Spain 2021

We embarked upon our journey on September the 7th, year, 2021. Upon arriving at the airport, we realized that it would really not be so simple as checking in. We mean ... it was technically that simple, but it was more complicated than that because of covid. We stood in that line for ages. And we mean aaaages. So much so that we had to have conversations with the people around us. A rather nice older couple let us know that we were insane for leaving the country by ourselves, and they wanted to ensure that we had someone that cared about us at home in case we didn't make it back. They were prepared to give us their number because they wanted to keep tabs on us. 'Twas preposterous.

By the time we finally got to the area to check in (no one could do the checkin themselves. Covid. Remember?) we were starting to panic. We had gotten to the airport hours early. Probably four. We don't quite remember. But we're paranoid. And got there way early. And now, because of covid, we might have been late. Anyway. We had to show that we had been tested for covid, and that we were negative (for covid, not just in general, though we've got that covered as well). We also had to show that we had filled out form after form for all the countries that we would be in (two. Transit through good 'ol GB). Finally, we were through.

Now for security. Through the line. Do your best to not look suspicious. Panic, because in your attempt to look less suspicious you know that you look more suspicious. Stop trying to stop trying to look suspicious. Fail. You just do. You look suspicious. It doesn't help that because you're a nerd, you've brought with you a Nintendo Switch and a couple of different power banks that are dense, non descript, and look semi high tech. You get to the place where you show the rest of the world what they could have, if only they were to take your bin at the end of the line before you actually get through security. You start putting things in bins. All electronics out of bags, they say. Rats. It takes forever and a year. But you do it. You're skilled. You're backpack was organized. You idn't in high school anymore. You can actually stand the smell. And theeeeen ... you walk through that metal detector with your suspicious face while next to your suspicious bins, and a suspicious bell goes off. "Do you have any metal on you?". "Uhhhh... a watch?" But the sign said to leave watches on!, you think. "Are you wearing a belt?" Oh. Whoops. back to the bins. Take off the belt. Back through the detector. Then through the other detector. Finally you're at the end. You watch as certain bins get an automatic pass while others are flagged for manual inspection. Here it comes... And then it does. Because, of course it does. TSA looks at your bin. You look at them. Don't look guilty. Don't look guilty. Dang it! Doin' it again! TSA looks up and says, "Next time, spread it out more." And off you rush. You're still putting your belt on as you enter the main airport because you just want out of there.

We get to the terminal. We've 20 minutes to spare. We sit down and try not to look like we're panicking at the number of people around us. We do a pretty good job. All of a sudden, someone announces that our flight's been delayed two hours. Something about a "thunderstorm" in "Chicago" and supposed "saftey measures". Well. that's our layover gone. But. They say the pilot says we're going to board anyway. If we do, maybe we can convince ground control in Chicago to let us leave anyway. Hahahaha. Hahaha. Ha. H ... a. What a clever lie. Gotta get people out of the terminal so the next flight can come in. They herd us like children on to the plane. Liars. The lot of them. We get on the plane, the plane moves out of the way onto unused space on the tarmac. Oh no! What's this? They say we can't come anyway? What a surprise. We sit there for two hours. We try to work. At work they say, "You're on vacation, stop working." We see how it is. We listen to music. It's all we can do at this point. Well. We did try to play the switch. Turns out, when you're really self concious and there are a lot of people around, doing anything visible isn't so great. We stick to our phone. We eventually take off.

We touch down. We're in Chicago. But. There's a problem. We have to get to the right terminal. But... it looks like we're going to have to through security. Again. Because. In order to get to terminal we need to be at, we have to leave the secure area of the airport! Wouldn't have had that problem had our flight not been redirected. We double check with a security guard. Yup. Gonna go through security. Again. Off we go. But this time, we have time. The change in flight has given us hours of time. Hooray? Not so much. Now we have very little time in Spain. We were going to get to Spain mid-day Wednesday. Now, we were going to get there at 11 pm. Alas. The concert was Thursday. We were still fine. The concert was, afterall, the entire point of the trip. We check in. We fill out yet another form because now we will be transiting via Finland instead of London. Sad day. Wouldn't have done or seen much in London, being confined to the airport and all, but it'd've been nice. We wait for forever and a year, and get on the plane. The plane, was actually pretty great. Best flight of the trip. Would recommend. 10 out of 10. FinAir, y'all. Jus' sayin'.

