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JV - Hi, I’m John Vergara.

PV - And I’m Paula Vergara.

PV - Welcome to the 5th episode of the Probably Speaking podcast. 

JV - So this month, we’re going to turn our focus back to some Vergara stories that are simply TOO good NOT to share. 

• You may have heard us refer to the Vergara bubble on occasion. What the heck does that mean? Well, it simply refers to the fact that we Vergaras have been around some crazy situations and somehow emerge unscathed. It might be tempting fate, but I want to take this opportunity to share a couple of stories about my most memorable experiences with the bubble. 
  Here's the first one:

JV - So Paula, Do you happen to recall my Alicante Train Story from my junior year of college in Madrid? 

PV - Vaguely. I think I was 12 or 13 at that time, so I was fairly oblivious to what was happening to you when you were over in Spain. It’s also possible that Mom and Dad didn’t tell me.

JV - Hmm..Probably for the best. 

• JV - So, as a double major in History and Spanish Literature at Middlebury College, I opted to study abroad in Madrid for my 1980-81 junior year. This story takes place around mid-October, and I was headed to Alicante on the coast for a weekend of fun. However, it didn’t exactly turn out the way I had planned, but it was a learning moment and a clear example of that Vergara bubble that has stayed with me all these years  later.  

PV  - I’m sure there’s more than one learning moment in this story…haha.

• JV - For sure…I packed quite a bit of ridiculousness into this situation.

• JV - So, while I was studying in Madrid, it seemed like every weekend was filled with new travel adventures. Who wouldn’t want to explore Spain if they had the opportunity?  

• I had been advised to purchase a eurail pass, to take advantage of the unlimited train travel within the participating European countries (with the exception of Britain, of course…and they wonder why Brexit happened….).  
• I think the passes cost about $100 and were good for 3 months unlimited train travel, so the clock was ticking, and in my mind, every moment I wasn’t using it was a waste of money! 

PV - Ah, you inherited the frugal gene. 

• JV - We Vergaras know how to pinch a penny. 

• So the problem was, you had to exit Spain via France or Portugal just to purchase the eurail pass (which made such Spanish sense...) That trip is another adventure for another episode…

• With that golden ticket,  I had planned to hit the road every weekend, sometimes on my own, sometimes with some other students, traveling to different hot spots in Spain, playing tourist for the weekend, and then dragging back on Monday at 

8 a.m. (with little to no sleep), just in time for class.

PV - That sounds really rough…galavanting around Spain on the weekends…sampling all the churros and chorizo...

• JV - Well, the fun didn’t last long.…back to the story at hand…

• That eurail pass was burning a hole in my pocket, so by mid-October, I had planned a trip to Alicante, to squeeze in the last bit of summer beach time.  I was traveling with about 5 other students from the competing NYU year abroad program (heresy, to my Middlebury friends) and therefore didn’t really know them, other than they were looking for another guy to join them to split the costs.

• I figured, hey, it'll be cheap and the train is already paid for, so why not?

• So we all met at the train station in Madrid. When I entered the train car, I realized that I had stepped back in time. I was riding on a 3rd class, antiquated train from the 1940’s era railways. It was a stark reminder of the recently ended fascist era in Spain. The country had just emerged from 40 years of the Francisco Franco dictatorship, so the infrastructure was a mess.

• These train cars had to be 40 years old, at least.
• There was no air conditioning, no heat, and the seats lacked any level of comfort.

• The rail cars were broken up into 6-person compact cabins, with the narrow closing doors, so you had bench-style seats facing each other where you had little room in front of you for anything other than your feet. 

•  It took over-night to get to Alicante by train, so we were stopping at every tiny town in Spain along the way.

PV - How long would it typically take to get from Madrid to Alicante, by car? 

• JV - Alicante is not that far from Madrid. Maybe a 4-hour drive? Madrid is in the center of Spain, and Alicante is on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, south-east of Madrid…it’s a resort city–very tourist-y type of place, known for its nightlife, seafood restaurants and very popular with English, German folks on holiday. I wasnt going there for the culture, in other words.

