Vol. 2: Como esta la casa de gato?

I wish I could say that we burst into Spain, but the truth is they had to prod us a bit to get us off the ferry. When we finally did stumble down the ramp to Algeciras, we found ourselves in another world completely; we'd entered the Christian world.

What does this mean to five young travellers fresh off the boat from life in a conservative Muslim land?

After settling into our hostel, a more difficult task than previously as all but one of us had returned to being deaf to the local language, and a bit of exploration, we landed at our first bar and ordered beer in public. "To Christianity!" we cheered, and approximately three beers later we were skipping through the quaint streets with stones all laid in charming patterns, laughing at ourselves and our rediscovered abandon. Trees in the parks hung heavy with oranges and an open-air market bore the biggest, brightest produce we'd seen yet. And we talked about Niger; and we told stories of our lives before; and we planned for Amsterdam; and we sang along to the campy pop songs that played on the radio. And we started, slowly slowly, to figure one another out.

As delightful as it sounds to travel with your close friends, I discovered on this trip that it can be far more enjoyable to get to know people via adventurous circumstances. As Peace Corps itself demonstrated, sometimes the relationships you build out of necessity, surrounded by unfamiliarity, as your knowledge of yourself is growing, can be the most fruitful. There is some chance, of course, that I happened to travel with four of the most interesting people I've known. But either way, the hours I spent at home squeezed onto the same couches as my close friends can't sustain me in the same way as a single eight hour bus ride through the mountains of Spain. Maybe it inspires a different type of interaction, maybe it builds rapid trust or maybe it's just a hell of a lot of fun, but that first day in Algeciras was the beginning of the rhythm we developed and, I think, we were all grateful for it at some point during the following weeks.

It sounds terrible, but I have to consult my planner to write my way through Spain. It doesn't seem like its been long enough to have forgotten so much, but with days so full, its difficult to recall it all. (Alhamdilalai.)

So, according to this, we spent just one (very early) night in Algeciras before climbing onto a bus to Grenada. Once again, we didn't have a hostel booked, so upon arrival we jumped a city bus toward the Cathedral. We were bobbing along, laden with our heavy bags, when our ears caught two things: First, the American accents of two make-up coated girls seated near us. Next to us, these girls looked clean, rich and, we resasoned, superficial. Study abroad students. Throughout our trip we'd run into more American study abroaders clogging museums and various attractions, and they nearly always proved lewd and alien. During a brief chat with these two we shared very few details of ourselves, content to keep the interaction shallow. But just as my interest had ebated almost completely, we heard the second cue: "AAAHHHHHHHHHH" came the familiar yelling intro to "Waka Waka."

It was starting.

After choosing a bus stop by cursory glance, we trecked down a road full of little shops peddling overpriced Moroccan goods and all things made of hemp, so we figured we were in the right area. Sure enough, we were soon checking into a funny little hostel, up a hill and around the corner from its accompanying bar, run by a Mexican woman who hid money in the books on her kitchen shelves. Once again, we dropped our bags and set to task.

By Spain, it had become decently clear that Peace Corps wasn't going to call us all one morning and yell "PSYCHE!" So, as much as we wanted to run through the streets, some of our settling in time in each new place had to be allotted to the computer. Not one of us had a plan; no one quite knew what was next. In the simplest terms, we'd all been very recently fired and were left to cope with unexpected homelessness and unemployment.

Leaving Niger meant so much more than that, though.

I never quite managed to be afraid of the future, which considering the terror that enraptured me before leaving for Peace Corps, must mean I've come some way since then. In a notebook given generously to me by a travel mate, I wrote a bit on the bus to Grenada before motion sickness stole my effort: "Doing these sorts of things," I wrote, "and thus being this sort of person always seemed fictitious. It was never an impossibility but neither was it particularly likely. I wonder now if it was a matter of confidence, a feeling tht perhaps I could not quite pull it off. I still get that feeling at times, the one that lingers just behind my earlobes and in the new crease between my eyebrows that just keeps my sneakers glued to the floor.

"In the last seven months, however, my shoes gotten less and less sticky. So much so, in fact, that even when terrorists ripped my whole world out from under me, I never quite felt scared..."

I went on to attribute part of this to the people I met while abroad:

"There are people out there who don't think we should live 'fully' or 'carpe diem' or what-the-fuck-ever but rather can't help but to do so. In this way these people don't choose to be 'brave,' 'adventureous' or to become 'experienced,' nor would they ever take credit for the universe's plan to bring them there. Instead, it's an understanding, a simple state of contented being that you are rather than try to be, which tells us that life is neither short nor long, neither hard nor easy, and neither beautiful nor ugly. It is all, and all cannot be labeled in these sorts of ways. But as it is all, as it contains everything already, why wouldn't you roll around in it a bit?

"We can't know anything for sure, so letting fear of the unknown control us quickly gets out of hand. Better to admit your own powerlessness and relax...Give yourself more chances, these people insist...

"We're on the coast of Spain, hour three in the bus, on our way to Grenada. I don't really know what we'll do there, likely something silly or delightfully normal, and there will almost certainly be coffee. And the mountains and the sea and the orange trees and the beauty are refreshing in a way I didn't realize I needed. Niger tore the colors from my eyes; it drained me of my ability to drink up the big and magnificent. It taught me to find beatuy (and inspiration) from other sources, but it also wore out of me a lot of my creative spirit, drained by hardship and furstration and ugliness and poverty and the consistancy of missing so much for so long. It's trickling back to all of us now, mousso mousso, and we're sensitive to it, to the rain, the soil, the trees and the most air, the beer and the freedom, but mostly we notice the beauty in such sweeping measures, hold our breath and hope we don't die from it.

"Because if something so glorious could exist, how could I? with all my weaknesses? If something so gorgeous could lie before me right this instant, is it possible that other equally extraordinary views lie before me always? Are they just farther in the distance? And should I run a bit more quickly to their banks?"

In Spain, I was immersed in this new adventure so fully that Niger, while constantly on our tongues and in our hearts, was often far from my mind. The Big Unknown Future, too, stayed obediently at bay as I focused nearly exclusively on the bigger task at hand, that of living.

As predicted, in Grenada, after a couple of hours of internet surfing, booking ourselves through the next leg of our trip and digging for options to keep us abroad for as long as possible, we did go out. We ate tapas and happily continued our meandering.

Since I called it early while everyone else continued, I woke the next morning hours before the rest. It was grey outside, the trees in every park still in their winter nude, and for a Saturday morning the streets seemed empty. For some reason, it is one of my most vivid memories of Spain. I wandered to the Cathedral, discovering on the way a section of town completely covered in graffiti, bought a newspaper in a language I can no longer read, and settled into a cafe to pass the hours. On my second cup, my notebook came out once again, but this time the weather seems to have soaked into my spirit.

"...We got on the ferry in Africa," I ranted, "rode for no more than two hours, and were spat out upon this gorgeous, wealthy new land. The differences, however, have been frustrating and jarring. Chruch bells for prayer call, drunkenness for modesty, a slow, dreary rain for the blazing desert sun, Spanish with a lisp, spoken by peacoat-sporting men, traded for my bouncy African tongues which spilled from the toothless, smiling mouths of men in long, flourescent jaabas. And for all the glory and beauty of this place, for all of its choices and smells and fruits, impatience radiates here, from these huge old buildings and the people surrounding them. Apathy beats from the footsteps of the crowds marching on the asphalt, pretending not to see me on the streets."

I continued out onto the ledge of an irrational tangent in the following paragraphs that I'll spare you the horror of trying to follow. Instead, lets return to the hostel just after noon, when my travelling friends had resurfaced from beneath their sheets.

By this point, I'd let my grumpiness swallow me whole, and the delayed beginning to our day was grating my nerves. After piddle-farting around the hostel for a while longer, we finally made it out to the road, where we caught the bus up to the Alhambra, the primary attraction of Grenada.

We were freezing, hungry and hungover again, and once again it morphed into a spectacular day. We openned our cheese, meat and bread picnic as we waited our turn to enter the castle, and by the time we'd reached the top tower, we'd broken into the olives, which made for spectacular spitting ammunition. We made our way next into the Matisse exhibit, the brilliance of which lingered through the rest of my day.

The next morning we slung on our packs and headed back to the station to catch another bus to Cordoba, where we'd found a discount hotel room, that's hotel sans the "s," directly across the street from our destination: the Mezquita-Catedral. By the time we arrived and webbed our brains out for a while, we were less interested in the religious site as much as tapas. The sun was bright, so after wandering in and out of restaurants we repeatedly deemed too expensive, we sat ourselves outside an Argentinian grill and ordered the special, the content of which was unknown but for the cervezas.

In comparison to Grenada, there seemed to be people everywhere, piquing our interest. Where are they all going? we wondered. So we followed, as the afternoon flew into evening, and were led to, well, I'm still not completely sure what it was.

