Travelling Alone

"You know what no one ever talks about?"

A friend asked me.

"What's that?"

"The lonely times. The gaps when nothing's going on and you want to be home."

I've been thinking about that a lot lately and she was right. It's a dirty secret that we don't bring up, that travelling alone and living abroad isn't always what our posted pictures seem to be. The holidays can be especially tough when you're living four thousand miles away. Bus rides through the countryside can be bleak when it's dark and raining and you're tired and every mile is taking you further away from your friends. That's where I found myself a couple days after Christmas. Taking a night bus from Dublin to Kilkenny to see some more of Ireland before I flew back to Madrid.

For some reason the aloneness of where I was hit me. Any immunity I had to loneliness had been wiped out by the closeness of family and late night talks with my uncle and playing with my little cousins over the past week. Now here I was again, about to stay the night in a hostel in a town I didn't know, way out in the rainy Irish countryside.

After I dropped my stuff off at my hostel I walked into town to grab dinner. Eating alone that night I realized something about travelling alone. It forces you to think about the people you want to be with. Whoever you're having that imaginary conversation with, whoever you want to be using your shoulder as a pillow on a long journey through the country. It makes you really think about who you want to spend your time with.

Now that I've been alone for close to four months I've had long talks by myself with ghosts of people back home. I've laughed thinking of what I was going to tell my brothers and sister about my most recent trip. I've had my shoulder ache in a bar, wanting to put it around the person I love. You see so many amazing things abroad, you meet so many interesting people that sometimes you have to stop yourself from turning around and telling something to the person that isn't there. The one you can't see for six more months that's back home.

I haven't found a vaccine for this ache yet. All I can do is try and keep myself moving forward. Get myself out of bed, see new things, keep pushing myself to learn and explore despite it. When you get home and you're back in that comfortable warmth where you belong, you'll have plenty of stories to tell and adventures to share, and you'll be more appreciative of the people you left behind when travelling alone.

5 Things I'll miss about Christmas back home

Christmas time in Madrid

     The year is winding down. The other professors and I are finishing up our classes and planning trips back home or elsewhere in Europe for the holidays. Ticket's back are ridiculously expensive this time of year so heading back to Florida for a week isn't an option. Instead I'm flying to Ireland to spend it with family there. Although I'm so excited to be back in Belfast drinking Guinness with my cousins and speaking English for a whole week, there are somethings I'm going to miss about being home for Christmas.

     1. Christmas Eve at Dads. Drinking too much wine, opening presents while Andrew and Dad play guitar together (Paul and I making fun of them the whole time), eating dinner and telling the same stories we told last year, and the year before, but laughing just as hard. Hayley and I talking about books or travelling and trying to have a real conversation before Andrew strikes a goofy pose from across the room and I spit up my drink.

     2. Midnight Irish coffee with Mom. Taking a shot of Jameson and Baileys with my Mom at midnight in our coffee while everyone tries to figure you sleeping arrangements. In 25 years this is the first time I won't be sleeping on someone's apartment floor or squeezed onto a couch with my brothers and sister snoring next to me. My Mom always made sure we were together.

     3. Christmas Morning. Seeing my Grandmother, a little smaller than last year but funnier than ever. The most upbeat, happy, amazing, intelligent woman I've ever met. She beat cancer last year and every Christmas I get to spend with her from now on won't be taken for granted.

     4. My Dad. Just my Dad. Walking around in his boxers in a Hawaiian shirt playing Christmas carols on his mandolin with glasses hanging from his collar and his hair in a cowlick in the back.

     5. The best dinner of the year. Hands down my favorite meal of the year. A couple of years ago Hayley, Paul, Andrew and I started going to a restaurant for Christmas dinner. We buy a couple bottles of wine and talk for hours. I never laugh that hard with anyone. It's the kind of laughing where you can't breathe and your sides hurt and you have tears running down your face. When I leave and walk out into the cold I feel flushed and exhausted and happy. All it takes is that one dinner to make everything okay. I'm 5 again and I'm with people that love me unconditionally and everything is a big ball of significance and meaning. For those couple hours we beat back the world and nothing can touch us.