PV- Was there food on the train??

• JV - Oh God no. Everyone had their little satchels with their meal in hand.

• Also, keep in mind that there were no cell phones back then, and I had no credit cards…NUTHIN.

• No way to communicate with anyone on the outside other than pay phones (remember pay phones?) and even those were very finicky.

• Walking along the skinny hallway of the train car, I noticed it was loaded to capacity, mainly with rowdy military trainees, who were likely going on a weekend bender. 

• It seemed like everybody smoked back then, and in Spain, they smoked those nauseating black tar, filterless cigarettes, and the whole train was just filled with grubby people, clouds of cigarette smoke, and loud noise.  

• Since we were traveling on the overnight train to Alicante, I had hoped to have a little siesta.  That possibility was obviously out the window the minute I had set foot on the train.

• It was impossible to find a place to try and get any sleep whatsoever on this train car.

• I was with I think 2 members of my group, in a little box-like cabin. 

• We shared our particular cabin with four soldiers, and they clearly had no plans to sleep during this trip. 

• At about midnight (we left Madrid probably around 10PM), I had an epiphany! I was going to search for an emptier cabin nearby to try to get some rest.  I left my “mighty red” boyscout-era backpack with all my belongings in the overhead, safely nested next to the bags of my 2 friends.  

PV - Ooo, I remember that red backpack. I used it for a Girl Scout overnight trip in the woods with my Girl Scout troop when I was 10….about ⅔ of that backpack was filled with food. Gaahd, I hated that trip. I think M&D were testing the waters to see how I would do on my first overnight away from home. Camping was not my thing. 

• JV - Yes, I remember that about you.

JV - Anyway…back to my Spain story…

• I informed my friends that I was going to search for another cabin that might have a place to lay down.

• I saw some other people moving to the next car down, which appeared to be lightly occupied! Like a lemming, I followed.

• The first room into the next railway car had a bench seat that was completely unoccupied so I could stretch out and sleep! Being 6’4”, it wasn’t so easy for me to find a space that would offer much comfort.  This bench was a miracle! And as a bonus, I was only about 20 feet from my friends and my bag, so I didn’t bother going back over to grab it and bring it with me. What could possibly go wrong?

• I settled in, and immediately fell asleep.  Mind you, the train was stopping every 20 minutes or so, as we were on the overnight local train to Alicante.  So I became accustomed to all sorts of noises, such as people coming on and off the train, and grinding metal noises, as well as the nasty, old conductors yelling incoherently in Spanish. 

PV - We Vergaras don’t have any trouble sleeping…

• JV - VERY true. So, I managed to ignore all of those noises on the train to get some rest.  BIG mistake. 

PV - Uh oh…

• JV - As the sun began to rise, I awoke, rested and excited to spend the day at the beach with my new friends.  

• Wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and only my eurail pass and passport around my neck, I exited my little cabin, and turned to the right, to cross back into the railcar and my backpack and friends….feeling vindicated and superior about my decision to break away from the group for the night. 

• To my horror and chagrin, instead of a railcar, all I saw in front of me were miles and miles of empty train tracks.  In the cloak of darkness, while I was sound asleep, the rest of the train had detached, carrying all of my stuff, including my %$&^ wallet. 

PV - OH NO!

• JV- So after a fairly major freak out, I cornered a conductor and demanded to know what had happened.

• Apparently, at around 3am, the train had split in half, with some rail cars continuing on to Alicante, and the other half attaching to a new engine and heading to Valencia!  

• While my friends and my bag were now in Alicante, I, of course, had moved to the Valencia train, which was now entering a city of almost 2 million people…without any money or any way to contact my friends…awesome.

• OK, side story: The other guy that was in the cabin with me was going through the exact same situation. He was from the middle east, but not sure exactly what country. His spanish wasn’t very good and his English was non-existent. 

