Spain - Day 5

There’s a big difference between traveling alone and traveling at the whim and will of another. It’s a production, especially when the other is called “wife.” I’m amazed I ever made it through India, Vietnam, blah blah blah, when it seems now it’s enough for me to order a ham and cheese sandwich at an airport counter without complications. I am no longer the hunter/gatherer I used to be, but instead a slow furry animal easily picked off by loud and brash predators.

Today for the first time during our trip to Spain I set out to find internet access. There’s a lot of internet places, smoke-filled storefronts with keyboards and screens that for a small fee you can reach out to the complex world. But find Wi-Fi (pronounced here Wee-Fee) that you can tap into with your own laptop? Spain’s never heard of it. Lia is out with her parents, so with me being alone, light and culturally agile today, I was able to find a Starbucks with access.

(Being that I am in a foreign country, I am temporarily suspending my own personal anti-Starbucks campaign. And in fact the coffee in Spanish Starbucks is very good, as compared to the burnt dirt served in US Starbucks.)


The person I am happiest to see and identify with most here is Lia’s father, Cornel, seen in the picture studying a Madrid map after a day following Lia around looking for just the right boots (10 hours). I now know how Lia came to be – a house with 3 women abused the poor guy mercilessly, and still do, and thus this is why Lia, my wife, is such a brat, and thus why I identify her father so. But this week is his reward, Lia’s sister, Nicoleta. And that’s why we’re here.

God bless Cornel Nicoara.

Remember I met Lia here in Madrid some six years ago while she was here visiting Nicoleta, who was studying for her PhD in physics. Yesterday, Nico presented her thesis before the jury. She speaks Romanian, wrote her thesis in English and delivered it in Spanish. As if that wasn't hard enough . . .


Physics, big deal, right? Weights and pulleys and maybe a bit of math. Well, what a shock we were in for when Nico and her boyfriend Victor (who delivers his own PhD thesis in a month) showed us around their labs.


It sort of freaked me out, looking like something straight out of NASA. Come to find out it’s NASA Nico may be working for if Japan doesn’t get her first. We toured labs with accelerators and giant vacuums and particle smashes and gas lines and cables and giant magnets and shiny stuff with that radioactive symbol on it, and God knows what else. I felt pretty smallish, thinking of my little laptop with Photoshop and Word – mere sticks and sharpened rocks in comparison.


At one point I looked out a window and saw a bio research building. I joked that if we saw people running out the door screaming we should be afraid. Victor looked at me, smiled a bit and replied, “With what we could do in this building, they would never even get a warning.” I saw him look off into the distance over the hills between us and downtown Madrid some twenty miles away. I suspect he was calculating how far away any warning would even do any good at all.

But back to Cornel. He was a physics professor for some 30 years in Romania. So imagine his feeling of pride coming to Madrid for his 30-year old daughter’s PhD graduation with his other daughter, a Microsoft database brain, in town from half way around the world as well.

We sat in a room, like a classroom, and a few people milled about as Nico set up a projector for a PowerPoint show. I was thinking it seemed anti-climactic for such an event. Then, in a matter of 30 seconds, the room exploded with people, leaving many standing in the back of the room, even spilling out the door. It was a packed house.

For an hour solid Nico delivered a lecture - something straight out of Star Wars. I can’t even begin to describe what happened, but it was mind-boggling. Atoms and molecules and structures of silicon on gold under various voltages and the stuff even Jesus Christ looks at and goes, “Huh?”

In the end they awarded her a PhD. I wish I could say more about the gravity of what happened, but I am still sort of in shock myself. Imagine being the proud father, Cornel.


God bless Cornel Nicoara.

But you know me, always looking for something funny. Like I always do, I was shooting pictures like crazy, which drives Lia crazy. One picture shows her waving her hands at me to stop clicking. I guess that’s funny. But what’s really funny is that before we left the house that morning, she put on her dress. I had an idea, and I told her she would have to go without out panties, in that they showed through the material. She was alarmed. I never thought she'd go for it.


“Really,” she said, feeling around for the lines.

“Oh yeah.”

I showered and when I returned I found she’s put on a smaller pair, if there could be such a thing.

“Nope, that’s even worse.”

“No!” she exclaimed.

“Yeah,” I said, and guided her hand to the telltale lines. Her eyes got wide, and she realized she’d have to go bare.

I was waiting for her to confer with her mother, who would tell her I was lying, which I sort of was. But she didn’t, and in a dress, she left the house with nothing underneath. A couple blocks from the house I told her. She stopped, got wide-eyed again looking at me, contemplated running back to the flat to get them, but knew we were in a hurry.

So, it really wasn’t so much my clicking away that got her panties bunched up in this picture. You know, no pun intended.


In one picture Cornel and Lia’s mother sit next to each other on the Metro as we went somewhere. He’s taking notes for a journal he writes at night. He’s fascinated by mechanical things, so when he sees bridges or structures or anything like that he draws little schematics and maps and such.

Romania isn’t very high tech by and large. And Cornal and Lia’s mother are always getting bit by things we take for granted. Cornel keeps getting chewed up by the automated gates that control entrance and exit to and from the Metro, and his wife keeps tripping at the bottom of escalators, at one point nearly being thrown to the ground.

At one point Cornel looked at Lucci and said, “We wouldn’t make it here. We belong in the mountains with goats.”


This crazy picture of Lia shows her reaction to what’s going on over her shoulder – her father and uncle arguing about something. Most of the conversations these people have sound more like disagreements than small talk.


This images means a lot to me. Anytime we travel to see her mother, the two of them talk endlessly like here.


The shot of Lia with her family shows something funny as well. Notice how Cornel stands bolt upright facing a funny direction. I think this is something he’s carried over from the communist days. He does it automatically when I point a camera in his direction. I’ve tried getting him to stop, but he just laughs about it. I have a lot of pictures of him doing this. I think I caught him by surprise in the shot of him on the bench.


Here is a shot of Lia outside a train station. It’s Atocha. If you don’t know what that is, look up “Reason why Spain got out of Iraq, and replaced its own government.”