Author: myer4269

As a senior in high school, I took a humanities course. That complete immersion in the painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature of the Western world may have been what C.S. Lewis calls the baptism of my imagination. At the very least it created an appetite in me for culture and aesthetics, and I don’t know that I would be in Europe right now if it weren’t for that class.

One of the paintings I fell in love with in that class was Jan Van Eyck’s, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. I have been fortunate enough to see many of the world’s great masterpieces in the world’s greatest museums, but seeing this painting had always been at the top of my list. Part of my affection for the painting is that when I saw at as a high school student, it was one of the first times that I truly understood the ability of a painting to a tell a story. Even if you didn’t know the story of Christ, you could glean so much of what was going simply by looking at the subjects’ faces. I knew that I had to see it and since it was a short train ride away from Paris, we headed for Ghent, Belgium, home of the altarpiece and waffles. Clearly we were going to have a great day.

And it was.

Mostly.

It was windy, rainy, and overcast in Ghent, and because I sent all of my clothes to be cleaned, save for a short sleeve shirt and a pair of shorts, I was completely under dressed. I looked like Johnny America, Lord of the Tourists. I maybe saw one other person wearing shorts the whole day, and I think he was drunk. I decided to buy some pants.

I was so cold and so eager to see the painting that as soon as the tram dropped us off, I headed to the nearest gothic church, power walked through the doors, and proceeded to do a lap around the transept. I looked in ever side chapel, but the painting wasn’t there. I panicked. Maybe the painting was on tour. Maybe I wouldn’t get to see it.

It turns our Ghent has multiple Gothic churches. We found the right church and I continued my power walk search for the painting. And there it was in a side chapel.

But not really.

It was a life size, photographic copy. You had to pay to see the real one.

But I wanted to see the painting in the context it was painted for—in a side chapel meant for personal devotion. I have to say, it took me awhile to realize it was a photograph. Even as a copy, the colors, and the level of detail are remarkable.

And it turns out we were rewarded for looking at the copy. When we walked in the chapel, a slight, old man stood at the doorway. He had a small smile on his face, and you could tell he was waiting for a crowd to gather so that he could tell the story of the painting.

And tell the story he did. He loved the painting. He loved its beauty. He loved the attention it brought to his beloved Belgium and to Ghent. And you could tell he was still personally offended by the theft of one of the paintings panels in 1934, a panel that has yet to be returned. He spoke with pure devotion and illuminated many of the paintings mysteries and symbols. He spoke of the single horsehair brushes Van Eyck used for some of the finer details. He spoke of Eve, the mother of humanity, of Christ, the mystic lamb himself, and of God, enthroned at the center of it all. And because of this man’s passion and knowledge, when we paid to see the actual painting, I had a renewed sense of fervor for the painting.

It did not disappoint.

The painting has too much symbolism, too much detail, too much history to go into here, but it is so worth seeing. It is the story of the gospel, told in image and symbol. This painting exists to create devotion in the viewer for the mystic lamb who was slain from the foundations of the world.

So Johnny America had a good day in Belgium. We saw the painting, enjoyed Belgium’s two greatest inventions waffles and fries (though strangely not waffle fries), and we even were trapped in a parade.

For pictures of Ghent and of all our adventures, see Joseph’s website.

I’ll admit it. We were pure tourists in Paris. You can’t help it, really. For one, there is such an overwhelming amount of amazing things to see and something beautiful around every corner that you walk around with your mouth open and your camera out. Another thing is the French don’t ever let you forget that you are a guest in their country.

I know the stereotype is that the French are stuck up and snobby, but I don’t see it that way. I think they are proud of their country in the same way that we Americans are proud of ours, and to us that comes across as snobbishness. Americans can’t imagine that there is any better place than America, and the French can’t imagine that people aren’t falling all over themselves to learn French.

