Spain 2024 Part 1

 Day 1

I arrived at the Gare de Lyon station in Paris well in advance, only to find out that my train was delayed. I never learned if it had anything to do with the fact that the police cordoned off and evacuated half the station and most of the exits. I never learned what this was for. My train was delayed by an hour and a half, meaning that I would certainly miss my bus in Perpignan. I had already paid for the ticket and there were no other buses going to Girona that day. This was going to be a problem.

I had spoken with Blai on the phone and he said he would try and figure out if there was another means of transport onward from Perpignan because I had no internet access. The train arrived in Perpignan just a bit earlier than expected (though not early enough to catch my bus), and I was still waiting to hear from Blai. I hustled to the part of the station for local bus transport and asked the man at the ticket booth how to get to Figueres, the nearest town to Blai. He said it was complicated but that there was a bus going to Le Boulou, on the French side of the border, and from there I could get a bus to Figueres. The bus was loading and he said I needed to hurry. As I ran to the bus, Blai called. I told him to hang on while I loaded my bag under the bus. I told him that I was getting on a bus and he said that he had found a Bla Bla car, some kind of ride share that would leave in thirty minutes. He said I might as well stay on the bus. This was a big mistake. If I had taken the Bla Bla Car, I would have been in Figueres in about an hour.

Instead, I arrived in Le Boulou (confusingly it is also called El Volo in Catalan) only to find out that the next bus wasn’t leaving for about two more hours, at 8:30. I walked all the way through this small town to the highway and started hitchhiking at a roundabout. It was a pretty decent spot and I had high hopes. Within minutes, a small car stopped and asked where I was going. Unfortunately he wasn’t even crossing the border. As it started to get dark, I noticed someone start hitchhiking in the opposite direction as me. This didn’t appear to be a traveler, but probably a local just trying to get home from work. They were picked up within minutes. I was so bummed. I walked back to town with just enough time to catch the onward bus to Figueres, the hometown of Salvador Dalí.

I finally arrived around 9:30 and Blai showed up with Jonathan in his zombie-looking purple Renault from the 80’s. While I had seen each of them a couple of times in the past decade and they had had their own travel adventures since we parted ways in Mali, we hadn’t all been together since 2015. We picked up where we left off. We bought some beers at a little shop and sat in the plaza, catching up. Blai said that it was illegal to drink in public in Spain, which was news to me, but we did it anyway. Jonathan just flew in from Myrtle Beach, where he’d been working as a bartender. Blai kept making fun of him for the American-style belly he’d grown. Jonathan kept whining that he was hungry and wanted a hamburger con queso, so we went looking for food. After going past a couple of chic and/or chain restaurants we found a classic Spanish style bar with the typical menu. We ordered some fried calamari, fried boquerones (anchovies) and beer. It was a great snack. Then, as we were thinking of heading back home, we wondered if we should stop off at this hookah bar we were walking past. None of us wanted hookah, but we decided to go in anyway and see what was going on there. It was basically a bar full of Colombian immigrants, some of whom sat under the neon lights smoking the hookah. It’s really wild how in twenty years, hookah went from being kind of an obscure practice limited to your occasional Egyptian restaurant or college dorm room (and a good chunk of the middle east), to a social event popular among young people all over the world. Or maybe it’s just popular wherever the large Lebanese diaspora lands, which, basically is all over the world. Jonathan flirted with the Colombian bartenders, telling them all about how he lived in Colombia and even had a piece of land. They didn’t seem that impressed, and I wondered whether they even believed that he had even been to Colombia. His Spanish is so weird. The grammar and accent are atrocious, but his confidence takes him where he needs to be. He can communicate in Spanish better than I can, obviously, but I kept being shocked that anyone could even understand him. We had a round of Colombian Aguardiente and a beer before pilfering one of the decorative Halloween skulls on the table and heading out.

Day 2

Well, I woke up pretty hungover. I’m not sure how the others felt, but I wasn’t great. We gathered in the kitchen and had some pa am tomàquet, the Catalan staple of toast rubbed with garlic, tomato and olive oil. Blai was always making this when we were traveling in Mali. I never quite understood the appeal when we were there, but have since learned to appreciate it with better bread, better oil and the right kind of tomato. Blai grows a certain type of tomato that works especially well for this. In Spanish they are called hanging tomatoes, because if you hang them up after picking them, they can last for months in the open air. Blai has them strung around his kitchen. It has a very thick skin which gives them protection from bugs and such, plus it make it far easier to rub them onto your bread, squeezing out all the pulp, while the skin stays intact in your fingers. A well made pa amb tomàaquet (or pan con tomate in Spanish) is truly one of the best foods in terms of its simplicity to deliciousness ratio. Blai also opened up some of his homemade botifarra, or Catalan sausage. These were large cooked sausages that were sliced like deli meats.

