Blog-icide

If anyone's still paying attention, yeah, I disappeared for a while. Trust me, you didn't miss much. The only people who would be amused by Benidorm stories were there. I'm glad to be back. Don't ever go to Benidorm.

Anyway, today I went to this festival called Hamaka (Spanish for hammock). It's about bringing artists and audiences together, and with a lot of relaxing. Getting there wasn't at all relaxing: The festival was happening at a castle on the far end of Montjuic, this mountain at the southwest corner of Barcelona, and we had a hard time finding it and it got hot on the (really long) walk there so I was way overdressed and sweaty. But once we finally found the place, there were portable lounge chairs set up and we ate ham while reclining and it doesn't get too much better than that. There was music. First was this guy Bitxe whom they refer to as the Catalan Bob Dylan (lots of harmonica, oh joy oh bliss); he played a bunch of his own stuff and then did Visions of Johanna with a Catalan accent and it was adorable (think Viss-ions of Yohanna). Then there was a really good jazz band. There was a guy on a bike riding around among the lounge chairs pointing at people and taking them for rides in a little seat attached to the back of his bike. There was a guy wearing pants made out of newspaper. If you sat in his chair, he'd blindfold you and massage your feet and put scents in front of your nose. There was a beer guy walking around with a keg of San Miguel on his back. And it was almost entirely noncommercial; except for the beer, everything was free. The musicians weren't even selling CDs--kind of a bummer actually because I probably would have bought one from the Catalan Bob Dylan, but still the blatant lack of money-making was nice. And it was so Barcelona, in its creative, weird, laid back way. Finally things are back to normal.