It's hot in Spain. I grew up in a part of California where it gets really, really hot; it's over 100 degrees three months out of the year, but it is a dry heat, and there is air conditioning.
It's humid in Spain. That, combined with the heat, means that you sweat. A lot. And the only thing you really want to do is be in a pool (the chlorinated kind, not the sweaty kind of your own making). You want to wear nothing at all, you want to do nothing at all, you don't really want to exist in that sort of sticky heat.
Walking through hallway in my five-inch wedge heels, traipsing defeatedly down the slight decline en route to the outside world, a world I had not been privy to for 20 hours, sans luggage, travel-weary, jet-lagged, surrounded by people speaking a different language, walking towards a person whose physical presence I had enjoyed for a grand total of something like four hours, had broken up with my boyfriend for, and still didn't trust, well, is it any surprise that I freaked out? I already knew the week was fucked, the luggage being lost and all, and when I saw his face in the crowd, gave him a, "And...this is my life" smile, and after he kissed me, I started shaking uncontrollably, like, anything but this, run in the opposite direction, I never should have come, what have I done, what a terrible idea this was. And then, the heat hit me. And I decided to calm the fuck down, be a good sport, make the best of a bad situation. I was there to find out more about this person who had cruelly stolen my heart, but I was also there to relax, to have my first real vacation in years.
Driving from the airport to the villa, which, in actuality, was a condo, or at least, that's what I called our vacation house in Oregon, which reminds me, I remember my mom saying that she wishes my parents hadn't bought a vacation house because then you feel obligated to go to that house every free minute you have to justify the cost, and this is true, although Sunriver, Oregon, is actually a fantastic place to have a vacation house, and I have some awesome memories that wouldn't have been possible without that second home, but I hope I remember that when I have the means to purchase a second home: there's a whole other world out there*.
Driving from the airport to the villa, Johnny turned to me at one point and said, "This is Spain. Beautiful, innit?" (His cockney accent made for some interesting reinterpretations, the most memorable of which being when he asked if I knew of Paul Weller and I thought he asked if I'd been having poor weather--oh, how we chuckled). He was being sarcastic; it was not. Indeed, he spent a good deal of time sneering in Spain's general direction, which, in turn, made me wonder why he (or his parents or whoever) bought a vacation home there if he hated it so much, and why he let me buy a ticket to meet him there if he was so intent on impressing me. The only advantage to this particular location was the weather, which was, in my opinion, shit, but I live in Santa Barbara, the motto of which is Fiat Lux**, which translates roughly to, "The mildest weather that ever weathered, now with 50% less humidity!" It's December 30, and I just spent the last two hours walking my dog wearing workout pants and a t-shirt. So, you know: spoiled and ill-suited to be endeared to a location purely because of its proximity to the equator.
The part of Spain I was in was bland and colorless and reeked of sulfur. I tried to think highly of the stacked housing, I tried to be impressed with the shopping district, I tried to appreciate the ocean view, but the bottom line was this: the view of the roofs were voyeuristic at best and redundant at worst, particularly as they were surrounded by what, in my memory, amounted to mounds of dirt; try as I might, and I fucking tried, man, the shopping in Spain was terrible, especially when I desperately needed clothes and ended up at H&fuckingM to find things to get me through the week; I've lived within walking distance to the ocean for years at this point and am not all that impressed with the European version, especially since the beaches here are private if you know where to look, and even the public beaches are void of that certain European beach style. I don't care if that makes me a xenophobic asshole; I don't want to see some 60-year-old's beer gut hanging over his banana hammock no matter what continent I'm on.
*I keep going off on these tangents because this is where my mind goes when I try to contemplate my trip to Spain. It can't fully grasp what happened, so it shoots off in a thousand different directions until I forgot what I was trying to think about in the first place.
**Not really, and that's actually the UCSB motto, because, apparently, Santa Barbara doesn't have one well-known enough to discover in the 5 minutes I was willing to dedicate to researching it.