Hasta luego, España

Tomorrow morning we'll be getting on the plane and leaving this lovely place.  I'm sad that the adventure is over but I'm also already excited about the next one. Also, I'm excited to sink my teeth into a Chipotle burrito. And to not have to wake up every morning and check the paper to make sure the currency in my wallet is still worth something.

I'll miss the fruit market, and fresh persimmons, and paella and Manchego cheese. I'll miss Claire and my friends, my students at school and their grubby adoring little hugs. I'll miss the beach being outside my front door, and I'll miss the nighttime walks along the waves with The Mister. I'll miss the everlasting sunny weather and siesta and the way the shops are closed on Sundays.

But after all the adventures over the last two years, after Italy and Jordan and France and Scotland and Ireland and Morocco and Portugal and Sweden and all the rest, I have come to this timeless conclusion:

There's no place like home.

Photos from the archives

The view from my living room window on a rare cloudy day.

Sunset.

I'll miss this - fresh food delivered straight from the fields.

Bullfight

I went to a bullfight yesterday. Oh yes, I did.

Saturday night The Mister and I were hanging around, getting ready to meet friends for dinner, when we started talking about things we hadn't done in Spain. Seeing a bullfight was pretty high up on the list, and we both remembered walking past lots of posters in the past few days advertising a bullfight in our local ring on Sunday. Hmm, we thought -- destiny?

And so we went, dutifully punching in our ticket to this particular cultural oddity. Now I know this subject can be controversial: there are the "HELLO ANIMAL CRUELTY" people and the "JUST A CULTURAL THING, NOTHING TO SEE HERE FOLKS" people, and I'd say we fall right in between. I didn't grow up on a farm or anything and I'm not around wild animals that much, so I'm not exactly used to seeing something - anything - die right in front of me. Killed right in front of me, let's be honest.

But I suppose the bulls have had nice lives munching grass and frolicking under blue skies and all that, which is far, far nicer than the life of your average American feed-lot guy. I mean have you seen "Food, Inc."? And I still eat cheeseburgers. So, yeah. I suppose I can't get on my high horse and judge. 

Annnnyway, enough philosophizing. For those of you who think this whole thing is terrible, see below: the bull got his comeuppance. Maybe we saw a crappy bullfight or something but I think there were four or five near-gorings, with men in tights and sequins hightailing it as fast as they could with a raging bull in hot pursuit. And one man fell off a horse and narrowly avoided being trampled by both the furious bull and the confused horse. I can't say I felt that sorry for the men - why can't the bull get in the action too? All's fair in love and war.

 

 

 

A note on the future of this blog

Looking ahead. Or behind, depending on how you look at it. I'm a glass half-full kind of girl so I say ahead.

I debated back and forth for awhile. What to do with this blog? What do you do with a travel blog about living in Spain when you no longer live in Spain?

So here's what I've decided: I'm not going anywhere. Internetly, at least. I'm going to keep blogging  throughout the summer, as I navigate what is sure to be a fun (funny?) transition back to the motherland. 

I've never heard the overplayed radio hits, I've been told that there's something/someone (still fuzzy on that?) called "The Situation" that is somehow culturally important, and when I left America the word Siri didn't mean anything. My sisters told me that I am like their little alien that has to be taught how to be around normal people again. They said my de-Euro-ization will take at least six months (maybe longer in the fashion department?), but in the meantime they're willing to be patient.

At some point in the summer, I'll begin blogging on my new blog, which is in the final stages of my super-secret design and testing process (read: I've barely started throwing around ideas).   I'll leave this blog and URL unchanged so that anyone who likes can access posts about Spain and travel without having to sort through layers of stuff about life in Boston and Harvard. But I hope you come along for the ride over on that blog too, because even if law school is completely outside your area of interests, I bet there will be some incidents involving Boston baked beans or New England leaves in the fall or über-special people straight out of The Paper Chase (true or false? everyone at Harvard Law is a pretentious overprivileged trust-funder? tune in to find out...). 

In other words, I do not think it will be  boring. 

Is it ever?

Photos from rural Spain