Finally, the entire story about my trip to Spain for the Space Generation Congress 2006 is now presented. Since I didn’t write it while it was happening (except for the Genius in France part), I’ll try to keep my 20/20 retrospect criticism until the end. Pictures will be added very soon.
Day 1: Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 [Travel and Arrival]
Genius in France:
[Wednesday, 3:20 am ET, 9:20 FPT (French People Time)]
After the most pleasant flight I've ever been on, I have arrived in
Paris. The flight was 7 hours, but was delayed by half an hour because someone forgot to load potable water into the tanks on the plane. Even so, with a 100 mph tailwind we arrived 20 minutes early in Charles de Gaulle airport. The flight was the best one I've ever been on (except of course when I was the pilot) because we got served drinks so many times, had two small but delicious meals, the in flight movie was free (X-Men 3 was my choice), and I didn't have to go to the bathroom once and be crammed in that small cabinet they call a lavatory.
My only complaint about Paris? No hot French chicks. As I sit here waiting to board the final leg to Valencia, I still have yet to see anything above a 7, and that's without seeing armpit hair, which instantly drops everything by 3 points.
Navigating the airport was a hassle. Even though we got in early, I still only had an hour to find my gate. This airport is pretty bad because they had to bus us to the arrival terminal. It was the worst bus ride ever. We were crammed in like sardines and the driver went around in circles. Then I had to pull a Home Alone to find my gate; I don't think I could have been further away from it from where I started.
I'm sitting at my gate, saying "bahh!!' once again to the fact that wireless internet isn't free. So far the trip has been without a single bump. Now I need to find a Redwood to knock on.
The trip to Atlanta was uneventful.
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Viva España!
After meeting four people from the conference in the airport (
Kat, Kathryn, and Joe Palaia), we split a cab fare to the Hostel and checked in. The hostel was located about two blocks from a
cathedral and
bell tower that made a great landmark for us to get lost by. Immediately after setting my bags down and talking with Dan and Juan, the 2 other UCF guys, I met a guy from Kuwait named Hussein and a guy from Belgium named Pieter. Registration didn’t start for another hour.
Hussein: Wanna get a beer?
Me: Sure!
Pieter: Alright!
Ahh, the freedom of being of legal age in foreign countries. Aside from the cab driver, whom one of the girls I met in the airport spoke to in Spanish to get is safely to the Hostel, this was my first chance to try out the Spanish I learned and forgot in high school.
Me: Una cerveza, por favor!
Waitress: (something I didn’t understand)
Me: …Una cerveza, por favor!
She gave us our
beer. Linguistic mission accomplished. While we had our beer, I learned Hussein is the son of the cultural director of the Kuwait Embassy in Paris, so he knows Kuwaiti, French, English, and enough Spanish to hit on women (which he did often, and was only successful because of the sheer number of passes). Pieter (pronounced with a –ch at the end, like Chanukah. That really confused me during introductions because of his very thick accent) is a medicine student from Belgium, and he’s one of the officers of Europe’s version of SEDS National.
After we finished our beers, we paid and I was astonished how cheap beer was (I would find out later just how cheap it gets, and how expensive it could be. Dichotomy can be bad). The one we had was €1.50, or around $1.80. We went back and more people had arrived. Registration was basically “Here’s a bag with some important papers, like maps and schedules. Come back later and get your nametag.” There was a serious lack of corporate free stuff like we got from the Monster DLP, but I didn’t care. I felt like exploring some more.
I started wandering in the opposite direction of the bar and 15 seconds later I ended up in a bakery/coffee shop/bar where the girls I met at the airport (Kathryn and Kat, very confusing considering they looked alike) were having tea with some other SGC people I hadn’t met yet (Sandeep, an American guy from Ohio, and some other girls I didn’t really meet during the day so I didn’t know their names when I danced with them at night, which is kind of embarrassing but what do you do).
Kat, Kathryn, and I decided to walk around the town and explore the sights. There was a
memorial for some guy that I can’t remember but got a picture of a block from the hostel, along with a kids’ park and a shopping mall. The first thing I noticed was
Charlize Theron’s huge face on the side of a building advertising for a clothing line at some store. The advertisement that would become much more annoying as time went on was the Nestle ice cream bar ads with some model whose face I wanted to punch in just because her smile was kind of annoying and everywhere. There also seems to be a drug store on every other block, complete with a big green flashy plus sign. I seem to take more
pictures of
architecture than of
anything else, so I got plenty of pictures of buildings while we were out.
After the short walk I came back to the Hostel to take a nap. Hussein gave me an eye blinder because the light coming through the windows was pretty bad at that time. During my nap I distinctly remember having introductory conversations with four people, Kristen and Jeremy from Embry-Riddle, and Lisa and Mark.
Kristen and Jeremy don’t remember that conversation, but after a brief conversation with Lisa and Mark I woke up to talk to them more.
Lisa was in my project group (Moon Mars Workshop – Habitats), and
Mark turned out to be one of the more interesting characters of the whole conference. He was an Irish Rastafarian. Let that sink in.
At 7:00 they served us a traditional Spanish college-style meal that the hostel workers went out and bought food for. I don’t remember what I had, but it was all pretty good. I definitely downed 2 glasses of delicious Sangria out of a box before someone told me it was alcoholic, which then prompted me to drink two more (Sangria is like wine but with less alcohol and more fruit flavor). We were
crammed into the hostel’s dining area pretty deep, but it was alright.
Pub CrawlThat night we went out on what was called the Pub Crawl. For €12, you got entrance to three bars and a dance club, a free drink or two at each stop, and some food. We met two sketchy looking guys who could have easily walked away with all our money after taking us to the first stop. I turned out they were alright, but I was still concerned at first. They gave us weird names or
symbols and wrote them on our hands so we got into places. My name was
El Micalet,the name of the cathedral tower, because I had to “stand strong!” according to one of the guys.
The first stop was a
tapas bar. I personally don’t understand the point of a tapas bar. Tapas are basically plain Lays potato chips, only not quite as good and probably not as healthy. They also served us a few glasses on
Sangria and a lot of
pieia (I believe that’s the spelling). Pieia was the one thing my dad told me I had to try, and I must admit it was definitely good, especially with four glasses of Sangria.
Since this wasn’t an SGC sanctioned event, there were other people going along with us, including two Irish
army guys who were on leave. Mark, the Irish Rastaman, hung out with them most of the night, but I had some fun with them too. It is now time for cultural blunder #1.
Me: Are you guys in the IRA (Irish Republican Army)?
All Three Irish People: What?!! AHAHAHAHA!!
(The IRA was a radical leftist group that I learned about while doing work for the SAIC revamping the Joint Special Ops University’s anti-terrorist training manual. I had to ask. Apparently, Ireland has more than one army.)
After the tapas bar, we walked to a
regular bar for two free shots. On the way, Hussein and I were shouting “Viva España!” at every person who walked by. Later, I thought about what we were doing. Imagine a drunken French or Mexican guy walking down highway 98 in Destin or Church Street in Orlando, shouting “Go America!” Now imagine him jumping off of weird poles in the ground that serve no purpose that I know of and singing Monty Python’s The Lumberjack Song. That was me after Sangria.
We got to the bar and they served us what I thought were the two best shots I’ve ever had. One was a
lime and vodka mix that was delectably tasty, the other was a
peach shot with an actual peach slice in it. We got those done pretty fast, and then someone decided to ask for
Absinthe.
For those who don’t know,
Absinthe is a glowing green, highly potent alcoholic drink that is illegal in the United States because in addition to making the person drunk, it also makes the person hallucinate. If you’ve seen Eurotrip, it tends to make you make out with your sister. The Irish guys bought Pieter and me shots, but Hussein stole Pieter’s because it was set right in front of him. Pieter didn’t mind, he took a whiff of it and knew it wasn’t for him. I knew I come from a long line of festive drinkers and had to try it for first timer’s sake. Up went my glass for cheers and down my throat the absinthe went. It tasted purple and felt like rainbow. All of a sudden green fairies started flying around the room and
Sandeep’s whole mouth turned purple.
Not really. As someone explained to me later, real absinthe is actually brown with brown tree bark in it, which is what makes the person who drinks it hallucinate. What I and everyone else had was the popular knock-off used to trick stupid Americans. Oh well, it was tasty, but I was done drinking at the point (I know my limit). Pieter was fascinated with the fact that I have better balancing skills when I have alcohol in my system, hence the
many pictures of my on my head throughout the photo album.
