Winner of a Gold Lowell Thomas Award (The Society of American Travel Writers)
Lavinia Spalding
I’ve been in Spain only two days, and already my fingers hurt. It’s a prickly, high-pitched sting, like when a fallen-asleep limb returns to life. The sensation delights me. It means I’m doing something right.
Yesterday, after arriving in Madrid, I took the metro to the Delicias neighborhood, home to Picasso’s Guernica (in the Reina Sofia Museum) and the magnificent iron-and-glass Atocha railway station. I didn’t visit those places. Instead, I walked to a nondescript apartment building and knocked on a stranger’s door. A thin, soft-spoken woman with sleepy eyes and floppy bangs invited me in. We chatted a bit, and then she handed me a $3,000 guitar. “Can you play something?” she asked.
This was the reason I’d come to Spain. Because I once believed I was destined to be a tocaora.
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(photos by Laura El-Tantawy)
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The Art of Eating Crawfish in New Orleans
Find New Orleans’s Soul at These 6 Mini-Museums
Politics is on the Menu at Hell’s Backbone Grill
New Orleans for the Celebratory
To the one who was supposed to get away
To write a diary every day is like returning to one’s own vomit.” –Enoch Powell