I think I had a deceptive enough Hola that no one ever defaulted to English after hearing me say hi. Most people in shops or cafes would say Buenaaas, which I loved.

I hope you had a nice week. I’m back to overbooking my social calendar and neglecting my self care. This week I also overbooked myself, so please do not hit me up ever again. It’s colder than I want it to be even though I feel like I’m in a bit more of a summer mindset. I walked down to work from the L train on that cold Tuesday last week and listened to podcasts down mostly empty sidewalks. I spent Friday and Saturday night out dancing and going to sleep at 5 a.m. I realized my Vejas now have holes in them, which ended up yielding trench foot fears on that miserably rainy Friday as I waited outside in the Nowadays line waiting to reunite with my friends while surrounded by the ex-fratty Brooklyn types and rain of similar annoyance. I saw a girl’s pair of non-Sambas-that-fill-the-Samba-void shoes on the train, asked her where she got them, and bought them the next day.

Back to Spain, waking up early after a night we stayed out later than we should have.

It’s a way easier flex than you think to drive in another country. Obviously driving somewhere congested with motorbikes or driving somewhere that prioritizes the wrong side of the road is something else entirely, but a lot of other countries reward you with what you assume to be a risk while roadtripping. The only non-mainland U.S. places I’ve driven are Puerto Rico and Iceland, and I was prepared to add Spain to that list. Meera was very excited to drive, and both of us got international drivers permits per Spanish regulation (fun fact: you get them at AAA. It costs around $30 if you don’t bring in your own pictures. You don’t need an appointment. The closest AAA to us is on the UWS near Columbus Circle).

I was the backup driver, which ended up meaning that I didn’t drive at all for our 7-hour journey to Barcelona. When we told people we were driving, they were shocked. When we told Spaniards that our route would go through Valencia, they were confused. The quickest way would be a direct train that would take, like 2–3 hours. The quickest drive would be to go up through Zaragoza instead of down through Valencia, which adds an hour. Plus, part of the route was through Castilla-La Mancha, which is partly a dry, ugly desert. It was described as having the same appeal as driving through Pennsylvania (AKA none).

We did not go home early enough to get a good night’s sleep for this drive. Allie, Meera, and I headed out of our accommodations around 8:30, which was the earliest we’d been awake in Madrid. We waited outside of our short-term home on a quiet pedestrian street while two girls sat a little further down chatting, maybe with a water bottle in hand. We Ubered to the area near Atocha, the main train station, where our rental car would be, passing museums we’ll have to see next time. Meera did the talking while Allie tried figuring out where Gabby was meeting us, and I just stood there.

Are you useful on trips? I had to teach myself how to be after growing up spoiled. To remember to clean or volunteer for tasks without people asking me to do something first. I needed to know how to do the thing and also be proactive enough to do it first. I think I’ve come a long way, but this trip really was a weird reckoning with a younger version of myself. On other trips, I love planning itineraries, navigating, and making group decisions (as long as I wasn’t the only person in the group doing all three for the entire time). Even going out to dinner, I love ordering for the group.

I found myself severely unhelpful this go-around. Because I was the only one with a foreign transaction fee’d credit card, I didn’t pay for anything. Because of that, I had fewer opportunities in which I was forced to speak Spanish. Gabby is famously Spanish, and Allie had been to a few of the places we went to before. I just didn’t feel like I was pulling my weight and wasn’t good at turning it around. I don’t think my friends saw it that way, but maybe they did. I know I did. This was one of those moments of feeling quite useless. Then again, I could have insisted further on driving for a leg of the trip, and I didn’t!

Our car was a brand I’d never heard of, a Skoda SUV. We booked it on Booking.com, which weirdly only had electric cars. The day of, we asked for a non-electric car and got the Skoda. The longer our drive went, the happier I was that we didn’t try an electric car for the first time in the middle of Spain. Once we wrangled Gabby, we drove for 30 seconds before pulling over and trying to figure out how to unlock the back doors without turning the car off, but we couldn’t figure out how to deactivate whatever child lock. The block we were parked at was picturesque in almost an autumnal way, our goodbye to a city I felt like I saw a lot of and also none at all.

