevitably, the only places they will offer are tied to the local hostels and hotels, much in the same way that I imagine surfers are infinitely protective of the best waves in the area. That being said, the ladies night bar we stumbled into on our first night seemed to be the only locals-oriented establishment we could find in the town, so on our last night we decided to return.

We ended up speaking for quiet awhile to the woman that owned and ran the bar. She was originally from Long Island. She fell in love and married a skydiving instructor and had been in Switzerland so long that she struggled a bit with her English. She sold bagels with cream cheese. She said that the girls were already insisting that the ladies night become routine.

We met two girls here (the crowd actually being mixed gender this time) and went dancing with them until much later than we should have, considering our early departure the next morning. Again, my feet were generally confused and my hips just couldn't quite sway properly for the salsa, but it was fun and maybe I am getting marginally better at the whole dancing thing. Marginally. Once enough toes had been crushed, we finally left the clubs and said a hazy goodnight and goodbye, ready to shed our sweaters and head south into Italy.

The Ticking Clocks of Geneva

Four minutes is only two hundred and forty seconds. Two hundred and forty seconds of grace time between one train arriving in a station and another leaving is not a lot of seconds.

Our first train of the night arrived in Toulouse about twenty minutes late. That made us about nine hundred and sixty seconds late for our eight hour long overnight train to Genève. We fetched our backpacks and waited anxiously by the doors of the train, watching the seconds slip away into the night. I was filled with an absolutely irrational confidence that everything was going to work out fine as train rambled forward.

When we arrived at the platform in Toulouse, with no explanation, our first sight as the doors opened was a train with its doors marked "Genève." Irrational confidence indeed! We sprinted across the platform and jumped on the train, moving through the cars to find our seats.

However, we became slightly confused when we had gone through all the cars and not found car #20, which was where our seats were assigned. In a confused panic, I stepped off the train and asked a conductor in French where our car was. She looked at my ticket, looked at the train, looked back at my ticket and informed me that this wasn't actually our train. Our train indeed had left nine hundred and sixty seconds before our arrival.

Fuck.

She shrugged, like any self respecting French person would.

But, again, after briefly panicking, I returned to my irrational confidence.

"Ok, our train has left, but we have these tickets, may we take this train instead?"

Again, she shrugged in a lovely French accent. This time though, the shrug said, "Why not? I am not going to stop you."

We managed to find two empty seats together and we fell asleep. No one checked our tickets, no one asked us for our seats. We arrived in Genève less than one-thousand seconds late.

Our stay in Genève was quiet and expensive. We did see some very beautiful sights though. Genève is situated around the end of a lake, which is the dominate vista of the city. Many cultures construct monuments that are strangely phallic in nature - The national monument in Amsterdam's Dam Square, the Washington monument - you get the picture. But, the Swiss have taken this trend to the extreme by punctuating their lake with a massive fountain that continuously pumps tons and tons of water at least fifty meters in the air. If you don't understand that metaphor then 1.) You aren't Swiss and 2.) You're too young to be reading this blog.

We took a tour through the cathedral that used to be the common preaching point of Calvin. We also stopped by Rousseau's old house which was very educating, but had been disappointingly stripped of any artifacts and was replaced by a glossy interactive audio tour. We even stopped by a restaurant that was advertised to us as being "beachfront." This actually meant walking out on a jetty to a manmade island on the lake, the shore covered by small pebbles. After coming from Spain, this version of a beach was a little bit laughable, but to be fair, there was still topless sunbathing here. We all make do with what we have.

But, what really happened in Genève was that we shed our Spanish nonchalance in favor of the Swiss efficiency and became extremely productive, spending no less than four hours preparing bookings for the rest of our trip and doing all of our laundry.

That may not sound as exciting as some of the other stories I've written about, but I assure you, when you are living out of a backpack in the middle of August, there are few things more thrilling than knowing that each and every one of your socks are squeaky clean.

We met an American in our hostel who was flying back home after a two month trip the next morning. He wasn't planning on going out and he seemed entirely unaffected by the fact that he was leaving Europe. I'm pretty sure they're going to have to drag me kicking and screaming onto the plane when the time comes for me to leave.

Genève was an insanely expensive city (with an attitude that reminded me quite a bit of New York) so we only stayed one night before packing up and leaving for Interlaken - far up in the midst of the Swiss Alps where we hoped to find out why the Swiss are so found of extreme sports.

Bordeaux Abbreviated

"Bonjour! On a une réservation pour ce soir pour deux personnes."

"Quel est le appelle?"

I hestitate for a second.

"The name?"

"Ah, yes..."

"What? Did you only learn enough French to say you had a reservation and nothing more?"

