Episode Summary

Jenna unpacks her college trip to Spain and the unexpected along with it.

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Show Notes

Welcome back to "My Uncommon Story," where I share moments from my life that have defined my path. This week, I speak to my experience traveling in Spain and Morocco during college. I reflect on sexism, moments of beauty, and life on the edge while traveling.

Traveling in Spain in my early 20s was a defining time, I witnessed life outside of high-pressure American models and cultivated my feminist roots. Join me as I discuss the challenges of the trip, how it excited and encouraged me, and a fork in the road that changed my life forever.

Learn why travel is so helpful for putting your life in perspective. Discover how gumption, being open to new experiences, and creating friendships with people who challenge your sensibilities can help you move beyond your comfort zone and towards what truly resonates with you.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• Why travel is so fulfilling.

• How to travel with gumption.

• The power of friendship.

• What to expect when you’re open to new experiences.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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• An American Girl in Italy

Full Episode Transcript:

Hey, this is a new series where I'm giving you the context behind what I share in this podcast. I.e., what went on in my life to get me here. Think of this as part entrepreneurial mindset building told through stories, part historical nonfiction, and part audacious, salacious, beach read. I hope you enjoy.

You're listening to The Uncommon Way Business and Life Coaching Podcast, the only podcast that helps you unlock your next level in business and life by prioritizing your clarity and your own Uncommon Way. You will learn to maximize your mindset, mission, messaging, and strategy in order to create a true legacy. Here's your host, top-ranked business coach, and reformed over-analyzer turned queen of clarity, Jenna Harrison.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to The Uncommon Way. My family and I are just back from our month in Spain, just this week. I'm back in my closet, my recording studio, and I'm really excited. I'll tell you about Spain in a future episode, about this recent trip. But in this episode, I'm going to be talking about the first time that I was in Spain, when I was studying there as a college student.

I really wanted to record the episodes in Spain. I thought that would just be so fun, but it didn't work, for reasons you'll hear about in another episode. But I still feel that the Spanish vibe. And so, I'm really excited to be talking about it full circle, about the first time I went there.

So, when we left off, I told you that I was taking my sophomore year of college to study in Spain. The scene opens with me going to a vending machine at the hotel in Madrid, I'd flown in the night before, and I wanted to get some water out of the vending machine. A voice behind me says, “Are you American?”

I swiveled around and I said, “How did you know?” Which is so laughable to me, in hindsight, especially at that point in time. Nowadays, Europeans dress a lot more relaxed, a lot more like Americans. But back in the day, you would know if someone was American. We tended to dress in a more relaxed way. But also, imagine everyone in the U.S. is wearing white socks with their tennis shoes, and everyone in Europe is wearing black socks with their tennis shoes. I mean, it was that striking of a difference.

But I had dressed up. I had dressed up for this excursion in Spain. I laugh because it's how history repeats itself. Because that's kind of what happened just now, when I was going to Majorca and I had my photo shoot. I was upleveling some pieces of my wardrobe.

I do see it very much, as I've been feeling this moving through me, as I'm stepping into this new phase of life and this new phase of business. I'm just feeling called to quality pieces of clothing that feel a bit more, I guess, chic, rather than the mom of a toddler life that I've been living here. But anyway, I digress.

So, I was dressing up in the same way there, thinking of this as a grand adventure, and I remember I was wearing an Ann Taylor dress. An Ann Taylor dress, which ooh-la-la, for a college girl was very expensive and really adult. I was really adulting for this trip.

And so, I was kind of shocked and a little miffed maybe, that I was called out on being an American. Although, like I said, in hindsight, it was glaringly obvious. And also, I do think that I was very carefully counting my change. Which by the way, wasn't euros. Y'all, we're talking dark ages here; it was Spanish pesetas. The European Union had not formed yet, at this time.

So, I was in Spain, counting my pesetas, and trying to put them into the vending machine to get my water. The boy says, “Are you American?” I spin around asking him how he knew, and I was confronted with this sight, which was so out of place in Spain. He was covered in piercings, and covered in tattoos. Again, early 90s.

I mean, back then, yes, Hells Angels had tattoos, but it definitely was not like today. Maybe punk rockers had some piercings, but he was covered in piercings and tattoos, and was very, very tall and very pale. He was just very much, Josh. That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. When I think back, it’s about how pivotal it was for me meeting him, and then becoming such good friends and spending so much time with him. He really was so much of the uncommon way of life that I wanted to live.

When I think about the earlier times, yes, my life was uncommon. I had been at parties in Greece and sheep farms in New Zealand. And it wasn't typical for the people I was living around. But everyone that I was with in each of those environments, were very much living like the world they were in. So, I was flitting in between worlds observing everything, but they were all, really, in their own world.

Like, that's just how teenagers were in Greece. They drink when they're 14, they go out, and there was nothing really uncommon about how any of them were living. Josh was the first person who was very uncommon within his own world; with the way he thought, with the way he chose to express himself and look, and with the decisions he made.

So, just in case I don't get to tell you the story later. He was a Crit Theory major, Critical Theory, in the States. Very cerebral, very, very intellectual, and you easily could have seen him just going off and staying in academia. He ended up falling in love with Spain and dropping out of school. He dropped out of college, and to this day has not left Spain. He still lives there, has a daughter, a happy life.

I didn't know anyone else... I was the closest I knew to anybody that was making decisions like that, just daring to think differently. But Josh was ahead of me in this, and I was enraptured, enthralled. I wanted to know all the things and just pick his brain and know everything.

So, it was wonderful that I made those connections right away. There were other really wonderful Americans on the trip, as well. We were all going to Alicante, to study there in the university. We were from different schools in the U.S.

While that was wonderful, the effect of that was that we didn't really learn a lot of Spanish. Except for Josh. He was smart. He went and made an effort to hang out with a lot of Spanish speaking people. He even had a Spanish girlfriend. So, he was able to really immerse himself. But I remember being so shocked and baffled…

There are many Americans, as you all know, that only grow up speaking English. And so, maybe they have a few years of language instruction at a school and they feel like they're fluent, right? Other Americans might consider them fluent because they can converse with their teacher when they pass them in the quad.

But what they don't realize is that that teacher is slowing down their speech by about 75%, and that they're talking about topics they practiced in the classroom. Then you get there and everyone's speaking so quickly. Back in those days, hardly anyone spoke English. It was a little humbling. But don't worry, I will learn Spanish, it's just further on in my story. Probably not in this episode.

One of the other things that was different than I had expected was, again, this topic of how Mediterranean men behaved in that time. So, I've already talked about when I was in Greece, the Greek boys are saying to me that they thought foreign women only came in the country in order to have sex and then go home.

At that time, in Spain, there was, unfortunately, quite a bit of sexism. Spain had been living under a fascist dictator for many decades; Franco. It really kept Spain decades behind some of its European counterparts. So, when I got there, they were just a couple of decades out of that. The people that were living there still very much remember those times.

Part of what I did love about Spain, I'll talk about that more, but I think because of that there was very much a drive to better themselves, really. To expand their minds, to catch up, and to become “modern.” It felt like an amazing energy. When a city is just starting to take off, for instance, and there's really this feeling of, ‘we are creating ourselves.’

But there were some lingering things that were still kind of dark ages. One of those were, in my opinion, the way men behaved. I had my first flasher experience in Spain. Actually, first and only, now that I think about it. Thank goodness. It wasn't just young boys. I remember once when my Spanish was starting to come online, I was walking along and I passed what I thought of as a very sweet little old Spanish man.

I passed him on the street and he said something to me. I took a second, he'd passed me already, and I registered what he said, which is that he wanted to suck on a very specific body part of mine. I was horrified and immediately distrustful of anyone and everyone.

There was a practice called piropean. And so, piropo is like a compliment, or a sound that you can make or something to describe this. It was even a verb. You could piropear; you could compliment someone. But it's almost flirty. Groups of men, like when you would pass… You know, in the old days, the stereotypical passing by construction workers, and all the construction workers would turn and whistle. That's how it was.

If you've ever seen the very iconic photo called “An American Girl in Italy,” it was taken in the 50s, and it's an American girl walking along and the sport of Italians following her. That is actually what it was like in Spain in the 90s. It would often define my whole day. The direction that I would walk to the bus stop. Or asking someone to walk with me home. I hated this feeling so much of being ogled.

I think that's a normal thing to say nowadays, but at that point, in Spain, it was considered a little strange. So, I remember, one day Josh's girlfriend got on the bus. We were all happy to see her but she was a little down. We said, “What's up?” She said, “I didn't get a single piropo on the way to the bus today.” That was like a self-judgment that she must not look, I don't know, appealing enough.

