spain | existabovethenoise

I am tired. I am tired of hotel lobbies. I am tired of wake up calls from hotel lobbies. I am tired of people offering to take my bags to and from hotel lobbies. I am tired of guidebooks on the front desks of hotel lobbies. I am tired of the insinuation that I should see something outside of the hotel lobby. I am tired of being a tourist.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining. Please don’t confuse my fatigue for blame against this lovely town or country. I remember having this same feeling when I lived in Spain. Around month seven I was pretty sure that I had seen every Catholic church in the entire north east. And I was also sure that if I saw one more rendition of Mary and baby Jesus, I would jump off the rock of Gibraltar. These days it’s not the Holy Trinity that makes me want to drown in the Indian Sea. It’s forts and palaces.

But, I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until I arrived in Hyderabad and decided that I didn’t want to see anything. I didn’t leave the hotel all week, actually. My friends chided me for not being more motivated. They wanted to take me out, but chose the inopportune time of 4pm during an Indian summer. So, we all quickly undecided and postponed for cooler times to come – neveruary.

I don’t know how to break the rut of tourist fatigue. I don’t think there’s a way, exactly, except to just give in and be exhausted. Forgive yourself just this one time. Know that the city won’t collapse around you just because you didn’t see the Mecca Masjid. You’re not a bad person because you came to town and didn’t see the Golconda Fort or the Falaknuma Palace. Being a tourist is supposed to be enjoyable. When it stops being fun, you should stop yourself from faking like it is. Here are the top five things I do when I have stopped being a tourist. Maybe you frequent fliers will recognize this in yourselves and prevent the guilt from hitting you like a ton of Fodor’s guides. Just open up a Lonely Planet book on the plane ride back, read about it, and say you did it.

This is how I know it’s bad…

1- I swing by the grocery store on my way to the hotel. Straight from the airport, I have the car drop by a grocery store along the way, so I don’t have to ever leave the hotel once I check in. I don’t pretend like I want to try the newest restaurants reviewed by Food & Wine magazine. I really just want to eat cereal out of the mugs they left in the room for self-brewed coffee. I don’t kid myself.

2 – Download free episodes from itunes. A girl can’t live on BBC World News and CBeebies alone. I load up on all the free episodes that itunes is giving away. If they’re giving, I’m taking. And I watch with reckless abandon.

3- Always keep the door on DO NOT DISTURB. Always. Do you hear me? Always…except when they catch me in the hallway and ask if I’ve run out of potable drinking water. Then, and only then, do I consider taking off the prohibitive sign. But even then, I think long and hard.

4- Tip well. When I’m not planning to spend much time in the hotel, then screw ’em. I’m not making that much trouble anyway. I’m out being a tourist! But, when I plan to stay camped out in my hotel room, wrapped in the hotel bath robe, using up all the shower gel and asking for boutique pillows at odd times of night – I tip well. We’re going to be seeing an awful lot of each other. And I don’t want them to steal my stuff or spit in my food.

5. Carry lots of books. I know I sound like a dinosaur for saying that I read books at all, but some of us actually enjoy paper. You people with thick corneas can perhaps handle all that backlight. I digress. On this last trip, I brought one self help book, one book of short stories, one novel, and two autobiographies. Two books, I had already read before I arrived, but I needed to write an article about them while on the road – done by day three of week one. In that same one week, I read two of the other books and kinda gave up on the last one. I’ll get to “Dreams of my Father” one day, but on this trip it too was fatigue enhancing.

My traveling friend, don’t be bullied into being the good tourist. You don’t owe any city the effort needed to get over your malaise. It can certainly be inconveniently timed, but being tired on the road isn’t an indication that you must fight through it. Just like when you’re at home, sometimes fatigue is a good indication that you should rest and be still.

May the power of the do not disturb sign be with you.

