Christiane's Clamor's: THE BERDAN FAMILY IN SPAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you couldn’t tell by the ridiculous amount of exclamation points after this particular title, this blog is going to be filled with a ton of positivity and happiness through our adventures here in Spain!

I thought that Monday would never come, yet there I was sitting on the bus to the airport! It seemed like this was something I had been looking forward to for months, seemed so far away, yet all of sudden it was here. While sitting on the bus, I felt like a kid who’d just had a giant pixie or something with a ton of sugar because I couldn’t sit still—the excitement was just too much to contain. After the 40ish minute bus ride, I quickly proceeded to the area near the baggage claim. The grease board said that my family’s flight was on time which meant that I would be seeing their faces and hugging them tightly in a mere 10 minutes! I think those were the longest 10 minutes of my life, and I got especially when the announcer came over the PA saying that their flight had landed and they were coming off the plane. Ahh! As silly as this sounds, I actually did check my pulse and it was quite elevated. Flyers have to pass through a hallway and gate of sorts before entering the actual airport and those already in the airport can only see the shoes of those coming in. So I was frantically looking for any shoes that my family members might have worn for the flight. After what seemed like hundreds of pairs of shoes, I finally spotted my brother’s blue Mizuno’s from track and just about levitated right there. As soon as I saw his face, I did a dead sprint towards him and jumped at him to give him a hug. My Mom and Dad followed. All of a sudden, I heard this other voice say, “Oh hey!” I turned around, and saw my sister standing there in the airport. A loud, echoing scream of joy escaped my mouth and I immediately rushed over to squeeze her to death. Now, when I say I screamed loudly, that’s not an exaggeration. I think just about everyone else in the airport turned around to see what the heck was going on. If you don’t believe me, Ron (always coming in the clutch), videotaped it so check it out for yourself. It took me a bit to compose myself and stop crying like a 2 year old, but eventually I got a handle on myself, and finished greeting my family…ALL of my family. J I was so, so happy to have my wonderful family here in Spain that you couldn’t have beat the smile off of me. Even as I write this now, I’m just beaming! We took the bus back into the city center to go pick up our rental car, but as we arrived the place was closed for siesta (go figure). So we decided to pick it up Tuesday night before we headed out to see Spain on Wednesday. Then it started raining, so I told my family to take a cab to my plaza and that I would walk home because I knew where I was going. My parents were staying in the hotel across the street from my apartment and I was to meet them there so they could get checked in and then we would go see where I lived. After giving the grand tour of the apartment, which probably took a total of 1 minute, we got everyone settled before heading for some famous Granada tapas! I took them to one of my favorite places called, “Beauty and the Beast” where you get a plate of tapas with each round of beverages. Yum! Since they had all been up for at least 24 hours, we made it an early evening, said goodnight to my parents and Joe and Elese, who were staying with me, headed back to the apartment. We all fell asleep relatively early, but not without watching a few episodes of Glee first! (A great family bonding activity, if I do say so myself).

Tuesday morning arrived and my family and I headed out to the INEF campus so they could see where I had been going to school for the past couple of months. It was fun to take them around and show them what I’ve been up to since being here. We picked a good day to tour because apparently the NBA player, José Calderón, originally from Spain, was there giving a presentation. Who got a picture with him? This girl! My family also got to meet two of my teachers, Victor Soto and Ignacio (who is my favorite!). We had reserved tickets to go see the Moorish palace, Alhambra, so after campus we headed there. It had been raining on and off all day, so we weren’t sure if it would be a good day to see the place, but everything worked out fine and the palace is beautiful. I was just so impressed with all of the Islamic patterns on the walls—the entire place was so intricate and must have taken so much time and effort to design and build. Amazing! We were all pretty worn out from walking all day, so we came back to the apartment while my Dad went to get the rental car. However, he didn’t return until 2 hours later with quite the story. You see, driving in Granada, put simply, just sucks. There are a crazy amount of one-ways, round-abouts, and un-labeled roads. Pair that with driving stick shift in a foreign country where the dominant language is not English, let’s just say my Dad had quite a time getting back to the hotel/apartment. Nothing a schwarma can’t cure though! So, we went off to my favorite schwarma place so my family could experience this amazing cuisine. We were going to be headed out of town around 9, so we made it another early night.