     I miss my friends and family but I'm excited for what Christmas and the new year will bring. Merry Christmas to my new family in Spain, my family in Chicago, Northern Ireland, and Florida, have a great one guys.

Teaching

 

      Sometime around noon today I looked down to find myself in an apron with a giant tortoise printed on the front in bright pastel colors. His name is Tex. Because I'm wearing the apron, I am now Tex. I want to tell the three year-old student sucking back snot who is holding on to my leg that although my appearance has been cunningly disguised as an amphibian I am still his teacher before bubbles of mucus soak into my pant-leg. While trying to disengage him however, I am still trying to get three students to understand what I mean when I say 'please get that out of your mouth, it's not safe and you'll be electrocuted' and calm down a hysterical young Chinese girl. I look up at the teacher I'm supposed to be assisting and her head is in her hands.

     

Luz Casanova-The front of my school in Carabanchel

 

 My teaching day usually starts off so full of promise. I wake up and take a quick shower, throw on some clothes and pop my I-pod on and run out the door. I grab a coffee at the metro stop closest to my school. The air is cool, I have a hot drink in my hand and I'm awake and ready for the day.

      My first few classes are primeria or elementary school aged kids. These are my best behaved students of the day. They can be bribed with anything. Telling them I'll draw an American flag on their work if they finish is enough to get them in a frenzy. They ask questions, they are quiet when I ask them to be, and they are generally respectful and nice to be around. About 10 I get one of the older students to grab me another coffee and I chug this while writing in the staff room.

      My next group is harder. The seconderia students are not interested in where I'm from or how I can help them. I'm just the guy standing in the way of the chalk board speaking too fast in a foreign language. I try to get through the next hour without causing anyone bodily harm.

      By noon I'm out of steam and it's time for the big leagues.The infantil or preschool group is like if you took a group of the criminally insane, made them bite-size, then got them drunk. As I walk into the classroom I'm confronted by a litany of offensive sights and sounds. I rank them in my head to organize which to deal with first:

 

 

-There are two boys holding another, extorting payments in the form of jigsaw-puzzle pieces.

 

-A thin girl has her hand shoved up her nose to the wrist, searching for something that is probably better off lost.

 

-The boy in the corner being quiet and pensive as he stares at the wall just shat his pants.

 

-A crazed three year old has just taken ahold of a plastic cup and is wielding it as a weapon against four cautious students who are looking for their opening in what appears to be the toddler version of a classic bar brawl.

 

       I quickly disarm the cup kid, send the two mafiosos back to their seats, and (with paper towels encasing my hands) remove the girls forearm from her nose. I avert my eyes from the boy in the corner and wait for the real teacher to arrive to deal with the rest.

 

       When I get home I'm exhausted, my clothes need to be fumigated and I feel frustrated. Not because I feel overworked or mad, but because I didn't expect to care this much about teaching. I catch myself getting really excited when that light clicks and a student understands a tense or can answer me in broken English. When I flop down on the couch at night and grab a beer I thank God for the thousandth time that I had teachers in my life that stuck it out and put up with my snot, disrespect and insanity so that I could be here now.

     

 

 

 

 

 

