Baby, you can drive my car!

Post-pandemic, as many of you know, cars available for rental are hard to find! And expensive! So I made the decision to buy a used car. They also are not in abundance currently, at least ones with automatic transmissions. Although I’ve driven manual cars before, I never owned one, so I’ve never become accustomed to it to the point that it’s second nature. The thought of taking on that task now (at my age!) might be a challenge I would take. I can’t turn down a good challenge. But there are a lot of hills here. Just recently I was behind a truck and a car and we were stopped at a stop sign at the top of a hill. The truck was having trouble and started slipping backwards. Finally the driver got it under control and drove off, but then the car in front of me began moving back towards me and came very very close to hitting me. I don’t want to be that person! I have nightmares of very angry people yelling at me in Spanish and waving their arms. No thanks.

I finally found a car with automatic transmission and not too many kilometers for not too much money. I felt so proud to have my car. I bought a car, I got Spanish car insurance, it all made me feel permanent! Then [cue scary music]…I had a little accident.

Just a few days after I got the car, I went to a celebration of the Queen’s Jubilee hosted by some of the British expats. It felt very strange to be there as an American. They sang “God Save our Queen” and toasted her with champagne. It would have been a lovely evening if it hadn’t included me hitting a small (invisible) concrete box-like thing on the side of the road leading to the parking area. I was trying to avoid the tree on one side and the drop-off on the other while navigating a hair-pin turn. And this was prior to any alcohol. What’s done is done, but such a bummer. We had three days!

Even though I really know next to nothing about cars, I am somewhat fascinated by them. Whenever I see a really unique one, I snap a photo. Some of these tiny cars look like they’re built out of Legos!

Then, there are the weird names of some cars here: Renault Trafic (with one “f”), Mercedes Marco Polo, Citroen Jumpy, Renault Scenic, Peugeot Tepee, Peugeot Bipper, Citroen Space Tourer.

This Monday was a holiday…another one…called “second Easter”. WHA? It’s the Pentecost. It is always celebrated on the fifth Sunday after the “first” Easter. According to Christian dogma, the holiday celebrates the appearance of the Holy Spirit to Christ’s disciples: the Bible says that fifty days after Jesus rose from the grave, the Holy Spirit appeared to his most trusted advisors in the form of tongues of flame, and directed them to evangelize, spreading the Christian gospel across the globe.  This is from an online source, Metropolitan Barcelona (https://www.barcelona-metropolitan.com/features/culture/segunda-pascua-the-second-easter/). It’s main popularity, I think, is that it is a long weekend just at the beginning of the summer season.