When you are in France you actually feel bad that you don’t speak French. It isn’t a guilt thing. I never felt guilty for not knowing French. I just had a huge desire to communicate with them in their language. In other countries I usually just go straight for English and then see what happens. In France I always tried to open with some French. I don’t know why that is, but it is something that I noticed. Maybe it goes back to their pride in their country—you want to respect that.

Since we had lost one of our Paris days to the horrors of the Barcelona train system, we knew that we would have to cram a lot of Paris into a little amount of time. And that is what we did. As soon as we got off the train and put our bags into storage at the station, we headed for the Eiffel Tower, then to a boat tour, then to the D’Orsay, then to St. Chapalle, then to Notre Dame. See what I mean—pure tourist.

Of these sites St. Chapalle is my favorite. It is a church in the gothic style, but it is not overwhelming in size. I love that the space is small because sometimes it is easy to get over stimulated by the size of cathedrals, so much so that you can’t take everything in. Not so at St. Chapalle, though it does overwhelm in other ways. The walls are almost purely stained glass, and the vibrancy of the colored glass makes all other stained glass seem anemic. As you turn your hands in the colored light, the color of your skin changes, at once deep blue, then vibrant red. The small space allows you to be swallowed up in colored light. Truly an unbelievable place.

I’m glad in one sense that we lost a day in Paris because it is an expensive city. I don’t think it costs more really than London, but you just want to spend money in Paris. You want the big meal. You want the desert. You want the coffee every couple of hours. You want Parisian clothes. You want everything you can get your hands on. There is something about Paris that makes you manic to experience everything.

I think this is because the French enjoy life in a way that is paradoxical to Americans. We want to figure them out. There are so many books in America about how French women eat incredible rich and decadent food and stay skinny. Which is true on both counts—the food is decadent and the women are skinny. I think the key to all of this is pace. They do enjoy life but they enjoy it at a more leisurely pace than us.

Take their café culture for instance. All the seats that are outside face the street so that the café goers can leisurely enjoy their coffee and people watch. This would never happen in America. When we are in a coffee shop it is for a specific reason. It may be to work. It may be to get a caffeine fix. It may be to read. It may be to study. Even meeting a friend for a chat is a stated purpose. I think the French take life more as it comes, and I think in that non-pragmatic, non- ends driven approach is at the heart of how the French do things. There doesn’t always have to be an agenda. Which is a hard pill for us Americans to shallow. We always have to have reasons for things.

The very premise of this travel blog shows that my American brethren and I are driven by pragmatics. With these posts I’m attempting to show why travel matters, which is a presupposition inherently about value and pragmatics. It is an attempt to show that the cost/benefit analysis of travel actual comes out in my favor in the end. And that may or may not be possible to quantify. Some things are just worth it, even if you can’t explain it.

Look what the French have done. They simply turned their chairs ninety degrees toward the street, and I’m questioning my pragmatic presuppositions. C’est la vie.

For more pictures, check out Joseph’s website.

I was no longer the navigator. After two days of utter defeat at the hands of Barcelona’s public transport system, I relinquished my role as map keeper. It felt good to no longer bear the burden of getting us places. From then on I would be in charge of trains and activities, of front end logistics, and this was a relief.

So a new day. That night we planned to get a sleeper car to Paris, so we headed to the train station to get the tickets. Except they only had two spaces left on that sleeper train. And we had to sit in the train station another hour waiting in line to buy tickets for the following evening. This meant that we basically had two more days in Barcelona. This was good and bad. At worst we had lost a couple days on our schedule. At best we gained a chance to actually enjoy Barcelona. Joey booked a hotel in the city center, we checked in our bags, and headed out to enjoy the city.

Our first stop was the Sagrada Familia Temple, an architectural masterpiece that is still under construction after more than one hundred years. I considered seeing a cathedral while it was under construction a great gift. I’ve always been overwhelmed with the beauty of cathedrals, and I could never understand how they were built. I couldn’t believe that medieval man could persevere in the construction of something so cohesively beautiful, so harmonious in construction, so massive, so overwhelming in scope and purpose. To me the best cathedrals are seamless. They feel like light filled caverns carved out of hulking pieces of marble. To see in the present moment workers piecing together columns of marble, to watch them climb scaffolding to carve out the ceiling, to see the construction of something that seems timeless, helped me see the collaboration, the shared vision necessary to achieve the desired end.

