A Day of Travel

            I left Granada the 26^th of June, 2012 around 3:00am. I had been out with friends that night walking around town saying good-bye to the place I had come to call home. Then the harder part came, when I told all of them friends good-bye. I had decided to stay up because I knew I would be traveling the entire next day. Later I sat with a special girl named Rosa; we sat together in the balcony of her apartment until I looked at my watch and realized that it was time to pick up my things and hit the road. Rosa’s mom also named Rosa happily agreed to take me to the airport to say good-bye. After I had spent so much time living in the woman’s house, she treated me as if I were one of her own.

            Finally, we got to the official airport of Granada, which was a small one-runway airport. At this point I put my baggage down to hug Rosa, her mother,her brother Fran, and Jess (an exchange student I had spent the whole year with). Then I picked up my luggage and began to board my plane, looking back only once. In that moment it hit me, as I took my seat, I realized my exchange year in Spain had finally come to an end. I was shocked, absolutely speechless. It occurred to me that two years prior to this particular moment, I had been applying for a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholarship to be able to go on this trip in the first place, and now right before my eyes it came to an end.

            The jet engines turned on and the plane began to speed down the runway, then liftoff. Since I was exhausted at the time, I fell right back to sleep. Later, I remember waking up after hearing the captain over the intercom say “Ya estamos alcanzando Madrid, momentariamente bajaremos. Espero que hayan tenido un viaje comodo, y gracias por elegir Ibera”. The plane landed shortly after, and I was now in the Madrid international airport. I had a very faint memory of it from 10 months earlier when I first arrived in Spain. It was still the same busy international airport that I remember with tons of travelers and announcements over the intercom, but everything seemed completely different then the first time. First off, I had achieved my goal of learning Spanish. I understood that Vuelo 190 se ira momentariamente meant that flight 190 would be leaving momentarily. 10 months earlier I was completely unaware of what the announcements were saying or if they even concerned me. I utilized the new language I learned when I asked a man at the information center for directions on where to get to my returning flight back to the US. He told me to take a bus to a different terminal a few miles away.

            While I was on the bus I remember seeing many of tourists speaking in many different languages, so excited to be on vacation. It made me think of the time I arrived in Spain, and I was so excited to finally be on exchange. Then I got to terminal E, went through airport security, and waited for the return trip back home. While waiting I saw a coke machine and drank one just before I boarded. Then they called for us to board, Atencion,todos los pasajeros yendo a Atlanta, Estados Unidos, ya estamos embarcando. Tengan sus cosas listas para ir. That was it! I knew then that I was probably not going to see Spain for a long time to come; I took my seat and began to reflect on everything. The first memories were those I had the day I got there 10 months earlier, being in a country where I didn’t know the language, when everything seemed so new and different. Then the second day I was there I went with my friend Fran to go play basketball in a park in Maracena. The day when my friend Piti took me out to see the vibrant city of Granada, I remember being so dumbfounded by all the old architecture and places in the streets. Then I remembered my first day of school at IES La Madraza, and how I was terrified to start school. I then thought of the week were I tried out for a soccer team, and got denied so I signed up for a basketball team. I then went on to meet great people and true friends like Navarrete and Luis. I thought of the times I went with my friends to la joventud on Friday nights to break-dance even though I knew I wasn't any good, or the times me and friends would go out to bars to shoot pool or play Foosball with complete strangers.  I remembered las manifestaciones, when I marched with the Spaniards against the injustices of the system, and the craziest Halloween I've ever had where me and 10 friends all crashed in Javi's house for the night. Or the times where me all the guys from school would go out and play football sala until we were all too tired to continue.

   It reminded me of La feria, a weeklong carnival that came to town, where my friends and I would go out and hit on all the gorgeous girls we could find. These would be memories I’d keep forever, and experiences I would never live down. When I arrived in Atlanta, I got stuck in US customs, causing me to miss my flight to Denver. So I waited in the airport until the guest services found me a new flight. After getting through US customs and waiting 5 hours in Atlanta,  I finally got on to my next flight back to Denver. I wasn’t sure if I was ready or not to return because my mind was still obviously 

stuck in the past. But nevertheless I came back, changed, but still Jose