A typical day in Madrid

One of the reasons I wanted to move abroad was to live somewhere long enough for the place to sink in. I wanted to be changed. I wanted to adapt to the things around me. Vacations aren't really enough time to get the full effect of a place. I wanted to really live somewhere. I wanted to buy groceries and ride the metro, be annoyed and frustrated at times and become a local. I'm only a month in so I can't really say whether or not living here has made a permanent impact on me yet but I do know that I love it here.
The people have a lust for life you can taste. The culture is centered around living, not working. And although their economy is one of the worst in Europe at the moment, you could never tell by looking at them. My walk to the metro every morning takes me down a two-lane road separated by a wooded boulevard. I wake up early when the steam is still rising from the sidewalks as fruit and vegetable vendors hose off the walks in front of their shops. Open cafes line the street and offer café con leche, churros, zumo de naranja, and pan for breakfast. Students run to catch buses, parents lead their kids by the hand to their schools and the air is thick and fragrant like a birthday candle has just been blown out.
The metro is fast and efficient. It's clean and has color coded lines that make it easy to identify and remember. I usually only wait about five minutes for one to come rushing into the station.
My school is located in Carabanchel in the southern district of Madrid across the river. The neighborhood is working class but lively. I found a kebab place across from my school that sells thick lamb sandwiches in a white and brown sauce packed with lettuce. They bring it out to you steaming, cupped in a square of parchment paper. During lunch I usually grab a cana to go with it, a cheap half-pint sized cerveza. After my regular classes I head to some private ones located in different areas around Madrid. My last class is located twenty minutes form my apartment so I cut through Retiro park to get there.
Retiro park is a massive expanse of fountains, garden, glades, ponds, atriums, and cafes right down the street from me. I take any opportunity to pack a backpack with my laptop, some food, and a book and head there for a few hours.
After I cut through Retiro to my neighborhood I stop off at the mercado to grab dinner. A loaf of bread still warm from the oven, sliced jamon, olive oil, and a bottle of wine costs me three euros.
I go to sleep full, content, and tired.
You would think a month would be long enough for the honeymoon phase of living here to wear off but I still find more things I love about living here everyday.

Madrid-The first couple of days

     The cool thing about Barajas airport in Madrid is that the metro, the underground subway that has lines running through every major barrio in the city, connects to it and allows you to get anywhere you need to go in less than 30 minutes. I had just spent a long, cramped airplane ride trying not to think too much about the fact that I was leaving everything behind for a year. So I sat on my thick duffel bag, zipping through the dark passages underneath city. I wrote down which lines to take in a little blue book that I kept in my back pocket and lugged my bag up and down stairs and through ticket booths until I arrived at the Bilbao metro station. Because the metro is underground and the airport a few miles away from the city, I had technically been in Madrid for an hour but hadn't seen any of it. This was my first sight as I walked up the steps and stood blinking in the fresh air.
     The Bilbao stop has 5 streets running through it in a tangled web. Overlooking the monument in the center are tall, pink and tan apartment buildings with wrought iron balconies and ceramic flower boxes. Mopeds zip by as white vans park crookedly on the clean sidewalks and unload massive cuts of Jamon Iberico, Madrid's specialty cured ham that's served sliced on baguettes with olive oil or tomato.
      Waiters in black and white moved around tables clustered under an awning, serving café con leche and churros. Always in the background was the rush and swirl of air as cars zoomed by and people ran down the steps into the metro to catch their early commutes to work.
      I let my bag slip down my shoulder.
      The sun was just coming over the top of the plaza, and I was finally here.
      That was nearly a week ago. Like I've told some of the other BEDA teachers, Madrid has completely blown away my expectations. When I was doing a bit of research on the city before moving I got the feeling that Madrid was much like any other big city. Noisy, dirty, with a few museums, some nice parks, etc. Nothing about that is correct.
      Madrid is clean. Cleaner than the majority of cities I've been to in the states even. Although the city does have its barrios that are more crowded and busy than others, it only takes a five minute walk to find a thin winding street with a café or a quiet square lined with trees.
     My first few days I stayed in Malasana (the n has a tilde above it but I still haven't figured out how to do that on an American laptop). The hostel was small and cramped. I had to lug my bag up four flights of narrow stairs to get to the room I shared with twelve other guys on aluminum bunk beds. After nearly 48 hours of no sleep I was jet lagged, my arms were killing me, and I started to have a sinking feeling that maybe I had made a mistake. I dropped off my things and rented a locker so that I could stow my laptop and passport while I walked around the city a bit.
     When I went downstairs there were four other BEDA teachers waiting to be checked in. These guys have since become some of my best-friends in the city but more on that later.
     That night I was alone on the bottom bunk of my room wondering what I was doing. I had little money, no plan on how to find an apartment, and didn't know anyone within a couple thousand miles. I was overwhelmed that I would go at least nine months without seeing my family or the other people I love. Sometime during this pensive, obnoxious self-pitying I must have dozed off.
    The next thing I knew someone was nudging my foot. The room was dark and I could hear snoring coming from the other side of the hall. I immediately made sure my pants and belt were securely fastened. Then I turned on the light.
     It turned out to be the guy from the bunk next to me, asking me if I wanted to go out and have a drink with him and some of the other people in the hostel. What I really wanted was sleep. I wanted to not think or talk to anyone or have to worry about the logistics of changing clothes in a room full of people. But I nodded and struggled into a wrinkled shirt and followed him downstairs. The next thing I know I'm in a square a few blocks from the hostel, sharing a beer with two British girls, a hilarious Londoner named Nathan (who turned out to be in BEDA as well), a few university students from Holland and Germany, and the guy who had woken me up to begin with from Mexico City, who was finishing up the last leg in his month long travel binge around Europe.
     We stayed up until 3 in the lobby of the hostel, talking until we had to drag ourselves up the stairs to bed.
     This post was supposed to be smaller and kind of recap everything over the past week; how I found a place, made friends, and explored that city. Its rambling and its hard to describe everything about the past week. All I can do is flip through the snapshots in my head and try to make sense it all. I guess the one thing that stands out the most is that first day and that rush of excitement and fear.