Much of the cathedral is complete, and for me the most affecting part of the cathedral is the Passion Portal. Featuring sculptures by Sabiruchs, the portal depicts the final hours of the life of Christ. The sculptures themselves are blocky and weighty; it is almost as if you can see gravity pulling them down. The weight of the sculptures communicates the pathos of the scene itself—here the innocent Christ suffers willingly at the hands of vindictive man.

Each scene is powerful, but it is the centerpiece that pulls the entire portal together for me. At the center of the portal is Christ himself, bound to a column, weary and bloody from Roman lashes, and on the door behind him in gold letters Pilate’s infamous question to Christ, “What is truth?” glitters in the afternoon sun.

What is truth? These sculptures, all art really, attempts to answer that question.
Keats famously wrote that truth is beauty and beauty is truth, which at least means that we experience truth by experiencing beauty and that we experience beauty by experiencing truth. In many ways I agree with Keats. There is most certainly a relationship between truth and beauty, because our voracious appetite for beauty indicates that there is something more than aesthetic appreciation going on when we experience something beautiful. But I can’t go all the way with Keats. As N. T. Wright argues in Simply Christian, I think beauty is an echo of truth; beauty is not truth itself—it is something that indicates there is truth. In the same way that an echo is not a voice, beauty is not truth. But when I see something like the Passion Portal, that echo resonates more strongly, and I know that truth is afoot.

I love travel because I think travel teaches us how to keen our ears to that echo, and it is important to find that echo. It reminds us that there is someone speaking.

There is a Voice.

I’ve been meditating on Psalm 29 for the last few weeks. In it King David enumerates the many ways in which God’s voice is powerful. One of my favorites is, “The voice of the Lord is over the waters.” For me this image hearkens back to creation, when God’s spirit was over the waters of the earth, waiting to burst forth in creative power. When that voice speaks, it does echo throughout the cosmos. “The heavens declare the glory of God” mostly because they still vibrate with the power of His voice. So what about art? The feeble work of our hands—our paintings, our sculptures, our buildings, and our words—are echoes of an echo, and even the echo of an echo points back to the Voice.

For more pictures, visit Joseph’s website.

I’ve always wanted to drive in Europe, so when we couldn’t get a train from Pamplona to Barcelona, renting a car seemed like a great option. And it was. The car was pretty cheap, the place was easy to find, Barcelona was a mere 4-hours away, and we even got a GPS. Everything went great. Except I didn’t get to drive the car. All the cars on the entire continent, it seems, are stick shift, and to my shame, I can’t drive a manual. So I had to ride shotgun all the way to Barcelona.

At least I got to sleep a bit.

The drive was fun, and I’d found a great deal on a hotel, but it wasn’t until we got about 45 minutes outside the city that I realized that our hotel was actually in the Barcelona suburbs. Now I don’t have anything against the Barcelona suburbs, especially since the hotel room was the nicest and most spacious one we’d had yet, but it did mean that it would take a long time to get back from the city every night. This proved to be an almost fatal error.

After checking in we drove the car into town to drop it off at the train station. This was a major hassle. Following the GPS directions lead us into a distribution center of sorts with fences all around. I don’t know how we got in and I don’t know how we got out. We rechecked the GPS coordinates and for the 300th time the slightly smug British woman warned us that the train station was in a restricted area. I don’t speak GPS so I didn’t know what that meant, and even though Tyler is an engineer, he didn’t either.

When we made it to the city center and pulled into the train station, we couldn’t find the car return area. So I rechecked the GPS again and she told me that the Europcar return center was actually a half-mile away. Winding through the downtown Barcelona streets proved stressful (we had more than a couple close calls), and when we pulled up to a stoplight, a Spanish man started gesturing wildly at us. I thought we might have found ourselves in the middle of a Barcelona turf war, but it turns out our tire was flat. Since the car was on my credit card, I imagined that this would cost me a lot of money and that I would have to fly home early because I would be completely wiped out.

