T4Travel.
where in the world are the girls going?
a story by Elyah Benson.
“Hola pasajeros. Bienvenidos a Barcelona.”
After an 8 hour flight that breezed by thanks to the mimosa-induced coma we put ourselves in, Emily, Jojo, and I finally landed in Spain. Emily planned the trip to celebrate her 28th birthday and despite only working with her for about a year, I figured it was a great excuse to scratch the itch for international fun. Her and Jojo had been friends for nearly a decade so I certainly was the wild card but in the days leading up to the trip it was like I had been with them from the very beginning. We shared pictures of our outfits in a group chat and got our nails done the day before at Emily’s usual studio in East New York.
“Your dress is tucked into your underwear,” the lady behind me whispered as we grabbed our carry-ons from the overhead bins. Emily let out a deafening cackle. Jojo helped me as I failed to pick the fabric from between my cheeks. The disembarkment from row 28 took longer than we had hoped but who cared? We were in Europe!
Luckily, our journey through customs went by in a flash thanks to our US passports. Usually travelers spend much more time waiting to see one of the several monotoned uniformed officers than any other leg of the airport but we proved to be the exception. Despite Emily’s fluent Peruvian Spanish, she had a very difficult time understanding most of the signs and directions from the neon-vested Catalan employees. Given this was the first trip I was on without parental supervision, I was clueless. Jojo was fluent in French, which would have helped if we had landed a few hundred kilometers north, but alas we were helpless.
Finally after scouring nearly every corner of the impressive Josep Tarradellas Airport, we found the escalator that would bring us down to the line to wait for taxis, which moved hastily thanks to a worker who had the chutzpah of a high ranking military general.
“Cuantos?” the man barked at our small group.
Luckily the word for “how many” in Catalan was the same in Peruvian Spanish.
“Tres,” Emily replied with a smile. The man pointed us to the next available taxi and the tres of us crawled into the backseat while the polite driver piled up our luggage in the trunk. We pulled off and started our journey toward the city center where our Airbnb awaited.
“Please buckle up,” the driver ordered.
“Oh, of course. Sorry. We’re used to the drivers in New York who wouldn’t care if you hung yourselves out the windows as long as you tipped generously.”
“Well, you’re not in New York anymore,” the driver said with an eye roll.
And New York it sure wasn’t. The city was breathtakingly gorgeous and extremely clean. The old world architecture and lack of pollution made for an amazing view no matter which side of the car you looked out of. And there were palm trees! In the city!
The man dropped us off at our apartment but we had a couple hours to kill before check-in so we lugged our bags into the first air-conditioned restaurant we could find and ordered generously. I’m not much of a coffee drinker but the European air persuaded me to order an espresso that I sipped through painfully before asking our waiter for a Redbull.
The snails that Emily ordered arrived first. They were served with a green herbed sauce and tiny forks to scoop the tiny bits of meat delicately from the shells. I dressed one up and placed it in my mouth before spitting it back out into a napkin politely. “Not for me,” I told the girls.
Stuffed, and needing to stretch our legs, we paid our bill and headed out into the August heat. We knew we were close to La Sagrada Familia but our American phones had yet to find service so we walked aimlessly, sweating profusely and slightly annoyed that we hadn’t planned our arrival with more care.
“¿Dónde está el parque?” I asked a man passing us on the street.
“Que parque?” the man responded.
Duolingo hadn’t prepared me for follow up questions. Emily pointed and laughed as I choked desperately trying to find the words to say, “Whichever park is closest.”
Luckily we had been walking in the right direction and found ourselves in the park directly across from the front of La Segrada Familia. Jetlagged and nearly heat-stricken we laid in the grass and stared up at the towering church. Just as I was getting comfortable, Jojo gasped as though a cockroach had landed on her face.
“What?!” Emily and I panicked.
“I don’t have my passport,” Jojo cried.
“What do you mean you don’t have your passport?” Emily sternly prodded.
“It’s not in my pocket. It must’ve fallen out.”
Just to cover our bases, the three of us emptied our bags to make sure it hadn’t magically appeared under the endless outfits we carefully packed the day before. Nothing.