• Once we got out of the train at the Valencia Station, he and I sprinted to get tickets to Alicante, with an absolutely absurd plan that I would somehow find my friends once I got there (perhaps they’d be waiting for me in the train station when they realized I had been taken to Valencia.) No, don’t take the train back to Madrid where you actually lived and could get more money…

PV - Right? Why do the logical thing?

• JV - Thank God I had my eurail pass on me or I would have been really stuck. Remember, there were no ATMs, no banks open on the weekend, no wallet…just my eurail pass and my passport. Sure…no problem.

• The middle eastern guy and I jumped a train, and unbelievably were in Alicante by like 10a.m. on Saturday morning. 

As expected, there was NOBODY waiting for me at the train station.  

• So there was just me, and this middle-eastern guy, who didn’t speak much English. Let's call him Bob. 

• He's like, “why don't you just come up to my house and get some rest and I can feed you before you go out to search for them all over a city of 750,000 people?” He said he lived with a bunch of other immigrants who recently arrived in Spain, and they would be cool.

• Then you can go look for your friends and I was like, “What could go wrong?” No red flags…

PV - I suppose you didn’t have too many options.

• JV -So I needed to regroup. I was pretty stressed out and exhausted.
• So I thought, okay I just need to get some rest and figure this out.

• I slept for maybe two or  three hours…something like that. (sleeping with one eye open, of course.)

• I woke up and thought to myself, this place is filled with guys who are looking at me like I was the bad guy. Maybe it was my internal bias or prejudice…who knows, but my “Spidey Sense” was tingling, and I thought I needed to get out of here, pronto. 

• Bob (the middle eastern guy) was perfectly nice. You know, I probably should not even be saying things like this, but it did make me rather nervous, especially when I started saying, “Well listen, I got to go” and they started objecting to me leaving. 

PV - What???

• JV - Bob made me some steamed carrots with sauce on it which was very nice, but for whatever reason, the group of guys in the house didn't want me to leave the building, so I was like, okay, staying here could potentially have disastrous consequences, so I pretended to go down the hall to use the bathroom, and I just kept going right out the front door.

PV - Wait. No side salad with the carrots? 

• JV - Nope. 

• The guys were in the living room hanging out, doing whatever, and they didn’t see me leave. Phew!

• This house that I “escaped from” was in a very sketchy neighborhood, way up in the hills, and I was like, okay where do I go from here, and where would my friends likely be? 

PV - So you had to choose between staying in a potential kidnapping situation, or fleeing for your life, then running through a dangerous neighborhood, not knowing where you were. Sounds like a good time.

• JV - Right? So, because I had no money, I walked down through the city to the beachfront, which was about 4 miles long. 

• Lo and behold…it wasn't ten minutes that I had been walking down the beach when I saw my red backpack on top of a pile of other Luggage right on the beach, and there were my friends. It was about two in the afternoon by now and I couldn’t believe my luck. 

• They hadn't checked into a hotel yet. They'd gotten off the train, waited about an hour and then went right to the beach hoping that I would show up there, which was very nice of them.

• So that was it. My life was saved, all of my stuff was there, and I spent the rest of the weekend hanging out with all of them and having a great time.

• Needless to say,  I had a few cocktails after that nightmare.

PV - If that were me, I would have found the nearest church, and sat in the back, all by myself, eating a big plate of churros, but that’s a personal choice, I guess. 

• JV - You know, when I climbed on that train on Sunday afternoon to go back to Madrid, I thought wow, you can fall off the grid pretty fast over here in Spain, and not have a way out of the hole. 

PV - WOW. So at what point did you tell Mom and Dad about this misadventure?

JV - YEARS later.

PV - Smart. 

JV - The learning summary

1. Always keep your eye on your bags and never be separated from your friends.
2. Have an exit strategy and always a plan b
3. The vergara bubble is tried and true

PV - Well at least you learned something. That was a close call. 

JV - Yah.

PV - So what else you got? Any more Spain adventures?

• JV - Absolutely. This next one was maybe a bit more terrifying, but in a totally different way. 

