Pilgrim's Progress # 7: For (preferably non-Spanish speaking) Women Only!

Hello ladies.  Can I talk to about something that happened to me while traveling in a foreign country recently?

Ok.  Thanks.

With all the hype regarding tampon commercials on Facebook these days, (If you haven’t seen them, watch this one. You will laugh out loud), I thought I could safely put this out there (and be pretty sure that the guys would have stopped reading by now).

Imagine that you are hiking in Spain and your ‘monthly visitor’ arrives a bit early.  This is not an emergency as you do have a few days' supply of feminine products in your pack.  But as those items run out, you find yourself needing to do a little shopping at the dollar-store-like tienda across the street from your pension.  And because you don’t know the language, you go to the section with items that are obviously for this purpose and quickly pick out a cushy pink package that seems to have some type of absorbency scale on the side.  And after you carry this package (luckily, it was in a bag—which I had to buy—I think—or maybe they just provided it because they were embarrassed for me—I couldn’t really understand the question asked.  I just answered “si” and they stuck it in a sack) back to the room you are sharing with the REST OF YOUR FAMILY, you nonchalantly pull out one cutely wrapped tri-folded item and find it to be especially large; in fact, not only are these things literally MAXI pads, they are shaped like little boats—think ‘small canoe’. Nothing was getting through those babies. 

Got that image in your head? Let me tell you, girlfriend, the whole experience was like wearing diapers all over again…with the crinkle, crinkle sound thrown in just to make it fun.

Only later, as one of my Spanish speaking daughters (who may or may not have needed to steal some of my mucho maxis) commented that I had not actually purchased feminine pads. My self-stick wearable schooners were, in reality, bladder control pads (you must understand, pad in Spanish is compresa and I assumed all compresas were for the big M—my bad—or my pad—whichever you like better). I was, however, grateful that I was successful in identifying and purchasing my other necessary items, as tampon in Spanish means inkpad (according to one disputable internet site. Hey, it's probably totally wrong, but let's go with it because it's funny). Talk about making it obvious that it’s your time of the month.

So there you go. More than you wanted to know about the flow of events that cycled through our time on the Spanish Camino—did you see what I did there?

Moral of the story:  When Aunt Flo visits you in Spain and you have to buy items to appease her, steer clear of the compresas and go straight for the inkpads.

And that’s the end.

Period.