In my day (LOL), ‘rawdogging’ meant something completely different and way nastier 😅 Fucking Gen Z and their jargon. I don’t even ‘rawdog’ on a 45-minute flight to Vegas. In fact, we take bets on whether or not we’ll even get refreshments on such a short flight. Sometimes the flight attendants claim ‘turbulence’ and say they need to remain seated for the duration of our flight and can’t do beverage service. I always get an iced coffee and bottled water after TSA, no matter how short the flight is, because this bitch is always thirsty 😅
Pammie had to go to OC for work yesterday, and there was a horrific accident on the 5, so she stopped at a cafe to wait out the traffic and enjoy a matcha green tea latte. She’s just like my dad. They would rather wait out the traffic somewhere, but I prefer to just sit in the traffic and get to my destination faster. As long as I have Spotify and a bluetooth connection, I can sit in traffic for hours. It’s usually a 2-hour drive between LA and SD, but it can take upwards of 4 hours on holiday weekends 😵💫
Today, on the drive back from my doctor’s appointment in LA, we hit traffic coming back, so my dad wanted to wait it out and eat dinner somewhere. We got back on the road around 6:45pm (usually non-traffic time in SD), but it was a parking lot on the 8. An ambo, police cars and two firetrucks zoomed past us on the shoulder. ‘Maybe someone’s dead up there,’ I mused to myself, and my mom was like, ‘Marion! Why are you always so morbid?!’ When we were finally able to creep past the accident, we saw an unconscious man on the ground getting CPR from the EMTs, his mangled motorcycle just ahead of him down the road. Yikes.
Actual footage of me driving in LA traffic:
Anyway, if my sister didn’t stop in that cafe to wait out traffic, she wouldn’t have heard this song they were playing inside and sent it to me because she knew it was my steez:
If I could be by your side I’ll give you all my life, my seasons I can’t be your love ‘Cause I’m afraid I’ll ruin your life
I knew they were Korean! They remind me of this other alternative Korean band I stumbled upon while looking for strawberry moon vibes on Spotify – The Poles 😅
The Poles never tour the US, though, and I saw that wave to earth is doing a North American tour and coming to SD, OC and LA. Their whole tour is sold out, though! WTF? Am I a Korean fangirl now? 🫰🏻
I need this shirt, except not in crop top form. Although I hate to deny the world the sight of my muffin top, I believe that people from the 1900s (or people who are old enough to have died of dysentery in Oregon Trail) shouldn’t be wearing crop tops. Fight me.
Talking to Pammie about current events is like trying to find meaning in a Pauly Shore movie 😅
My sister has been in Solana Beach for work all week, so my parents are taking me to my doctor’s appointment in LA tomorrow. I got my labs back, and it was negative for lymphoma and leukemia, but my white blood cell count was still elevated and they saw some ‘abnormalities’ whatever that means. Hopefully the hematologist will have more insight for me tomorrow. At least it’s not blood cancer! 😅
I was eating dinner, and my sister and her husband were watching House of the Dragon. I don’t watch it, so I was like, ‘Who’s that? Why’s everyone sad? What’s happening?’ and I was met with this look 😅
My toxic trait is that I talk and ask questions during TV shows/movies. I watched Game of Thrones when it first came out, but I stopped watching after they killed off Jason Momoa in the first season. I started watching it again from the 2nd season during the 7th season when I found out the 8th season was gonna be the final one. I was like, ‘How come no one talks about Rob Stark? He’s fine as hell!’ and Pammie was like, ‘Uhh…’ 😅 Spoiler alert: Rob Stark dies in season three.
Donna and her husband were vacationing on the coast, and she sent us a picture of the beach and was like, ‘David says this is where Dobby’s grave is!’ and I was like, ‘Dobby dies?!?!’ I’ve only watched the first four Harry Potter movies, so I didn’t know Dobby was murdered in the 7th movie. The last Harry Potter movie came out in 2011, so it’s my own damn fault for getting spoiled.
Me: Anyone else die in the movies? Pammie: Sirius. Me: What?! Wait, who’s Sirius again? Pammie: Sirius Black. Harry Potter’s godfather. Me: Ohhh. I confused him with Severus Snape. Pammie: He dies, too. Me: What?!
