I hope a theme that you’re starting to get from my blog is that while traveling isn’t always easy or perfect, it’s worth it.
This past summer, my friend, who goes to my college and who was also au pairing in Madrid, and I flew to Ibiza, Spain one weekend. We booked an Airbnb to stay in (which is usually the move when you’re trying to find an affordable place to stay).
I’ve stayed in a handful of Airbnbs, but this experience was a first: we had a private room in a woman’s apartment, while she was staying there. I had never had to interact with an Airbnb host before. While this lady was sweet as could be, she had not one, but two cats.
Every cat-lover always gasps and gets defensive when I say that I don’t like cats, but I have two valid reasons:
Reason #1: They creep me out.
When I was in elementary school, my friends and I used to have sleepovers in our friend’s family room. We slept on the floor in sleeping bags, but in the middle of the night, I would always get awoken by the eerie jingle of a cat collar, meaning that one of the cats was slowly approaching. The cats would also run on top of our sleeping bags. One time, I called my parents at 4am to come pick me up. You can see why I’ve been scarred ever since.
Reason #2: I’m allergic.
I usually just sneeze and my eyes get itchy when I’m around cats, but in Ibiza, one of the cats got into our room while we were out, and when we got home, it wouldn’t move. I had to pick it up to get it out of our room, so you can probably figure out the rest. My eyes were so itchy, and I couldn’t sleep that night because of all the cat dander around me. Another fun twist was that our Airbnb had no air conditioning.
The next morning, my eyes and face were swollen. As you can see, this was not my finest hour.
Hi, here I was upset because my eyes and face were swollen
So, to the cat-lovers out there who are still trying to convince me that cats are cute and cuddly by showing me a picture of their own, I’m sorry, but you’re not going to win this one.