So back to the restaurant we went, Jojo ahead of us several paces, mucked with sweat not only from the heat but also from the idea of needing to spend a day in the US embassy, a leg of our trip we definitely did not plan for.
As we rounded the corner back to the snails and bitter espresso, our waiter noticed us and threw his arms up in relief.
“Necesitas esto?” he said with a grin, holding her passport out proudly.
She certainly did necesita esto.
As we thanked the waiter and headed for our Airbnb which was now ready for us, I asked myself for the first time, “Do I really know the girls I had traveled 6000 kilometers, over an ocean with?”
The next few days were spent roaming the city with wide eyes. Entire neighborhoods were blocked off purely for pedestrians and there were plenty of shaded spots to sit without needing to buy something. To a group of New Yorkers, it was a huge culture shock but it made for an even more exciting time exploring the gorgeous city. We got guest passes to the closest weed club and stocked up handsomely for the rest of our stay. We got high and went to Camp Nou. We got high and went to Mercat dels Encants. We got high and went to Nobu (where we got a generous discount thanks to Jojo being an employee at their NYC location.)
Before long it was the weekend which meant it was time to dance. We had received a couple suggestions from friends who had traveled the area before and we began with Razzmatazz, a huge building that houses five separate clubs in one. While we had an especially good time in their techno and karaoke rooms, we left after a couple hours as the crowd was quite young and the vibes were slightly lackluster. We boarded a second taxi to take us to Opium, another club located directly on the beach and charged a 35 euro cover, which to our surprise included a free beverage (though at this point in the evening that was the last thing we needed.) We headed to the bar to claim our complimentary drinks then added on a few more rounds of shots.
The liquid courage certainly worked its magic as Emily, Jojo, and I quickly found a group of European cuties to serve as our arm candy for the evening. My boyfriend of the night was a lanky French nerd with a skinny mustache and the eagerness of a jackrabbit. It only took us a few minutes of making out to get the hint that our inhibitions were low enough that we would fuck right there in front of everyone so we quickly made moves to head back to our Airbnb before we ended up in a Spanish jail cell. Jojo had stuck right by us with her man so we rounded her up and searched around the club for Emily. After a few laps around the bar and patio areas with no luck, we checked our Find My Friends to realize our friend was miles (or kilometers, rather) away.
After about an hour’s worth of unanswered phone calls, Emily finally picked up and drunkenly told us that she was safe with her boyfriend of the night and that we should leave her alone. We attempted to plead with her to meet us back at our apartment as she had the only key, but to no avail. She hung up on us and ignored the rest of our calls. As Jojo and I tried to figure out what to do, my Frenchman lingered politely.
“You don’t have to stay with us. We don’t really know where we’re going to stay tonight if our friend doesn’t come back,” I told him.
“Well, I lost my phone and don’t know where my Airbnb even is so I’m in this for the long haul,” he responded.
I kissed him and went back to Jojo to make a game plan. At almost 5 AM we figured that finding other accommodations would be futile, so we decided to go back to the apartment building to hopefully finagle our way back inside. The Frenchman and I made out the entire ride back as Jojo took one for the team and stared out the window awkwardly. By the time we got back to the Airbnb the sun was coming up so we accepted our fate of ending up homeless for a couple hours before Emily hopefully returned.
My boyfriend and I made out against the front door of our building until I heard a loud cackle and the slamming of a car door. I broke away from my Frenchman’s mustached lips and watched Emily stumble over.
“Looks like you had a good night,” she said slyly.
“It would’ve been an even better night if I could have gotten to my bed to suck some French dick!” I screamed.
We argued up the narrow stairs and into the apartment as my arm candy giggled behind me.
“You really can’t understand how rude it is to leave us high and dry in a foreign country while you hang with some random man?!” I spat.
“You guys just don’t want me to have fun!”
“Riiiight, that’s it. We flew halfway across the globe to make sure you don’t have any fun. You know what? We’ll deal with this tomorrow. Right now I have some fat French dick to suck!”
“Have fun with that!” she screamed.
“I will!”
And have fun I did. That night, as I was gagging on my mustached boyfriend, I realized a very valuable lesson that I still hold with me to this day: Never travel with someone who will put any amount of time in between you and some French dick.