The passenger seat is the best seat by far. Navigating with a competent driver is fun. You can control aux; you probably have the best legroom and the best views. Meera and I built a collaborative playlist full of pump-up music for the trip and played it here. Madrid as a central city has a bunch of highway arteries spreading to the country’s corners, so you have to make sure you get on the right one so you don’t have to do a tragic exit and turnaround elsewhere. The signs were a bit confusing but we collaborated properly. Once Meera was on the right highway, it would go straight to Valencia. Each kilometer marker sign would show how far we were from the city. Did you know that all kilometer markers in Spain are based on how far they are from Sol, the plaza in Madrid?

Maybe driving through Castilla-La Mancha is like driving through Pennsylvania, because to the non-jaded it’s very beautiful. Pennsylvania has these rolling hills, endless trees, and little towns or fams in valleys. Aside from the endless trees, Castilla-La Mancha fits this bill. Gorgeous mountains, tiny towns that look unchanged for decades — even centuries. This is supposed to be the desert, but it rained so much the past week that everything was green. It got rural quite quickly, and we saw tons of farms and vineyards. A few controlled burns, which was cool…but no horses to be found this trip.

Except for within Valencia and Barcelona, we didn’t really see billboards aside from standalone cutouts of a bull’s silhouette. Gabby said there’s some sort of law banning billboards, but this brandy brand bucked it with these bulls, mostly atop hills. They don’t have any words on them, just the logo. It’s kind of beautiful.

We took a pit stop at a one-off roadside stop that felt more like a cafe than a Flying J. They had an old-timey wagon outside with some old dudes hanging out on it. We used the bathroom break while Gabby and Allie got coffees and shared this muffin with the consistency and taste of a madeleine cookie. At my urging, we took our worst picture of the trip in front of our car. The sun is in everyone’s eyes, and it’s very unflattering. Most of the pictures we took this trip were of our surroundings or candid eating moments.

We conversed for a few minutes and seemed to all decide without saying so that it was time to take a nap. I turned on my oldies playlist. Aside from Meera, we all slept. I didn’t realize the others were sleeping until I woke up, maybe 20 minutes before them. I’m not sure if I slept for an hour or if they did. When I woke up, the terrain was quite different — greener, rockier. I picked the perfect time to be awake because we arrived at a viaduct with aquamarine pools of water underneath us, which might have been the prettiest part of the drive. Meera and I also didn’t have many moments alone this trip, so it was nice to share a portion of the drive just the two of us with our sleeping kids in the back. Even though we’ve spent more than half of our relationship without cars, driving (especially me as the passenger princess) is one of my favorite things to do together.

I took pictures of our sleepers and sent them in our WhatsApp group chat with our Dutch friends. Once they woke up, we were just driving down hills until we hit Valencia. Street and city signs started having a ton of Xs in their names, a letter I didn’t see much in Madrid. None of us had been here before aside from Gabby stopping here once to catch a ferry. A girl I dated while studying abroad until the pandemic started was from here and told me that once lockdown ended she would take me around Valencia on her motorcycle, so I obviously have had a positive association with the city. It’s right on the water, and you can feel it even if you aren’t super close by. There are palm trees and long drags.

We had an hour before our lunch reservation, so we parked at an easily accessible garage nearby and walked around. It’s a warm, sunny city. Kids playing everywhere. Real lives are being lived here but they look pretty great. We eventually walked into the older part of the city with ornate churches and city buildings. The streets shrunk and spun then widened into plazas complete with touristy things. Instead of the towering old church behind them, I saw at least 7 tourists facing the other way with their cameras to capture a 3-story building decked out with Santa and Christmas decorations in the month of March. This is what you want to remember?

Allie’s friend recommended a horchata and churro spot, which we needed to make up for since we didn’t make it to San Gines, allegedly the best churros in Madrid. Valencian horchata is different than Latin American varieties I’m more familiar with. We sipped from four straws out of the same cup. The adjective we kept using was vegetal. It was kind of weird and I’ll probably never have it again, but I’m happy I tried it. The churros were forgettable, but the cup of chocolate we dipped them in was divine liquid.

