People just ain't no good

I wrote such nice things about Cáceres. Then some dickless piece of shit stole my purse and there went my notebook. I still mean the nice things I wrote, but I dunno if I have it in me to rewrite them all. I've lived in Barcelona and New York, I know how to not get robbed. I got all stupid about small towns and wasn't being careful. I don't wanna talk about it.

The old part of Cáceres is very old and very preserved: The walls are still up, the buildings (15th and 16th century) are all made of stone, the streets are narrow and cobble-y and authentically hard to walk on. Beautiful houses and churches, ivy, gardens. The houses have the crests of the families who built them carved in stone on the front. When I first got here I thought it was kind of an eyesore that a lot of the buildings (especially the churches, maybe because they're tall?) have big piles of crap on top of them. Maybe I've been in the city too long (or maybe I need to go back to the city, where I know how to take care of myself...): They're not piles of crap, they're birds' nests. And not just any birds, they're storks' nests. Very cool. They have these little bodies with big wings and long skinny legs and beaks; they make these loud woodpecker-like noises by opening and closing their beaks really fast. They look just like the cartoon storks that bring the babies.

The night I got here I was walking around feeling lonely and sorry for myself because I don't have any friends (here--I don't have any friends here) when I met this guy Valentín. The Spanish word vale doesn't exactly translate; it's sort of a catch-all expression for yes/okay/thank you/I understand. You don't learn it in Spanish class, but you hear it constantly. Valentín is a pretty cool name, but Vale is an even better nickname. Somehow Vale and I got on the topic of bullfighting. He didn't change my mind or anything; I think killing for sport is wrong, period, but it was an interesting conversation and one of my favorite Spanish phrases, es complicado, kept coming up. He said that the bulls that aren't used for bullfighitng live for a year or two in shitty conditions before they're killed, whereas fighting bulls live like kings (viven como reyes, he kept saying--don't know what that means exactly, though) for four or five years before they're killed. He assured me that after they're killed, fighting bulls are used for meat and leather. Let's assume that Vale isn't full of shit. If I had to choose between a short shitty life followed by an unpleasant death and a longer good life followed by an unpleasant death, I'd want to be a fighting bull. Not the point, but it did make me think a little. And apparently it's really hard to become a bullfighter because they make a lot of money and have a little mafia thing going. Vale also told me that Extremadura is really backwards and undeveloped compared to the rest of Spain: no airport, no communications infrastructure, no jobs. Apparently the service industry is the biggest employer in Cáceres; he specifucally mentioned street-cleaning. And drugs seem to be big here. No wonder tourists get robbed.

Cáceres has been designated as some kind of European culture capital for the year 2016 (whatever that means). I get it: It has history, some art, some good museums, a university. And all kinds of music. On Saturday night I heard a group of oboes and clarinets playing in one of the squares. Then in the museum courtyard was a music/spoken word concert. The music was five flutists (flautists?), an upright bass, and percussion. The spoken words probably would have been cheesy in English, but they were in Spanish and I was thrilled that I could mostly understand them. Then in a different square was a guy with a guitar singing Spanish folk songs. And no one was even collecting money. One of the bars had live music and that was free, too.

Slightly less cultured were the three Spanish military guys I met on Sunday. We drank beer and played darts (dartos, en español); I even beat one of them. The one from Asturias may have been a little bit of a warmonger: I asked if he thought there should be a more international presence in Iraq and he said yes because he wants to go. (At least I think that's what he said.) Or maybe he just likes to travel, I dunno.