Have you ever met someone who tells you they hate beer? They will usually say they don’t like the taste….hence this is usually university girls and 17 year old boys. My response is always the same: “Get really fuckin’ thirsty on a hot day. I mean really fuckin’ thirsty. And then drink an ice cold beer, and your life will be revolutionized…”
One memory informs this wizened advice. A summer day in university (I was on exchange in Australia) my mate asked me over to help work on his car. It was quite warm, and he had chosen the one spot in the street where there was no shade. The procedure involved removing all the petrol and my job was to hold the clear, plastic jug to which we needed to siphon out the fuel.
So I sat for what felt like hours with the sun beating down hard on me, shriveling me up like the hollow shell of a cockroach which had died in the middle of a wide open playground, seared from underneath by the sizzling, black asphalt. Milliliter by painstaking milliliter, the pale, yellow fue (I had no idea what it looked like outside of the car) trickled into the jug.
And hell did it look good. Like a crisp, refreshing sickly sweet lemonade that would free my tongue from my side molars, fused together by adhesive, sticky saliva. One sip and I would be cooled and refreshed like a burn victim taking a nose dive into a lake of gleaming, sea-green aloe vera, submerged and suspended like all those little bubbles, grinning with utter relief…..
Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink…
I snapped out of it. Only then did I know what a man marooned by his companions in the sandy desert, pulling himself hand over bare foot, scaling massive dunes with his shirt wrapped around his face to mitigate the singeing, inevitable sunburn feels like: and then we took a break and the crisp, few, hoppy drops of ice-cold lager hit my lips and I knew what it was to spot the oasis. And I knew what it was to learn it was not a mirage.
That was the day I learned to love beer. The next time I would contemplate the soothing effects of pouring petroleum down my parched gullet was the hours spent baking in the dry Mediterranean heat of Seville, Spain, Europe’s hottest city.
The Giralda church tower: Seville’s most famous landmark
I had arrived in the daytime, and by evening, I had surely shed maybe ¾ of my body weight in water. I am not by any stretch from a warm area, growing up in the United Kingdom. England is the soppy, lint-covered, old sponge that sits in the bottom of your sink in a puddle of dirty water. No small wonder, then, that we decided to get the fuck off this island and sent our native sons to colonize the warmer climes of the Americas, Australia, and the Caribbean (if only our skin would hold up in these areas).
Though my sojourn in Sydney while studying had introduced me to something other than damp, English cloudy days, I had very little experience with the Mediterranean world. And it was like a completely different reality, where I was learning fundamental life lessons on a daily basis regarding how to survive on what might well have been another planet. By the time I was this dehydrated crust of a man on my first day, I had learned that the sun’s core intensity varied in different locales.
Scorching
Whereas previously I had flocked outside to let the lukewarm sun nourish my milky skin from time to time, now the sun was my mortal enemy. Northerners like my parents decry the Spanish siesta as an indicator of Southern laziness, yet now I understood its purpose. In this region the sun is your enemy, and when he has taken the high ground, you had better seek cover from his onslaught of raining arrows….or Hellfire missiles.
Even the homeless pass out away from the sun
My main lesson came while lugging my suitcase down the type of narrow sidewalks that are commonplace in the older cities of Europe. At some point I realized that I was not being jostled, not beholden to that general hubbub that swirls around you on a regular Spanish street.
This realization came as a shock, but my surprise came from the intensive focus I had placed on the current task at hand. I had previously been so fixated on pulling my rolling bag, and how hot I was, and how sweaty I was, and Why in the fuck did I wear a black shirt?, Did I mention how hot I was?, frustrated and perturbed by every little skip of the STUPID plastic wheels of my shitty suitcase. But there was no one around — so I looked up.
My side of the street was a literal ghost town…papers fluttered, cobblestones dried and cracked, groaning and begging for salvation. And I stood there in silence.
By contrast, the other side of the street could have been one of those futuristic superhighways you see in movies about the 25th Century, with sleek, electronic floating cars zipping around in the darkness everywhere on elevated bands of light. That was the key: just like in those movies, these people buzzed by in a furiously busy metropolis shrouded in eternal night, a cacophony of human sound protected from the UV light.
Looking on the sunny side has a different meaning here
They were too wrapped up in their daily activities to notice the moribund individual who had dared to step out into the Forbidden Zone.
Here I stood, skin smouldering in the quiet sunlight, sweat pouring down my brow. Yes, my suitcase was unwieldy, and destined to annoy Spaniards of all ages on that narrow sidewalk in the shade. But one must adapt to local tradition, and this meant not being an idiot and plunging into the darkness ASAP.
To strengthen my resolve for the coming challenge, right before diving into the multitudes, I ducked into the nearest pub for a pint.
Lesson learned: Do as locals do, especially with regards to the weather. They have lived it their whole lives, and you truly don’t know a thing.
-Gregory (Liverpool), 34, drying up like a leaf in Seville, Spain