salad days

I don’t know what the recommended RDI for olive oil is, but I’ve surely passed my monthly quota in 3 days as I’ve just returned from an adventure in the capriciously priced universe known as budget holiday flights in Europe (incrementally increasing costs and unexpected additional transport planning to be revealed at the next step – click accept to continue).

During my final years of study at uni a couple of years ago, one of my many part time jobs was in a library. I remember coming across a big blue book on Gaudi, who’d I’d never heard of before, and at once I developed an intense interest in organic architecture and a strong compulsion to visit Barcelona. I’ve had a hankering to go there ever since (side note, did you know Gaudi was killed after being hit by a tramway – and that was back when they hardly existed, how unlucky is that? And yet, for some reason I still didn’t bother with travel insurance). I couldn’t help thinking back to that moment, when my impulses demanded I see these buildings someday, as I wandered round the sights of this city. The sun was shining, the olive oil was flowing, I joyfully mangled the smattering of Spanish I thought I knew and the city seemed to be in the grip of a full blown street performer statue epidemic.

Well, essentially monuments were explored, sites were visited, garbled Spanish was attempted and I sucked it up and played tourist for a couple of days, abandoning all self-delusion that I was a traveller, pounding the pavements of the earth with my beat up sneakers, sleeping on buses, wearing my cruddiest clothes, not following my map, writing in a moleskine journal in some existentially cool cafe, not wearing my watch, not photographing everything in my path…Nup, I was a bona fide unapologetic sellout. And so, I forget pretty much everything I learned in that 16 week Spanish course, apart from how to say hello and order coffee. But at least I got to Spain. Forgot my bloody sunglasses though.