My visa is ready! My visa is ready! My visa is ready!

Actually, that's a wild exaggeration. My visa renewal process has passed the first of two stages of renewal, according to the online system. Now I have to wait for a letter that tells me to go in for an appointment to get fingerprinted, to turn in photos and, of course, to pay another fee.

But this means there's a light at the end of the Spanish bureaucracy tunnel. Which is fantastic, because we've been told that this year they are taking even more time than usual to process visas so some people may never get a new card. I went on June 25th to renew it, so it has quite literally been nearly half a year. And that's not including the two to three weeks it will take for me to receive the letter, and then after that the forty or so days that I have to wait for the actual card.

But the good news is that at least until next August I won't have to go back down to lovely Aluche for any more stupid Return Authorization forms. Score!

Aluche

Today I took my annual pre-Christmas departure trip down to the Spanish immigration office (referred to ever so fondly by most of us Americans as Aluche, after the neighborhood and metro stop in which it's located) to get the accursed autorización de regreso document that permits me to leave the country and reenter while my visa is in the indeterminately lengthy renewal process.

I hate Aluche. As if it weren't enough that it's where illegal immigrants in Spain are detained (and not known for its good conditions), the place reminds me of a combination between a prison and a circus. Maybe you're laughing, but I'm dead serious. The building looks both like a creepy cinder-block building not much unlike my high school and a bizarre multicolored circus tent.

Do you think this looks like a government office?

But, alas, the greatest part about the office in Aluche is not its schizophrenic architectural styles. It happens to also be located right across from the site of an enormous prison called the Cárcel de Carabanchel. The prison was not only one of the biggest in Europe until its demolition in 2008, but it also had a pretty bad reputation - it was, after all - built by political prisoners, for political prisoners. Spain's most recent (and hopefully last) dictactor, Franciso Franco, had the prison built in the early 1940s, immediately following the Spanish Civil War. After Franco died in 1975 it was (supposedly) mainly used for regular criminals. It was finally closed in 1999, and during the next nine years the building remained abandoned and subject to graffiti and destruction.

Carabanchel Prison before its 2008 demolition.

Now all that remains of the building is the original entrance - kind of like some sort of ancient Greek or Roman arch, except creepy and Spanish. Like a disturbing ghostly metaphor for those visiting the building across the street - those living in Spain but who aren't actually residents or citizens, which the government makes pretty clear that this is not all that welcome.

Significance of leaving the prison's main entrance?

Traveling Sola

Last June I bought a plane ticket to Stockholm. I knew that I wouldn't be going home for the summer, and since many of my friends were leaving Madrid for good or for the summer months, I wanted to take advantage of all of the free time I would have (one of the advantages of being a teacher). So, on a whim and without any travel companions, I bought a ticket to Stockholm.

My first thoughts were: okay, either I'll find someone who is around and wants to go or I could meet my parents there when they came to (at the time) an undetermined European location. And, if worse came to worst, the ticket was only €68, so if I decided not to fly, no biggie.

Then I got to thinking - one of the only ways to get to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia that I was dying to visit, on a budget airline was via Stockholm. No one else I'd talked to seemed to ever have any interest in Estonia, so I might as well just do it while I had the time and the opportunity.

How can one not want to go to Tallinn after seeing this view?

So I got planning: booking flights, finding and booking hostels, researching my destinations and their surroundings, etc. (For those of you who don't know: I LOVE Excel. I wouldn't say that I excel at Excel but I certainly do excel at organizing my travel details in Excel. All of my multi-city trips have resulted in extensive, often color-coded Excel spreadsheets. It makes everything so much easier. Really, it's just common sense.) I finally wound up planning four days in Stockholm, four and a half days in Tallinn (one of which would be spent in Riga, the capital of neighboring Latvia), and nearly four days in and around Girona, a city about an hour north of Barcelona. It would total a little over 13 days of travel, 100% on my own.

Stockholm is also incredibly beautiful (and expensive....).

The closest I'd traveled alone in the past was a few flights to places alone (London, Paris), where I met people in those places, a few days in Madrid one summer when I came here to go on a dig down in Murcia, and a few hours wandering around Vienna alone when, as a group, we decided to split up. None of those actually counts. So I was nervous about the idea of traveling two weeks alone but I was also really excited about it.

Besalú, a cute little town in Catalunya (Spain).

Now for the point of this post, my experience traveling alone - I loved it. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy traveling with friends and my family (until we start arguing with each other), but traveling alone is a really great experience that I think everyone should try at some point in his or her life. It's not for everyone - but you really never know until you've done it.

Why I love traveling alone:

The main square in beautiful Riga.

1. The obvious: you can go wherever you want to go, do whatever you want to do, and spent as much (or as little) time or money doing whatever it is you want to do. Maybe this sounds ridiculous, but quite frankly, if you're spending a lot of money (or any money) and personal time to travel, you should do whatever you damn well want to do. For example, when I stayed in Tallinn I took a day trip to Riga, which was a four-hour bus ride away. Probably very few people would be willing - let alone interested - in doing a day trip within a trip that required eight plus hours of bus rides. I also tend to be the type of traveler who tries to fitasmuchinaspossible. I don't like to waste time or money, and most of the places I visit I don't have any intention of returning to in the future (the world is just too big). It's easier to cram things in (if necessary) and make fast decisions when yours is the only vote that matters.

