It was a cloudy, warm summer afternoon in Madrid. I had my nose stuck to the window, looking down on the Plaza de Olavide, which was unusually empty. I had been too scared to roam the streets by myself for the first couple of weeks. It was strange; everything was strange, from the way the taxis lined up, down to the boots some women wore.

I liked to look at the people passing by outside and wonder what their lives were like, what they thought about, where they were going, if they were married, separated, sad, happy, if they liked ice-cream or Hemmingway. But this day I got tired of sitting home and looking out the window.
So I did what I always do when I get a bit anxious and I need to go out into the world.

I put on my best heels, my most colorful skirt and I took my matching umbrella (just in case). I figured out how to get to the statue of Don Quixote, which was neatly marked on my map, grabbed my purse and went out to meet the cloudy streets.

I had walked for about five minutes, passed the playground, passed the hardware store, the stamp store, the boutique around the corner. I could see a Metro stop for Quevedo when suddenly it started pouring.

Unfortunately, I don’t buy umbrellas for their function. My little umbrella was silver and compact, made to fit in my purse, and matched my heels. Needless to say, it took two minutes for me to turn back. It really was a humorous sight: my sandals were splashing about in the puddles, my matching umbrella was barely holding up to the wind and my skirt was imitating that famous Marilyn Monroe picture in a very unflattering way.

I was walking back, cursing my luck, when out of nowhere a young man jumped underneath my umbrella. “Can I walk with you?” he asked.

“But you don’t know where I’m going,” I responded.

“It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s someplace dry,” he smiled.

By this point it was evident that Spanish wasn’t my first language. He asked where I was from and I told him St. Louis, not expecting him to know where that was.

“Oh! Missouri!” he said. I looked at him with surprise and shock.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Well, I’m from Mexico. We’re neighbors,” he smiled.

So there, in the summer Madrid rain, among my fear of going out alone, among all of the mess of my wet sandals and sad, floppy umbrella, I met a neighbor-a neighbor who walked with me until I got home to make sure I didn’t slip in my heels, and then turned around and walked back out into the rain, without even telling me his name. I never saw him again.

But that rainy afternoon, if someone were watching me from one of the windows, wondering if I were happy, they would be pleasantly surprised.

I was pleasantly surprised.

As I walked up to my room I looked down at my umbrella, which turned out to be not that useless after all.
All in all, I hadn’t walked more than 200 meters, but something had happened, something nice, something unique, something that never would have happened if I had just stayed home with my nose pressed against the window, watching other people live.

Dorotea Lechkova is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences.