Ep #61: My Uncommon Story: Lessons in Life, Love, and Simplicity in Spain

Episode Summary

Jenna continues her Uncommon Story series, unpacking the slow life, romance, and the wisdom of other cultures.

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Show Notes

In the last episode of this series, I hinted that when I made the decision to not leave Spain and go instead to Seville, that one decision was going to really change my life. This is how decisions are. So often, you can never imagine the ramifications that could come from one simple decision.

This week, you're going to start to see how this was so true in my life. My Uncommon Story picks up in Spain, hitting the Eurail and all that goes along with improvising as a poor college traveler. This is a rag-tag story of youth, beauty, love, and learning.

Lean in and learn about my first love, travel stories, and the hidden gems I learned along the way. Discover how living in Spain led me to question the traditions I was raised with, the comfort zones I was used to, and my perceptions of other cultures.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• How my perception of Americans evolved.

• My experience of being immersed in Spanish language and culture.

• The surprising normalization of drug use across social classes I observed.

• What I learned (and loved) about simple living.

• How I realized I didn’t need as much as I thought to survive.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Full Episode Transcript:

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.

Welcome back to The Uncommon Way everyone. I hope you are enjoying your September. When we first began this series, it was meant to be just a few episodes that you could listen to when you were on the beach or having some downtime. It was just going to be a summer series but it hasn't turned out that way. So, I guess these will be, I don't know, spicing up your fall, heating up your winter. We'll see. I'll continue to drop a few here and there.

But this is a special episode. I hinted last time that when I made the decision to not leave Spain, after studying in Alicante, and go instead to Seville, which is where we left off last time. I hinted that that was going to really change my life, that one decision. This is how decisions are. So often, you can never imagine the ramifications that could come from one simple decision.

You're going to start to see how this was so true in my life, in this episode. But before we even get to Seville, I had some time to kill in between semesters. This is a time when transcontinental flights were still very expensive, and my mom grudgingly conceded that it probably wouldn't make sense for me to fly all the way home just for a week or two.

So, I decided I would stay in Europe and just use the Eurail pass that my parents had gotten me when I first went over there. I don't know if they still exist, probably, but it gave me pretty much carte blanche to go anywhere that I wanted to via train. I had a friend who was an exchange student in my high school back in Washington who lived in Germany, so I figured I'd go visit her up there.

But I had something else up my sleeve, too. Which is, what we didn't know back in the States, is that in Europe they were really getting into the charter. There was a very big charter flight industry. And so, I had found a charter flight that flew from Madrid to New York, I think it was every couple of weeks, and I decided I was going to go back and surprise my parents.

I want to say I had seven days to kill, or a little less. So, I thought, “Oh, perfect. I'll just go see my friend, and then I'll take this scenic train trip through the Alps, come back to Madrid, hop on the flight and fly out.” Meanwhile, there was a person who was a coordinator for our exchange trip in Madrid who would always meet the group when they got off the flight and get them all to Alicante.

So, I asked him if I could leave my suitcases at his house and then take a travel suitcase that would be more convenient. He said, “Sure.” But there was a little hiccup when I got to Madrid, because he wasn't home. I had a train to catch to go up to Germany. Mind you, there are no cell phones in this day and age, there was really nothing I could do.

So, guess what? I just left my bags outside of his house. Now, he lived in an apartment building, so I had him leave them straight on the streets of Madrid. But I did have to wait until somebody was exiting the building, and then basically sneak into the building, get up to his apartment, and just leave the suitcases right there. Hopefully they’d be there when I got back.

I made it to the train station, hopped on a train, and I was the only person in my compartment. It was like a six-seater compartment. I saw a young man walk past the door, and then come back a minute later. He came and sat in my compartment as if that's where the seat was. He was very handsome. We got to talking.

In the middle of the night, we had to transfer trains because the train tracks in Spain were a different size than the train tracks in France, so we had to get onto another train. It must have been something about the late-night hour, but when we got back on the other train, something sparked up and we just started kissing and cuddling.

Now, there was a conductor walking by so it wasn't going to go any further than that. But I did find it all very romantic and exciting finding romance on this international train in Europe; very much fit the schoolgirl fantasies. Luckily, we exchanged numbers but it never went anywhere after that, and I'm really glad because there's more fun stories coming up.

I remember the trip in Germany being so fun. Then was time for my Alps adventure. So, my train went from Germany down to Paris. In Paris is where I would catch this loop that would go through the Alps.

