Moving to Spain: Holy Sh*t, Is That a Tarantula?

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Photo by Danielle Suijkerbuijk on Unsplash. Did you know the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao features a giant spider? This one is called Maman.

Before moving to Spain, my wife and I booked a month-long accommodation in Santiago de Compostela. A bespoke base of operations for finding a permanent address.

We couldn’t book it until money changed hands on our condo sale, which was contingent upon our prospective buyer selling their home. This took a couple of months. There was always the risk they couldn’t sell in time, or they might walk away for whatever reason, so our available options for temporary stays decreased while expense increased.

The result was not a convenient landing point by the train station or city center. Instead, it was at the far end of Rúa das Casas Novas.

This street, which I’ve written in Galician, not Spanish, translates to something along the lines of “Street of New Homes,” which is a false statement, but it does feature the most scenic of outlooks, adorable houses, and oldest of people. The plot of our stay was situated beyond a steep hill, and while walking back and forth to it every day is certainly possible, I don’t recommend it. I’m speaking from experience, and I have a reputation as a step-climbing aficionado.

The more you know: Santiago de Compostela is the capital of Galicia, the northwestern Spanish autonomous community overhanging Portugal. We learned from a taxi driver that the President of Galicia lived on the same street where we were staying. El Presidente! We were practically royalty.

Unfortunately for people (us) going car-free, this location was much more rural than others nearer to the Ensanche or historic district of the city. I already mentioned the hill, but there was another thing.

Giant fucking spiders.

After engaging a basic lockbox mechanism as if it were a five-dimensional Rubik’s Cube for all of fifteen minutes, we unlocked the front door to a vertically-endowed house that was crammed like a sardine between two others. Sweating, I carried our luggage into the upstairs bedroom, and I was exhausted.

We had no cell signal, which was kind of a problem. We needed to make some calls, and while we could use Wi-Fi calling with our American mobile plans, that was not possible without Wi-Fi —

— because apparently, the Wi-Fi password sent to us did not work.

Let’s go back in time. My wife tried to start a Spanish mobile plan the day before, indicating said day as the activation date in the online form. That was bad, because she completed the form shortly after midnight, technically the following day, tripping up the logic of the service involved. As software engineers, this was remarkably infuriating on multiple levels. For one thing, never trust user input. Two, how is it possible she, of all people, was the first and only person using this service to provide that user input?

Adding insult to injury, I deliberately did not bring an Ethernet cable across the Atlantic Ocean to potentially plug into a router, because I figured it would look suspicious in my luggage. (Thanks, security theater.) Consequently, it was not possible to inform the owner that the password didn’t work. As I stumbled downstairs to discuss this ordeal with my wife, she said something I will never forget.

“Looks like we have a roommate,” in an uncharacteristically level tone, probably due to shock.

And what I saw on the wall before me was a monstrosity forever etched into my long-term memory (a faculty I’m otherwise unable to rely upon).

“Holy shit, Jesus Christ! WHAT IS THAT?!”

It was basically this thing from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Sorry to take your name in vain, Spanish Jesus, worst of all in a city as holy as Santiago, but there was a giant spider on the wall, and our lives were in danger.

Phoning it in.

None of this was part of any mobile phone plan I’d sign up for.

I gazed upon the gargantuan, probably mutant spider. A vile fiend for which an ornately armored paladin would courageously sacrifice himself in order to banish in a dramatic video game cinematic. Its exoskeleton was discomfortingly meaty. The entity, probably summoned in the 1930s in a botched ritual by some asshole like Aleister Crowley, had intersected with my troubled life path.

I knew this would happen eventually.

As with any foul creature of the eternal shade, such as an HOA board member, non-interaction is key. Mutual avoidance was in the best interest of all involved parties, sustaining an indefinite ceasefire so long as a DMZ could be maintained and respected. The spider was North Korea, I was South Korea.

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A spider as big as that can’t move fast, I thought in my internal monologue characterized by a distinct southern drawl only I can hear. I shut the door to the room where the being’s miasmic aura freakishly pulsed beside the patio door.

“We’ll deal with the spider later,” I told my wife, “but, while it’s still daylight, we need to run into the city and fix your mobile plan.”

The worst immigrant you know.

In America, we have a place called Walmart.

It is so profoundly massive, you can see one from any desecrated mound in the land. It is there that all basic needs, including mobile plans, can be satisfied. This is because of a market innovation called the “monopoly,” which we Americans take credit for since it’s gone out of vogue for the other developed nations that originally invented it some hundreds of years ago.

Yet from our privileged vantage on Colina del Presidente, we saw no Walmart Supercenter, only a medieval cathedral straight out of one of my favorite video games: Dark Souls. The scene was reminiscent of a level called Sen’s Fortress that deeply frustrated me because of its boobytraps and belligerent snake people.

We strode down the hill we dedicated to our newfound President, venturing into the cobblestone alleyways of Santiago de Compostela in search of a telecommunications storefront. Toward the beginning of our journey, my wife said we should stop by a cafe and look at a map, or ask someone for directions. I scoffed at my European-born wife’s ludicrous suggestion, remarking there was no way we couldn’t find a mobile plan store, if we simply walked around.