Wednesday! This was the day we all planned to hop in the rental car and drive all over creation (well, just southern Spain, but creation sounds much better). We got specific directions to get out of Granada to try and minimize my Dad’s stress level, so once we got onto the auto-via, things seemed to go much more smoothly. We didn’t have a set plan, just that at some point in the next two days we got to Gibraltar. After driving a bit and making a pit stop in Malaga, we decided to set up camp, and by set up camp I mean stay in a hotel near the beach, in a suburb outside of Malaga called Torremelinos. We relaxed, got some good sun, rest, and a gourmet continental breakfast the next morning!

We were on the road again, making our way to Gibraltar. Now, some of you may ask why in the world we would want to go there. I used to be one of those people because before my father explained its main attraction, I thought this place would be just another tourist town. First, the town of Gibraltar is owned by the UK as a result of the Spanish War. The UK seems pretty chill about this town though, because all the border patrol did was count to see that we had 5 passports for 5 people in the car, he didn’t even open them up. Anyway, the city is most famously known for what is called “The Rock” of Gibraltar, where upon standing at the top, you can see the tip of Africa. On this same rock lives a vast amount of monkeys, Barbary Macaques, who are quite social, especially if you have food. We decided to take a cable up to the top of the rock and then do the 2 hour walk back down. The walk down was entertaining! Between seeing 2 different guys get jumped on by monkeys because they had food out in the open (after specifically being told not to), watching them ‘monkey’ around with each other (HA!), to listening to my brother say, “Oooooh, it’s a monkey!” (Hangover 2 quote) every 5 minutes, there was not a dull moment! We had a little picnic sandwich lunch, then jumped in the car to drive to Sevilla. Not wanting to stay directly in the city, we found a hotel about 20 minutes outside of the city center to stay for 2 nights. Between driving to Gibraltar, seeing “The Rock,” and driving to Sevilla, we were all ready for bed that night. We were up and ready to go sight-see Sevilla by 8:30 that next morning. After catching a bus into the city center, we decided to start the day out with seeing the Cathedral there. Holy huge! Besides the jaw-dropping architecture, this is the home of the tombs of both Christopher Columbus’ son and himself! Between that and some old antique artifacts that they had, I was rather impressed. We then toured the government building where the King and Queen of Spain stay when they are in Sevilla and took a bus tour throughout the city. Dad was just happy because he didn’t have to drive at all for one day! Upon returning to our hotel we tried to walk around to find somewhere to get dinner because everyone, especially Joe (surprise, surprise), was hungry. As I suspected, restaurants don’t even start serving dinner food until 8:30 at the earliest because normal Spanish dinner isn’t until 9:00 PM or later. So we had some drinks and tapas while we waited.

