Four Things My Geeky-Jock-of-a-Best-Friend Must Do in Europe (6 page)

Just after sunset, Tuesday night

Dear Delia,

Now I will tell you about my day in Barcelona. And I’m going to do it at the same speed my Nazi tour guide—er, mother—set for the day. I think reading it will be sort of like that day in class when we read those Faulkner stories, which had these whole long paragraphs that were just one sentence, and we read them real fast and tried to only take a breath after each period. Well, it’s like that, only worse. So, take a very deep breath to start and GO!

The first thing we saw was a statue of Columbus, which had a sign in front of it that said (and I’m not making this up, although I could be leaving out an accent mark, but what-ev) “COLON,” causing me to wonder if the Spaniards know that word means “intestine,” which doesn’t seem like a very flattering thing to call a person, seeing how it’s a bodily organ that’s filled with, uh . . . well, you know what it’s filled with; but I couldn’t ponder that for long, because my arm was in sudden danger of being separated from the rest of my body since my mother was “guiding” me to the Gothic Quarter, which is a super old and stony place, where we stood in the very spot Queen Isabel stood when she greeted Columbus upon his return to Spain after his famous discovery of our continent (although some years later it was proved that he was actually full of crap, and never made it to America at all, which—now that I think about it—might have something to do with that sign in front of the statue . . .).

(You can breathe in now.)

Then we went into a shop where someone who looked like a Native American (perhaps they are called Native Spaniards in Spain) was selling silver and turquoise jewelry, hippie clothing, incense, and pot pipes, so my mother pulled me out of that shop quickly due to an infiltration of inappropriateness into her carefully planned itinerary, and we went back to the busy street where we looked for a place my mother’s guidebook recommended for authentic Barcelonese snack foods, but since we couldn’t find it after marching around in the blazing sun for at least two or three minutes, I pulled my mother into the door of McDonald’s, where we ate McPitas.

(Breathe now!)

Then, we (that means my mother) studied the subway map, and we (that means my mother) decided to take the subway to Parc Guelle, a place that has artsy statues and stuff done by a local artist named Gaudi, who designed bunches of buildings in Barcelona and lived at some other time that my mother told me all about as we rode the subway, which might have interested me if I weren’t sleep-deprived, having been at the Roman Ruins party and walking around the boat until midnight.

(Breathe . . .)

After we arrived at the subway station, which my mother swore (take note of this) was the nearest to Parc Guelle, we stood on a street corner and saw no park anywhere, so we went into a shop where my mother reached back into the ancient recesses of her brain for some Spanish phrases she learned in the seventh grade, and (miraculously) began emitting Spanish words in the direction of this man, who looked at her quizzically (since, as it turns out, many Spanish people don’t speak Spanish, but something called Catalon), until she finally shrugged and said, “Parc Guelle?” to which the man smiled and pointed to his right, then up to the sky.

(YES! Breathe!)

Following his detailed instructions, we set out to the right and immediately came to understand his “up” direction, because there was an extremely steep and long sidewalk/stairway with an escalator running up the middle of it, going so high into the sky that the top was obscured by a mist, and we began going up, not knowing if it were the stairway to Parc Guelle or the stairway to heaven, my mother on the stairs and I on the escalator for the first half-hour, after which we stopped for a break at one of the cafés that lined this stairway, then continued our journey (my mother taking the escalator, too, at this point), until we reached a sign at the edge of a little wooded path, which read: Parc Guelle.

(If you have not already hyperventilated, breathe . . .)

After mustering our strength for a few lame cheers, we trotted past the sign—which turned out to be a LIE—and hiked along this path covered with roots (which at first I cursed because I kept tripping on them, but later worshipped because they served as a means of holding onto the earth as the hill increased to something close to a 90° angle), until we rounded a bend in the path and could hear the sounds of music in the distance, which I hoped would not turn out to be harps played by angels.

(Breathe . . .)

Parc Guelle was really cool, with these awesome, long walls (purposely wavy, and not—as I first thought—a sign that I was delirious) made from tiny, colorful tiles, going around this whole huge plaza (placa, I believe, in Barcelonese) from which you could see the entire city below—easily a million miles away—so we slumped onto a bench and looked at the view, listened to the sounds of Spanish guitars from a stage below us, and then (after we recovered—perhaps a week later) we went to the other side of the park where there was a big lizard made from the same tiles and a gate leading out to a street, where we saw a sign pointing to a subway station, which turned out to be (hear this) just FOUR blocks away, over FLAT terrain.

