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.

Riga - Vilnius

I saw a moose! The Baltic landscape is about as boring as any I've seen, but the (relatively) little moose by the side of the road did briefly perk up an otherwise pretty dull four-hour bus ride.

Riga II

A Georgian appetizer plate looks like my worst nightmare. Little blandly-colored blobs that look tuna- or mayonnaise-based. Ew. But the blobs are actually good, and made of things like beans and nuts not tuna or mayonnaise. According to the guidebook, the purpose of Latvian food is to provide fuel to farmers for working in the fields. It is hearty and heavy and not bad, but not that interesting. Enter the best Soviet holdout that I know of -- Caucasian food. When it's good, it's flavorful and interesting and different and really good. So far we've had one mediocre Georgian meal and one pretty good Georgian-Armenian meal, presided over by one of those pushy/helpful women who told us exactly what to order (at a restaurant whose menu warned you'd be charged 50 lots (about 75 euros) per hour if you stay past 10pm), and tonight I'm drowning my first-solo-meal-of-the-trip sorrows in scary-looking appetizers and Georgian wine. (Not sorrows exactly, but my friend that I was with for the first part of this trip is a good travel companion.)

Anyway, today the Latvian State Art Museum finally opened so now I've seen some Latvian art. It's a good museum, but 19th and 20th century Latvian painters and sculptors basically did what European painters and sculptors in general were doing then, so there wasn't much there that was super new. The depressing thing is that the works are presented chronologically and in the mid-1930's they just end. The Baltics finally got theiry happy ending, at least. Now if only the EU would step in and demand some better opening hours.

Riga I

The bus stopped at the Estonia - Latvia border and we had to show our passports but the border guard, or whatever he was, couldn't/wouldn't stamp my passport. Please don't deport me, Spain. I swear I left the country.

Riga (the capital of Latvia) is advertised by guide books and tourism boards as beautiful and cosmopolitan. And it is, kind of. Mostly. It's just also snowy, and freezing, and windy as hell, and largely not open for business. Ok, so it was my choice to come to the Baltics in very early spring. Of course it was going to be cold. And there are lots of non-Orthodox Christians here and it's non-Orthodox Easter weekend, which includes Easter Monday. Of course the museums were going to be closed. So fine, most of this frustration is not that surprising, but still it's frustrating. And the Latvian State Art Museum's also being closed on Tuesday felt like some kind of last straw. Screw you, Riga, lovely Art Deco architecture and all.

Ok, I feel a little better now. The architecture really is lovely (but somehow I ended up with zero decent photos of it, and a whole bunch of photos of this one bridge I got really excited about) and a lot of the more notable buildings were designed by Sergei Eisenstein's father, which is kind of novel.

Compared to Estonia, Latvia is less well heated. And Latvian is a Slavic language, so no more ridiculous words with consecutive umlaut-ed u's. I can't make too much more sense of the language than I could of Estonian (why do I always think I'll be able to get by in any Slavic language? I can barely get by in the one Slavic language (Russian) that I've actually studied), but most people speak English and the tiny little bit of Russian I know comes in handy with the ones who don't.

Aside from the existence of the Latvian Occupation Museum (which was open and is good but depressing but at least sort of has a happy ending) and the fact that most people speak Russian, the casual tourist would never guess that 20 years ago (ok, 21) Latvia was the Latvian SSR. Same with Estonia. If a local or a guide book tells you where to look, there are a few hammers and sickles and Soviet stars to be seen, but not many. And there are some Orthodox cathedrals and some Soviet-looking buildings outside of city centers, and there is borscht and sometimes Russian beer, but it feels like Europe here. No one is making money selling the Soviet Union to tourists they way they do in the other former Soviet republics I've visited. I haven't seen a single CCCP or DDR shirt since I got to the Baltics. You can't even drink on the street here.

Latvia also unfortunately shares with Estonia a taste for terrible terrible music. Businesses blast bad music into the streets, so much that if you stand in the wrong place you'll end up in the middle of dueling crap. And the terrible covers continue. Slow jazz Smells Like Teen Spirit? Joder. One cafe branched out a little with French music, but it was still bad covers of adequate pop songs, just in a different language. Latvia and Estonia both are supposed to be known for their folk music and song festivals -- where is this musical heritage? With the bad covers and the wind and the closed museums, I'm starting to think dirty thoughts about staying in the hotel and cranking up Bob Dylan on my iPod.