I think I know what I’m talking about, I thought, I’ve been to Europe before.

And so the search went on for a couple of hours, because the serpentine path we took just so happened to avoid every single one of the several stores we could’ve instantly found had we paused for a moment.

The cathedral’s gravity began to pull us closer. We experienced a street performer going hog wild on the bagpipes in an ode to the Celtic origins of our adopted city. Then we limped past pilgrims of the Camino de Santiago whom bystanders were clapping for. Why, you might ask?

They were at the completion of a long sojourn, a spirit journey that can be weeks or even months in the making. That contrast between me, being an excruciatingly furrow-browed dickhead, and the starry-eyed pilgrims, shedding tears, was not lost upon my deranged and fragile psyche. I took a deep breath, and pointed to a building in the distance.

“We should stop by that cafe,” I told my wife. She rolled her eyes.

Confronting demons.

With a coffee cup in one hand, and a tea biscuit in the other, we were ready to seize our mobile phone plan manifest destiny. I signed up for a Spanish plan, and my wife managed to sort out hers with the cafe Wi-Fi. My wife reached out to our facilitator about the password issue, and he quickly responded with something to the effect of:

The password is written on a piece of paper in the [spider room].

“God damn it,” I muttered under my breath. Sorry, Spanish God, but I wouldn’t say your name in vain if you didn’t test a new species of spider in my fuckin’ Vrbo, hombre. I was planning on avoiding the spider room altogether.

…Now, I wasn’t going to kill the spider.

That’s not who I am, but I’d have to find the largest transparent plastic container and corresponding piece of cardboard I’d ever use to quarantine something whose evolutionary path assuredly diverged from my own billions of years prior; I’d venture to guess it predates the panspermic origin of life in this world.

No, I figured, this couldn’t be a new species introduced by Spanish God because, last I heard, He’s been taking an extended siesta.

No God, not even a wrathful Old Testament one, would create such an abomination. Worst he would do is place annoyingly horny cicadas everywhere, or kill my firstborn child. Not instantiate Shelob from The Lord of the Rings in my Vrbo.

I feared for my wife’s and my safety.

A disturbing revelation.

After we walked back to the house, I considered pouring an entire bottle of salt we just purchased in front of the spider door. Instead, I steeled myself for cosmic horror. The door creaked open while I dual-wielded the plastic box and cardboard packaging in which my apostilled documentation (for immigration purposes) was delivered.

My eyes darted to the wall where Shelob was last observed. Where is the spider...? I wondered, as my blood ran cold.

Then my wife appeared in the doorway. “You know it’s probably more scared of you than—”

“No,” I said, staring at the wall where Shelob had vanished. “That would be true if the spider weren’t plotting my demise at this very moment.”

A dark blur crept into my lower peripheral vision. My heart thumped as I lowered my head. There it was. On the couch. The spider was the size of my hand if all of my digits were fully extended. Colossal as I had previously intimated to you, but of course you didn’t believe me.

All right, it wasn’t like Australia big, but it was big, okay? You had to be there.

Just as I sprung the box toward the spider, its alien nervous system reacted like a lightning bolt, the legs mechanistically pumping away with hydraulic force. I corrected my angle of approach, beads of sweat dripping from my… “sweaty-ass, bald-ass head,” so my wife has described it. I channeled my inner Saiyan as I fully thrust the plastic containment outward, contacting the couch fully (which I would later have to steam clean with holy water).

Shelob wickedly thrashed about in his petroleum-derived prison, a free temporary stay I offered at no monetary cost. Carefully, I wiggled the cardboard underneath the spider’s feet, because I didn’t want to hurt it.

Then I maneuvered my hand underneath the cardboard, trying to equally apply and distribute opposing force between the plastic and cardboard. Then my hand slipped.

“Aghghhghg!” I exclaimed as I caught and pushed both the cardboard and box together in mid-air, shutting my eyes.

…Was the spider okay?

I squinted and visually verified the beast had been successfully contained; he was only tweaking out because he was mad that a nerd had bested him.

Adios, amigo.

This next part is kind of fucked up, so I considered not including it. This is not for everyone. Obviously, the next logical step was that, well, Shelob couldn’t live with us anymore. He had to be an Outside Boy, not an Inside Boy. That’s just how it goes. He wasn’t an ideal roommate. He certainly hadn’t helped us finance the Vrbo.

I called to my wife, requesting she open the patio door.

After stepping outside into the cool air, I cautiously opened the plastic container and cardboard at an angle that would hopefully dissuade Shelob from crawling up my arm and biting me to death.

Lit by the high-lumen back porch lamp, he scurried away…

In a direct beeline toward the house that happened to be right behind ours.

And its front door was wide open. My jaw hit the proverbial floor watching Shelob as he traversed the steps. It seemed like he had done this before. I watched him go right through their front door, and I immediately rotated 180 degrees back into our place, promptly closing the door and switching off the porch light.

We used the Wi-Fi password printed on a piece of paper taped next to the TV. It worked. And we avoided any contact whatsoever with the neighbors behind us for the rest of our stay.

Long story short, Spain has giant house spiders. This may be good to know if rural life ever calls to you there. Hopefully you’ll still come and visit sometime.

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