Day 6: Que será, será
Yesterday was pretty darn normal, or as normal as day 6 in a new country can be. We’ve got our morning routine pretty well down — I wake up first and do my dinacharya before sitting down to write my post of the events of the prior day. Bill wakes up and does his morning things and then makes breakfast. Regular life stuff.
We had our Spanish lesson with Sinaí yesterday which is something we’ve been doing twice a week this month (we’d met with 2 teachers in July, each of them once a week) so that continued the normalcy even though it delayed our visit to the cafe.
We had our familiar waiter at the cafe and even shared a laugh about the consistency of our orders. True, I only understood him well enough to get the gist, but sometimes that’s all you need.
Our exploration yesterday centered around finding a shopping cart. Sexy, I know. Since our first day here I’ve been eyeing these ubiquitous carts with envy. Everyone seems to have them and they, to my mind, held the key to enjoying the frequent smaller shopping trips that come with living with a dorm-sized fridge. Google served up El Corte Inglés as a place to find them so off we went.c
One trip on Bus 11 and we were deposited into a plaza surrounded by STORES. Friends, we had landed in a hybrid Magnificent Mile/Woodfield Mall type zone. Big buildings filled with bright and flashy stores, lots of signs in English, and a whole lot of people focused on buying all the things. It was a bit of a culture-shock/whiplash moment. We found our way into El Corte Inglés and continued to be overwhelmed. It turns out this place is a major department store. By “major”, I mean there were 5 or 6 levels of shopping from perfume, cosmetics, and handbags on the entry level, clothes for women (1 or 2 levels worth, I honestly lost track), clothes for men, clothes for kids and babies, housewares, shoes, and more. The top level had a cafeteria with a rooftop terrace and what appeared to be a fairly extensive store credit service area.
It was intense.
We toured each level and, while it seemed they had everything one could possibly want, weren’t finding the shopping cart of my dreams. I got brave and, armed with the picture of my google search up on my phone screen, asked for help at one of the counters. The employees responded quickly and, in Spanish, told me it wasn’t there. My look of confusion (how could google have let me down again?) prompted one of them to ask if we spoke Spanish. When I said, “un poco,” she, instead of dropping into English, switched into slow and enunciated Spanish with hand and body gestures and communicated that we needed to leave the store through the perfume entrance and look to our right and we would see the *other* El Corte Inglés. Her coworker then repeated the directions in English. We thanked them both profusely (muchas gracias!) and headed on our way back down through the maze of things and escalators.
We did detour a bit to see if we could find Bill a pair of sandals (you know Spain is magical and hot if *Bill* is looking for a way to go without socks) only to discover that we were in a store with fancy prices (so more Nordstroms, less Kohls). We left without making that particular 119€ purchase and hoping that the other shop would have prices more in line with our budget.
Success! The other El Corte Inglés was less intense, less expensive, and they had the shopping carts on the 2nd level we tried!
Back into the consumerist frey we decided to see about finding food before heading home but struck out — nothing looked really compelling and we weren’t feeling all that hungry. We did pass a Claire’s, a sunglass hut, and an Apple Store. I just wanted to get back to our neighborhood.
The metro to a tram got us back home. We walked, with our hard-won cart rolling behind us, to our local Mercadona and were faced with a new challenge — the cart locking station. You’re not supposed to take the carts with you around the store for some reason, so they have this station set up at the front of the store with lockers for large bags and chains for the carts. Using this required getting change for a 2€ coin so we could put a 1€ coin in the machine. It’s just like the Aldi quarter!
We did our shopping, I learned the word for jam (mermelada, with a big roll on that “r”), and we found gf cheesecake and gf tortellini to make Shabbat happen in style. We, and our cart, stopped in a fruit market on the way home and picked up some apples and peaches.
Our afternoon at home was so sweet and normal. We had a light comida of cheese (a new goat cheese) and crackers (a new wasa-crisp like cracker). I zoomed with Lizzie for a luxurious 90 minutes spent catching each other up on the events of our week and hanging out in a really normal way. Bill made Shabbat dinner and we set up our candles (from our luggage), bread, and wine (from Graham) on the little step stool in our living room. We sat next to each other on the couch and exhaled.
We live here now. Que será, será — what will be, will be. Somehow, the total normalcy of the day followed by the ritual of Shabbat sealed it for me.