This is before the Euro; I'd mentioned that before. And so, every time that you were in a different country you had to exchange money, and you always lost money on the exchange. I didn't have that much money. Remember, I pretty much spent everything for this flight to get back to the States. So, I changed the minimal amount that I could.

I walked around Paris, looking for something to eat that I could afford, that would be the most bang for my buck. Something warm, and hopefully hearty, to hold me over. You all, I have to confess, the best thing I could find was a Burger King burger. Yes, that was my first time in Paris and what I had was a Whopper. But I figured, that's okay, I'm about to have the true experience on this beautiful train through the Alps.

But I had a couple miscalculations about this. One, is that as the train went through the Alps, it was passing through several different countries for which I did not have currency. So, I actually wasn't able to eat on this train trip. I mean, I could have, but I was so stubborn. I didn't want to lose any more money in the exchange fee. And so, I didn't.

The second miscalculation was that it was winter break in the Alps. The trains were packed skiers. I, of course, had bought the bargain basement ticket. You all can see, right? I hope you're understanding now, my journey from complete scarcity towards abundance. The way I talk about money now, you would never imagine, right? But this was me. This was me.

I was the poor college student saving every single little cent that I could, or peseta, or whatever currency I happen to be in at the moment. So, I had bought the bargain ticket, and there were no seats for me. So, not only had I not eaten, I'm wearing this big backpack traveling around, but I was having to stand up on the train going through the Alps.

But at least I got to see the Alps, right? Wrong! Because guess what else happens in winter? It gets dark so early. By the time we actually got into the Alps, it was after four in the afternoon. It was so dark; I couldn't see a thing.

What happens, later in the night as we're going through, I faint. Yes, I faint, probably from dehydration. And so, someone has to move aside, give me their seat, and bring me back. Nowadays, they probably would have called the ambulance or something. But back in those days, they were like, “She'll be fine. Just give her some water.”

We continued on, I got off in Milan, and I had nowhere to sleep. And so, I just had to kind of hang out in the train station all night until I could get on my train to Madrid, and then catch my flight back to the States; on this charter flight which would bring me to New York. Then from there, I would catch another flight to Washington.

I'm really wondering if you find this as crazy as I do. I crack myself up, obviously, just thinking about my younger years. But for those of you whose thoughts are actually going to my poor parents, I’ll tell you that of course, my mom really never even wanted me to study abroad. We were very, very close and she didn't want me to be away from her.

And so, she was disappointed when we realized that I couldn't fly back to the States for that interim period. I knew that she would be so happy when I walked through the door, so I wanted to make it a surprise. I had a friend from high school pick me up at the airport to bring me home. My friend said, “What will you do if your parents aren't there?” I said, “Oh, they'll be there.”

I guessed that mom would be in the kitchen, and Dad would be watching TV. Guess what? That's exactly where they were. I just walked in and I said, “I'm home.” To this day, mom says it was the best present ever. She was so happy and it was so good.

Now you're caught up to the point where I finally did get back to Seville, to study Economics at the University of Seville. My first order of business was finding somewhere to live. This is not like nowadays where you can look online and get everything all arranged before you actually get to a city. You would never think about going to a city and having nowhere to live.

But back then, especially when you're traveling in Europe, what you would tend to do, you'd get off the train and there would be ladies there that had a room for rent or something. They would just call out “Rooms for rent,” you’d meet one of them and you'd go back to their house. That's where you would be staying for the night, or the three nights, or however long you were touring that place.

I knew that I wanted something more than three nights, so I did not stay with them. I stayed in a hostel at first, and then somebody told me… Oh, I know, it was my friend. I had a friend that I mentioned on the last podcast, who had also studied in Alicante, who convinced me to continue and study in Seville.

He told me that at the university, there was a board where people would post notices of rooms for rent. So, I went there, and there happened to be somebody hanging up a notice right as I got there, and I got it. I went to see this place. Immediately, I fell in love with it.

Now, if you don't know Seville, first of all, is the most beautiful city you've ever set your eyes on. It's just magic, with its little yellow and white buildings. It also has the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, a beautiful plaza, a round plaza with horse drawn carriages, and it's just so picturesque.

Well, this apartment was in a building right on that main street leading straight to the cathedral. We were on the top two floors of that building; with balconies, and I mean, the view was to die for. It was a really fun apartment made up of all different international young people, really. I was paying the most of anyone there so I got the room that was right on this main street, Mateos Gago, looking straight at the cathedral.

There was the woman who had the lease on the apartment, she was a Dutch woman, and she lived downstairs with her boyfriend. Later, it came to pass, that apparently, she was never passing on all of our rent to the landlord. Apparently, supposedly, she had some sort of sexual liaison with the landlord so that he didn't kick her out. But she was, meanwhile, taking all of this money.

Upstairs, there was another American woman who had a Spanish boyfriend, who also lived in the apartment. There was an older American couple. I say, older, they were probably my age now, but they were empty nesters. They were just doing the kind of vacation where you actually learn the language. So, they would come over for a month or so, and were studying Spanish while they were there.

There was another Dutch woman. Boy, was she a character! I had never met somebody so sexually liberated and out there. It just absolutely knocked my socks off. I think I'm forgetting somebody. But anyway, it was a large group of international people all there for different reasons. Such a fun environment.

I remember that once, somebody brought some people from New Zealand over to the apartment. When they met me, the woman said, “Oh, you're American. So, I know one thing about you for sure, and that is that you are way more repressed than I am.”

I somehow had grown up under the impression that Americans were the most rebellious, and the most sexually liberated. That the world thought of us as like little James Dean rebels.

It was so eye opening for me to realize that actually, that's not how most of the world saw us. I have to give it to her; she was 100% right. I was very, very repressed and very conservative at that point in my life, which is probably why kissing on a train felt so naughty. In hindsight, it was nothing. But hearing that and then contrasting myself with this Dutch woman who lived there, who really just seemed to have another man every night…

She was very much like, “I say where. I say when. I say who.” Pre-Julia Roberts. She would do things; she would just have fun being the object of desire for all of the men in the neighborhood. There was a pizza place across the street. You had to take like four steps up into the restaurant. She was famous for sitting there at the first table with a very short mini dress and no underwear… As people would walk by, seeing who would notice this and who wouldn't.

I'm laughing. It's completely inappropriate, and so fascinating for me. All of this is the backdrop to the life that we're living there, my friends and I, as we were able to really get further into Spanish culture. There was this little flamenco tablao that we would go to at night, and we really felt so transported.

What was amazing, was that after hearing that music, when I would come home, I'd go back up to my top floor, have the large windows open… of course, no air conditioning… and I would hear beautiful strains of guitar, flamenco guitar, classical guitar, coming up. I realized that one of the workers in these restaurants down below, one of them played guitar. So, it was like I was getting serenaded. I loved it.

I'd tell all of my friends, “Well, I've got to leave now, because at midnight the serenade starts and I want to be home for that.” Now, I had no idea who this person actually was. Because, movie perfect, the orange trees that line the streets of Seville were in full bloom at this time. And so, not only was I hearing the beautiful music, but there was also the wafting fragrance of orange blossoms coming up to me, as I would stand out on my balcony each night and listen to this.

My friends would say, “Don't you want to know who this person is? Wouldn't you rather hang out with us a little longer so you can actually see this person face to face?” I said, “No. No, that's a terrible idea. Are you kidding? This is the perfect romance right now. I can imagine whatever I want about this person who serenades me, and in truth, I know. He's some abhorrent Spanish man.”

If you've listened to my earlier episodes, you'll have heard that I had some unfortunate experiences in Spain. I had a bad impression about Spanish men, in general. I thought they were uncouth. I thought they were arrogant. Now, if this is not the perfect setup for a romance novel, I don't know what is.

There's one other little detail that I have to tell you about. So, in order for anyone to come into our apartment, because there was no buzzer or intercom, and we lived on the fifth floor, we had a key. These doors are probably 20 feet tall, and made of old wood. This is old Seville architecture. The key was probably four or five inches long; one of these old-fashioned keys. We had that tied to a rope.

And so, whenever anyone would come over, they would have to shout up to us from down below. We would lower the key down on this rope, they'd untie it, use the key to get in the building, and then they'd come up to see us. We'd reel the rope up again and we'd retie this key, right?

All right, one afternoon, I'm walking home from the university. and there are two young Spanish men lounging against a car that's parked outside of the building. As I got closer, I swore that one of them made one of those Spanish sounds.

Now, I've talked in an earlier episode about what was called piropos, about little compliments that people would throw out. One of the most common kinds of sounds to get a woman's attention was something like tut-tut. Now I swore I heard that; he denies it to this day.

