Zaragosa, One Pigeon at a Time -Zaragosa, Spain

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Zaragosa, Spain In the springtime, the women of Zaragosa, Spain bloom bright purple. This ritual of communal hair dyeing dates back to the first century A.D., when the Roman regional governor, Augustus Septemberus, decreed that all women within the city walls must mash eggplant into their hair to ensure a bountiful harvest. That, plus spend the night at his place. Okay, I made that up, but it seemed the only possible explanation for this hair color. Maybe it was a cry for attention. Zaragosa is industrial town stuck between Madrid and Barcelona, mentioned in my guidebook only as an afterthought. Aside from the hair, there wasn't much going on. The long walk from the train station to the city center is littered with 70s architecture designed by Fascist war criminals: imposing, blocky structures that convey little love of humanity, stingy with any color other than grey. The streets are dusty and there are few pedestrians. No point in taking an afternoon stroll. In Zaragosa you hop in your car and drive. We were here because my friend James, an art historian, wanted to see the collection of a local church. I was grumpy, thinking of all the places we wouldn't have time to visit: the Guggenheim in Bilbão, the Alhambra in Córdova, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. There were architectural marvels to experience and here we were, stuck in the land of the purple-haired women. We found a room right off the main square, the Plaza del Pilar. The hotel lobby was windowless and filled with 30-year old leather couches occupied by elderly people watching TV. Except the TV was in another room, so they all sat silently and slightly bent over, peering through the doorway. Like the rooms in many older hotels in Spain, ours didn't originally have a bathroom. A corner of the room had been walled off and a bathroom retrofitted by a frustrated cubist. The sink was crooked, the shower was on a raised platform, slanted at an odd angle and the entire room was triangular. To maintain water pressure, a pump belched every 2 or 3 minutes. Someone left something in the sink that unfortunately wasn't an extra mint for the pillowcase. "This isn't a bad room," James said, suddenly afflicted with total dive blindness, a condition common among travelers convinced that to have an authentic travel experience they must be afraid to use their own bathroom. Soon after I adjusted to the rhythmic, nocturnal belching of the bathroom and fell asleep, I was woken up by a garbage collection crew that wasn't emptying the dumpsters so much as bowling with them. The sound of crashing metal bounced off the surrounding stone façades, and narrowed its focus to a point of convergence directly in the middle of my forehead. It missed James completely, who slept shamelessly in the other bed. The next morning, a fresh supply of elderly people was trucked in to watch TV in the lobby and we walked past unnoticed. Our hotel was directly across from the cathedral, which cast long, early morning shadows over the square. James's art collection was outside of town and he was off to look for a bus. I had plans to sit in front of the cathedral and watch pigeons until he got back. Much like McDonalds, pigeons are a reassuring reminder that no matter how far you are from home, some things don't change. Bobbing like a gang of little gray head bangers, Spanish pigeons are indistinguishable from their cousins that hung out on Michigan Ave. during my morning commute in Chicago. An older woman set up shop in the middle of the square, laying out little bags of seed kids that tourists could purchase for feeding pigeons. But it was still early and no one was buying yet, so a group of ambitious young head bangers decided to bypass the middleman completely and went straight for the bags of seed. "Pinche palomas!" - damn pigeons - the woman shouted, tossing her knitting needles and balls of yarn. The birds fluttered off to another part of the square to reconvene and bang their heads some more until they came up with another plan of attack. At the north end of the square, a fleet of school children gathered near a fountain, shouting as only kids can at 10 a.m. Dressed as ancient Romans, they were yelling "Cesare! Cesare!" A man in a toga stepped up the podium and started to speak. "This year we will have a bountiful harvest!" "Cesare!" "We shall be victorious against the Gauls!" "Cesare!" "Long live the Roman Empire!" "Cesare! Cesare! Cesare!" We were just blocks from the ruins of the old Roman city wall. The name Zaragosa itself is the relic of a Roman outpost named after Caesar Augusta, which, via 'Sar Augusta, Saraqosta and other names, eventually evolved into Zaragosa. The speech came to a triumphant end and the kids cheered and scattered in every direction, on a treasure hunt for candy and Christian infidels. We never had mass historical reenactments like that when I was a kid, perhaps because there weren't Roman outposts in California. We did tour the General Mills manufacturing plant in Sacramento once, and were shown how Cheerios are made and given little handfuls of Trix to snack on. But we didn't get to dress up as Lucky Charms elves and run around in a sugar-fueled frenzy. My school did try to teach us about Native American culture and our teachers prepared an authentic Native American meal for us. Showing remarkable cultural sensitivity, I threw it up on the floor and my mother had to come get me. It's probably just as well we didn't have Roman reenactments, as I would have ended up in the nurses office with a flesh wound inflicted by a third-grader named Brutus. I walked towards the commercial district of town and the Roman kids were replaced with businessmen talking on hands-free cell-phones, looking like well-dressed mental ward escapees, roaming the streets shouting to themselves about last year's profit margin. Just up the block was the familiar sight of a McDonalds, but something was horribly wrong. Smoke was pouring out of the windows. This couldn't be right. McDonalds don't burn down. They're indestructible. Like weeds, you just toss a few seeds and they'll grow anywhere. The only reason there aren't McDonalds on the moon by now is that no one's figured out how to keep those little catsup packets from bursting in zero atmosphere. But unlike its American counterparts, this McDonalds blended into the downtown architecture and - except for the plumes of smoke - didn't call much attention to itself. All the stores, restaurants, apartments and hotels in the center of Zaragosa are shaped by centuries old stone façades. Buildings don't make way for the golden arches. The golden arches are tucked under an awning or reduced to fit in a window. I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the center of town and was late meeting up with James. We got a beer in an outdoor café overlooking the Plaza de Pilar. The pigeons, quicker learners than we give them credit, hung out around small kids because they knew the kids would 1) ask their parents to buy some seed and then 2) spill the whole bag on the ground into a ready-made pigeon buffet. The square was covered with kids: two young girls played with their dog, boys splashed in a water fountain, girls chased boys, then got tired and were chased by boys. As the sun started to disappear, all the kids pulled out cellphones. Their purple-haired Moms soon came to take them home for dinner. I sipped my beer as the shadows carved deeper and deeper grooves into the façade of the cathedral. Guggenheim, smoogenheim.


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