S2E4- Primer l’amor després de la tècnica: Life lessons in Espainia

Kaixo guztioi eta ongi etorri blogaren beste edizio batera.

For the first time this summer, I am actually sitting down to start this blog on a Friday instead of a Sunday, mostly because I have my one and only full weekend trip with a hotel stay coming up. I’ll save all the details for the end of the post when I finish writing this all up on Monday morning before work, but the quick teaser is that I’m headed for Logroño and Pamplona.

While I try to include a life lesson or takeaway in all of these posts—whether it be to buy the correct ingredients at the supermarket (a lesson I’m still learning), the worst way to travel (a 7.5-hour bus ride), or how to navigate life in your second language—this week just felt especially full of solid life lessons. So, with that in mind, let me introduce you to lesson number one.

1. The question isn’t why women aren't having kids—it’s why they are.

As I hinted at last week, I began my new internship with ELFAC, the European Large Families Confederation. Day one involved learning more about the organization, meeting the three other interns, getting our first tasks, and, of course, sampling the office coffee.

The new office is much closer than the previous one and much nicer. I actually commented to my roommate when we stepped inside that this was exactly the type of space I was going to recommend the strategic plan team transfer to. It has individual offices, a large conference table in the main area that doubles as our intern workstation, beautiful balconies, and a kitchen. The office is much smaller than the last one, but with only five permanent employees and us five interns, it makes sense.

Still, it’s quite funny to see our jefe try to manage us all because it seems like one of us is always finishing a task and needing a new one, or asking a question. Managing us is honestly a full-time job. On our first day, our introductory meeting lasted about three hours, and notably, none of the topics discussed included pineapples or side tangents that didn’t make any sense—which was a massive upgrade.

In short, ELFAC is an advocacy group that hosts events and conferences for families with policymakers, and generally advocates for large families both within individual European nations and in the EU.

About halfway through our meeting, our jefe asked if we wanted coffee or some sketchy-looking herbal tea that the previous intern from South Korea had left behind. He went down the line and everyone said no, until he got to me. Obviously, I said yes, because I needed to report back to all of you on whether this was an improvement from the last office’s terrible coffee. I started to get up to make it myself, but our jefe called in another employee to brew it for me like we were in a restaurant. It was a little embarrassing… but then he asked everyone again if they wanted coffee. Suddenly, the entire intern team changed their minds. This poor lady went from office employee to barista for five interns plus our boss in the blink of an eye. The coffee was nothing fancy, but we have a Nespresso machine, and that tends to make acceptable coffee, so I’m content.

After the coffee interruption and the conclusion of our meeting, we were assigned our different tasks—mine being the coolest, by far. I am in charge of writing official ELFAC feedback on EU policies. Basically, any time the EU wants to introduce a policy or update a law, they host a platform for citizens and organizations to submit feedback or statements. This week, I wrote feedback on the EU’s “Right to Stay,” a policy designed to offer economic development and resources so that EU citizens can remain in their home regions rather than being forced to relocate due to economic circumstances.

My statement focused on large families, the increased costs they face, and their need for more robust support. Since ELFAC writes a lot of these statements, the majority of the research was already done in past documents; I just had to piece together the relevant statistics for this specific policy, which took a few hours.

ELFAC’s entire philosophy centers around the idea that with declining birth rates—where the EU population is failing to maintain replacement levels—large families (defined as three or more children) are performing a vital social service by repopulating Europe, meaning they should be entitled to more social benefits.

Sociologically, I still have a lot of questions. Like, who says the current number of EU citizens is the optimal number? Maybe we need fewer? What is the actual livelihood of children living in large families? Do they receive the same level of support, attention, and parenting as children in smaller families? Do older siblings end up having to parent the younger ones?

I’m certainly not saying that large families don’t need support—they definitely do—but I think I need a bit more data to be fully convinced about the whole “large families repopulating the entire earth” narrative.

That brought up a broader discussion about why women aren’t having children right now. I understand that birth rates and having kids are important, but I don’t think it comes down to a single, simple answer like “it’s too expensive,” or even my own default answers like “access to birth control and women’s access to higher education.”

In the past, having children was viewed essentially as a career for women—a way of fulfilling a duty to her husband and society. Now, more than ever, having kids isn’t an obligation; it’s a choice. To be honest, framing it as a duty to society feels a bit Handmaid’s Tale to me. It’s not like you just have the kid and that’s it. It’s a lifetime sacrifice of time, energy, love, and, of course, money. You can’t just spontaneously jump on a flight to Logroño for the weekend; you have to calculate the cost of taking your kids, hiring a babysitter, or asking a relative to watch them. Your life is no longer just about you (and maybe your partner)—it revolves around a whole other person you are entirely responsible for.

Our working hours at this new internship are only 9:30 AM to 2:00 PM. We come into the office Mondays and Wednesdays, and occasionally Tuesdays or Thursdays depending on what’s happening, with Fridays entirely free. If you’re doing the math on that and wondering how it adds up to my required 32 hours, don’t worry, so am I. But I really can’t complain, because the work is interesting and I actually get to write directly to the EU.

2. The American is the best EU citizen.

Through my research on this “Right to Stay” policy and my next assignment for next week—which, ironically, is about the “Right to Leave”—I’ve learned a lot about freedom of movement throughout the EU. Page after page on official websites, I read that the EU is a melting pot of cultures and that they want to encourage cross-cultural interaction. However, the reality on the ground is quite different.

