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Sunday we left Spain and headed back to Tampa.  "Uneventful" is how I'd term it, and that's exactly what one would hope for on such a long trip.  We left Madrid at eleven A.M., went through Dullus airport again and got home at nine P.M. local time.  A day after we got home, I got sick again with fever and chills ... I thought I had left that back in Spain!  Last night the fever broke and so I'm back here writing this blog.

One of my favorite quotes (that is usually attributed to Mark Twain) is:  "Never try to teach a pig to sing.  It wastes your time and annoys the pig".  Well this pig is rather annoyed.  I realized years ago that I don't have a great capacity for foreign languages, but I had hoped to speak Spanish better than I do after being in Madrid for almost four months.  I'm sure that a lot of it is my age ... the brain just doesn't assimilate new information as well the older one gets.  But I've been keenly interested in, and have studied the language off-and-on (mostly off) for thirty-five years, and still am not proficient at it.  I'm thinking about going back to continue studying, but for the time being, I have my hands quite full in Florida taking care of all the things that I've neglected for four months.

I do speak and understand Spanish much better than I did before I went.  And I now understand what I know and don't know in Spanish grammar.  But just as importantly I learned what the Spanish culture is about.  I'm not saying that the family's persepective of Spain was biased, b-u-t .... having lived there for a short while, I formulated my own impressions of the place.  I don't know if it's because I'm older and have had greater exposure to things outside of my village, or if it's that things in Spain have changed that much since the first time I saw it, but the single thing that struck me the most about Spain this time (and I assume by extension, Europe) is how homogeneous the world has become.  Sure, there are differences, but what impressed me more were the similarities between the U.S. and Spain, especially in the built environment.  I often looked at a streetscape (usually in the suburbs) and thought to myself that with very little exception, that it looked like an American scene.  And in talking with people there, their day-to-day lives and attitudes and manner of thinking seemed very much like our own.  Their medical care and facilities were almost identical, except that their doctors didn't seem overworked and too much in a hurry as our system has caused our doctors to be. 

I'm glad that I went to España, even if it was 30 years too late.  And at this moment I'm of the mind to go back and continue studying the language.  But as the saying goes:  "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" ...  We'll see.