Yankees suck!

I don't love soccer as a sport; I don't even know the intricacies of the rules.  But I do like it, and people here love it, so living here means I follow it.  Plus, soccer is a sport full of cute boys with beautiful mouths.  And it's fun to have things to get excited about.  It's been a rough week to be a Barcelona fan, though.  On Saturday they lost to Madrid and lost any hope of winning La Liga (the Spanish league).  Last night they lost the semifinals of the Champions League (the other league that they are in -- I still don't really understand how the leagues work) to Chelsea.  They lost on a very last-minute goal by Fernando Torres, who is Spanish and one of my favorite players who doesn't play for Barcelona; I'm not sure if losing to Fernando makes it better or worse.

The little bright spot here is that Madrid lost tonight so they are out of the Champions League playoffs as well.  Like the good Red Sox fan that I am, I hate Madrid as much as I love Barcelona.  I hate Madrid's coach (he pokes people in the eye), and I hate Pepe (he stepped on Leo Messi's hand on purpose), and I hate the stupid little collars on their uniforms, and I hate Cristiano Ronaldo's weird Adam's apple.  So there.

I am a bad person

...but this sign made me giggle.

I'm doing excellent shopping

Most of the businesses in my neighborhood take a serious siesta: 2-5pm or longer.  The bars stay open, including the bocadillo bar where I can get a pretty decent bocadillo de jamón plus drink all afternoon for about ten euros.  That may or may not be a good thing.  And the mall stays open; I live within walking distance of a shopping mall.  It's not that I like the mall, but it even has a huge (overwhelming) grocery store and it is convenient to be a 10ish minute walk from virtually everything I might ever want to buy.

Anyway, enough about the new apartment/neighborhood.  The king of Spain, who I always thought was mostly a pretty cool guy, is in the hospital.  With a broken hip.  Poor king of Spain.  The problem is that he broke his hip hunting elephants in Botswana.  I don't really care that he was doing something extravagant while half of Spain is unemployed; the royal family's money, alleged corruption and all, has gotta be a fraction of a drop in the ocean of Spain's economic woes.  But elephants?  Come on, Juan Carlos; that makes you a huge asshole.  That makes me glad you broke your hip.  Can't you stick to cocaine and prostitutes like a normal super-rich person?

Down in a hole

My roommate/friend/landlord assures me that it's a legal domicile, but my new apartment is also zoned as a business.  It's on the ground floor of the building and the front "door" is one of those metal garage-door-type things that you pull up/down to open/close.  Like the ones in this photo, but less cool.  In square feet, or square meters or whatever you prefer, my room is pretty small (which is fine because I don't have much stuff), but in cubic feet it's huge because the ceilings are super high.  When I lie in my bed it sort of feels like being at the bottom of a well or something.  (In the book I'm reading right now, some of the characters spend some time at the bottoms of wells, but I'm pretty sure I would be getting the well sensation regardless.)  If anyone knows how to make good use of vertical space in a small room, do let me know.

Home, or something

My flight back to Barcelona got in late and I shelled out for a taxi.  When the driver turned onto my street he asked me the Spanish equivalent of "Why the hell do you live here?"  I actually like the neighborhood (and, for the record I found myself missing a lot of things about Barcelona while I was gone), but it's also true that it's cheap and I'm not really employed right now.  I didn't tell him that, partly because I don't really need to justify my choice of apartment to taxi drivers, but mostly because in two weeks I feel like I completely forgot how to speak Spanish.  Hopefully it comes back quickly.

VNO - BCN

Ryanair doesn't assign seats on its flights, unless you pay extra to sit in one of the first four rows.  Fuck that.  Flying back to Barcelona tonight, we had to walk out on the runway to get on the plane.  Usually I love walking on the runway; it makes me feel like I'm in a Cary Grant movie.  But this was no romantic walk across the runway -- it was a free-for-all of pushing and shoving and running.  I barely even cared where I sat, aside from not wanting to be stuck in a middle seat, but in all that chaos, shoving and running myself seemed like the appropriate response.

Low-budget airlines that don't assign seats probably board more smoothly in places that don't have a history of bread lines.

Vilnius

Vilnius has, among other things, a Frank Zappa statue.  Not on cathedral square or anything, but it was only about twelve steps out of my way so I went to take a look.  No informative plaque or anything, just his head and his name.  And a guy loitering around who looked a lot like Frank Zappa.

"Great," I thought as he came over.  "I'm the silly tourist who came to take a picture of a statue and he's the sketchy local who loiters around the statue hitting up tourists for money."

But he didn't hit me up for money.  He barely even knew what he was doing there, as far as I could tell -- some Polish students roped him into their art project or something.  He didn't know why Vilnius has a Frank Zappa statue, and he apologized for the weather.  I think the real Frank Zappa would have approved.

Vilnius also has a nice art museum and pretty churches and nice architecture, and the food is adequte and hearty and potato-y and not that different from the food of Estonia or Latvia.  What Vilnius really has going for it, though, is that they play decent music here.  I heard indy rock; I heard the Stones; I heard stuff I didn't recognize and didn't hate.  And most of all, I didn't hear a single slow jazz cover.  Hallelujah.

I've heard a lot of music here, because there's not really enough to do here to occupy three days.  Now that the music's stopped sucking, though, spending hours in bars and cafes every day feels pretty ok.