But as I walked up to my actual door, he goes, “Oh, you're the girl with the key. You're one of the girls with the keys.” I turned around and I said, “Yeah, that's the only way we could get people in.” He said to me, “Well, maybe one night, you'll lower the key so that I can come up.” I said probably not, “Probablemente, no.”

I walked into the house, shut the door in his face, and locked it. Remember, we're on the fifth floor so I have all these flights of stairs to walk up, and listen to the combatting voices in my head. One of them is saying, “Jenna, you are such a prude. Leslie never would have said that to an attractive man. Why are you like this?”

The other voice was saying, “You know what? Maybe it's time to let loose a little bit. This could be a fun Spanish little fling. Why are you so in your head?” By the time I got up to the fifth floor, something had shifted within me. I walked into the house and I said to my friends, “Why did nobody ever tell me that the father of my children was working across the street?”

I forgot to mention that the reason I knew he worked across the street is because he had said to me, yes, we see you all lowering your key all the time. So, as soon as I burst into my apartment, said this, and I described the person, they said, “Oh, we've told you about him. He's the one that we've said you missed hanging out with a few times, who plays the guitar.”

It was one of those moments where it's like you lose the ground beneath you and you're just sucked into a vortex. It all comes rushing to you so quickly. I realized that that man was the one who had been playing the guitar and serenading me each night. Now, in truth he wasn't serenading me, with the orange trees there, he had no idea I was standing out on my balcony. But in my mind, he was serenading me and it was really a coming together of worlds.

Within a week, we were throwing a party on the rooftop and coincidentally, this was an event that both I and Paco could actually attend at the same time, so we met officially. We were like two magnets. We basically moved in together from that point. Because he was staying with his sister further out of town, and since he worked right there, it just made sense that he started spending more and more time with all of us in the apartment.

Now, because of that, because he was working, he'd need some food, something to eat. He got a little sick of just eating the pizza, from the pizza place that he worked at. I think I had one dish that I had learned to make by that point, which I proudly made for him. It was cooked spaghetti with lemon juice and a lemon pepper sprinkled on top and some parmesan cheese.

My mom is an amazing cook, and she always kind of shooed me out of the kitchen. So, I went straight from her house, to the dorm room, to this place, where luckily the older Americans at least showed me how to boil pasta. But I was really clueless in the kitchen. Paco told me, “Hon, I'm just really hungry for a nice hearty chicken soup or something. Could you make that for me?” I said, “No, I would have no idea how to make chicken soup.”

He wrote me a little list to take to the marketplace, exactly what vendors to go to, and what foods to buy. Then, all I had to do was throw all the ingredients into a pot and boil it, and he'd take care of the rest when he got home. So, dutifully, I did exactly as was told.

I remember watching with horror, when, part of what the butcher was wrapping up was chicken feet. Now, you hear nowadays about nose-to-tail cuisine. The Spanish were famous for nose-to-tail cuisine, historically. So, apparently, they thought the best flavor came from the chicken feet.

I brought these home, I held the package out as far away from me as possible, I undid the tape, and then I kind of plopped it all into the pot. I just thought it was the grossest thing ever. I put the lid on; I didn't want to see anything else about it.

Well, here's something that I didn't know. It sounds so bad, but did you know that you should clean out the chickens feet before you put them in there? Because the chickens have been walking around in a bunch of poop, and you don't just want to throw it into the pot. Yes. How would we have known this? But apparently this is a solid truth.

When Paco opened up this pot, what did he see but a bunch of shit floating around on top of the water. Bless his heart. He kept it together. He let me know how they usually would have handled the chicken feet. He skimmed off the top, and would you believe he still ate the soup, which had been boiling for hours. I'm sure it was okay. But man, if that's not love, I don't know what is.

Our relationship was so sweet and so special. Really, it was my first true love. I remember people saying to him, when they thought I couldn't understand the Spanish… Of course, my Spanish starts getting better and better as I'm in Seville… They would say, “Why are you with her? She's not even sexy.”

You have to remember, this is the 90s, so it was a very kind of androgynous culture and fashion, back in the States. This is pleated khaki pants, big button-down shirts cut very loose with big arm holes and tucked into your pants, and loafers or something. I don't know. It wasn't attractive. Yet, this is pretty much all I knew. I wasn't wearing a lot of makeup. I tended to have my hair up in a bun.

