She said 'focus'.

The problem with watching original version films in Spain is the subtitles are all in Spanish. Even when the characters are speaking Arabic or Urdu, which they do a lot in Syriana. Not that I expected English subtitles, but the lack thereof made an already complicated film even harder to follow.

I understood most of it, which was encouraging. But trying to read the subtitles made me realize something about communicating in a language you don't really speak. You really have to pay attention. (I guess that should have been more obvious from the start--sometimes I'm a little slow....) When speaking or reading a language in which you're fluent, you can zone out for a while. You can think about other things. You can skip words. A motorcycle driving by can drown out a sentence. And it won't really matter because you know the language so well that you fill in the gaps without even realizing it. I'm nowhere near that point in Spanish. Several times during the film I caught myself skimming the subtitles, not really understanding them, and then being frustrated that I didn't understand them. But the reason I didn't understand was I didn't read them carefully enough--I was trying to read them the way I read English. I do it in conversation, too. Sometimes I just forget to pay careful attention, because if I were speaking English I wouldn't need to hang on every word. Then things that I should be able to understand end up sounding like unintelligible noise. I think that's why I seem to be completely incapable of buying bus tickets here. Either that or they're speaking Catalan.

They speak Mexican there, but the food's not as good

I like food. Maybe I even love food. But I don't love food. I knew the food world was all atwitter about some restaurant in or around Barcelona, but I'd never even heard the word elBulli until I came here and became friends with someone who does love food. elBulli is in Roses, which is on the coast about two hours away from Barcelona, and is considered by some to be the best restaurant. In the world. Apparently people pay hundreds of dollars just for reservations there. I did not go to elBulli tonight. But I did go to Inopia, a tapas bar run by Albert Adrià, pastry chef at elBulli and brother of elBulli god Ferran Adrià (what, you didn't know that?). So now I can say that I've been to the elBulli tapas bar. I'm not sure how long it's been open, but it still seems very under the radar; it took a lot of googling to even find the address. Which should make for an even better story: "I went to Inopia (you know, Inopia, Adrià, elBulli?) beforeit was famous and crowded and waaaay overpriced." Or something like that.

I had high hopes. I was all set to spend too much money on a really good meal. And it was a good meal, but... They were out of most of their specialties, they only had Catalan menus, and they were stingy with the bread. I kept quiet about how underwhelmed I was, in case I was missing something that only food people can appreciate, but my food friend confirmed that there just wasn't anything that special about these tapas. Hm. The wine was very good and the entire bill for two people was only about 20 euros. It was a perfectly good and reasonably priced meal, just not one that I'll feel very justified bragging about.

And. Speaking of food, I have a confession to make. People rave about the seafood here. I don't know if I have no taste or if it's because I lived in Boston for a while or if I'm just really picky or what, but the seafood here does nothing for me. The fish is good, but the shellfish always tastes fishy. Maybe some people like that? I thought it wasn't supposed to taste fishy. And anchovies and sardines are a big deal; they're apparently way better here than in other places. And I'm trying with them, I really am, but I just don't like them. I guess maybe they're an acquired taste--I definitely haven't acquired it yet.

Signed, sealed, delivered

Internet access just isn't very good here. It's slow and expensive and the support is bad and you're always losing service. A friend of mine used to have free wireless in her apartment. It stopped working, and now she's considering moving--that's how much of a pain it is here.

Service at the university isn't all that much better--the internet was down for four days straight once back in January, and went down again a few weeks ago just before final exams started. Anyway, I had been using wireless in my office, but the wireless connection is really slow. And also really flaky--sometimes you have to log in; sometimes you don't; it's always disconnecting. I'd finally had enough the other day when every 5 minutes, on the dot, I would get disconnected and have to log in again. When I couldn't connect using the ethernet, I assumed I'd somehow fucked up my laptop. This time it wasn't my fault, though. In order to plug into the internet in my office, I had to go talk to the computer help people, who did some configuring on my computer and then gave me a letter. I had to take the letter to my department secretary to certify that I'm affiliated with the department and then return the signed and stamped letter to the computer guy, who then hooked me up.

Do they really think that there will be a problem with non-University people stealing internet from offices with ethernet cords? The offices have locks! If I have access to an office, probably I'm legit. And the letter-stamping process is made all the more absurd by the fact that the wireless here is rarely even password protected. Anyone could walk in off the street and use a hallway or classroom to steal wireless (slow, shitty wireless, but still), but they need official stamps to let professors use the internet in their offices?

...this probably sounds like I'm complaining. I'm mostly not. I get a kick out of absurdity--even when I'm annoyed by it I usually kind of appreciate it. It makes me appear a lot more negative than I actually am.

This song has nothing to do with the number eleven

The opening band at the concert I went to last night was, in the words of VH-1, awesomely bad. I couldn't tell if they took themselves seriously or not, so I held back from laughing out loud. It was all Americans on the stage, all night, mostly speaking English, but with some really bad Spanish thrown in. I realized I probably sound more like them than I like to think I do, dammit. As far as I can tell, American accents are sexy to no one. Anyway, the main act was this guy from Seattle who my friend had heard sounds like Tom Waits. And he does. More the drunken growling Blood Money Tom Waits than the sensitive Closing Time Tom Waits, but it worked. He played guitar on a few songs, but the main accompaniments was an accordion and a big plastic soda bottle filled with coins. There was some just plain screaming, and an unrecognizable-but-for-the-lyrics Outcast cover. Like I said, it somehow worked. Towards the end he growled "Do you want to sing a drinking song?" There were some cheers, but he didn't exactly get a resounding 'Yes' for a reply. It was a Sunday night, after all. Then he growled "What's wrong, you're not drunk enough? Do you want to get FUCKED UP?" That got a more enthusiastic reply, and he told everyone to stand up and point our right index fingers in the air. There were only maybe 40 people in the room and, after looking around skeptically, everyone got up and pointed. Then he growled "Now I'm gonna count to twelve and you're all gonna look up at your fingers and spin around twelve times." And we all did. And we got fucked up. Then he made us put our arms around the people next to us and sway. And we did (the swaying part was easy because we were all ready to fall over at that point). And then we sang the drinking song. It didn't feel like Barcelona at all. I don't know what it felt like.

