Pandora

Pandora's Box:  An artifact of Greek mythology . . . and actually a large jar which contained all the evils of the world.

That's some jar.  Some skeptics see a similarity between this story and the Bible's Adam and Eve tale, which occurred much later.  I'm just sayin.'

Grind: To move with much difficulty or friction.

Today we climb into our VW Polo and begin the descent from the heady spiritual heights of Montserrat and into the controlled implosion that is Barcelona.  The trip has awakened a whole Pandora's Box of nagging little worries: I need gasoline to avoid the hefty for returning the car un-full but I don't know where the gas stations are - they aren't located every 50 feet like the The States - and I don't want to get off in a bad neighborhood, which seems likely the closer I get to the inner city, while making sure I don't buy the gas too early and use up enough gas to put me in Fine Land, AND, I confess, I'd like to use as much gas as possible without the needle dropping below full which is . . . you know . . . pretty unethical.

Then there's the whole driving in Barcelona thing.  The roads in Europe are roughly the same size as a rain gutter in The States.  Driving rules are flexible and indeterminate.  I would be in a deep, dark dungeon in Vacation City were I to pull half the moves I pull on an average drive here and I may be the most law-abiding driver in Spain.  People really just go where they want to go - there doesn't seem to be much concern for where anyone else is.  If I'm kind and let one person merge then I open the door to a whole merge-a-thon, people merging right at my car.  If you blink you die.  Other drivers can smell your weakness and they come from miles around to merge in front of you.  They make outrageously illegal U-turns to come back and re-merge, laughing all the while.  When you start to recognize the people cutting you off it's time to pull over and take some deep breaths.

The gas thing went OK, $90 to fill the $%!! car notwithstanding, although I did get behind some slacker kids at the station trying to buy tobacco and cokes and snacks and shit.  The attendant rolled her eyes at me as if to say "fuckin' kids."  And I did successfully get the car into the general area of our apartment.  There are so many narrow, Medieval one-way roads in there that if I entered I would never get back out.  Fifty years from now I'd still be in there driving around.  I parked in a no-stopping-ever handicapped loading zone next to a fire hydrant in front of a nursing home while SuperK went for the keys.  I had to move the car several times, shushed out of the way by delivery guys and municipal workers with a "eh, what can you do" good cheer.  I had to move but no one seemed too mad about it.  

I had rivers of sweat pouring off me by the time SuperK returned with the keys - keys the owner didn't want to give her because she wasn't . . . you know . . . me.  The woman holding the keys was a new contact and spoke no English and kept trying to take my wife to the apartment. SuperK managed to finally pantomime: "If you don't give me the keys right now I'm going to kill you."  When she returned I put on my emergency blinkers and we hustled the luggage to our place.  I enjoyed using the blinkers - all the lights on the car go on and off, on and off.  There was no emergency, to the best of my knowledge, beyond the fact that I didn't want to move the car again.  We got the car back to Europcar, full of gas and none the worse for wear and despite a printed sheet warning that people will try to steal your luggage, they'll try to divert you by offering to help some non-existent problem, they'll impersonate a Europcar employee to steal the whole fucking car, for chrissake.  I was vaguely worried about this, too.

SuperK said: "I feel like I'm home."  That's a good feeling.  Everything went fine.  Niggling worries added up to nothing.  I didn't worry about them too much but I shouldn't have worried about them at all.  It was a day of little victories over little challenges and that, my friends, is a big part of what makes travel such a grind and such a joy.