Booths lined a couple of streets before spilling into a huge courtyard full of the aroma of roasting meat, sugary candies and beer: a fair. As we were pushed through the hoards of people, past a fucking dragon and signs for warm wine, we began to put the pieces together: a Medieval Fair. What?! How could we be so lucky?! The rest of the evening was packed with hilarity that honestly deserves a blog in itself. At one point, Nichole held a freaking owl. Some octopus was stollen. Costumed people on stilts blew fire. Live music, dancing, free samples, did I mention the dragon?

We did make it to the Mezquita-Catedral the following day, which was lovely but a bit overpriced, where they were selling shotglasses with tiny photos of the mosque on them. Welcome to the Christian world, eh? And later that afternoon we found a record store, where I did not purchase the Graduate soundtrack on vinyl. And I closed the evening on the roof again, with the Spanish stars above and a new, close friend beside.

The next morning we woke before the dawn, determined to catch a city bus to the station for an early bus to Madrid. After an unpleasant search for the correct bus stop, we waited and waited in the dark cold. Just about the time we'd all grown desperate, a truckdriver informed us that our stop was not currently in rotation, and that we'd been standing in vain. So we hitched up our bootstraps and marched our heavy bags all the way across town to the station on foot.

Only to miss our bus by less than ten minutes.

Miserable, exhausted and frozen, we slumped onto metal benches to wait for the next one. It was the first moment I realized my Niger-ingrained patience had begun to ebb, and as we stood at the bar scavenging breakfast, I could see in my friends' faces that I wasn't the only one suffering. Added to my frustrations was a deep disappointment in myself. How could the lessons I learned have faded so rapidly?

How does this world steal so much from us?

"Now I'm thrust back into a world in which I never was content," I had written the day before. "More aware of why I am unhappy here but even more powerless to change it.

"Let me explain. The lessons I've learned in Niger, that I've been blessed with, have given me power via awareness. I can see areas that don't suit my expectations for myself and my world, and that vision is the first imperative to finding my place. HOWEVER, drug prematurely from Niger as we all were has left me with too many frayed edges; my entire life and future are out of control, undefinable and unknowable, and if I cannot grasp the sheets of my life and future, how am I go change them? Whip the wrinkles out? Hang them out to dry when they're damp and musty?"

I drained my orange juice and lingered over my coffee before returning to where the others sat. "Where's Sam?" I wondered allowed.

"At the park."

In the depths of my self-loathing, while an exhageraged, ill-tempered melodrama was streaming through my mind, Sam was bopping along as happy as ever. My self-absorpion shattered by her infitely positive attitude, I headed into the station's candy shop, grinning and grateful again for my new friends.

We caught our bus and arrived in Madrid with its underground metro and walls of skyscrapers. I felt like a farm girl in Manhattan for the first time, my eyes popping as we paraded along the cracked sidewalks in pursuit of our hostel. We found it, finally, and checked in. Dropping our bags for what felt like the thousandth time, a familiar face appeared. Sure enough, two of our fellow Niger volunteers were staying in the same hostel! What luck!

Soon a group of six with a couple of random Americans we'd met in the lobby, we ventured out in Madrid, in newly washed clothes (take note: first time we'd had access to a washing machine). In a Spanish bar along the pub crawl we'd joined, a familiar yell sounded in the room. "AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" we answered, rushing back to the dance floor for what was becoming our anthem.

We spent the next day in smaller groups, toodling about the city at seperate paces. By afternoon we'd made it to the Reina Sofia, where we spent a spectacular five plus hours wandering through the single greatest art museum I've ever had the joy of visiting. Standing before Guernica, its massive scale and frozen power causing thousands of mini erruptions in my mind, I was reminded again of the question that plagued my previous writing. In a world so full of wonder, why do we not run in desperate joy to such things each day? If our lives, our full daily efforts, aren't spent in pursuit of the marvelous, what are we doing?

Don't we have an obligation to rejoice in the beauty of the world we've been so blessed to be a part of? Isn't it only this that demonstrates our full appreciation?

I came out of the Reina Sofia glowing, literally struggling to contain my smile, and ran into one of my travel mates. We walked back to the hostel at an ambling pace, he so patient with my crazy and I so full of joy. We met that evening at a scheduled time and calculated a plan for the night, which would end at the airport for our 6 a.m. flight.

What does this mean to five young travellers fresh off the boat from life in a conservative Muslim land?

When we finally tossed our packs back on that night, it was on unstable feet. We made it to the airport, though, and when we finally climbed onto the flight, it was with bated breath.

Next stop, Amsterdam.

"AAAHHHHHHHHHHH!"