barcelona alastair pearson ‘14
I have always been a firm believer in the cleansing power of a good trip abroad. Strange experiences in foreign lands help restore a necessary dose of unreality to daily life - a fantastical vitality
that is only compounded when the bizarre incident in question is the doing of one’s countrymen.
And like a traumatic accident, vacations leave a permanent imprint behind, in the ineradicable
memory of the sights, sounds, and occasionally the smells of times past that it would have been
better to forget.
Two months after I got back from Spain, I was leafing through the aisles of a grocery store when I
entered the dairy aisle. And like a slow, merciless wave of whey, the odor hit me. July. Barcelona.
The gleaming, endless corridor whose confines have etched themselves into my mind, invulnerable to all conscious attempts at amnesia.
I was crippled with fatigue, with the residue of an eight-hour flight during which I had been
relentlessly pounded by snack packets (politely and repeatedly refused) and the muffled curses of
the Bluetooth-ed entrepreneur to my left. The passengers disembarked lazily, languorously; disoriented, like me, and most of us too tired to interpret the breakneck Castilian Spanish of the crew,
we sought only the air-conditioned beds our aerial ordeal had earned us.
And as we spilled from that plane, two-hundred assorted Midwesterners thrust suddenly into a
gleaming oasis whose intensity seemed to mock the gray skies back home, two mountains loomed
in my escape path.
They lumbered - no, they oozed. Men, almost identical. Masses of flesh perched atop trunk-like
legs which, fortified by bulk as they were, seemed destined to collapse at any moment.
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