While the EU may fund initiatives like Erasmus—a program that sends students and young adults to other EU countries to study or work to foster exchange—the cultural landscape remains highly segmented. Every EU country has its own distinct, fiercely protected culture. If you want a truly great tortilla and a chance to practice your Spanish, you come to Spain. If you want Greek culture, you go to Greece. That isn’t a melting pot; those are completely separate pots. While you can visit different pots on vacation or for a study abroad stint, when you return home, that culture doesn’t stick around in your own pot.

Compare that to the United States. If you go to a city like New York, you have tastes of almost every single culture in the world accessible by a single subway ride. You have Spanish restaurants on one block, Little Italy on another, Chinatown down the street, and so on. People intermingle constantly, and you end up with a person like me: someone who is 25 percent Polish, 25 percent French (but really French-Canadian, because my ancestors decided to stop there before hitting the US), and then a whole mix of British Isles ancestry from England and Scotland, a bit of Switzerland, and random fragments of other places. I speak English and Spanish, but I have a French last name that no one in my family actually pronounces correctly. My new boss loves to repeatedly ask if my family is from France, followed by a detailed travelogue of all the French places he’s visited—as if I’ve been there, or as if anyone in my lineage has set foot in France since the 1400s. I have a babchi (Polish for grandmother), a grandma, had a pépé (French for grandfather… I think), and a grandfather who passed away when I was too young to remember what we even called him. To add to the confusion, I will soon officially be a Polish citizen, as my parents finally acquired the last breakthrough document we needed during their anniversary trip when they stopped in Poland.

The point is, that is a melting pot. Everything gets tossed into the blender, and you end up with a slightly culturally confused American who apparently should have taken French in school instead of Spanish (though, to be fair, my small rural middle school only offered Spanish).

But the more I work with and learn about the EU, the more I think it would be incredibly cool to work there eventually. I still have no idea how their bureaucracy actually functions, how much they pay, or really what they do day-to-day, but honestly, I am their ideal candidate. I already have a little piece of almost every European country inside me—even if I’m a bit partial to some over others.

3. When cooking with alcohol, you must cook the alcohol fully.

Post-day one at the internship, I hit up Mercadona and got ready for my Basque Culinary Week. On the menu was txipirones en su tinta (squid in its own ink), bacalao al pil-pil (cod cooked in its own fat), and sukalki (a Basque beef stew situation).

On Monday, I decided to attempt the squid, which turned out to be much more time-intensive than I thought. A few things went wrong right off the bat. First, I didn’t read the entire recipe before starting. I got almost to the very end only to discover that the final step was to put everything from the pot into a blender to smooth out the sauce. Having no blender, I went for a strainer instead—and effectively lost all the concentrated flavor of everything I had just cooked. I poured the remaining liquid over the txipirones and excitedly took my first bite, only to get what I can only describe as a mouthful of pure alcohol mixed with raw onion. Gross.

After some frantic troubleshooting with Google and Gemini, I discovered that I probably hadn’t cooked the brandy long enough to burn off the alcohol, and the onions hadn’t fully softened—compounded, of course, by losing the bulk of the sauce to my blender-less straining method. Did I still eat this terrible, onion-heavy squid “cooked” in brandy? Yes. I was hungry, and I like squid. Side note: brandy is disgusting, yet it seems like every recipe I looked at this week demanded it.

Before realizing that my squid were actually bathing in raw brandy rather than their own ink, I did try to offer them to my roommates. One shot me down with a swift “I don’t like seafood,” while the other hit me with, “People who eat squid and octopus are cool,” before proceeding to interrogate the protein-to-calorie ratio rather than actually tasting it. Week four, and I still haven’t convinced either of them to try a single Spanish dish. I should have led with, “I brought back wine from Basque Country,” which probably would have gotten more takers. Then again, they only drink Rosé, and Txakoli is a pretty far cry from a Rosé.

Later in the week, I attempted the sukalki, only to be met with the exact same luck. I really should have foreseen the curse of the txipirones, which—the last time I consumed them in Basque Country—led to an unexpected, off-course, let’s-call-it-“adventure.”

Pues nada, I got ready at 6:30 PM to cook this sukalki, only to learn as I was pulling out the ingredients that I had bought morcilla instead of morcillo. As it turns out, those are two wildly different things. Morcilla is a blood sausage. Morcillo is beef shank.

I then proceeded to go on an hour-long expedition to find this actual beef shank, hitting two different supermarkets. Once again, just like last week, I found myself standing in the aisles of Mercadona chatting with Gemini about why I couldn’t find this mysterious cut of meat. Well, apparently, Mercadona organizes its carne section based on the animal’s age rather than the type of cut—because that makes total sense. They didn’t have a single package labeled morcillo; instead, it was called something like “Meat for Cocido.” Gemini didn’t bother telling me to look for that until I finally uploaded a photo to ask if it was the right stuff, to which it cheerfully replied, “Yes! That is exactly what you want.” Um… why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?