• So this is another tale from my junior year of college, just a few months after the Alicante episode.

• The year was 1980-81 in Madrid, around mid-February.

• Up to that point, living and studying in Spain had been a pretty amazing experience (Alicante aside), but this next story really stands out as the one that was the most life-altering, and still gives me chills. Fortunately, the Vergara bubble was on my side.

• My “Tio Juan” (who was my Dad’s youngest brother as you may recall from The Fig episode), became my second father during that year in Spain, and took care of a lot of the setup process for me as I spent my junior year in Madrid. He came and met me at the airport and was a real help in getting me situated with a place to live, setting up a bank account, and all of the sort of things you need just to get going, when you're a clueless,naive 19-year-old in a foreign country.  
• So Tio Juan would come to visit me in Madrid from time to time, and it usually involved meeting up with him at whichever hotel he was staying at, grabbing a drink or dinner (or both), and generally helping me through the next period of time as a starving student. 
• In between those visits, I would go out to Villamalea (my Dad’s home-town out in the country), and visit with Tio Juan, and the rest of our Spanish family, whenever I had breaks from studying.
• On this particular occasion, it was February, 1981. I'd already been living in Spain for 7 months at this point, and my spanish language skills had improved significantly. 
• Tio Juan met up with me in Madrid at the Palace Hotel, which is a fancy, 5-star hotel, located right on the Gran Via, a street located in the old section of Madrid. I believe it is now called the Westin Palace Hotel. (For all of you globetrotters out there listening, I highly recommend it…you’ll definitely want to see the stained-glass, domed ceiling over the hotel’s restaurant.)
• So, we had a drink in the lobby, and the hotel was directly across the street from “the Cortes Generales” or the capital, if you will.  This is where the President, Prime Minister and Congress would meet and set laws etc etc.  
• A little bit of background: The King of Spain at that time 
• (King Juan Carlos, I ) had just recently taken over from Francisco Franco in 1975, just two days after Franco’s death, so it was a relatively new monarchy, and a restored democracy that was back in place after 34 years of a fascist dictatorship. 
• Juan Carlos was also the first reigning monarch since 1931 (When his grandfather was King.) This major political transition from a fascist dictatorship to a democracy was causing some divisions and instability within the country, and within the various political parties.
• At one point, I think there were over 120 different political parties in Spain right after Franco died, and that was the political environment in which I was living in 1981.

PV - 120??? Imagine having a political debate with 120 candidates…

JV- Right? 

• Some of you may recall that there was an attempted coup d'etat by the Spanish military or by a faction of the military (the guardia civil, that was essentially the same as the guestapo in Nazi Germany) in February of 1981. They wanted the unlimited power that they had under a fascist dictatorship, and they were determined to seize back power by any means necessary.
• Well guess what? -- that attempted coup started directly across the street from the Palace Hotel where we were, while I was grabbing a drink with my Tio Juan!  Lets say, 100 feet or so from where we were.  
• As the events were unfolding, my uncle unknowingly headed off to the train station to go back home, and I savored the rest of my beer, eventually heading out on my own out the front door of the Hotel…and much to my surprise, coming down the street right in front of me, were military, in tanks. 

PV - DANG! That must have been terrifying.

• JV - Um, yeah… At first glance, I really didn't think much of it, because at that point, seeing Military parades in the streets of Madrid was fairly common, but mostly benign.  Without sensing any danger, I then started walking the couple of miles in the direction of my apartment/boarding house that I had moved into about a month earlier. 
• The Señora who ran this boarding house for students was a widow, in her late 60s. She was very nice, but very dependent on the income from students like me to survive.
• As I walked back to the apartment, more and more information was coming out about exactly what was happening in the country.  Remember, this was 1981, and other than tv and radio, there wasn’t any other communication channel to alert the population what was going on. It was maybe 10:00 o'clock at night, and oddly, I noticed that there was almost no one in the streets. 

PV - Wasn’t that kind of a tip-off? For those who don’t know, in Spain, people don’t have dinner until 9 or 10 o’clock at night and the streets would normally be packed. 

