Pain is in the word Spain

So as you may have read I was out flying for just under 2 weeks. I am not a big fan of being gone that long, but it was rewarding... sort of... I flew my week of Toledo, OH-Dallas-Houston-Phoenix-LA-etc. I was supposed to come home on my 7th day as usual, but a trip from Houston to Valencia, Spain to Mauritius Island (off the Southeast coast of Africa) came available. So I signed up for the first part, Houston to Valencia with a 2 day layover in Spain.

For a pilot, it was my first time to fly across the North Atlantic, kind of a big deal for me. We left Houston and went non-stop to Valencia. It was a 10 hr flight in which we consumed 110,000lbs of gas (about 16,600gallons.) So after we parked, I stepped into Europe for the first time ever. I would like to do a top 10 list, but I will just go point by point. Some good, some bad, some never again.

-They are all about conservation. Most autos are compact cars with diesel engines. Their lights do not have bulbs with filaments, everything is halogen. There are two buttons over the toilet (p.s. in America we have thrones, in Spain it is merely an uncomfortable place to do your business and leave.) At fist glance both buttons seemed to serve the same purpose.. ahh but not so. The little button was for little flushes, the big button was for big flushes. The other thing was the different lighting procedures. We are accustomed to opening the hotel door reaching for the nearest switch then bam, light! First, I was in the dark (it was 4AM) I discovered the switch was a button, so no "flipping" was to occur. Ah but you see the button did not yield me light either. I fumbled through the dark room and found about 5 of these buttons that didn't give me even one candles worth of light. I was about to make an American fool of myself by going back to the front desk to proclaim the power was out in my room. As I was starting to fumble back to the door I noticed there was a little slot in the wall just inside of the door. I slid my key in and bam the room lit up like the sun. That way when you try and leave with the room with TV blaring and lights on, no sir not in this hotel, it all turns off when you take the key.

-The Spanish lifestyle. Well I thought that Lindsey liked to sleep alot... maybe she is part Spanish? On Saturday I got up at 12 in the afternoon and was very hungry. Time to explore and find food. This experiment taught me that 2/3 of the shops and stuff do not open at all on the weekend. The 1/3 that do open, they open when they want to and close when they want to. Lunch is a late afternoon activity 1:30-3:30 pm and dinner is 8-11ish you have to put "-ish" in there b/c the hours of operation they post are merely an idea of what they may do if they feel like it. After almost 2 hrs of wandering I found an open eatery. I figured someone would probably speak English and if not I could just point and motion until I got something to eat. At first I felt very uncultured and helpless as I couldn't communicate. It went from bad to worse. I was saying "habla no Espanol, no comprende" and just pointing at a pic on the menu. The person is just looking right at me spewing Spanish like an auctioneer. He leaves and gets someone else who just starts talking slower and louder in Spanish. It was funny, but not funny since I was starving and couldn't tell them anything. In actuality, they are not very keen on Americans. Many do know how to speak English and will only do so after you try fumbling with Spanish for a while. So I went back to the hotel, knowing that they spoke English at the hotel and went to the restaurant. I tried ordering and he tells me the cook stopped cooking. Just understand it is different over there, time is different. So I went back to a gas station I walked by earlier and got some snacks to tide me over until dinner.

-Cleanliness is not an issue. The street had trash everywhere, especially near the Mediterranean beaches. It was just gross. The filth was cans, trash that appeared to be heaved out of the windows above, and dog poop. The filth was everywhere. Chicago still gets my award for cleanest big city.

-The beach. The Med is supposed to be the garden-spot playground of Spain. We were about a 1.5 mile walk from hotel to beach. So after I stepped over all the trash getting there I was not surprised that there was not much to see at the beach. The beach was huge! It was at least 100yards wide and went as far as the eye could see. Its just that as far as the eye could see were all these slummy looking apartment buildings. I would compare the appearance to what we refer to as "the projects" in the states. There was one nice hotel and about 4 or 5 shops. People were showing up in droves, they are real sun-worshippers.

-After all the huff about when to eat, how to communicate, and the major taste differences I had to figure out something. I ended up finding a convenience store. I bought hot dog buns, a pack of ham, and Spanish Chips. That is all I ate for every meal until we left.

-The world view. Clearly the Spanish are not friendly of other races. The way they treated the few black people I saw was crazy. Actually that also applied to us. Besides the stuff they are being pumped about the Imperialistic intentions of the US on TV, they looked at us as work stealers. So when we were trying to leave the country they were anything but helpful. Cabs wouldn't pick us up to start with. Then we finally got to the airport to watch them drag their feet as we tried to hurry up start our long flight home (we had to stop in Gander, Newfoundland... cool place! on our way back to Houston.) Then we couldn't get clearance to leave and basically they were just not wanting it to go smooth so the French company that hired us would use a Spanish company next time so things would go smoother in the future.

-The last observation is PG-13 rated so you may want to just quit reading now. At precisely midnight all of the phone commercials start running on TV. They are just like the phone-a-friend late night commercials are here in the states except there must be no standards after midnight for what the can put on TV. I think that was the programming after midnight continuous nasty commercials. So I was limited to watching Bloomberg International or CNN International (which is basically political porn, not news, and 24hr a day USA/America bashing.) Now I understand why they do not like us and I couldn't order food at lunch earlier in the day.

In summary, I will not be going back to Valencia for a visit. I still want to get to some other places in Europe and the Middle East. We have some cities we fly to regularly that are supposed to be awesome. So until then...
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