Author’s note: WordPress, I love ya until I don’t. My final draft of this post didn’t save, which left story #4 unfinished and story #5 unwritten. My apologies; it looked finished.

Welcome back to The Lost Stories of Spain! We’re starting off a little before the youth camp and moving into October. Without further ado…

1. The Fireworks Fiasco

I don’t know a lot of things that push my buttons. It’s one of those things that I only know in the moment. One thing I do know of that drives me crazy: bad instructions. The people who constantly revise how they want me to do a task are the people who make me want to jump off a bridge.

Enter maps.me, the reason I ended up angrily eating chicken nuggets in a Spanish McDonald’s at 1 in the morning.

There was going to be some sort of fireworks show in a park. My group was talking in our group chat, giving directions. I bid my host parents hasta luego and started the trek down to San Fran Park, which is where I thought it was going to be.

It wasn’t.

Puzzled, I went back to the group chat. I got an address, Invierno Park. I typed it into maps.me.

Now to explain how this night ended with me eating in angry, I need to explain what maps.me is.

Maps.me is an app that allows for navigation without wifi. The problem with maps.me is its lack of precision. For example, it has a hard time comprehending addresses. Most of the places I found with maps.me I found by following directions to the destination street and then looking around until I found where I wanted to be.

This occasion was not one of those times.

Unbeknownst to me, I passed several future story locales as I wandered in confusion. I walked through the park next to the cachopo restaurant (see story #4) and past the club district (see story #3). The fireworks started as I was en route to wherever I was going. When I made it to a bridge going over the freeway, maps.me went kaput when I was in a roadside tunnel. As I stood in the tunnel, my confusion building into frustration, I got a text from Tanner saying the fireworks were over and they were heading to a McDonald’s down the street from San Fran Park, where I had thought we were originally going to meet.

At around 1, I walked into the McDonald’s, two hours of frustration at my wild goose chase making me look like Frank Castle about to sucker-punch his higher-up.

https://youtu.be/V8EGNISJLq0?t=16

I reached the table, slammed my hands down on it, and let out my frustrations with maps.me in a noise of frustration vaguely resembling English. Then I turned around and ordered chicken nuggets, which I then proceeded to eat while mean-mugging.

Following that night, my ire with maps.me would become something of a running joke with our group, prominent enough that Matt’s girlfriend (and former resident of my sister floor) Kali would bring it up when I asked her how things were going back at Calvin.

I miss a lot of things from Spain.

Getting around with maps.me isn’t one of them.

2. ¿Amigas?

You know that scene in every horror movie trailer? The main character looks around a corner, and nothing’s there. They relax, turn back around and get attacked.

I think a version of that happened to me, though it resulted in our group making friends and influencing people instead of dying.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned Cider Hill yet. Cider Hill was just what the name says: a hill occupied from top to bottom by sidrerías, restaurants whose selling point was alcoholic cider. We were at the top of the hill, getting ready to go our separate ways. I think I looked down to mess around with my phone. I looked up and jumped. Two girls had joined our group and were chatting away.

I got over my shock as I listened in. The girls’ names were Maddie and Meghan. They were from Virginia Tech and enrolled at La Casa de las Lenguas like we were. They had been walking around and heard our group speaking English, and had run up to us in sheer joy at there being no language barrier. (I don’t know anything about that. I totally didn’t write a blog post about how much the language barrier sucks or anything.)

Maddie and Meghan would end up being the sixth rangers of the Calvin group. They really buddied up with Kassidy and Kennedy and traveled with them a lot. They joined our Bible study, went with us to the Picos de Europas, and Meghan even photo-bombed me in the mountains.

Concluding sentence, followed by a group photo.

3. Exit Max, Enter the Clubs

Max left with a bang.

The weekend that Max was on his way back home, Kennedy’s parents were also in town, and some friends of theirs had come along for the ride. All of our groups–Max and his parents, the Genzinks and their friends, and our group–met at the top of Cider Hill.

Max and his parents turned in early in anticipation of their flight home. Our mega-group headed down to the Guinness, which, were our experience in Spain to be made into a sitcom, would be like the Central Perk in Friends or MacLaren’s Pub in How I Met Your Mother. In the hour or so that we were in Guinness, I learned several things.

First off, I learned that Kennedy has super-cool parents. I won’t legally be able to bar-hop for another year, but I would so hit a few pubs if I could get Kennedy and her parents to accompany me.

