Travel Thursday!
Last Thursday we were treated to a travel tale from Duke (too bad his name doesn’t start with a “T”…think about it), and this week we’ve got another installation from him! Read on to find out how his week in Spain progressed…
Day Three: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Alarm
Day Three of VaughnTown. This morning I’m feeling the pain of losing 6 hours. If you’ve never taken a trans-Atlantic flight, just know that you have to be prepared to take it on.
And that brings me to my punto principal. I have been making a point, despite the brain pain, to get up before the hotel alarm and hit the gym. Yes, it’s all about bypassing the great, inevitable, jet-lagged alarm. So here are two things you should know:
One: This VaughanTown English program generates automatic wake-up calls every morning at 8:00 a.m. (Yeah, ouch, although what’s even worse is that it’s only 2:00 a.m. in DC.)
Two: The shower in my hotel room is a coffin and the curtain is just in the way of…of leaking water all over the bathroom floor. So, I prefer to work out and then use the gym shower because it’s bigger and made of plexiglass.
So here I am in the gym, right… and it’s got the wide mirror, so I’m being all vain and checking myself out. And the key to remember is that I’m the only one in the gym and my iPad is playing music for my workout. Then Tootsie Roll starts playing (yes…Tootsie Roll) and I’m all dancing in the mirror being the fool I wanna be when no one’s looking…
And that’s when it happened; that’s when I got the inspiration to teach a room full of 19 Spaniards and 17 Anglos how to do the Tootsie Roll later that day. The song is poignant because it’s directional (it says, “to the left, to the left,” or “to the front, to the front.” It literally tells you where you need to move your body.) So, all week now, every time a Spaniard sees me, they say, “to left, to left” (of course forgetting the article “the,” but the intention is still clear).
The Spaniards and I have been cracking jokes about this. One of them is an air traffic controller. And I kid you not, she is “trafficking” my flight out of Madrid. So, now we’re joking that she’s going to tell the plane to go, “to the left, to the left…to the front, to the front…now fly, just fly, just fly baby, fly…”
Anyway, that’s how I came to teach the Tootsie Roll dance in Spain. Success.
(Have a travel story you’d like to share? Send it to us and it could be featured in G-Blogodaria!)
