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…]

I lost my phone in Madrid today. Left it behind in a taxi. Not an Uber, unfortunately, but an actual cab, which means I didn’t have the driver’s name or phone number.

It’s incomprehensible that this happened given that I’m kind of OCD and spend all day checking things. Keys, cards, phone, notebook, pen. Keys, cards, phone, notebook, pen. I can’t leave anything behind yet I somehow did.

Losing the phone is disastrous because I can’t access anything without it. The bloody two-step authentication drove me nuts all day. Of course I locked the phone remotely and posted a message with N’s phone number on the screen. I also tracked it, and the map showed that, in the time it took me to notice the phone’s absence, the cab driver ended up all the way in Guadalajara.

All day I waited for him to leave that address. All day he didn’t. I realized it had to be his home. I saw the exact address and the picture of the house on the map. Finally, I set out to Guadalajara on the phone recovery adventure. This time I took an Uber because cabs will give me nervous hives for months now.

How I searched for my phone with the help of three elderly ladies, the largest rainbow I’ve ever seen, and a Ukrainian flag on a hill, I’ll share in the next post.

I’m one of the generation of children who grew up reading Alexander Dumas. It’s wonderful to see every kiosk featuring stacks of books by this author.

I also really like this picture of me as a vengeful angel, and I’ll post it here even though it has nothing to do with the post:

No, I’m learning German, actually. Or, rather, recovering the German I lost after I left Ukraine.

But the TV screen at my seat on the flight to Spain was pre-set to Hebrew. It wasn’t easy to find my way to the language settings because I know zero Hebrew. Which is why I posted because it was the most fun thing that happened on the barfy flight here.

When I travel alone, it’s always hotels, and I prefer local, small, family-owned.

But when it’s the three of us, staying at a hotel with a child for 2 weeks is impossible. She goes to bed at 7:30 pm. What are we supposed to do? Sit in the dark in complete silence? Suspend our relationship for two weeks? That’s punishment, not vacation. We are a couple in love before we are parents. By myself, I’m mother first and woman second. But with each other, we are man and woman first.

Also, how do I feed a child at a hotel for 2 weeks? Even if I had the money (which I really don’t), I can’t feed her in restaurants three times a day. She isn’t used to that. What she eats is food cooked by me from scratch. I can’t offer her a complete change of diet all of a sudden.

But yes, on my own, I never stayed at an Airbnb. One is a different person by oneself and with a child. In what concerns my child, my only belief is what’s good for her. Spain and everybody else, with all due respect, can get stuffed. Let their own mother care about them.

In the future, there will be no phones, just Neuralinks

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 17, 2024

The question is a contradiction in terms because people who’d agree don’t have much thinking going on anyway.

We are seeing, though, how we are traveling from genital modifications and experimental vaccinations to obligatory brain surgery. There is no natural limit. The gods of fluidity will always demand more until we put a hard stop to their demands.