Out of options and on a dangerously low tire, we decided to try the train station again. When we circled the station this time, we saw the smallest Europcar sign imaginably, and we drove toward as if it were an oasis. The language barrier was our friend this time since no one I talked to seemed to understand what a flat tire was. I got off scot-free. We walked out of that train station and believed our Barcelona troubles were behind us.

They weren’t. It turns out there are multiple overlapping transportation systems in Barcelona, and we had a map for one. So when our well-meaning hotel receptionist explained that we needed to take train 4 to get back to the hotel, we assumed she meant one of the metro trains. She didn’t. And we ended up lost in Barcelona for 3 hours that night, boarding train after train, talking to agent after agent, finally ending up in a neighborhood somewhere without any chance of finding the correct. Miraculously we found a cab. Unfortunately that angel of mercy cost us $60 to get home.

At least we were home.

We woke up the next morning convinced our transportation problems were over. We started out well, finding a cab to the correct train station, and boarding the correct train into the city center. We even decided to buy our train tickets for Paris early so that we wouldn’t have any more train hiccups. I found what I thought was the central train station in Barcelona and we headed for it. And we found it. Except it wasn’t the central train in Barcelona. I had assumed it was the train station, since it was the only one I could find on the map. Wrong. I don’t even know why they called it a train station-it had one track. So we had to wait to get our tickets.

At least we could still go to the beach, and we enjoyed a few hours of fun at the beach and then had an amazing meal of tapas at an excellent restaurant and we were confident that we could retrace our steps back to the hotel.

We couldn’t and we ended up more lost than the night before. Somehow we ended up in a warehouse district down by the marina, and because we are gringos from the Texas panhandle, we were convinced we were in Spanish gang territory. I’m serious. At any given moment we thought we were a block away from a Spanish knife fight. There was no public transport around, so we walked. And walked. And walked. For two hours we walked.

We saw a cab and started waving our arms as if we were island castaways flailing at a passing ship. He stopped. We made it home. It was another night of missed connections, missed trains, misunderstandings. We wasted so many hours and so much mental energy trying to get around Barcelona that we hadn’t really seen anything in Barcelona. It felt like a waste.

In all of this I have to admit that we were lost mostly because of me. I would say some train or street or station was the right move and then it ended up being the wrong move. I’m supposed to be the seasoned traveler, the one who’s done the grand tour before, the one who’s lived overseas before, and yet I kept getting us lost. That’s why I was the navigator. But I don’t know who I was kidding. I’ve never been great with directions. I mean, I get lost in Amarillo sometimes. So I don’t know why I even embraced the role as navigator. But after that night, I was no longer the navigator, and we haven’t been lost since.

That’s the thing about travel. It most definitely keeps you humble. It has a way of showing you what you can and cannot do. Me. I’m good at the planning stage. Where we should go, what we should do, what we should eat. But once we get in the field, keep the map away from me. I will get you lost. And if that lesson isn’t something I can take into my everyday life after this fantasy trip has ended, then I don’t know what is.

For more pictures check out Joseph’s website.

On the train to Madrid, Tyler struck up a conversation with some Spaniards and discovered that the festival of San Fermin, or the running of the bulls, was still happening. For Tyler the running of the bulls represents the pinnacle of what a trip like this should be for a few reasons. First, we had to modify our schedule and timeline for the trip in order to make it to Pamplona, which instantly creates adventure. Second, running with the bulls is inherently dangerous, so it’s exciting. Third, everybody has heard of it so we will all be able to tell a great story about it someday.

Getting to Pamplona turned out to be much more involved than a three-hour train ride. In Madrid I was waiting for Tyler and Joey in a café, working on this very blog, oblivious to the time, when they rushed in scrambling, new white clothes for the bull run in hand, asking me why I wasn’t ready to go. It turned out we only had 20 minutes to make it to the apartment we were staying in, collect our things, make it to the train station, buy our tickets, go through security, and board the train. Clearly we didn’t think this through.