I finally got back to the apartment and went into full cocinera mode, chopping up an endless mountain of onions (side note: why does every single recipe in Spain involve cebolla?), potatoes, and carrots. Everything was going beautifully until I made two stark discoveries. First, this stew had to simmer for a full three hours. Second, once it was done cooking, I was once again going to need a blender. Third, once blended, it had to cook for another twenty minutes. I knew stews took a long time, but three hours? What could it possibly be doing in there for that long? By that point, it was around 8:20 PM and I started the three-hour timer. I gave up on actually eating the stew that night (Tuesday), stayed up until nearly midnight just to transfer it to the nevera, and resolved to figure out the blender dilemma the next day.

After work on Wednesday, I did some deep internet research and discovered you can use a metal mesh strainer and the back of a spoon to “blend” vegetables. My small strainer only held about a cup of liquid at a time, meaning this manual pureeing process took a grueling 30 minutes to get through the entire pot before I could finally combine it back with the potatoes. At around 3:30 PM on Wednesday, I finally sat down to my stew. Well, kind of. After eating, I realized I had completely forgotten to add the peas. So, by Thursday at 2:30 PM, I finally achieved the true, complete sukalki experience.

I have to say, it was actually better without the peas, but I’d still give the final dish an 8/10. It was good, but at the end of the day, it’s just a stew—nothing earth-shattering. However, this recipe yielded about 10 massive servings, even though I scaled it back and only used 1 liter of broth instead of 1.5. Since then, life has been a strategic game of how much stew I can tolerate and how much I can successfully give away. So far, I’ve managed to conquer two lunches of it (it’s so filling that by the time dinner arrives, I’m still stuffed), and I have given zero servings away. It will definitely be heading into the freezer alongside the cod later today.

It’s crazy to think that this is my life right now—constantly worrying about stew logistics and salad materials going bad. I feel like there are so many better uses for my mental energy, but hey, I gotta eat, right?

4. Side quests are the best kind of quests.

This week involved finding creative ways to fill my afternoons, since my working hours wrap up at 2:00 PM. Aside from tackling giant culinary experiments and surviving massive Mercadona hauls—where I bought so much food that the cashier genuinely asked if I had brought a car to load the groceries into, even though it was only two bags worth—I’ve had my fair share of adventures.

After a text message from my brother alerting me that Formula 1 was coming to town, I decided to head down to the F1 Village at Plaça de Catalunya to see what all the hype was about. Not being an F1 fan myself, and knowing absolutely nothing about it other than the fact that it involves cars driving around in circles and that my brother likes McLaren, I didn’t really know what to expect. Naturally, I dragged my roommate along, who knew just as little as I did. We looked at cars, took photos of said cars, and I somehow got talked into waiting over an hour in line to try the racing simulator. I was so spectacularly bad at it that I finished a solid 60 seconds behind the second-to-last person; by the time I finished, everyone else had already stood up and the next group was ready to start. It didn’t help that my virtual car ended up facing backwards on the track at least ten times.

In real life, I am actually a great driver—unlike my brother, who tends to drive his Honda CR-V like it’s an F1 car. However, my simulator strategy of flooring the gas the entire time around sharp corners didn’t pan out so well.

On Wednesday, I headed to the Mooby cinema to catch a random rom-com I had never heard of before. Why? Because last summer I never quite achieved my goal of watching an actual Spanish movie (meaning an original Spanish production, not an American film dubbed in Spanish) in a real theater. Plus, it happened to be Cinema Week in Spain, which meant all tickets were markdown prices at €3.50—so there was no better time.

It was the exact genre of movie that, had it been in English, I would have actively avoided, but my mom absolutely would have loved. This was quickly confirmed when I texted her a photo of the poster; she immediately asked what movie it was, to which I replied, “A Spanish one.” Because basically the entire readership of this blog, minus two people, doesn’t speak Spanish—and the two of you who do should definitely not watch this terrible film—here is a quick recap of the plot.

The movie opens on Lea, an older teenager, in a car with her family. They crash, and her parents tragically die. A year later, Lea is living with her older brother, who decides he needs to move to Berlin to earn tuition money for her. Because of her grief, Lea is repeating her final year of bachillerato (essentially high school). The brother asks his best friend, Axel, to look after Lea while he is away. Lea moves into Axel’s place and is deeply depressed. She spends all her time locked in her bedroom until Axel steps in to “teach her how to be happy again.” Predictably, they fall in love. The brother returns, discovers the relationship, and gets furious because Lea suddenly decides she doesn’t want to go to college anymore; she just wants to stay with Axel in his dramatic house perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean in the Basque Country. There is a massive fight. Eventually, Lea and Axel talk and decide they rushed into things, concluding that she needs to go to university and see the world after all. The movie ends with Lea standing in San Sebastián with her suitcase.

Setting aside the significant age gap between Axel and a girl who is literally still in high school, Lea fundamentally needed a licensed therapist, not a boyfriend. The whole thing was incredibly bizarre and riddled with plot holes; one scene Lea is so depressed she is literally attempting to drown herself in the ocean, and in the very next scene, she is suddenly cured and joyful. It made no sense. Maybe the editors accidentally cut the scene where she sees a psychiatrist and gets a proper prescription.

Despite the terrible plot, it was a fantastic experience because it was the first movie I’ve watched entirely in Spanish without any subtitles where I understood basically everything. I was a little confused during the breakup scene about what exactly was happening, but honestly, I think the characters were confused too. It was also really cool when the film ended at the iconic bridge in San Sebastián, right near the coffee shop I was just sitting at last weekend.

