Ready. Take a deep breath. No a deep breath, go on… suck in that fresh, relaxing air. You will literally be a changed person…. In SPAIN! I loved everything Spanish, in fact Spain quickly became my favourite country (so far). I believe this has a lot to do with the culture (which I’ll get to) but also it stems from having been on the road for 4.5 months and slowly realizing where I fit into this travel game. And it is a game. The budgets, itineraries, to plan or not to plan, socializing, to be a tourist or not to be a tourist, restaurant with local cuisine or cheapie take out or grocery store.
If you’ve traveled you may understand what I mean. But you may not. Traveling is a DEEPLY personal experience. Even Ken and I have vastly different ideas about how it should be done and if there is one thing that will be strong in our marriage, it will be our ability to compromise, because we’ve already had a lot of practice- ok, he has had a lot of practice (kidding!). One of the deepest revelations I’ve had about traveling is to NOT LET ANYONE dictate your experience. And they will try. Ken and I got scoffed at a lot about some of our choices. I had an entire argument with a man about how I was not a real traveler because I was doing it without a sleeping bag. Well guess what buddy, at the time of this reflection I’ve been to 12 countries over 7months, most of which I stayed with locals visited 3 or more cities in each. So I guess that I would be defined as a... yup I thought you might say traveler.
Ken and I needed this phase in our lives for very different reasons and we’ve had very different opinions about what may happen/ has happened to us out here. I know I was expecting to change and I had some ideas of the things that I wanted to change about myself; but you can’t force these things. You can try. Believe me I’ve tried. I would just like to state for the record that I don’t believe you need to travel around the world in an escapist type philosophy to compel change, what I realized somewhere in Spain is that you need to allow yourself freedom and time. I think the reason so many people find change within themselves through travel is that they have so much time, and almost daily you are introducing yourself to someone new where you realize you have the freedom to be whoever you want to be. You stop forcing things, because who are you forcing them for? Nobody knows you. You are, as the name of the blog so prophetically calls out, Brand New.
So we arrive in Malaga after a really long day of travel which involved a bus, a boat, another bus, a long walk, a city bus, a cab, one hostel with no vacancies and one with 2 beds (finally!) in different rooms. The first day in Spain might sound like a complete bust to most of you but in fact it was such a great adventure. I’m not perfect in situations like this, but just like the epic train trip from a few posts back, I kept my cool (ok admittedly alcohol can play a vital role in situation like this but I’m 26 and traveling around Europe so, lay off!) I just let the world roll by with an audio recording of Little Women, some Duty Free Vodka, a bag o’ potato chips and the love of my life by the next day.
We woke up the next day… (Ken knocking on my door bright and early) feeling really refreshed. We decided we needed a place where we could stay put for awhile and just let things happen so we booked ourselves into a really cool beach side hostel for 4 nights and went for a nice long walk along the beach. Ken and I LOVE long walks and talks. We can talk about anything. And we both have the habit of finding the answers to questions while talking them out. I think that first day in Malaga was full of deep, deep contemplative breaths and an exhaustion so deep my defenses gave in and I finally started to just shrug. (Shrug is a metaphor I use to describe the feeling of deep indifference that comes when you know that whatever is decided, you’ll be happy to just go with it). All of a sudden people were really interested in talking to us, we met tons and tons of interesting travelers we had people to join us for various sight seeing opportunities. Ken and I settled into a rhythm. A rhythm which I think is actually changing my life. One hilarious example of this was our adventure attempting to go to a night club in Malaga. Apparently Malaga has an EXTREMELY posh night club style and the group we were with, a group of rugged travelers in trainers, jeans and maybe a swipe of mascara were not exactly confident in passing dress code rules. But we trekked downtown anyway hoping for a dj who would at least make us laugh. What we got was 19 year old bimbos lying around on the sidewalk puking, and clubs which hadn’t opened their doors yet (I did eventually get used to this, but in Spain bars close around 12 or 1 and clubs open their doors around then. Things don’t get going until 3am or so.) So where did we end up? At a kebab shop eating olives and hummous and drinking cheap draft. And you know what? I just shrugged.
