Spain, Again

week ago at the time of this writing, my wife and I returned from a 12-day trip to Spain. More about that later. My first visit to the country occurred in January 1959. At the time I had recently turned 19 and had joined my German-Dutch Heidelberg student friend, Hans, who was going to Spain to improve his Spanish. Hans was studying at the Heidelberg Interpreters Institute. His languages were English and Spanish. Later he would work for many years as a simultaneous interpreter for the European Union. Alas, he died too young. From my perspective, his English and Spanish were already excellent. During academic year 1958=59 I was spending my junior year as a Yale-Heidelberg exchange scholar. My Yale advisor had made it clear to me that just by spending 12 months in Europe I would doubtless get more learning than from two academic semesters in New Haven. Of course, I didn’t totally believe him, so I kept a daily journal in English, German, and French and did attend my classes. Nonetheless, I felt free to travel—something with my $200 (US) a month back then I could well afford to do. Hans and I found a super-cheap room to rent near the Plaza Santa Ana in Madrid. There was a lot of night-time activity, however, and we soon discovered that we were staying in an unused space in a local bordello. So much for learning. I stayed on for a month and improved my prep-school Spanish a good bit. We carefully kept ourselves away from the other activities in our living quarters.

​The next visit to Espana took place in 2011, as part of Cedar’s and my 6-week overseas honeymoon. Besides two weeks on the estate of meditation friends near Granada, we flew in and out of Barcelona between our two-week visits to Turkey and Morocco and had a chance to see the sites of that city, including the Holy Family Cathedral and other impressive works by the Catalan architect Gaudi. Visit #3 took place in the late summer of 2017, when Cedar and I, 72 and 77 years old, respectively, managed to walk 200 kms. (120 miles) of the famed pilgrimage route known as the Camino—a trek of eight days, with a two-day rest top in the middle.
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The fourth and final visit to date is the one that just occurred. We were going primarily to visit my younger daughter, Christine, who with her British husband, Richard, were there for the destination wedding of Richard’s sister, Siobhan. Since their dad had died a year ago, Richard as the oldest brother would be walking his sister down the aisle in Seville. Since Richard and Christine live in faraway Brisbane, Australia, and would be unable to visit us in Boulder, this would be a rare, less expensive opportunity for us to see them after many years. During our time there, moreover, we would also be able to meet with Cedar’s professional colleagues in Madrid and, at the end of our time in the country, spend a few days at the home in Valencia of a young Cuban couple we had met and befriended during our one-week 2019 stay in Old Havana at the wife’s grandparents’ Airbnb. An interesting side note is that the first of our three hotels or hostels in Madrid was only a few blocks away from that house of ill repute Hans and I stayed in back in 1959. Finally, another special feature which we experienced for the first time was riding on four of  Spain’s bullet trains at speeds up to 200 miles an hour—something our self-proclaimed “Greatest Nation on Earth” hasn’t yet acquired! To which I say, Viva Espana!!!

This is what our four Spanish bullet trains looked like.