I’ve somehow avoided finding out the ending of Lost, even though the finale aired in 2010 😅
When your favorite 8-year-old loves Harry Potter and axolotls 💕
I was in Spain for her birthday, but I’m seeing her mom for dinner tonight. Christine messaged yesterday saying she missed our cackles and wanted to hang. We hang out all the time, but it’s usually for a special occasion (birthdays, holidays, Justin Timberlake concerts, etc. LOL). The last time I remember her asking if we were free out of the blue was when she told us she was pregnant 😳 She has since had three kids and her tubes tied, so I don’t think we’re gonna have any special announcements tonight (at least not of that nature). I would say it’s to discuss JT’s DUI this morning, but she asked to hang out yesterday so 😜
Anyway, can’t wait for chismé and cackles tonight!
I’m back at work doing web stuff after weeks of being on vacation, months of being on catalogs, and recovering after a bout with covid. I also have a new profile pic on Slack 😜
Whenever I see a short girl with a tall guy, I’m like, ‘Stay in your lane, girl. He can’t even see you.’ 😅 I’m not super tall (5’7″), but I’m taller than most girls I know. Shi has been trying to get me to expand my dating pool and go back to Asians, but I haven’t been with an Asian guy in 20 years, plus they’re usually on the shorter side. I don’t necessarily love wearing heels, but I like having the option 😜
Get you a sister who drops off a bouquet of your favorite flowers (peonies) to brighten your day when you have covid (you should be writing this down).
Our fabulous tour manager (Nelson from Gate 1) surprised us with sparkling wine on our way to our last city. I forgot my Beats on the tour bus on the last day, and he had the bus bring it back the next day (classic Mayan—I’ve left them on a plane before and paid $40 for the airline to ship it back to me 6 miles to my apartment in LA, because I wasn’t gonna endure the hell that is LAX to pick them up for free). He’s from Barcelona, and has spent his entire life in Spain, except for one year he decided to try out London. He came back the next year because, ‘People are just so ugly in the UK. Do they not have dentists???’ I mean, where’s the lie? LOL ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve never been to Europe or done a land tour before, I usually like to be on my own time when I’m on vacation—visit the places I wanna go, eat where I wanna eat when I wanna eat—but I liked it more than I thought I would! Our tour guides in each city were funny and super charming (Pedro in Portugal, Elena in Seville, Andrés in Ronda/Málaga, Rocio in Granada, and José in Madrid), I got to see places I never would’ve gone to myself, we had transportation to each city, plus we got free time everyday to do/eat where we wanted to. The only downside was being stuck with these obnoxious people on the tours. It’s like being held hostage in a group text you can’t get out of 😅 IYKYK.
These bus tours tested relationships. You’re stuck with the same group of people for 10 days. This old ass couple was fighting in Italian the entire time. I only understood when the wife told her husband, ‘Worry about yourself. I’m not a baby!’ and ‘Leave me alone!’ because she said it in English LOL. Another couple, the wife was asking the husband ‘Why are you smiling like that, I’ve never seen that smile before’ and this other couple, a gypsy was talking to the husband trying to sell him rosemary branches and read his palm, and when he came back, the wife was like, ‘Do you still have your wallet? Did she put a curse on you?’ LOL same couple when we were in Gibraltar, the husband was like, ‘It’s technically England, but all the waitresses are Spanish and they cross the border to work every day.’ His wife was like, ‘How do you know that? Were you flirting with the waitress while I was in the bathroom?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, we’re friends on TikTok now.’ 😂 I’m over here like 😴 Whenever people are arguing in front of me, I get super uncomfortable and pretend I’m sleeping LOL 😆
This old lady on our tour got her hair braided at the beach in Costa del Sol.
Her husband even went ziplining while we were in Toledo! Retired life is wild 😅
Nobody was my age (they were either in their 20s with their parents or in their 60s or older). This lady asked me what my husband’s name was, and I was like, ‘He’s my dad, not my sugar daddy’ LOL. She was like, ‘Oh okay, I didn’t want to assume.’ 😆 Another lady asked me if I was in school, because she thought I was a teenager! I was like, “I’m 42, ma’am.” She was shocked! She had her daughters with her, and they were in their 20s. I was closer to her age than to her kids 😆 My dad thought her daughters were teenagers, too. I was like, ‘They’re drinking sangria. They’re at least in her 20s’ and he was like, ‘But you were drinking vodka in high school’ and I was like, ‘Not in public!’ 😆
This group of six obnoxious people (three couples) were on the entire trip with us. They were super loud (lots of eye rolls and other people on the tour shushing them), always had something to say/complain about, in their 80s, Italian and from NYC. They had me questioning if I’m ageist, racist, or just don’t like people from New York LOL.