(Okay, breathe.)

Once back on the subway, I closed my eyes and listened to my mother have this little discussion with herself (since I was no longer speaking to her), which seemed to be all about adjusting our itinerary to take into account that we had only made it to stop three out of fifteen, or something, and we were almost out of time, so when we arrived at our destination station she pulled on my arm (to wake me up) and asked me which one of these I wanted to do: see some Gaudi architecture, visit a reptile museum, or buy some clothes.

(Breathe . . .)

I really wanted to go to the reptile museum (HA HA HA), but instead figured I would be practical and pick out something new to wear tonight on the boat, since it is a “dress up” night, so my mother suggested we look for some local Spanish fashions, but all of the shops seemed to carry only clothes from Paris, so I ended up with a GREAT denim skirt with little blue seed-beads sewn in designs all over it, and then I thanked my mother (since I was speaking to her again—the clothing purchase having worked well to re-open mother-daughter communication lines), and we ran all the way back to the statue of Christopher Colon and up the gangplank of our boat just as the whistle blew, informing us we were leaving port.

(Okay, you MADE it! Unless, of course, you are on the floor, dead.)

As you can see, being a tourist in Barcelona is exhausting. It also builds an appetite, so, luckily, we went right to the dining room when we got on the boat. I had two lobster tails at dinner. It was all-you-can-eat, and I was actually going to have three, but Cristo the waiter moves so slowly that he didn’t quite make it to the table with the third plate before Mom made me run up to deck ten to see the sunset. Which was really awesome. Think big red, uh, marshmallow melting into deep blue, uh, cocoa. As you can tell, I am still hungry. Which is okay, since there is a death-by-chocolate party in the teen lounge in about an hour. Delia, I truly think we should consider becoming stowaways on a cruise ship. Life is very good here. That is, if you never leave the boat.

Now . . . where WAS I in the “Poseidon’s Mixer” story before I was (so RUDELY) interrupted by Barcelona? Think . . . think . . . think . . . oh, yeah! I was in the pool, and Noori had just dragged AJ to the dance floor . . .

“Brady! Hurry, let’s go!” Tatyana called to me.

“Without Noori?” I asked.

“We’ll improve her chances of snagging him if we leave,” she said. “Trust me.”

“Where are we going?” I asked, pulling myself out of the pool.

“The Internet Café?” she suggested. “I told my grandfather I’d e-mail him. He’s 85 years old—and a MAJOR Web freak.”

“He should meet my sister,” I said, drying my legs with a towel. “Can I go like this? I’m totally soaked.”

“Just take off the shirt,” she said. “You’ll dry a lot faster that way.”

“Uh, that’s okay, I’m all right,” I said, looking around at all the people, and then at Lahn—who MIGHT have been looking at me, because he quickly averted his eyes.

“You’re modest, aren’t you?” Tatyana said. “THAT’S why your friend wrote that thing on your hand about wearing a bikini, isn’t it? Well, Brady, you should JUST DO IT. Isn’t that what jocks say? And—trust me—you’ll have WAY more thrilling adventures and attract WAY more Euro-hotties if you WEAR the bikini. In PUBLIC.”

I thought about you, then, Delia, and how AMAZING it is that I SOMEHOW attracted a new friend SO much like YOU. And I asked myself this question: WHEN will my life stop being so HUMILIATING?

“Hey!” some girls said to me as they walked by. “You’re the one we were looking for all over the boat last night—the one who choked!”

The answer to my question: Apparently not SOON. Trying to ignore all that had occurred in my life up to that moment, I threw a towel over my shoulders and followed Tatyana.

On our way out, we passed Gilligan, who was trying to stop the wristband tournament that was well underway at one end of the pool. There were several wristbands on each of the trident’s teeth and dozens floating on the surface of the water.

“Now, now,” he was saying to a girl who was getting into the pool to retrieve a wristband that had apparently missed its mark. “Let’s not throw things at King Poseidon, please.”

“Okay, sorry about that,” the girl said to him. “But isn’t that statue supposed to be Neptune?”

That, of course, was very amusing to us, so we laughed our way down the elevator and all the way into the Internet Café. People looked at us like we were weirdos, which was also amusing.

Doing some quick calculations, I realized that it was afternoon in the US, so I checked to see if anyone was online. I only found one person I knew, though. Guess who? You’re RIGHT—Clare! Two points! My IM conversation with her was yet another source of amusement for Tatyana and me, so I printed it out so YOU, TOO, can be entertained . . .