Ooh, ooh that smell

There's this certain smell you get from spending a warm day outside in a city. Kind of a mix of dirt and sweat and sunshine. It's not a good smell, exactly, but it's a good way to smell because it means you've been outside all day. I've been smelling like that a lot lately (was that too much information?) and it's pretty great. Winter here sucks, but it's already over and it's only March. I'm sitting in a park writing this and some tropical birds just flew by. I'm not sure what kind they are; they look like big parakeets and they're bright green. Sometimes when I'm walking I'll look up and see one in a palm tree and remember that I'm in a very different place. And speaking of strange animals, there's a guy over there with a ferret on a leash. I know people keep ferrets as pets; I didn't know they take them for walks. Which reminds me, the Spanish word for hardware store is ferreteria, which makes me laugh to myself about ferret stores.

Sign posted in the bar where I bought a sandwich for lunch:
Hitler no fumaba. Franco tampoco. Aquí, se permite fumar.
Translation: Hitler didn't smoke. Neither did Franco. Here, you can smoke.

The impression that I get

Perception is a funny thing. I had a drink the other night with a friend of a friend of a friend, a Spanish woman who doesn't speak English. It was encouraging that we were able to have a real conversation, even if I sounded like an idiot a lot and didn't understand everything she said. Anyway, we were talking about the so-called smoking ban in Spain and she told me that she had visited California right after their smoking ban took effect. She smoked at the time and said she felt like a real outcast, that whenever she went outside to smoke the only other people smoking were homeless. I was also a smoker in California right after the smoking ban, and I remember thinking that the ban wasn't that big a deal because most of the bars and restaurants have outdoor terraces with heat lamps where you can smoke (and lots of people did). But I guess coming from Spain it must have seemed pretty strange because smoking is so much more common and accepted here than in the US.

She also told me about a friend of hers who visited New York for two weeks and came back raving about how nice and friendly New Yorkers are compared to Barcelonans, especially on the subway. Now I'm a big proponent of the idea that New Yorkers are a lot nicer than most people give them credit for (grumpy and nice are not mutually exclusive), but "Don't make eye contact" is basically the NYC subway mantra. But if she happened to run into a few chatty people (they may have been from out of town....) during a two-week visit, the NYC subway probably did seem like a pretty friendly place. I'm glad it's not though--who wants to talk to strangers when you can listen to your iPod and stare at your feet?

Not that there's anything wrong with that

Quick, vote! Lonely Planet or Rough Guide?

Today was a beautiful beautiful day and I went for this great run on the beach this morning. Normally when I run I start going down the coast and then turn around and come back up. Today for a change of scenery I started going up. It gets a little less commercial going up, but also the sidewalk gets farther away from the water. When I came to a little walkway heading back towards the beach I took it, thinking it might lead to a path with a better view. It didn't. It dead ended at some sand and a naked old guy. Not knowing what to do, I turned left, now running through sand but mostly just running away. And then there was another naked old guy! I turned around to get the hell out of this little nude beach I'd happened upon, but that meant running past the first naked old guy again. Eeewww! And the really weird thing is I don't think it really was a nude beach; there were lots of other people around and none of them were naked. I knew that European women often go topless at the beach; I wasn't aware that full frontal nudity was common.

Europeans are more open to nudity than Americans are, and that's cool. I don't mind that there were naked old guys at the beach, I just wasn't really prepared for them. Next time I'll stay on the sidewalk.

One for you, nineteen for me

I heard the strangest accent ever today: Imagine a very proper Brit dropped into Arkansas for just long enough to pick up a drawl, without really losing the British accent. Bizarre. Then I saw a comb-over so bad it stopped me in my tracks. It hadn't occurred to me before I saw that one, but comb-overs are pretty rare here. I guess old Spanish men have better taste. Both these things happened on my way to yet another police station for the nth step in my seven-month process of becoming legal. And now I have my card and it's finally over. I'm a resident! Yay! Pretty anticlimactic, really, but hopefully this means I'll keep getting regular paychecks and won't be deported.

The paycheck thing is important, because I just signed over pretty much all my dollars to the IRS and the state of New York. I'm a good liberal, I like paying taxes, I'm not gonna bitch and moan, but... OUCH. The New York City tax is what really killed me. It could be worse though--I could live in Yonkers. Then I'd still have to pay a city tax and I'd be living in Yonkers.

La mierda has hit the fan

When I started college, the internet was still pretty new. Completely new to me, in fact, because I was coming from northern Michigan--not exactly on the cutting edge of technology. I remember spending hours at a time being mesmerized by Netscape and all the things you could look up on it. Song lyrics! The weather! ...Okay so not much has changed. I also remember that occasionally the email system would spin out of control: Someone would, appropriately or not, email some list, then someone would reply to the whole list, then someone else would reply to the whole list about how you shouldn't reply to the whole list, someone else who just found out about the list would take the opportunity to broadcast some unrelated message about Greenpeace or something, prompting a reply to all about inappropriate uses of the list, prompting another reply to all about not replying to all, and then people would start replying to all asking to be taken off the list, prompting even more replies to all about not replying to all, making even more people want to be taken off the list.... Remember those days? Improved email etiquette, better list management, and spam blockers have probably all helped make those inbox-busting cycles mostly a thing of the past; in fact, I had all but forgotten about them. Until today.

