2007-10-13 || 4:10 p.m.

|| in spain ||

my favorite part, boiled down to a minute in time, was this: lying on the bed in our room in san sebastian, the doors to the balcony flung open, alternating between napping (siestas come in handy when the jet lag kicks in) and reading a book checked out from the multnomah county library in portland, oregon. the bells from the church next door rang their hourly tune (the standard bing bong bing bong... bing bong bing bong) endearingly off key and below our balcony a group of 8 to 10 men began to sing the most beautiful music i've ever heard. so beautiful that i got up and leaned out the balcony to search them out but could only see the outer edge of onlookers that had gathered. and i leaned and pressed my hand to my heart and cried. and i cry for anything, sure, but it was one of the times you realize you are witnessing something extraordinary all wrapped up in the ordinary. it was a group of men seated in the outdoor portion of a bar. it was a thursday night. it had just stopped raining, and we were just lying around our hotel room.

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every night i fell asleep converting time across the atlantic. i would wake up feeling vaguely sick. i walked around in the morning, working up the nerve to order coffee in Spanish, stopping in shops and looking at souvenirs, holding up a tiny silver spoon and deciding i must be pregnant. since it's our honeymoon, since it would be quaint to tell the story that nine months later a baby arrived, the product of spain and the beginning of our marriage. nevermind we took our honeymoon almost a year after our wedding. nevermind it rarely felt like what i imagined a honeymoon to feel like, although sometimes we mustered the enthusiasm: holding hands while walking along the promenade, lying side by side on the bed in our hotel room to turn toward each other to kiss. it was more the feeling that we were a team; it was us against this foreign country; we had our own language.

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