     Travel isn't safe. Not real travel anyway. We can try to explore another culture and its people but it's hard when we return to the nice hotels and comfort of the familiar that we use to protect ourselves. I know, because that is all I wanted that first night, but what I got in return was much more valuable, and I can't wait to see where the rest of this journey takes me.

Sunset over Retiro Park from the roof of my apartment

    

Why I'm leaving

     The last month has been full of goodbyes. I said goodbye to the amazing friends I worked with for over six years, my family, and all of the friends near and far who have supported me throughout this decision. It seems strange now that just four days until my flight the reason WHY I'm leaving has become obscured. Six months ago when I was applying to the BEDA program  it was all so clear: drinking a beer in a sun drenched plaza, seeing the Mediterranean, bull-fights, sleepless train rides, and the freedom to be anonymous. Now the vision is clouded by the press of goodbyes, as if this whole time I've been walking backwards away from it. A fog rolls in and the logistics of what I'm about to undertake confront me.
     So I think I need to take the time to remember the reasons why I'm leaving.
     Travelling is not a selfless pursuit. We call attention to our conspicuous absence  by our empty chair at Thanksgiving or the presents left wrapped under the Christmas tree. So I can't really use the excuse that my leaving will somehow be better for the people I leave behind. I'm going to miss weddings, birthdays, and births. I might not be there when a friend calls and needs help or to help cheer up my brothers or sister when they have a bad day.
     If that's the case then maybe it's the experiences I will have that will be worthwhile to them when I make my way home. Maybe it's the challenge of seeing how adaptable you are when you're stripped of comfort, financial security, and your ability to communicate. Maybe it's the rush of having a few clothes rolled up in a backpack with your passport and no plan that makes travel so alluring. Maybe it's the chance to feel fear, and to overcome it, to start from scratch, learn something new, recapture your youth, meet new people, recommit to your curiosity, fulfill a promise to your twelve year old self that said that no matter how uncomfortable it may be, or scary, a normal 9-5 just isn't going to cut it. Maybe it's all of these things.
     These are just the final death throes of the me that thirsts for control of any situation, and the growing pains of a new life abroad.
     I leave for Madrid in four days. I'm terrified and exhilarated to start this new chapter of my life and so thankful that I have people in my life that make this a difficult decision.

     So I guess I'm leaving so that I can come home again. Ready to share my experiences with the people I care about.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -- Mark Twain