I have a lot of stories from Spain.

And here I am telling them!

I’ll be honest: had I been more on the ball while blogging in Spain, you guys would probably know most of these stories already. I’d definitely have a better sense of time.

But I want to have some kind of preservation of these memories, as well as beef up The Keene Chronicles. So here I go.

Oh, before I do, let me introduce the rest of my group. They obviously play roles in the majority of these stories.

I should also warn y’all: a lot of these stories involve alcohol. You should expect as much when you let a bunch of college students (even from a Christian college) into a country where the drinking age is 18.

Alright.

1. THE IRONY!

This happened the first week. I think we were in Granada.

The night that we were staying in Granada, our group split up in the search for food. I ended up in a restaurant with Elise, Elizabeth and Jessica. They ordered alcoholic drinks with their food, while I stuck with Coke. (After a few months there, I can attest: 90% of Coca-Cola’s stocks must come from Spain. If you could prick Spain with a needle, it would bleed Coke and Fanta.)

After they’d had a few to drink, they shifted into more personal conversations: relationships, past jobs, their relationships with their parents, and so on. Seeing as I am single, have worked the same job for the past two summers, and my relationship with my parents is fine (love ya, Mom and Dad) I stayed quiet.

Now, none of these girls are Amazons, but they all held their liquor pretty well. That being said, were we to go somewhere else, we would be walking around a busy, foreign city at night, with three of the four people in the group being not-completely-sober young women. I can put on an intimidating visage, but I doubted I could scare off every creep and pickpocket, so I decided to take the girls back to the hotel and turn in early.

I took them back to the hotel, got them into the elevator, and started the ascent to their floor.

Elise touched my arm. “We’re not trying to make you uncomfortable,” she assured me.

Blink blink.

What?

Now, you need to understand something: I don’t drink. Never have, probably never will. When I told my friends not a drop of alcohol had passed through my lips for the entirety of my time in Spain, I was met with a room full of hanging jaws. Even if I found something appealing about being drunk, I would die at the irony: the son of a man who works with addicts chugging alcohol. That being said, the fact that I go to a Christian college doesn’t mean I’ve never been around drunk people, and seen some truly mind-boggling stupidity caused by drunkenness. These girls were giggly, far from falling through any doors or screaming like they were getting murdered because they were too drunk to find their phone in their pocket.

“Elise, I [have been around drunk people–not mentioning names],” I told her. I held a hand over my head. “This is the drunk idiocy scale.” I dropped a hand down to ankle level. “You guys are like a .45.”

We reached their floor, and I motioned them down the hall. “Oh no, we’ll walk you back to your room,” Jessica said.

Blink blink.

What?

I find videos of women fighting men fascinating. Not because I find anything amusing about violence against women, but because just about every one follows the same formula: it’s always a woman who could be knocked over by a stiff breeze throwing hands with a guy 10 inches taller and 90 pounds heavier than her. Like, what do you expect, lady?

For some reason, this situation reminded me of that. Let me reiterate: the three drunk girls were trying to escort me, the one sober guy, back to his room.

“Wha–no! Come on, your room is down the hall.”

I got them in their room and bade them good night. I stood staring at their door for a few moments and came to this genius conclusion:

People are weird when they’re drunk.

2. The Great Discovery

I can say with near-certainty that this happened in Córdoba.

I’ve mentioned our tour guide, Enrique. On the one hand, he’s a super-cool guy. He has that personality type of someone who would be a dope uncle. He was funny and knowledgeable about his country’s history and a ball of energy. On the other hand, he was also taking my group on a 7-day turbo tour of southern Spain when we were still working through the jet lag. The length of the tour through Toledo also made me come close to pooping myself. (You can read a blurb about that particular experience here.)

But one thing I will be forever grateful to Enrique for: he introduced me to 100 Montaditos.

It was lunch time, and Enrique rattled off a couple of places we could go to eat. He started off by pointing directly across the street to a hole in the wall. The place’s name was 100 Montaditos, and as the name suggested, its niche was montaditos (en inglés, “small sandwich”). I was feeling a sandwich, so I walked in with Elise, Tanner and Elizabeth.

100 Montaditos is what I might call a carbine restaurant. A carbine is a short-barreled rifle, either chambered for the standard 5.56×45 mm cartridge or in a smaller caliber. It’s not as concealable as a submachine gun or pistol, but more maneuverable than a full-length rifle. The same thing can be said for a carbine restaurant: it’s not low-quality enough to be fast food, and not fancy enough to be high-class. I got my food quickly, a la a fast food restaurant. It also served fast food-y…food: French fries, pop, nachos, and cheesy bites. On the other hand, this food was waaaaaay too good to be slapped with a title as derogatory as fast food.

So anyway, I got an order slip, put down the sandwiches and drink I wanted, and handed it to the guy at the counter. When my name was called, I took my plate and started eating.

This place was amazing! I had some great food in Spain, both modern and traditional. But 100 Montaditos was my first food love. I about squealed like a little girl when in one of my explorations of Oviedo I found a 100 Montaditos.

Is it wrong that 100 Montaditos is one of the things I’m most looking forward to should I go back to Spain?

I’m going to assume the answer is no.