Remember, I'm coming from my very intellectually driven college where we don't care about superficial things. It’s very granola. He would just say, “She's amazing. She's like no one I've ever met.” We were so attached that when that spring was coming to a close, and it was time for me to return home, I didn't want to leave and he didn't want me to leave.

So, he said, “I'm going back to the place where I'm from, which is an island in the Balearic Islands. A very small island called Formentera. I'm going back there for the summer, and I think you should come with me.” I said yes. I decided to go.

Now, my parents freaked out over this decision. You're doing what? You met who? You're living in sin? They were not very religious, but it was that kind of atmosphere, right? It was like, “You guys are going to live together for the summer? What does this mean? You're only 19.” I think I had just turned 20 actually.

In their fear and worry, what they did was they cut off my bank account in an effort to force me back home. I'm a little foggy on the details of this, but somehow, I had already withdrawn some money. Some money just for my initial ferry trip and everything, to go back. But when they saw I was serious they cut off the money, which was a big falling out for us.

I think we still have some of the angry letters, snail mail, of course, going back and forth where I was talking about how they need to trust me now. I'm an adult. All of those things that happen when you're that age, and you make decisions about not coming back and running off with your Spanish boyfriend.

But honestly, you all, it’s one of the best decisions I ever made. Formentera is paradise. It is so special. Years later, when I was a travel blogger, that is the one place I would not write about because I didn't want it to be discovered. I didn't want it to be found out.

Now, it very much has been found out, which is why I'm talking about it. But for years, it was the best kept secret. It's very, very small, and very remote. There's no airport on the island, which is what helped it stay hidden for so long. But it's also right next door to Ibiza, so any of the super-rich people that are coming through on the yacht circuit would obviously know about Formentera, and sail over to Formentera.

So, you got this strange blend of the super-rich, although you'd never know it until they jettied back to their yacht. You had the super-rich, and you had all of these dropped out hippies. They had just decided to drop out of the rat race and leave the corporate culture or academic culture, wherever they were coming from, and just really live the true, simple life on this forgotten island.

You also had these locals that were absolutely lost in time. The older women still wore the traditional black dress, and they drove horse-drawn carriages. They had been a culture that was repeatedly attacked by pirates or invaders from all different cultures; The Romans, the Catalans, all different Italian people. Because of this, they had become a very closed off culture. They were very suspicious of outsiders. It was almost like an Amish community or something. They were just very, very tight.

But for me, who had never seen anything like it, it just fascinated me. Oh, and they lived off a barter economy still. It was like, “Hey, Francesc…” By the way, I couldn't even communicate with them because they didn't speak Castilian Spanish. They spoke a dialect of Catalan. Catalan is the language spoken in the Barcelona region. They didn't even speak Catalan; they spoke their own dialect of Catalan.

It was very much like, “Hey, Francesc, I'll trade you my pine nuts for your wine. I'll trade you wine for cheese. I'll trade you cheese for bread.” Well, probably not wine, cheese and bread, because I think everyone made wine, cheese and bread in their own house; they were all homesteading. But they were definitely trading items for subsistence.

And they were very wealthy, because they owned all of the property on the island, which was now being rented out to tourists. There were tourists as well, and it was very interesting how it was staggered. The Europeans very much tended to go vacation at the same time, right? Then they'd come back year after year to the same place.

So, I remember, June was mostly British. July was German. August was all Italian tourists. My boyfriend and his family were anomalies because they were from the south of Spain. His parents had come over in the 60s when electricity was first brought to the island. It was a big thing. They had recognized a business opportunity, and so they stayed and they opened restaurants there. So, he was very much in between worlds.

But all of these different groups very much had a respect and an easy kind of commingling between them. So, you'd never see a hippie that was best friends with a payas. Payas mean the local people of the island. There was a very large level of acceptance and tolerance, and we're all just living our best lives here.

So, we went to stay with Paco’s parents, and what we were not anticipating was that his mom did not like me at all. She thought that I was putting new thoughts in his head. Crazy things, like maybe using a little less oil when you cook your chicken. She thought that I was after his money because he was a good hardworking man, and I didn't have any money.

It was true, at that point my parents had cut off all of my money. I hadn't worked since I was at that towel shop, back in Washington, before the Spain trip. But really, deep down, her biggest gripe with me was just that I didn't behave the way a daughter-in-law should behave. There was this big unwritten code about how a daughter-in-law should behave, which I of course, didn't know.

