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Published: October 13th 2006
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When Ruben and Katia meet me beside the Plaza de Galicia, I’m more than a little relieved. With especially poor timing, my Spanish decides to escape me while making plans over the phone. We agree to meet at 9, though whether it’s for
cañas that night or coffees in the morning I’m not entirely sure. I’m still struggling to decide when Ruben, grinning broadly, comes up to rest a warm hand on my shoulder. “
Mucho gusto. Please to meet you,” he says, dealing out one of the few aces in his pack of English phrases.
Ruben’s another
CouchSurfing friend - one of a small family in Santiago that includes a flat-mate, Xoan, and a co-worker. He’s admitted from the start that his English is sub-par, and I’ve taken it upon myself - in a certain foolish fashion - to use these few days as a measuring stick of how far my Spanish has come. What’s quickly become apparent is that it’s still stumbling to make it out of the starting blocks. Fortunately, Katia - a transplant from Portugal not long ago - has years of that country’s fine schooling behind her. Whenever me and Ruben meet a linguistic
impasse, all it takes is a quick appeal with our plaintive eyes for the roadblock to be cleared away.
They take me on a
caña crawl of the Old Town, stopping where the tapas are especially choice. Ruben introduces me to
pimientos de padrón - a type of mild green peppers that, inexplicably, set off the occasional 12-alarm fire. Katia eats two that numb her tongue; Ruben, after eating the third, makes cartoon faces and does a little stomping dance with his feet. I luck out, avoiding the suckers altogether. If there’s no Spanish proverb regarding the heaps of good fortune soon coming my way, I’d like to kindly request that we all put our heads together to make up one of our own.
Because of its university, Santiago is a busy, boisterous city. By midnight the bars are beginning to fill, and there are packs of students sitting in circles in the street, passing around bottles and plastic cups. We barely get past the door in some bars; in others, we never even make it that far. Xoan and Manel - Ruben’s flatmates - meet us at a manic club where things are constantly breaking.
We take our drinks outside and then, deciding to move on, take them to the next bar with us. On the streets, where cars are largely banned, you hear ghostly echoes of laughter - the drunken cries caroming high off the medieval walls.
We push our way into a busy club that has a half-hearted anarchist air to it. Guys with upturned collars drink beneath posters of Castro and Che Guevara, and hammers and sickles are as abundant as Lacoste gators. A Basque flag flaps listlessly over the dance floor. In a smoky basement, Galician folk music is blaring over the speakers, and young
gallegos are unironically kicking up their heels and singing along to tunes that, Ruben assures me, are sadly beyond his skills to translate. It is, in short, a Galician hoe-down. Ruben hops and pumps his fist on the dance floor, then we all whirl each other around in circles, linking arms. A pack of plump, giggling girls are bobbing along beside us. Their tank-tops do an admirable job of pushing their breasts up toward their chins, and Ruben is shooting me elaborate eye signals that, I think, suggest something along the lines of “Tonight,
my friend, will be a night to remember.”
He’s been on the prowl from the start. It’s curious to see him at work, careening wildly between crippling shyness and Looney-Tunes mania. At times he’ll circle around a girl with predatory intent, grinning devilishly, before slinking back to us with his hands in his pocket. By the bathroom we get cornered by a young student from A Coruña - a pretty, swaying brunette who speaks capable English. We talk about Santiago and New York; she tells me she wants to move to London after university to put her psychology degree to the test. Ruben casually leans in to make small-talk, but when she finds out that he’s a native Galician as well, she smiles politely, nods her head, and then asks me how long I’ll be in Spain.
Outside Ruben’s attuned to the possibilities of the English gambit. He wants me to play the aw-shucks tourist card, asking me - in Spanish - to strike up conversations - in English - with girls who, themselves, only speak Spanish. It’s a bit too late in the night to get anywhere with all of that. On the way home,
Xoan takes a call from a bubbly, desperate co-worker. He passes her off to Ruben, and the two quickly hit it off. Though I can’t make out more than every third word he says, it’s clear that his charms have found their outlet. When we get home the two of them are still exchanging text messages, and Ruben’s making mischievous eyes while we cook up a pot of spaghetti.
When I call him at work the next day he’s in high spirits: he’s made a date with the girl. “
Tengo una chica,” he says. “Woo hooo!” I can picture him pumping his fist and making little toot-toot noises around the office. We cancel our plans for a fancy dinner in town, and when I get back to the flat, he’s dabbing on cologne and patting lightly at his hair. Xoan and his girlfriend - leaving for Vigo in the morning - are off to bed before 11. Katia, yawning and doing her nails on the couch, decides to take one for the team and join me in town for a few drinks.
After a few days of tripping through Santiago with my head in the clouds,
world-weary Katia is like a jolt of arsenic. Bless her heart. With three years in the city behind her, she’s itching to move on. Enough of these pilgrims with their cherubic smiles, enough of the drunken students pissing on the sides of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. She’s infected with the dual-malaise of life in a tourist
and college town. People come and go, they buy t-shirts and tacky
recuerdos, they snap awkward pictures on the steps of the cathedral and eat in the same overpriced restaurants.
This last one strikes a chord. Katia gets animated talking about Franco, the main restaurant drag in the Old Town. “Everyone goes to the same four places,” she says. “They pay too much for bad food. You can go like two blocks away and get better food for like half the price.”
She’s getting awfully aggressive with me, and there seems to be an implicit understanding that I’m somehow to blame. I take the bait, pointing out that some of the places serve up superlative tapas, and that, besides, the difference between a cheap
pincho and a pricey one is a difference of 20 or 30 cents. Admittedly, I’m being
a real dick about it. But it feels like something important is at stake here - at root I’m a tourist, after all - and when we pop into some little hole-in-the-wall later for a cheap
bocadillo, there’s some vindication in the fact that I’ve had much better on Franco.
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