After sprinting through a metro station, after bounding up the stairs, after flagging down a cab, after speeding to the train station, after Tyler had to run down the same cab to reclaim his camera, after running full speed with all our gear to the ticket office, after panting in line waiting for tickets, after hurtling to the train and through security, we arrived on the train panting and soaking with sweat, claiming we would never do such a thing ever again. Somehow we had made it.

We arrived in Pamplona on the last night of the 8-day festival, so everyone there looked a little weary. Their white pants and shirts were dusty. Their red scarf’s and sashes a little rough around the edges. The night before the last run we walked around the city square to take in the festival itself and to eat some dinner. What we saw was men and women throwing up and urinating in alleyways, and many weary people who had been drinking nonstop for over a week. I knew then why people were gored by bulls—they could barely stand, much less walk, let alone run from a bull.

So we decided to sleep, so that we would be nice and rested for the bull run the next morning.

After waking up at 6:30 and groggily making our way through the streets, we saw the erected barriers that formed the path for the bulls to run. People were everywhere, sitting along and atop the barriers, milling in the rain soaked streets, accumulating in masses all around the path of the bulls. Most people it seemed hadn’t slept at all, so they weren’t hung over but still drunk. I expected a blood bath, so Joey and I found a perch to take it all in. I decided to videotape Tyler’s exploits instead of running, and Joey thought taking pictures would be a better use of his time.

Tyler ran with the bulls indeed, but we missed watching him do it, partly because the whole thing lasted about two minutes, and mainly because Tyler ended up starting ahead of our vantage point. At exactly 8 am a canon blasted and the runners in front of us started sprinting down the street. After about thirty seconds, we saw a group of 13 bulls or so, trotting (that’s right, trotting, not running) past us. And like that it was over. No one was trampled. I saw no one gored. It was just some bulls trotting down the street.

Tyler claims that one of the bulls was a mere couple of feet from his right side, but I’m not sure. You never know with Tyler.

Of course, my favorite parts of the event were cerebral, mostly because when we perched ourselves on a concrete ledge 40 minutes before the running, I had a lot of time to think. I fantasized about jumping from 10 feet above on top of a would be thief who would surely attempt to take Joey’s bag of lenses. But it never happened, so I directed my thoughts elsewhere, and as it happened while we were waiting we saw a man who looked remarkably similar to Ernest Hemingway.

This was pure serendipity. While not detracting from the media coverage of gorings and tramplings at the running of the bull’s, I have to say that any American who was at that festival was there, directly or indirectly, because of Hemingway’s portrayal of the event in The Sun Also Rises. He made this festival famous. I find this vastly interesting because ostensibly the festival venerates the patron saint of Pamplona, Saint Fermin, but it didn’t feel Christian at all. That’s not to say that it wasn’t religious—it was wrought with ceremony and ritual. After all bullfighting has its roots in pagan sacrifice, and the week long drunken revelry certainly felt like it was rooted in paganism. So by my count most people who were there were a few steps removed from anything having to do with the original reasons for the festival. Some were there because of Papa Hemmingway, possibly chasing some sort of validation in terms of his definitions of masculinity. And some were there just to drink and to have a good time. So why were we there?

We were there for a good story.

Travelers are story chasers and a trip finds completion in the telling and retelling of your exploits. But as I’ve thought about this motivation to travel, I have to ask myself, am I looking at and experiencing these things because I am moved by them and am learning something about life and humanity from them? Or am I simply marking them off a list so that I can feel culturally significant?

That may seem harsh, but it does come down to this simple question—do I experience the thing in the moment or do I experience it later when I get to tell someone I saw such and such painting? Obviously, there is a little bit of both. Certainly it isn’t wrong to share experiences with people. A vital aspect of travel is the social ceremony of sharing your experiences with others when you return. As all of us have noted on this trip, certain things don’t feel real until you talk about them with people that you care about. For the most part, people want to see your pictures and hear your stories. But there is a fine line between the communal sharing of experience and cashing in the cultural cache you’ve accumulated by being a world traveler. I’m still trying to figure out where I fall on that spectrum.

