Hello! Or as they all say in Spain, “Eres alemán?” I’ve been in the southern parts of your mom lately, as well as the country of Spain. Sadly I did not end up taking the ferry over to Morocco due to some unforeseen consequences (the driver ruined everything), but I’d like to think I made up for it with an extra gnarly time in the Spanish region known as Ayuhuasca. Wait. I’m confusing my favorite drinks with locations again—the region of Andalucía. I went to two cities there: Sevilla (or “Seville” in White People Language), and Granada. Was I prepared? Well, read on to find out more…
Yes, I was prepared.
Sevilla did me dirty in more ways than one. I was there the first night, staying at some frumpy hostel (incidentally the first “mixed dorm” hostel I stayed in) which didn’t really suck me into the city right away. The next night, I found a Couchsurfing host, and we hit the streets and tore the house down. But then on Saturday he had to leave suddenly (“suddenly” in the sense of suddenly after I woke up at 4:30 PM) so I had to complete the simple task of finding another hostel, and…
THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE ENTIRE CITY OF SEVILLA. No accommodations or nothing. So I had to decide to migrate to my next destination immediately, and sooner than I was planning on going, which was the city of Granada. So I take a Blablacar with some random weirdos and I arrive in Granada at 10 PM. The temperature was 22 degrees Celsius (I SAY CELSIUS NOW YOU GUYS), and then when I get to Granada, it’s 6 degrees! And to my utter horror, only after I got there I find out THERE’S NO ACCOMMODATIONS LEFT IN GRANADA, EITHER. AND! The hostel I thought that I had booked for that night, I had actually booked for SUNDAY night, which was the following day.
So I’m like UGHHHWHATDAFUCK.
The hostel obligingly let me stash my bags there until the next day, but they told me that check in for Sunday was at 2 PM and I had like 14 hours left to kill. So I had to float around in the middle of the night looking for ways to keep myself amused. It was a Saturday night, so it wouldn’t be impossible. But you can only stay out clubbing and boozing for so long. When the sun starts to rise and everyone is having coffee and shit, you need to change your game plan. The highlight of that night/morning was when I got denied entry to a club I had just taken a taxi across the city to get to at 5 AM. For wearing “pantalones deportivos“. And then I went across the street to the only other club I knew about and they denied me for my jogging pants too. But then I convinced them that I always wear these pants out, and every other club in Spain let me in with them, and then they probably thought I was like a mafia guy who can wear the lower half of a tracksuit out and be considered dressed up. And then I told them I would be back tomorrow to payback their kindness and they let me in… But guess what? I never went back the next day! Talk about suckers!
Granada is a magical city. It’s got an Arabic influence to it, since it was ruled by the Arabian Knights or whatever you call those guys. So you see people smoking sheeshas all over. Kebabs, schwarmas, and restaurants not serving alcohol. Guys on flying carpets with talking cats and shit.
Granada is famous for their tapa culture, which fucking rocks my face off. When you go out and get a beer or cocktail, they bring you a different plate of tapas with every drink you order, completely free of charge. So you end up drinking a shitload because you wanna see everything they offer back in that kitchen, and then you get all full and fat and fugly, but hey, this is me now girls! [shoots out of cannon]
I met a girl in Granada who is–get this–half Japanese and half Spanish. And we were speaking all three languages. But actually I was schooling her on her Japanese but that’s because her Japanese mom (it’s always the mom) spoke only Spanish to her daughter, sans the rudimentary greetings and such.
Me and this girl went out on a date on my last night in Granada, and it started with a free movie they were screening at the library. The movie was a 2018 Swedish film called Border. I watched the preview on youtube for half a minute beforehand and I’m like “Okay, something about an ugly cavewoman sniffing people at the airport? Color me interested… no really, color me with crayons, but please be interested throughout the process.”
And then we see this movie and it’s the biggest piece of shart I’ve seen in quite some time.
The movie was so bad that when I got to the tiny student-centric city of Murcia the next day, I had to go see a movie by myself just to get the taste out of my mouth. Luckily, it was an art-house film theatre (a filmoteca) and the movie they were showing was a 1965 Jean-Luc Godard film called Alphaville. QUALITY! Why can’t they make movies like the old ones? Those old French “new wave” films from the 60’s are wicked yo.
So now I’m here in Valencia, which isn’t really in the South—it’s kind of in the middle of Spain, on the eastern coast—and I’m really wrapping up my time on the Spain tour. Valencia is another terrific city. It is the home of paella by the way, and if you’ve never had it, I would suggest that you GO HOME, and… google a picture of it and decide if that’s something you might like, and if so, I would lead you to the phone book and say “WHY THE FUCK IS THERE A PHONEBOOK IN YOUR HOUSE?”
Also interesting thinger about Valencia: they speak Catalan (like in Barcelona), but they call it Valencian. That’s pretty clever. Maybe if I change the name of English to Darblish, nobody will ever know? Oh my god, Darby—they’ll NEVER KNOW! QUICK DO IT, WHILE NO ONE IS LOOKING!
I’ll go back to Madrid after Valencia and start deciding which of the several cities I’ve been to over the last 2 months suits my personality best. Then I’ll chose. And then I’ll have one month to find a way to live there. And if the Spanish sluggishness that plagues all bureaucratic institutions is too much to overcome, then I’ll go live in Eastern Europe for the next few months. Kiev, Ukraine, anyone? Why not? Well, I’ll give you a good reason why: I can go there, disappear from the face of the world and write a book. Didn’t know Explicit Exploits would ever become a book? Well the cat’s out of the bag now! Will someone PLEASE put the cat back in the bag? You know she’s allergic to all of those dusty N*Sync posters I have up in the attic. Thank you.
And then the first day I can legally come back to Spain, there’s a music festival called Mad Cool, headlined by The Chemical Brothers, which is for my money, the best live show you can ever see. Honestly, seeing the duo live in Chicago was probably the greatest experience of my life. So I’ll either see them here in Spain, or/and in Moscow in June (again, why not?). So Mad Cool fest in Madrid on July 11, then make my way north to Pamplona two days later for the encierro, better known as the RUNNING OF THE BULLS FESTIVAL. And then four days after that is Tomorrowland in Belgium, and that’s practically Spain’s backyard. Could I do all three and have the most epic week ever? Why in the fuck not!? Things haven’t stopped being epic during this trip for one moment!
But then again: anything could happen between now and summer. The only guarantee is that I’ll be enjoying the hell out of this ride in the meanwhile. Life’s too short not to love every day on this planet.
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