It started with an email from the University administration to my department mailing list about Catalan courses offered by the University. (I'm still trying to educate myself enough to write something coherent about Catalan nationalism. For now I'll just say that it's a sensitive subject and language is a huge part of it.) Someone replied to the whole list saying that it wasn't such a great idea for the email to have been written in Catalan because the people who would be taking the class (i.e., those who don't speak Catalan) wouldn't be able to read it. I don't speak Catalan and I was still able to get the gist of the original email. Still, it was a somewhat valid point (they might as well have included a translation in the email), although not really one worth sending to the whole list. From there it just spiraled out of control, though.

A lot of the emails that followed were in Catalan (the rest were in English or Spanish, and some were translated into two or all three languages) so I couldn't follow the debacle word for word. What I did get was that some people were making arguments about this being a Catalan university, Catalan language, Catalan identity, etc. Others were pointing out that translation would improve communication, which is clearly a good thing. And of course others were writing that the ensuing discussion wasn't an appropriate use of the department mailing list (don't those people realize that they're part of the problem?). Then people started quoting the Estatut*. Then they started calling each other names. Really. I don't want to reprint without permission, but here's a paraphrasing of part of one of the English emails that went around.

"I've lived in Catalunya for four years now, and have found that even the best-educated Catalans lose all capacity for rational arguments when issues such as the Catalan nation or Catalan language are involved."

These are all people with PhDs. If not more mature, you'd think they'd at least be busier than all this. There were 48 emails sent in about a four-hour period today (I counted). I kind of knew that people get riled up about the Catalan issue, but I hadn't really witnessed it until today. Yikes.

Oh, and ETA declared a permanent ceasefire. Don't mean to be blasé about it, but people here seem to be skeptical that anything will change. I was enjoying listening to Zapatero address the issue, because political speeches are pretty easy to understand: usually spoken clearly and slowly with lots of pauses and repeated words (esperanza, terrorisma, victimas). Not a lot of content, but good for improving my confidence about Spanish.


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*The Estatut is the Catalan constitution. Right now they're arguing over whether or not Catalunya should be recognized as a nation, and what exactly it would mean if it were. I'll write more when I understand it better.

Urban Dictionary

It started out innocently. I was looking up the Spanish word for butterfly to try and figure out something I'd heard on the news, when, flipping through my Spanish dictionary I happened upon the word boner. (It was the first word on its page, so it was written in bigger letters at the top.) There were three Spanish words listed: gazapo, patochada, and plancha. I only recognized plancha, which I think means fried when used in the context of food. Boner seemed awfully slangy for my Spanish-English dictionary, so I decided to see what the English translations of the Spanish translations were. Kind of like that game telephone.

gazapo: young rabbit, cunning fellow, fib, lie, slip, blunder.
patochada wasn't in the Spanish section.
plancha: sheet, slab, plate, flatiron, horizontal suspension (in gymnastics). Naut gangway, gangplank. Inf howler.

Huh? Now I'm all confused.

Anyway, I was watching TV because I'm trying to be in hard core learn Spanish mode. My interest and enthusiasm for learning Spanish really comes and goes; sometimes I'm all gung-ho about it, but then I'll go for days or longer where the Spanish language is nothing but an annoyance to me and all I want to do is read, speak, and hear English. Now that teaching is pretty much done, though, I really need to spend more time on Spanish. I don't feel like I've improved much since I got here, and that's bad. I was thinking of taking an intensive class for a few weeks, but my Spanish teacher doesn't think it's worth the money. She says all I'll learn is grammar and I already know grammar; what I need is to do more language exchanges to practice speaking and listening. That should have been good news: I'll save money and she told me my Spanish isn't so bad. The thing is that I'm really good at being a student. It's one of my skills. And I'm really bad at having conversations in Spanish. I know, I know, that's why you practice, so you get better. But I really prefer doing things I'm good at to doing things that I suck at. I guess my bad Spanish isn't a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. [Although I was reading recently about learning languages through hypnosis....]

Changing all my strings

Nothing like watching Crash to make you feel shitty about life.... (At least now I can legitimately gripe that Brokeback Mountain should have won Best Picture.)

I tend not to feel shitty about life for very long, though. For one thing, I think today was the first time ever in my life that the first day of spring hasn't meant snow. For another thing, I'm going to Bilbao! I'm going to Granada! And Madrid! And Galicia! (And Croatia! But that's another story....) Now that teaching is pretty much over, I'm starting to think about the places in Spain that I want to see while I'm here, and it's very exciting. I think the first stop will be Cadaques and Figueres for a little Dalí tour.

Salvador Dalí, like cereal for dinner and the irreconcilability of free will and an interventionist god, is something that I think most people got over after their first year of college but I never did. He wasn't just weird, he was really brilliant. He studied physics and made art inspired by quantum theory and Heisenberg's uncertainty principal. He also made my favorite sculpture ever; it's a woman's body, from the waist to about mid-thigh, I think, made of something smooth and black and shiny, with a white egg on top. It lives at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow.

The public transportation options to Cadaques and Figueres aren't great, so getting there will take some planning. So much better than preparing lectures....

Woke up this morning with the cold water

So my shower did finally get replaced, although not on Wednesday like it was supposed to. That meant showing up in Valencia all grungy because we couldn't shower before we left, but at least we had the truck stop bathroom. While in Valencia I got a text from my landlord that the shower was working again. Great. So we get back to Barcelona on Saturday night to find that the shower had indeed been replaced, but I was now out of hot water. I tried calling my landlord to have her son replace the buteo, but no one was home. We didn't really need to shower that night anyway, so I left a message and hoped that he could come by on Sunday morning. Then I checked my email and had a message from a colleague asking about meeting for coffee this week. He's a friend of my landlord, and his email happened to mention that if I see my landlord when she gets back from Belgrade, I should say hi for him.

Okay. First my shower starts flooding my neighbors' apartment so it needs to be replaced, putting us out of a shower for one day while my friend is here. Then the shower isn't replaced when it's supposed to be, making for another shower-less day. Then the hot water runs out. Then it can't be replaced because my landlord is in fucking Serbia? And it all happens while I have a guest staying with me? What is this shit? Even if this were some stupid sitcom with Charlie Sheen, rather than my actual life, the series of events would be too much--you wouldn't write it that way because it's too easy. What's next, I slip on a banana peel?

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Epilogue: I tried to replace the buteo myself. I really tried. Couldn't do it. I suck. I was finally able to get ahold of my landlord's son, though, and now I have hot water again. Stay tuned for the next apartment disaster....

It burns, burns, burns

Las Fallas means 'The Fires' in Valencian.* Translation: They burn stuff. That, some restaurant recommendations, and the address of our hotel was about all the information my friends and I had when we showed up in Valencia on Thursday. My friend had asked for directions to our hotel when she made the reservations; they told her it was really hard to explain over the phone and she should ask at the bus station when we got into town. So we asked at the bus station's information booth. No information there. We decided to take a cab; the cab driver had never heard of the place or the address and had to call for directions. The hotel was allegedly in the market, which in Spain usually means a large and somewhat centrally located building where you can buy cheap produce and live chickens. A weird place for a hotel, but it was the only place we could find because there was, after all, a fire-themed festival taking place. Anyway, after much confusion, several phone calls, and a toll booth, we finally got to the "hotel" and found out why the cab driver and bus station information desk were so unhelpful: We were staying in a truck stop. Who takes a bus or a cab to a truck stop? (Insert punchline: Three blonde-ish blue-eyed American girls walk into a Spanish truck stop....) Turns out by 'market' they meant more 'shipping depot.' Or something. There were a lot of shipping containers. And a lot of Spanish truck drivers. And a lot of pornography, both gay and straight, in both magazine and DVD form. It was fine, really, and we got a lot of laughs out of it. You know what the sad part was, though? The bathroom in the truck stop hotel was magnitudes better than the bathroom in my apartment which, as of Thursday, still had no available shower. Our truck stop shower had nice hot water and tons of pressure, and was part of a full-sized bathtub so you could actually move in there. It was the best shower I've had since I left New York, and it was in a truck stop. Sigh.

Anyway, the festival. I think it started out as some sort of pagan thing (am I the most half-assed Fallas-goer ever, or what?) but now lines up with St. Joseph's Day. They make these big floats which are displayed all over town for a week and on the last day they burn them. We missed that important detail because we had to get back to Barcelona. Whatever. (One of the floats was a giant Virgin Mary made out of flowers. Do you think they burned that one, too? I'm not really in the know here, but that seems a little sacrilegious....) During the whole week of the festival there are marching bands parading through the streets, accompanied by women and girls in fancy dresses and Princess Leia-style side buns. And fireworks every night. And firecrackers all day. I'm an anal American, and it all seemed a little unsafe. There were kids setting off firecrackers in the streets. And they're really loud; what if someone started shooting? Would anyone even notice? I'm a stick in the mud, I know. And the mild undercurrent of anarchy was kinda cool, if a little scary. And no one really seemed to be overdoing it. Still, phrases like "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" don't seem to exist here.

The festival seemed pretty geared towards locals; we spent a lot of our time there feeling a little out of place. We were trying to think of US equivalents: Would a group of foreigners know what to do in Boston or Washington on the 4th of July? We weren't sure. Still, they burn stuff and that's fun, even if we didn't get to see it. And the fireworks were good and we saw a really good Caribbean-sounding band one night. And we had good paella. And Valencia has a great modern art museum that had a fantastic Braque exhibition (I am such an art whore). So it was a good trip.

Friday was St. Patrick's Day and I felt obliged to find a pub and drink a Guinness. (My mom says, not all that seriously, that I shouldn't drink Guinness because the English used it to enslave our people. But the Irish are doing pretty well for themselves now so I figure I can drink what I like.) I had seen an Irish pub and a few Guinness signs before I started looking for them; once I started looking, though, they were nowhere to be found. It did feel very Spanish to be looking hard for good beer and only finding red wine, though. It's not that you can't get beer here, it's just had to find good beer. Barcelona has tons of English and Irish bars; Valencia, not so much. Eventually I settled for Bailey's and called it good. No Guinness for me.


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*Valencian might be a dialect of Catalan. Or a different language. Or the same language. I'm not sure. To me Valencian and Catalan seem indistinguishable, but what do I know? Valencian is definitely less prevalent in Valencia than Catalan is in Barcelona. There were a lot more Valencian flags than Spanish, but I don't think anyone's arguing over whether Valencia is a nation. Here's something infuriating, though: The street signs are all in Valencian, but the maps all have the Spanish versions of the street names. You can figure it out, but who would think that's a good way to make a map?