We walked back to our lunch restaurant past a few quieter streets. Casa Roberto won some sort of paella award and was recommended to us by Sofia’s girlfriend, who would know better than us. We had to call ahead to make a reservation so they could start the paella for us since it traditionally takes a day to get going. Paella is normally something you eat at home with your family, but we did the next best thing.

Casa Roberto felt like Italian restaurants in the U.S. When you’re here, you’re family. Everyone was dressed moderately nice, and all ages were present. There were sleeping children and gossiping adults. The servers were super chatty and fun. Gabby did most of the service talking for us, and I got to hear my favorite new Spanish word: vale. At first, I thought it was more like the best Italian word, allora, which is a filler word you can use in any situation. Vale seems to be closer to okay and serves more of a function, but it feels constant. All of Gabby’s server conversations feel like they’re minutes long, and at least 5 vales are exchanged every time. It’s a Spain thing. If I was Spanish, I’d be vale-ing all over the place.

Something about the interior design and white table cloths made me feel like I was in a restaurant that was more familiar to my childhood than now. We shared a bottle of red that we didn’t finish and noshed on some bread, yummy enough to serve as a good omen for the paella ahead.

We had a traditional paella in a city known for having some of the best. On the long platter, rabbit, snail, artichokes, and some more green (asparagus?) on a bed of rice. I knew upon the first bite that this would join the ranks in the top meals of my life. The rabbit was so tender, the artichoke layers falling off each other. A meal of surrendered ingredients, and I surrendered back. The snail had the actual dudes popping out with their tentacles. Not everyone ate them, but I did. They were actually delicious once I got over that I was eating snail. The paella commanded me to keep going. We all did. We rewarded ourselves with some panna cotta. This was yet another restaurant of multiple in which we closed down the place awaiting our check.

Full and ready for bed, we hit the road again, this leg a bit longer than the last. Four hours along the coastline until we hit Barcelona. We saw even more dramatic mountains and seaside towns once we got out of Valencia’s expanse. We listened to more upbeat music this go-around and chatted throughout. We stopped at another rest area that mimicked American ones more, and their bathrooms were on their last legs. It elicited a word Mathilde revived for me: dafuq? I used to say this word a lot, or its variant the fuck? but have since moved on. Mathilde is in that phase now, and I am still trying to shake it upon returning home. It’s just so easy.

The sun set, and our driver was starting to get a bit sleepy. We veered off of the main highway we were on to the one that would take us straight to the city. This was lit in a way that reminded me of the I-93 stretch of Massachusetts above Boston. We played all sorts of throwbacks to hype us up, which included some Usher and Jesse McCartney for Allie. We passed by Tarragona and Sitges, one town that’s a UNESCO site and the other that’s better than UNESCO because Sunset travel editor Krista Simmons recommended it to me. We couldn’t see either because it was now too dark. We started seeing billboards again and knew we were almost in Barcelona.

We saw a billboard for an escort service, something we’d never see in the U.S. We finally hit the city with enough cars and odd maneuvering to get Meera and I into militant driving mode. She obviously slayed, but it was stressful after a wrong turn. I put on some of her favorite pop punk songs to motivate her, and once we passed Placa de Lesseps I had to play “Money Can’t Buy You Class” by the incomparable Countess LuAnn de Lesseps. We had the same sleeping arrangement as last time: Gabby with someone she’s close with and the three of us elsewhere. We dropped her off at Maria’s and headed back to the rental center.

The rental center closed at 10 p.m., and we were pushing it. Our car was almost silent. We originally wanted to get gas, but once Meera made the smallest of wrong turns, it just seemed better to go straight to the dropoff point. This decision paid off, because we would not have made it otherwise. We dropped the car off, left the facility, and the garage door closed. We waited for 15 minutes in silence for an Uber as we were frazzled and tired.

