Diez: “Coffee shops”
The student petitioners, whom I wrote about earlier, are back at Las Setas this week. One stopped me, and when I tried my best “No hablo Espanol” shtick, she said, “What do you speak? English? German?”
Busted.
Turns out the students are volunteering on behalf of UNICEF’s Syria campaign. She was from the Czech Republic and had spent some time in South Carolina, was fluent in six (!) languages, and very nice. So when I passed her again in the afternoon, I asked where I could find a quiet coffee shop to sit and write.
“Ah, you’re talking about weed, aren’t you?”
Huh?
Apparently she had recently returned from studying in the Netherlands, and when people ask about a “coffee shop” there, that’s what they mean. I was very grateful for this encounter, because it meant I wasn’t the only one misinterpreting cultural clues in Spain.
Traveling to this country is an exercise in embarrassment. These are just a few in the long line of indignities I’ve experienced:
— Locking myself out of my apartment on the first day, and having to text the landlord
— Not knowing how to close the blinds, and having to text the landlord
— Walking into a restaurant, asking for a seat for one (“Uno, por favor.”) and having one beer pushed in front of me instead (I eventually just seated myself and they got the message)
— Ordering food at the bar, carrying it to a “table” (really just a barrel you can stand at), and being charged a service fee because I was in the “service” section
— Walking into any given restaurant and signifying I’m there to eat by making the universal gesture of shoving food into my mouth, because most Spanish restaurants also serve as bars, cafes, general meeting places and other things I don’t completely understand
— Letting a waiter “recommend” a meal in Spanish, which turned out to be an expensive steak (ok, that was probably just dumb)
— Walking a significant distance to any given restaurant and finding it closed, because Spanish restaurants open and close whenever the hell they please, I think
— Yoyo-ing and retracing my steps around Sevilla’s labyrinthine streets, because they wrap and twist around with no logic or reason
— Failing at buying train tickets
And so and and so on. If you plan on traveling to Spain, you best be prepared to laugh at yourself. And if you need a little humbling, it’s a great place to get it.
