Cultural Capital in the Corner Café

This is a copy of my latest English assignment - to imitate an author's writing style, in my case Hemingway's. I guess I just thought it belonged here, and want to remember it. I really wish I could have kept writing:


All the noise came from below the street. Before I found that alley off the Plaza de Toledo there was always the smell of fresh tulips in the air, and suddenly there I was among the pashminas and the waffle vendors and dozens of children were pouring out of the candy shops into the street. I would walk past these shops every Sunday afternoon that semester, making sure to drop twenty cents into the hat of a lone guitarist, and I’d glance up from time to time once I reached the view at the top of the hill. Sometimes when I had only bought mandarins and a pair of earrings I would walk home afterward. If I walked enough in this city I might not need a map anymore, and anyway it didn’t matter where I walked in Madrid because I could lose myself among the ham shops and the fruit stands and the pickpockets so that there was always something to do in the afternoon.

At first I couldn’t help but think of my American friends back home and wonder what they might be doing, but then a paralyzing nostalgia would grip me around the neck and I would duck into a small boutique to forget about it. If not for that initial fear mixed with a sense of brash curiosity I would certainly not have found my hidden flamenco cafés or bookstores and I might not even have followed a city cat down her secret path to the riverbank. These were the unwritten pleasures of my semester in Spain, where I learned of the daily rhythms and the tortillas de patatas and all the slang words for “see you later.”

All students should abandon their routines and their comfort zones to travel somewhere in the world, to be adventurous, to learn from other people’s habits. We all need to get lost when we’re five thousand miles from home before we can really know what we’re capable of, and that’s a personal truth we can’t just find in novels.

Walking through the thick desert air with the sun pressing down on me was not a feeling I could read about. The invaluable companionship of my walking shoes could not reveal my joys and fears from the comfort of a classroom desk. On the day that I first put away my map of Madrid and stepped out onto its fresh familiar sidewalk I knew that the city had entered me, and no literature professor could have captured that feeling.

Only after you have been surrounded by beautiful and immaculately-dressed Spaniards for two months can you understand the logic of buying a pair of boots with a week’s worth of lunch money. In my case it was worth the eye-widening hunger to click down the street in confident brown leather, a conclusion I never would have come to in the lazy streets of small-town Iowa. When you’ve been weaving empty-bellied through crowds all day and finally submit to a city bench, there is no word to describe the satisfaction of a slow conversation with the weary señora sitting next to you.

At last, as you find yourself accustomed to the rapid-fire Spanish bartering of the Sunday afternoon market, you realize with indescribable emotion that you are about to leave this dream world and return home. When the caipirhinas at the bar and the old man on the library steps become commonplace, when the mobs of tourists ask you for directions, when you know that your favorite bakery is coming up on the left and you can already smell the dough, then you are ready to go back home and think about your next adventure from the unsettling comfort of your dorm room desk. There is never any ending to Spain and you will never know that about a city until you strap on your scuffed shoes and look for it.