I have not slept in an actual bed for two nights.  Last night I was on a red-eye flight from Washington to Copenhagen.  The night before I had been packing up all my things in Venice Beach all night.  The days in between were filled with plane-hopping with intermittent naps between in-flight films—just enough to keep me from passing out from exhaustion.

At noon today I finally made it into town, and retired immediately to my tiny hostel room in a northern part of Barcelona, near the university.  It’s the smallest hostel room I’ve ever stayed in—even smaller than the one I’d been crammed into on my last night in Tokyo—but I’m grateful for this funky, orange-walled solitude.  I figure I’ll give myself a few days of this kind of recovery, before I make the economic compromise to stay in a room with four or more bunks.

This is my first time having arrived to a place abroad, that I know (or at least think) I’ll be calling home base for three months.  I’m one of those travel addicts, who can name dozens of places they’ve been across six continents, but has yet to have been in any one place for longer than a week.  My condition has in part been a product of the standard American 2-3 week holiday.  Only as a freelancer have I been able to make the compromises to carve out this extended time.  This trip isn’t a study abroad, a full-time job overseas, or family members conveniently giving me a place to crash.  It’s a self-funded endeavor—part extended travel experiment, part reclamation of the years of Spanish I’ve buried in memory from high school, part time to think about what’s next, and part just kicking back and enjoying life.  If I learn something new from this experience, it’s worth it.

Tonight I ate a bistec dinner at a cafe down the street from the hostel.  I made conversation with three young people from England, Switzerland, and Brazil.  Afterwards we sat by the lake and drank some beers.  I took my time getting back to the hostel, wandered a mile or so down the narrow streets to the one 24-hour supermarket that a local had pointed me to, where I purchased a water bottle and a some other food items.  On the way back I sat at a bar and had a Corona.  The way the bartender had pronounced it, I thought I was getting something other than what I was used to back in the States, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.  

So far I love the lack of pressure to rush into anything.  Where in the past I would have fought jet-lag with caffeine and tylenol, so that I could rush out and start seeing sites right away, now I can take my time, and ease into Barcelona.  

I had previously come here in 2007 on a whirlwind spring break trip, where a couple friends and I hit three Spanish cities and Morocco within nine days.  Barcelona was there and gone in a flash—just long enough for me to take the mental note-to-self to come back here for a more extended visit.

Current location: Carrer d’Hedilla, 58, 08031 Barcelona, Spain