Bienvenue a France. Relax, American readers, the man at the desk was clearly just joking around with us.

"Désolé! Je suis americain, so admit it, I've already exceeded your expectations."

Our room in Bordeaux was not even in the same building as the hotel reception. When we got there we found a rather desolate studio room with two beds and a balcony. The shutters of the balcony seemed to be dressed in the peeling layers of paint from hundreds of years of history. The room was not much, but somehow it felt right. Maybe spiritually? There was something about the struggle to turn the key the wrong way in the door several times to unlock it from the outside, immediately repeating the process to close it from the inside that just made you feel French; like this really was your normal life.

Since this was D's first night ever in France, we set out to find a restaurant where we could have some good French food. I had a delicious cassoulet and, in proper Bordeaux fashion, D had a wonderful lamb shank. The house wine - while not life changing - was still better than many of the wines I come across back home.

It's almost impossible for me to explain in words how beautiful this city is. Put it this way - almost the entire section of the historic district of the city is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Not a building - the entire city. Strangely enough though, despite endless streets of gorgeous buildings, what really struck me in my heart the most was when we first stepped out of the side streets and made it to the bank of the Garonne River at night, where the path is lined by lanterns glowing in soft pinks and greens from the colored glass that lines them, the even softer lights of the slumbering village shining in the distance.

When the morning came we climbed a bell tower where you could see the whole city and beyond, off into the beautiful wine country. Climbing back down from the tower we stepped into the cathedral it shadowed. Inside, someone was playing the huge, gorgeous pipe organ. They weren't playing any actual songs. It was random playing; immense, deep chords that shook you deep in your core followed by atonic and dissonant runs. There was no structure. It was amazing to listen to, the pipes singing the song that our lives have become. Full of energy, forgoing structure. Passion without punctuation, every note played solely for the sake of being heard. By anyone, by no one.

One night here really wasn't enough. One day I will be back here to really understand and know the city.

"Bonjour! Ça va?"

"Ah! Bonjour! Très bien, merci, et vous?"

"Ça va! We are checking out!"

"Excellent, it was great meeting you guys, I hope you enjoyed your stay. Bon Voyage!"

Stereotypes don't have to be true. Vive la France!

Bilbao - We're more alike than we are different

In Bilbao I was in so much pain from my aching ribs that I barely even noticed the city around me as we arrived. The weather was relentlessly dreary and I had developed an upper respiratory infection, each cough sending a fiery stab of pain through the right side of my chest.

But, despite that, what we thought was a private hostel room turned out to be a surprisingly posh hotel. I immediately took advantage of the "real" shower and let the hot water soothe my aching muscles, collapsing afterward on my bed for several hours of sleeping.

When I finally woke up, we walked through the rainy streets to find some dinner. After patrolling the streets for the best pintxos we could find, we stopped to have a drink at a bar that advertised itself as a "rock and roll" bar. Inside was loud metal music which corresponded to videos on a large projector screen. After hearing some classics and indicating to the girl working the bar that her music choices were awesome, she asked us in broken English what kind of metal we liked. I told her that we liked metal "muy rapido" and hardcore. She asked us if we knew a band but her Basque accent was indecipherable to our ears. But, when she played the video, D and I both said in chorus, "Oh! Hatebreed! Yes! We know Hatebreed!"

The rest of the night was spent with us all trying to understand each other, speaking in broken Spanish and her little bit of English.

"You are knowing ze Layumbafojood?"

"No....Yo no se...I don't think so?"

*Video Plays*

"OH! Lamb of God! Yes!"

Music can bridge any cultural gap. She gave us free Jagermeister shots and beers. We gave her some new bands to check out. She tried to get us to visit a small surfing town on the coast that she said was amazing and that tourists never could find. Maybe next trip.

Our second day in Bilbao sent us to the Guggenheim whose shocking architecture tended to dwarf most of the art contained within it. I am sure that there is some really great reason why this landmark museum is located in the remote hills of Basque country, but I don't know what it is. I should really look it up...

But, seriously, I don't mean to diminish the works that were inside the museum. The collection was smart and well presented. Downstairs was a large, long room full of monolithic Richard Serra sculptures - the ones that you have to walk through to understand as they bend your perspective, sense of space and awareness of the assumptions your mind makes about the world around you. I have actually seen so many Richard Serras around the world now that they have become oddly comforting and familiar. They tie me back to New York and make me think of standing in the Andrea Rosen gallery.

We left Bilbao as quickly as we arrived, catching a train to the French border at Hendaye where we could pick up another overnight train on through France to Bordeaux.

San Sebastián - Donostia

Basque country reminds me so much of home...but...only if you took the ocean and drug its shores to very toes of the mountains. I remember being awestruck by the sheer cliffs falling away as the train brought us north to San Sebastian.

