Month: October 2007

It’s strange to be one day in one country, wake up and be in another the next day. When I open my eyes in the dark, I could be anywhere.

Ruth and I have come back to Lloret De Mar where we celebrated our honeymoon 14 years ago. When we came then, it was summer and full of sun worshippers; now it is a virtual ghost town peopled by folks looking for a cheap escape or to chase the last rays of warm sun.

At breakfast we gobbled down the usual fair in these cheap hotels – rolls, something that passes for sandwich meat, off-branded cereal that tastes like something you might feed to your pet gerbil, cheap pastries, soggy bacon, water-logged scrambled eggs and coffee that tastes like tar no matter how much sugar you add to it.

Later, we wander around the town looking for our honeymoon hotel (we would have stayed there, but even during the off-season the cost was more than we wanted to pay – money killed romance and left her broken body for the worms). The town is more alive than I thought; there are plenty of shoppers, holidaymakers and general folk wandering around the many inviting side streets – a shoppers and food lovers’ paradise. A t-shirt catches my eye that claims to sum up the Spanish sporting life:

A Spanish triathlon: drinking, eating, and fucking (little stick figures out each scenario).

Another t-shirt, one I end up buying, says:

You laugh because I’m different; I laugh because you are all the same.

We find our honeymoon hotel and touch a little history. It hasn’t changed much in 14 years; or maybe it has and only looks the same because of the fixed mental image in our minds.

We pass a church. A crowd gathers to watch a bum beat his bitch on a bench in the churchyard. The people stand and stare, watching this scene unfold before God, with bemused looks on their faces unable to act, unable to turn away. Ruth and I walk by this surreal scene; spectators of the human drama not wanting to intervene least we become participants in the drama.

Another airport. At least this time it’s for leisure. We are finally taking our belated anniversary trip, which we were both too busy to take in April.

We are flying into Barcelona. The plan is to rent a car and then drive about two hours north to Lloret De Mar, where we had our honeymoon 14 years ago. Looking out the aircraft window, I marvel at the ethereal landscape the clouds make; it’s almost as if you can step off the plane and walk for miles into the cloud mountains painted red from the sinking sun.

I read Kerouac to pass the time.

About an hour into the flight, the ride gets rocky; it feels like any moment the captain will come on the intercom and say ‘bend over and kiss your assess goodbye because this is it boys and girls.’ Thankfully he just says fasten your seatbelts, the ride is going to be rough until we get over Paris.

We arrived at our hotel after midnight. The plane was and hour late landing. The drive north took us an hour and half and the first challenge we faced was finding a place to park our little Ford in a densely packed concrete beach town because the Hotel Cleopatra apparently doesn’t have parking for its patrons. Nevermind. We drive around the endless one-way narrow streets until we find a place to park.

The night porter looks like Commander Adama from Battlestar Galactica. He is a pleasant chap – helpful – he tells us in Spanish and hand gestures how to find our room. We toss our bags on the bed and hit the hotel bar. The barmaid is Kat from Eastenders, but nowhere near as good looking as Kat, but twice as foul. We down a couple of Sangrias to wash the road from our tired bones before retiring for the night. The hotel is bare basic, but for 20 quid a night, it’ll do just fine.