I must admit a very serious truth that may in fact dismantle the superheroinism that shrouds me in the blogosphere (and not so much in reality). As the frequent traveler with miles out the wazoo, and travel tips hasta las narices, I have a tendency to appear unfazed by the temporal changes and competing commitments of global travel. And the vast majority of the time, things are precisely as they appear, save one very understated exception. When traveling to and from home, I get deathly ill. Not kinda sick, not borderline unwell, I mean “wow, I think I’m going to die on the floor of my bathroom, never have kids, leave my mother to pay my debts, the dog will die of sadness and never bark for help (cuz’ he’s a mystery that way), oh is that ‘tuberculosis or the black plague’ I feel welling upside my lungs, a disaster on the borderline of deceased” debilitated and impaired.

This has happened to me for as long as I can recall. And I genuinely believe that about 5 years ago, I subconsciously began to orchestrate the type of illness I hoped to suffer. There were the times when I just needed my immune system to collapse so that I wouldn’t have to endure some overblown event a friend had planned for the day I returned. There were the headaches, whose throbbing I could feel in my throat, which meant that I would surely have to sleep in the next day – prohibiting any form of work for an additional 24 hours, at least. But each time, my conscious self was always shocked and surprised by the fact that I was (again) sick and so devastatingly so. I’m not sure if these illnesses were just excuses for avoidance or delay on the other end, or if it’s been to up the ante since just boarding a plane is now as mundane as stepping onto a public bus, but I think it has come to mean a crossing of a threshold. It has meant my exerting effort; I don’t just hop on a plane, I must traverse that unforeseen space between life and death, called insert acute concocted illness name here, to decide that YES, I really want to leave/go home.

Going to/ From home is not just another trip. It’s not simply hailing a taxi in New York to catch a show that I’ll miss if I take the subway. It’s a choice. There’s a wide world out there, after all, and maybe I should reconsider going back to some place I’ve already been. And, hey, if I miss that flight who could blame me – dude, I’m coughing up a lung through my earlobes. If I do make it home, well, shouldn’t somebody take good care of me and give me attention? After all, I’m as sick an abused dog in a country of drought. And, of course, why leave the comforts of home for some wretched land of mysteries and unforeseen problems? Shouldn’t I really take another day, maybe that’ll allow the antibiotics to soak in, see if I can get my flight changed for a later time or not at all, since I don’t really feel well?

See, I’m crazy! There! I freak out, subconsciously, even when boarding planes regulated by airlines that always mess up my vegetarian meal and seat me in the middle and oblige me to carry only one checked bag. But, I’m only human in the face of home… for the rest of the world, I’m pretty dagnabbit robotic.

Imagine the world of wonder that opened to me when I got my version of whooping cough before embarking on this trip to Spain. What a wonderful surprise! After all, I haven’t considered Spain home in about a decade and the last time I was here I was certainly here for vacation, but this trip… thanks to my near death experience… reminded me that I was in fact reuniting with a place I’d called home. And why not? After all I had spent a very formative year here. Well not, here here, like Madrid, but here like Spain. And it was spent with my mama, not my mom, but my mama Espanola. So, surely, coming back to Spain to stay in the house of my Spanish host mom – even though it’s not the same house – was so much like coming home that the requisite bodily rejection was subconsciously elicited, like a charm. How friggin’ cool?!

So cool that I certainly missed an entire day of site seeing while hocking up loogies in my sleep, which lasted from siesta time ’til 7 in the morning the following day. And while I’m walking now by the grace of God and the act of good judgment that permits double fisting advil and paracetemol, asi es la vida!

I remember la Plaza del Sol, and the Caixas with their art exhibitions (I never understood how a bank would double as an art space or as an exhibitor (are they investing people’s money in fine arts dealing?), but…hey, it works). And the Prado and the Reina Sofia, I remember you too. It’s been so long, but you’ve changed so little. So much that could be forgotten in a decade, and yet what’s important remains like the coating on a non-stick pan. The night is young, my ears have stopped popping, and I think my eye will stop twitching after I take a short nap. After a home cooked meal, I feel better already. Even my mother (the real one) would appreciate that at this very moment someone is whistling “These are a few of my favorite things” in the open courtyard below my room.

Let’s just say, being at home is a lot like riding a bike – you never forget – or else you’ll bust your arse and surely the self-inflicted, highly avoidable pain will serve as a reminder not to forget the next go round.