Tartu

Tartu is Estonia's university town. It looks universityish; it reminds me of a midwest college town with its big old colorful wooden houses and late winter/early spring dirty snow and mud (sorry midwest, but you know it's true). It doesn't much feel like a college town, though. It is Easter weekend so maybe all the students are gone, although we had sort of a hard time finding a place to stay so there must be people here. I wonder where they are.

One of the things you can do in Tartu is tour the Le Coq brewery, at 9am or noon or 2pm. We showed up around 12.15 half expecting the tour guides to have no one else to show around and nothing else to do but start the tour fifteen minutes late and in English. The guard (the brewery has a guard which, now that I think about it, is sort of cool) first told us to come back at 2 but eventually took us in to join the tour, heavily attended and in Estonian, already in progress. (I guess now we know where everyone is.) Brewery tours are not so interesting in a language you don't understand, but at least there was beer at the end.

Tartu also has a small not bad art museum with mostly 20th century Estonian painting. They talk about the Soviet period works having to be apolitical in order to get past the censors, but none of them looked very Soviet. Maybe the Estonians were somehow able to get around having to glorify the State.

On our first night in Estonia we had a really good dinner at a restaurant that played mostly Estonian music. Well, I assume it was Estonian -- it wasn't any of the languages I can identify, anyway. Incidentally, in the restaurant's courtyard was a statue of Sean Connery that looked suspiciously like Nikita Khrushchev. Anyway, musically it's all been downhill from there. I'm used to hearing not-great American music all over the world, but the Estonians take it one step further by covering the American music. And they don't improve it. Someone decided to cover a whole bunch of George Michael songs and someone at the restaurant where we ate lunch one day decided to play them all. I like George Michael a lot more than I really like to admit, but these were not good covers. They were just bad imitations. Even worse is the apparent trend of taking a perfectly good or at least adequate rock/pop song (Bon Jovi, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, etc.) and turning it into a slow jazz piece of crap. Dear Estonia: If you want to listen to crappy music, please write your own and leave the already existing adequate or better rock songs out of it. Kokomo translated into probably Estonian was at least funny, but mostly this is just painful.

Kuressaare

I'm still not really sure how to pronounce it, but it's easy to remember an approximation if you think Kurosawa. The Estonian language is a disaster. It's one of those impenetrable non-indo-European languages, and the vowels sometimes have umlauts and other times have tildes (sometimes in the same word) and words often have ridiculous things like consecutive umlaut-ed u's or o's. This language loooves consecutive identical letters. Even the very few recognizable-to-me words have extraneous letters, like baar and stopp.

Anyway, Kuressaare/Kurosawa is the biggest city on Estonia's biggest island, which is Saaremaa (see?) and has no useful mnemonic that I can think of. With the hotel/lockout saga we missed our bus here, and my super eloquent Russian (we have tickets Kuressaare but we are not here 9.30 is it possible…) was not enough to get out of having to buy new tickets. Not paying for the lockout hotel, we ended up a collective two euros ahead plus a breakfast buffet, we lost 1.5 hours of Kuressaare and at least that much sleep, and a gained a story to tell our friends.

The island is better seen with a car but we don't have a car. So we took a taxi to the crater lake and ate bread and cheese and sausage by the side of the road (no snow today and we were able to find a dry non-frozen, non-muddy place to sit) while waiting for the bus that took us to see windmills. The bad thing about going to see windmills is they put them in places that are really fucking windy, but we got to eat bread made from rye ground at the windmill and there was a group of old Estonians touring the windmills and very thoroughly documenting everything and they were pretty cute.

The island allegedly has a brewery, but we looked everywhere and found nothing but the same two adequate Estonian beers we saw all over Tallinn. Aside from failing that little holy beer grail quest, though, no disasters this stop. And no snow. Maybe it really is spring after all.

Tallinn

Oops. I sort of fell off the planet for a while. I'm back now. Here's what's been going on.

Under other circumstances, like summer, I think I would like Tallinn a lot. I don't hate it. But it was snowing when I arrived and it pretty much kept snowing. It's been a long time since my feet were so cold they hurt and I worried that my toes might actually fall off. Not a good feeling.

The center of Tallinn is lovely and the gift shops (where we spent a lot more time than I usually would because it is too goddamn cold to stay outside for long) want you to think that Estonians spend their time knitting socks by fireplaces. (Well, when they're not busy glaring at you as you look around their shop. Old Estonians are not very friendly. The young people are nice, anyway.) I like the image even if it's probably not at all accurate. And falling snow really is kind of pretty. But it mostly makes me want to sit by a fireplace and knit socks, not go exploring and have adventures.