I'm afraid of Americans

After Tossa last night we were tired, and had to wake up early today, so we stayed low key and ate at a little restaurant right near my apartment. Now remember I live in the Queens of Barcelona: There are warehouses and most of the restaurants have video poker machines. Even my subway line is like one of those weird Brooklyn/Queens lines; it starts in the northeast part of the city, almost goes to the center but then turns and ends up in the southeast corner. Like the J line or something. Anyway, tourists don't come to my neighborhood, and it's not really equipped for them. So we're eating at what has now become my local restaurant, no one else in the place except for the waiter/bartender, when this older American woman bursts in. The waiter/bartender couldn't understand her because she was speaking English; my American friend and I could barely understand her because she was a little incoherent. Apparently she and 10-15 of her friends were trying to go to some other restaurant nearby but it was really crowded, and she wanted to know what they had at this restaurant. Rude in any setting, but made magnitudes worse by the fact that the waiter/bartender clearly didn't speak much English, and she just kept talking more and more loudly in English. We tried to translate for her (she didn't even thank us) but it turned out the restaurant where we were was about to close so she left. We bonded with the waiter/bartender about how obnoxious some tourists can be. She didn't even ask if he spoke English--just barged in and started yelling in English. Damn Americans. A few minutes later two other women who were clearly part of the party of the first one came in. They wanted to know where they could get some pizza and sangria. For fuck's sake, if you're in Spain and you want pizza, WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN SPAIN? Through us, the waiter/bartender told them there are lots of places by the beach, about ten minutes away. And they whined "We have to walk ten minutes? We've been walking all day!" They really said that. At this point I was hiding my face and contemplating crawling under the table. What I should have done was tell them there's a Pizza Hut at the beach and a Hard Rock Cafe at Placa Catalunya, but I'm just not quick enough with sarcasm. Maybe I'm being too hard on them. At least they left the US, that's something. But they didn't even say gracias after that whole awful exchange. If you won't even say gracias (how in earth could an American not know that's the Spanish word for thank you?) you shouldn't be allowed into Spain. Punto.

Drinkin' white rum in a Portugal bar

I think that from now on, whenever possible, I'm gonna be an off-season tourist. Today we went to Tossa de Mar, a little Costa Brava town about an hour away that a Catalan friend described as nice and only a little touristy. I bet in June the place is overrun with tourists, but on a Wednesday in March, it was perfect. There's this hill overlooking the sea with really cute houses and some old ruins and a lighthouse at the top. We went to this weird but fun lighthouse museum whose English-version information guides also had Russian translation. The first room was supposed to make you feel lost at sea: pitch black with the occasional flickering light that seemed to come from far off in the distance. The adolescent boy in me was thinking it would have been pretty cool to be stoned in there. The whole museum was almost entirely free of words--very foreign-tourist friendly, but without being cheesy. After the museum we had beer and olives and basked in the sun and the fact that we basically had this beautiful place to ourselves for the day. At an outdoor cafe on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean and drinking in the middle of the day in the middle of the week--life is pretty damn good. Marc Chagall lived in Tossa briefly and the art museum had a few of his paintings, as well as a really cool photography exhibit. On a different hill is a fifteenth century watchtower that our tourist information called the Moorish tower. We almost didn't find it because our tourist office map was so bad we had to wonder if it wasn't bad on purpose because they hate tourists in Tossa, but the getting lost first gave more of a sense of accomplishment when we finally found it. A fifteenth century Moorish watchtower--doesn't that inspire all kinds of romantic historical notions?

The bus made one stop along the way, in this horrible-looking town with casinos and neon lights and restaurants prominently displaying pictures of food--made Tossa seem even better, like we found a little hidden treasure.

Blown to Pieces

I know I say this all the time, but.... I swear it's not my fault. I tried to post this on Wednesday. The internet was down at my office. I tried to post it on Thursday. blogger.com was down. I was in Valencia for two days and tonight is my friend's last night in Barcelona. I've been writing. More soon.

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Today was my last day of teaching (yayayayayayay!) and I'm just as excited to be done as the students are, if not more. Teaching wasn't so bad, but I can't say that I really enjoyed it. At the end of my second class today, the students clapped, those fuckers. Cheesy, but kind of hard to stay mad at them even if they did infuriate me all semester.

If I sound less than thrilled about life, it's because I am. I need to have my shower replaced because now when I use it all the water ends up on the bed of my downstairs neighbors. Worse for them than for me, I guess, but at least they get to bathe. And replacing the shower isn't gonna make it any bigger. The plumber is supposed to come tomorrow and it's only supposed to take half a day, but I have exactly zero expectations that it will go that smoothly. I have a house guest! Whine. Luckily she's an incredibly good sport, but still this is just a total pain in the ass.

Yesterday afternoon sometime is when their apartment started flooding. So they turned my water off and we didn't have any water at all last night. No dish washing, or bathing, or toilet flushing. I haven't brushed my teeth with bottled water since I was in Russia two years ago. I am the worst host ever. This morning we turned the water on and the neighbors put a bucket on their bed while I showered. Apparently it's only the shower that's causing the flooding so I can use the toilet and sinks but no showering until the shower is replaced. Argh.

At least I'm done teaching. I think facing my students unshowered would have been more than I can handle.

Weekend Update

Flamenco isn't really even supposed to be good here; it's an Andalucian thing, and this is definitely not Anadalucia. Still, we are in Spain (sorry, Catalunyans), and when flamenco's good it's amazing so we took a chance on Saturday with a flamenco place that gets mixed reviews. It wasn't that bad. But it was a little cheesy; the singer had moments of both brilliance and awfulness; and at a few points during the show I got the distinct impression that the performers were mocking the audience. Oh well; whenever I finally get back to Sevilla I'll really appreciate the good stuff.

