December
The first few weeks of December were more or less the same. Work, come home, write and/or do yoga, become a vegetable in front of the TV. There was the first week when we had a five-day weekend and I kissed two different Spanish boys in two different Spanish cities–– one I kissed when we sat on a bench overlooking the glittering water of Puerto de Gandia; the other occurred after he went out of his way to pick my friends and I up from my apartment and drive us an hour to Benidorm, but I won’t elaborate anymore on these instances because neither served much of a purpose aside from bolstering my ego.
I also went on two field trips–– one to this swamp-like place called l’Albufera and another to Valencia to watch kids’ theatre–– which I enjoyed because they were a nice reprieve from the monotony of work. It was weird, though, because almost no one gives me any real responsibility (perks of not being a real teacher and not speaking Valencian), so the only difference between the field trips I went on as a kid and the ones I go on as a chaperone is that no one yells at me if I wander off at the park.
On the last day before winter break, there was a Christmas festival at the school in which the kids all performed various Christmas songs and then proceeded to play around all day. Nothing notable even really happened, except for when I found myself sitting on the lap of Los Reyes’ messenger’s lap for a picture with all the teachers; this would have been less awkward had the lap not belonged to one of the dads of a little girl I teach or if it hadn’t essentially been the equivalent of a grown adult sitting on Santa’s lap at the mall. It was incredibly awkward situation for me, which only made it all the more enjoyable for the laughing teachers and students, who already think of me as awkward anyway and like to playfully poke fun at my ubiquitous state of not knowing what is happening. Still, that moment I didn’t feel as much as an outsider as I usually do, which seems like a frivolous concern but one that had been extremely stressful to endure at work.
But aside from all that, routine and boredom reigned until the last week when winter break finally commenced.
SCOTLAND
I went to Glasgow to celebrate Christmas with my Scottish friend’s family, and it was unlike any other Christmas I’d ever had, namely because it was cold and I actually celebrated Christmas instead of just handed presents to family members. The family traditions I partook in, the thematic decorations, and the tiny town were all so new to me and worked together to create a dissociative sensation that made me seriously feel as if I was in a Hallmark movie. I felt like I didn’t actually belong, but I had still somehow managed to slither in anyway; I didn’t know what to attribute this feeling to–– me or the Christmas plot that was unraveling in my personal narrative.
Regardless, it didn’t matter and I just dismissed that line of thinking as one of the many other nonsensical ones I regularly have. I had a lot of fun drinking and meeting people at the local pubs my first night, dancing to Christmas karaoke, playing Bingo, and for some reason patriotically gushing over Arnold Shwarzenegger because he used to be governor of California. The next day, I was shown around Edinburgh and I drank mulled wine in a Christmas market. It was extremely pretty, and I kept expecting to turn the corner and find Catherine and Heathcliffe run towards each other through the misty fog. I did see the actor who plays Eric from Sex Education, but he was with his mother and I’m a lady so I didn’t disturb either of them.
That night, I finally gave into the metaphorical Christmas sparkle and wore matching pajamas with my friend and her family. Waking up in them the next morning did feel good, I will say. I was also overwhelmed and grateful at the extremely thoughtful gifts I received, a feeling only soured by my own inadequate knack for gift-giving, which was evidenced when I revealed the meager scented candle and Toblerone bar I had bought for my friend’s parents. This feeling of being a gift-giving failure didn’t recede later during Christmas dinner, and in fact was emboldened because I didn’t have anything to give my friend’s extended family as they handed me more neatly wrapped presents. I hope my poor imitation of their accent, my ironically earnest pronunciations of Scottish slang, and my ability to break an impressive amount of their belongings helped to make their kindness worth it. I had a really good time.
BRUSSELS
Undeniably beautiful, but boring and too far from the airport. The architecture was imposing amidst the fog and rain, but the posh people (made all the more snobby with their French that seemed to pass judgment simply by virtue of the accent) and lack of non-commercialized activity made it difficult to enjoy. I did have decent ramen, though.