I met three ladies who are married with children, but traveling alone because either their husbands hate traveling or their husbands have bad hips LOL. I would never travel alone. I do a lot of things by myself—go grocery shopping, eat dinner in my apartment, go to John Mayer concerts LOL—but I know I wouldn’t like traveling alone. It’s like watching a movie in a theater alone. I’ve only watched Fever Pitch and Made of Honor by myself in a movie theater, because no one wanted to watch these romcoms with me LOL. I want to be able to look over at another person and be like, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?!” Like in that movie, Shall We Dance?, Susan Sarandon says, We need a witness to our lives…You’re saying ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.’
Can I get a witness?
Our trip started in Lisboa, Portugal, and it was gorgeous. The weather was much like San Diego, so it was really nice. Felt like home.
My favorite food of the whole trip was actually in Portugal. We had arroz de marisco (it was a lot like seafood paella, but soupier) and grilled octopus (@ Luzmar, Cascais, Portugal)
I also ate a Portuguese egg tart every day. I’ve never eaten one back home, and now I never can, because they taste so damn good over here. My mom said they’re way better than the ones they have at Paris Baguette 😅
Did you know Portugal is the largest producer of cork in the world? I didn’t. I just picked up this bag in Cascais because I thought it was cute. The “I ❤️ España” keychain was a gift from our tour manager, Nelson 😆
My dad: Slow down, we get more drinks at the flamenco show after dinner. Me: *washes down my meds with a 4th glass of sangria*
If sangria was on the menu (and it always was), I ordered it.
Spain is on Central European Time instead of its natural time zone, so the sun didn’t set until close to 10pm! The flamenco show started at 9:30pm and I was already so tired and five glasses of sangrias deep 😅 (@ Tablao Flamenco El Patio Sevillano, Sevilla, Spain)
This photo was taken from our hotel at 9:45pm! The days are so long here ☀️
Me: What do you feel like eating for dinner? My mom: Chinese food. Me: We’re in Spain.
I found a Chinese restaurant that was near to our hotel and actually pretty good considering China’s on the other side of the world! Plus, I’m easygoing and they had sangria (@ Ming 明, Sevilla, Spain)
My dad: Another sangria? Aren’t you hungover from last night? Me: *sipping my sangria* Nah, I’ve been training for this my whole life.
Churros con chocolate for breakfast? Sí, por favor (@ Meliã Lebreros, Sevilla, Spain)
Driving from Seville to Costa del Sol, we passed by this beautiful countryside full of sunflowers. They farm the sunflowers for its oil and energy. BRB gonna quit my job and move to the south of Spain to work on a sunflower farm ✌🏼 Or at Google in Málaga (we saw a corporate office there). Plus, Spain has 17 bank holidays a year!
My sister’s old company has a location in Madrid, so I told her she could work there while I work on a sunflower farm 😏 (@ Ernst & Young, Madrid, Spain)
It’s gorgeous here. Our tour guide in Ronda and Málaga, Andrés, said that the south of Spain is so easygoing. People die of heart attacks and diabetes from all the good food, but they don’t die of stress. And he said if we see someone running (exercising), they aren’t from Spain LOL. Sounds like my kind of country!
As I was toasting my second piece of bread during breakfast, I looked out the window and saw this tourist doing zumba outside. As a rule, I don’t exercise while I’m on vacation. I hardly exercise when I’m not on vacation 😅 I damn sure am not gonna exercise when I’m in Spain!
We stopped by this little town in the south of Spain with no traffic lights called Ronda. We visited one of the most famous bullfighting arenas in Spain. I thought bullfighting was bulls fighting other bulls, but it’s a man fighting a bull! And one of them dies at the end (usually the bull). They still do bullfighting once a year in this arena, but it’s banned in other parts of Spain (like Barcelona). I would never 😅
Nelson (who’s from Barcelona) isn’t into bullfighting either, and wanted us to leave that place with a happy memory, so he surprised us by taking us to this nearby horse farm, where the horses are loved and taken care of their whole lives (@ Reservatauro Ronda)
Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, and his family built a museum there (@ Museo Picasso, Málaga, Spain)
I had to buy some souvenirs from the gift shop. The left is of his famous painting of prostitutes in Barcelona, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It’s part of the permanent collection at MOMA in NYC, so I didn’t get to see it in person. The original painting of the one on the right is featured in this museum, though, and it’s of Françoise Gilot. Picasso married twice and she was one his many mistresses. She was the only woman to ever leave him ✌🏼 She said, ‘Pablo was the greatest love of my life, but you had to take steps to protect yourself. I did, I left before I was destroyed.’ She was an artist in her own right, and also my hero. She just died last year at the age of 101.
