part one: learn how to order beer
part two: go out and drink a lot of them
part three: stop caring what you sound like and your mistakes
part four: tell your life story to your cab driver at 4 am in your new language
I went to Barcelona for a total of 36 hours last week and it was a wild ride. Did I mention I was completely alone? Yaya dropped me off at the metro after giving me directions to my hostel in spanish and I was off. Bewildered by the number of people (I think there were more people on the subway than in the whole of Vilaverd) I quickly turned on 1989 by Taylor Swift to calm my nerves.
I found the hostel easily enough, found out my online reservation was for another location, intentionally left my passport at home so it wouldn’t get stolen to find out that you need it to check in, waited around for a half hour, found a copy of my passport in my email, and got an entire apartment for 9€. Then I went walking around the city for 8 hours.
I walked past La Sagrada Familia and it took my breath away. If you do anything in your life, please go there, pay the 18€ to get in and marvel at Gaudí’s masterpiece. I cried. I then walked to Las Ramblas and shopped along the way. I highly recommend coming to Spain in January because everything is on sale. Seeing as my wardrobe was packed in one duffle back coming here I decided to expand it a little bit. After buying a slightly warmer jacket I walked my sopping wet feet around the Gothic Quarter, drank coffee at Els 4 Gats (where Picasso used to hang out!), explored a bit and made my way to the MACBA.
At the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona I wandered around the one of the exhibits and was about to exit when the security guard directed me into another room. It was a incredibly odd and amusing piece of 15 laptops sitting around a round table playing a video of a girl playing with adults’ shoe laces under the dinner table from all different perspectives. And across from me sat a cute boy. And somehow I managed to get this boy to walk around with me the rest of the rainy night. He’s Australian, his name is Charlie and he owes me 10€. We walked around the neighborhood the MACBA is in and got tapas at Quimet y Quimet. If you are ever in Barcelona go here. I think I died 5 times during our dining experience.
Now, maybe I’ll talk about the title of this post. At dinner I had a couple of glasses of sangria and by the end I was ordering all of our tapas in Spanish. I knew coming into this experience I would have to get over my fear of speaking incorrectly, but I don’t think I realized how much that mattered until after the sangria.
(my phone died so here’s a cool stock photo to illustrate me drinking sangria)
We made our way back to my hostel around 9:30pm and our night had barely begun. (Mom continue at your own discretion here). We bought 2 bottles of wine for 6€ total and pregamed for the hostel pub crawl that began at 11. Somehow we managed to find a channel on TV playing Adventure Time in English and after 2 more glasses of wine we headed to the common area to go out.
At this point I’m tipsy. (Sorry mom, I told you to stop reading). Charlie, Me, a guy from the Netherlands, Rico (hostel staff), and Kate (American) headed to the metro before it closed at midnight to get to our destination. On the metro Kate and I make friends with the boy a few seats down with a puppy. At this point I manage to have a conversation with him about his life. In Spanish. I probably mess up, but I know he’s just moved he from Italy to study. His dog is a five months old.
As the night goes on, I drink more beer (sorry mom) and a ton of water (you’re welcome mom) and more beer (stop reading mom). By the end of the night I’m having full fledged conversations with strangers in Spanish. It sure as hell wasn’t perfect. I couldn’t figure out the word for “fall down” to save my life but I managed to communicate.
By the end of the night I couldn’t find my friends at the dance club and with my phone dead and no understanding of the bus system I took hailed a cab back to the hostel. And I spent all 20 minutes of this cab ride telling my driver every detail of my life that I could manage to spit out in Spanish. I’m pretty sure we got there and he had to tell me to shut up and pay.
The next day I went to dinner with Frida, a Swedish girl who works at the hostel and went out with us the night before, and we relived the night together. I started by saying “Yeah, I think I was talking in Spanish for a long time last night and sounded like a complete idiot.” To which she replied, “You were actually pretty good.”
Even though my Spanish is far from perfect, it still works. Language is all about connecting human beings together, sharing the way we see the world, and building relationships. Maybe for now it means me stumbling over verb tenses and using my hands, but I’m connecting with people I would never get to meet if I didn’t try.
I probably don’t need to spend 25€ on alcohol to practice speaking Spanish. I could have just thrown my pride out the window on day one.
This is me learning to be humble.
PS - More photos coming when I write about my love affair with Guadí and day 2 in Barcalona! For now enjoy some iphone photos.