Growing up in urban areas (Washington, DC; New York; Lima, Peru) I’ve always had contact with the homeless, but I could never really empathize or truly understand how it felt to be living on the streets.  It was winter of last year, when I was studying abroad in Spain, I experienced what it might be like to be homeless.

I traveled to Valencia, Spain, for the festival of Las Fallas. Las Fallas is like Valencia’s version of Carnival, which is a festival celebrated all over Europe in the early spring. The Valencians spend all year building massive papier-mâché floats, which they display all over the city and on the eve of Las Fallas. They pick a winner and set the rest on fire. It’s truly an amazing sight and experience, which is probably why the city’s population more than doubles during the event.

Not knowing this, my friend Tommy Kang, Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) ’12, and I looked to book a hotel only two days before going. We wound up with negative results. In the end, we knew we’d possibly only see this once in our lifetimes, so we scoured the entire area for any vacancy so we would have a place to stay. We did find one on the beach, miles away from the actual city, where the event took place. The campsite was only open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., so no one could get in or out in the meantime, and unfortunately we arrived in Valencia at around 10 p.m., so we had no place to go that first night. We knew that we would possibly face this scenario, so I packed light, meaning I brought my return bus ticket, my cellphone, my iPod and my wallet. Tommy, on the other hand, had all his stuff with him as he was going to return to the United States right after Las Fallas.

The plan was to wander the city until we were exhausted and to crash in Valencia’s amazing Parque de las Sciencias. However, we hadn’t planned on Valencia’s freezing nights. We wandered the city hoping that the trek would tire us to the point where the cold wouldn’t matter, and honestly the walk was really fun. We got to see all the sites in Valencia, all the floats and even the Valencia soccer team. Eventually, though, we saw just about everything there was to see in the city, so we decided to try and get some sleep. The climate in Spain is pleasant during the day, but at night it is freezing cold. We were shivering all night long and I couldn’t get a wink of sleep. Tommy managed to get a few minutes, but in the end neither of us could take it anymore.

We were too tired to keep walking through the city, so we decided to go door to door, begging any hotel we could find for a room. We went through three hotels with no vacancies. The fourth hotel was full as well, but unlike the previous hotels, the receptionist at this particular one let us use his bathroom and called hotels all over the city for us looking for a vacancy. He found us one very close to the city center that was very reasonably priced. When we got there, the receptionist was extremely nice, especially considering it was 6 a.m. He even pushed back the checkout time to 1 p.m. because we were arriving so late. We couldn’t be happier to have a warm place to sleep, but that wasn’t the end of the adventure at all.

The next day Tommy left, but I stayed because the Valencia soccer team was playing the next day and I wanted to see the game. That meant staying overnight again, alone this time, and this time there wasn’t anyone to help me find a hotel vacancy. All the hotels were fully booked and I couldn’t afford to retain the room at the hotel where we stayed the night before. I had seen the homeless sleep in ATMs before, so I figured I’d try that, too. I wandered the city looking, and I did finally find one. I spent the night in that ATM where it was mildly warmer than outside. I was able to sleep, but I was so paranoid the police would find and arrest me, that I only got an hour and a half of sleep. Eventually, I was able to see my soccer game and return safely to my host family in Madrid.

I wasn’t exactly homeless in that had I been able to, I could have afforded a place to stay, but I did feel what it was like to be alone and without a place to sleep. I felt the paranoia and loneliness that you can only feel when you are truly helpless to fix your situation. While I can’t say what it feels like to be truly homeless, I can say what it feels like to be helpless and alone, and at least on that level I understand the homeless better.