Arrival On The Continent

We’re approaching Spain, having just passed over Porto, Portugal, nearing the end of an 8:15 hour flight. It’s pretty amazing how quickly we can be transported from our familiar homes to another different and distant locale. 

I used to think that being in a faraway and novel place would feel pretty magical, as if every sensory input would be magnified and enhanced, but through experience have learned that things feel pretty real no matter where you are: rain is still wet, heat is still hot, tired legs are still tired, and I get hungry eventually no matter where I am. 

But still, traveling to a foreign (by which I mean, not my familiar home) place still feels special and exciting, because even though people look like, well, people, they may dress differently; they often talk a different language, and the shapes of the the surroundings are different. Most obviously, in Europe things are just old, suggesting a history way beyond that in the States. In the US, “old” buildings might be 100, even 200 years old; are likely to be wood-frame, whereas Europe seems to have much more stone— at least those buildings that have survived 200, 300, even 1000 years. I guess the US has old masonry structures, too, but those that I’ve seen are brick ruins of cliff-dwelling native Americans in the desert SW. 

With enough trips to Europe behind me—I’ve lost track, 8? 10?—it feels familiar, even in a city I’ve never visited before. Streets are often granite cobbles, 2” squares laid in a grid, or in repeating fan shapes. 

Carrie, unfortunately, struggles to walk on those uneven surfaces, and while I find they require more attention than flat paved concrete, I can navigate them pretty well. Streets tend to be more organic in layout: curving, winding, more likely to follow geographical features than a simple grid, though there are exceptions. I like the walkable scale of the "old" or central cities; public transport; an emphasis on quality of food and drink; smaller dimensions; smaller cars; efforts to be more efficient with space and energy. It almost seems as if many cultures in Europe have realized what they have is all there is, there are no new areas and caches of resources to exploit, so they have to use what they have well. Sadly, this still hasn’t seemed to catch on widely in the US. 

I’ve also traveled often enough that although I don’t really speak a 2nd language, I like to think I can at least figure out simple signage and directions: the Romance languages have many similar words, and my meager vocabulary in Spanish and French lets me recognize some words and phrases. Generating speech is the most difficult, and I’m practically mute in another language. I can get around in German, harking back to Jr High and HS language classes that seem to have lodged in my brain. I feel embarrassed that I’m not fluent in another language, which seems to be the norm in most other countries. I also look around at home in the US and see profligate use of resources, material and energy, that betrays a persistent wastefulness. And the current political polarization is a source of shame for me, not that I feel responsible for it, but as a US citizen, I’m associated with it— and, of course, affected by it. 

Probably one of the most notable results of traveling is to raise my awareness of the places we’ve been: a year ago the volcano on La Palma, Canary Islands was important because we’ve been there, and hiked “the route of the volcanoes” down the spine of the island. Protests in France—“manifestions"--grab my attention because we were in Marseilles for the first Yellow Vest protests. Drought in Andulusia in Spain is vivid because we hiked the arid south slope of the Sierra Nevada and discovered their centuries-old asequias, stone aquaducts that follow the counters, capturing every bit of the scarce precipitation and channeling it just where it's needed; China’s threat to Taiwan is front and center in my view since visiting our daughter-in-law’s family there. As we approach our bike tour of the Pyrenees, I think back to the books we’ve read and movies we’ve watched about those who smuggled downed Allied pilots during WWII across those mountains from France to Spain, then through Portugal and back to England. I plan to watch for the historical markers recalling those fraught and famous escapes. 

But back to the present on the ground at the Madrid airport, waiting for our final flight to Bilbao,

 I can appreciate the beautiful architecture of terminal finished with natural wood, and designed to minimize noise. How civilized! Likewise the coffee and pastries-- hard to find bad coffee in Spain.