I. Madrid

Having contracted malaria and a couple of other health problems just in case malaria wasn’t enough, as Jono wrote in previous entries, I headed back to Bombay to be treated and generally recuperate. This I did while poor Jono got bitten by another of the malaria-spreading-squad, and had to suffer through malaria all by his lonesome self. This suffering included playing soccer, taking un-marked medication from an un-marked brown paper bag, and making a 16 hours bus journey from Mwanza to Dar Es Salam – none of which I was particularly happy about. However it was done, and we both made it to Madrid airport on the 18th of March. Due to the incorrigible issues that the Newton family seems to have with airports, there were a couple of harried hours spent walking up and down Madrid airport, waiting, and looking for each other, but in the end we found each other – although as we walked towards each other (movie style) we had to look many times to make sure the person walking towards us was in fact our significant other (awkward, not at all movie style). Luckily we did still recognize each other, and I was ridiculously relieved that Jono was in fact, alive, and not stuck malaria-fied in Qatar airport. We thus began the final, Europe leg of the trip.

Jono, having just come from Tanzania, was a little overwhelmed by how big, grand, clean, comfortable, sane, and wealthy Spain was. One thing that was severely lacking, however, was our ability to say anything in Spanish other than loud and irrelevant “Chiquita!” “Margarita!” “Chihuahua!” “Ensalada!” and so on…and it was kind of amazing how very much better Jono’s Swahili was than his Spanish, even though it’s a romance language and he’s had his fair share of studying French and Latin. While our Spanish was non-existent, so was – as we very rapidly discovered – the Spaniards’ English. Trying to ask for directions was out of the question, attempting conversation was mostly futile, and requesting vegetarian food invariably resulted in little lobster heads sticking out of my paella. The menus and sign-boards that had horrible English translations were baffling. These included ‘thigh’ instead of ‘thai’ on the menu of a fairly classy restaurant, and ‘cooffe’ instead of ‘coffee’ on a huge sign-post at the Madrid airport. Jono drove himself almost to tears lamenting on this, asking why no-one would pay him ten euros to read their menus or signs before blowing them up, laminating them, or hanging them for all and sundry to mis-read.

Although almost everyone we had spoken to about Madrid said they didn’t like it very much, we definitely did. It had a lot of grandeur – beautiful, huge buildings that turned out to be banks, large islands of greenery with benches, and tree-lined avenues. Since it was the first and last stop of our trip, we also spent more time with each other than manically devouring one tourist attraction after the other.

One big treat was the Prado museum, in which Jono unfortunately did not realize he was going to spend a solid six hours walking around. It was really spectacular, and Jono as I’m sure you agree, impossible to see in the two hours it’s free some evenings! Near the museum is a beautiful church, which unfortunately seemed to have truly bizarre sermons in which people waved and saved seats like it was a play, a little girl popped a balloon and scared everyone half to death, and someone began clapping. After a day and a half of recalibrating in Madrid, we hopped onto an Easy Jet flight to Lisbon. The words ‘hopped’ and ‘easy’ belie the trials and tribulations of flying low-cost airlines in Europe, and although we heard many horror stories from the friends we made at various hostels, we managed to make it to our destinations with all our stuff and no real calamities. The FAQs on the website did include: can I bring my own parachute? So I suppose we should consider ourselves truly lucky.