A Typical Thursday Night?

Means Friday morning with a well-earned hangover. But, the night was worth the repeated thudding realizations that no, there’s no jackhammer between your ears and that if you stand up, there’s only a 50/50 chance you’ll actually throw up. Last night, after a new route home from work turned a 12-minute walk into a 40-minute one (turns out, most European cities, not arranged in grid patterns), I opted for dinner with my friends over the gym. While we have not yet acclimated to the schedule, I think my American friends and I are getting a knack for the Spanish style meal, the one in which two and a half hours evaporate into bread, wine bottles, and laughing at toothless, singing buskers.
Indecision and epically good mojitos brought us to a youth hostel close to Plaza de la Merced. Fabio is Brazilian, and if you give him six minutes, mint and a lot of sugar, the night is sure to evolve (devolve?) into a sweet, rummy blur. But, this isn’t what kept us there. In the hostel bar, a jam session was brewing, and the cast of characters I met is possibly my favorite part. The rotating band consisted of two guys playing guitars, a Frenchman, Jerome, who’d grown up in Algeria, and a German, Waldo, who assured me that he did know where he was and no, he didn’t own any striped clothing or wear glasses. Later, while discussing our new president elect, Waldo forgave me for being just one more person to exhaust that joke. Two Nordic guys kept switching off playing a jambeau, Petes, a Norwegian who explained why the rose tattoo on his neck had special significance and truly believed in the personal touch of the LOVE and HATE on his knuckles, and a Swede, who was my age but frankly looked like someone had stretched a 15-year-old and put a Peruvian shirt on him. Occasionally, Marisol from Colombia would overcome her shyness and play. And then there was me, singing, in a smoke filled room, in front of people that could actually hear me. Towards the end of the night, Waldo asked if I knew “Summertime,” and despite the clinking of glasses and the hum of talk in at least three different languages, I very nearly silenced the room for two and a half minutes. It was one of the greatest moments of my life, given to me by people from at least nine different countries. In all honesty, that’s what made it better, a group of happy, supportive strangers, from all over the world.
The strange hitch is that most of the lovely people I met in the travelers’ hostel actually live in Málaga. Perhaps they had stayed there when they arrived, but now it had become a home for hanging out, for finding odd friends, for playing guitar and staying up late.