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Scenes from the 14th Century Palacios Nazaries at the Alhambra in Granada.

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Lunch with a view: Almeria’s Alcazaba as seen from our table at Teteria al Medina. The one-time Muslim fortress was built in the 10th Century. 

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The port city of Cartagena, Spain, stands as a treasure trove of ancient Roman ruins, including those uncovered at Casa de la Fortuna and the Roman Theatre. Both date back to around the 1st Century B.C. 

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Elche, Spain: Home to Palmeral de Elche, a UNESCO World Heritage Site consisting of 200,000 palm trees originally planted by the Muslims who lived in this city in the 10th Century. 

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Castle of la Atalaya which is said to have been built by Moors in the 11th Century. The Villena-based castle served as an important stronghold of the northern frontier of the Islamic emirate of Iberia. 

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Xativa Castle, allegedly where Hannibal plotted his campaign for the seige of the Roman city of Saguntum. The site consists of two castles that sit about 310 meters above the modern-day city of Xativa.

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When in Valencia do take a trip to neighboring El Palmar, where you can enjoy picture-perfect paella at Restaurant Canyamel, which is surrounded by rice fields. 

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Valencia’s San Nicolas Church is a gothic church with a baroque interior. The ceiling has been compared to that of the Sistine Chapel. 

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La Lonja de la Seda held a major commodities trading floor where goods including silk were traded. The building is a Unesco World Heritage Site. 

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Valencia Cathedral and El Micalet tower. 

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La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

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Attention! Attention!

I snapped my finger across the screen to refresh my inbox. “Attention! Attention!” called each bold-faced subject line. My morning habit: reading emails on my phone as I walked to the NoHo subway station. East Coasters had flooded my unread stack – just like always. That three-hour lead time meant catch-up, and my 15-minute walk was plenty of time to make a dent before I sat through 30 WiFi-free moments underground.

No, there was no crisis. But email has that Pavlovian way of invoking urgency; compelling you to check. Again. And again. And again…

 Suddenly, I heard a sound from above that jolted me back to Earth. “Aw-reeeee!”

It was the parrots! The wild parrots of NoHo… or Burbank, depending on where you are. They’d joined me on my morning commute for the past six months in a flock of about 11. Then, later in the day, I’d hear that same jarring call from my office window. If I leaned back at just the right moment, I could spot them flying above. I imagined they’d followed me there, but I had no way of knowing whether they were indeed the same birds from earlier.

Marbles. A writer once described the Wild Parrots of Burbank’s sound to be that of marbles. But to me, it sounded more metallic. Steel marbles, I thought, and remembered my first steelie marbles; the ones I’d shoot with my 6-year-old index finger across the asphalt on the playground.

I thought I’d treasure those shiny silver balls forever. But alas, they were stashed in some box or drawer or pocket never to be found; never again to be shot with such a flick that they’d impress all of the kids. Like Sean in his red leather jumpsuit, sporting a wristwatch that played “Beat it” in Japanese. “That’s what it sounds like there,” he said of the beeps of his Casio.

“Aw-reee reeereee…” I’d never heard them shriek so loudly. As I stepped onto the corner, I could hear nothing else. It was coming from Fulcher Avenue. 

I looked up from my phone long enough to see row upon row upon row, crowding out every inch along the electric wires and poles. Green with menacing orange beaks, twisting and tilting into all contortions, lifting their red chevroned wings to catch themselves as they nearly fell, swinging in opposition along the sagging lines.“Oh my god….” The neighborhood parrots seemed to have recruited some friends. A whole lot of friends.

I grabbed my phone again, flipping through my apps to video mode. No one was going to believe this, I thought, reaching my arms up with the phone resting between both palms. I barely realized I was walking smack-dab in the center of the street. I began counting. 1, 2, 3…. 30. 30 on that line alone! Now 10, 20… there are four rows…. 80, 100… 150? Perhaps more. “There are definitely more in that tree,” I said aloud through the drips of drizzle that must have been raining down this whole time.

