"My Trip to Spain" | Andokides' Porch

My Trip to Spain
Jimmy Darsey
Miss Poller

Spain is a country in southern Europe with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Mediterranean Sea on the other. Spain is separated from northern Africa by the Strait of Gibraltar.

The people of Spain speak Spanish, except those who speak Catalan, who can speak Spanish when they want to, but that’s not very often. The people who speak Catalan are still mad about a war they lost 300 years ago when Catalonia went from being a rich country that went all the way to Greece to being a part of Spain. The people who speak Catalan are Catalonians, and they are celebrating their loss to Spain this year, and many of them are flying flags, trying to get support for Catalonia to be separate from Spain again. This reminds me of the people who still fly rebel flags in the United States. The Basques are very much like the Catalonians, except more so.

The people of Spain eat mostly ham and cheese sandwiches, croissants, croquettes (but usually not salmon), calamari, potatoes, and a rice dish they call paella, which is kind of like Rice-a-Roni. They also like hamburgers and pizza. They don’t eat vegetables except a little bit in the paella, mostly English peas and peppers, and they eat a lot of tomatoes in a soup they call “gazpacho,” which is Spanish for “cold tomato soup.” They definitely don’t like broccoli, but they do sometimes eat spinach in dishes with eggs and cheese. They put olive oil on everything. Spanish people drink coffee, beer, and a punch made with wine and fruit called sangria. They eat lots of desserts, but they don’t seem to be as fat as Americans. If you order a hot chocolate in Spain, you get a little cup with a melted candy bar in it, which is very hot.

Spanish people like to eat outside a lot. Maybe their apartments are too small to have dining rooms, but they have very wide streets—not the part that the cars, and bikes, and motor scooters are in; that part is very narrow—but wide sidewalks or wide spaces in the middle of the street where there are cafés. You can buy a cup of coffee and a pastry or a sangria or a beer and sit outside at your table all day, and no one seems to mind. Sometimes, it’s hard to pay your bill and leave.

The Spanish economy is not in good shape. This is because you cannot buy a t-shirt in Spain and because everything closes at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Every time you go to a castle or a cathedral, when you leave, you go through the gift shop, just like you do at Disney World, but there is nothing to buy in the gift shops. Sometimes they have two or three t-shirts on display, usually in sizes for very little kids and very big grown ups, and that’s all. The gift shop at Sagrada Familia had some things, but it closed before the cathedral tours were finished, so people at the end of the day didn’t get a chance to shop. The gift shop at the Prado also closed before the museum closed.

When you do find something to buy in Spain, the shopkeepers really like to use pretty paper bags and Scotch tape. There are no plain brown bags in Spain. All of the bags have nice designs in pretty colors, and the shopkeepers always tape them closed very neatly, just like they were wrapping a present.

Spain is a Roman Catholic country, and there are lots of cathedrals that are very old and very big. The cathedral is usually the biggest building in town, and you can see them from far away. While most of the cathedrals are very old, there is one in Barcelona they are still working on. They have been working on building it for 100 years, and they hope to be finished in six years. It is called “Sagrada Familia,” and it was designed by a famous architect named Gaudí who was crazy, but el Greco and Salvador Dali were also from Spain, so maybe there is a crazy Spanish gene, or maybe it’s the sangria. The Sagrada Familia looks like a picture from Happy Birthday to Me by Dr. Suess. It looks like it is made from melting candy. But that’s only the front part. The back part looks very modern.

The Virgin Mary is everywhere in Spain. Spanish people really love “the Blessed Virgin.” Sometimes she’s wearing beautiful clothes that make her look like a queen. This is especially true in the altars of some cathedrals where sculptures of the Virgin are wearing real clothes with gold threads that are very fancy. Mary does not always look like she would be giving birth in a manger. Even in some scenes showing the nativity, Mary looks very rich.

There are also a lot of really gory paintings and sculptures of Jesus and of the saints. Jesus has blood on his head or dripping from his hands and feet; in one painting, Saint Jerome has arrows sticking out all over and blood dripping from each one. The same for some paintings of Saint Sebastian. Sometimes Jesus and the saints are nearly naked and very muscular; sometimes, Jesus, like Mary, is dressed more like a king, even in some paintings of him falling with the cross on the road to Calvary. In an altar in the cathedral in Cádiz, Jesus is buried in something that looks like a very fancy silver and crystal terrine.

