el último día

I just took my last exam, my bags are packed and my plane leaves Sevilla at 7 tomorrow morning. So today is my last day here and this is my last entry on this blog. It’s entry #141. I type up everything in MS Word before posting it, and the Word document of the entire blog is 92 pages long (single spaced in size 12 font – holy crap!).

I left the US on August 25 last year and will return 286 days later. I am curious to see how I’ll feel when I’m back, what I’ll like and dislike about the US and what I’ll miss about Sevilla. I’ve been wondering for a while what it will be like to go back and see everything with a new perspective.

I had so many incredible experiences. Sharing a small apartment with twelve Spaniards for nine months is certainly one thing I’ll never forgot. There were so many things, such as going to class at a 500-year old university in a giant building surrounded by a moat, riding a camel in Morocco, interviewing the Turkish ambassador in Madrid, catching an opera in Vienna with Charlie, going to a sunny black sand beach with Martha in December, publishing articles, celebrating dozens of birthdays at home or with friends in bars, driving a little Citroën through the Basque mountains, seeing a symphony in Prague, and dancing sevillanas with the Delahunts and my Spanish family – all were unforgettable.

And the food! I enjoyed pizza in Italy, crepes in Paris, cod in the Basque country, waffles in Belgium, Cruzcampos and tintos in the streets and bars of Sevilla, herring in Denmark, red wine at a small bodega in la Rioja, bratwurst in Germany, Heineken at the brewery in Amsterdam, fish and chips and meat pies in London, tapas in Spain, goulash and pivo in Prague, fresh fruit in the Canary Islands, couscous and mint tea in Morocco, and fresh lobster and crab in Lisbon. Surprisingly, I’m not coming home any heavier than I was a year ago.

I saw and did a lot while traveling– I went to 13 countries outside of Spain -- Morocco, Portugal, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden (I am counting Sweden – I spent all of 15 minutes there). I have over 7400 photos of Europe on my computer. Some were taken by other people but most of them are mine. And I’ve collected a lot of postcards from every country and a map of almost every city I’ve been to.

I learned a great deal of interesting things, such as the versatility of olive oil – it can be used on toast in the morning, drizzled on the popcorn sold in movie theaters, used to fry eggs or to make omelets (with a little olive oil mixed in with beaten eggs they don’t stick to the pan), used to make desserts, soups, sauces, and fried food, or used to rub on your skin for a healthy shine. And some people actually go olive oil tasting and drink different olive oils. I learned a lot just by experiencing a different way of life.

I also learned the value of a three-hour afternoon nap after going out until 6 a.m. the night before. I realized that big houses and cars are frivolous. Spaniards have taught me that family time, leisure time and just having a good time are the most important things in life. I grew a taste for wine, coffee, tea, and beer (none of which I really liked before) and good food (I’ve always like food, but now I’m more sophisticated). I stayed out way too late many times and I ate my fare share of ham and drank a whole lot of cheap wine. I took nine classes in Spanish. One other class, teaching English, was in English. I learned a lot of Spanish language and culture – from art and history to phonetics and literature.

So now it’s the US and everything about home that seems foreign and unfamiliar. It’s hard to remember things about home, it’s been so long.

One thing that always strikes me is the first picture in my photo album. I had Charlie or Martha, I can’t remember which one, take a picture of me holding my bags (which are now much heavier going back) standing in the back room of our house just before I left. I put this picture in my “Spain” album in iPhoto because I consider it the first picture of my experience in Spain.

Throughout the year, whenever I add photos to my Spain album on my laptop, I scroll through the new ones and when I get to the last of the new pictures, it jumps from the last picture to the very first one – the one of me standing in my house on August 25th with my two backpacks and a giant duffel bag. I always react to seeing that picture. At first I would say to myself “it’s home!” with some feeling of nostalgia, but quickly everything in the picture started to seem more and more distant and hazy.

Now every time I see it I think “that’s me!?” It started to look more and more like a ten-year old photo of some time and place that had begun to slip from my memory. It’s weird to think of that room, the garage and the yard in the background, to see the clothes I wore for the flight over here and recall the thoughts that were going through my head as I walked out the door. I didn’t look any different back then, but I feel that I was in some ways a different person back then. And I certainly had no idea what I was about to experience over the next nine months.

I do have a record of what I thinking that day back in August. I started my Spain journal/blog on my laptop while sitting in the international terminal at O’Hare. I never posted this on my blog. So, here it is, unfinished and unedited:


˝Day 0
O’Hare Airport

The plane starts boarding in one hour. I’m thinking about how much I will have changed when I am back at O’Hare, 9 months from now. I’ll be fluent in Spanish, a senior in college, well versed in European culture, and I will be able to buy a drink at the airport bar – that’s a big change.
I’m in the middle of the hardest part of the experience, saying goodbye to home and my family and enduring the long haul of two flights and hours of sitting around in airports. Well, leaving Spain and coming home is probably the harder part though. But it will take a couple of weeks to adjust to the new time zone, language and living situation.
This is going to be, without a doubt, the best year of my life. I’m looking forward to nine months living in an awesome city as a student, weeks and weeks of travel, seeing many new countries and meeting a lot of new people. A lot lies ahead of me, too much to take in all at once. I still don’t know exactly what to expect, either. My memory of what Spain is like is getting rusty, but I think I will get right back into the Spanish way of life quickly.
The people waiting at gate L8 for the flight to Madrid are either very Spanish or very touristy Americans…˝


After every trip, even a nine-month long one, you end up back in the same place. Home. So I guess it’s appropriate that my Spain photo album always takes me back to that picture of me at home. It’s hard to believe, but I will be standing right where that picture was taken in a short time. Home will be more or less the same as it was when I left, but I won’t be.

Adios España.