Bumpkining in Europe

When traveling, accept that you will have fledgling albatross moments, soaring albatross moments, and bumpkin moments.

Europe isn’t all tapas and quaint villages. Sometimes, you might find yourself in the suburbs of Madrid on a sectional sofa watching a David Attenborough Netflix nature documentary about an albatross chick, because it’s in English.

Once born, the chick sits, clueless and uncovered, on the beach on a remote island in the Pacific, blinking through monsoons, boiling sun, and wind, helpless and hungry.

All alone.

Months later, Dad shows up to regurgitate food, half plastic (thanks, Anthropocene). The chick then almost chokes to death trying to heave the plastic part up, disturbing to watch. This meal is the last sustenance the parent will bring.

As the chick uses this piecemeal nourishment to fuel his final growth, a shiver of tiger sharks migrates north. Cue dissonant minor chords. It’s like when I lived in Utah, and word spread of a new Western Sizzler buffet, minivans circling the parking lot.

The albatross is born to fly, great wings soaring over the Pacific. But first, it must fledge, meaning the bird can fly, but it can’t quite fly away. It flips. It flops. It runs with its wide, webbed feet down the beach… it launches! For about a minute. Then it has to rest in the water.

Don’t try and die, or try and die trying.

Oh! to be young again, people say, but we forget about how we sat, blinking and clueless on the beach, eager to take flight, ignorant of sharks.

Travel makes me young again. The reward is new experiences. The penalty is the suffering that comes from ignorance. I probably won’t die, but I might feel dumb, or I might fall prey to shark people. My mother never traveled except with a tour group. But I like to figure places out on my own, which makes the trip more interesting, but also makes me more vulnerable.

For instance, at the airport yesterday, the Italian airline employee insisted the flight was full, and I had to check my bag. She wielded an authoritative Italian accent and it was five in the morning. She got me. Later, I watched a woman disembark with two enormous shopping bags from first class. I’d been sharked.

Later, when my plane arrived in Tirana, I’d had coffee and knew the sharks were waiting because I’d been here before. For one, I knew to insist on smaller bills at the exchange desk, because everyone in Albania wants cash, but they hate large bills.

Cashier: “It’s no problem, everyone will take that (5000 lek). No problem.”

Me: “Sorry, nobody likes it when I give large bills.”

Cashier: “It’s no problem! I should know! I live here!”

Me: “I was here last summer, and I know no one likes it.”

I got the change, but not without a huffy dealing of the change.

For my next trick, I briskly rolled my bright red luggage right past the line of male taxi drivers outside the airport, all promising “ride, cheap to Durres/Sarandë (the beach),” all assuming I’m here for my Eat, Pray, Love experience. I roll right by them like a boss to the bus, which is one-sixth the price and faster. Like that, I was the albatross, taking flight.

A complication for me when traveling is my determination to not be the Ugly American. I don’t gripe about ice. I don’t wear white sneakers and baggy Capri pants. I eat the local food. I even ate mayonnaise at a fancy Spanish restaurant once, and anyone who knows me understands the sacrifice I made. Like, if I were an albatross chick starving to death on a remote Pacific island, and my albatross Dad showed up with mayonnaise, I might call it a life.

But my need to people please is greater than my desire to live, and while a Spaniard can decline mayonnaise, snails, or anchovies (foods I’ve heard Spaniards say they don’t like), I would come across as limited, xenophobic. Anthony Bourdain’s greatness as a travel writer came from his enthusiastic consumption of all foods. I’ll never forget the Thai pig blood soup he ate with grace.

“For you, Tony. RIP,” I thought as I ate the ensaladilla rusa.

Aioli, the “daise” family, “salad” in the South and Midwest, “rusa” in Spain, “Kewpie” in Japan. It’s all mayonnaise all over the world, and it’s all disgusting.

Tony knew that if you love a culture, it will, more often than not, love you back. Human interactions with people are everything to me when traveling, those moments of connection.

I had one of these later that day at the Rome airport, where I huddled at the gate for Albania, while an Air Italia employee barked constantly changing orders about the eight zones and when we could board with luggage or without luggage. One Albanian man — bless his soul — dared to ask if his zone was okay.

“No! Not you! I never mean you!” The woman dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

To me, the Kafka moment was funny, and before I could think, I laughed. He laughed, too. And we had one of those shared moments I love. I got to albatross over the water.

More often than not, I’m good at finding random people with whom to share a moment. But not always. The man might have thought I was laughing at him, not at the situation. Sometimes, I soar. Sometimes, I bumpkin.

In this same 24 hours, I had a bumpkin moment the night, I was at this grocery store in a suburb of Spain, whih had huge hams hanging at the deli. It’s very Spanish to see bougie hams for sale at what would amount to us as a Kroger.

The grocery store employed two women whose job is to saw the ham, and I mean saw like a carpenter. My first thought was to take a picture of the ham, and my second thought was that a picture of the woman sawing the ham would be more interesting.

I’m aware of not treating people like objects—I have discussions about this ethic with my journalism students—but for a moment, I forgot. The woman with the saw gave me a withering look and mouthed NO.

For what it’s worth, if you want to destroy me with a withering look while sawing ham, you can. I’ll crumple from shame and cry for you, no contest. But I’m tired of crumpling up and crying, and making a big show of my hurt feelings, which is, truth be told, childish even as I feel like a gross, gringo lady in a loud green dress.

I tried putting up my hand by way of apology, which she interpreted as me still wanting to take the picture. I accepted that the best move was to retreat to the rice aisle, remind myself of a lesson I should have already known, and feel quietly terrible until I move on, which will be about ten years from now.

How I want to be seen

How I’m probably seen

I can’t help but wonder if I should wear more black, yank my hair back in a stern bun, and get some tattoos. I don’t know. My search for a Mrs. Roper image yielded the phrase “style icon,” so there. Luckily, I’m not an albatross but a human with a middle-class income who can survive a few chomps.

In the nature documentary I watched, the albatross chick whose gripping story of survival I’d tracked for an hour lives to soar, although I’m suspicious of a composite bird character. Is this fledgling on screen that barely escapes the shark really the same one? I doubt it, but I need to believe so I can sleep, which makes me remember this Tracy Bonham song, Sharks Can’t Sleep.