We were four people, sitting on top of the walls of the ancient tower in Girona on a cool December afternoon. Down below, we could see the locals buzzing about the streets, all wearing their winter coats. Living in Scotland, however, the cool breeze felt almost tropical. I was reminded of visiting the ski resort in the Sierra Nevada many years prior. The local people were wearing almost arctic gear, and there I was, wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
The thing about staying in hostels when you travel is that you always seem to encounter the weirdest people. Freaks, a friend of mine calls them, in a tone of endearment. And through a series of strange mishaps, we four were freaks on top of the Torre Gironella. Me, a dear friend, a Floridian woman, and a Welsh lass who the Floridian girl had somehow found wandering the streets of Barcelona.
“You know,” I began, “in Scotland, when they go to get the grocery shopping, they call it ‘the messages’.”
“Really?” said the young Floridian woman. It was her first time travelling outside of the United States, and somehow we had formed the role of tour guides, in a city that none of us had ever been to before.
“Aye,” I said, “you can look it up if you don’t believe me.” And she did, and it was true.
The sun shone through the trees in the old gardens, and the birds twittered away amongst the branches. Out in the distance, we saw rolling hills, covered in forest, and far away in the distance, so far that you needed to squint to make it out through the haze, was the snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees.
“What else do they say in Scotland?”
“Well, obviously,” replied the Welsh woman, “as I’m sure you know, they say ‘aye’ instead of ‘yes’. Also, I heard they say ‘piece’ instead of ‘sandwich’, is that true?” She looked pointedly at me and my friend, neither of whom were from Scotland, but had merely adopted it as our home.
“It’s true, they say that at my work all the time,” I said.
“Yeah, my boss says that sometimes. Just going to the shops to get a piece, he’ll say. Took me ages to not question him ‘a piece of what?’”, agreed my best friend.
“You know what else they say in Scotland?” I laughed. “They don’t call it a microwave. You’ll never guess what they actually say.”
“Why, what do they say?” asked the Floridian lass.
“They call it a Michael-wave,” I replied.
Cottoning on to my obvious falsehood, but deciding to run with it anyway, my dear friend and the Welsh woman agreed. “It’s so weird, isn’t it!”
At that moment, a group of French tourists climbed the rusty spiral staircase to admire the view. The Welsh lass, in her best French, asked them if they’d take a photo of the four of us. I had forgotten my sunglasses, so, straining against the glare, I tried to smile the best I could. It came out okay, in the end.
“I miss my boyfriend,” said the Floridian woman. “He prays for me.”
She fell asleep on the train back to Barcelona in the evening, whilst we listened to some Canadian exchange students talk about how excited they were to go and see their families at Christmas. It had been an exciting, but tiring day. Travelling does that to you, I always find. The days are packed with so many things, and you almost don’t have time to be exhausted. But when you sit down on a nice, warm, comfy train, suddenly the fatigue catches up with you. There’s no coffee in the world strong enough to overpower that feeling.
***
Some weeks later, I saw the photo of the four of us on her Instagram page. You couldn’t really tell that I was squinting in the photo, but looking at it I remembered the feeling of the sunlight in my eyes. She captioned the photo ‘The best day with you’.
I felt bad about having told her it was called a Michael-wave.