That started a conversation. I perceived that it would be so difficult to grow up in Spain. And she was really puzzled. She thought it was just a nice flirtatious way that men appreciated women. If you read about this iconic photo, “An American Girl in Italy,” it was published in Cosmo in the 50s, and what was underneath the photo was this:

“Public admiration shouldn't fluster you. Ogling the ladies is a popular, harmless and flattering pastime you'll run into in many foreign countries. The gentlemen are usually louder and more demonstrative than American men, but they mean no harm.”

Forty years later, that was still the prevalent attitude. These kinds of experiences, growing up with being told that I could never be a pilot like my father because I was a woman, and obviously women can't do certain jobs that men can do, women need to be protected, women should stay in the house and be commented upon on their husband’s evaluation reports...

Experiencing these kinds of situations in Spain, and also at home sometimes, this is very much what has fueled my feminism and my determination to help women achieve both financial but also emotional and life independence.

To really help us be our own women, be able to make our own choices, live the way we want, and create an equitable society. So, if I seem a little vehement at times about that, you're now getting the backstory and to everything that built up.

Now, in tandem with all of this, our fall break was coming up. I wasn't the only person, many of us had an interest in going to Morocco, but there was a perception that Morocco would be even more difficult than Spain. That they had even more sexism there. And for that reason, none of the men on our trip, the college students, would go with us, would go with any girls.

They didn't want the girls with them. They considered it a huge liability, and didn't want to have to be protecting us through the whole trip. A friend and I found this so frustrating that we finally decided to go alone, just the two of us heading into Morocco. What's funny, on the way there we stopped in the port town of Algeciras, which is on the southern point of Spain. It's the closest place to catch a ferry to cross the Mediterranean and go into Morocco.

A man came up and he said something in Spanish, held out his hand, like to shake hands with my friend, she put her hand out and he used that opportunity to brush past her hand with his hand and cup her breast. Then kind of laughed and walk away. What's funny is we had that experience in Spain, right before going to Morocco.

In Morocco we had the most enchanted experience, with seemingly very respectful and gracious and kind men. When we came back, and we told our stories, we just couldn't believe that Morocco got such a bad rap. Now, who knows what they were saying in Arabic? It was like my Pollyanna perspective of those sweet, little Spanish men. Who knows?

But what I will say is that the contrast between the two countries, I think led us to really let down our guard. Now, don't worry, nothing bad happens on this trip, but it definitely could have. So, we were so caught up in this sense of safety and invincibility, that we had just gone out on our own.

We were on a train, we'd arrived in the port town of Tangiers, and we were catching the Marrakech Express to go straight to Marrakech. In this train cabin, there were the two of us, a Japanese woman that was traveling by herself, go girl, and two Moroccan men.

We all started talking, and they suggested that we not go to Marrakech, that we instead get off the train at the stop in the town where they lived. And then they would show us around and we could have dinner at their mom's house.

Looking back, I'm so grateful for whatever angels were watching over me. We were so naïve. Of course, no cell phones in that day, no geo tracking devices, nothing. And no parents have any idea where we are.

We're just getting off the train without telling anyone and following these people through the medinas, through the soucks, which are these winding, tiny, little streets of vendor stalls and marketplaces and going into strange places we never could have found our way out of.

And yet, it was such a beautiful experience of really seeing something that most people don't get to see. We really got to see how the locals lived. I remember we stopped in this plaza for mint tea, and it was all men; I'm sure the women were home caring for children and cooking and doing all the things.

But the sweetness of that tea and the beautiful weather and just hearing the calls to prayer, you can tell I'm so exoticizing all of this. But it was very, very fascinating and beautiful to me. And then, sure enough, they did, of course, take us to some of their friends, their vendors, that were selling things to see if we wanted to buy anything.

Then they took us to their mom's house for dinner, just as they had promised. She was so kind and sweet. We had this feast, I mean, just this beautiful meal sitting in the home, sitting on the floor, eating with our hands; the whole experience. Then they brought us back to the train station.

I remember looking, and I saw this man galloping on his horse towards me. It really looked like something where you would see a man galloping across the Sahara. We paid them handsomely, gave them a tip, and we got on our train and headed off to Marrakech. It was just a beautiful memory.

It was something that I prided myself on for years. For being so daring and to see people live their lives so scared they don't get to experience these moments. Now that I'm a little older, I understand how that could have gone south. Mom, if you're listening, I'm very sorry to tell you this story. But everything turned out okay, and I did end up falling in love with that country.

