The only cure for homesickness? Fanta Limón
How this bright yellow soda — that's impossible to find in North America — became my closest companion during a year that got harder before it got easier.
Hi, readers! Frank and I are hosting our first backyard (OK, and indoor) summer camp this week, so I won’t be at my computer much, but I wanted to share the written version of a story I performed on Saturday night at a super special event in East Austin.
Soon, I hope to share a video of the slate of performers, who, like me, wrote and shared pieces around the theme of “comfort food.” Until then, this will have to do. I hope you enjoy it.
Addie
The first time I had Fanta Limón, I was meeting my future roommate Sofia.
It was 2003, and I'd left my home state of Missouri to spend my junior year of college on the southern coast of Spain.
Having grown up in the Ozark mountains, I was a bit of a country mouse at the time, but because I’d traveled to New York and San Diego and that one fuzzy weekend in Mazatlán, I was sure I wouldn’t suffer even a little bit of homesickness during this year abroad.
For the first month, I was in heaven, enjoying Spanish tortillas and cafe con leche for breakfast and paella for lunch and sangria at dinner. I’d been living with a host mom those first few weeks, but when I saw Sofia’s flyer looking for roommates in a proper Spanish flat with people my own age, I reached out.
We met up at, coincidentally, at a place called Bar Austin, where Sofia ordered this bright yellow soda I’d never paid any attention to.
It was September, but the weather in Alicante was sweltering. When she poured the sunshine-colored soda over the thick round ice cubes, the intensely fizzy carbonation perked up my ears.
“Que es esto?” I asked. We were doing an intercambio — mixing Spanish and English to try to help each other learn — and she was incredulous that I didn’t already know about Spain’s most beloved bubbly beverage.
She offered me a sip, and the clouds parted. I forgot everything I knew about soda. This wasn’t a Sprite or Fresca or even a lemon lime Jarritos.
This, my friends, was the holy grail. A tart, tangy and sweeter-than-it should-be drink that soon became one of my closest companions as the year went on and got harder before it got easier.
Sofia and I became roommates and friends, then frenemies fighting over who left the dirty dishes in the sink.
There were seven of us living in that apartment, each of us with our own room but exactly one half of a shelf in the refrigerator. We laughed and cried and butted heads, especially when the American roommates were too loud playing rummy in the living room.
When I think about it now, that year feels like a dream, but I remember the days that felt like nightmares. It would take all day to go to the post office to file a form about my visa. Sometimes teachers just didn’t show up for class. I couldn’t figure out how to call home when my prepaid card ran out.
I started cursing in Spanish and flirting in Spanish and debating politics in Spanish, but those impassioned conversations in my second language never left me feeling completely heard. I remember crying in the middle of my Spanish-language film class because I couldn’t understand if the assignment was *due* on Tuesday or if there was test *about* the assignment on Tuesday.
I got emails from my friends back home about how much fun they were having. I missed tacos and sushi and maple syrup. I missed driving down the road with the windows down, listening to the radio.
Little Miss Independent here missed her parents.
My sister got engaged. It was almost like life was carrying on without me.
That’s when I got a true taste of homesickness.
But when the heartache about being away from home set in, a Fanta Limón could sweeten my mood.
It slowed me down long enough to look out my window at the little slice of the Mediterranean Sea that I could see from our fifth floor apartment and realize that I was getting exactly what I’d hoped for.
A mix of highs and lows and new friends and new experiences and pangs of what-ifs and what-have-I-dones. I missed my life in Missouri, but I knew I would have regretted not taking this leap to find a new home somewhere else, however temporary.
I thought: They say there’s no place like home, but who says there’s only one home?
Spain, even with all its bumps and bruises, was beginning to feel like a place I would one day miss in the same way I missed my life back in America.
I was right. For the next decade, even as I made a home in Austin and became a parent, I met a new kind of homesickness, for my home away from home. I dreamt of that view of the Mediterranean Sea — and one of those Fanta Limóns — more times than I could count.
In 2015, I went back to Spain for the first time since that year abroad. I’d just gotten my heart broken by one of my first boyfriends after my divorce.
I was working as a food journalist, raising two kids as a single mom and still looking for Mr. Right — hi, Frank, he’s in the audience.
Fresh off a breakup, I dried my tears, booked a ticket and traveled back to my beloved Alicante, where I went straight for the goods: a Spanish tortilla and a cafe con leche and an ice cold Fanta Limón.
Twenty-year-old me might not have recognized 30-year-old me with a couple of kids and a divorce under her belt, but I’ll be darned if that bright yellow soda didn’t taste exactly like I remembered. And I realized — again — that maybe, on this adventure called life, I was getting exactly what I’d hoped for.
I was fairly obsessed with Fanta Limón by this time because I’d figured out that they don’t sell Fanta Limón in the U.S. Just that knock off pineapple flavor that masquerades as the real thing in that beautiful yellow can.
The Coca Cola Company hasn’t said officially why they don’t sell the real deal in North America, but I suspect it has something to do with the yellow food coloring that gives it a neon hue. Or the fact that Fanta was invented in the 1940s in Nazi Germany when the Coca Cola bottlers had to come up with a new drink to keep the factories open.
After the war, Coke bought the Fanta brand, but maybe they had to make some kind of deal with the devil — or Franco — to keep it in Spain. But I’ll leave that up to the Reddit sleuths who, like me, flock to the internet in search of their favorite soda. (Seriously, you won’t believe the threads dedicated to this stuff. It’s like $10 a can, plus shipping.)
So, this summer marks 20 years since I embedded myself in Spanish culture, and to celebrate, earlier this year, Frank and I took the boys to my old stomping grounds, where I tried to convey to them what it was like having my world turned upside down and then right side up by a silly little soda.
My blended family walked the streets of Barcelona and the hills of Granada and that little city block in Alicante where I shed all those tears in my 20th year.
Everywhere we went, Fanta Limón was right there with us. At the bustling breakfast diners and the oldest restaurant in the world and the open-air cafes where we munched on olives and patatas bravas and watched the people passing by on their afternoon vueltas.
By the end of the trip, I think the boys started to understand that just because something comes from somewhere else doesn’t mean it can’t nourish your spirit, especially when you need it the most.
When we got home, at least to the place I have called home since 2006, Frank took it upon himself to make a homemade Fanta Limón.
You see, travel is my love language and cooking is his. And in our new marriage, we are doing our own intercambio, patiently learning how to communicate so both of us can feel truly heard.
This trip — and all my trips, really — was a way for me to say “I love you.” First to me. Then to my family.
Homemade Fanta Limón, which by the way, tasted exactly like the real thing, was his way of saying it back.
This part really moved me. Thank you for sharing, Addie!
"You see, travel is my love language and cooking is his. And in our new marriage, we are doing our own intercambio, patiently learning how to communicate so both of us can feel truly heard."