theme song

Hotel Switzerland (Suecia) Granada

I almost wrote this entry a month ago.  It appears that this trip has a theme song – not one we chose, but one that keeps coming up.  And the song is …

Hotel California!

We first heard this back in Chicago while we were walking around the city when we had a 4 hour break before picking up the Amtrak train to Oregon.  There was a live band playing in an office building courtyard while the management was handing out free lunches to their tenants.  We particularly noticed the song during their set because there was a group of young women dancing and singing along and taking photos of themselves.  Next we heard it in a hippy-ish vegetarian restaurant in Reykjavik, Iceland.  They also played songs like Sitting on the Dock of the Bay and Dylan’s Let’s Go Get Stoned.  In North Berwick, Scotland, we heard it at the pub we frequented called The Ship Inn, but even then it didn’t seem too odd.

We started to really notice the song when we left Great Britain, where at least you would expect to hear English language music.  It turns out that the vast majority of piped-in music in Europe seems to be American.  In Vienna, we heard it in a Chinese restaurant that was near our apartment and very veg friendly.  We heard it on a bus going into Nimes in southern France, and in a taxi in Avila, Spain.  That was when I thought about writing this post, but I procrastinated, and the moment passed. 

There was a long gap, but finally today in Granada (a Saturday) as we were walking in the “gypsy” quarter and listening to lots of different buskers on street corners, one of them sang Hotel California.  I gave him a Euro and told him we had heard it from Chicago and through Europe.  I think he was a little disappointed that it was such a common cover.  BTW, he sounded Spanish, although he could speak and understand my English.

In a few days, we hope to see the Bosch “Garden of Earthly Delights” at the Prado in Madrid.  Then we return home and are done with hotels for a while.