That was the first of now three visits to Morocco. I love so much about it. I love the architecture. The architecture is something that I get to experience in Spain, as well. But I was fascinated by the idea that Arabic art, which is mostly geometric patterns. It’s really meant to allow your mind freedom to dream and imagine, and to become closer to God, of course. They're very religious.

It would be considered too constraining to paint, for instance, a picture of a landscape or a picture of a still life or anything that would kind of lock your mind into seeing what the artist hopes you will see. I also loved the idea of these very plain looking outer walls surrounding gorgeous courtyards filled with tiles and fountains and plants and birds, and not needing to showcase all of this to the world around you.

Contrast this with America, where I'm coming from, just having lived through the 80s and excess and lots of bling, and I'm here and I'm just seeing people that choose to keep it all private.

Here's something else I loved. So, we were actually there during Ramadan; we didn't know that we would be doing that. And so, everything was very sleepy during the day because they're fasting, and then at night everything comes alive. It's like Morocco on steroids during Ramadan at night.

Everyone would be out. We were in Marrakech and we were all in the medina area. And oh my gosh, it was crazy. Yes, snake charmers, of course. But there were also dentists. If you need a tooth pulled, you go into the big crowded plaza, to the dentist, and he'll pull your tooth right there.

What really captured my heart, to this day, is that the most crowded performer or vendor, whatever you want to call it, in the marketplace, in the plaza in the middle of the night, was the storyteller. He wasn't speaking in English for the tourists, he was speaking in Arabic.

People would gather around to hear the storyteller tell the stories, and then would tip him at the end. That was how he earned his living. Oh, gosh, how can you not love this? I'll tell you such an interesting thing. When we got home and told everyone about our experiences, those guy groups that refuse to travel with us, they had a completely different experience.

One of them got their backpacks robbed. They ran into people that they felt were kind of hostile and in their face. I have a feeling they went in so defensive and so scared that, who knows… Their experience, it was night and day. Maybe they should have hung out with us girls. Maybe they would have had a different experience.

Returning to Spain, I've already told you the influence of the architecture and certain ways of thinking. There were so many things that I did love about Spain, despite the neanderthal men. Just to clarify, I think that Spanish men are amazing.

Nowadays, just even in this last trip, I saw so many dads spending one-on-one time with their kids. There's a love of beauty there, of history, of really understanding what matters in life; the simple life, family, good food. There's obviously rich history and traditions.

I find that people are very conscientious and worldly. They know a lot more about world events than Americans tend to. They know a lot more about a music, popular music and culture. They're extremely warm and family oriented.

And the number one thing, besides natural beauty, of course, is this joie de vivre. If you ask someone, and I was talking to someone in Spain, who was saying this is still pretty much true. But especially back then, if you asked someone what they do, they would tell you what hobbies they like doing. It would never occur to them to define themselves by their work.

This was such a radical concept for me. I had come from working my tail off to get into the best college that I could get into, so that I could get the best job I could get, so that then I could keep climbing the ladder and keep struggling. And there, the most coveted job was the postal worker. Yes, my friends, the postal worker. Because the postal worker works the fewest amount of hours and gets the most benefits.

Later on, I did try living this life and found out that it wasn't for me. But there, I could not deny a deep awakening and a deep yearning inside of me that told me there was something here that I really needed to learn about and integrate into my life. That somehow there had to be a better way than the model I was being brought up in; and children, really, at my school, committing suicide because of the pressure.

Wouldn't you know, right about then my friend, Josh, was also falling in love with Spain. He was not going home at the end of the semester. He was transferring to a different Spanish city, to Seville. The more that he talked about it to me, the more I realized that I wanted to go too.

As soon as I said that, you know that he was like full court press, with the perfect logic; I told you he was really smart; for all of the reasons that I most definitely should not go home. That I was just beginning this awakening. It was so true, and I just needed more.

I felt like a veil was lifting and I wanted to see what was on the other side. So, that's what I did. I called home. I broke my mama's heart. I told her that I was staying for a year. But it turns out it would be much less expensive for me to study there than to go back to my ivy-covered private college. Also, my parents were still struggling to get back on their feet, so I got the permission.

It turned out to be such a life changing decision. I know I keep saying this, but really, you'll never guess what happens next. In fact, it's probably the last thing you'd guess based on what I've told you so far. But I will tell you about all of that next time. Be well, everyone, have a great week.

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