As I was exiting the museum, this guy mistook me for a local and asked me for directions. I’m wondering if he understood my broken Spanish or if he’s still wandering the streets of Málaga 😅
Fun history fact: Gibraltar was taken from Spain by the British in the early 1700s, so it’s technically in England. We needed our passports to get in and out. From the coast, you can see Spain and Africa, but it was cloudy today, so we couldn’t see Morocco.
We toured this palace, and it was so beautiful and smelled so good because of all the rose gardens and jasmine (@ Alhambra, Granada, Spain)
There were these ceramic bowls placed all around the palace, and I thought it was to feed water to the dogs (it was hot as balls this day), but the tour guide told us they were just beautiful trash cans 😆
Real Madrid played Dortmund in the final while we were in Madrid. The actual game was at Wembley in London, but 90,000 people gathered at this stadium to watch it on the big screen. Real Madrid won the championship, so it was crazy in the city. The team had a big party at the stadium the next day, but it didn’t start till 10 o’clock. At night! On a Sunday! 👵🏻
No pictures were allowed inside the museum, but we got to see incredible works from Goya, Velázquez, Greco, Picasso, Rembrandt and more (@ Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain)
I went to this other museum specifically to see works from Salvador Dalí, but was delighted to see some Picasso and Gris (@ Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain)
My mom: I’m not really into art. My dad: Who’s Salvador Dalí?
I can’t with these philistines 😅
It was impossible to get a photo of Picasso’s Guernica without a gaggle of tourists in front of it, but I picked up this postcard in the gift shop. I wanted one of Dalí’s most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, but they didn’t have it because the original painting is also at MOMA in NYC. I will have to go to that museum the next time I’m in New York, so I can see more works from Dalí and Picasso.
I’ve only ever seen jamón ibérico on Food Network, and I finally got to try it at a Starbucks in Spain 😅
These prize pigs are fed acorns and live on free-range grass pastures in the Iberian peninsula. I guess it’s similar to Wagyu cattle in Japan, except jamón ibérico is harder to find in the US (it’s against the law to import jamón ibérico – the hind leg of an Iberian pig, hoof attached, swaddled in fat – because Spain does not have a single slaughterhouse that conforms to the regulations of the US Department of Agriculture).
I still regret not buying a jamón ibérico pillow from the souvenir shop across the street from our last hotel 😆
I kept seeing this Museo del Jamón everywhere. I thought it was a museum of ham, but it was just a bar/resto that specializes in ham 😆
There was also a La Casa de las Carcasas across from our hotel. I was disappointed that it didn’t mean ‘house of carcasses’ like I thought it did and didn’t see any dead bodies. I google translated ‘carcasas’ and it meant ‘casings’ in Spanish. I thought, ‘Oh maybe it’s sausages!’ so I was double disappointed when I saw it was just cell phone cases. I really gotta brush up on my Español. How embarazado. JK. ‘Embarazado’ means ‘pregnant’ in Spanish. I’ll never make that mistake again 😅
A guy I used to date when I was sixteen responded to my Museo del Jamón story on instagram, and this was our convo 😂 I’ve either gotten more morbid in the last 25 years, or I was better at hiding my freak flag when I was a teenager 🏴
It’s so hard to find iced coffee in Spain. One of our tour guides said people here like to buy a tiny cup of espresso and sit in front of it for hours. We were walking by a cafe, and he was like, ‘Remember these faces. They’ll still be sitting here when we walk back this way in a few hours.’ 😂 He said Starbucks hasn’t been super successful here because people don’t take their coffee to go. Luckily, they have these chilled coffees to go at the rest stops for all the tourists, complete with a straw you can pierce the lid with Capri Sun-style 😅
I ate a lot of seafood paella (or arroz de marisco). It takes like half an hour to prepare, because it’s made to order, but it’s so worth the wait.
Same Mayan, different country (@ Mcdonald’s, Granada, Spain)
Sometimes you don’t want anymore paella and just need to UberEats a McDouble to your hotel 😅
Spot the tourists (it’s my parents).
My dad was so worried we’d get pickpocketed, yet he was the one walking around with a big ass selfie stick, carrying multiple bags, and misplaced everything (our luggage locks, his glasses, his whole ass luggage—he left his luggage on the curb in front of the airport and didn’t realize it until we were checking our bags!). Like, should you be the one holding all our passports, my guy? 😅 I’m the one over here getting mistaken for a local LOL.
We spent an afternoon in Toledo before going to Madrid. It’s one of the oldest cities in Spain, but I can’t remember much else of what the tour guide told us. It was a lot of information. One of the ladies on our tour, Denise, was like, ‘Is there gonna be a test at the end???’ 😅
Actual footage of me trying to eat my tapsilog while another customer was singing horribly off-key. Why do tone-deaf people always want to do karaoke???