The weather over the weekend was absolutely beautiful. Perfect. On Sunday we went to Park Güell (the Gaudí park), which continues to be one of my favorite places in the whole world, and drank overpriced sangria and got sunburned. I'm pretty sure this isn't just me being a sucker for Europe: Food for the masses here is so much better than in the US. The tortilla was cold; the tuna was dry; the olives weren't great; but still, we were eating tortilla (española) and tuna and olives and sangria at a public park. In the US it would be soda or bad coffee and pretzels and nachos with that awful bright orange fast-congealing cheese product. Anyway, later on Sunday the bad flamenco was more than made up for with a concert by Vengo a Cantautar--more like a collective than a group or band. There seemed to be about 30 different performers, constantly changing who was performing and doing all kinds of different stuff. (iTunes lists the genre of their CD as Unclassifiable.) There was this one women playing an accordion. Now I've never thought of the accordion as anything but jokey, but she was pretty sensual with hers; it sounded really good.

Yesterday the weather got shitty again and, I hate to bask in someone else's discomfort, but I'm feeling so vindicated. My friend from New York, home of record snowfall and six-month winters, is freezing. It's not just me--when it gets cold here it's way colder than what the thermometer implies. I still don't understand, but at least I have some validation.

Checking in

So blog coverage will be a little intermittent this week, what with the end of the term's fast approaching (yay!) and my friend's being here. The really good thing about guests is you get to go on vacation in the place where you live. We've been going out to dinner and going to concerts and going to the beach and going to the park.... I try to do that stuff all the time, but it's easier when you have a good excuse like a visitor from out of town.

Remind me to tell you about the really bad flamenco we saw on Saturday....

Coming to visit?

Here's what you can expect. I'll get to the airport a little bit later than I mean to because the bus will take longer than I think it will. I'll arrive feeling like a bad friend who can't even make it to the airport on time when you've flown across the ocean to see me. But you're not off the plane yet so I'm off the hook. But then I'm waiting and waiting and waiting, half convinced that either I'm in the wrong terminal or you've been abducted. It turns out that the airline lost your luggage. You were using the luggage to bring me some stuff from the US so I feel bad, but you feel worse because your luggage is lost and you're too tall to borrow my pants. It's all a little too stressful to deal with the airport bus, so we shell out for a cab. The cab gets stuck in traffic and ignores my detailed instructions about where I live. We get out a block away, and I throw my "I hate cab drivers" fit.

It's happened twice so far, just like that. The good news is later on we'll go for tapas and have wine and the next day your luggage will be delivered and someone else will have carried it up the five flights of stairs to my apartment. And you'll be in Barcelona!

I came back as a bag of groceries

My eating habits are regrettable. If I'm eating it, it's usually either processed or bad for me, often both. I have been eating a lot of oranges and clementines (Valencia is close by), and the coffee I drink is of good quality (I'm even getting used to the smaller amounts of it), but everything else is pretty much crap. Crap, or from a restaurant, which at best means way more olive oil than anyone really needs. Writing about Valencia inspired me to grab a clementine from my big bowl o' fruit just now. (I buy fruit with the intention of eating it instead of bad things. In practice I eat it in addition to bad things.) And it was moldy! Eeeewwww!!! (I swear I just bought those clementines. Don't think I'm gross.) Anyway, from buying so much of it I've noticed that the processed food here has a much shorter shelf life, or claims to, than similar food in the US. I bought some canned marinara sauce the other day (hey, pasta requires boiling water, that's something) and the label says it keeps in the refrigerator three days after opening. 3 days? I keep that stuff for months in the US. Well, weeks, anyway. I even noticed on a frozen pizza that you're supposed to eat it within a week of buying it. Isn't one of the points of frozen food that it lasts a long time? So now I'm all confused. Is the processed food less processed here and that's why it doesn't last as long, or is the labeling just really conservative? Or is all processed food like this and I just never read the labels and let things get too old in the US?

...and then I dropped my pants.

Hear me roar?

Someone asked me today how teaching was going. I gave my standard answer that it's okay, but the students talk a lot. And do you know what his reply was? He said "They don't respect you because you're a girl." What do I do with that? The first time I taught my own class, I was worried the students wouldn't take me seriously because I'm young. But they were great, so I stopped worrying about stuff like that. It never even occurred to me that my gender would have anything to do with anything. Does that sound horribly naive? I really thought we were beyond all that shit. With some exceptions, sure, but a whole class full of otherwise intelligent people? What a disappointment.

Anyway. I'm reading a biography of Trotsky right now. While making a "wholesale condemnation" of Lenin in 1902, Trotsky apparently called him, among other things, an "adroit statistician." Is that really a putdown?

MTV makes Beck want to smoke crack

I finally bought a TV. It's not entirely my fault that it took so long (it's all about blame with me). I bought the TV from a friend of a friend, but these friends in question weren't really speaking for a while, leaving my TV in limbo. But I finally got it, and now it sits very prominently in my kitchen/living/dining room, right on top of the microwave. (I'm a little nervous that one day I'll wake up to find the microwave caved in from the weight of the TV, or that I've become some kind of mutant from the combination of micro/radio/UV/whatever waves are emanating from the TV/microwave tower. Probably there are better things to worry about, though.) I don't really even like TV that much, but it should be good for Spanish practice.

I watched a weather report tonight (I'm not gonna go off about the weather again--it's a weekday and it never rains during the week here, so there's not much to complain about). The weather maps here are funny. The map shows the whole Iberian peninsula, but only Spain has texture and color coding and forecasts and stuff; Portugal is just this flat brown blob off to the left. I guess Spanish weather forecasters (who totally suck, by the way) probably don't have weather stations in Portugal. It makes sense, but it looks funny.

It's been a little demoralizing to see how much I don't understand. Even listening to the news, which is delivered by people who are trained to speak clearly, I just don't understand that much. Yesterday it took me about ten minutes of not understanding anything before I realized I was on a Catalan station. Not a good sign.

An honor just to be nominated....