We get to the airport in Helinski. Suddenly, we're exposed to a language we don't actually know or understand... That was unexpected. But it's okay. We make our way through the practically empty airport. It might as well be abandoned. It's just our flight and nobody else. We meander until we arrive at the gate where we're supposed to show our passport. "Why are you here?" ... Ummm ... "Why are you going to Spain?" ... Ah. That's a bit less existential. We can handle that one. "Going to a concert." We receive the most judgmental and simmultaneously skeptical look we've ever received. "Welcome to the EU." We're in.

We go find our gate and create an emotional bond with it. This is our homebase. We don't speak the language and so we'd best not stray too far. Our mind continuously tries to resolve the Finnish to Spanish. Obviously, this fails. But, rather than pannicking, we sit there and open Pokemon Go. This is, after all, the first time we're able to do so while in Europe. There might be an opportunity to get a Mime Jr. or even a Pansear. We spin some stops and gyms. Nothing. But, the Inkay event has just started. Better get us some of those. Too bad they're just in raids. Although, given our reluctance to leave the home base, perhaps the fact they're only in raids is a blessing. Eventually (five minutes in) we get bored. We decide that we're going to go buy chargers. We had planned to buy these in Spain, but we're bored. And airports should have chargers, right? They do. We find a store selling chargers. We buy them. We're cool. We go back to homebase. We take a charger out. And we look at it. It's... foreign. But it's' fairly intuitive. We figure out how to plug it in while silently thanking whoever made american plugs for making them (slightly) less conspicuos. At this point, we realize we're going to have to fill out yet another form in order to enter Spain. We already filled out the form, but we had said we were entering via the UK and now we were not. Well. We attempt to fill it out, but this time, we do it properly. We were about to enter Spain, afterall, and we didn't want to be detained. The problem was that the form asked us which autonomous community we were traveling to. What? We ask someone next to us. They're not from Spain. They don't know. At least, we think that's what happened. They didn't speak English either... We ask the person next to the person next to us. They speak Spanish. Result. Cataluña. That's where Barcelona's at. We fill out the form and it's time. We board the plane, we fly to Spain.

We get to the airport in Spain. Nobody asks for our passport. Why? What's going on? It wouldn't be until tommorow that we realize that we had entered the EU, and not a specific country... Hey. Cut us some slack. We were really tired. But. We worry so much about it that we go find someone that looks official and military-y and explain to them that no one checked our passport. And did someone need to? And we can show you our passport? And Covid vaccination? And? No. They're confused too. They don't know why no one checked but they certainly don't care. Above their pay grade we hear them say to each other. So. They let us through. Cool. Now. We're tasked with getting a taxi for the first time in our life while speaking our second language in a country we've never been to while by ourselves. Fun (but genuinely). Turns out, airports make it really easy. There is a line of taxis just waiting. We get into the line of people waiting for the line of taxis and it is soon our turn. I get to the taxi. The driver asks where we're going. Hotel España de Las Ramblas. Not much conversation ensues. Which we're fine with. We're really tired. We get to the hotel. The street is so narrow that the car can only barely fit. People scatter as we drive through. The building is old. Really old. We wonder if we'll have plumbing or not. We go in. Turns out while the exterior has been kept the same, the interior has been gutted. It's beautiful. We're now eight hours later than what we said we would be. But that's okay. They check us in all the same. They give us a key card and away we go. We go find the elevator. As we go to get on, someone is getting off at the same time and we nearly run into them. "Oh. Lo siento. Es que ..." Wait a second. That's a mirror. We just nearly ran into ourselves in a mirror, apologized to ourselves, and then tried to start a conversation with ourselves. We really are tired. But, we're not too tired to notice we just stepped into a programmer's paradise. We had always heard wondeful myths and legends of floor numbers starting at zero in Europe. But here it is. In all its glory. In an elevator we are on. The floor zero. We almost don't want to leave. But, our bedroom beckons. We ascend and find our lodgings. They're really great. They're small, but great. Barcelona really know's how to take advantage of the space they have. Which is good. Because they don't have any... We end up doing a work meeting (we had been planning to do it from the get-go) and we crash into bed around midnight.

