Alicante (Gone Fishin')

Alicante: 3/18/2017

I picked Spain because two of my good friends coincidentally happened to be there as well at different times and in different cities.  My stopover was in Moscow. It was very ass-backwards, overshooting Spain by a few hours, but I didn’t care since the flight was cheap.  After eight hours on a plane as the only non-Russian speaker, surrounded by old ladies wearing slippers and chugging airplane bottles of vodka, I was ecstatic to be in Spain.

Alicante is a charming little seaside town.  When I arrived, it was 65 degrees and sunny.  I met up with Melissa and her study abroad host, Rocio, gave us a recommendation for a tapas restaurant nearby.  In greeting, Rocio said “encantada” and kissed me on both cheeks. I absolutely love that about Europeans and immediately adopted “encantada” (“charmed, enchanted”) into my vocabulary.

We walked through the town until we came upon a series of winding streets with hidden passageways nestled into hills.  The restaurant was on a charming little hill that reminded me of Santorini with its whitewashed buildings with blue trim and laundry hanging from balconies.  I tried patatas bravas (basically like potato chips with some kind of tomato sauce – why don’t we have this in the US?) and purchased an empanada every time I saw one for sale.

HOW CUTE.

After lunch we went to the Castle of Santa Barbara and hiked around the grounds. As you probably know, I love old things, and this fortress was from the 1200s. At the edge of the fortress we stumbled upon a lovely view of the bright blue ocean. 

I love castles.Then we went back to town, to a little café between some crazy-looking banyon trees. 

 

I also love nature. 

We had tea and coffee and then walked around the Old Town and did some shopping downtown.  The clothing stores here all have strange, poorly translated English phrases, such as:

“Why? Trust Me. Remember?”
“LOST STORIES”
“Property of NO ONE. It’s not happening”
“New Kid Club”
“There is [sic] always two options: Make it happen or make an excuse. YOU DECIDE!”

Everyone eats dinner really late in Spain, which I find fascinating. At 11:00 (!) we headed out for tapas.  Alicante has surprisingly vibrant nightlife, and crowds of people were out in a neighborhood full of bars and cobbled streets. Melissa and I had some sangria and people-watched while I tried to keep up with the rapid Spanish buzzing around me.

I studied Spanish for nearly eight years in school, from age 12 through age 19. I could speak it fluently, although my vocabulary was more moderate. After nine years of disuse, I’ve lost my grasp on the subjunctive and most important words (bathroom, “nice to meet you,” train station), although some random phrases remain (“como se dice? – how do you say?” “busco a” – “I’m looking for,” and “zanahoria” – “carrot”).  In Spain I found almost immediately that native speakers talk far too quickly for me to get more than the gist of the conversation, and sometimes the gist wasn’t even correct (“did she say ‘go left’?” – “no, she said DON’T go left”).  The accent made it hard to understand, and so I found that I could more or less follow along, but that it took extraordinary mental concentration to do this, and I couldn’t last more than a few minutes at a time doing so.

I love languages as a concept; the idea that most languages are derived from each other and related. The etiology of language is something I like to read about as a hobby, and yet I found it safer to speak in English because if I were to say something in Spanish, the other person would reply to me in Spanish too, and then I would have to confess my ignorance. Luckily, Melissa speaks Spanish fluently, and so she did most of the talking while I concentrated on listening.

We spent the night at Rocio’s, playing with her two adorable young sons.  The next morning we headed out to Valencia.