I was a volunteer at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. I just happened to see an ad in the paper one day about how they were looking for volunteers; it seemed like a fun way to see some free movies. I really wanted to see this Russian film called 4, but so did everyone else in New York and I wasn't able to get tickets. I did keep running into the director, though (literally, I almost crashed into him several times; he never seemed to notice). Someone told me that the Russians brought their own security to prevent bootlegging; even if that's not true I like to pretend it is because it sounds so Russian. I was a ticket-taker at the awards show, and after the tickets had been taken I got to go in and watch the end of the show. The usher ushered me right into the seat of someone who was up getting an award--pretty embarrassing when he came back and wanted his seat. The only other thing I really remember about the awards show was Felicity Huffman winning best actress for Transamerica. Afterwards, I got to crash the awards show party, where Dennis Leary was first in line for the deep-fried appetizers. I was thinking of all these things last night when I finally watched Transamerica (it may have inspired me to drive across the country this summer; we'll see), and this morning I was sad to see that Felicity didn't win the Best Actress Oscar. But nowhere near as sad as I was to see that Heath Ledger didn't win. Maybe because Brokeback Mountain was such a sad movie that Heath Ledger's winning an Oscar would have been like some sort of happy ending? I dunno, but it really bummed me out. Damn the Academy!

She has trouble acting normal

Dear Barcelona Weather Forecasters,

FUCK YOU. You're fucking up my plans and soaking my pants with your overoptimistic weather lies. 'Chance of rain' means bring an umbrella, not brace yourself for the fucking apocalypse. I went to a former convent turned museum today, but I'm so wet and grumpy right now I don't even wanta talk about it. After the convent I was planning to go to this palace, but by the time I was about halfway there I realized I was too wet to enjoy anything touristy and too full of rage to do anything besides throw a fit or drink. So I seeked (suck?) shelter in this overpriced restaurant where I'm sitting right now. Wine in the afternoon usually feels decadent; right now it feels absolutely necessary. I'm cold; my pants and feet are soaked; and now that I'm finally over my six-week-long cold, I'll probably wake up tomorrow with another one. I checked the weather four hours ago--if I'd known it was gonna rain buckets I would have done something else today. I think something must be wired wrong in my brain. I try to keep it together, I really do. But I'm just incapable of acting like a rational person when the weather's bad. I can't not anthropomorphize heavy rain as a hateful, angry being, and I take it personally and want to fight back. Maybe I need to be medicated.

Anyway, the convent. Churches freak me out sometimes, but I've always kind of liked convents and monasteries. What bothers me about organized religion is the power it often yields and the inevitable abuses of such power. I picture monks and, to a lesser degree, nuns, as being more removed from all of that; whether it's true or not, to me they represent a purer form of the good that religion can represent. Nothing I can begin to relate to, but I guess they inspire in me a certain respect. This particular convent was built in the 12th century, and has only been a former convent/museum since 1983.

When you walk in, the building opens up into an open courtyard; it's really beautiful and I'd love to show you pictures, but my camera cable still hasn't presented itself. The different rooms were mostly small chapels and individual nuns' rooms. They also had the kitchen and dining room preserved. The dining room was this very big, very plain room whose only real decoration was a painting of the crucifixion. Apparently the nuns weren't permitted to talk while they ate, except for one who read aloud from the bible. (This is reminding me of the movie The Magdalene Sisters, which was very good but terribly disturbing. Not all nuns are good. I knew that; my mom taught me that. I take back what I wrote before about nuns being pure.) Anyway, the convent also has a small museum with its art collection. I was happy to see that the early stuff was more Flemish than Italian (I hate Italian Renaissance art, and I don't care if it makes me uncultured), and that the Catalan artists seemed to take after the Flemish (i.e., proper noses and no flat faces). Also of note were the choral books, which contained the hymns and stuff for church services and, for reasons the museum left unexplained, were about 3 feet tall. And I got a kick out of the following quote about the convent's 16th century art acquisitions: "Despite their grave financial difficulties, the nuns continued to acquire new artworks in accordance with devotional needs and changes in taste." Interesting priorities.

Sundays always seem to find me unhappily dragging myself to a museum in the rain. It always ends up being worth it, but today was a closer call than usual.

Hit the Dusty Trail

Hiking is one of those things that in theory I like but in practice I rarely do. I went today, and it was really fun. We didn't get too far out of Barcelona--there were power lines and various other signs of urbanism along the way. Still, it was nice to get out of the city--the air was noticeably cleaner and it was quiet and peaceful. I went with this group called Active Barcelona, and I liked the group as much as I did the actual hike. This Dutch woman recently started the group just because she likes hiking; she's done it enough around here so that she doesn't need a map and can act as a guide. For 15 euros she did the planning/guiding, bought train tickets, and bought us a beer at the end. I'd probably never have the gumption to go out on my own with a map, so I was happy to pay for her guidance. And I'm all about people earning money doing things they enjoy, so I was happy to contribute to that. And everyone spoke English but I was the only American (the others were Dutch, English, and Australian), so it felt all international but without any language issues. (Kind of cheating on the international thing, I know... I'll learn Spanish; I really will.)

A good trick for making crappy light beer more tolerable is to squeeze some lemon juice into it. If you order cerveza con limón like I did today, though, you get this concoction of half beer, half lemonade. I had heard that they drink lemonade + beer here, but I never had any intentions of trying it. It was surprisingly not bad, although the next time I just want beer with a lemon in it I guess I'll have to do some explaining.

And in other news, after over two months of living here, I finally bought salt and pepper today.

¡Otra! ¡Otra!

An Ojos de Brujo show is like the flamenco version of a variety show. On acid. There's music, dancing, video, politics, lights, costumes, poetry, art, sprinting across the stage Mick Jagger-style. Dance ranged from traditional Spanish to breakdancing to pole dancing. I've heard their music described as radical flamenco, and I think that's pretty fitting. There was also some old school rap with mouth noises. (You know, when you put your hands up to your mouth and make rap noises? I don't know what the name for that is.) They played for almost three hours, and by the end I was exhausted just from watching it. How do you come down after performing something like that? I even forgave them for the encore (I hate encores, just keep playing dammit), because they must have really needed a break. But when I become a rock star, I won't fuck around with encores.

After the concert this strange guy with crutches (I see so many people on crutches here, it's weird) was trying to tell my friend and me that the band was copying Norah Jones. Trust me, there's no band out there that's less like Norah Jones than Ojos de Brujo. I also suspect his crutches may have been just for show, because I saw him waving them in the air and dancing.

Doing the Unstuck

We talked about body parts and sickness in Spanish class today. Basic stuff: arms, legs, eyes, I don't feel well, I have a cold, my ears hurt. Then we came to medications: ear drops, shots, acne cream. And then supositorios para la fiebre. I took this to mean suppositories for constipation. Supositorio seemed self-explanatory, and fiebre is kind of like fiber, which is a word often associated with constipation. Nothing I really wanted to talk about, but potentially useful information, I guess. Then one of our practice exercises was to match up a list of conditions with a set of pictures of people suffering from various conditions, and one of the conditions listed was fiebre. This had gone too far. But after scanning the pictures, I was both confused and a little relieved to find nothing resembling an illustration of constipation. Turns out fiebre means fever. Oh. Once I realized my mistake, it didn't seem worth trying to explain it in Spanish or English, so I just bit my tongue to keep from giggling like an adolescent boy. Supositorio does seem to mean suppository, though, so I hope I don't get any fevers here in Spain....

And speaking of things that are unpleasant, I almost got myself run over by a tram tonight, a la Gaudí. I'm not looking to die, but it would have been an interesting way to go.

Buckets comin' out of my ears

I swear I'm not making this up. They have ham-flavored potato chips here. I saw them in a vending machine today: Jamón Ruffles. Really.

Anyway, this unannounced rain is getting old real fast. It was not supposed to rain today. I check the weather obsessively. I know it wasn't supposed to rain. That's why I didn't have an umbrella when, 20 minutes from home and without my metro card, the sky opened up and poured on me.

Barcelona has an Arc de Triomf. As far as I can tell no one knows who exactly was triomf-ant over whom, but it's there. I stood underneath it for a while hoping the rain would let up. It didn't, and when the wind picked up, making it rain sideways, the Arc stopped being much of a shelter at all. There were quite a few people trying to wait out the rain under the Arc but, aside from a little girl who asked me if her backpack was wet (as if the answer could have been no?) and asked someone else the time (where were her parents?), no one was making friends. I guess even Spaniards get grumpy in the rain. I get really grumpy in the rain. But I kept it together, even though I had clothes hanging outside to dry and even when a passing car hit a puddle and soaked me, cartoon style. In the end what did me in was the grocery store. You always have to bag your own groceries here, which is fine except that the plastic bags at my grocery store are nearly superglued shut. They are so hard to get open. And I was cold and wet and the store was about to close and they were turning off the lights and I COULDN'T. GET. THE FUCKING. BAG. OPEN. And that's when I kinda had a little mini-meltdown....

The good news is that there are few meltdowns that can't be fixed with scotch and Bob Dylan, and I'm better now. At least it isn't snowing, I guess.

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So I've been reading the European version of the Wall Street Journal. Not by choice, exactly, but it's the only English newspaper my department subscribes to and there are always free copies lying around. I can't find the New York Times here, and I don't have internet at home. Before I had ever read it, I always assumed that WSJ was a very reputable, if right-leaning, publication. Maybe it's just the European version, but I've been surprised by how not-very-well written it is. And also by how right-wing it is. There was an editorial last week spouting the declining cancer rates in the US as evidence of the virtues of the free market. Anyway, the reason I'm bringing it up is that I have to share the following, which was at the bottom of a section called Washington Briefs or something last week. (Please no one sue me for copyright infringement....)

"Minor Memos: In honor of Women's History Month, which is March, the Census Bureau reports that women earned 77 cents for every $1 earned by male counterparts in 2004--and that 83% of aerobic-shoe buyers are women."

Now I'm no radical feminist. I love men, and I don't offend easily. But that's what they have to say about Women's History Month? That women earn less and do aerobics? It would have been better not to mention it at all....

Hard to win when you always lose

I went to a blues jam session tonight at a place called Harlem Jazz Club. I know I should be going to see flamenco or merengue and learning to tango, and I will. But even though I'm living in Barcelona now, I'm still me. And to me, really good live blues is just about the best thing in the world. Now these particular blues were not the best thing in the world, but they weren't bad. (I've always thought I would make a really good blues singer, if I could only sing.) The host, who also played guitar and sang the first few songs, looked a lot like Ben Stiller in the prom scene from There's Something About Mary and clearly did not have the blues. The second singer had huge long curly hair pulled back in a big ponytail and covered by a hat that was pulled down so low you could barely see his eyes, and was wearing what can only be described as red silk pajamas. He played the piano, and he was good. (What is it about eccentricity?) The drummer looked like country music with a big ol' cowboy hat and the snarly bassist looked like heavy metal, but it all kind of worked. Even the smoke didn't bother me as much as it usually does--blues bars are supposed to be smoky.

And I hate to pick on accents, but you just can't sing the blues well unless you can sound American--at least the American accent is good for something. Mick Jagger definitely had the right idea, going all twangy.