When we got to the hostel (after passing by the entrance twice), no one answered the door, which was unmarked and entirely nondescript with the exception of a tiny sheet of paper taped to a buzzer that said "hostel." D and I gave up after 15 minutes of bell ringing, assuming it was siesta time and left for some food y dos cervezas, returning later to be let in by a girl who happened to be staying at the hostel but who didn't work there.

When we finally checked in, we learned an important lesson in hostel etiquette: While it doesn't matter at most places, for a smaller place like this one, if you said you'd be there at 4:00, no one will be there until 4:00. The hostel was run single handedly by a Spaniard named Ernesto. If Ernesto didn't have a note that said you were arriving early, chances were that he was surfing on the beach until he absolutely had to be back. This was the general attitude of the entire municipality of San Sebastian. If you let yourself resonate with that attitude, you found yourself immediately relaxed. If you couldn't, it spit you out with the next tide.

One of the first things we did was climb a steep mountain that appeared to have a castle at the top, overlooking the bay. It was actually a centuries old fortress and battery, complete with cannons and prison cells. The view from the fortress walls were unreal - as in - I could have sworn that they were not real. When I finally go home (some day), I will keep expecting to see the next mountain range fall into the sea just like it did here.

Oddly enough, near the top of the fortress there were a few old rooms that had been converted into a small bar. D and I had drinks near a wall where young soldiers were once trained to fire artillery.

I woke up on our second day in Donostia in extreme pain. My ribs were in agony from the fall I had in Barcelona chasing the pick pocketers. Despite this, D somehow convinced me that we should go ocean kayaking. We walked to the beach and I asked for the kayaks in perfect Spanish. But, when the girl who ran the stand asked if it was our first time, I hesitated and D stepped in to say that we'd both kayaked on white water rivers before, just not the ocean.

Of course, neither of us have white water kayaked ever in our lives, but she was more than pleased with this explanation (and possibly our confident smiles) and eagerly gave us the faster, larger, much tippier kayaks. D an I shrugged, laughed and drug them to the water.

The wind was heavy because of a storm out past the bay and that made the waves severe for Donostia. We struggled to learn how to handle the boats, but neither of us ever turned over. It was a serious two hour workout, but I don't think I'll ever forget the feeling of paddling out to the end of the bay, at the edge of the island that capitulates San Sebastian, and just letting the kayak roll in the waves while we stared out over the silver waters of the Atlantic Ocean. I mused to D that this was actually the closest we were going to be to home before we actually went back home.

The last night in San Sebastian involved a bunch of Americans and a lot of alcohol. The Americans were the kind of Americans that reminded us of why we left America in the first place. I limped behind the group, my ribs pulsing after the kayaking and got an Australian girl to take pity on me, sharing some pain killers before we left the next morning for Bilbao.

Barcelona or The Banishing of Suburbia

"Cerveza? Beer?"

"Massage, cinco Euros!"

"Cerveza? Beer? You want coca?"

This is the chorus you hear as you stroll along the Barcelona beach front at night. But, I am getting ahead of myself. How did we get there?

The subway to La Rambla, right. Let me begin here. La Rambla is an immensely crowded pedestrian street. It is lined with cafes and street performers in elaborate costumes and ten

thousand tourists at any given moment shoving in line to take pictures with them. There are lovers kissing and children running away from their parents and flashing lights and pictures of paella that no self respecting Spaniard would go near. It is the Times Square of Barcelona.

Our first priority upon setting foot in Barcelona was to hurl ourselves carelessly into the Mediterranean Sea as soon as we possibly could. We dropped our bags off at our hostel and marched straight towards the first bit of water we could see.

Unfortunately, this led us straight into a beachless marina well away from our intended destination. Still, while we wer

e there we stumbled across one of the boats from Whale Watchers, which must have been in port to raise money before whale season.

The boat had a sign that said, "We accept food donations. Vegan only."

That sign was probably the last sign of self-restraint we saw in Barcelona. Th rest of the city is fueled on raw hedonism.

After several kilometers further, our blistered feet finally reached the beach. I immediately stumbled, missing my footing on the boardwalk when I first realized that the unfathomably gorgeous women lining the oceanfront would be largely forgoing the tops of their beach attire as they baked their already golden bodies in the sun. Trying my best not to stare, I lamented that my sunglasses had been destroyed in Madrid.

Gathering some composure, we found a spot on the beach and took turns diving into the sea so that someone could stay with the bags. The water was blue and the sun was uninterrupted by clouds. Some Australians we would meet later lamented that the water and the sand weren't nearly as nice as they had back home on the "real" beaches, but it didn't matter. I was happy. We didn't have beach towels or dry clothes, so with salty, dripping bodies we walked the rest of the beach front and let the Spanish sun do its job.

