España

Spain is a quartet of octogenarian dames closing down a cafe at 2 AM having finished their last coffees hours earlier. Spain is a joint smoked on a topless beach while drinking a cold beer bought for a euro off a Senegalese thief. Spain is a mad crowd waving white kerchiefs in the air so that the ear of a dead bull might be severed and presented to a man of high station as a token of honor.

It was scenes like these that made me fall in love, that made me return. I'd been country-hopping through Europe, in some cases feeling the brevity of my stay almost an insult to my host land. But I didn't know when I'd be back, and I wanted to see a lot. I had. It was my plan all along to make a close study of a single country. Spain would be that country.

The women had something to do with it, too. To talk of their physical beauty is facile. What it is instead is a certain sensuality. A confidence that seems to emanate not from the conquest or suppression of self-doubt but rather from the absence of it entirely. But it must be a trick, I told myself. Surely they're afflicted by the same insecurities as American girls.

If they are, they don't show it. When I was in Spain a year ago I could hardly say a word to them, and what I could say came out very wrong. One of my friend's favorite anecdotes from that trip was when I thanked a girl in Spanish after spilling a beer on her. Now I could at least get started. It was never about trying to get a Spanish girl. Funny how it worked out. I would end up with a girl who spoke Spanish, but she wouldn't be from Spain.

My itinerary would allow me to cover the entire country. First San Sebastian, located in the extreme northeast just across the border with France. Then I would travel west to the pilgrim city of Santiago, and from there to the middle of the country toward an eventual rendezvous with my sisters in Barcelona.

I was lying in bed in my San Sebastian hostel dorm room finishing my book when a group of three Italians walked in. A couple and another girl. They were all architects who had just finished grad school or were still in it. I would end up traveling with them for a week. The single girl, Michela, would be as close to a girlfriend as someone who you won't see again for a long time, if ever, can be. From San Sebastian we went to Bilbao and then Gijón, where a fiesta was taking place. This was my first fiesta in Spain and the charming little town was invested with a wonderful vivacity. A stage was set up in the Plaza Mayor and each evening what seemed the whole population of the town streamed up to the square to watch the entertainment, the elderly seated in folding chairs in the center and everyone else standing around them looking on or spilling out of the bars that lined the edge of the square. The night we went there were traditional dancers. The men on stage wore black pants and long-sleeved white shirts with red kerchiefs tied at their necks and black gaucho hats. The women in colorful garb, shawls about their shoulders and clicking castanets in hand and their tapping shoes ringing out over the crowd. My new friends were moving on the next day to A Coruña where Michela had done her Erasmus studies. But I wasn't done with this town. We were arm in arm in the plaza watching the dancers when she asked me about my plans and I told her I was staying. That I needed to stay and write about this town and the fiesta.

"Well," she said, "you say it will be hard for you to leave Gijón, but it's going to be harder for me to leave you."

This affair had been long enough for real guilt. The disappointment in her eyes she tried to hide. The old sickening feeling of hurting a girl.

Later that night when I held her in my room I said to myself "Remember this" because a moment like that is a perfect encapsulation of the traveler's life. A few joyous days together, a week if you're lucky. The entire time colored fatally by the parting that is so soon to come. Then it comes. And beyond that sadness the promise of the next step, and the new people, places and experiences it will bring.

She left the next morning and I was alone again. The atmosphere of the town at fiesta - with the dancers, the decorations, the ceremony - was lovely. But that wasn't why I stayed. The posters were all over town. In the foreground a simple table with two roses laying on it and beyond the table the sand of the empty arena. The main event of the fiesta was a week of bullfights, and I was going to one.

London

At last, a chance to breathe. After six weeks of staying in no one place for more than five nights and having traveled some three thousand kilometers by air, road and rail I was finally stopping. For ten days, in my friend's apartment where I'd have my own room.

About that friend. Randy Hines was one of the first people I got to know at university. We lived across the hall from one another in a residential college, different from a dorm in that it tried to foster a more intimate atmosphere focused on cultural activities and extracurricular learning. I think the plan was to reform our wild high-school ways and make a go at legitimate young society. It proved an ill-fated ambition. My program of self-improvement was already teetering when I met Randy and when we started hanging out it utterly collapsed. He was the first of many great accomplices.

After school he moved to New York for work and then to London. He was always generous and gracious and these traits seemed only to have grown more pronounced with his success. Aside from opening his home to me he took me golfing at a prestigious club in the English countryside and even to the Olympics. All on him. All without a thought of taking the money I offered for these outings. Men's weightlifting was the event. A North Korean won gold and set a world record in the process. After each successful lift he'd jump up and down and cry out in triumph and the crowd just ate it up. His government calling my country its sworn enemy be damned I cheered him on like all hell. Good to know someone over there's getting enough to eat.

I first visited London two years ago and loving it was a foregone conclusion. It was my first time in Europe as an adult, and before that trip I loved Europe as much as a person could love a place they'd never been to. I was intoxicated by the beautiful streets and buildings, the people, the way of life, and I realize now that being in this state prevented me from seeing the place fairly.

This time I was an experienced traveler with the time to form a complete opinion. Randy gave me every free moment he had but he was working during the day and had some other commitments as well. That was fine, I like being alone. But it's the biggest cities that make you feel lonely. Seeing the Londoners spilling out of the pubs in huge crowds after work, pint glasses in hand, or sitting in small groups in the parks on blankets drinking wine or champagne - I wanted someone to do those things with. The fact that I had come very close to moving here until that chance was taken from me by circumstances beyond my control made this outside-looking-in feeling even worse. This was almost my life, my city. The local language was my own, and the barrier to being a part of it all didn't seem that high. But it was.

That's not to say I didn't meet anyone. There's one more anecdote from London I have to include because I told someone I would. One of my last nights there I went to a house party thrown by some guys Randy knew. Most of the people there lived in London but I met this one girl who was a traveler like me. Like practically everyone you meet in that town she had a cool international history, she was from New Zealand but lived in Qatar. I sat at the window with her while she smoked cigarette after cigarette and we talked about traveling, the middle east, my own story. Her name was Jade.

I thought she was a really cute girl and later on in the night when I saw she was leaving I caught her up and told her exactly that. She smiled and said "You're a sweet boy" and our eyes held a moment too long and I planted one on her.

"Did you just kiss me?"
I looked at her. I didn't say anything.
"Did you just kiss me?" she repeated.
"I did."
"Are you going to put this in your blog?"
"I thought I'd leave this out actually."
"Well now I want to be in it. What do I have to do to be in your blog?"
"Kiss me again."

And she pressed her body against mine and we made out in the middle of the party. We stopped and I said Goodbye and it was hard to watch her go because I knew she was going forever. I gave her the address of this thing before she left. So Jade, if you're reading, you made it in.

Two days later I would get my flight to San Sebastian, Spain.