Saturday, September 5th

Culturally, Americans and Spaniards have little in common, which is what makes visiting Spain the adventure that it is. Americans don’t routinely begin dinner at around 10pm, for example, or spontaneously dance in the streets, or shut down most businesses at 2pm for a 3-hour siesta. Americans do baseball; Spaniards do soccer – and an occasional bullfight. Americans are wired for high-speed; Spaniards are wired for leisure.

But Friday morning, while on the hunt for my morning Spanish treat – churros with chocolate - I discovered a bit of common cultural ground. Spaniards, like many Bostonians I’ve encountered over the years, will act as though they know for sure – that is, with absolute certainty – that they know how to get from point A to point B. Ask for directions to some shop or restaurant and they will confidently point you in a particular direction and send you off with the utmost conviction that the place is actually there, where they say it is – when it’s not.

That morning we asked three different times and three different people where we could find a café that sells churros with chocolate. The person working the front desk of the hotel, a woman in a local gift shop, and a server at a restaurant (OK, he probably wanted us to get lost since he didn’t sell them himself), and each answered without hesitation. “It’s one street over,” the hotel receptionist told us. We went there and looked up and down and up and down the street. It wasn’t there. Then there was the woman managing a gift shop. “Go through those arches over there,” she said, “over to the next street, and look for it there on the corner.” There were men using jack hammers on that street corner, and there were lots of retail shops on that street, but there were no places selling churros on that street. Trust me, we looked.

Eventually Jo Ann and I walked in a totally different direction than anyone had suggested, spotted a corner café, walked in, and there they were -- stacks of freshly baked churros together with warm, thick-as-pudding chocolate for dipping. I was in paradise.

I’m convinced there are printed instructions for this kind of misdirection, and the central distribution points are probably throughout Madrid and in Boston’s Back Bay. You could ask a local in either city where to find such a pamphlet just so you can learn some tricks of the trade, but you know how that will go.
But here’s one giveaway I picked up from a day or so of wandering in the wilderness. Note how much time elapses between your request for directions and the person’s response. Anything over a nano-second of silence – no matter how convincing they sound when they begin to speak – is a sure sign of trickery. They DON’T KNOW. Step back, thank the person, then leave. If you stay and continue to listen to the colorful directions you will be hypnotized. Trust me, I speak from experience. You will believe they know what they’re saying is true, and that you only need to go through those arches or turn that corner and -- voila! – you’ll be in Camelot. You won’t. You will be in the Land of the Lost.

The Land of the Lost is not a happy place to be. The people there have tired feet and they have frowns on their faces. They’re not happy people. Hungry most likely, but not happy. I know that too. I was there, in the Land of the Lost. If you happen to want directions for getting there just ask me.