We wake up. It's Thursday. That's good. That's what it's supposed to be. It's one in the afternoon. ... Not so good. What happened? We don't know. But we're still exhausted. Please can't we just sleep in some more? No. Get up, you dummies. You just slept thirteen hours. We groggily stumble out of bed. We get ready, get dressed, and stumble (somehow) still groggy, out of the room. We leave the hotel and try to not appear too dazed. We start walking around at random (this was always the plan, for the record) and find a food market. We go in. We walk around. Nothing looks incredible except for the stuff that we would need a kitchen to prepare. But, there's some dried fruit. That's fun. We buy some. Sadly, it's absorbed the scent and therfore taste of fish. Wonderful. That's okay though. We keep going. We find a little music shop that has books on composers. We take a look so we can see if Spain's approach to art music differs greatly from America's. It doesn't. They don't have any books on Saint-Saëns (they had a lot of biographies), but they had some stuff on Bach, and he's alright, we suppose. We get a book about him. We keep walking and find a nerd store. Settlers of Catan was in the window. It's in Spanish. We've always wanted to purchase a set, but we'd never had justification. Well. Being in Spain seems like good justification to us! We walk in and

Wow. We wrote all of the above in October of 2021. It's now September of 2022. We can't go into nearly that much detail anymore. It's kind of a shame that we didn't finish the story, really... Well. Long story short, we didn't buy Catan. We really couldn't justify it. Who would've played the Spanish version with us? Dunno. Anyway. We bought a pretty cool Ridley amiibo and a golden Shovel Knight amiibo. That was pretty cool. Also we got a pretty neat Ocarina of Time lenticular. Later, we went to lunch in some random shop. We got a sandwich. It was alright. Nothing special. We went to the concert, but on the way passed a drug deal between some teenage girls... That was a bit odd, but, y'know, whatever. We then had some extra time and so we explored some botanical gardens that we passed by. Then, we went to the concert. And that was really great, you know? Almost rained, that'd've been bad, but it didn't, so we were fine. Taxi ride back (We didn't think it safe to walk back that late at night, and, turns out, neither did our driver. He compliments our Spanish (said we sounded like we had spoken it our whole lives) and tells us that we're staying in a sketchy part of town. We don't really care.). Next morning, I found out that trips that last two days are silly because jet lag is real. We've slept through most of the day, but we go to the Picasso museum anyway. That was pretty cool. We also find a used game store and buy a PAL 2DS and some games for it. We go back and take a nap. We wake up and we... go to FIVE GUYS! Why? Because we could. Turns out, it was basically the same as America. The only difference was that they put the barbecue sauce on the burger instead of the bun, which was a bit odd, but hey. Close enough. Finally, we get a taxi to the airport (very early morning / very late night). The taxi driver insists that we will make a killing as a developer in Spain. A whole 50k euros a year. We politely decline. The taxi driver insists that when people come to Spain the first time, they come to visit, but when they come back the second time, they don't leave. We politely nod. At the airport, we're very self concious of the fact that it is 9/11 and we're flying back to the United States. We're in a bit of a panic, honestly. We get to security and go to take our shoes off when security yells at us to leave our shoes on. The line laughs. Look at the stupid foreigner... Yeah, yeah, whatever. We have a nice flight back, which we mostly slept through. We did have one layover and they did a random search of us and swabbed us for bomb particulates and whatnot. A little annoying, but also reassuring given what day it was...

And that's that. That's the trip. Not much more for us to say. Will we go back? Oh yeah. Will we go back to stay? Remains to be seen.