For more pictures from our adventures, go to Joseph’s website.

For our first full day in Madrid, we decided to visit the Prado Museum. This made me happy, since I am something of a museum junkie. I love how you can move through large, crisply lit rooms and know in a purely visual way what different artist’s cultures valued and what was beautiful to them. For example, you can see the non-dimensional, non-expressive faces of Gothic frescoes and know that these anonymous artists lived in time where God was emphasized and man was flat. You can stand before a Raphael painting, noting the stunning attention to anatomical detail, and know that he lived in a time when was beginning to become the measure of all things. Art, in all its forms, unlocks the values of a culture and allows you to step into a by-gone era. Plus, it looks cool.

At the Prado seeing works by El Greco and Bosch were particular highlights, but as we moved through the gallery spaces a particular theme emerged for me personally in the art—the fragility of man and the ravages of time. Two paintings particularly embodied this idea for me. One was Peter Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death.

This painting is a panorama of a burning landscape where Death and his minions have free reign of humanity. At the center is Death himself, scythe in hand, riding an emaciated horse, commanding a horde of skeleton soldiers who flood the entire landscape, each administering awful punishments. In one scene people are hanged on a makeshift gallows. In another people are beheaded. The whole ordeal is horrible, apocalyptic and gruesome, and most would describe it as morbid, but I saw in the painting a stirringly honest picture of an oft-forgot reality—that Death will come for us all. On this side of Eden, we are on the clock.

The idea of time leads me to the second painting. In Mark Buchannan’s The Rest of God, he describes the reality that we are slaves to time, and he illustrates this with the story of Chronos. Chronos was the Greek god of time, and in the myths, because he fears being usurped, he chooses to devour his children. Buchannan sees in this story our plight as humans—that we are all subject to time’s gnawing mouth. Goya captured this horrifying scene his painting Chronos (Saturn) Devouring His Children and when I saw the painting I instantly connected it with the Brueghel painting. They are really about the same thing. These paintings are vivid, if macabre reminders, that as children of Adam, we are slaves to time, and that in many ways time does devour us.

I know this is true in my own work, how there is never enough time to accomplish everything you think to do or even everything you have to do. But work isn’t the only thing that time devours. On this trip I came in thinking I would have scads of time to read, to blog, to reflect, and to see everything that I wanted, but it hasn’t been the case. In everything you always have to choose what you really want and even then you mostly run out of time. Both these paintings were reminders to me that in God’s scheme of things, we are no longer enslaved to time. Yes, death will come, but it will have no sting because there is a world coming were time does not exist and we will not decay. Sometimes it takes a glimpse of horror to remember that.

About a year ago Joey and I were at Barnes and Noble flipping through photography books on Europe. While looking at a book on Spain we came across a few sweeping panoramas of a tiny medieval town called Segovia. One look at the fortified walls, the forbidding castle, the jutting spires of the cathedral, and the endless arches of the aqueduct, and I knew that we had to go. Luckily, Segovia is a short bus ride away from Madrid and after our night in the inferno of Jeremy’s apartment, a day in medieval village sounded nice. We bought some food, boarded the bus, and headed to Segovia.

Segovia is beautiful and if you are in Madrid for any amount of time at all it is worth the bus ride. But I have to say, our time in Segovia solidified a shift I’ve sensed in myself concerning travel. I’ve been to Europe a handful of times and to other places where you travel in a similar way, namely, you stay in a major city, take in the major sights, enjoy the local cuisine or some of other culturally significant thing like flamenco or bullfighting.

But lately I’ve really just wanted to be outside, to hike and to enjoy the landscape of a place more than the things I’ve traditionally enjoyed. The castle was amazing and I always love cathedrals, but the best part of the day in Segovia was when we hiked around the perimeter of the city. At one point we were lost, so we cut across a field and down a hill through some trees, and that was the most fun I had all day.