But we are tough. Ish. We can do this. We tromped out of the center to the big important art museum; my bad map reading meant we also had to scale a small steep snowy hill and hike along the sidewalk-less snowy side of a highway for a bit. We earned that Estonian art. But the guide book listed its summer hours not winter hours and when we finally arrived it was closed and we wanted to cry. My hero Peter the Great lived in Tallinn for a while and you can (sometimes) visit his old house but that was closed, too. You couldn't even see in the windows. Well, I couldn't. Peter the Great was something like seven feet tall and I guess they were built for him.

I did feel like I pulled off a little coup when the woman at the bus station didn't speak English and I bought tickets in Russian. But then someone accidentally chain-locked us out of our otherwise cozy hotel/room-above-a-restaurant and no one answered the door or any of the three phone numbers and eventually it was 1am and there was nothing left to do but get another hotel and by the time anyone showed up the next morning to let us in we had already missed that bus.

Joder. We tried to like you, Tallinn, but you did not make it easy.

Spring break!

Probably no one would say that my new apartment is in a good location -- it's far from the center and the subway -- but it is close to the beach. And I like the neighborhood. It's warehouse-y and there's a family of gypsies that has a home but generally occupies a little side street around the corner, and there are cats and at least one French bulldog.

But the new neighborhood is on hold for a while, because tonight I leave for two weeks of vacation: spring break in the Baltics. I think it will be a good trip and I'm looking forward to it, but it's also true that when I checked the Tallinn weather yesterday, it was 0.9 degrees Celsius and raining and snowing. Latvia and Lithuania might be a little warmer, anyway.

One of the reasons for the Baltics is that my work visa expires today, so if I really want to do this whole immigration thing according to Hoyle, I should leave Spain and then re-enter as a tourist. I didn't realize until after I bought the plane tickets that all three Baltic states have been part of the European Union for almost a decade and there almost definitely won't be passport control. Man, sometimes I still really suck at travel.

Roomful of dust and a broom to sweep up

Not having stuff rocks. I moved today, and it took about two hours to pack everything and one taxi ride to move it. No boxes, no hernias, no self-loathing for possessing too many objects. No friends mad at me for having to help me move.

My old apartment had a gross kitchen, and was in a sort of boring neighborhood, and was too expensive for someone as unemployed as I currently am. So it was super convenient that my friend has a little extra room in his new apartment. Less convenient is that the little extra room doesn't have a bed yet but that will come, and, I guess you get what you pay for.

Hasta la vista, you little fuckers

At the university where I work, after you assign final grades you have to schedule a day (well, a few hours at least) when the students can come look at their exams and argue about their grades. It's hard to argue with a multiple choice exam, but they came anyway. Some wanted to talk me into a better final grade, but mostly they just wanted to look at their multiple choice exams and calculate for themselves that their posted scores were correct. It was cute, if mostly a waste of time. Better than arguing with them, anyway. And now it's done done. Whew. I did it. I may not have done a great job and I still don't speak fluent Spanish, but I must speak better than I did before even if I mostly don't feel that way. And I didn't die. And the students, well, they definitely grew on me. I'm not saying I'm gonna miss them or anything, the little fuckers, but, well, maybe I might miss one or two of them. At least the Christmas-story-bully-look-alike who was always smiling, even when trying to type with his arm in a cast up to his shoulder. I think I'm allowed to miss him.

Walked the 40 blocks to the middle

Spain is on strike. It's the sixth general strike since Franco died. The whole country, the two big labor unions, most of the smaller ones, plus lots of non-union students and bar owners and others who are mad about budget cuts. Plus the anarchists and hooligans who will take any excuse to fuck shit up. One of my roommates hung a "We are the 99%, fuck you banks"-type sign, painted on a sheet, from our terrace. It makes me feel like I live here, even if I'm not really 99% de acuerdo with the sentiment.

I had some work that I felt like I needed to do, and it took a lot longer than I wanted it to, so I missed the big protest rally. I sort of hate huge crowds of people anyway. In the evening I took a long walk around the city to check out the aftermath. The main streets were still mostly closed off to traffic and there were little parades of protesters all over the place. Closer to the center, the police presence got more and more intimidating. A several block radius around Plaza Catalunya was blocked by a wall of police in riot gear. Just outside that wall trash bins burned and protesters waved union flags and hipster types took photos with huge cameras. The police shot plastic bullets off seemingly at random from huge guns, eliciting some "¡Hijos de puta!" in return and scaring some dogs. (If you take your dog to a protest and the super loud plastic bullet shots scare him, take him home for fuck's sake.) Across the street a raised middle finger sometimes rose up from behind a big trash can. It was all kind of novel and more dramatic than I'm used to, but after not long I started to get bored. When I realized that the situation's getting more exciting would almost definitely not be a good thing, I left.

