A European Disappointment

If you’re here looking for hot stories of hunky Spaniards and Frenchmen, you’re about to be sorely disappointed.  My trip was a disappointment, bordering on disaster.

I started in Madrid, in the rain, with a reluctant and grumpy traveling companion.  She wanted only Starbucks and vegetarian food, both nearly impossible to find in Spain.  While I was eager to embrace the ham and espresso culture of the place, she longed only for the familiar.  We were on different pages from the get-go. 

After three wet days in largely unfriendly Madrid, we made our way by train to the charming Barcelona.  There her grouchiness continued, despite my best efforts to make the trip fun.  When I lost a bag on a tourist bus (never got it back), the whole trip melted down and she returned early to the states.  Hugely disappointing.

I pressed on alone to Pamplona and my waiting hot Spaniard, trying to look on the bright side of things.  Perhaps he and I would connect better in her absence.  The train trip was long from Barcelona, and I fell asleep and missed the stop for Pamplona.  Finally arriving three hours late after turning myself around, I was nearly swept off my feet by a huge hug from this handsome man.  Taller and stronger than I remembered, he had changed his look some from New Orleans, and I liked it. 

We started with a romantic hike up San Cristobal to look out over Pamplona and its environs. He took my hand on several occasions to help me up steep climbs, and we took (chaste) pictures of ourselves on the hilltop.  Returning to his gorgeous house (I didn’t know there were single, 40-something guys who kept such beautiful homes), we relaxed for the evening with European weed, cheap beer and chicken wings, not the classic Spanish experience of the guidebook, but very pleasant nonetheless.  I retired early to my guest room and slept deeply.

The second day we explored Pamplona.  The sun shone brightly on the old city, where families and singles wandered from one taverna to the next enjoying tapas and little glasses of wine and local cider.  We strolled with his arm around me, he introduced me to his friends, and we continued our amiable but difficult struggle to understand one another through the language barrier.  After a long day of walking, drinking and eating, we again returned to his house for another evening of smoking, drinking and talking.  As it got late, I said I needed to go to bed soon, and gently asked if I should stay in the guest room again.  “I can’t.  Do you understand?” he said.  I said that I did, taking that to mean he was too tired to be intimate that night. 

The next day I drove us (!) to Palacio La Cava, outside the city.  His shoulder to mine, we wandered the cloistered rooms and gardens of this magnificently restored castle, again taking photos and enjoying ourselves.  He received a couple of texts while we were there, and told me that a friend – an old girlfriend – would be joining us at his place for lunch.  Fine.

The woman – we’ll call her Ana – arrived at 2, and they prepared a light lunch for us in the kitchen, murmuring to one another in Basque Spanish, while I puttered around the house reading and writing.  From there, the whole trip turned sour for me.  I was largely excluded from any continuing conversation, as Ana spoke very little English.  Their obvious intimacy left me alone and alienated. 

Ana stayed for two days.  We went together to the beautiful San Sebastien, where THEY walked shoulder to shoulder, chatting quietly in Basque, and I tagged along behind like a mute third wheel.  We hooked up with some friends of theirs later in the evening, after several hours of tavern hopping, and landed at a birthday party for a very drunk young woman in a closed bar.  None of the forty or so people there spoke any English, and I felt completely isolated amidst the revelry.  I didn’t know where we were staying that night, so couldn’t ask to go home and crash.  The party continued into the wee hours of the morning as I fought tears, and at one point I went outside with my iPod to escape the dreadful Basque music the crowd was loudly singing along to.

My high hopes for this connection, as well as my hopes in general for an enjoyable trip with my companion, went completely unrealized.  I am home now, nursing the Spanish flu, and wondering how I’ll justify the $5,000 I spent on this botched trip.  Perhaps the lessons learned will come to me over time.