I had a good day exploring via the cobblestone streets and squeezing through masses of people in extraordinarily lit city squares, but was relieved when I left the following morning.
BUDAPEST
Amazing, stupendous, unbelievable, awesome, and ridiculously fun. Is it too dramatic to say my life officially started in Budapest? My first night I went to the Ruin Bars–– buildings taken over by students fifty years ago and converted into unconventional, multi-storied bars–– and spent my time with four to six different Austrians, who were interested in American politics and telling me about how much they hate the British (a common trend I’ve jumped on in order to survive this continent.)
The next night, I met a boy from Long Beach with whom we have mutual… acquaintances, though I’m not sure how to properly refer to girls I played soccer with ten years ago. We shared the origin stories of our uncommon names, he listened as I went on a fairly long tangent about Pride and Prejudice, and I respected his decision to not sing karaoke with me. He showed me his favorite bar in the city, where he’d been living for a month at that point, before we got kebab and decided to go to a strip club. Along the way we crashed a freshly thirty-year-old German’s birthday party and walked with him and his friends, concocting different stories about what we were doing together; we eventually settled on being long-lost childhood friends who had been separated too soon, leaving him to chase a “beautiful girl through Europe” (his addition, not mine). Eventually, we did find a strip club that would let us in, but the sparse audience and seemingly reluctant girls made for a depressing environment and we left soon after arriving. By then it was getting late, but on our walk back we coyly peered into the stained glass of an architecturally impressive church before kissing against its pillars. Did I mention that interspersed throughout the night was us mutually exchanging “gay” and “pussy” as terms of endearment? So, yeah, it was basically a perfect date.
I was sitting on my hostel rooftop the following evening, talking on the phone with Alex about the great time I’d had the night prior, when a whole smorgasbord of people arrived and I ended up talking to them for two hours. A Scandinavian girl was generous with the details of her previous night spent in jail, a situation she said she’d been surprised and angry to find herself in, but judging from how gleefully she relayed the story I think she was more amused by the occurrence than anything else. A Hungarian teenager lingered and awkwardly interjected himself in the conversation, explaining away his shyness by sharing how he’d run away from home to visit Budapest; a backstory he only proffered when an Italian used his own experience having grown up in a religious cult to pontificate on the importance of solo-travel. I didn’t participate very much in the conversation because I was too busy smoking an Egyptian’s spliff, which was surprisingly the primary mode through which I earned my place on the roof. No one took much interest in me until they saw me knowledgeably take a drag of the joint; it also helped that me being from California carries a lot of weight.
That was how I spent my last night in Budapest: listening to the philosophy of traveling from this geographically diverse group of people, only offering input when my hazy head and I felt it necessary. Then I got hummus and went to sleep happy and content.
COPENHAGEN
This technically bleeds into January, but who cares.
Copenhagen was looking like a disappointment, I won’t lie. I was feeling a distorted sense of homesickness towards Budapest, which was intensified by Danish bars and establishments closing right when Yuki (our Japanese friend and angel who we hastily invited after meeting him in our hostel room five minutes prior to leaving), Alex, and I hit the town. Unfortunately, it became clear pretty quickly that all there was to do was go to the city center and watch the fireworks–– which at times were dangerously close to the ground and usually pointed in someone’s direction–– and ask stoner-looking people if they had weed.
After an hour of people replying, “Go to Christiania,” we finally found someone five minutes into the new year who casually handed over his spliff to us. Though I gratefully smoked it I felt a bit spiteful that he was using his charity toward us to start the year on a karmically rewarding note. Regardless, the night was looking up and suddenly the fireworks didn’t bother me as much, especially when I used their light to spot two boys next to us rolling another joint. After feigning cold or fear or whatever it was Alex said to get us talking to them, the boys decided to give our group a quick tour of the city. I briefly thought of the futility of this plan, since it was late and cold and I knew I was going to be in bed within the hour, a thought I knew Alex shared with me. But still, we went along and smoked and had an enjoyable night learning about the Danish prison system and explaining what the word “between” means to a guy really eager to improve his English.