Maybe it was the cosmic energy of the lead-up to the 100-year anniversary of Gaudí’s death, the rumors of the Pope visiting, or the giant firework and drone display I watched from my roommate’s balcony on Wednesday night, but on Thursday, I woke up feeling incredibly creative. Since I was “working” from home and my EU policy feedback was already submitted for the week, I decided to update my scrapbook with mementos from my recent travels.

After lunch, I headed out to a local pottery-painting studio to start working on a souvenir mug. If you remember from last summer’s blogs, I painted a mug here in Barcelona that easily became my most-used cup of the 2025–2026 school year, serving as my daily afternoon tea mug. Naturally, I needed to create a successor. I dragged my roommate along for the journey again, and two hours later, my new tea mug was complete. Well, almost—I have to go back in two weeks to pick it up after it fires in the kiln.

The only downside to this particular ceramic studio was the workflow: instead of letting you grab the paints yourself, every single time you wanted a new color, you had to flag down the owner to pour it for you, which became a bit tedious. That said, the mug turned out beautifully and highlights all the places I have visited or plan to visit in Spain… so there might be a few visual spoilers painted on there regarding my upcoming travel plans.

6. Religion can be beautiful.

I’m not particularly religious, nor am I Catholic, but I do have to say that Barcelona did an amazing job hosting a beautiful event with the Pope at the Sagrada Família. I didn’t see the Pope in person—or, more importantly on my personal list of people I want to spot, the King and Queen—but I caught them all on a giant broadcast screen right outside the movie theater on Wednesday. I wasn’t planning on lingering since I was heading home from the movies, but I ended up watching a solid 15 minutes of it because it was just so striking. From the choral singing to the golden vestments and the sheer art of the Sagrada Família itself, it was very cool.

7. Religious ceremonies are long.

After heading back to the piso and relaxing for an hour, I stepped out onto my roommate’s balcony at 9:00 PM to watch the big firework display. Then came 9:15 PM, 9:30 PM, 9:45 PM, 10:00 PM… until finally, around 10:10 PM, things actually kicked off. Maybe the website I checked simply had the start time wrong, or maybe the ceremony was just heavily delayed, but I was out on that balcony for a very long time.

It was entirely worth it, though, because the fireworks were spectacular and the drone show was also very cool. It was also pretty amusing to watch the Pope on my phone screen wave a liturgical branch to throw holy water at the Sagrada Família for the blessing. I think he was supposed to be blessing the massive tower that was just completed, but the water was nowhere close to actually touching the building itself. The concrete pavement below, however, is now deeply blessed.

8. Internships are complicated.

Not in the sense that the actual work is difficult, but rather that organizations often don’t seem to know how to structure an internship program. I guess that makes sense; no one explicitly teaches businesses how to design a meaningful internship. Even my mom once admitted to me that she doesn’t think the internship her workplace coordinates with a local college is very good, though she does attribute some of the blame to the interns themselves. Consequently, part of my self-assigned project when I get back home is redesigning their internship structure.

I understand the challenge: it’s tough to bring an inexperienced new person onto your team who might know nothing about your specific operations. You have to find a manageable task for this enthusiastic student, balance that task with giving them a broader understanding of the organization’s different roles, and make them feel included in the team culture. Most importantly, you have to give them enough work to stay engaged without completely overwhelming them.

Maybe it’s just a Spain thing—though my winter break internship with a textbook publisher felt similar, just to a lesser extent—but organizations seem terrified of giving their interns real work. Even with this new role, my weekly task was simply to write a policy feedback statement of about 500 words. Yes, a fair amount of baseline research had to go into those 500 words, but the vast majority of it was lifted directly from the organization’s own website and their past statements. And even after all that effort, when my boss told me it looked great and forwarded it to a colleague in Madrid, she basically rewrote the entire thing—including some highly questionable grammar choices. That and my jefe told me he would submit the writing under my name, and instead, not only submitted it to the wrong EU policy but did so under his name. Honestly, thank god. I don’t think it would have been a good look for me.

Maybe it’s just me having misaligned expectations, even though this is my second internship, but I generally expected a balanced mix of project ownership and shadowing organizational tasks. Instead, it feels like a lot of sitting at a desk and twiddling my thumbs. Maybe it’s because I’m a Princeton student and a blogger who is used to turning out 10 single-spaced pages in a few hours, so my efficiency is just calibrated differently. Or maybe I’m just adjusting to the pacing. Either way, it’s quite an odd rhythm.

That isn’t to say this internship is bad; quite the opposite. The environment is a massive upgrade from my last placement. We’ve met everyone in the office, consult with our boss multiple times a day, have our own official company email addresses (which feels like it should be standard practice, but wasn’t at my last job), and enjoy a proper desk space that isn’t shoved in a corner surrounded by curtains.

We even went out for aperitivos, where my roommate was finally forced to eat some Spanish food—if you count potato chips with salsa brava as Spanish food. I also tried my very first vermut, which felt like a massive milestone. Back in my Spanish 108 class, we read a story where a couple named Pilar and Manuel go on a date, and Manuel drinks vermut. To be completely honest, I don’t entirely remember the plot—I think it involved streetlamps, darkness, a river, and themes of toxic masculinity—but I distinctly remembered the vermut.

