Fun in the sun

Happy Friday the 13^th everyone.

My buddy Jamie loaned me his backup digital camera for the trip, and I’ve actually been doing a good job of taking pictures. Unfortunately, either I forgot to get or I have misplaced the cable I need to attach the cam to my computer. I’ll get a new one asap, but for the time being my entries will be sans photos.

Where to start. Since I have so much time here, I haven’t felt compelled to try to fit everything in at once. Tuesday and Wednesday were spent mostly catching up with Dustin and wandering around the neighborhood. We live in Sant Andreu, a neighborhood that everyone says is on the outskirts of the town, far from the city center. I like it out here, though. Coming from the states, a 10 minute cab ride or 20 minutes on the train isn’t far at all. It’s much quieter out here, too; more families, and the feel of more permanent residents. Not that the city center isn’t great, it is; it’s just that I’d rather be able to come and go as I want, and have the place where I live more like this. I’m planning to look for my own place in this hood, as well.

Some of the best things so far:

1. The food of course; this town’s all about cured pork and seafood. That’s a little bit of okay with me. There are lots of great little markets everywhere, in the traditional model--a meat shop, a fruit and vegetable shop, a bread shop--and everything’s fresh and local.
2. Dustin and Esther. D and I haven’t lived in the same town for a long long time, so it’s a pretty special occasion just for that reason. And meeting his fiancé Esther is very cool too. It’s perfect, she’s learning English while I’m learning Castilian. We can almost barely communicate. But it’s great fun of course, Dustin is exhausted from trying to translate two sentences at the same time but he’s been undyingly patient. He’s gonna get pissed off one of these days, I know it.
3. The terrace. La terrace. They have a top floor apartment with an enormous sunny terrace, 15x20 feet or so. Lots of beautiful plants, and a view overlooking the huge square across the street. I’m sorry I can’t post any pictures yet, I’ll put together a nice photo montage once I get the right cable.
Anyways, I went out and bought some mostly adequate equivalent of a yoga mat and used it today to practice on the terrace in the sun. For some reason the makers of this mat coated both sides with a slippery, plastic, sprayed-on substance. Thereby negating the entire purpose of the yoga mat, as far as I can tell. Ah well. But it’s fine, it works better than the stone terrace floor, and I know I’ll get garroted by my friends and family if I complain too loudly about the weird plastic crap the Spanish spray on their yoga mats, which makes it tougher to practice my yoga on the sunny Barcelonian terrace. In any case, I plan to spend a lot of time out there. Which brings me to...
4. The weather. Ahhh. It’s been mostly sunny and warm, with a nice pleasant breeze. I’ve been going out in shorts and t-shirts. It rained on and off from Wednesday evening through yesterday night, starting with a beautiful big lighting storm and culminating with us downtown getting soaked when it rained the hardest. It wasn’t a cold rain, though. It was nice. It will get colder of course, but not that much colder.

All sorts of things are in process. I met Marc, one of D’s friends, last night downtown. He’s a jogger, so I’m going to start running with him soon. He is also pretty new in town, so he’s going to give me some info about his language tutor. I hope to start working with her or someone else she can recommend early next week, for a couple sessions a week to start. The language thing is going alright, I have found myself going brain-dead whenever somebody speaks to me in Castilian but it’s getting better. And it’s really interesting in Barcelona because a lot of the signs are in Catalan. Which can get kind of confusing. It will most likely get worse as I actually learn Castilian, because then I will have the opportunity to be mislead by the signs. For now, I can’t speak anything so it’s a-okay.

I wish I could show you a picture of this funky apartment, there’s this deathtrap of an entryway with three levels; you step into the apartment, then have to step up one stair to get to this sort of small landing that encloses the area immediately around the front door. Once you’re on the landing (second level), you can either step down to the right to the bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchen (this is on the same level as the area immediately around the front door), or up to the left into the living room (which leads out onto the terrace). So I’m staying in the living room. First night here, I wake up at 6am (9pm to me) and stumble off to the bathroom. Suddenly, the ground falls out from under me, not once but twice. I kind of lurch around, running into stuff and trying to right myself while having to continually step up, down, and sideways. I couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like to break my ankle or smash my head open on my first night in Barcelona.

Guess that’s it for now. I’m going to have the place to myself this weekend (D and E are visiting her parents outside of town), so I’m sure I’ll have some interesting stories.

How are you supposed to end a blog entry that’s more letter-like, anyways? I guess I should come up with a standard sign-off. For now, I’ll just say...

Ciao.