Late for Supper

Captain's bLog: 19 weeks.

Remember how your Grandma used to say things like, 'Oh I just cannot get over...' and the thing she couldn't get over was something you felt she should definitely get over (and probably also stop talking about, like, forever)? Well, now pretend I'm your Grandma, and the things I just cannot get over are things like how people eat supper at 10pm in Spain. Seriously - I can't get over it. Restaurants don't even open until 8:30pm, and if you are there smooshing your sad, hungry little street urchin face against the glass at 8:29pm it is an obvious sign that you're a tourist. First of all, only tourists get hungry for supper at such an unreasonably early hour, and secondly, definitely only tourists would expect the place to open at the actual time the signage indicated it would. Silly tourists, with their quaint notions about time!

So if supper is at 10pm - way after Grandma's usual bedtime - then when the heck is bedtime? The answer is that I'm not entirely sure people sleep here. Nightclubs close down at 7am, yet school and work days seem to start at comparable times to back home. I understand that the schoolchildren and nightclub-goer populations are unlikely to overlap substantially, but since everyone eats supper so damn late the overall effect is one of no one ever sleeping. There was a drunk dude on the street outside our window the other day bellowing "Puta! Puta!" and rubbing his dick on a taxi window - at 7:30am. I don't know what your youth was like, but that seems distinctly more of a 2:30am activity to me - days just seem to blend together differently here. We sipped our morning coffee and thought to ourselves grandmotherly things like, If only that poor young fellow had eaten supper earlier.

It also occurred to me that this would have been a much different trip for me at 21-and-single than it is at 41-with-family-in-tow, and it surely would be different again at 61-and-who-knows. More tripping at both ends of the scale - ha! Taxi-dick guy reminded me that I'm not experiencing the (apparently) wild Spanish nightlife, but on the other hand, in my recollection the wild night life was overrated sometimes - pretty sure I've been in that escape taxi enough for one life. And maybe I'm spending more time lesson planning and cooking supper (at a stolid North American hour) than one might envision for a dream trip, but I've also never felt closer with DH and Small Fry, and we will always have this incredible shared experience on file. In short, it would certainly have been a different trip, but I can't imagine it being any more perfect, and I certainly would have experienced different stuff, yet I don't feel as if I've missed out on a single thing.

Basically, I just cannot get over how splendid it's been. And I hope to never get over it.