Anyway, it was a big huge deal and some people got hurt and lots got arrested, etc. But as far as I can tell, the one thing most people really agree on is that the strike won't have any effect on anything. Joder.

Jacking off to Mozart

This blog is not supposed to be about my dating life. My parents read it, after all. But I had no cultural experiences or adventures or disasters today, so it's either waxing melancholy about my terrible taste or more hand-wringing about how I don't speak Spanish very well.

Talking art in Spanish with an Italian filmmaker/photographer over wine and jamón sounds really nice. It sounds so nice that it takes me at least ten times longer than it should to notice if the broody arty type in question is incredibly boring, or not particularly intelligent, or not remotely funny, or super pretentious or all of the above. Those of you who know me already know this. Unfortunately, recognizing bad taste doesn't make it magically get better. So, I spent tonight listening to someone who's spent a total of one month in New York go on about gentrification in New York, and how it's all the fault of the banks, wishing like hell that I was in the other room smoking pot and watching soccer with his roommate. Who happens to be a fifty-ish year old woman. Maybe I need behavioral counseling, or shock therapy.

At least the jamón was good.

Filling the whine void

Sometimes I have bad Spanish days. Every once in a while I have good Spanish days or, at least, not-bad Spanish days. Today was specifically a bad accent day. My accent is not usually good, but it's usually adequate enough that people understand what words I'm trying to say. Not today. At lunch I wanted tortilla as a first course. It was one of only about five options, and the only one that started with t. It's a common word here, and I say it a lot. But my waitress was having none of it. I had to repeat myself three times and still she acted like she really had to concentrate to understand. (It's true that I'm still not very good with r's in Spanish; it's also true that some people are assholes.) At dinner I epically failed at saying the word three, as in "make it three beers" after my two friends had each ordered one. Damn internal r's. Damn gringo tongue.

Now that I have less work-related stuff to whine about, I think I'm getting whinier about my bad Spanish.

Chaos is a Greek word

Final grades are calculated. One step closer to having survived this course in its entirety. Unfortunately it's not that simple, though, because in order to actually post the grades I have to first combine them with the grades from the probability course that they all took last semester. Which seems odd and silly to me but shouldn't really be a big deal, except that it kind of is because those probability grades from last semester still aren't finalized. Joder. Last semester ended three months ago. I'll keep the rant about southern European inefficiency mostly to myself, but know that I'm thinking it.

Anyway, there is also one exam score missing which I bet could easily turn into my having to give an oral exam, because some people here seem to think that giving oral exams to students who fuck up is an acceptable way to expect a professor (aka me) to spend his or her (aka my) time. And, I'm going to have to fail some people, which is never fun. And whenever I finally am able to post the damn grades, I'll have to have annoying painful conversations in Spanish with everyone who doesn't like their grades. Whine whine bitch bitch.

Having the stress of the past few months replaced with low- to medium-grade irritation and expasperation is a definite improvement. But this is starting to feel like it might never end.

Mother tongue

Accents are funny. An Italian accent in English sounds really nice. An Italian accent in Spanish sounds weird and not very nice at all. There's probably a distinction there between your native and non-native languages. American English doesn't sound nice to me, it's just what I'm used to and lots of other accents in English sound much nicer. Castilian Spanish is something I aspire to. It sounds nice to me, and almost no other accents in Spanish sound nice. Spanish people apparently think that Argentinian accents sound nice, but to me they just sound like gibberish.

Gringo accents are particularly painful to me, along the lines of hearing a recording of your own voice. But the worst of all, regardless of the origin of the accent, is other foreigners who speak Spanish much better than I do. The close Romance languages, like Portuguese and the Italian that started this rant, don't count. If you speak a close Romance language you can learn Spanish easily and that's an advantage I don't have and I don't make myself feel bad about it. But if your native language is not a Romance language, and especially if it's English, and you speak good Spanish, well, fuck you. (Except for my actual American friends who speak good Spanish... unfuck you guys.) It's not like it's a rare event; Barcelona is full of foreigners who speak Spanish way better than I do. And it's not like it's surprising; I know my Spanish isn't that good. But oh man does it bother me when I hear another gringo speaking much better Spanish than me. I think part of it is that there's a part of me that wants to believe that all my current problems with Spanish are just my being a nonnative speaker and therefore insurmountable. And gringos speaking good Spanish kill that stupid idea.