So, I should have been the first one up in the morning in the house, helping prepare breakfast for everyone. I should be the last one to sleep. I shouldn't be cleaning the house. I should do everything I could to have my mother-in-law sit down. And I, of course, would be cleaning the dishes or I do anything I could to take any kind of burden off of her. I didn't know that.

I thought I was a guest in her house. I mean, my mom would have freaked out if a guest tried to jump up and start cleaning the dishes back then. “Am I not a good host? What are you trying to insinuate here?” I very politely let his mom do all the work, and she very adamantly thought that that was ridiculous and self-centered and lazy. Yeah, lazy.

So, this finally blew up, to the point where they said, “Get her out of the house.” To the point where she said, “Get her out of the house.” Paco said, “Fine, we're leaving.” She said, “If you walk through the door with that girl, you are never coming back.” And he walked out. He walked out.

We went to scout around for a place to live, because of course, by now it's June and most of the places on this tiny little island are rented out to tourists. Luckily, he knew people. He'd grown up there. He heard that clear on the opposite tip of the island, there was maybe a small house that he could rent.

Now, the way this island formed is that there's a lower half, which is very flat. This is where all of the tourist activities are. All of a sudden, the other half, it's called La Mola, juts out of the sea, and it's this plateau. So, you have to wind up this windy road to get up to the Mola, up to this plateau. And then once you're there, that is where most of the most isolated local people lived.

There was a hippie commune there, as well. At the very tip, there's this lighthouse and plunging cliffs, straight down to the sea. It was so beautiful. Well, the very last house, by the lighthouse… supposedly Bob Dylan stayed in the lighthouse, who knows?... but the last house apparently was vacant.

So, Paco went to talk to the payas, speaking the local dialect of course, and was able to get us in there. Now, like many houses, and most houses up there on that part of the island, this house had no electricity. It didn't even have a bathroom in the house. There was a bathroom outside of the house. There were two little houses next to each other, and that's what they shared.

That's where we were living for the summer. Now, when the payasa inquired about me, Paco tried to tell her that I was a foreigner, that I was from far away. She looked, I remember her head kind of tilting, and she said, “Barcelona?” He said, “No, no, further away than that.” She looked at me again, and she said, “Holland?”

Because they were, in the very beginning, the first tourists that came; there were a lot of Dutch tourists. So, that was stuck in her mind. Like, people that lived really, really far away must be from Holland. He tried to tell her further than that, and she just couldn't conceptualize what that might mean.

So, because there were no other tourists around us… There was one bar where the hippies would go, and some mainland locals that live there, would come up to sometimes. Needless to say, this is when I finally learned Spanish. I mean, really learned Spanish.

Because Paco didn't speak any English, hardly any English, I was forced to learn Spanish. I really think that that is what allowed our relationship to flourish for so long. Because what starts to happen when you both speak the same language, is that you become so attuned to intonation. There are little barbs that you can throw in when you start getting frustrated or annoyed with a person.

Paco and I didn't have any of that. We had the most simplistic language. We had to be very clear with our communication with each other, and it really cut out any of the misunderstandings, I think, that can start to bubble up in other relationships.

The only time I spoke English was once every three weeks when my parents would call. Now, there are no cell phones. Again, there's no landline, no phone coming into our house. So, remember that bar I told you about? They would have to call that bar at a certain time, every three weeks, and the bartender would pass the phone to me so that I could talk to them. I was trying to hear them over the noise.

I was always cognizant of the fact that I was tying up the phone line of the bar for the 10 minutes or 15 minutes when I talked to my parents. My poor parents, in hindsight, they had no idea what was happening with me. But other than that, I was fully immersed.

Now, we had been hoping that Paco wouldn't have to work. By the way, that's not his real name. But we had been hoping that he wouldn't have to work, and I used all the money I had, that I'd taken out of the bank, to rent the apartment, the little house that we were staying in. Which was super cheap because he got the local rate, of course.

But then we had no money for food or for gas to get around the island, and so he did have to get a job. He's an amazing cook, so he started working at a restaurant. He was earning the equivalent of $400 a month. That’s what we had to live on for the whole summer, including our gas, including food, including all the things, utilities, of course.