These orange trees grow all over Andalucía, or the southern coast of Spain. The fruit is bitter, though, and is mostly exported to make marmalade, so no one eats them off the tree.
I had to take video of this as proof that the parrots followed me to Spain 😅
Nori and I would always be sitting outside Starbucks on our lunch break at the beach, and the parrots would be in the palm trees yapping away!
On top of seeing a Skechers store in every major city, I saw so many tourists wearing them (including my parents). I can’t get away from this fucking place 😅
We stayed a few extra days in Madrid, so my dad booked a hotel for those days. It ended up being a hostel in the fucking ghetto. This is just like when he booked us at this shady ass hotel in Queens with a reggaeton night club at the bottom of it. My sister ended up booking us at the Hilton New York Times Square after that first night. We ended up moving to the Hotel Madrid Plaza España. It’s a Meliã hotel, and most of the hotels we stayed at on this tour were Meliã hotels, so I already knew it was nice. My dad is the kind of person who never checks reviews, and only booked this place because of its walkability to the city center.
I woke up with the worst headache that day. I hadn’t had a single headache since the strokes, and I used to get migraines all the time. I thought it was because I drank too much sangria the night before, or because I was on week 2 of vacationing with my parents 😅 but now I know it’s because I had covid. Needless to say, I was already so irritated this day. It was hard to get an uber because a lot of the city streets were blocked off since Real Madrid won the championship the night before and the city was celebrating. So we had already uber’d to the hostel, uber’d to another nice hotel that was booked and had no vacancies, and schlepped our luggage another few blocks to this Meliã hotel.
My sister (and KD, my favorite 8-year-old LOL) would have loved the in-flight movie selection.
All things considered, I will def be back here again! I loved everything—the people, the art, the culture. I took the rest of the week off because I need some ‘me’ time to wind down before I go back to work, so I’m just gonna rest and get rid of this virus. Or move to the south of Spain to work on a sunflower farm. I haven’t decided yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Welp, I finally got covid. Half our tour bus got sick towards the end of our trip. I took a test as soon as I got home last night, went to bed, and woke up 20 hours later 😅
Spain recap soon. Perhaps when this virus has left my body ✌🏼
Update: Supplemental paid sick leave for covid ended in California in 2022, so I guess I’ll be reporting those sick days in kronos 😅
I haven’t seen this iconic carpet since Deane, Sarah and I vacationed in Portland in 2017!
My parents like breaks while traveling, so we flew from Madrid to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Portland, and are now waiting for our flight from Portland to SD. We’ve been traveling since 6 in the morning (which is really 9pm PST time the night before), and we don’t arrive till 9pm (PST) tonight. We have to go through customs every time we land, go through TSA again, had to pick up our luggage at baggage claim in Portland and re-check our bags. We flew business class, so we have access to the business lounge during our layovers, but I don’t care about free food and drinks in the lounge, or even the free meals on the plane. I’d rather sleep on a direct flight and not deal with any of that shit. Especially since I keep getting flagged for random security checks 😅
This old man in a wheel chair was wheeled to our waiting area in Madrid. He was yelling and cussing at the staff because there was no airport bar in our terminal where he was departing, and there was one in the terminal he arrived in. But since he has wheelchair assistance, they wheeled him over to our terminal. He kept screaming for them to take him back to the old terminal so he could go to the airport bar. I’m like, ‘Sir, it’s 4 in the fucking morning and too damn early to be yelling this loud and def too damn early to be drinking.’
I got stopped by TSA in Madrid also. They swabbed my bag but found nothing. I also got ‘randomly selected’ for a security check when I was boarding the plane in Frankfurt. I had to go to a private area where they searched my bag again and swabbed my clothes. Like, do I give off terrorist vibes? Or did they not like my Michael Myers shirt? 😅
I’m going, going, back, back to Cali, Cali
I follow Chino Moreno’s wife on IG (partly because Chino’s IG is private, but mostly because I’m a creep) and I saw he was in Hamburg, Germany. I had a layover in Frankfurt, but I google mapped it and Hamburg is 5 hours away 😅 I also have a layover in Portland and he lives in Oregon, but he’s touring in Germany. One day, the stars will align and I’ll meet him 😆
Also, I’m tired as fuck, because the first leg of my flight home from Madrid to Frankfurt was at 6am, so I had to get up at 2am 😴 which is really 7pm the night before pacific time. I just know I’m gonna be all kinds of fucked up when I get home. I was messed up for days after I flew home from Nashville and they’re only 2 hours ahead 😅
