Sparkling, brand spanking new unemployment, or “freelancing,” as I call it, is a funny thing. While my apartment is now impeccably clean at all hours of the day, and I find myself planning dinner hours in advance, the truth is my life suddenly consists of trawling through job sites and watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother.
While I have had some early sporadic success selling myself in the form of 500-word blurbs to keep myself afloat, the stark contrast between my life of exactly one month ago and now does not escape me. On December 31st, 2010, I was in Madrid, Spain, being serenaded by three opera singers in front of a sloshed crowd of elite Europeans. Today, January 31st, 2011, there is a butt imprint on my designated job-hunting couch cushion and I think my milk may be past its expiration date.
Let me rewind.
While showing my family around Europe, it naturally became my duty to arrange restaurant reservations. When we crossed over into Spain, however, where my language skills held no value, it was somehow still my job to sniff out eateries that satisfied my family’s needs. With a vegetarian who will eat fish and a vegan who is only pretending to be vegetarian in order to not starve to death in Europe, the stakes were pretty high; New Year’s Eve was to be the highlight of our Madrid trip, so the restaurant that we found ourselves in when the clock struck midnight had to be perfect.
After an hour of searching online and reading jumbled translations of menus off Google Translate, I settled on La Capilla de La Bolsa, a restaurant near the Plaza del Sol, where the countdown would take place. I made a reservation for 9:30 pm after signing off on the simple and edible-for-all-parties menu, and called it a night.
But, being silly Americans, we failed to take two things into account. 1) The streets of Madrid are a mess of twists and turns, and we left no time for getting a tiny bit lost, and 2) It was New Year’s Eve, which may as well be called Night of a Thousand Police Barricades no matter where you find yourself. These complications finally maneuvered around, we arrived at La Capilla around 20 minutes late for our reservation.
Upon entering the foyer, a small room of white draped satiny curtains, it is important to pause at this moment and explain an important part of this story. The slight detail of how fancy this place was may have escaped us as we prepared to leave the hotel. Luckily my sister and I had dresses on in some sort of semblance of dressed-up-ness, but my mother was mildly horrified because she had worn casual pants with a nice shirt, as had my stepfather. The hostess took our coats after I hurriedly explained our delay, and finally she dramatically swept aside the curtain and beckoned for us to follow.
Behind those curtains was one of the most impressively decadent and elegant rooms I have ever stepped into with my plebian, peasant feet. My dress may have turned into a potato sack upon entry, but I can’t be positive. A piano player was tickling the ivories above the whole scene, on a mini platform stage ascending from a golden spiral staircase, and a woman’s diamond necklace blinded me on the way to the table.
Here is where my panic attack began. Though I like to think I can be very smooth, I don’t tend to do well in extravagant settings such as this. I suddenly got a sinking feeling in my growling stomach and as I grabbed the menu off the table that sinking feeling turned into a flight response level of adrenaline. It was a fixed menu, not one that I had seen on the website a night earlier. Half of it was meat. While I tried to take solace in the fact that we had done this in Paris and were thus experts with the ability to choose one plate from each starter, entrée and dessert course, cocktails and salmon caviar landed on the table without warning. I glanced down at the menu, and there they were at the very top, blueberry cocktail and salmon caviar.
“Wait, wait, wait. Do we get all of this??” I was sweating in my potato sack.
“Calm down, I’m sure we don’t get all of it,” my mother reassured me, glancing around for one of the waiters buzzing around the room like water skeeters on a pond.
Trying to digest the words swimming in front of my eyes, I had still not managed to see the final price listed at the bottom: 185 euros. Each. I think we all arrived there at the same moment, because when I looked up there were three jaws on the table. Well, two. My younger sister was busy eyeing her (normally contraband in the United States of Puritanism) cocktail.
Luckily, our waiter appeared and we were able to strike or replace a few items for vegetarian options. While they negotiated choices, I was still trying to comprehend how I was going to eat six or seven courses. We settled in after these initial hurdles, all inhaling deeply and me giggling nervously while I clutched my martini glass for dear life.
Suddenly, the piano music changed and a booming operatic baritone burst into the room, ricocheting off the domed ceilings and mosaic walls. A bald man in a tuxedo had begun circulating through the tables as people ate, belting out a well-known number from La Traviata. And wouldn’t you know it, he and his two opera singer companions—a woman in a Ferrari-red sequined dress with matching gloves up to her elbows and a shorter man—did this every half hour or so, with a new number every time.
Once the courses started flowing, so did the wine. Because the night was falling deeper and deeper into the last moments of 2010 and the servers were likely to be a little tipsy themselves, my glass never seemed to be less than ¾ full. Because of this, the night became the best night my peasant self had ever experienced, as I emphatically told my family repeatedly. (And not as eloquently. It was more attuned to this: “This is AWESOME. This is SO AWESOME!” as I clapped wildly and giggled when the tall bald baritone approached our table.)
In the end, we ate (crazy things, like foie gras with gin and tonic gelée), we drank (I waxed poetic about the decorative lights in the street on the stumble back home) and of course, somewhere along the way the singers were tipped off that it would be my birthday when the clock struck 12 and I was treated to a rousing rendition of Feliz Cumpleanos right before the countdown.
As we shoved 12 grapes in our mouths for 12 months of good luck along with the last 12 chimes of the year (a tradition that I will continue alone every year in the States, picking up weird looks along the way), I momentarily forgot that the meal cost more than my college education and learned to enjoy the decadence. I think somewhere in my heavily wine-saturated mind, I understood that in no time at all, I would be here, on my couch, emailing my resume over and over and devising a strange concoction for dinner with all the leftover ingredients I could find.
So congratulations on surviving the first month of 2011, plebs. Valentine’s Day is coming up, and I may just have to introduce Justin. Hang on to your potato sacks, ladies.
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