It’s pretty creepy to see Jesus, all scrawny and shrunken, looking like he’s about to be served at a dinner party; I’d rather just have the communion wafer.

After churches, the next biggest and oldest buildings in Spain are old military towers and fortresses, along with some castles or palacios. All the old towers and fortresses are a reminder of all the wars in Europe, countries always fighting with each other and taking each other’s property. Cities in Spain still have parts of walls that were built to defend against attack. This is very different from America where we don’t see old fortresses all over American cities.

Churches and military towers look alike in some ways, which is interesting since churches are supposed to be about peace, but this has not always been true. Sometimes, the church was as greedy about grabbing other people’s stuff as the kings were, and the church sometimes had its own army or used the armies of others, especially during the Crusades.

Some of the wars were about independence. Spain, and almost every other country in Europe, had an aristocracy for most of its history. This means Spain was ruled by kings and queens and had an upper class of princes, princesses, dukes, duchesses, marquis, marquesas, counts, countesses, in addition to cardinals and bishops of the Roman Catholic church, all of whom lived and dressed and ate much better than most of the people and went to the same parties and had dinner together. The Spanish people finally rose up to fight for equality in 1873, but it took them more than one try and about 100 years before they finally got it right, going back and forth between republic, monarchy, republic, monarchist dictatorship, and monarchy.

The Spanish people seem not to be able to make up their mind about class and equality. On the one hand, they are very dedicated to the idea of equality, even building opera houses such as the Paleo de Artes in Barcelona just to make the opera and the symphony and all available to everybody. On the other hand, everything in Spain is still about class, including where you sit on trains, and the Spanish still love their grand cathedrals and palaces. The king’s palace in Madrid is much bigger than the White House. After I got back home, the king decided to retire and to hand the job to his son, and the Spanish people are now debating if they still want to have a king at all.

Today, even though it still has a king, Spain is a democracy. The two major political parties are the Popular Party and the Socialists. It is surprising that the Socialists would be one of the two major parties since most Spanish people don’t look like Socialists; they look like regular working people. This is probably why the Socialists lost in 2011; there aren’t as many of them as people thought there were.

The Spanish people really love soccer, which they call football. When the team they like wins, the people get drunk and riot in the streets, and pee on things, and explode things, just like rednecks in Georgia, except that in Spain, all the shouting and singing is in Spanish, which makes it sound more sophisticated.

The Spanish people also love their dogs, and they take them everywhere, not just on walks in the park, but to restaurants, on trains, and in department stores. There are three kinds of dogs in Spain: little white fluffy ones, great big huge ones, and French bulldogs, which seems strange, since the Spanish have not always liked the French very much.

Old Spanish ladies wear sensible shoes, maybe because they walk a lot and go around to the different little markets everyday instead of driving once a week to a huge grocery store. There are lots of shoe stores in Spain, and lots of stores called “ortopedia.” I walked a lot while I was in Spain, but Spain also has very good buses and trains you can take.

The Spanish people take great pride in their culture, and they celebrate their artists. They are eager to tell visitors about the work of outstanding Spaniards and to remind everyone of Spain’s contributions to world culture. Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote the famous book Don Quixote, has streets named after him all over Spain; he is featured on souvenirs; and in Madrid, there is a Miguel de Cervantes Institute in a huge building downtown. This would be like if we built a huge building in Manhattan or Boston or someplace dedicated to just Emerson, Hawthorne, or Faulkner, which we haven’t.

Though the cities in Spain are very old, the buses and trains are very modern. They are clean and inexpensive. There are buses, subways, trains, and electric trolleys. There are high-speed trains that go between cities. The train I took from Barcelona to Madrid reached speeds of 300 km/h. The thing you have to remember on Spanish subways is that you have to open the door yourself to get on or off; the doors don’t open automatically. You can find yourself waiting on the next train or at the wrong station if you’re not careful.

In Spain, they are very serious about conservation. All of the toilets have two buttons: one for big flushes and the other one when just a little flush will do. And many of the lights are controlled by motion sensors or timers, so don’t sit still for too long on a public toilet, or you may have to find your way out in the dark.