Ali- Several months ago, our friend Jeanie told us she was leading a group of students from Goucher College on a Spanish Immersion trip. Goucher requires all their students to spend time abroad, which I think is the coolest and probably most useful academic requirement a college student could have. I mean I was required to take a humanities course way back in college and can’t say the Drugs and Humanity course that fulfilled the requirement has done more beyond add minimally to my value on a trivia team and forever ingrain the words to Wasted Rock Ranger in my brain. In contrast, the Goucher students experience a cultural and communication challenge living with host families in a foreign country that might almost overcome their handicap of a sheltered and privileged upbringing.
The timing of this educational excursion happened to coincide with the second half of Maya’s winterbreak and our Italian farewells to the Kaufmans. The travel gods had spoken again! And we obeyed, hauling our butts first to Madrid where the students were due to arrive on the 2nd of January. We arrived on the 30th of December, to our micro-airBnB located right next to the Palacio Real. That was the good news. The bad news was that the one bathroom had a nonfunctional sliding glass door that rendered private pooping impossible, particularly since, by some architectural anomalie, the pooper could be seen from any spot in the entire apartment. Maya was particularly distressed by this state of affairs and managed to wrench the door shut, only to be trapped inside while Joe and I tried to refrain from laughing long enough to get her out.
On the first night there, Maya was tired from the trip but Joe and I decided to venture out to get some food. We ended up in a Mexican place around the corner, where we managed to get food with my all-but-forgotten Spanish. Then we tried to order some take-out for Maya. Google translate was zero help with how to say ‘take out’. So I gave it a shot after waiving down our waiter:
Me: Quero tacos. Para mi hija. Para mi casa.
Waiter: Pollo?
Me: Si!
Waiter: Picante?
Me: No picante.
Waiter: Suave?
Me: Si!
The waiter seemed to get it but then he came back with a plate of tacos, at which point Joe jumped in with some really nice Germanish:
Joe: No! Zu casa!
Unfortunately the German zu meaning ‘to’ sounds a lot like the Spanish su meaning ‘your’. No! Your house! Needless to say the guy just smiled and took away the tacos and didn’t come back. In case this happens to you, para llevar is the correct expression, which I will now never ever forget.
Our first full day in Madrid was New Years Eve, which meant that a lot of shops and restaurants were closed or had limited hours. This was only a problem when we realized that Madrid was colder than any other place we had thus far visited, including Swiss mountaintops, Italian Alps and rainy German cities. We wandered around on a walking tour until we found an open gastrobar just in time to prevent appendage loss. Gastrobars are great places to get some fun Spanish cuisine, and the steady flow of bonus unordered tapas was delightful. Maya had a classic Madrid bean stew that was very similar to the Cassoulet we had in Alsace. 
Totally stuffed, we waddled over to the Teleferico, which is a fairly old looking gondola system that takes you across the city into Casa de Campo, a giant park on one side of Madrid. 
Supposedly there is an audio guide that tells you the sights you can see from the gondola but apparently asking for the English language version was code for ‘give them the silent treatment’. Afterwards I marched us by several Madrid hotspots: Teatro Real, Casa de la Ville, Plaza Mayor, Puerta de Alcalá, Palacio de Cibeles, etc. 
Along the way we hit the Mercado de San Miguel, which was in full party mode prepping for New Year’s Eve celebrations. 
There must be some tradition that called for wearing wigs and ridiculous hats as we spied quite a few examples of festive headgear. 
We also hit one of the many crowded Chocolaterías, and got churros and a bowl of melted chocolate for dipping. 
The Plaza Major was gearing up for a wild welcoming of the new year
, but we are lame and headed back to the apartment, blaming Joe’s work terrorist training (which we both had to do before departing the States- go ahead and ask me which hotel room you want so as to avoid being a hostage victim in a hotel terrorist takeover!) for making us cautious of crowded places filled with people having fun.
Ok, to summarize the next several days of delight and frostbite, the highlights of our stay in Madrid were the flamenco show, for which we acquired tickets in the Mercado de San Miguel from a lovely lady from New Jersey (a different lovely New Jersey lady than the afore mentioned Jeanie, who appears a little later in this episode) and the Palacio Real, for which we acquired tickets after waiting in a long outdoor line. The Prado also deserves an honorable mention because it’s famous for its painting masterpieces, which the Abrahams could only vaguely appreciate and comprehend, being total art philistines. However we appreciated the fact that we were surrounded by art that more worthy individuals really appreciated.