The moral of the story: a year later, your students aren’t going to remember the fine narrative arc; they’re going to remember the alcoholic drinks. Okay, that sounds a bit questionable on paper, but the vermut discussion was a major talking point. Anyway, it was a very cool full-circle moment to be sipping my own vermut at the bar. I am happy to report there were absolutely no issues with streetlamps, darkness, rivers, or toxic masculinity. It was just my boss launching into an enthusiastic rant about the best cities to visit in Europe, while I tried to convince the interns that there is plenty of incredible stuff to see without ever crossing the Spanish border. We can call it Balada del Besòs: the epic, good-natured battle between my very sweet boss (who, for the sake of the visual, is definitely grandfather-aged) and me over where the rest of the interns should travel. I promise you it’s a hilarious dynamic if you know the geography of Barcelona and the class reading, but it’s definitely an “unfiltered, had-to-be-there” situation.

9. If you have two or more roommates and they both have novios, you will eat in the jungle.

Okay, maybe they aren’t full-on novios—one of them is definitely more of a talking-stage situationship—but anyway. During our first week here, Novio A attempted to send flowers to Roommate A. Unfortunately, due to a distinct lack of communication and him not realizing he needed to specify our exact apartment door number at the address, the flowers never arrived.

Enter Novio/Situationship B. Looking to gain some serious traction, achieve official novio status, or perhaps just one-up Novio A, he sends a floral arrangement to Roommate B. These weren’t just basic grocery store flowers; they were quite literally the most beautiful, lavish flowers I have seen in my entire life. They must have cost easily €150—absolutely wild.

Well, naturally, Roommate A then had to show Novio A a picture of the stunning arrangement Roommate B received, which meant Novio A had to immediately send a retaliatory round of flowers—this time with the correct apartment number.

As a result, our kitchen table is currently completely buried in floral arrangements, and I have to eat my meals like I’m foraging in a tropical jungle. I should also note that our apartment, predictably, only came equipped with a single vase. Roommate A had just left her extra bouquet out on the counter to dry up, so I kindly salvaged the wilted stems by arranging them in a plastic Tupperware container. Nothing screams romance quite like flowers in Tupperware, am I right?

But seriously, guys… if you’re reading this, we don’t need any more flowers. How about a digital gift card so the three of us (myself included, because I am providing the unfiltered intelligence here) can go get actual coffee? And please make sure it’s a high-end specialty coffee shop, because your novias are creating all kinds of chaotic mad-scientist concoctions in the kitchen every morning. I am talking cinnamon, salt, condensed milk—absolute wildness. No more flowers; our kitchen table simply cannot handle the structural weight. Or better yet, just have the coffee delivered directly to the apartment. I’ll take a classic café con leche, and then we’ll just need two iced coffees loaded with syrups, sugar, cinnamon, and every single add-on they could possibly fit into a cup.

10. Don’t eat strange food in the office.

I know I’ve gone on and on about how I will try absolutely anything. However, if a coworker approaches you with a tin full of unidentified objects and tells you to try one, make sure you ask what it is before agreeing. Otherwise, you might just find yourself with a mouth full of pure wasabi.

11. You learn Spanish just to unlearn it.

They really need to offer a university class on how to text in Spanish, because it honestly feels like unlearning everything your professors told you was important. Don’t dare put the upside-down question mark or exclamation mark at the start of a sentence. Suddenly, qué becomes just q or k. Anything containing por is abbreviated to a single x. And then there’s the complete lack of standard grammar.

I kid you not, I got a text message a few weeks ago from the Spanish volunteering women that contained a major grammar and spelling issue. There I was, doing a deep internet dive to decode what this mysterious, unknown word could possibly mean, only to find out 10 minutes later from AI that it was just a simple typo. Yeah, I do the same exact shortcut texting stuff in English, but it just feels so different in Spanish—like I am intentionally making mistakes just to meet the local “style guidelines.”

12. Primer l’amor, després la tècnica.

Maybe it’s still a little too early to be getting sentimental or diving too deep into lifelong takeaways. But with my halfway mark landing on the 13th, and having all my trips for the rest of the summer officially planned out thanks to some very helpful recommendations from a local Spaniard (hint: it wasn’t my boss), it feels like everything is already wrapping to a close.

That bittersweet feeling brings me back to a beautiful gem of a quote by Antoni Gaudí that was projected onto the Barcelona night sky via drones during the celebration: “Primer l’amor, després la tècnica.” Roughly translated into English, it means: “First love, then technique.” Or, perhaps better put: First passion, then skill.

In life, we seem to get very wrapped up in one centralizing topic: money. And to get money, you are told you need marketable skills. But really, and far more excitingly, there is passion. Passion is the thing that causes you to write 10-page single-spaced blogs for just a handful of people to read, to curate scrapbooks, to take photographs, to come to Spain, to come to Spain again, and to study sociology. While technique and skill may secure you jobs, opportunities, and short-term milestones, passion wins out in the long run. Because those with passion aren’t doing something for an award, a resume line, or a paycheck—they do it because they have to. Because they could think of nothing better to do with their time.

