Madrid, SPAIN — “Tell us something about American culture,” they asked as we sat Indian-style on the cold pavement of a park in Granada.

After parading through the city with heavy backpacks and dodging fiesta traffic for two hours looking for a room, it was too heavy of a question for me to answer.

Semana Santa was in full gear, and my friend Blair and I had just pulled into town by train to witness the Easter processions southern Spain is so famous for.

Little did we know the reservation we’d made via the Internet was lost somewhere in cyberspace. Thanks to the wonders of technology, we were forced to find accommodations elsewhere.

Every hotel, youth hostel, bed and breakfast — anything within close range of the city of Granada was booked solid for the Holy Week festivities. But it didn’t matter.

Possessing only our backpacks, a few measly pesetas and some good company, we kept our spirits high and set sail for an adventurous evening.

We weren’t alone. Only a half-hour earlier, my friend and I met up with four Spanish guys from Madrid who were in the same shoes as us.

They stood on a corner looking utterly clueless, just as we did, with no place to go and a broken-down car being fixed in a nearby garage. Blair and I knew we were going to end up sleeping outside that night and thought “Hey … if we’re gonna have to risk our lives sleeping outside all night in an unfamiliar place, we may as well do it with some fellow backpackers.”

So we introduced ourselves, put our heads together and brainstormed ideas of places to sleep.

A fenced-in university campus with fluffy beds of grass seemed like the perfect solution. But just when we began to climb the fence, two policemen rode by on motorcycles and asked what we were doing. “There’s no place to stay,” we argued. “Where can we go?”

They had no suggestions. Instead, they left us alone to figure things out for ourselves.

We thought about taking up residence in an ATM booth but shot the idea down after realizing it’d be better to sleep on the street than to spend the night in jail.

On a short walk we discovered a nice park with lines of trimmed bushes which connected to form small enclosed squares. As soon as we saw the park, we knew we were home.

So there we were, worn out from the previous night spent in Seville, sitting on the pavement in a “cubicle” with bushes surrounding us like walls in a park with 10 hours to kill before the sun came up. It was plenty of time to hang out and relax.

Our Spanish friends bought us some beers, and we sat chatting, switching off between Spanish and English.

They nicknamed me Conor “Macleod,” because when I introduced myself they thought of the movie “The Highlander.” We joked about how we were going to fix our home up by putting up carpeting and wallpaper, and we actually found a way to do it.

In a nearby dumpster, we found cardboard boxes and bubble wrap, which served as a softer foundation for us to sleep on. We discussed politics — everything from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal to the anarchist movement in Madrid.

They taught me some new colloquial Spanish expressions. The descriptive noun “la leche,” for example (“the milk”), is pretty much equivalent to the English phrase of calling something “the bomb.”

They also taught me some other phrases like “puta madre” and “puta mierda.”

A dark corner shielded by some trees and bushes became “the bathroom,” and we politely excused ourselves whenever we needed to use it. Our home even had a nice view. There was a beautiful fountain with the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the background.

When it was time to hit the sack, Carlos and the others hopped into their sleeping bags and were nice enough to give Blair and me a tarp to use as a blanket.

A street lamp towered above us shining light in our eyes and we joked that someone should get up and “turn the damn lights out,” as if it were really possible.

The next morning, I woke up shivering and saw the sun rise over the Sierra Nevada. It was then that I realized the night in Granada was my first experience truly “roughing it.” As a city boy, born and raised on the north side of Chicago, the whole idea of trekking out into the wilderness and surviving on the bare necessities was completely new to me. But I think I fared well.

It wasn’t camping in the traditional sense. Instead of worrying about bears attacking our “campsite,” we feared being discovered by police or the Semana Santa processioners (the traditional garb of Holy Week brotherhoods strikingly resembles that of the Ku Klux Klan with its insignia-marked robes and conical-shaped headpieces and to our unaccustomed minds seemed quite scary).

There were no forest animals, pine trees or beautiful lakes but instead dirty pigeons, tall lamp poles and a spouting fountain. I guess it was more of an “urban wilderness.”

As the night wore on and conversation grew deep, we began to see the many similarities between us.

We were all college students who had just ventured down to Andalusia to enjoy the week off from school and join in the Semana Santa festivities.

The six of us all loved to travel and constantly enjoy new experiences. We all had hopes and dreams.

Two of us were Americans and the other four Spaniards, but despite these minor classifications, we somehow linked up in the chaotic frenzy of overcrowded Granada and found some common ground.

As we lay in our cubicle, freezing and homeless, we couldn’t help but laugh at the humor of the situation.

We knew at that moment there was no better place on earth.

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Conor Bezane is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication from Chicago. There can be only one.