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We left Seville and reached Madrid by train in around 3 hours, which I think is the perfect amount of time to spend on a train. While enjoying the Spanish countryside, we learned from some Spaniards that the festival of San Fermin, including the running of the bulls, was still going on that we could be there with another 3-hour train ride. We decided that we would go after leaving Madrid, but more on that later.

We arrived in Madrid and made our way to the Plaza de Espana to meet Jeremy, our first couch surfing host. For those of you who don’t know, couch surfers are an internet community of people who offer their homes to travelers for free, and since you typically end up sleeping on their couch, they call it couch surfing. Joey and I have hosted a handful of travelers over the last year, and since none of them were serial killers or that weird at all, we decided that we would try it as travelers. At the very least we would save some money and meet some interesting people.

And we met Jeremy.  Jeremy is a French ex-pat who lives in Madrid, working as a language tutor. As you will see from the pictures, Jeremy is, in my opinion, very French looking. According to his profile, he considers himself an expert in English, but he is an earnest amateur at best. During one conversation it took me ten minutes to understand that in France three separate channels show Desperate Housewives.  Really?

Hardly worth the effort. I’m not criticizing him—Jeremy honestly loves language, he says he knows 8, and you can tell he hosts couch surfers, particularly English speakers, so that he can practice. I admire this for two reasons. One, if my French were at the level of his English, I would never dream of hosting a French speaker, so he is certainly brave. Two, though we struggled to understand each other, he genuinely wanted to communicate with us and he strove to make that happen. During conversations he would look up words and then ask us how to use certain phrases or verbs.

In all of that I didn’t ask him how to say one thing in French, and I realized we native English speakers aren’t very generous with other languages. For us other languages are more like novelties because we understand that English is the language of culture and commerce, and that in terms of cost benefit analysis, the effort necessary to really learn another language isn’t worth it since English is king. Traveling helps us see how the rest of the world perceives our language and our culture and how we perceive ourselves, and I love this because I don’t know if I would ever think about this if it weren’t for encountering people like Jeremy. I realized that Europeans are like distant cousins to us Americans, so even though we have relatives in common, our families are different, and it’s always interesting to see how other families raise their children, so to speak.

But Jeremy was only with us in Madrid for one night because he was going to a nude beach for a couple of days (true story). We thought this meant that we were getting kicked out after one night, but then something incredible happened—he gave us the keys to his apartment—and he told us we are welcome to come and go as we please. Crazy, really. But then I looked around and realized he had no fear of us taking anything. There was nothing to take, unless we wanted a PC laptop with a French keyboard. We didn’t.

Now to that first night. His apartment had three bedrooms, but one of them was inaccessible for reasons that remain inexplicable, and because Jeremy’s roommate had the other room, this meant that all four of us would be sleeping in Jeremy’s room—his tiny, tiny room with two mattresses and a fold out couch. It was kind of like if you combined a sleep over with a refugee camp in Africa, except hotter. Way hotter. Jeremy had no AC because Europeans love to sweat and love to smell like sweat. I’m serious—there was nary a fan, which blows my mind because it’s not like ceiling or floor fans are a big secret. That first night in Madrid may be the worst night of sleep I have ever had, if you can call having your eyes closed for eight hours pretending to sleep while you roll around in your own sweat sleep.  Hey, at least it was free.

Our flight from London to Seville was easy overall, aside from having to get up at 4 am to make the airport. This compounded our sleep debt and when we finally got to Seville the only thing we were able to see before taking a 6-hour nap was the Seville Cathedral. I knew for sure that I needed to sleep when trudging through the world’s largest cathedral felt like a chore more than a privilege. Christopher Columbus’ stunning tomb only inspired a mild response. We did see a wooden alligator hanging from one of the outdoor transepts. Though I should have been asking why there was a wooden alligator at a church, I instead named him Woody Allengator. Tyler and Joey both laughed, which is concrete evidence that we all needed to sleep. Clearly, we weren’t thinking straight.

So after a glorious 6-hour nap we enjoyed a meal at a 300-year-old tapas bar. The food was good but the surprise of the evening was discovering a half-formed pearl in one the oysters we ate. Actually, my teeth discovered it. And after realizing what it was, we decided to make it the trip mascot and to name it. We settled on Gary Lawrence of Iberia. Unlike Woody Allengator, the pearl’s name is absolutely brilliant. He was too small though, and I lost him the next morning. Tyler cried.

We planned to head to Madrid the following morning but Tyler found out that there would be a bullfight that night in Seville. This was exciting to all of us, since attending a bullfight was at the forefront of our imaginations from the planning stages of this trip. There seems to be nothing more quintessentially Spanish than a bullfight, and Seville is the world capital of bullfights.

But I have to say the overall experience was strange and a little unsettling for me. One bull, for instance, had blood gushing out of his mouth by the end of the fight and when the team of horses would drag the dead bull’s body away, it always felt like they were celebration was a little too extravagant. It’s not like the bull had a real chance.

The most fascinating aspect of the whole ordeal was the matadors themselves. I didn’t realize there was a team of matadors each with a different job. The main matador though is the most fascinating. He is the one who ends up killing the bull, and he occupies a strange masculine/feminine space. In one sense his main job is to seduce the bull, luring him into a hypnotic dance. His main weapon is a kind of dance, a dance full of graceful and strikingly feminine steps. The bull spins and lunges into an ever dizzying trance, and ends up utterly stunned, standing woozy in front of the matador, who then plunges a sword into the bull’s back. This is where the matador becomes decidedly masculine. What starts graceful and seductive ends forceful and aggressive. And though we saw one matador toppled end over end by a charging bull, I never felt like the bullfighters were in danger. The only one in danger was the bull. His fate was sealed as soon as he stepped into the arena. What I thought would be a true confrontation between man and beast was really more pageantry, a prelude to a known end—the death of the bull.

Now on to one of the reasons travel is so great. Edward de Bono describes the human brain as a “self-organizing system,” which means, among other things, that as your brain figures something out, a place, a process, etc., it creates neural shortcuts for that thing. These neural shortcuts self-organize so that when certain stimuli hit your brain, your brain knows exactly what to do, so that over a long enough period of time you can do certain things on autopilot. Think about driving in your hometown. For the most part you aren’t paying attention because your brain knows how to get around.

What this means is that to learn, to grow, to shake up your brain, you need new environments and challenges. Travel, especially in foreign countries, jump-starts your brain.

In London when we walked into Victoria station and there were thousands of people moving in every direction and I was on no sleep and I had to figure out what tube to take, my brain kicked into overdrive. And I loved it. I had to form new patterns or at least develop pathways between existing patterns in my mind. I’ve always described travel as heightened living. You do many of things that you do in your regular life, but you experience them in a heightened way. If your every day life is standard definition television, then travel is high definition television.

For more photos from our adventures go here.

All photos by Joseph Schalbs.

Dave gets married then Tyler gets shot down, only to rise again and dance with minor.  Watch the wedding and the fall of Superman here.

Watch as we indulge our inner rednecks as we shoot our way into the Lacey’s hearts.  Here is the sixth installment of our great American adventure here.

We leave St. Louis behind and make a dead sprint for Ohio to get Dave to his bride-to-be.  That’s not to say that we don’t have fun along the way because we do.  We very much do.  Check it out Day 5 here.

We almost drown in a sea of cardinal red and a very special guest arrives on the fourth day of our adventure.  There is song and dance galore on the latest episode of Ahoy Ohio.

Between the banned fireworks stand and the sweaty waiter at Outback, things warm up as we continue east on our journey to Dave’s wedding. Check out the latest installment of Ahoy Ohio at Tyler Buschman’s website.

What do you call four friends going to the world’s largest cross, an Indian trading post, and a smoke-filled casino? Chereoke. Follow the link to see our misadventures as we journey to Ohio and Dave’s wedding.

Ahoy Ohio: Day 1 from tylerbuschman on Vimeo.

Three friends and I are heading to Ohio. Here’s the teaser trailer of our journey in progress on Tyler K. Buschman’s very own website. Enjoy.