Thinking back on my research journey over the past year, it has naturally been very skills-focused. It has to be, considering I’m an undergraduate navigating the technicalities of research methodology and sociological frameworks. But when you step back, look at it all from the balcony of your apartment here in Spain, and start calculating the endless hours spent reading, studying, and battling over the syntax of a single paragraph, it can all seem quite silly and stressful. But then you remember what brought you to those exact moments: the initial question, the burning desire to know more, and the passion that turns a project into your entire world for a few months. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so bad.

Maybe that’s just a long way of saying I’m feeling the effects of this 1.5-month mandated break from my boarding school research project, and I have definitely been checking my email a little too frequently waiting for my feedback to come back. Or maybe it’s just a way of admitting that there’s something about Spain that makes me entirely willing to survive 7.5-hour long bus rides—which all of my relatives now think have live chickens strapped to the roof because my dad thought it would be funny to announce that at a birthday party last weekend. It’s the same energy that lets me wake up at 4:15 AM to catch a train to Pamplona, or gives me the ability to name more regional Spanish cities on a map than the average Spaniard.

But enough of the sentimental stuff—there are still four weeks to go, and I haven’t even talked about my fin de semana. Or, as we say in text language: fds.

After effectively running out of ideas for new places to travel to in Spain, I sent a mid-week WhatsApp message to Gorka, my Spanish professor from last year who happens to be from Spain. Very kindly, he sent me an entire essay of a reply packed with brilliant suggestions, one of which was Pamplona.

So, I pulled up my computer on Wednesday while at work—mostly because I had absolutely nothing else to do—and started trying to figure out how on earth one gets to Pamplona from Barcelona. Spoiler alert: you don’t. At least, not easily. I am convinced that Renfe and all the major bus lines have some sort of under-the-table financial agreement with the hotels in Pamplona, because they made it physically impossible to do a quick overnight-bus day trip like the one I pulled off last week to San Sebastián. To be completely honest with you all, I had absolutely zero desire to subject myself to a 7.5-hour bus ride like that ever again.

I started getting a little more creative and looked up the surrounding regional airports. Bilbao was still on my radar because I had found a cool mountain trek online a few weeks ago that I wanted to check out, but the lack of flight alignment and available tickets made it impossible to pull together last-minute. I checked San Sebastián, but the flight prices were absolutely ridiculous. Then, while scrolling through Vueling’s route options, I spotted Logroño—the capital of La Rioja, aka the wine capital of Spain—which was only a two-hour bus ride away from Pamplona. I figured, why not? and booked a one-way flight there, along with a train ticket back from Pamplona to Barcelona.

Important side note: I learned a major trick about Vueling’s website to secure cheaper flights. You can’t just enter your destination and dates into the main homepage search bar. Instead, you have to find and click the hidden “Deals” button, which takes you to a flight “outlet” page. It shows you the exact same flights as the main page, just significantly cheaper. I have no idea how this pricing system works or how it’s even legal, but I scored my flight for €64, which I thought wasn’t too bad.

If you’re wondering what exactly is in Logroño, don’t worry—so was I as I boarded the plane, only to discover that practically nobody was on it. Well, let me rephrase: there was a decent concentration of people exactly where I was assigned, because Vueling loves to completely pack the very back rows of the aircraft (including the middle seats, which I had) while leaving three-quarters of the cabin completely empty.

Luckily, a flight attendant must have seen the look of pure disgust on my face in the absolute last row. I was stuck in a middle seat next to a girl whose hair was so incredibly long it was draped all over my armrest. The attendant came over and asked if I wanted to move from row 31 up to row 4. I practically sprinted to the front of the plane and snagged the aisle seat.

At this point, it still hadn’t fully processed that I was headed to the middle of nowhere. The flight was at 7:30 AM, meaning I had woken up at 4:00 AM to catch the opening of the metro gates at 5:00 AM. I then proceeded to miss my connection and had to wait a agonizing 30 minutes in a station 80 meters below ground for the airport line, completely convincing myself that I was going to miss my flight.

Spoiler: I arrived at 6:15 AM and had plenty of time to grab a coffee, use the restroom, and aimlessly scroll through Instagram. Airport security in Spain is remarkably efficient; you basically just walk right through to the gate. The point is, I didn’t want to shell out €33 for a Cabify, so I played a high-stakes game of “let’s see if free public transport gets me there in time.” I was so sleep-deprived and genuinely surprised that I actually made it onto the tarmac that I didn’t put two and two together: an empty plane usually means you are heading somewhere incredibly remote.

An hour later, we touched down. I walked down the mobile stairs onto the tarmac to find myself standing in the smallest airport I have ever seen in my entire life, with our plane being the lone commercial aircraft on site. You should have seen the look on my face. It was a chaotic mix of, “Oh my god, these mountains are incredible,” and, “What on earth did I just sign up for?”

With La Rioja being the wine capital, I had assumed it would be a prime, bustling international tourist destination. I assumed very wrong. It was a prime destination, sure, but apparently only for domestic bachelor parties. Around every single corner, there was a group of guys celebrating a despedida de soltero in matching, embarrassing t-shirts.

I spent my morning wandering the streets of the city and seeing a whole lot of nothing. A nice church, a cool bridge, some old buildings—nothing groundbreaking. I was starting to worry that the day was going to be a total bore. But then, right around 12:00 PM, things started to get exciting. The local bars finally began rolling up their metal shutters, and a massive crowd of people started spilling out into the streets. Gemini had designed a custom pintxo crawl and wine-tasting itinerary for me, so I was starving and ready to dive in.

