Spain Vignette 1: “Once you get used to the smell of rendered fat, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.”

Spain was wonderful and beautiful. But we were struck quite often by an undeniable fact: It’s kind of stinky there. No, this is not going to be a rant about Europeans and BO (but if you are interested in that topic, check out Das Blog). It’s the cities themselves that smell. Both Barcelona and Madrid have a prominent smell of sewage. You catch a whiff of it every few minutes. It’s particularly obvious when you’re near a sewage grate, but it’s noticeable even when you’re not. Our first stop was Barcelona and I thought maybe this was just a Barcelona thing. Maybe they haven’t had much rain and the sewage drains were festering. But then, after a half-hour in Madrid, the smell was back. It wasn’t quite as noticeable, and it didn’t really bother me, since I had gotten used to it by that point. (And my theory about the rain didn’t really pan out, since it was raining the day and night we were in Madrid and it didn’t seem to mitigate the smell.) We were surprised by Seville, because there wasn’t much of a smell, and I would have expected it more there, since where we were staying and spending time is the really old part of the city, where one might expect the sewage system to be a bit antiquated. We did eat lunch outside one day in the Barrio Santa Cruz, which had a unique rotting meat smell that didn’t do much for my appetite. So, all in all, Spain was lovely, the smell, not so much.