2. You often have the opportunity to meet other travelers. This isn't to say that you can't meet and talk to other travelers when you yourself travel in a group. It's just more likely when you're alone, and staying in hostels helps a lot as well. Whether it's people you simply talk to in the hostel, or people you eat lunch with or explore the city with or go out with at night, that alone makes the trip worthwhile. I love talking to people who are equally interested in traveling or talking about where they're from or really anything - we Americans may consider our country a "melting pot," but I've met far more foreigners living and traveling here in Europe than I did even living in New York City. It's the repressed anthropologist in me - I want to learn as much as I can about other cultures.

Walking through a bog in Lahemaa National Park. NBD.

3. I, personally, tried to join in on tours that would be with other people, which turned out to be something that I wish I'd been doing all along. Many cities outside of western Europe (i.e. Spain, France, Great Britain, Germany) have organized free walking tours. Most places they occur daily, sometimes more than once per day, and you just show up and the tour goes, rain or shine, whether there are four people or forty, and it's completely free. At the end you can give a tip, since this is the only way the tour guides get paid, but you're in no way obligated to do so. The best part is that the tour guides (at least in my experience) are very good and very interested in what they're doing, even if it's just a hobby of theirs. They give you great information about the city's history and monuments but also about the hidden gems of the city. I did a tour like this in Stockholm, Tallinn, and Riga, and they were definitely worth it. I also did a day-long organized trip to Lahemaa National Park outside of Tallinn. There were seven of us plus our great tour guide, and aside from being able to see this part of the country, which I wouldn't have been able to do by myself without a car, it was nice to do it with other people.

4. Maybe it sounds cliche, but traveling alone is great thinking time. Actually, I was a little worried about traveling by myself because I get so incredibly bored with myself and my own thoughts, especially here in Madrid. I suppose had I really not interacted with other human beings (aside from saying hello; can I have a sandwich?; which way is the train station?; etc.) I would have gone crazy from too much alone time. Luckily this wasn't the case; I had just enough time to think about what I was doing, where I was, the history behind it, etc. (Not to mention I had enough time to reflect on why the heck I'm living in Spain and teaching English here. Still.) I think this also makes traveling more relaxing (because keep in mind that I'm talking about "traveling," not "going on vacation"); you have time to organize your thoughts, which I know I often have a hard to doing when I'm working.

Nothing more relaxing than this gorgeous beach town in Catalunya.

5. You're isolated from everything you know. Which is liberating. It makes things more relaxing. I've always traveled with some sort of device that uses the internet, which I'll use to check emails, let my parents know that I'm still alive, and that sort of thing. But aside from that, everything around you is new territory. The places, the people, the experience. It makes you more eager to do things, maybe even things you'd never before considered doing. (For me, having conversations with strangers. I normally hate talking to strangers. But turns out, once I actually get into a conversation with an interesting person, it's nice. I love to here travel stories - where people are from, where they're going, where they've come from, why they're there to begin with, etc.)

So there it is. Since this summer trip I also went to Switzerland in November by myself, which I also enjoyed. Like I said, company is great and I will almost never turn down a travel buddy, but I'm glad to know that I always have the option of going on my own and still enjoying it. In fact, I'm already brainstorming a good long trip through the remaining countries on my list before I leave Spain for good.

Typical Espanish

You know how there are certain words that are like nails on a chalkboard for some people? For example, if you watch "How I Met Your Mother," you know that Lily hates the word "moist." Well that's how I've come to feel about the phrase "typical Spanish." I think it's perhaps mostly because of the way it's used: in its own incomplete sentence and heavily Spanish accented. Teepeecal Espaneesh. I swear, if one more person tells me something is "teepeecal Espaneesh" one more time, I'm going to pretend that I didn't hear them.

Anyway, one evening last week I was eating a bowl of cereal (cocoa crispies, to be exact) with milk and one of my roommates asked me if I wasn't going to heat up the milk. I replied that no, I always eat cereal with cold milk. "¡Qué frío!" ("How cold!")

Now, I can't speak for all Spaniards since I've really only witnessed very few eat cereal and I haven't started a poll, but it's definitely relatively common here to pour milk on cereal, and then stick it in the microwave for a minute or two. When I lived with my señora (host mother, essentially) during my semester abroad and then my first year here this time around, she would always stick bowls of Special K cereal in the microwave and heat it until that stuff must have been soft enough to drink like a hot smoothie. 

I personally gag at the smell of hot milk (I'm not sure what would happen if forced to drink it), so the thought of heating it with cereal until the latter is a soggy smelly mass kind of makes me lose my appetite. But hey, cultural differences. Typical Espanish.