I enjoyed it because it was restorative. I didn’t feel like I needed to accomplish anything other than enjoying the landscape. Much of the way I travel is reflective of how I live my life, namely that I am striving to learn and to accumulate information, purely for sake of having information. My number one strength is input. I collect information like middle school girls used to collect trolls—that is, crazily. Europe is great for that because everything has a story, everything has cultural weight. There is information everywhere and if you are wired like me, that can turn into work rather than pleasure.

One thing I’ve been learning this year spiritually is the difference between vacating and recreating. The vacation implies vacantness, that you are fleeing a space, fleeing your life. But that never works. If you are a workaholic at home then you are going to manifest those things on a trip. Vacating isn’t really possible in my opinion, and if it is then it certainly isn’t healthy because it is probably coupled with mind-altering substances. Recreation is different—it is re-creative. What this means is that when we travel or take any time for ourselves it should recreate us. Our day in Segovia was that for me.

We left Seville and reached Madrid by train in around 3 hours, which I think is the perfect amount of time to spend on a train. While enjoying the Spanish countryside, we learned from some Spaniards that the festival of San Fermin, including the running of the bulls, was still going on that we could be there with another 3-hour train ride. We decided that we would go after leaving Madrid, but more on that later.

We arrived in Madrid and made our way to the Plaza de Espana to meet Jeremy, our first couch surfing host. For those of you who don’t know, couch surfers are an internet community of people who offer their homes to travelers for free, and since you typically end up sleeping on their couch, they call it couch surfing. Joey and I have hosted a handful of travelers over the last year, and since none of them were serial killers or that weird at all, we decided that we would try it as travelers. At the very least we would save some money and meet some interesting people.

And we met Jeremy.  Jeremy is a French ex-pat who lives in Madrid, working as a language tutor. As you will see from the pictures, Jeremy is, in my opinion, very French looking. According to his profile, he considers himself an expert in English, but he is an earnest amateur at best. During one conversation it took me ten minutes to understand that in France three separate channels show Desperate Housewives.  Really?

Hardly worth the effort. I’m not criticizing him—Jeremy honestly loves language, he says he knows 8, and you can tell he hosts couch surfers, particularly English speakers, so that he can practice. I admire this for two reasons. One, if my French were at the level of his English, I would never dream of hosting a French speaker, so he is certainly brave. Two, though we struggled to understand each other, he genuinely wanted to communicate with us and he strove to make that happen. During conversations he would look up words and then ask us how to use certain phrases or verbs.

In all of that I didn’t ask him how to say one thing in French, and I realized we native English speakers aren’t very generous with other languages. For us other languages are more like novelties because we understand that English is the language of culture and commerce, and that in terms of cost benefit analysis, the effort necessary to really learn another language isn’t worth it since English is king. Traveling helps us see how the rest of the world perceives our language and our culture and how we perceive ourselves, and I love this because I don’t know if I would ever think about this if it weren’t for encountering people like Jeremy. I realized that Europeans are like distant cousins to us Americans, so even though we have relatives in common, our families are different, and it’s always interesting to see how other families raise their children, so to speak.

But Jeremy was only with us in Madrid for one night because he was going to a nude beach for a couple of days (true story). We thought this meant that we were getting kicked out after one night, but then something incredible happened—he gave us the keys to his apartment—and he told us we are welcome to come and go as we please. Crazy, really. But then I looked around and realized he had no fear of us taking anything. There was nothing to take, unless we wanted a PC laptop with a French keyboard. We didn’t.

Now to that first night. His apartment had three bedrooms, but one of them was inaccessible for reasons that remain inexplicable, and because Jeremy’s roommate had the other room, this meant that all four of us would be sleeping in Jeremy’s room—his tiny, tiny room with two mattresses and a fold out couch. It was kind of like if you combined a sleep over with a refugee camp in Africa, except hotter. Way hotter. Jeremy had no AC because Europeans love to sweat and love to smell like sweat. I’m serious—there was nary a fan, which blows my mind because it’s not like ceiling or floor fans are a big secret. That first night in Madrid may be the worst night of sleep I have ever had, if you can call having your eyes closed for eight hours pretending to sleep while you roll around in your own sweat sleep.  Hey, at least it was free.