Second, there are stages to Cameron getting drunk. First comes the tipsy stage. That’s the easy part. Then comes talking about politics. Before he was a linguistics major, Cam was in the poly-sci department and is still pretty politically aware. Once he starts talking about going to CPAC or whatever, you know he’s good and drunk.Then there’s the slapping the table story time stage. This is interchangeable with stage four, talking about his family. He would start telling stories, oftentimes involving his family. Keyword being start: the alcohol in his system usually makes the story go unfinished as he messily segues into the next story. All of this while slapping the table at random intervals.

Anyhow, after some drinks and us assuring them we would see each other home safely, the Genzinks also turned in for the night. So we went clubbing.

A visual representation on how I feel about going to the club:

We bounced from club to club, waiting on the Funky Room (which was like the club) to open. I wallflowered, drinking nothing stronger than Coke and looking for a good time to make an exit.

That opportunity came as we exited the Joker a few minutes before Funky Room’s opening time. I was flipping through my ebook, contemplating whether or not I should leave. Then I looked at the gates of hell–I mean, the entrance to Funky Room–and I made my decision.

I told everybody I was done for the night, and told everyone to get home safe and unroofied, and then went home.

I think I should start making a checklist of things I don’t miss:

__ The university

__maps.me

__Clubs

3.5. __The Steakhouse Pizza

I don’t have a clue when this happened, but it’s relevant to story #4.

One night, I went to Telepizza. It’s a middle-of-the-road pizza chain–think the Spanish equivalent to Little Caesar’s.

I was there with Tanner, Elizabeth, Elise and Cameron. I ordered the Steakhouse Pizza, which was something like a meat lover’s.

The comparison I made after eating the Steakhouse was like rekindling a relationship with your ex: good for a brief moment, and then all at once, you realize how bad of an idea it was.

The first two pieces were OK. The third piece wasn’t that great. The fourth piece was terrible.

“Steakhouse pizza” is now in my personal dictionary, to define foods that are good for the first few bites, and then just become horrible.

4. The Birthday Cachopo

“What’s the significance?” you may ask.

Matt’s birthday is on October 8. I was going to Bible study that night, but Cam texted me asking if I wanted to go to a cachopo joint for Matt’s birthday. I didn’t know what a cachopo was (and in fact, I had to Google it just now), but hey, time with friends. So I agreed.

I went to Bible study, which was at Marisol’s apartment; coincidentally, on the night of the Fireworks Fiasco, had I crossed the bridge and kept walking, I would have ended up at Marisol’s apartment building. See what I mean about walking by future story locations? After Bible study, I walked straight to the cachopo restaurant.

It was Cam, Matt, myself and Jamie at the restaurant. Jamie wasn’t hungry, I ordered some dish I don’t remember, and Cam and Matt decided to split a cachopo. Whatever I ordered wasn’t a cachopo, and I dodged a bullet.

According to Wikipedia, cachopo is an Asturian dish. It’s two veal filets with cuts of ham and cheese; the whole concoction is breaded in eggs and bread crumbs, and then deep fried. On paper, it sounds amazing.

Well, remember my reaction to the steakhouse pizza? Cam and Matt gave me an idea of what I looked like as I ate the Steakhouse.

When their food arrived, they dug in. Though I don’t remember what I ordered, it was great. I finished before them, and then looked up to see their progress.

You know that look of slow realization people get on their faces when they realize they ordered something bad? Both Matt and Cam were wearing that look on their faces. Their cachopo had been made with blue cheese, which did not make for a good flavor blend. They passed it off to Jamie, who gave up the ghost after a few bites.

After paying, we walked over to Guinness, where we met up with Amy and Noah Shin. They ordered Irish car bombs, and I snapped this picture with Matt:

We ended up burning those birthday hats, because why not?

Hope you had a good birthday, Matt. Crapchopo aside.

5. ¡El osoperro!

This might have happened the same night as Matt’s birthday, or it might have been a different night, one where we had the same group minus Cam. You wait six months to write down your experiences, you pay the price.

Anyway, we walked into Guinness and then did a double take. Lounging on the floor of the joint, in between the bar and the step up to the window seats, was this absolute unit of a Golden Retriever. This yeti of a canine was flopped on the floor like a good boy version of a bear rug. While Amy and Noah Shin took pictures with it, I settled for feeding it steakhouse pizza chips we were given with our drinks. (You ate one, and it left a terrible aftertaste, so you ate more to delay the oncoming of the aftertaste.)

We saw the dog a few more times, and it was always when a particular bartender was working, so I presume the Barky Gold Giant was his.

And that will be it for today. May your cachopos not be made with blue cheese, your pizzas not be steakhouse, and your good boys be furry mountains of love. Bai.