Courtesy of Tom Hammel

All of my reasons for leaving the U.S. for Madrid, Spain can be traced back to a guard booth in Orange County. I spent my summer after freshman year in a swivel chair waving in cars, looking out a window at trains passing every hour on the hour.

That time spent alone blurred the days and weeks together. All I’d done in more than two months was make plans and churn through memories. To pass the shifts, I turned to Ernest Hemingway. The man loved beautiful women and Spain. He didn’t love himself. I didn’t either.

My great expectations for the next year at San Diego State fell short by the fall. Friends from freshman year went their own ways. Classes were large and impersonal. I listened to the advice of older students. “You have to have a list of internships on your résumé. What’s a degree worth anymore? If you don’t you’re already behind.” I wasn’t having that.

One day I stopped walking and asked myself what the hell I was doing. I had quit my job and pushed away someone I loved. This life in this place was hollow because I had made it that way.

Ten minutes later I was in the Extended Studies Center Study Abroad Office. I talked with Yadirah Lagomarsini. She listed every program SDSU had in Europe, and we narrowed it to Spain.

“We have a summer program in Madrid for a month, how does that sound?”

“Perfect.”

***

After three days at an elderly Spanish woman’s dinner table, I could speak more Spanish than I could after two semesters at SDSU. The traditional grandmother understood English but refused to speak it. By our fifth breakfast I was discussing Spain’s economic crisis with her.

Those of us from San Diego would meet in front of University de Nebrija and walk to the metro station up the road, look at the city rail map and make a decision.

Anyone who had been searching for something else finally had it, and the pace never ceased. The tapas, smoke-filled bars, the World Cup, electric nightlife, five-story clubs, 4 a.m. (early for Spain) taxi rides and walks under orange street lamps were there for the taking. I slept into the afternoon, made phone calls and walked out the door for the parks, cafés, architecture and world-renowned fine art museums.

Life attracted more life. The crowd I spent my weeks with took trains and buses to Toledo, Barcelona and Valencia on the weekends. We temporarily lived in hostels and took people from anywhere with us.

But I still looked forward to coming home to Madrid. Every ideal had a pulse. The people I came to know and respect represented countries from every corner of the world. A young girl in a museum told me how hard life was in industrial Russia and how beautiful the heartbeat of a horse felt. A Syrian man had taught me the principles of the Islamic faith on a plane. I heard a South Korean translator tell his wife and daughters in Seoul that he loved them while the North Korean military was performing tank demonstrations.

The afternoon and night before my final, I spoke solely in Spanish. My British and South Korean roommates were sitting at the street corner café and hailed me toward them. We watched rolling lightning in the dark clouds and listened to the thunderstorm on the terrace until it rained. By 1 a.m., a Spanish secretary in the bar was telling me about the 2004 al-Qaida bombing of Atocha station.

At 2 a.m. I ate two loaves of bread, drank a liter of water and studied my flashcards. I was delirious writing paragraphs for my Spanish final running on two hours of sleep but strangely, I felt content. The only set plan I had for the next 20 days was a flight out of the Czech Republic.

The next day I was on a train to Rioja with an eccentric character from San Diego.

Twenty-four hours passed and we stood on a mountainside with our skin and clothes stained purple, eating baguettes with jamon, looking at the vineyards through the valleys below. We hadn’t slept a minute the night before; we sang and danced under buckets of wine thrown through the air into crowds stomping over streams of purple in the mud, to horn bands blaring Spanish anthems for three hours. The man who took us in for the weekend, the Spanish professor who treated us like family, took a picture. It was the most complete and thorough happiness I’d ever felt, and it stayed with me.

Then there was Paris.

8212;Tom Hammel is a political science senior.

8212;This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec.