Belgium

The first time I ever left Spain was for Belgium. I was at university when a friend announced that there were flights to Brussels for 15,000 pesetas. It was the dawn of cheap air travel, and it sounded almost too good to be true. A few hours later, there were already six of us.

There was one small problem: we had an exam on exactly the same dates. So we convinced our lecturers that “a sizeable group of students” had “a study trip” planned for those days. It worked. They moved the exam. I passed it.

And the trip was exactly what a first journey abroad should have been: backpack, youth hostel, shared dormitory and strangers who stopped being strangers for a few hours. We saw Bruges, Ghent and Brussels; visited the Pandemonium Atomium; and ended up eating steak a la riojana in a Spanish restaurant where, for some reason, they gave us a discount.

I do not remember Belgium simply as the first country I visited. I remember it as the first time travel stopped feeling like something distant.