We met so many amazing and possibly life changing people in Barcelona that I can't begin to explain it all. So, I won't. But, if you're reading this, you probably know who you are.

We had some of the best food ever here. I recognize how exaggerated that statement sounds, but I mean it quite factually. The best meal was from a tiny backstreet cafe called La Candela. We had fried plantains with fresh guacamole and hot chili oil, grilled manchego cheese with a sweet green sauce (who knows what magic went into that sauce) and pork-belly risotto with skewers of scallops and shrimp. I told the waitress, "Por Favor, esta un problema con mis comidas. They are so good that I will never be satisfied with another meal again." She laughed.

One afternoon, feeling that we were finally able to peel ourselves away from the beachfront, we walked across most of the city stopping along the way to look at the surreal architecture. The buildings by Gaudi have an almost dream-like quality to them. But, what appears at first glance to be childlike and cartoonish is almost always contrasted by visions of nightmares. The giant cathedral, La Segrada Familia, appears to be both melting and arising from some primordial waste of earth. Gateways to other buildings may appear as the twisted steel gates of hell or as archways of rainbow lollipops. Each structure pulses with the natural elements that inspired it. The hike to the top of Park Guell was long and steep. D and I were both thoroughly soaked in sweat by the time we reached the summit, but every blistered step was worth it.

We were supposed to leave Barcelona after three days for Majorca, but, after speaking to a number of locals and after having difficulty booking the ferry to the islands, we decided to do what everyone who comes to Barcelona seems to do: Not leave. We decided to stay three extra days. Or four. Or something like that. Time lost a lot of meaning while we were here.

On one of our extra nights in the city, we walked through a seedy red light district to have absinthe at a bar that was once frequented by Hemingway. We met a wonderful group of Parisiennes and tried to follow them to a discoteque, but, it was not in the cards for us that night, and we were highly opposed to queueing for an hour. (Queueing is not "Espana.")

Walking home, a young Spaniard came up to me asking for the time. I didn't really understand all of what he was saying, and my head was still quite light from the absinthe, but before I knew it he was congratulating me on my good Spanish and shaking my hand. As soon as he walked away I felt like something wasn't right. I reached for my wallet and it was missing. In that second I turned around and saw that the two guys who had stopped to talk to us were walking casually away. I ran straight for them.

They looked over their shoulders and started running. But somehow, despite the wet streets and my dress shoes, I was gaining ground on them. Adrenaline is a powerful thing. At this point, I suppose they decided that it wasn't worth finding out if I could throw a punch as well as I could run, so they tossed my wallet back at me.

My instinct was then to turn into a wide receiver and try to catch it in the air, but my sudden change of movement and the aforementioned wet streets finally caught up with me and I landed rib-first on the ground. Hard. However, my wallet was there and the only thing that was missing was a handful of receipts.

More happened in Barcelona after that; maybe one day I'll write a novel to cover it all. But, not now. For better or for worse, the city felt like raw passion every single hour of the day. It was intoxicating. Before we left, my exhausted body was cradled on the sand and I watched the sunrise from the beach to the fading echoes of "Cerveza? Beer?"

Madrid

The landscape around Madrid is scorched and dry, littered with the crumbling remnants of old fortresses, but also accented by the facades of breathtaking Spanish mansions. Staring out the window of a high-speed train you can't help but imagine your life unfolding on the balcony of one of those houses, watching the dust and the trains drift past under the scorching sun.

Madrid the city is also scorching, from the sun and from the passion of the inhabitants. I have been really taken aback by the resoundingly negative opinions other travelers have of this city. The buildings are ancient and regal, the palaces a reminder of the dominant power that once was Spain. And, if you are willing to hike the steep city hills, the hippest neighborhoods are as hip as they come. It was here that I ate my first Spanish tapas, headlined by breaded, fried brie cheese with raspberry preserves.

I spent a night in a Madrid discoteca with a Brasilian girl, "A," who I am pretty sure understood one out of every three words that I said to her. However, like most Brasilians (I imagine), she spoke through the sway of her hips and we completely understood each other. After a late night stumble back to the hostel, we found ourselves unable to part company, tangled together in a hallway until one of the proprietors found us and frustratedly swept us away to our separate rooms like children. And I felt like a child again, invincible, having a first kiss in the stairwell of my school.

In Madrid's modern art museum, Reina Sofia, we saw a collection of Salvador Dali paintings from a period before his Surrealist mind saw clocks melting and elephants walking on giant spider legs. I feel like this is where I am now, on the cusp of a dream world that only exists in my mind.