Let me just say: the wine in La Rioja was incredible. It was easily the best I’ve ever tasted, though, as you can imagine, I have very little to compare it to.

My first stop was the famous Bar Soriano for their even more famous champis—essentially a towering stack of grilled mushrooms on a stick, topped with a single shrimp, sitting on a slice of bread catching all the garlic butter. Gemini had explicitly instructed me to pick out a white wine to pair with these mushrooms, but knowing absolutely nothing about wine, and with the menu board being completely illegible, I spotted the name Ramón Bilbao. It sounded cool, so I figured, what the heck. It was solid—absolutely no complaints from me.

One thing I quickly realized on this pintxo tour was that the prices were fantastic. Or, better put, they were exactly what I wished I had paid in San Sebastián for some mushrooms on a stick and a glass of wine. In fact, all the pintxos I had in Logroño were so well-priced and reasonable that you could easily hop from bar to bar without completely tanking your budget.

I can’t say I fully followed the itinerary Gemini mapped out for me, mostly because it involved consuming something like five glasses of wine in a single afternoon, which seemed a little crazy for a solo traveler. So, the next couple of stops were purely food-related.

Bar Lorenzo served up what they call a Tío Agus—a mini-sandwich filled with perfectly seasoned marinated pork loin (lomo de cerdo adobado) slathered in a secret garlic-herb sauce. It wasn’t exactly life-changing, but it was a pretty great bite.

After that, I hit up Blanco y Negro, which is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, bars on Calle Laurel. I went to try their famous matrimonio (the “marriage”), a crispy mini-baguette topped with a salt-cured anchovy, a vinegar-marinated white anchovy (boquerón), and a strip of sweet roasted green pepper. I was supposed to ask for a specific, sweet, artisanal wine that the bar is famous for, but the bartender told me they were out of it—or maybe they just didn’t have it, I forget. Instead, he poured me an alternative. I have absolutely no idea what it was, but it was spectacular. In hindsight, I really should have gone back and asked the guy what kind of magic was in that glass, but perhaps one day I’ll just happen across this mystery wine again.

My final stop of the day was Bar Sebas to try their famous take on the tortilla española—if you can even call it that. It was a standard slice of tortilla that they decided to drench in a vibrant, hot pepper slurry. I don’t know what personal vendetta the chef had against the classic tortilla or humanity in general, but I was standing in that bar practically crying from the heat. I couldn’t even taste the actual eggs or potatoes. From what I could decipher through the pain, it wasn’t anything groundbreaking—just your average tortilla, but served with a lethal dose of hot sauce.

I should note that while Gemini assured me these were the absolute best places to go, they didn’t seem to be the venues hosting the massive bachelor parties. Maybe when you’re completely drunk at a bachelor party, culinary prestige isn’t your top priority, but these bars were relatively empty. It was surprising, considering every single recommendation Gemini made for San Sebastián involved pure chaos and lines snaking out the door. Maybe the algorithm steered me toward a few hidden gems, or maybe people genuinely come to Logroño for one specific thing—and I’ll give you a hint: it isn’t the historical architecture or the food.

After wrapping up the food tour, I headed over to the bus station to catch my two-hour ride to Pamplona. This bus journey was something else entirely. We swept directly through the mountainous, rolling vineyard fields that bridge La Rioja and Navarra. Now, I am not typically someone who gets motion sickness, but these winding, looping mountain roads were intense, and I was definitely not feeling my best.

If you ever find yourself on a regional bus in the middle of mountainous, rural Spain, I learned two very important things. First: bring Dramamine. Second: while Navarra is officially its own autonomous community and not legally part of the Basque Country (País Vasco), Basque culture is absolutely everywhere.

Suddenly, I was passing town names containing twenty characters of X’s, Z’s, and K’s, followed underneath by the Spanish “translation.” Every public sign was fully bilingual. It was quite a shock, because back in my Spanish classes, whenever we discussed the Basque language (Euskera), it was always neatly categorized as existing strictly within the borders of the Basque Country.

This trip accidentally signed me up for an impromptu history lesson. Historically, the Kingdom of Navarre was its own independent realm, separate from both Castile and the early Basque provinces. It held out as an independent kingdom much longer, meaning it has a distinct political history, yet it shares a profound linguistic and cultural tapestry with its neighbors. Judging by the sheer volume of Navarra/Basque Country independence posters and the fact that I saw more Basque flags (Ikurriñas) flying from balconies in Pamplona than I did in San Sebastián, the modern political and cultural connection between the two regions is incredibly tight.

Even though the road was rough on my stomach, there is something incredibly freeing about riding a bus through the middle of nowhere by yourself, on an itinerary you planned entirely on your own, watching the history of the landscape unfold out the window. That little winding bus ride turned out to be one of the major highlights of the entire trip.

After making every stop imaginable—where a “stop” was usually classified as a tiny shack on the side of the road—our bus finally rolled into Pamplona around 6:30 PM. I walked thirty minutes to my hotel, making a strategic pit stop at the famous Eroski supermarket along the way. I can completely understand why the Basques and Navarreses love this chain so much; it has absolutely everything you need to craft authentic regional cuisine. They even had premade txipirones en su tinta, which I may or may not have snagged for la cena as a comforting backup plan after my epic culinary failure earlier in the week.

