Exciting day for our heroes. Of course, it started off normal enough, with our Spanish class. Spanish class is the finishing touch on all the details that make Spain a lot like middle school. First, there are the obvious connections, like people we know, and us, going to “Spanish class” and having “Spanish homework.” But there are tons more. Take the clothes: too tight. Enough said. We’ve worked in middle schools, and we’ve seen firsthand that kids can’t dress themselves. We currently know more than we think is proper about the exact shape of various Spaniards. The current style for women, for example, seems to be wearing buttondown shirts that don’t fit, so the buttons pull apart in front and make it look like…well, like your shirt doesn’t fit. Tres chic. Or muy suave, I guess.

Then we have the other constant reminders of the late 1980s. People wear leg warmers here. Leg warmers. Outdoors, where others can see. The music – everywhere – seems piped in from my orthodontist’s office, and from the exact dates when I had braces. We were prepared for many surprises in Spain, but hearing “If This Is It,” by Huey Lewis and the News nearly every day was not one of them. Never mind that almost nothing else – except blessed football (football football, not soccer), shown over British satellite cable, but that’s a story for another day – is available in English. Even Seinfeld (Es una programa de nada.), which barely translates well west of the Delaware River, isn’t subtitled.

The other connections to middle school are more psychological. We never know what anyone’s talking about. When we address people in any sort of crowd, we’re sure the rest of the gang is talking about us. Everyone is looking at us, the dopes who have no idea that they just agreed to purchase an entire cow; or who just told the movie ticket cashier than they wanted to buy her, and, by the way, would she tell them how much she costs?; or who walked for forty-five minutes on one bright and sunny Monday to a particular museum, just to learn through experience exactly what “cerrat dilunes” means in Catalan.

Other than a place where you are the focus of everyone else’s conversations, middle school is remembered by many as a world where odd rules applied, where you could be accused, tried, and punished before you even understood what exactly you had done. Those of you who attended Roosevelt Junior High School will remember well the “Chocolate Milk Affair” of ’87, for example. (Leah went to very hoity-toity private schools where such injustices never happened.) Just yesterday, I wound up in the middle of one of those affairs yet again. I was trying to buy some groceries at the local vegetable store. When I handed over my 10 Euro note, the guy – or, as the Spanish say, El hombre de las verduras – whipped out a little blue highlighter and wrote on it. He showed it to me. There was a tiny gray mark. “Es falso,” he said. Even I knew what that meant, because everyone tells you to watch out for counterfeit Euros, as if we had any idea how to do that. But we needed groceries.

“Please,” I said in Spanish. “It is from the Caprabo.” The Caprabo is the supermarket here in Masnou, the somewhat ritzy suburb where we are staying until our apartment is ready. The store is about the size of a 7-11 (which they also have here in Spain for Los Eslurpees, by the way) and is a little expensive for vegetables, but it’s the only game in town for toilet paper and suchlike. “What am I to do?”

In a friendly voice, and with a bit of a laugh, he told me that I ought to bring the bill right back to the Caprabo and tell them to change it. While this sounded like a halfway decent idea for a money-laundering scam, I didn’t think it would solve my problem, and I really didn’t want to wind up charged with counterfeiting.

I wandered outside, pretty much ready to give up, but the next thing I knew I was in line in the store where I received the fake bill. When I wound up in front of the cashier, she looked confused, because I had nothing to buy and was holding out a 10 Euro bill. “Pardon me,” I said. “I do not have much Spanish. But yesterday I buy wine and bread here and I have this money for change and the man in the other store says it is false.”

She said some words that I understood, and some others that I didn’t. The ones I understood translated loosely to, “You want me to just give you another 10 Euros? Are you on crack?”

I smiled my most polite smile. “With a receipt?” I said.

She didn’t smile back. “I can’t change the bill, because I don’t know that you were here yesterday,” she said.

“To bring the receipt?” I said. “To change, to bring the receipt?” As I got more into the conversation, somehow my Spanish was getting worse.

“No,” she said. The line of other shoppers was getting interested. A lot of them said something about a receipt. I hoped it was, “Oh, give him the money if he brings a receipt,” but it just as easily could have been, “This nut thinks she’ll change a counterfeit bill if he has a receipt?” She pointed towards the bank, and I was out of words, so I left and went to the bank.

At the bank, I began the same story. “I am sorry, but I do not have much Spanish,” I said. “Yesterday, I shop in the store and I get that bill.” I produced the bill in question. “Today I shop in the other store and the man in the other store says it is false.” He seemed to be thinking hard about my questions, all phrased in the kind of broken Spanish that I though would elicit sympathy.

“So,” he said, in almost perfectly unaccented English, “you speak English?” I nearly hugged him. “Let’s see that bill,” he said, still in English. He waved it under a black light, drew on it with the same highlighter marker I had seen in the store, and tore the edge. “It’s real,” he said.

“It is true?” I said, forgetting to switch back to English. “The money is true?” He looked at me strangely, shrugged, and went on in Spanish.

“It’s good,” he said. “But I will change it.” He thought a minute, then decided that there was no way I would understand the next part in Spanish. “We send it back to the national bank, and they reimburse us. It’s no problem.” He took the offending bill, put it in an envelope, threw the envelope into his desk drawer, and handed me ten more Euros. I thanked him profusely and left.

Back at the store, I found my bag of groceries still sitting by the cash register. The cashier smiled. I took out my new bill. “I change,” I said. “It is new money. It is good money. Very good.” He asked how, I think. Maybe he asked where. My answer was going to be the same either way. I said, “I go to the bank and I say the problem and the man of the bank changes the bill.”

I paid for my groceries and he gave me change. “In the bank,” he said. “Bllllllth easy pthptphtphth to change the money?”

“Yes,” I said. “No problem.”

“Buena idea,” he said, looking at the bills in his cash register drawer and then skyward, as if deep in thought. “Buena idea.”