The next morning, I would like to say we walked around Copenhagen and got a feel for the city, but after breakfast Alex and I made a beeline to the mythical Christiania. A magical place that’s technically part of neither Denmark nor the EU, the whole autonomous region consists of dirty, smelly dogs frolicking through the center square and wacky, iridescent psychedelic murals playing tricks on the mind. But what truly drew us in were the dozens of pushers selling weed from behind highly stacked, green milk crates. It should go without saying that we patronized them, and later we smoked on a park bench that provided the perfect vantage point to take in the pushers shouting Danish at each other and to ponder the little kids walking by with their families. We eventually walked around and perused a haphazardly organized bookshelf full of an assortment of books on various topics and written in different languages, but which were all full of beautiful illustrations that were deliciously consumable for my brain. It was the best time; I felt I had accidentally stumbled upon one of those spiritual ascensions people claim to find with enlightenment, but I know that was just my drug-addled brain’s way of measuring how happy I felt at that moment.
And then Alex and I left to get the most delicious vegan burger from a nearby restaurant.
Later that night, our bellies full with some mediocre Vietnamese food we’d had for dinner, we were walking around looking for a place to drink before pubs started closing early again. We were considering a karaoke bar when this group of Swedish boys walking past told us not to go in. We just nodded and kept walking, even passing them as they peered into the darkened windows of some closed store. After we joked with them about not going in there, they invited us to their AirBnb–– at first it was a dinner invitation, but once they found out we’d already eaten it turned into an invitation for “other reasons they can think of.”
I would like to point out that for a brief moment I thought, “maybe we shouldn’t go with these strangers to their strange apartment,” and “wow, my dad would kiiill me.” But I quickly realized I didn’t take any of those elementary Stranger Danger lessons to heart and these fleeting thoughts weren’t enough to dissuade me from going with them. Soon after, we were sitting around their dinner table laughing about how one of them had awkwardly joked he “ate ass for a living,” and how I had drunkenly gone to the bathroom and gotten frustrated at the locked door, which naturally spawned a myriad of door jokes throughout the night.
I couldn’t stop laughing as one of them told the story of how he had crashed a New Year’s Eve party the night before and enraged the host and his other neighbors so much they’d thrown a glass bottle at him. He told me that when we were all smoking on their balcony and Alex and I triumphantly watched them cough after every inhale, one of them even blowing out the contents of a whole spliff. Luckily, we hate spliffs, but we did enjoy feeling superior about meaningless activities like smoking spliffs. It was truly one of the most fun nights I’ve had, filled with fun conversation, cute and flirtatious boys, and stupid jokes that Alex and I still reference. When we left hours later I had already begun planning a trip to Sweden just to hang out with all of them longer.
The next day, our last day, we sipped on some mulled wine while visiting Nyhavn and then taking a boat tour through Cophenhagen. After that, we decided to commence our goodbye tour of Christiania, which obviously wouldn’t have been complete without another delicious burger. Once in the glorious Holy Land, we smoked and were having a great time pointing out cute boys before we were joined by this cumbersome guy who I had met at the hostel and who now thought it’d be cool to eat my fries and smoke our joint.
He accompanied us on the walk back to the hostel, happily sharing some of the pyschoanalytic observations he’d made since he’d joined us and interrupted our otherwise splendid afternoon. This had the effect of making him even more exceptionally annoying (a feat I thought was impossible), especially since he was eerily accurate in Alex’s case; I had up to that point been stubbornly unresponsive towards him and had instead chosen to stew in an irritated silence, so he just said I was quiet. Eventually, he took the hint from the eye conversations (you know, when you communicate using just facial expressions and subtle gestures) that Alex and I had been having behind his back and finally left us alone once we reached the hostel.
Later we had some amazingly delicious pasta served by some cute Italian waiters and then went to bed at a decent hour to catch our flight the next day.
Now I am in my own bed writing this, having officially returned to Playa de Gandia.
Amazing lovely so much fun omg YOU MAKE ME SICK!!!! This is such a treasure ❤️