After my younger sister graduated from Georgetown with a major in Spanish and Linguistics, she taught English to Spanish businessmen in Madrid. I visited her a couple of times, and we travelled around the country guided by her local friends. 

In Santiago de Compostela, I did shots of something called “burning grass” in a dark pub populated by old men in berets and some cats. I went topless in Ibiza. Later, Steve and I backpacked through Spain and Morocco. Starting off in Madrid, we went south to Granada, the Costa del Sol, and then took a boat across Gibraltar to Tangier. 

When we were planning our trip to Spain, I chose cities and towns that I hadn’t already seen. We started off in Barcelona, which is the Catalonian region of the country. Then took a train to Zaragoza, which was layered with Roman, Medieval, Moorish, and Baroque buildings. If you say Zaragoza fast, it sort of sounds like its original name, Caesaraugusta. We drove to Valencia stopping a little town called Teruel, which had to be rebuilt after the civil war blew it to rubble. After two days in a great hotel in Valencia, we traveled on, swimming in the Mediterranean in the shadows of a castle that was used as a set for Game of Thrones.

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