The absolute highlight of the day happened during check-in. The guy working the front desk casually asked for my DNI (Documento Nacional de Identidad), meaning he genuinely mistook me for a Spanish citizen. He looked completely caught off guard when I pulled out a navy-blue United States passport instead. Almost as glorious as being mistaken for a local: this hotel room featured a huge bed and a beautiful, fully functioning persiana! How I have missed Spanish window blinds. I desperately wish our apartment in Barcelona had them; my bedroom window may only be the width of my hand, but our current curtains do absolutely nothing to block out the Mediterranean sun.

When I woke up at 8:00 AM on Sunday, the room was shrouded in a pitch-black darkness that felt like the middle of the night. It was fantastic. I spent the rest of the day wandering around the city center, completely in awe of the sheer gorgeousness that is Pamplona.

What truly made this weekend trip special was that during my entire 48 hours away from Barcelona, I heard exactly one tourist speaking English. It was a stark and welcome contrast to San Sebastián, where it feels like the entire population of Great Britain goes on vacation. I even got to hear some Basque out in the “wild” and learned two new words: agur (bye, but also hello, I think), and komunak (bathroom).

I saw ancient churches, a striking monument dedicated to the Running of the Bulls (an event where people brave the streets in front of literal bulls later in the summer), and the beautiful silhouettes of the mountains in the backdrop. I even ordered a glass of rosado (Rosé) in honor of my roommates, since Navarra is famous for it. I also tried a huevo trufado (truffled egg). Maybe it was the oppressive 95-degree heat combined with my running on zero sleep, but the texture of the dish was really off-putting to me. The flavor profile wasn’t bad, but something about the consistency just didn’t sit right.

The great news is that by the end of the weekend, I think I have finally mastered the traditional Spanish bar. It is a fast-paced, hectic environment that, as I wrote last week, requires a touch of patience and a massive dose of confidence. While you wouldn’t have caught me dead inside one of these establishments by myself last summer, I think I finally understand the hype. In fact, I think the concept could completely catch on in America.

It’s essentially the original fast food. While a sit-down lunch in Spain can easily stretch on for hours, the bar scene moves at lightning speed; you order your pintxo, and it’s on your plate practically instantly. The only difference is that in America, you eat fast food alone in your car; at a pintxo bar, you eat it standing up among a crowd. I’m telling you, this is an untapped market. You could even brand it to American audiences as “healthy” fast food.

I wrapped up my weekend by grabbing some jamón and a baguette to assemble a makeshift cena on my train ride home, which wasn’t scheduled to arrive back in Barcelona until 11:40 PM. Unfortunately, this particular bakery not only refused to provide a bag for the bread, but—as I realized many hours later into the journey—they also sold me a completely stale baguette. When I tell you there were breadcrumbs absolutely everywhere in my train row, it was bad.

To make matters worse, my phone was sitting at 50 percent, my portable charger was completely drained, and I needed to aggressively conserve battery in case the train ran late. If I arrived past midnight, I would have to figure out an alternative mode of transport, since the Sunday metro system closes exactly at 12:00 AM.

To pass the time without draining my phone, I read a random book I had downloaded about a girl who studies abroad in Madrid. On her very first night, she predictably falls in love with a Madrileño who vows to show her the city and teach her Spanish. The book was comically awful. Everyone was constantly drinking sangría, and whenever the author attempted to spell out Spanish words phonetically—to reflect the main character’s inability to speak the language—she completely botched the accent. Instead of writing how a Spaniard would actually pronounce words using distinción (where the ‘c’ and ‘z’ form a “th” sound), she wrote it using seseo, turning everything into a standard “s” sound. Maybe this is the universe signaling that I need to write my own terrible romantic comedy set in Spain; at this point, I think I am more than culturally qualified. Also, this fictional guy’s actual advice for learning the language was to just chug sangría until you start dreaming in Spanish within a few months.

Maybe this is just a personal quirk, but whenever I actually do dream in Spanish, it’s never fluent. My dreams literally consist of me awkwardly correcting my own bad grammar mid-conversation.

Finally, after a whirlwind 48 hours, I made it back to the apartment.

I’ve come to realize something incredibly important on this journey. Last summer, I saw Spain. This summer, I am doing Spain. Sure, you can observe the pintxo bars from a safe distance, let a host family handle all the cooking, or only speak Spanish when someone explicitly coaxes a response out of you first. But this summer has taught me how to be an active participant in the culture. It’s about cooking things out of your comfort zone, jumping headfirst into a crowded bar scene, navigating the enigmatic aisles of Mercadona (which I still rate a solid 9/10, by the way), mastering public transit, and even planning a traditional San Juan party for next week so my roommates can experience the full cultural calendar (we shall see if they actually buy into it—I haven’t actually told them about the party yet).

While it’s incredible to travel and sightsee, Spain isn’t just a collection of monuments. Spain is its people, and the culture lives in their collective drive to actively create community and preserve traditions—whether through food, language, or even massive, generational church-building projects.

Ondo izan aste honetan eta hurrengora arte,

Que tinguis una bona setmana i ens veiem al proper,

Que tengais una buena semana y nos vemos en el próximo,

Have a great week and we’ll see each other in the next one,

S2E4- Primer l’amor després de la tècnica: Life lessons in Espainia