But back to the flamenco and Palacio Real. If you haven’t had the opportunity to see a flamenco show up close and personal, it is a powerful site. It’s all improvised and you can see that the music and movements are a combination of skill and wild abandon. 
Pictures can’t capture it so I put a video of my favorite performance on You-tube. My second favorite performance was Joe’s post show brilliant adaptation. Can you believe he has never taken a single lesson???
The Palacio was Madrid’s artisanal excellence and decorative flare on steroids. The whole city is bloody beautiful, with every building a work of stone carving, iron work and/or architectural mastery. Statuary is as ubiquitous as pigeon poop. 
So imagine the challenge of outdoing all that for a guy like George V? We weren’t allowed to take pictures through most of the palace so I can only give you a taste of the crazy opulence with a couple ceiling frescos.
The ‘audio guides’ were full Samsung tablets complete with detailed pictures and videos of particularly interesting pieces (e.g. atomiton clock carted by mule over the Pyrenees by a famous Swiss clock maker for George).
On the 3rd, we followed Jeanie and the students to Alicante, a 3 hour train ride away on a very nice Spanish train. In contrast to freezing Madrid, Alicante, located on the east coast of Spain, was warm and sunny with palm trees and beaches. Maya exclaimed numerous times that this was her kind of place. 
We met up with Jeanie and Maite, her co-Instructor and a native Spaniard, to head to the three bedroom place they had rented on the main drag. Their place was situated right next to the best bakery in Alicante (personal opinion that does not necessarily represent that of the Alicante Bakery Guild) 
and down the street from the Mercado Central. 
The main sight in Alicante is the Castell de la Santa Barbara, which is a giant fort on top of a small mountain right in the middle of town. 
There is apparently an elevator built in the middle of the mountain that can take you to the top but we chose to hike up and met Jeanie, Maite, and their 16 student charges at the fort, where we tagged along for the tour. 
The tour guide, Cristina, spoke the most clear, slow Spanish complete with hand gestures that a person with very modest Spanish skills could hope for. Her target audience were the 3rd semester Spanish students, but my superior adult attention span and apparent partial comprehension I’m sure made me a favorite tour participant. I usually gathered just enough to outline a credible but probably completely inaccurate translation for Joe.
You see Joe, this monument commemorates a guy who had something to do with Christianity and they gave him a key to the city and then he died and they buried him with the key and a sword. And over there is the holy face, which I think is supposed to be on Jesus’s death shroud, but I think there’s more than one and then there was something about parades.
If Jeanie reads this and emails what Cristina really said, I’ll be sure to post it for hilarious conparison.
We managed to lose the tour at the top but caught up with them back in town at the Concatedral de San Nicolàs de Bari, which we passed on the way to the self-proclaimed 3rd best gelato in Spain- a bold yet underwhelming claim.
We followed along through the streets of the old city, which was a Moorish town before the reconquest (Alicante is actually Arabic for city of lights), to the Basilica de Santa Maria d’Alacant, at which point I dumped my ice cream down my front trying to take a picture, entertaining the nearby students. 
That evening, after Jeanie and Maite had dealt with a student panic attack, we headed out for tapas at the usual Spanish dinner hour – 10:30 pm – to a fabulous place called El Cantó and then were in bed by the usual Spanish bed time – 1 am. 
Jeanie forced me to run the next morning and we hit the dead and empty streets by 8 am, well before Spanish wake up time.
In our last day, we had the good fortune to witness the Three Kings Parade. Spain apparently celebrates the three wise kings that brought completely inappropriate baby gifts to baby Jesus, like choke-hazard gold pieces and whatever Myrrh is. This parade features a visual cacophony of biblical, Disney and star wars characters, most of whom launched handfuls of hard candy at the crowd. Jeanie and I tried catching the candy until enough pieces painfully cracked us in the head, at which point we actively ducked the candy bullet barrage. 
Maya was far braver and was rewarded with quite a candy haul.
Today we sadly left Jeanie, Maite and Alicante to head back to Zurich. We are all a bit travel weary so probably time to call it quits. We just heard it’s -6 degrees Celsius in Zurich, with no chance of palm trees. But frankly the 10:30 pm Spanish dinner time was killing me; I’m looking forward to the excuse of dark, cold evenings so I can justify my 9 pm bed time.
As a side note, Jeanie, who is a bonafida technophobe, moved into the modern world with the purchase of an iPhone. Maya and Joe took turns showing her the wonders of her new device during our stay and I captured the epic moment for posterity.