The Uber went around a ring highway, which would show us all of Barcelona if we could see it. I couldn’t really get the hype in the dark and wasn’t sure if I’d like the city. Meera fell asleep as our assumably Italian Uber driver played terrible Italian rap music, including a song called “Scooterini.” We stopped at the Airbnb, which was on a quiet street in the Gracia neighborhood. This was much nicer than the other place we stayed in and felt much more European, something about the bed being lower to the ground as well as a bidet in the bathroom.

We changed and Ubered again to Carrer de Mozart, a street with some cute neighborhood bars, to meet Gabby and her childhood friend Maria. I met Maria once at a sleepover during my sophomore year of high school when she was silent and not prepared enough to speak English comfortably with our loud freak American friend group. Then, she visited Gabby in New York for a week about two years ago and became my friend for real. I was really excited to reunite.

All of us were exhausted and sat at a table at Lee’s Gin House. The owner was hosting a birthday party for his 12-year-old son, so while most of the patrons were partying, we got the attention of two of the servers who would constantly come check on us and chat. They were from the Philippines and moved here relatively recently and don’t work at the bar but know the owner and came to step in for the night. For the most part, we had fun watching Chinese music videos with them and learning about their lives. One of them, who looks like she could be our age, is actually 40 and has an 18 year old. However, she would not stop teasing Meera for looking exhausted even though she was just driving us around for hours. It was funny at first but eventually stopped. She also took my favorite pictures of us on the trip, which Meera later said I do look tired here.

We caught up with Maria and shared some Estrellas before we got kebab, which I learned is really just getting something in a pita. I wonder why kebab culture hasn’t reached the U.S. in full force the way it exists in Europe. I got a spicy one, and we all ate them outside on a bench around 2 a.m. I think this was my favorite day of the trip, if I had to pick.

We slept in again and awoke to neighborhood sounds of babies crying and businessmen on the phone. Another shower whose hot water quickly stopped. It was either this day or the next that I took a full shower in the freezing cold, which felt both horrible and incredible. We had lunch plans with Gabby and Maria in the Eixample neighborhood, so we walked almost an hour to get there.

Barcelona goes from the water up through the mountains and is a city on a hill. We were high up on the hill and would have to walk down it to get somewhere flatter. It was already a hot, sunny day in the neighborhood. Cafes, supermarkets, stores with low ceilings before opening up to views of dramatic hillsides. Allie walked us to a Gaudí (the architect of some of Barcelona and the world’s prettiest places) building called La Pedrera, which had wavy balconies in that eccentric Gaudí style. The sidewalks (in Valencia, too) were smooth panels marked with pretty patterns.

Barcelona felt more international than Madrid. I saw more signs in English and businesses I’d see more here. I saw a lot more Asian restaurants. In case you didn’t know, they speak Catalan there, which isn’t a dialect of Spanish but a completely different language that feels like a mash of Spanish, French, and Portuguese. I don’t know enough about the Catalonian independence movement and took in whatever information I could about what the complex political moment. I saw lots of tourists, but it was easier to tell who tourists were in Madrid.

As I started getting tired, we hit Cafe Roma for lunch. Our table was outside with an umbrella, but the sun didn’t hit our table ever for it to be necessary, which was a good metaphor for our experience here. One of the surprising hallmarks of coming to Spain was how cheap all of our food and drinks were, but this place had each croqueta priced out. We tried a few different balls and sandwiches that were fun but with portions that were too tiny to justify the prices. The people who worked there all looked gay in a Bushwick way, and I wondered if our server was American.

Our crew walked to the Gothic quarter. I’ve been seeing memes and posts about how Barcelona is an urbanists dream since before I knew what urbanist meant, and now I got to see their grid in action. Protected bike lanes, sidewalks everywhere, big enough streets for safe infrastructure, I could have walked forever. We snuck into the Gothic Quarter, which is full of winding pedestrian streets built to get lost on. We tucked into a vermuteria and enjoyed some vermouth before going to a busier square and buying torron (flavored nougat bricks…?) for our home peeps. Living in New York has ruined souvenir-buying because we can get everything here, so might as well go with a delicacy.

When we got closer to the water, we made it to make sure you’re holding your bags territory. The sidewalks were packed along the water and suddenly got quite tacky, harkening back to Atlantic City and Hampton Beach memories which would be surpassed by Florida beach memories if I ever went to one of those drinking ones. Loud drunks, strange outfits, and people selling whatever weird wares along the beach. We walked and stared. I asked Maria if people who lived here ever went to the beach. She said no.

I was surprised that my pants didn’t get dirty after we sat on a less crowded part of the beach for a while. Sketchiness aside, all beaches are beautiful and this was no different. I usually dip my toes in, at the very least, when visiting a beach but none of us saw a need to here. We walked off to a cafe for a while, and Maria ordered chai lattes for both of us. At this point in the trip I keep wanting to speak German, my mind defaulting to that before Spanish even though I haven’t spoken an accurate word of German since high school.

The sun starts setting, and Maria leaves us for the night so she can get ready for work the next day. We nab a reservation to a slow food restaurant in the Gothic Quarter called El Chigre. We wander for a while back into the quarter stop to enjoy each little playground, square, and garden. We walked under Barcelona’s redder, more beautiful in my opinion, Arc de Triomf. To kill time before yet another 10 p.m. dinner, we stopped at a place to sit outside and drink sangria out of a beautiful pitcher. By this point, I definitely liked Barcelona and just needed to see it sunny to get there. The restaurant kept calling Allie, who made the reservation, but she could not call them back because of something I forget that had to do with the different country codes.

When we walked over, we were greeted by a beautiful hostess that told us there had been a kitchen malfunction and they could not serve any more food that night. She gave each of us a perfect glass of cava and a reservation to their other restaurant a 5-minute walk away for when we finished our glasses. Other than her beauty, she was really nice. Maybe I was just enchanted but the hospitality felt actually genuine.

Time for our best meal in Barcelona. We walked over to Llamber and were greeted with yet another free glass of cava. The restaurant had the perfect atmosphere for a special occassion night, not too formal but lighting low enough to celebrate the mood. The servers here were also super nice, and we ordered an incredible bottle of wine that was one of the more expensive on the menu at 28 euros. Suddenly, our original El Chigre hostess arrived to make sure that we were having a nice time settling in. We were shocked and excited to see her. This would not happen in the U.S.!

We locked in for an incredible meal. We got a cheese plate that our resident cheese expert Allie took us through, some arancini-esque fried rice cubes with a bit of cheese stuck on top through a layer of praline, arroz negro with pulpo (octopus on tar-black rice), and this bean soup with some random pork cuts. I tried blood sausage for the first and last time. The four of us were tipsy and happy. The restaurant, against the vibe, would play random 90s and 2000s pop music. I peed in yet another single-stalled women’s bathroom that should just be genderless.

We were on a high upon our departure, and while we waited for our Uber we saw three different couples making out in a way that looked romantic and hot instead of tacky and weird. Just part of the Barcelona magic, I guess. I took little notes on my phone and have a note at the end of the night here that I don’t remember putting down or why: I need to do something big and good in my life.

Up early for our last full day. Gabby and Allie love a free walking tour, so we planned to meet at 10 for one of the Gothic Quarter. Meera and I are always running late, and I thought the tour started at 10:30. Allie left ahead of us and took the Metro, but we ran late enough that we had to Uber. Thankfully, we didn’t seem to miss much of the tour. We got our earbud packs and tapped right in, learning about the old churches and eras of the city. They even have old Roman columns.

The most surprising thing I learned from the tour was how Jewish the city was at one point, and relevant Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals lived there. The city had a deal with the Jews to protect them as long as they dealt with the city’s money since Christianity prevented the ruling class from doing so. Then, it was inquisition time (we even stood in a square where Jews were executed) in which Jews had to convert, leave, or die. One of the buildings had a few Hebrew words inscribed on some of the bricks, and our guide explained that those bricks come from Jewish gravestones since the graves did not have any visitors since all the Jews either left or died. Super sad! We walked through the very tiny, narrow Jewish Quarter, which was a nice treat.

