Goodbye

Apparently I wrote this on the plane on the way home from Spain, and I had forgotten about it, and I just found it again today. So, here's my last entry, I suppose. I'm home and clearly nothing exciting is ever going to happen in my life again, so that's that. Dems was good times. Oh, also, here's a photo album from my trip: http://picasaweb.google.com/Alisha.Schor/ExcursionsInEurope

My awesome present(s)

The last few days I had in Tarragona were great. Determined to not let my tendency to overthink or get overly sentimental overrun my chances of having a few last good times, I basically kind of pretended that I wasn’t going anywhere, and that I was simply continuing on with my amazing vacation. Which was definitely the best way to go. Goodbyes, I’ve decided, are just silly. The people you care about seeing again you will, eventually, the people who were simply a part of your life at that time are just that, people that fulfilled their role at that time, and the rest, the ones you liked but weren’t necessarily close with are simply more opportunities for chance encounters later in life, which are always fun. And life always goes forward; a good time may never last but it will also never be the last good time. And with that, I was fairly ok with leaving, and in between packing and running errands, I made the most of the time.

To be honest, it wasn’t a whole bunch of crazy last few days, like we had in the weeks before my friend Thor left (I think that month or whatever really wore us out), but I kind of liked it being calm. I didn’t have anything left that I “had” to do, I wasn’t restless or really wanting a party, after my 2.5 week trip, and I just kind of went along my way. The highlights, to be honest, were a number of shared meals—first, on Monday after I came back from my trip, one of my roommates, Daniela, made dinner for her boyfriend and me and the three of us ate together, which we hadn’t done in a while, and we caught up on each other’s vacations. Then, on both Tuesday and Wednesday, I went over to Laura’s house where her mom prepared lunch for us both days (they’re still on the jornada intensiva at Dow so Laura just worked straight until 2:30 and then come back to Tarragona), which were a lot of fun. I don’t know why I enjoy meeting other people’s parents so much but I do, and Laura’s mom is fun and really sweet, and made an awesome seafood-laden paella for us, which definitely topped any restaurant paella as an option for one of my last few meals in Spain. I really really do talk about food so much; it’s probably unhealthy, but a good meal really does make me genuinely happy, so whatever.

Then on Wednesday, after lunch, my friend Luis came over to teach me how to make Spanish tortilla, which is nothing like Mexican tortillas. A Spanish tortilla is basically a cake of potatoes, eggs, and onion, and really a super-versatile staple food of Spain (by cake I just mean the shape, it’s not at all sweet). We didn’t eat so much of it since we had both just eaten, but we sampled and then I actually ended up bring a tortilla sandwich with me to the airport the next day for brekkie. But we had been meaning to make a time for me to learn for a few months, so it was good that it worked out on my last day.

Finally, Wedneday night, we all went out to dinner at a nice restaurant in Tarragona. Again, a great meal, seafood, jamón serrano, and pa amb tomáquet galore, but the best part was undoubtedly the company and the gift the prepared for me. (Really, I appreciated all of the meals and get-togethers the last two days, and I consider them gifts as well, but this one was special.) Basically, summarizing, sometime during my stay in Spain I made some joke about being really excited for there being dragons at some festival. And my over-the-top reaction to the dragons led to other people’s over-the-top reaction to my reaction, and the whole thing just snowballed until I essentially became la dragona, enough so that sometimes my friends would say “Hola, dragona, ¿qué tal?” instead of using my real name. In addition, Laura and one of our other friends, Eva, are very repetitive people, in that they never let a joke (or mispronunciation in Spanish) go, and it gets repeated and repeated until it goes from no longer funny back to funny again (Conner 3, anyone?). As a result, we have a number of key phrases that evoke first echoes and then roars of laughter every time someone says them (and they’re not entirely uncommon phrases, which makes conversation difficult at times). So basically, what Eva and Laura did was compile a whole bunch of pictures that we have from all the bazillions of things we all did together, and write “La Leyenda de la Dragona de Tarragona,” basically the chronology of my time in Spain, but littered with inside jokes, crazy memories, and plenty of our special phrases.

It’s seriously great. Like, it’s obvious that they spent tons of time trying to think of everything, and they really did. I mean, I’m really a person that notices details most of the time, and every time I page through the book again (which I did several times between that dinner and arriving to Boston), I find something new that they snuck in. Not to take away from any gift that anyone reading this blog might have ever given me, but I really really do believe that it was one of the most incredibly thoughtful gifts I have ever received in my life. At one point I was sitting the airport in Zürich rereading it over lunch between flights, and I couldn’t keep myself from laughing aloud, even though I already knew everything it said. Really, it’s a great gift. It made/makes me so happy (yes, more than the paella or that really good meal I had with Leanne in Rome). I met a ton of great people in Spain, and we made a ton of good memories, and it makes me feel so good to think about all the crazy fun stuff we did that there really wasn’t and room at all for me to be sad. An ideal goodbye, that way. Well, not goodbye, because we’ve already agreed that I’m going back for Pamplona 2010. A Pamplona hemos de ir… YAY!