MADRID, SPAIN: I don't speak Spanish, but I'm fluent in napping. (7/9/10)

For my birthday this year, Mama McG sent me to Spain to bug my friend Felicia, for a change. Felish has been living in Spain for about a million years and is (finally) moving home to NY in a few weeks. A perfect time to visit, because she's getting all nostalgic for things she won't have for much longer- namely, food opportunities.

I landed in Madrid at 8:25 am. I checked into my hotel (Plaza Basilica) shortly thereafter, and thought "Hey, why don't I take a two or three hour nap, get up for lunch, do some work (all vacations are working vacations) and then maybe see some sites?"

Bobo salchicha.

My two or three hour nap was seven hours long and I woke up at 4pm to Felicia calling me to say "Hey... I'm downstairs... and I'm hungry..."

So after exchanging a brief hello and how are you to her and her lovely doggy Ysa, we headed off on a brief walk through Madrid. We saw the Plaza Real...

Cibeles was excited for World Cup...

Our walk made us work up an appetite for dinner. Mercado San Miguel is an awesome food market where you can purchase high quality food and drink, and eat it at booths there! Also everyone is super friendly. Felicia bff-d a French oysterman.

We started with oysters and champagne before moving onto a delicious cheese. Here's something Felicia will miss about Spain- she went up to the lady and said, "we have champagne. Pick a cheese for us to pair." And the cheese the cheese lady picked was amazing- a distinctly European talent.

Then we moved on to langostinos

And polpo (octopus) fried with huevos and roasted red peppers. Amazing. You dip the polpo into the huevos and the red peppers is a perfect match for the salty fried cephalopod.

After dinner we headed to after dinner drinks, and ended the night a gorgeous rooftop bar,

Where we saw this.

In Spain, playgrounds are built next to bars so that parents can drink in peace and send the children to play.

I don't think there's anything left to say about that.

Stay tuned for tomorrow: Llanes.

NEW YORK, NY: Planes, Trains, and Anti-Anxiety Medication (12/28/09)

Each birthday as a child, my father gave me a new volume in the "Worst Case Scenario" guides. This was his way of calming my panic attacks during travel. I've learned how to stop a speeding train, how to escape from quicksand, and how to ward off a zombie attack. I've studied the books, and have followed their travel instructions to a tee. However, his intentions backfired; in preparing for every eventuality, I have learned the vivid details of everything that could go wrong...

I am a terrible traveler. I love being other places, but the process of actually getting there makes me nervous. I will check to see if I have my passport at least twelve times, and will then check twelve times more to make sure that my passport didn't fall out when I was checking. I will then move my passport to another area in case some thief saw where I checked to find my passport. This continues until my passport has made a merry-go-round of my person. In my pre-teen years I would spend entire flights with my fingers crossed. On a recent flight from San Francisco I had to sedate myself because the man next to me refused to turn off his cell-phone. I've never been stopped at airport security for the same reason that Woody Allen has probably never been stopped. If you need a valium to just make it through airport security, you have bigger issues than ascertaining that all your 3 oz. liquids are in a sealed plastic bag, no larger than a one gallon size.

I can spend a whole vacation just recovering from a flight (reference the Kiwi turbulence debacle of 1995). But I can't stop traveling. No matter how neurotic, superstitious, or physically ill it makes me, I want to see how small the world is and drink up every drop, play every game, and dance to every tune. There has got to be an easier way to travel, aside from ocean liners (no go since the Titanic) and magic carpets (I won't ride in anything without seatbelts).

And now there has been a truly scary situation in Detroit, which, to my endless gratitude, ended peacefully. But now I've got a bone to pick with this Nigerian jerk, with jihad, and with Homeland Security. There is never a good time for this sort of thing, but it would have been more convenient if this had not happened when I was fresh out of anti-anxieties, and my flask exceeds the liquid ounce limit prescribed by the TSA.