Once our tour ended, we walked through a meat and cheese market then ate a small lunch. I had pasta that reminded me of pasta my Nonna would make. We then visited a perfumery owned by Gabby’s mom’s friend from high school in Jersey who coincidentally moved to Barcelona and started this shop with his husband. He was wearing a Princeton shirt when we came and surprised him. It was funny to hear him have a slight accent and default to Spanish words sometimes when he’d forget what something was in English.

Our foursome split into two while Gabby and Allie went to see some other Gaudí house while Meera and I went up to the Sagrada Familia. Meera had seen the outside of it during a layover, and we drove right past it our first night on our way to drop off the rental. We had to buy waitlist tickets, but apparently they’d be for a certain check-in time that they’d tell us the morning of. We missed the notification and our check-in time. Meera and I walked up to the unique, formidible church to find that our tickets were no longer valid.

Meera obviously cared because it’s wasted money. I really didn’t care. The Sagrada Familia was probably one of the things I was most excited to see, but at the end of the day, it’s just a church. Gabby and Allie were excitedly reminiscing and hyping it up for us, which weirdly made me want to go to it less. I’m not sure why this specific thing taps into the most cynical part of me, but maybe it’s the Christianity of it all. The church isn’t even finished!

We sat outside and ogled at it for a while from different angles. I didn’t need to see the inside because I loved how fantastical it was from the outside. We went for consolation cappuccinos at a cafe nearby and got a pistachio cheesecake slice. We then went to a crappy souvenir shop and bought our usual vacation suspects: a fridge magnet and a shot glass.

The four of us had tickets later to see Parc Güell, so Meera and I slowly meandered up the hill. We stopped in a few parks and sat in one near a school with a few boys running around playing soccer while their parents chatted in a corner. There are so many playgrounds in Spain, and it really feels like a country that values its children. We sat and stared for a while at the serene, typical scene, and I talked about entering another phase of feeling stuck at home. At this point of the trip, I was really feeling antsy about needing to leave the U.S. or at least make my time there more meaningful. We talked about starting a business at home or where we would want to live instead. It felt hopeful even if it doesn’t happen, but I hope one of those do.

Now we’re really getting steep. We walked up the hill past another school at pickup time and finally arrived at Gaudí’s master park. I understand why it’s ticketed but feels like it shouldn’t be something you pay for. We came from different sides and met at a big clearing in the middle. This was probably my favorite tourist attraction of the trip. The architecture was so cool, especially matched with such unparalleled views of the city. Meera and I thought about taking the teleferic from the beach to the mountain earlier in the day, and I was happy I saved the great views for this moment. We kept seeing how far up we could go, how much more we could see.

Gabby left us to get dinner with Maria and meet her boyfriend, so we spent a little longer slinking through the park. Once it was time to go, the walk down the hill was probably the best part of the trip. The sunset demanded my attention from all angles and showed off the nature and buildings as we mosied down the steepest hills. Someone played piano from their apartment. This was my favorite part of the trip and sealed that I didn’t just like Barcelona but love it.

We finally returned home and rested for a minute before our dinner reservation. Finally I got to take the metro, and the station was close to our place. It was clean and fast. Allie made an observation in the morning that we saw this time around, too: people don’t listen to music on the train here. We had to transfer once and went back to the beach where we’d eat our last full meal in Barcelona at a restaurant called La Mar Salada. This is the second restaurant of the trip that we ate at on our last night somewhere that I saw and remembered from the first day (this place, the signage font looked almost Arabic from far away). It’s sandwiched next to a bunch of super touristy restaurants, but both our tour guide and Eater recommended it. There, we finished off the last of our Barcelona food bucket list: bomba (another fried poof with filling), fideua (if paella had vermicelli noodles instead of rice), and crema (like creme brulee). We talked about how proud we were of ourselves over a bottle of white wine.