Our flight from London to Seville was easy overall, aside from having to get up at 4 am to make the airport. This compounded our sleep debt and when we finally got to Seville the only thing we were able to see before taking a 6-hour nap was the Seville Cathedral. I knew for sure that I needed to sleep when trudging through the world’s largest cathedral felt like a chore more than a privilege. Christopher Columbus’ stunning tomb only inspired a mild response. We did see a wooden alligator hanging from one of the outdoor transepts. Though I should have been asking why there was a wooden alligator at a church, I instead named him Woody Allengator. Tyler and Joey both laughed, which is concrete evidence that we all needed to sleep. Clearly, we weren’t thinking straight.

So after a glorious 6-hour nap we enjoyed a meal at a 300-year-old tapas bar. The food was good but the surprise of the evening was discovering a half-formed pearl in one the oysters we ate. Actually, my teeth discovered it. And after realizing what it was, we decided to make it the trip mascot and to name it. We settled on Gary Lawrence of Iberia. Unlike Woody Allengator, the pearl’s name is absolutely brilliant. He was too small though, and I lost him the next morning. Tyler cried.

We planned to head to Madrid the following morning but Tyler found out that there would be a bullfight that night in Seville. This was exciting to all of us, since attending a bullfight was at the forefront of our imaginations from the planning stages of this trip. There seems to be nothing more quintessentially Spanish than a bullfight, and Seville is the world capital of bullfights.

But I have to say the overall experience was strange and a little unsettling for me. One bull, for instance, had blood gushing out of his mouth by the end of the fight and when the team of horses would drag the dead bull’s body away, it always felt like they were celebration was a little too extravagant. It’s not like the bull had a real chance.

The most fascinating aspect of the whole ordeal was the matadors themselves. I didn’t realize there was a team of matadors each with a different job. The main matador though is the most fascinating. He is the one who ends up killing the bull, and he occupies a strange masculine/feminine space. In one sense his main job is to seduce the bull, luring him into a hypnotic dance. His main weapon is a kind of dance, a dance full of graceful and strikingly feminine steps. The bull spins and lunges into an ever dizzying trance, and ends up utterly stunned, standing woozy in front of the matador, who then plunges a sword into the bull’s back. This is where the matador becomes decidedly masculine. What starts graceful and seductive ends forceful and aggressive. And though we saw one matador toppled end over end by a charging bull, I never felt like the bullfighters were in danger. The only one in danger was the bull. His fate was sealed as soon as he stepped into the arena. What I thought would be a true confrontation between man and beast was really more pageantry, a prelude to a known end—the death of the bull.

Now on to one of the reasons travel is so great. Edward de Bono describes the human brain as a “self-organizing system,” which means, among other things, that as your brain figures something out, a place, a process, etc., it creates neural shortcuts for that thing. These neural shortcuts self-organize so that when certain stimuli hit your brain, your brain knows exactly what to do, so that over a long enough period of time you can do certain things on autopilot. Think about driving in your hometown. For the most part you aren’t paying attention because your brain knows how to get around.

What this means is that to learn, to grow, to shake up your brain, you need new environments and challenges. Travel, especially in foreign countries, jump-starts your brain.

In London when we walked into Victoria station and there were thousands of people moving in every direction and I was on no sleep and I had to figure out what tube to take, my brain kicked into overdrive. And I loved it. I had to form new patterns or at least develop pathways between existing patterns in my mind. I’ve always described travel as heightened living. You do many of things that you do in your regular life, but you experience them in a heightened way. If your every day life is standard definition television, then travel is high definition television.

For more photos from our adventures go here.

All photos by Joseph Schalbs.