I took a lot of
pictures at this point. Some of them are
very gay because of the 17 year old
Indian kid. I learned later that Indian men tend to be touchy-touchy with other men more than Americans are used to. I felt a little violated despite the smile I put on for the camera. Some people did
flaming shots, more people did absinthe shots, and a good time was had by all.
European Coke doesn’t taste much different than American Coke except it is served in glass bottles, which you only see at Atlanta’s Coke factory.
Hussein told me I had to come visit him in Kuwait next year before the conference. First invite to another country I need to follow up on. Even though he was drunk then, he kept talking about this when he was sober later, so I guess he’s serious.
It was time to leave that bar and go to another. This one had an actual dance floor. Since it was empty, Pieter asked me to breakdance to the bad music that was playing. Since this was a cultural experience for everyone, I decided to do so while a few friends who had never seen breakdancing watch. I would rather not be the ambassador of hip-hop to other cultures because I do not feel I am an adequate representative, but oh well. We then downed our big glasses of free beer. Hussein wanted to force himself to vomit to feel better, while Pieter and I did
stupid things with our hair. I then went and kicked some German people’s rear ends in foosball (at least they sounded German; their English accents were weird like that).
This was actually a very odd
foosball table. For one, it was a lot bigger than standard American size. The five-player bar and the three-player bar were switched, which made the offensive side a little difficult (even though there are more people, you have to switch back more often, making the front line of the goal hard to attack from). The players had two feet instead of one stub, which made straight shots almost impossible (I rely on bank shots anyway, but it was more difficult because you could hit it left with your right foot and vice versa). There was also no hole for the ball to roll through to enter the table; it just kind of rolled off a metal plate however you thrust it in. Thankfully, losers and new arrivals paid and I got to play three games for free because my partner was awesome. He made some pretty good shots from downfield and even though I wasn’t used to the table, he made up for it. I’d like to join the World Foosball Circuit to meet some interesting people.
Once the games were over, Pieter grabbed me and we went with Hussein to hit on women on the dance floor. They were talking to a young girl and what appeared to be her mother. Pieter said “the old one is all yours, I can’t understand her!” I was able to decipher from her Spanish that she was from Hungary (I think, I don’t remember too many specifics) and she was here visiting. She didn’t speak a word on English, and Pieter’s Spanish was way worse than his English, so he gave up trying to communicate with the music playing. Then I talked with the young girl, who spoke a little English (and by “spoke” I mean “yelled in my ear, just like Americans do to people who don’t speak English.” I thought it was funny), and she invited us to go to a free movie since she works in ticket sales at a theater. Hussein got her number, which is all that’s really important. We didn’t have time to go see her, but we accomplished the mission.
I will say communicating in another language (especially with women) is actually very fun. Maybe the more you know the better, but I thought it was exciting. I see why French guys and anyone with an accent has an edge over regular guys here in the states. Sure, it might get old after a while, but I had a good time having a conversation in another language.
Hussein, Pieter, and I decided not to stick around and go to the dance club (neither did a lot of people) but after accomplishing a mission, we were hungry. It was time to find food (3am food nonetheless).
Hussein: Kebabs! We must find kebabs!
Me: Alright!!! Kebabs! Viva España!
All Three: Viva España! Viva España!
Hussein and I to every stranger on the street: Viva España!
We found a
kebab place down the street. My God, it looked
disgusting. However, I was inebriated and hungry, so I bought one and took a bite. My God it was DELICIOUS!! I cannot imagine living life without tasting this stuff. I need to find a kebab place here in Orlando and go feast there once a week at least.
We walked back to a
plaza on the other side of the cathedral where we met and noticed a big
statue/fountain. We decided to eat our kebabs there. There were a bunch of French students messing around the place so we talked with them. Hussein is fluent in French so he talked about something with them and another French guy talked to me. He seemed excited to talk to someone in English just as I had been excited to speak in Spanish to the girl at the bar. We all got a
group picture, because I’ll probably never see those guys again. However, the guy who took the picture was a complete moron. He put his finger over the lens and dropped my camera on the tile ground. It was now 3:30am and time for bed, so we wandered back to the hostel and slept for about 4 hours. It was quite an eventful first day, and definitely one of the most fun days/nights in my entire life.