Now I was below them. Unafraid of what else might splatter down. Watching as a few careened their disproportionately large heads and hooked beaks down to spy me. I stopped. Lowered my hands, tilted my face upwards, smiling into the rain. And then, whooooooooosh… aw-reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…… putt-putt-putt-putt…

They were gone.

“Did you get all that?” someone asked.

I spun around. A woman was standing there on her porch. Her hair swept back in a ponytail off an enormous smile that seemed to reflect my own. I laughed. And, so did she.

“I didn’t even see you,” I started to say.

“I’ve never seen that many,” she continued, closing her eyes now as she spoke, shutting out everything but the memory. “For 15 years now, I’ve seen ‘em in my backyard. Maybe a dozen or so but never that many. My goodness, there were so many… “

Goodness, indeed.

Those birds were trying to tell us something.

“Here and now! Here and now!” they seemed to say, just like Aldous Huxley’s fabled mynah birds of Pala in his novel Island. The birds served as a device to bring the characters back to “Attention! Attention!”

With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, many an American looked East (perhaps as far as fictional Pala) for insight. They found comfort in the teachings of gurus like Ram Dass, who wrote, Be Here Now.

It was a discovery 2500 years in the making, for the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, had also preached the concept with lessons in insight meditation, or Vipassana. His view: anyone can achieve Buddhahood. But first, we must break free from so-called “clinging aggregates” (or skandhas) that threaten to derail us each moment of every day. We are not our skandhas, and once we realize that, and open our eyes (“Attention! Attention! Here and now!”), we discover we are free. 

For my part, I made the decision to wake up. I left some emails unanswered that fateful day, and would eventually leave a job that no longer served me in my current state. The experience inspired me to dig deeper into my psyche and begin practicing daily 20-minute mindfulness exercises. I even signed up for a weekly creative writing class.

My walks are much more pleasant these days, knowing that with my head up I won’t miss out on the Here and Now. And when things do feel out of control, I remind myself. The sky’s not falling, it might just be the 100 feral parrots down the street.

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Finding Zero

I’ve been to the hottest place on Earth, driven over the Four Corners, jumped off USA’s southernmost point in Ka Lae, Hawaii (and belly-flopped into the Pacific), and recently stood directly on the equator in Ecuador, the country named for the discovery of its coordinates. 

Selfies were made for places like these; superlative features we mark as waypoints on our respective journeys. But as Picasso once said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand.” 

Such is the case for Ecuador’s equatorial monument, La Mitad del Mundo, which commemorates the first Geodesic Mission of the French Academy of Sciences that defined the equatorial line. 

A 98-foot-tall near obelisk marks a spot that a sign states is 0°00'00”. There’s even a yellow line you can stand on to say you stood right on the equator. But anyone with a GPS or even GPS app could tell you: This is at least 250 yards off from the actual center of the globe.

As this site ranks just below the Galapagos among Ecuador’s biggest attractions, the tourism board is not about to give up the ghost. But I was determined to find True 0.

So my fellow explorer(aka husband) and I set on a mission of our own to find the actual “Middle of the Earth,” using a GPS app we’d downloaded at the pizza shop across the road.

Clutching my Android like a Ghostbuster’s PKE meter, I watched as the coordinates began dropping closer and closer to 0. And then, “Oh!” I saw for one moment 00° 00’ 00.” 

There, someone had actually scratched the stone on the wall alongside a faded graffiti tag. Planting a virtual flag, I snapped a photo of this wall that a pile of rocks — a construction site. 

Word has it another, more precisely situated monument is being built. Whether or not that will displace La Mitad del Mundo remains to be seen. And in truth, does it even matter?

For now, one of the sweetest dogs in Ecuador bides his time between head-scratches and photobombs. He’s not about to give up the ghost (or scraps of tourist food) either.