• JV - Yes, my spidy-sense was going off, but I just decided to focus on getting home.
• Little did I know that the government was under attack in all the major cities of Spain, and a curfew had been announced on the news of this attempted coup d'état, with a little side note--full emergency curfew-with instructions to shoot to kill anyone on the streets. 

PV - WHAAAAAT????

• JV - Um, yeah. I got that information about halfway home, when a bar owner that was shuttering his business, yelled that out at me to get home and that the orders to the monarchy-loyal military was shoot to kill! 

PV - Right…because with all of that political turmoil,  they wouldn’t know which side you were on or if you had a weapon.

• JV -  So, here’s what was happening: A few hours earlier, some senior military officials had coordinated takeovers across the major cities in Spain, and paramilitary civil guards had stormed the lower house of the Cortes in Madrid, holding 350 deputies hostage, in an attempt to overthrow the government. In Spain, there is a well known phrase “sientate, todo el mundo!” that was shouted by the lead aggressor, as he fired shots in the congress hall. Scary and fascinating…the leader of the communist party reacted by sitting down and lighting a cigarette.  So spanish.

• By this time, I was in full-freak-out mode, since I had little to no money, and was imagining myself having to hike out of the country during a time of revolution. 

• (It was a very Hemingway-type of moment.)  

PV - so you were dodging the insurgents during a military uprising, as well as the military of the monarchy in tanks, who would have shot you for violating the curfew?

• JV - Yep. I would have been shot by either side, that was the catch. No, the tanks were the insurgents.
• The remainder of that white-knuckle walk/SCURRY back to my apartment consisted of hiding in dark doorways, behind barrels, and avoiding any potential encounter with people in the streets.

At one point, I was literally hiding behind a bush for about 15 minutes…which at any other time, might have seemed creepy. Fortunately, it was dark. 

• So when I finally arrived at the apartment, the Señora was very upset with me (having survived the Spanish Civil war) but not so upset that she would let me use her telephone (which she kept under lock and key) to prevent American boarding students from driving up her international telephone bills.

PV - That’s nice.

• JV- I finally managed to convince her to let me call Tio Juan (who didn’t get the full story until he got off the train), and we made plans over the phone to try and Get Me Out of the country through Portugal. 

PV - Mom and Dad must have been having a freak out. 

• JV- Yeah…Suffice it to say, I didn't get much sleep that night, but fortunately by the end of the second day, the uprising had been snuffed out, and a week later, I was attending a huge pro-democracy rally in Madrid, not too far from where the uprising had happened, along with a million other elated Spaniards. 

PV- Because…why not?? haha…

• JV - So, back to the Vergara bubble. I was literally 100 feet from where the uprising happened, risked getting shot as I ran for safety, and had packed a bag with just the necessities (and a sharp knife taken from the kitchen) to try to escape from the country. 

PV - What were the necessities? Passport? Underwear? 

• JV - Paper work, and layers. It was cold. 
• JV - As an American citizen, things would not have worked out well for me if I had been captured during a fascist uprising. No cell phones, no credit cards, no ATMs to get cash, everything shut down. My parents were understandably flipping out back in Boston.  
• Afterwards, I decided not to continue living with the cheap Señora and moved in with some graduate students who had a short-term opening in one of their bedrooms. 

PV - Phew! That was probably a smart move.

• JV - The rest of my time in Spain was incredibly eye-opening, as I observed the blossoming of the first social democracy in the history of the country. I was taking a political science course that second semester and got a chance to attend an actual session of congress that following May.  The bullet holes had not been covered as a reminder to visitors, which was pretty sobering. The Vergara bubble had served me well. 

PV - Wow! That’s quite a story! 

• JV - So that’s it! We’d like to thank everyone for listening. We hope these stories have inspired you to reminisce about your own family stories. If you have some time, please give us a review at ProbablySpeaking.com, to let us know what you think! 

PV - Be sure to subscribe and listen for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.