Marcuses go to Spain

I spent the past two days in Spain with my family, as as usual on Marcus family vacations, we saw the good, the bad, and the hilarious. I flew into Spain a night before the rest of the family and met Laurel in the airport. She was flying back in from Madrid where she’d been on a trip with her Dartmouth program. We spent the night in a youth hostel (as her host family isn’t expected to host the student plus five family members at any point in time) and arrived back at the airport the next morning to welcome the rest of the Marcus clan to Spain. However, as we arrived, it became clear that another welcoming party was waiting for the same flight. Reporter after reporter shoved right in front of me with the chutzpah I didn’t think I’d see again till I was back in Israel. Turns out they were waiting for some big shot European soccer player who jetted out of the airport as soon as he could, bringing after him the crowd of pushy Spanish reporters. This left the coast clear for us to properly greet our family, who had arrived just prior to the soccer hype, along with the requisite slew of color Marcus family suitcases. Finally, after peeing, gabbing, and exchanging money, we headed into the bright Spanish sun and into two taxis to take us to our rented apartment (Tali, Ilana, and Alan in one taxi, Laurel, Marielle, and Sheryl in the other). After happily discovering that our high school Spanish wasn’t useless after all, Tali and I struck up a halting conversation with the driver, Jose. After some fairly typical small talk, Tali decided to get more creative.
“What music is popular here?” she asked.
“David Bisbal,” Jose answered. Tali, who recognized the artist, promptly shouted, in true Tali form, “Te amo!” intending to express her fondness for Bisbal’s music, but instead proclaiming her love for Jose [lit: I love you]. We all burst into laughter and just about then we arrived at our apartment, which forebodingly was located inconspicuously on a street that resembled an alley.


Fortunately, the inside of the apartment was pretty nice, except for the smell of garbage issuing from the washing machine and sink. The landlord didn’t really know what to do about that.


For the most part we spent the two days I was there walking around, buying fresh squeezed orange juice and café con leche (coffee with milk), being confused about how to pronounce the letter “x” in the regional dialect, Catalan, and appreciating eachother’s much missed company. Most of the time. Our communications skills were on par enough to order a local favorite, the Bikini sandwich (ham and cheese) without the ham. (My dad preferred the menu pointing slow English speaking method, which was pretty entertaining since it hardly ever worked.) We ate a lot of bread, basically.


Sadly, after two days of Marcus happiness, it was time for me to return to Israel. We took the metro to the airport bus stop (the metro is no small feat with a party of six and only one person who knows where we’re going…thanks for your tour guiding, Laurel) and I said goodbye. Digital cameras were snapping at the bus window as it pulled away. (Part of me hopes those pictures came out just as reflections of themselves).


Right now [this post was written by hand] I’m sitting in the Rome airport waiting to board the Rome-Tel Aviv leg of my journey back to Beer Sheva. On the Barcelona-Rome part, I had a whole row of seats to myself! I’d like to take this opportunity to mention how Italian is driving me crazy. On Alitalia, the flight attendants make the announcements first in Italian, then in English. If I, a native English speaker, can’t tell when they are switching into English from Italian, I think there’s a problem. Earlier I thought an attendant was saying to me, “Say I love you?” but he was really saying, “Are you going to Tel Aviv?” which became clear when he pronounced it the third time as though I were hard of hearing. As a side note, the thing about flight attendants in general is that their intonation seems to have no connection whatsoever to the words they’re saying. Doesn’t help the current predicament.


So far the flight is about half an hour late to board. The check-in person calls a different list of passengers up for “information” every five minutes. It’s pretty funny listening to her pronounce Hebrew names with her accent (imagine “eh” being appended onto names like Aharon and Ben Moshe, producing calls for Misters Aharon-eh and Ben Moshe-eh to come up for information).


I’ve been sitting next to two older Israeli couples who appear to be traveling together. To pass the time (I’m assuming), one of the men chooses something new to gripe about every so often. Every time a list of people is called for “information,” he grumbles about how idiotic the employees here are since the loudspeaker only has a fifteen foot radius of sound. Now he’s complaining about how the seats in the waiting area are metal, therefore cold and uncomfortable. I think he said he was hungry too. Hope he’s not next to me on the plane… Ooh, looks like we’re boarding. Back to Israeli concept of a line. YES! Ciao! I mean, Adios!