Photo by Elisha Rubacha.
While many students dream of travelling upon graduation, few ever get the chance. Trent Alumna Elisha Rubacha can be listed among those few.
Over the summer Rubacha embarked on a whirlwind tour of Spain, visiting three cities—Madrid, Pamplona, and Barcelona—in 10 days. She detailed her experiences online, and has been visiting English classes, sharing her story further.
Rubacha is the inaugural winner of the Barbara Rooke Travel Prize, which is awarded annually to a graduating English major with an average of 80% or higher. The winner receives a trip to a site of literary significance of their choice, and $2000 to spend while they’re there.
To apply, students must submit a brief essay detailing where they would go, why it has literary significance, and how they would spend their time on the trip. They must also supply transcripts and two reference letters from Trent faculty.
Rubacha was inspired to choose Spain by Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which she read for Charmaine Eddy’s Modern American Fiction course last year.
Eddy was one of Rubacha’s references, along with Stephen Brown.
However, Rubacha took an unusual approach to her application, explicitly promising to not attempt to relive or recapture the Spain of The Sun Also Rises.
She told Arthur, “People have the idea that when you travel to a different place you’re going to be enlightened and all that. That’s not the case; you’re still you, you’re just somewhere else.”
Accordingly, Rubacha wrote that from Spain “I would not bring back Hemingway’s Pamplona, but my Pamplona.”
She added “I wanted to go to this place that Hemingway loved because I love Hemingway, but I didn’t want to go and do all of the things that he did exactly the way that he did them.
“In order to be true to Hemingway I had to not do what Hemingway did. In order to follow in his footsteps I had to not follow in his footsteps.”
Hemingway was unhappy about the influx of tourists who flocked to the The Festival of San Fermín, which includes the running of the bulls, after his novel made the festival so well-known in North America. In later works Hemingway refused to expand on the details of certain locations his protagonists stories were set in to avoid similarly sharp rises in popularity at other locations.
Rubacha’s tour of Spain did not involve a trip to San Fermín. Instead, she beat her own path around the three cities, often straying far from other tourists as well.
“I went to a Clandestino, which is a sort of secret pub that nobody knows about. They aren’t advertised, you just have to know about them,” she told Arthur.
“I got dragged out doing the hostel’s pub crawl thing but immediately met a local and hung out with him instead. He took me to this clandestino.”
On her blog, Rubacha described the interior of the clandestino:
“The place was tiny. Smoke in the air. Small, and dark. The bar straight ahead, two little nooks on either side, the walls so covered you couldn’t see them for all the things that seemed to float there: chairs, bits of clothing, pots and pottery – a jumble of odds and ends, and no discernible method of how they were fastened.”
Other activities included attending a bullfight, sightseeing around the cities, and befriending a bartender with whom she could not communicate verbally—he spoke no English, she spoke no Spanish.
Despite this, Rubacha described him as “definitely my favourite person who I met in Spain.”
Aside from providing a warming atmosphere and much free wine, he also “ended up taking me to the train station when I had to leave, and waited with me until I got on the train, which was delayed by about 20 minutes.”
When asked how she overcame such a language barrier, Rubacha replied “you just try to find different ways of acting things out and communicating that don’t require having the same language.
“Some people didn’t want to have anything to do with me [because of the language barriers] … and it was a big difference I noticed in people’s attitudes. It’s an unfortunate way to live, I think.”
While Rubacha has recorded her journey online and happily shared her story with Arthur, she indicated that there were a few details that she has left out of her answers and her blog posts.
“A friend thinks it’s stupid that I’m censoring myself and asked me if Hemingway would do it. No, he wouldn’t, but at the same time I don’t want a written record of absolutely everything for people to see when they think about this prize. … People can ask me about it in private.”
The first chance to try and do exactly that will be on Thursday September 19 at 7pm in the Trend at Traill College. The English Department is holding an official party for Rubacha, complete with internationally trained flamenco musicians and dancers.
You can also read more about Elisha’s experiences in her own words, including the bull fight and the clandestino on her blog http://terrainofthebull.wordpress.com.