A bumpy arrival: Spain 2020

It’s New Year’s Day. We leave Penticton on New Year’s Eve, connect in Vancouver AND Toronto, and finally land in Barcelona the next day, minus one bag. In a haze of jetlag, we submit a lost bag claim, acquire a local SIM card, find our tiny rental car. Then, feeling like we are part of some experiment on the torturous effects of sleep-deprivation, we navigate out of the snarl of Barcelona and drive for two hours to Amposta, the little town where we will stay for a couple of nights en route to Chulilla. 

Google Maps takes us relatively close to our AirBnB at #77 Carrer General Prim. We park in front of #75 and get out. As we walk, the street numbers skip from 75 to 79 and continue into the 80’s. Oh? Are we meant to take a run at the brick wall on the side of #75 and hope for magic? Eventually, we discover that 77 comes before 75 here.

The button for the doorbell is at least 6 feet off the ground. I wonder how a child, or even the typical, vertically challenged old Spanish lady could reach this? After a time, exactly such an old lady answers the door, greeting us with a torrent of words. I catch almost none of what she is saying and attribute my slow wits to the drunkenness of jetlag. I wave my hands as a sign of defeat: “Más despacio, por favor,” I finally manage to say. She asks if I want it slower in Catalan or Castilian. Ah, that could be part of the problem. “Castilian,” I confess, knowing that in Catalonia, this will not score any brownie points. 

She acquiesces for all of one sentence and then she’s off to the races again. We follow her into our apartment while she speaks without appearing to stop for breath. I understand a small fraction: she tells us about the keys, the heater, the natural spring water in the bottle on the shelf, and that there is some sort of museum with planes from the era of Franco. Could that possibly be right, or is my jetlag worse than I feared?

When she leaves, Ulysse and I look at each other in amused relief, grateful for the silence and the cozy apartment. Ulysse tumbles like a felled tree onto the comfortable-looking bed. I tell him that he shouldn’t sleep now—it’s only 5pm and we need to find something to eat or we’ll wake up hungry in the middle of the night. But he doesn’t care about this. Not now. 

Only later, after I have been walking around the town for an hour, stopping by one closed grocery store after another, do I remember the warning of my dear friend Julia about small Spanish towns on statutory holidays. I pass a number of people on the street, some walking purposely, others loading the family into a car, all staring at me quizzically but smiling and returning greetings of “Bona Tarda” or “Buon Anno.” I am about to give up my search, when I stumble upon an enterprising fellow who has kept his tiny grocery store open. As I make several laps around the store, wondering what I can concoct from the sparse and somewhat unfamiliar offerings, a steady stream of people drift in and out, some greeting him with an enthusiastic “Assalamu alaikum!” I take my selection of fruit, veggies, sauce, chickpeas, tea, and potato chips to where he stands behind the butcher case. I wonder idly if he might charge me extra, being a stranger in a bind he’d never seen before and would never see again. If he does, it can’t be by much: the total comes to 5 euros. Then I watch, with not a little consternation, as he flaps open a plastic bag, places it on the bloody butcher’s block in front of him, and proceeds to fill it carefully with my purchases. 

But as he hands me the bag, I can’t help but beam at him anyway: bless his honest, hard-working, unhygienic soul for being there when I needed him. 

And it begins.

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