Spain: the last pen

Our last day in Barcelona—the day of our return flight to Gatwick, London, actually—I purchased the most expensive pen of my life.

Originally, Angela and I had intended to awaken at a reasonable hour and use the morning hours to pack our belongings, check out of the hostel, and exchange her stockings at El Cortes Ingles. (She was determined to wear her skirt, since one of her pairs of jeans was wet and the other dirty. However, in order not to freeze, she needed stockings. Me, I would have gone dirty. By her standards, I’m sure I was. For our plane ride home, I was re-wearing a T-shirt for the third time, the pair of jeans that wasn’t wet, and the same sweatshirt I had worn every day of the trip.) Then, we intended to return to a tapas bar that we had hunted down earlier in our trip. We had gone in search of this bar one night and found it so packed, the customers were overflowing out the front door, food and drink in hand. We weren’t sure we’d ever get close enough to the counter to order, never mind a seat, so our plan was to return on the last day of our trip and arrive at the bar by twelve noon (when the place opened) so we’d be assured a table for lunch. Then, we would return to our hostel, pick up our bags, walk to the aerobus stop, and be on our way to the airport in plenty of time to check our baggage and board our 9:55 pm plane back to the UK.

Unfortunately, even the best laid plans sometimes are not followed to completion. Packing, checking out, and even exchanging the stockings went smoothly enough. However, as we were preparing to leave El Cortes Ingles, the rain that had plagued the latter half of our trip began again in earnest. Our clothing and shoes still damp from having trudged through the previous day’s downpour, we opted to forego our final meal of tapas in favor of reclining in a Starbucks (Angela’s favorite haunt, as I discovered on this trip) located only a few blocks away. Securing chairs by the window, Angela sipped her latte and read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty while I worked on catching up in my journal and drafting the first blog entry I would post upon my return to Holland house.

We arrived at Starbucks at about 11:30am. By Angela’s calculations, we would need to leave by approximately 5:30pm in order to return to the hostel for our bags, particularly since we needed to find out which metro stop to get off for the aerobus (because now that it was raining steadily, we were certainly not walking to the stop; not with her in a skirt and ballet slipper shoes). Needless to say, six hours is a long time to spend in a Starbucks. I hadn’t thought to bring my own book—David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day—along, particularly because my purse was already full enough, so I just amused myself by alternating staring out of the window, napping, and writing in my journal. Six hours worth of those activities, even in unequal portions, means a lot of writing. And, consequently, a lot of ink.

By 3pm, I had used up both Angela’s pen and my own pen. I was stuck. I neither wanted to spend yet more money on this trip, nor did I want to go out into the rain again, but my alternative was not acceptable: it meant sitting idly for another two-and-a-half hours with thoughts swarming my brain and itching to get onto paper. Reluctantly, I ducked out of Starbucks and headed to the closest place I thought might sell pens: the !Hola! tourist stand. When I requested a “bolígrafo,” the man running the stand handed me a blue Bic pen. It was the kind you can buy at Staples or Office Max in boxes of 25 or 50. Had I not seen him fish it out a box on the counter labeled Bic, I would have thought it was his own personal writing instrument, perhaps having come from behind his ear or his coat pocket. “Setenta,” he told me. Seventy eurocents for a cheapo Bic pen? Did he know what I could have bought this for in the States? Sighing, I handed over one euro, but when he began serving his next customer, I indignantly demanded my thirty eurocents change. He might be able to overcharge a desperate writer for a pen, but he was not going to cheat an American out of her thirty cents change.