My love affair with Spain

In August 2012, I came back to Dublin from a 3 week trip through the United States. I had visited Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC, and then went back to Philadelphia and Boston. What does this have to do with Spain? Well, I’ll get there in a minute.

After 2 days of acclimatizing at home, I went back to work. I was working for an American car rental company at the time, and had been for over 5 years. For a few months, I had been looking for a new job as I thought it was time for a change. A few days after I returned to the office, having wrestled my way through the 500+ e-mails that had come in during my holiday, our director of Human Resources came up to me in the hallway and asked me if I could come to her office. I went over, and she told me that they needed to cut numbers in our team. She handed me a piece of paper with a number on it and said that I would receive that sum if I volunteered to leave. I looked at the number, signed on the spot and came back the next day to clear out my desk. 

With money in the bank and no immediate urge to find a new job, I spent my days in a leisurely fashion. I would get up mid morning, have some breakfast, take a shower and around opening time head for the pub. After a few weeks, I decided to go to Latvia. 

We will get to Spain soon, I promise. 

The thing is, I travel a lot. I had been to America several times, to Australia, to obscure former Soviet cities like Riga and Minsk (which, by the way, is not in Russia, no matter how often Phoebe’s boyfriend in Friends says it is) and countless other places. I had, however, never been to such an obvious place as Spain. 

I also did a trip through Ireland after I came back and then started looking forward to Christmas back home in Holland. In the run up to Christmas, I decided to start looking for a new job. After the usual frustration of applying for jobs, not getting invited to interviews, then getting invited but not getting the job, I finally managed to land an interview with a big pharmaceutical company. It was a process that took 2 long interviews but in the week before I left for Holland for Christmas, I received the phone call I had been hoping for: I was hired and could I please start in the second week of January.

On my first day in the office, we were introduced to each other, and this is where Spain enters our story.

This was a new department, so it was new for everyone. Our team was small and consisted of 7 people, plus an ever-absent manager. If he wasn’t “working from home”, he disappeared to Switzerland or the UK “for business”. He generally checked in via e-mail or telephone about once every 2 weeks to see how things were going. Things went fine, and we didn’t really need him.
The rest of the team consisted of 3 Irish ladies on one side, and then a Dutch girl whose name I can’t recall, even though she sat next to me for a year, and 2 Spanish girls, Laura and Esty with whom I shared a 4 desk block. 

Esty sat right across from me. She was from Andalusia, the Southernmost part of Spain. She was smart, friendly, funny and cute. She had an Uma-Thurman-in-Pulp-Fiction hairdo, hazelnut brown eyes and spoke with that fantastic Spanish lisp that adds an almost indiscernible extra syllable to two or three words in every sentence. We got along great and she was always fun to talk to. When I mentioned that my birthday was in July, she said that hers was too and we found out we share our birthdays. Within 2 weeks, I was borderline in love with her.

While we could talk about anything, food, drink, travel, movies, there was one subject that always came back in our conversations and that was her undying love for her hometown of Malaga. I would remark on the quality of a salad during lunch, and she would reply “Have you ever had a salad in Malaga? Oh my god!”. If I pointed out that the weather was nice, especially for Irish standards, she would say “32 degrees in Malaga now”. When I told her I live next to a stadium, her reply was “Malaga football club has the best stadium in the world”. 

After 2 months of this, I was both intrigued and maybe slightly annoyed (though not really, nothing Esty did could ever annoy me) so I told her “You know what, if Malaga is really such a paradise, I’ll go over and check for myself”. “Do that” she said. “You won’t be disappointed”.

On a Friday in April, I set off for Dublin airport early in the morning and boarded a flight to Malaga. We arrived  there 3 hours later, I walked to the airport bus and 20 minutes later found myself in the city centre of Malaga. I stepped off the bus and into the streets of Malaga. Immediately, the balmy Mediterranean air enveloped me. I walked 3 steps, stopped in my tracks, had a look around and thought “Damned, Esty. You were right.”
This really was paradise. The sun beamed down from a cloudless sky, the temperature was in the high twenties, even at 10 in the morning, there were palm trees everywhere, everyone had a smile on their face, it was busy everywhere without being crowded, I looked out over a beautiful marina of the type I had only seen on postcards and it was just so.. Perfect. 

Esty had given me 2 pages full of tips on things to do and, with time to kill until I could check into my hostel, I made my way to a place called the Paseo de Parque. When I got there, I simply couldn’t process it. It was so beautiful. There were orange trees everywhere, more palm trees, innumerable plants of species I never even knew existed, nevermind had seen, and everywhere was the chirping of exotic birds in every color of the rainbow. There were several low walls and fountains, decorated in beautiful mosaic tiles and a couple of comfortable benches. I sat down on one, too stunned to speak and pinched myself. This could not be true. I’m probably still asleep in Dublin and will wake up any minute now. After a minute I realized that this was not the case and that this was reality. I knew there and then that I loved Spain and that I would be back many times. 

I had a great weekend in Malaga and fell deeper in love with it every time I turned a corner. The beautiful and sunny Plaza de la Constitucion, the busy, bar-lined Plaza de Merced, the fantastic food everywhere, the cheap beer, the Playa la Malagueta where I would often sit for an hour or more, just staring out over the sea. Everything in Malaga just hit the exact right spot. I was in heaven.

After I got back from Malaga, I took a deep bow, thanked Esty profusely for making me go there, and I bought her lunch to concede that she had been right- Malaga was as close to paradise as any place I had ever seen.

From then on, Spain started to feature prominently in my travel plans. I have lost track of the number of times I’ve been there, but it was a lot. I traveled down the East Coast by train and bus, from Barcelona all the way down to Malaga. I traveled from Lisbon through Andalusia, to Seville and then Malaga again. I visited Malaga again and then went down to Gibraltar and Algeciras, where I popped into Morocco for a couple of days. I celebrated New Year’s Eve in Barcelona in 2016 and then in Madrid in 2018. I was on the streets of Barcelona when the Catalan independence riots broke out, and I have had many other trips there and there are many more to come. 

Everything about Spain just hits the exact right spot with me: the amazing food, the great weather, the friendly people, the cheap beer and the amazing scenery. It all just falls into place.
I am very happy here in Dublin, and have no intention of leaving, but if I do ever leave Dublin then, well, it’s probably because I’m moving to Malaga.

My job at the pharmaceutical company ended the January after my very first visit to Malaga.
I haven’t seen Esty in 5 or 6 years now, though we still text each other on our birthday every year. If I have taken anything away from my friendship with her, apart from having a wonderful friend, it is that she has instilled in me a deep and profound love for Spain and all its colorful glory, and for that I will be forever thankful.

Have a good weekend.