It is impossible to launch into a six-month journey abroad without having expectations of some kind. There were certain reasons I picked Spain (the weather, the proximity to other European countries, the weather, the beach, the weather...) and certain things I knew I would have to overcome. For instance, I knew I would have to get over my residual Monroe-Doctrine-esque intrusively protective attitude about Latin American Spanish--the lisping would certainly take some getting used to, and the new vocabulary as well.
Alright, I thought. Difficulty and challenges. Bring it on. Nasty ham products? Easy. Speaking in a foreign language? Piece of cake. Being looked down upon for being American, yet being inexplicably incapable of breaking out of the strangling bubble of Americanness despite being in another county? Whatever.
I had one Great Expectation. Just one: that the weather was going to be nice.
It wasn’t an unreasonable expectation. Alicante is a huge tourist destination for snowbirds year-round. Google it and give me one single picture that doesn’t look like pure paradise. Go on, I dare you.
Well, newsflash. Anything you google is in the quaint little downtown area. This is what the majority of the city actually looks like:
Whatever, it’s got a certain graffiti-and-ugly-ass-brick charm. Moving on.
The point is, I though I would escape the “cold” in Arizona and be laying on the beach every day. In reality, I was bundled up under three blankets in my bed for a month because I was too stupid to bring sweatpants, thinking, “Oh, if the buildings in Spain don’t have heating, certainly that means that they just don’t need it!”
February came and I thought, okay Spain, show me what you’ve got! Bring on the heat wave!
Then March. Still nothing but teasingly bright-but-weak sunshine. The smile stapled onto my face got harder to hold onto as I finally admitted that my one Great Expectation was shot to shit. I got bitter. If Spain were my boyfriend, I joked, Spain and I would need to take a little break. Then I realized, no; if Spain were a man, teasing me day after day for two and a half months with promises that he would change and we would have a better future, I would throw a vase at him and then break up with his sorry ass.
The weather FINALLY got warm in early April, but it’s dipped chilly again, bringing torrential rains for Semana Santa all across the country. The huge irony in this is that when I finally have my spring break, the time I’ve been yearning for since March when all of my peers in the States had a week off from their studies and I was stuck in the classroom, it’s raining. I’m in Spain and I finally have free time during the daylight hours to go to the beach and it’s raining.
It honestly doesn’t even matter that the weather is supposed to be nicer next week. I think there comes a time in every relationship, personal or national, in which one just gets so tired of waiting for better things that by the time better things actually come about, one just wants to say, “Fuck you, better things. Where the hell were you two months ago?”
I was supposed to take this week of my two week, wildly-and-inconveniently-placed-in-the-semester spring break to go on a hike in Northern Spain. I was going to do part of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the famous Way of St. James--apparently the third holiest Catholic trek in the world after marches to Jerusalem and Rome. I was even still going to go after my friend bailed. I had misty-eyed daydreams of myself, stomping solo through cow pastures, getting in touch with my own latent spirituality. How invigorating it would all be! How worthy it was of purchasing 60 EUR in nonrefundable plane tickets!
Then I got sick two days before I was supposed to leave. We’re talking like, mild fever symptoms: tickle in the throat, achy neck and shoulders, mildly elevated temperature. Nothing serious. But I started thinking about it: what if I got worse while I was on the Camino? I would be all alone, in god knows what dinky little pueblo without the benefit of the internet or someone to translate for me if I got so delirious that I couldn’t communicate in Spanish anymore. I wasn’t really that sick yet, but I started to just feel...vulnerable. Then I started thinking about what it would actually be like, hiking 116km in five days. Five days of walking is a long time to just walk by yourself. Completely alone.
Then, the kicker: I looked at the weather report and it said it was supposed to rain. Every single goddamn day. I decided to stay home.
Here’s a quote from Archie Griffin, whoever the hell that is: “In the face of adversity, you find out if you're a fighter or a quitter. It's all about getting up after you've been knocked down.”
Well, ladies and gentleman, my time here has taught me something important about myself: I’m a quitter. And I’m sorry, Archie Griffin, but I don’t feel like getting up. I don’t feel like trying to plan more trips and squeeze every last dollar I can out of this trip. I’m sick of waiting for the weather to get nice so that I can do the one goddamn thing I came here to do, which was just to lay on the beach with a sangria in my hand and not a care in the world.
I’m sorry Spain, but I think we should just be friends.
(I’ll feel better when the sun DOES come out again, and I can go to beach and I’m feeling less hormonal. Forgive the rant.)
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