Spanish Candy

How to really not enjoy your vacation

While visiting Spain one summer during Corpus Christi, I found myself alone and lost in Granada. I love to explore, so this situation would normally be ideal, however most of Spain was in an enormous heatwave at the time, bringing the temps to a sweltering 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and I was without water or Google Maps to guide me.

Using my less than perfect (at the time) language skills, I barely made it back to our hotel in time to go visit some local candy shops and restaurants with my teacher and classmates. I gorged myself on candy, particularly one type of candy rope/tube, dark red in color with a white filling. I ate way too much of the stuff for sure, but normally my industrial strength stomach acid would render any potential irritant impotent and harmless.

But somehow, by dinner time I wasn’t feeling too hot, even though the evening had cooled the stony city. I couldn’t even bring myself to eat the delicious roasted pheasant and other scrumptious dishes that were brought out at this chic local restaurant. How could that be? Turned out, wandering the streets of Granada in the blistering heat had given me pretty bad heat stroke; I was feverish, nauseous, aching, hurting, but not squirting, not yet. Overall, a mess.

My companions did their best to leaven my suffering, although they did feel inclined to stop at one particularly cute corner store and shop around for somewhere between 30 minutes and the rest of time immemorial, leaving me crouched on the sidewalk, my clouded head weighing down heavy on my hands, my burning back seeking relief flat against the cool stone wall, my eyes not able to decide whether they wanted to pierce the back of my skull with pressurized, headache inducing, ear popping, boiling eye goop, or drool futilely down my cheeks and through my sweaty fingers, pooling into the paved stone tile and flowing via the street grooves between the anxious feet of passersby, flowing away in the river 60 feet away.

Eventually they came out of that store, after what felt like an eternity, and we carried on. My teacher had gotten me a Spanish brand of electrolyte water, Aquarius as I recall, and having drank most of the liter bottle by the time we reached our hotel, I felt what I thought was my gears grinding and grooving again after having been greased by the human version of WD40, which, in my stupor, I was entirely ready to believe was not only real, but also a strictly Spanish invention, being that I’d never heard of Aquarius before. Emboldened by this surge of not feeling completely awful, I broke my heretofore vow of silence (gurgling noises not withstanding), and endeavored to explain my earnest gratitude to my teacher from the threshold of my dark hotel room, backlit by the bright yellow bathroom whose door and light had been open and on since I’d left in the morning.

Before I could get too many words out, however, my stomach let out a preeminent warning gurgle. I could tell what was coming. Just as a middle schooler’s handcrafted paper structure crumples on contact with the ground in order to save the egg inside from the shock of hitting the ground, I felt my innards crumple, and rushed through the open bathroom door to the toilet, luckily obscured from the sight of my teacher in the entrance, to save her from the shock of witnessing what was coming out of me. Those red ropes of Spanish sugar came back with a vengeance, and between shotgun like blasts of bright pink liquid, while my esophagus was clear, I managed to blurt out a semi-polite “good night” and “thank you” to my teacher, to which she replied with a yelp and fled the scene in terror. I can hardly blame her, the sounds I made were unholy.

I emerged from the bathroom an hour and a half older and a half dozen flushes wiser, a new man. My classmates may have gotten to sleep earlier, but no one slept better that night than me, overcome by the exhaustion of expulsion as I was. I couldn’t eat anything for a few days after, until I finally broke my fast for some beach jambalaya, which proved underwhelming, even though the jumbo shrimp’s funny eyes managed to cheer me up considerably. Although, to this day, the taste of those candy tubes are marred in my mind. Some banana flavored taffies utilize the same kind of sugar I believe, and every time I eat eat one I feel I shiver down the base of my skull and my jaw stiffens.

Overall, the experience taught me the value of being prepared, of having good, supportive friends in times of crisis, and of drinking lots and lots of water. After this incident I was also gifted the unfortunate pseudonym, “Spanish Candy”, which serves both as an interesting conversation starter, and a safety net if I ever decide to get into exotic dancing, and happen to need a catchy stage name.

Thank you for taking the time to read this! I hope you got some enjoyment out of my tale of suffering and woe.