But it's amazing how far $1, or in this case a peseta, can stretch when you're in love. When you're just determined to make it work. That really was my first lesson in sufficiency. Everything that I thought, the amounts, that I thought it would take to survive actually weren't true. Now, we were lucky; often, one meal of the day, he would bring home food from the restaurant. So, there was that. But still, $400 a month!

Because he was working at night, we would have these really lovely days together. Honestly, just making love, exploring the island, going to the beach, and then eating maybe it at a little… they call them chiringuitos… tiny, little shack-a-boo type restaurants on the beach. They don't necessarily have any electricity; they just catch the fish completely fresh. They have a little gas burner and cook up the fish for you, you have some drinks, and that was island life.

On days that he was off, we would stroll down, at sunset, we'd get a glass of wine, and we'd play some backgammon with the little old men that were playing backgammon around us. But most nights, he would head out in the late afternoon for the 30-minute drive down the island to the main city for work.

I remember my heart hurting; I was worried. What if something happened to him on this drive, especially up this winding road late at night? I remember, we didn't really have a closet. He had gotten a long branch from outside, and that was our kind of our closet, where we hung clothes. I remember just touching his shirts hanging up, so lovingly, so much missing him even for those few hours that he was away from me. I just couldn't stand it.

Then, after midnight, because the Spanish eat very, very late, he would ride home, usually carrying a pizza box for our dinner. Sometimes after that, we’d drive back down again to go out to the bars and clubs that night.

But this really was a whole new world for me. All of these groups of people were not ones that I would interact with back home, and also, to see how they interacted. How the tourists interacted with the hippies and the super-rich out in these clubs was just fascinating. That was really my first exposure to…

I suppose Seville was my first exposure to different sexual mores, but this was really my first exposure to drugs. There was a lot of hash, specifically hashish, being passed around. People would just pull out the cocaine right on the table of the clubs, and cut up some lines and be snorting up the cocaine right there. It was very normalized.

I noticed, what I think blew my mind even more than the fact that the drugs were so normal, was that it crossed classes. I started to come up with a theory about middle-class values, which is that really, the way I had been raised here in the middle class, we lived in a bubble of ‘do's and don'ts.’

Meanwhile, people that tended to be on the lower end of the economic spectrum really didn't live by those same rules. So, there were more drugs. You tended to have more sexual partners. When I looked at the super rich, it was exactly the same; they were doing drugs, and they were switching partners. I started to think, “Huh, I wonder which one is actually more beneficial and is actually more natural for humans?”

But that kind of got blown away when the house next to us, up there on the Mola, got rented out to some people from Madrid. They were what we would have… they’re called pijos… what we would have called yuppies. So, they were kind of well-to-do, had money, had good jobs. So, upper middle class, right?

I expected them to be really aghast right when Paco would be sitting out on the porch smoking a joint. But actually, they're like, “Oh, great. Yeah, we brought some too, you want to smoke together?” I just realized that there was a completely different national attitude around recreational drug use.

Now, I, myself, I didn't enjoy smoking hash, it tended to make me really paranoid. But cocaine, that was fun. The biggest eye opener of all was definitely the way of life on the island. I already alluded to this, or already talked about this in the last episode. It’s just this true desire for the good life, to understanding what is “the good life,” and simplifying down all the things that really don't matter, not stressing so much.

I very much saw that embodied here, even more so than in Seville. There was a character that I loved so deeply; everybody called him Joaquin Francaise. He was actually from France. Supposedly, he'd been a famous journalist or professor, and had finally realized that basically, the modern world was just shit.

He really wanted to drop out of it, so he went to Formentera and just never left. He never really had a job. He did have a house he lived in, but he'd just be eating off… You’d always see him at different dinner parties and things. He looked like the Spanish artist, Salvador Dalí. He had this long, gray, handlebar mustache.

You'd see him on his little motorbike, going down the road, with a scarf wrapped around his neck and flowing in the wind behind him. He was just such a character. Of course, nobody wore helmets. He was such a character.

He told me once, I'll never forget, he said, “Jen, do you know what true freedom is?” I said, “What?” He said, “True freedom is waking up in the morning, stepping out of your doorstep, stretching in the sunlight, seeing that beautiful tree in the distance, and saying, ‘I want to go to that tree,’ and then actually doing it. Yeah, not saying, ‘Oh, I'll do that later. I'll do that someday.’ But actually, doing it then.”