This next adventure, escapade, fiasco, explicit choice of words, whatever you want to call it deserves its own paragraph. You’ll soon find out why. We got up for an early breakfast and were on the road by 8:30 because we had a 6+ hour drive ahead of us to get to Alicante and then a town called Villajoyosa because we were staying with the friends I met and stayed with back in March. So we hit the road and filled up with gas because we only had about 1/3 of a tank left. It took all 5 of us, plus the gas attendant to figure out how to open our gas cover, but thank God Elese came along for the trip because she’s the one that figured out you simply have place your fingers on the top portion of it and open it normally like a door. Wow. That should have been a red flag warning to the next few hours we were going to have. So we fill up, are driving, driving, and driving some more further into the countryside…yep we’re lost. After driving about 20 minutes out of our way we decide to turn around and get back into a town so we can stop and ask for directions. Wellllllll, first a light on the dashboard came on and we had no idea what it meant. We saw a sign for a town called Utrera that was the next stop so we began making out way into town. As we entered the city limits, all of a sudden my Dad said, “The power of our car just went out.” What!?! Now we have a mysterious light on the dashboard and can’t go above 40 mph. Grrrreeeaaaat. We found a drive-thru gas station and Elese and I set to work. Through the conversation, we found out that our car required diesel fuel to run and my Dad had put gasoline in it. Sh**. The man at the gas station gave us directions to a car shop to see if they could take the gas out and we could refill it. Well, as you know from the previous paragraphs, directions in Spain aren’t that exact, we couldn’t find the place, and we ended up just pulling into what looked like a car rental/possibly used dealership shop. Elese and I went in to find someone and a man in a red shirt came to greet us. The first words out of my mouth were, “Señor, tenemos un problema.” Elese, being a much better speaker than I am, then explained our gasoline/fuel situation to him. He said that we could not drive it any further because it will wreck the engine and that we needed to get a car shop to get the gas out. Lo and behold it was a Saturday and although he called around, no one was open. Awesome. Just as it looked like we were going to miss out trip to Alicante, Joe, having work experience with water heaters while working with my dad, had the idea of siphoning the gas out the old fashioned way through a tube with a bucket at the end to catch it. Well, we thought we may as well at least try because we had nothing to lose and were between a rock and a hard place. The man in the red shirt, bless his heart, drove us to a hardware store where we bought tubing and a big bucket, in addition to already giving us some of his extra pails. Then the process began, my brother was manning the placement of the tube in the gas tank while my Dad started the siphoning process by sucking it out using his mouth. ICK. That right there deserves a hero status, an award or trophy or something! The first couple of tries were unsuccessful and we were getting pretty discouraged because we had about 45 liters of gas to siphon out. Joe came through again though and readjusted the tube one last time before my Dad restarted the siphon (this would make it about the 8^th time he’d had to start it over). It was working! We ended up siphoning 40 liters of gasoline out of the tank and drove back to the drive-thru station to fill up with DIESEL. Let’s just say by the end of this whole ordeal we had drawn a crowd and I’m sure they were all talking about ‘those’ Americans. Talk about family bonding, right?!?! We tried to pay this wonderful man who had done so much to help us, but he wouldn’t take any money. He said that if he was in our country, we would do the same thing for him. Wow, he was certainly our guardian angel—it’s nice to know that there are such good people on this earth!

About 5 hours behind schedule, we finally made it to Villajoyosa, where we got to the house, had some dinner and crashed. The next day we met with Brian and Iona, went to church, and then they took us to the villages of Guadelest and Finestrat, the same places I went on my first visit. It was so good to see the Cronins again, they are just two of the neatest, most hospitable people I know! Before heading back to Granada on Monday, we all went out for a typical English breakfast at a restaurant on the coast consisting of fried eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, and beans. It was scrumptious! After saying our good-byes we headed back for Granada and returned the car as soon as we got there so my Dad could lower his stress and anxiety level a bit. J

That next Tuesday and Wednesday were filled with seeing more of Granada’s sights including the Albayzin and Plaza de San Nicolas, the Cathedral (which is GORGEOUS! I liked it better than Sevilla’s, but that might just be because I’m biased toward Granada), Parque de la Ciencias, and I took them to two of my clinical sites to meet my supervisors and see where I have been doing my internship. Oh, we obviously added some shopping in there as well! Wednesday was another early night because my family had to take a taxi at 5 AM to get the airport for a 7 AM flight to Madrid to begin their journey back to the US.

Saying good-bye to them was hard. The last two weeks spent with them was absolute bliss, I was even smiling and happy just sitting in the same car as them. It meant so much to me that every single member of my family had the opportunity to come visit me while I was here in Spain. My family is already one of my top priorities in life but this trip just made me appreciate them that much more. I love you Dad, Mom, Elese, and Joe! <3

With all that said (once again, I’m sorry you got what seems like an encyclopedia this time) I have ONE month left in Spain! Let the countdown begin!