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.

It’s from my German Duolingo app:

It’s 100% of times. As in, always.

The host of our Airbnb apartment in Madrid is a very gay, very sweet gentleman in his sixties.

“Are you a Vox supporter ?” I ask, noticing his wristband.

He searches my face for signs of contempt. Vox is right of center and its supporters are denounced as fascists, Nazis, and hateful bigots. Finding no sign of shock in my face, the host lights up and narrates his whole political trajectory.

He’s for Vox because mass migration is turning Spain into a third-world country. “It’s easy to destroy what we have but we’ll never get it back afterwards. I love my country. Is that a bad thing? Socialists, they lie. That’s all they do. I decided I won’t be lied to again.”

Once he sees that I listen with interest and respect, he’s touched to tears and hugs me effusively, stunning N who didn’t understand the subject of our discussion and the resulting emotional scene.

The flight was hellish, people. Klara vomited copiously at the beginning of the 8-hour flight and then again at the end. By that time, we had no clothes for her to change into in our carry-on luggage. N took off his T-shirt and Klara used it as a dress. But N was left half-naked and not looking forward to presenting himself like that to the Spanish customs officers.

Thankfully, N always brings a heavy denim jacket, so he wore it with no shirt underneath. It was hot, so he kept unbuttoning it. So I’m standing there, with a half-naked man and a vomit-plastered child who is lecturing me on the differences between vomit, puke, throw up and barf, our Airbnb will not be available for the next 9 hours, and I’m thinking that only yesterday I was almost a YouTube star, and now this.