I remember once, this was later but I'm going to bring it in now, in Spain they had a huge Christmas lottery. Everyone played the lottery for Christmas. I remember getting all excited about the big pot of money that was available. I said to Paco, “If you won, what would you do?” Because I knew, chances are you're not going to win, but part of the fun is just daydreaming.

He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “No, what would change in your life? What would you want to do differently?” He just looked at me, and he's like, “Why would I want to change my life?” Oh my gosh, the lessons, the lessons, just non-stop hitting me.

Imagine living life truly the way you want to live, and really not wanting to change anything. It just blew my mind. Right? There was nothing about that, in my hustle striving, get into the best school, to get the best job, to have the best car, to have the best house, kind of life that I had been raised in.

I was also noticing how a lot of the hippies lived. Not just the hippies that were living in the commune raising livestock together and growing fruit and vegetables together. But there was another type of hippie that were vendors. They would sell jewelry and sarongs and things like that to the tourists.

What they would do, was they would sell all of these trinkets during the summer, they'd take the proceeds and they would go to either Goa, up in India, or somewhere in Mexico. They'd buy their inventory over the winter, but they'd also live in a beautiful climate, continue to party, and continue the life until it was time to fly back to Spain for the season. Then they'd sell off all of their inventory, and they'd get the money to travel again.

Oh, on top of that, because it was a socialist country, every two summers that they worked, if they made those six months, then they'd get to collect unemployment throughout one of the winters as well. The absence of striving, and the way that they lived in these premier locations, that other people only vacation in a week or two a year, really opened my eyes to possibilities.

And to the fact that we, back in the U.S., maybe the way we chose to live wasn't the way I really wanted to live. Maybe there was a much better life available to me another way.

The last thing that was happening, there was really kind of a form of anti-intellectualism, and not in the Trumpist way that we have now. But I started to really honor and listen to the local people and the wisdom, the natural wisdom that they'd acquired.

It really, when I thought back to my philosophy professors and the way that we all lived, it really started to challenge my worldview of who is the fit person to teach, right? Who do I really want to learn from? So, it made it difficult, very difficult, for me to even think about returning to college.

I felt so divorced from that world, and so much like I'd found home there in Formentera. I did consider dropping out, but I was afraid. Now, this is pre-internet, of course. There's no way to telecommute or to even think about communicating with your family back home once you leave and move to another country. We'd get a letter in the mail every month or something.

I thought I “needed” that degree, right? That's the smart, adult thing to do. I could die homeless and penniless if I didn't do it now and continue this education. Looking back, it’s so interesting that I considered myself a person who always broke with expectation, and did live such an uncommon life, but here we're really seeing exactly where my rails were.

I could go this far out of the norm, this far out of the comfort zone, but I couldn't really push beyond that. That is the place where I think so many of us find ourselves. Where we're able to go so far, but not really all the way.

So, on the final day, when I was due to leave and go back home, Paco took me to Ibiza, to one of the nicest restaurants to have lunch. I just couldn't eat. Tears kept overflowing. I was having to choke them back. I felt sick in my stomach, and I just couldn't eat a bite.

We were standing in line at the airport and it was distressing him so much to see me like this. I had my arms wrapped around him, and I just wanted to soak up every single second that I could. He finally said, “You know what? I'm coming with you.” I said, “What?” He said, “If I can get a ticket for this flight, I'm going to hop on. I'm going to take you to Madrid,” where I'd catch my international flight. There was a place available for him.

This was a wildly decadent, to buy a plane ticket to Madrid just for a turn-and-burn. But I was euphoric on the plane. We were so in love. It looked like we were probably honeymooning or something. When we got to Madrid, I called my dad, my biological dad, whom I was going to go visit first, before seeing my parents, my mom and stepdad, and then going back to school.

I knew he hadn't seen me in over a year so I knew he was missing me. I said, “Dad, here's the situation. Would you mind if I just stay one more day, and I come home one day later?” I am forever grateful for his understanding. He said, “Jen, I remember being that in love. I remember my first love, I completely understand. Absolutely. We'll see you tomorrow.”

Paco and I had a wonderful night in Madrid. I have very keen memory of us hanging out in the Plaza Mayor, with time just feeling like it was stretching out. The next day, I felt so much more prepared and optimistic. There was something in that token move that showed me that somehow, we're going to make this work even though we come from two different countries and two different worlds.

So, my friends, I will close this chapter here, and wish you the very, very best week to come.

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