The Post-Spanish Influence on 20th Century American Twenty-Somethings.

My part this is grand adventure is already over, and with a little time to settle I've come to realize I absolutely adore Spain and the relaxing departure from my own sort of early-rise, fast-paced travel was exactly what a ten day stay called for.

Mostly I think I will remember the way streets in the Barri Gotic, where our hostel sat, are smooth-stoned and dip in the centre with the weight of feet and wheels and tiny square trucks that squeeze through the high-sided buildings at alarming speeds. The view from the balcony up the street, eyes ending at what we will imagine is a 500-year-old castle and not an amusement park trick. The fresh fruit shops overflowing with colour and the cafe con leche in white china cups. The calm, cold, aquamarine of the Mediterranean spotted with flecks of mica that make the water look streaked with gold. The warm sun without humidity, the balcony in every flat, the pleasant mornings and the late dinners and the meals always outside. Free champagne and the prettiest tequila sunrise and the clove cigarettes late at night after dinner, after cafe, with a drink in our hands.

I think I enjoyed most of all the Gaudi architecture, from the Sagrada Familia to the Park Guell to the La Pedrera. Something about the smooth organic curves and innovative colours and almost natural look, as if it could have simply sprung from the fertile Spanish soil, these buildings so new in style as to be almost sacrilegious for their time. I lament that things like the La Pedrera, designed for inhabitants, have now (and so relatively soon after their construction) been transformed into museums- that most inorganic of places where beauty is taken out of its moving context and put on static display. I wish it still held tenets even if it meant I could not see it. Then the beauty would be complete I think, to fulfill it's purpose, to function fully as an apartment. At least the Parc Guell and the Sagrada Familia (although not yet finished) still function to their meaning.

It was good to see Melina again (a friend I met while studying in Ireland who is now at the university in Barcelona.) She invited us to her childhood home in Valenica for a night and I easily fell in love with the gothic and modern ends of this small city. In a more personal way than Barcelona, Valencia is able to encompass the history and the modern with a beautiful stretch of green river-turned-park weaving like a verdant serpent through the city's layout. Here is the home of paella and orxata and the Holy Grail and one day I will return there to find oranges and more warm strolls through the river-walks. It was a city of the perfect kind of size and history.

Our other trip outside of Barcelona took me and Val to Montserrat, a Benedictine monastery settled in the hills about an hour's trainride outside of the city. I expected a historic site preserved in the tall hills, but at the top of the funicular railway sat an evidently thriving monastic community with a wealth of pilgrims flocking to touch Our Lady of Montserrat- an iconic statue in repose behind the alter. This made what I expected to be an ancient place of worship alive with parishioners and new buildings and gold-guilding over the chapel.

But we took lunch outside and then the second funicular to the top of the mountains where we wound back down among spectacular views of the valley below stretching away to what we suppose, but are not sure, was Barcelona. It was a good walk among all the Spanish scrub-brush and composite rock on the hills, formed like the large round stone pillars of a Gaudi house. I liked the quiet walking of Montserrat and the tiny wildflowers and monastery cats mewing kindly for food and the views of the spanish interior, green and lined with orchards, away from the coast and into the hills.

Back here in Maryland I am already missing the perfect weather, where the heat was bearable without humidity and the nights cool and comfortable. I think I understand a little better an expat's love for the European continent, and as we often wondered "Why did we leave for the New World?" This comfortable, historic existance is a marvel and a luxury and with the promise of abstract ideas about 'freedom' and 'justice' removed, I find Spain a small part of Europe that I would like to visit for longer.