My friends and I had to go to a class on Friday that we usually don’t have, which was a huge pain, but it caused us to get out of the house and come downtown. Karlee, Christine, Meredith and I had a picnic after class by the river, which was beautifully cerulean, surrounded by crimson flowers that smelled amazing. The random assortment of bottle caps and used condoms scattered around marred the perfection, but we avoided them for the most part and found a nice spot to gorge ourselves on sandwiches and chips and salsa. I’d also forgone self control and bought a pack of Principe cookies (they’re the best Spanish food ever, other than Bueno bars) to share. We did work on them, but didn’t quite finish them.
Christine and Meredith split from Karlee and me since they had real work to do (which is an abomination in Spain), so we decided to spend our afternoon in the Real Alcazar (the king’s palace that originally was a Moorish fort), which is absolutely beautiful and has huge, fantastic gardens. We decided to sit in the gardens to get our tan on before our romantic Groupon dinner that night with Christine and Meredith. (Since none of us have boys here, we have to make our own romance. So we bought two, two-person Groupons to a classy restaurant.)
We sat on a lawn in the gardens and reposed in the sun where we could watch a cute baby and a peahen from a distance. My friends were astounded that female peacocks are called peahens—when I first called it that, they thought I was trying to say pigeon with a Spanish accent. As we were lounging in the sun, a pair of ducks waddled over to us to see if we had anything for them. Karlee tried to feed them a stick, but they weren’t very into that. I pulled out my Principes and gave Karlee the cookie half with no chocolate to give to the ducks. They were much more interested in that, and almost took off Karlee’s finger grabbing pieces from her. The peahen figured out what was up, and moseyed over to partake in the cookies.
I got out the other half of the cookie and hastily licked off most, but not all, of the melted chocolate frosting. Since the peahen was being pretty demanding and her beak looked sharp, it seemed best to give her what she wanted asap. She really liked cookies as well (who knew peacocks liked cookies? I guess it’s universal—nothing can resist the tastiness of Principes). One of her peahen friends came to join the party, and Karlee and I had a ball giving them de-chocolated cookies and attempting to take pictures with them. But then they got a little aggressive about grabbing our snacks (I guess they only liked us for our food), so we decided to move elsewhere to eat our cookies and tan in peace.
We walked away and encountered a male peacock showing off, so we took some pictures of him then walked back past our peahen friends. But something was different, and not in a good way.
Karlee stopped dead in her tracks and clutched my arm with a terrified look. “What?!” I demanded. She pointed to the grass in mute horror. I looked over, and didn’t understand what I was looking at right away, but then it hit me that one of the peahens was lying in the grass, not moving. Had we killed a royal peahen with our cookies?? I have no idea what peahens usually eat, but I’m assuming chocolate isn’t good for them, and there definitely was some chocolate residue on the cookie we’d fed her. We were transfixed by the body, staring at it, completely aghast. Killing a peahen is bad enough, but these peahens belong to the king of Spain—we’d murdered the king’s peahen! Can they arrest us for that?
Then, miraculously, her head moved and she stared straight at us. Karlee and I leaped in joy. Hopefully we’d just given her indigestion. But in the future, when I hang out at the Alcazar, I’m keeping my cookies to myself.
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