3. The Faux Pas to End All Faux Pas…es

As previously chronicled, that first weekend with my host parents was a rough two days. The cringiest moment came when I was done unpacking my stuff and walked into the living room, looking to talk with Elisa and José.

The living room was always dim, even with lamps on. There was a man sitting on the couch, on his phone, who I assumed was a family member I hadn’t met yet. Circe, the family dog who seriously needed to chill, started yapping.

“La perro necesita menos azúcar en su comida,” I told the man. The man laughed and nodded. I held out a hand. “Me llamo Noah.”

That’s when the man stood up and walked into the light, revealing himself as José, my host dad.

I don’t remember if I figuratively or literally facepalmed, but it was one linguistic blunder in a weekend full of them.

4. The First Day of Lit Class

Being an international student is a weird, weird thing.

While at the University of Oviedo, I was technically enrolled in three schools. I was at the University of Oviedo, obviously, taking a literature class. I was also at La Casa de las Lenguas, an international school that shared campuses with the university, but was a different entity. That’s where the bulk of my classes were. And of course, I was still a Calvin student.

The first day of lit class, I walked in with Kassidy, Tanner and Noah Shin. We stuck out like sore thumbs: Me and Shin were the only black and Asian guys in the class, Kassidy’s blonde hair might as well have been a neon sign, and while Spanish men might not be as short as stereotypes say, Tanner towered over even the tallest of our classmates. We all sat in a row at the back of the class.

Our professor walked in and began speaking Spanish. I looked down the row, and I’m sure all four of us looked like this:

We had been told that the Lit class was going to be taught in English. As much as I love books, trying to talk about themes and symbolism in Spanish for the next three months sounded like a one-way trip to an aneurysm.

Our professor had a rather odd accent. (We actually had three professors, and none of them had the typical Spanish accent, despite all of them being natives. Our main professor, Luz Mar, had gotten her degree in Ireland and picked up an Irish tinge while she was at it. Marta, who substituted for about a week while Professor Mar was on medical leave, sounded like a French expatriate in the last stages of losing her accent. And Carla, who plays a role in a future story, sounded like she was from one of the posher parts of England.) After maybe 10 minutes of speaking, Professor Mar looked back to our row and said, in that odd Spirish accent, “You do not speak Spanish, yes?”

We all nodded frantically.

She switched to English, which I think was her plan the whole time. We were on the Humanities Campus, and most of our classmates spoke very good English, albeit the Queen’s English.

But anyhow, bullet dodged.

5. Dang It, Maxwell!

If you, the reader, are from Calvin, then you probably already know this story. I’m telling it anyway.

Allow me to reintroduce Max.

Of all the people who went to Spain, he was the guy I knew best. To heavily paraphrase Captain America, “Even when I was surrounded by strangers, I had Max.”

And then everything changed when la neumonía attacked.

It started out as a cough. Me and Max met up a couple of times to wander Oviedo, and he had a bit of a cold.

Then I showed up to class one day, and Max wasn’t there. Professor Pyper told us he’d gone to the hospital, citing some kind of lung issue.

I was definitely concerned, but not surprised.

You see, alongside [having been around drunk people—still not naming names], I am also surrounded by smokers. My freshman year roommate loved him some cigars, and it was regular to be lying in bed with the lights off and hear the crackle of a vape being hit. Just about everyone in my group of friends smokes and/or vapes, Max included, and Max had been hitting the Kools spectacularly hard in the absence of a vape.

Along with Professor Pyper, I was the first person to visit him in the hospital. I walked in the room, got a good look at the oxygen tubes, and said something to the effect of, “Max, you look like crap.”

I’m joking about it now, but it was a scary time. Seemingly overnight, Max had gotten so sick that I heard whispers of whatever was wrong with him potentially being fatal. Whether the rumors were exaggerated or not, it was serious enough that Max’s parents flew over to check on him.

The test results came back, and by God, if it wasn’t a strange one.

I’m still not 100% certain on the cause, but here’s what happened to the best of my understanding.

Max told us pneumonia was the problem, and just about everyone agreed that it probably happened because of his riding the Camels. We were only half-right. Along with cigarette residue, the doctors also found vape juice. A vape (or vaporizer) vaporizes flavored liquid to produce scented steam, which is inhaled and exhaled like cigarette smoke. Apparently in all of his vaping, Max’s vape had malfunctioned, giving him a breath of juice instead of vapor and trapping the juice in his lungs. When he got pneumonia, the combination of cigarette smoke and trapped vape juice had caused a nasty reaction in his lungs, which prompted the hospital visit.

Max was discharged from the hospital soon after, with the doctor telling him that for his health’s sake, his smoking days were done. Max had the option to stay in Spain, but he ultimately decided to go home. The decision was mostly a pragmatic one: a guy who just left the hospital for lung issues is going to have a hell of a time in Spain.

Seriously, everyone smokes in Spain. I asked for a non-smoking host family on my form, and I got a needle in a haystack.

So, with Game of Thrones shot glasses and much internal crying from me, Max left in early October.

I think the wind just picked up. I don’t know where this sand that blew in my eyes came from.

That’ll conclude today’s edition of The Lost Stories of Spain. More to come, both blogs and volumes of The Lost Stories of Spain. May your vapes function properly, your host dads sit in the light, and your 100 Montaditos be delicious.