San Sebastián is plastered with Palestinian flags and “save Palestine” slogans. I kind of started to feel bad for Palestinians after observing this for a day and a half. Mannequins in fancy clothing stores are decked in Palestinian flags. Palestine-themed beach towels and grocery totes are on sale. We went into a candy store and at the cash register there were chocolate gift sets in the form of the Palestinian flag and the words “free Palestine” made out of candies. Clearly, nobody takes the idea that there’s a genocide in Palestine seriously, or they wouldn’t make such a mockery of it.

With the help of the very kind and generous Spanish people, the phone was restored to me.

Which is just as well because this is a working trip and I need access to my stuff.

It’s not hard to have a great view in San Sebastian. One would have to try their darndest to avoid having a view. The whole place is one gigantic panorama of views.

The building between me and the view is a school, proving that making schools as ugly as possible is a truly global phenomenon.

Here in Spain, what I miss most bitterly from back home in America isn’t even being in a shower larger than a shoebox or having people not react to a child like a harbinger of plague.

What I miss is radishes. Nobody seems to be aware of the existence of radishes. Six days sans radishes, and I’m in deep withdrawal.

Only in the Basque country does a clothing store mask as a bookstore and offer free books to lure customers.

In other news, the apartment we are renting has a washer but no drier and we had to dust off old memories of clotheslines and the thingies you use to attach clothes to them. It’s mega cute.

One thing that keeps pleasantly surprising us here in Spain is the pricing. Every time we have to pay, we feel buoyed by the low cost of everything. I’m sure the prices don’t seem as low to Spaniards who have salaries to match them, of course.

I don’t know why we have to to experience such blowing up of everything money-related.

What I don’t like, on the other hand, is that restaurants are not child-friendly. There are no children’s menus anywhere and nobody offers activity sheets for kids. Back home, even the fanciest places are prepared to feed and entertain kids. In the meantime, everybody complains about low birth rates.

I wish neoliberals would at least leave Christianity alone:

That people would actually think this sounds smart and important is embarrassing.

We stopped in front of the cab driver’s house. It had clearly been built to be part of a pricey development but the swimming pool looked like it had never been filled. A thick fence and a tall gate with a fancy yet non-functioning intercom system precluded all approach.

An elderly woman stepped out into the third-floor balcony to observe the unusual sight of two men, one woman and a child decamping in her street.

“Who sent you here?” she inquired in a trembling voice.

Based on the woman’s age, she must’ve grown up in the Franco dictatorship, so I tried to look homey and unthreatening as I narrated my story of a cell phone and a taxi cab across the elaborately paved space between the gate and the house. My efforts failed entirely, and the old lady retreated into the house. I saw her draw the shades on her floor shut.

The house next to the cab driver’s lacked a gate but it had another elderly woman tending to a beautiful tangerine tree.

“Yes, a cab driver lives here,” she confirmed. “Name of José. His mom is on the third floor, and his apartment is on the first. The cab was outside all day but it left 15 minutes ago. Doña Chelo – the mom – won’t talk to me because we had a little disagreement but I’ll take you to doña Toni who’s still friendly with her.”

With the help of doña Toni and her husband, we managed to lure the cab driver’s mother out of the house.

“It’s OK, these are good people, religious,” coaxed doña Toni who had been won over by my enthusiastic exclamations “oh, thank God” and “thanks be to our Lord Jesus.”

The elderly and still confused doña Chelo took a while to locate the name of her cab driver son José among what seemed to be a million of other Josés on her phone. Eyeing me suspiciously, she passed me the device.

“I’ve been looking for you!” José exclaimed. “Give me your address and I’ll bring by the phone! But it won’t be soon because I have some clients I need to see to.”

“I’ll wait for you, José!” I yelled, buoyed with the prospect of regaining my phone. “I’ll wait for you all night, if needed!”

Hearing this, doña Chelo perked up. My enthusiasm for José seemed to awaken some dormant dream regarding her very middle-aged, unmarried son and an empty apartment between his and his mom’s floors.

“She seems nice,” doña Chelo shared with doña Toni. “I don’t mind the kid either. But who are these two?” she pointed to N and the Uber driver. “Her, I don’t mind, but there seem to be a lot of men around her.”

We thanked everybody profusely and left to avoid feeding doña Chelo’s hopes.

The pro-Palestinian protest in Madrid is tiny and not in the least obnoxious, so I don’t mind it:

If you don’t see the protest, that’s the whole point.

This, however, is as funny in Spain as it is everywhere else:

The slogan on the right says “worker solidarity”, which makes the whole installation as postmodern as can be.

On our way to Guadalajara, we passed one depopulated village after another. Some were bombed out and lay in ruins. Others were brand new and cute. Yet they were all mostly or completely empty.

“Todo por la patria” said a large sign on a military-style building we passed. It was the most cheerful thing we saw in a landscape devoid of people.

Finally, we approached the taxi driver’s village. It was one of the housing projects built right before the Great Recession of 2009. Luxury single-family homes with swimming pools in the middle of absolute nowhere and with no infrastructure to support family life. The proliferation of these construction projects that were used as money-laundering and corruption schemes contributed to the severity of the economic crisis in Spain.

The luxury housing projects had stood empty for years but later people like José, the driver I was pursuing, started buying them. He wouldn’t be able to afford housing in Madrid, but as a driver by profession who chooses his hours of work and has no children, he can live far out and drive into the city to work.

As we entered the village, we saw a gigantic rainbow – the biggest I’ve ever seen – over the few houses that constitute the settlement and a Ukrainian flag on the hill over the village. The rainbow and the utterly unexpected flag added to the surreal nature of our hunt for a phone in the midst of rural Spain. In the US you can come across a Ukrainian flag pretty much anywhere but in Spain all we have seen is an overwhelming presence of LGBT and Palestinian flags. Some buildings are pretty much wrapped in the inclusive rainbow flag making one think that protesting too much is as suspicious as it’s ever been.

[To be continued…]