Later we went into the nearby town of Besalu for lunch. I wasn’t hungry at all, but Jonathan and Blai went to a kebab place. While they ate at a table on the sidewalk, I went inside to buy an ice cream. The guy working there, who I would guess was an immigrant from Bangladesh asked me where I was from. His Spanish wasn’t great, but he could also tell I wasn’t from there. I told him “Estados Unidos” avoiding the more complicated term “America”. He didn’t understand, so I repeated, but still he was like, what? “America” I said. “Oh, ok…America Sud (south) or…America….normal?” “America normal,” I responded with a smile.

We walked around Besalu’s medieval, walled center. It’s dramatically atmospheric, with all of its narrow alleyways, stone buildings and giant, rustic doors. The last time I was here was in the dead of winter and it was empty. Now, in the middle of autumn, there were quite a few tourists wandering around and more souvenir shops offering overpriced candy, souvenirs and toy swords for swashbuckling children.

That night I made my legendary peanut soup, a dish inspired by Awine’s groundnut soup, but adapted to the context of our voyage on the Niger River in Mali. I refined it a bit by blending the aromatic base, but it was essentially the same thing as I’d made so many times during our 2010-2011 West African adventure. I also roasted some oyster mushrooms in the oven, but I forgot about them and they burned to a crisp. I was devastated and almost just left out of shame. I was so excited about the mushrooms. The soup was still good though. Neus, Blai’s new girlfriend arrived for dinner. We spent the rest of the evening hanging around a fire outside, reminiscing and singing the songs
we used to sing while traveling together.

Day 3

In the morning I brewed mint tea over some of the leftover embers from the previous night’s camp fire. Blai brought me some pan con tomate with some sausage on it. While I was turned toward the fire, though, one of the cats came through and knocked over my breakfast and ate most of the sausage. Cats.

I wanted to go on some kind of adventure in the forest on and/or around Blai’s property. Instead we did chores to get ready for Blai’s birthday weekend. I didn’t mind doing chores, but I still wanted to get out and explore the forests. Jonathan was super pumped to spend a couple of hours weed whacking a bunch of the grassy areas around the house. I washed the tables, the plastic chairs and cleaned out the big stone water basin, clearing it of green algae. Blai was mostly on the phone the whole time, organizing who knows what. I also sharpened his set of very cool Catalan style wood handled knives. I had sharpened them the last time I’d been here, but clearly hadn’t been kept up with.

Later we drove up to a nearby farm. Blai was considering doing some work for them, but in the end he decided that even if it was decent money, he knew his worth and he didn’t want to be doing any low level work. Jonathan seemed surprised and said that he always takes whatever kind of work he can get if he needs the money. Blai plays the long game though.

That night Blai got out a couple of his bows to show Jonathan and I how to use them. Jonathan was very enthusiastic about them, but he had a bit of experience with them. Blai was pretty much an expert in using a bow. I was intimidated as the bows seemed expensive and fragile. I could tell Blai didn’t have a lot of confidence in me using them. The first bow we used was a traditional bow, and that wasn’t too hard for me to understand. I didn’t do great on the target, but I was able to hit it…most of the time. As the sun set, Blai brought out his compound bow. It was like a whole different kind of machine. Like comparing a Ferrari to a Schwinn bicycle. Jonathan shot it a couple times before Blai started to want to put it away because it was getting dark. Jon insisted that I get to try it though, and Blai couldn’t really say no since the bow had a powerful light mounted on it. It was a serious task to just get the string pulled back. This thing had serious power. Of course, I hit the wooden edge of the target, getting the arrow tip to get stuck in the wood when I pulled the arrow out. I was embarrassed as Blai can be a little protective of his things. So I had to get some pliers and carefully pull the tip out without bending the tip. Anyway, I would have liked to shoot the bow a bit more, but it was kind of stressful. I was a bit relieved when I got back to the kitchen after to get some dinner started. Jonathan found some tonic in the fridge, so we started sneaking gins and tonics while Blai was busy on the phone. Later that night one of the horses got out of its enclosure, so we had to go and corral it back in. Blai had some confusing arrangement with a neighbor who had inherited horses from his wealthy parents. They were living on his land, while the owner lived out of a van on the edge of Blai’s property and cared for the horses. I think. It was kind of unclear.