21 de Julio (A Mary Post)

Sometimes in life, on the day after you had a weird, utterly-displaced and nearly penniless experience in a foreign country, you gotta get back in the saddle. Embrace your inner Pau Gasol and rebound like a Spanish maniac. That’s what we did on Wednesday, July 21st. It had to be done.


Back-in-saddle Task 1: Run. We started the morning hoping to get in a 6.2 mile tempo run, and ended up with a dehydration-inspired 4 miler. Could this relative failure stop Mary and Kase Johnstun? Nope.

Back-in-saddle Task 2: Eat a Spanish-lunch standard. A quick jog across the street for a hearty boccadillo, croquette, and café-con-leche lunch added a little bounce to our step.

Back-in-saddle Task 3: Off-road tourism. We hit the streets again to do one of our LP Guide’s walking tours – a three-mile Modernista archeticture tour of L’Eixample, our neighborhood in Barcelona (see 2nd post for more info on this…such loveliness shouldn’t be tainted by any sort of post-displacement negativity). It felt amazing to be a tourist again…to stick nose in weathered guidebook again and get lost in the amazing and surprising of Barcelona.

Back-in-saddle Task 4: Good ol’ fashioned white-collar labor. Work for both Kase and I called our names for quite a few hours after that, and it lulled us into a nice, regular rhythm like only work can. Sometimes, it’s really comforting to answer email, solve problems, and write boring documents.

Back-in-saddle Task 5: On-road tourism. I left Kase (who’s seen enough European churches to last a lifetime) behind to check out the ancient century Born District Eglesia de Santa Maria del Mar and the equally old La Catedral. There’s something about 14th century structures, being built before the Americas were even discovered, that made me and my 21 hours of displacement seem small in comparison. And they were quiet and beautiful, and the lovely hush, low lighting, and little details were like churchy comfort food.

Back-in-saddle Task 6: Shopping. After visiting churches, I hit the shops in the Barri Gotic and Born to load up on gifts. The hunt to find the perfect item for each of our completely unique family members was putting me one step closer to complete contentment.

Back-in-saddle Task 7: Starbucks. Yes…I visited a Starbucks in Spain, where lovely coffee is even more accessible than in the Pacific Northwest. But nothing says “home” to a tourist from Tacoma like a latte and a slice of bread.

Back-in-saddle Task 8: Tapas and Gelato. This mode of eating (in San Sebastian, mobile; in Barcelona, not as mobile, but pretty fabulous) is the comforting Spanish standby – anything outside this has almost come to feel as if you’re cheating on Spain with another food genre. We feasted at the Bar del Pla in Borne on our favorites – roasted peppers, pan con tomate, blue cheese croquettes, patatas bravas, cava for me, and vino tinto for Kase.

All in all, it was more than a full day…it was a day full of our favorite Spanish things, favorite US things, favorite life things. Most of them probably seem pretty mundane and mind-numbing, but that’s exactly what we were looking for – a regular, run of the mill day for two Spanish tourists pretty comfortable with their city.