We had to do something gay in Barcelona other than living our lives as ourselves, so we met Gabby for a lesbian night at a gay bar called Candy Darling. The bar was super cool. An uninformed straight guy asked if he should go in and the doorguy told him no. We had to walk down a long, pink neon-lit hallway before reaching the bar. It had the electricity that I imagine from Sex and the City early 2000s Manhattan or Girls early 2010s Brooklyn. Everyone was hot and genuinely having a good time in conversation with one another. Barely a phone in sight. We got cocktails and sat atop a bleachers-ish seating arrangement, looking out at the bar filled with all kinds of queer people. It was a much cooler scene than the place we ended up in on our last night in Madrid.

We ended the night at a mostly empty gay bar called Priscilla Cafe, filled with tons of pictures of people that gays live for and ads for drag nights that would be much busier than this one. At one point, a guy selling roses came in and nobody bought them. Since it was the end of the night and he was frustrated, he just gave them to us. Two American-sounding girls a few tables away from us said That was weird, right? after he left.

For convenience’s sake, Gabby stayed at our Airbnb that night so we could all leave easily in the morning. When scheming for our commute to the train station tomorrow, I saw the most European alert on Google Maps telling me there might be delays or cancellations due to train workers striking. We were scared that we were going to miss our train and flight, but Gabby called the customer service desk and they informed us that we were fine. It was a scary five minutes.

Not enough sleep. We pack into the Uber and see Barcelona at its earliest like we did with Madrid. So many bikes. It was nice to be part of people’s Tuesday commutes. We arrived at the train station, went through security, and had to wait a while for the train. The one we were supposed to get on ended up not coming, so we were moved to a slightly later train we still had to wait for. We still had enough time for the airport, so I didn’t stress. We had a nice view that I barely looked at because I slept almost the whole trip.

We arrived back into Atocha and had to get to the Madrid airport. I wanted to keep our Uber streak going since we all had luggage and should prioritize getting there on time, but my Catholic need to be early was shut down by the prospect of free metro transfers for everyone coming from a longer trip.

The Madrid metro was also nice and felt a bit more retro. We were definitely confused on where to go and had to get separate tickets eventually. Allie was using Reddit to get us the right route for our transfer. I felt helpless, dumb, and frustrated, but they stewarded this simpleton through. We got to the airport and through security with ease.

I don’t remember if I told you about the only ads we saw throughout Spain, which were either for Burger King Stackers (burgers or chicken sandwiches with multiple patties) or Dominos’ Croissantizzima (a croissant pizza I actually need). Since we saw Burger King in the airport, Gabby, Meera, and I decided to get it. It was our most expensive meal in Spain. Gabby’s expertise helped us with choosing the right fry variety and a little ice cream. I chose the burger stacker, a combo meal whose drink options included beer the same way you could get a Coke. I wasn’t planning on drinking in the airport, but I had no choice but to take advantage. The burger was a bit dry but still good.

The flight boarding was all chaos. There were multiple gates in a small, seatless room with crowds of people. I checked in first and accidentally used Gabby’s boarding pass because I had it up on my phone earlier when she had trouble scanning it upon our entry. I was at a different level, and Allie had to come get me to rectify the situation. This is why I get to airports early because I always make mistakes.

We take a hot bus to our plane, which thankfully had a prettier walkway up to the top. I’m back in the middle of my girls, and the flight was much longer than we thought it would be. We all slept a little, read, and watched movies. Meera and I watched Anora and A Real Pain.

We landed back at JFK around 4 p.m., which was perfect. In a trip of endless Ubers, we had our final one home and hatched a business plan so good I won’t even tell it here. Meera and I got home, ordered BOGO Thai to get us through the next day before grocery shopping, showered, and conked out before 10 p.m. I originally wanted the four of us to debrief over a voice memo so I could remember everything about this trip, but we were too busy to make it happen there and even busier once we got back home.

Jetlag was easy to adjust to, and the trip already feels so far away. I feel like I’m already back in my stuck routine. Spain taught me that I’m less uptight than I perceive myself to be but I’m also exactly right and I should take more risks. I am the most American person ever, probably. I’m so grateful for my friends and an incredible trip.