Bent-back tulips

Calçots are sort of like green onions, except that they're Catalan and they're a much bigger deal here than green onions have ever been anywhere (I'm pretty sure). You can order them in restaurants, but what you're really supposed to do is get yourself invited to a calçotada (or, if you're not me, have your own calçotada). That's what I did today. It was good. The only slight catch is that because it's impossible to make friends with Catalans if you don't speak Catalan*, there were no actual Catalans there (there were a bunch of Spanish people, for the record) and so it took a few rounds to get the calçots made right. All you have to do for a calçotada is grill calçots on a barbecue (well, plus drink wine but that is easy), but you have to figure out about how long to grill them if you want them to be good (maybe that goes without saying). Once you get the timing down and grill them, you sort of slide the skins off and dip what's left in romesco sauce and eat it. Romesco sauce is red pepper-based and flavorful and definitely a sauce, not a condiment. I like calçots about as much as I could imagine myself liking a food that's part of the onion family, and the skins get all charcoal-y from the grill so you get messy which is kind of fun. Apart from that I sort of don't see what the big deal is, but I guess they're as good a reason as any to have a barbecue.

*That's a fact, not a value statement. It's also basically impossible to make friends with Spanish people in Spain if you don't speak Spanish, or French people in France if you don't speak French, or Americans in the US if you don't speak English, etc.

Brought the sun and the flowers

The weather was perfect today (lately the weather here is usually perfect, but it did rain for one and a half days straight earlier this week -- the horror) so I thought I would go for a long walk by the beach. But then I decided that what I really felt like doing was looking at weird modern art. So that's what I did. Some aspects of un/der employment rock. I'm not really sure why I felt like seeing weird modern art -- the super modern two-piles-of-dirt-type stuff usually sort of irritates me and I remember not loving Barcelona's contemporary art museum the last time I was there. Maybe I've gotten more weird, or the museum has gotten less weird, but this time it was perfect. They had a big exhibition of old Barcelona photographs -- boxers and brothels and street scenes and drag queens -- and some video stuff that I genuinely liked, including some stuff by Aleksandr Sokurov, the guy who did Russian Ark. Seriously, old gritty underbelly photos and dark artsy Russian film with readable Spanish subtitles is about the best a contemporary art museum could possibly do for me. I should probably never go to another one again.

Anyway, they kicked me out of the museum (it was closing) at exactly that point of the evening where, if it's been a clear day, the sky starts to glow bright blue. I got myself a little lost -- I don't stay lost for long, but I kind of like that I can still sometimes get lost here -- and as I wandered through the palm trees and soccer balls and hash, being here felt like travel. Travel in the good exhilirating everything-is-an-exciting-adventure way, not the I-am-so-clearly-a- tourist-please-no-one-rob-me way. It's amazing what a difference not having a painful job (or the flu) makes.

Paradise by the Port Vell lights

I almost never buy beer from the usually south Asian guys who often sell it in cans here after hours on the street. But sometimes life calls for cheap lukewarm beer late at night. That's how my life works, anyway. Sometimes, drinking a can of lukewarm bad beer while looking at the boats in Port Vell and the night lights shining on the water is its own little paradise. Paradise brought to you (well, to me) by a south Asian angel on a bike.

Proctor!!

The hard part of teaching -- the lecturing -- is over. But the course will drag on for a little longer. But today I'm another step closer to being done, because now the exam is over. It wasn't a huge disaster, but it was two hours of trying to be in four different exam rooms at once to answer questions and the rooms, as usual, were hot. I wonder if the students think I have some kind of sweating disease.

The university provided a proctor for each room, but the proctors didn't necessarily even speak Spanish and were basically just there to (in theory) prevent cheating. Fifteen minutes after the exam was supposed to have ended, one of the proctors hadn't even made the students turn in the exams yet. "They're being slow," she said hand-wringingly. Christ. I understand being afraid of the students, but that's just negligent.

But anyway, nothing exploded and no one died and the exams are multiple choice and will be graded by machine and this is all moving along and now it's one step closer to done. Score.

You probably want hardboiled eggs

I have this friend who hates bocadillos. Everything that I love about them, the way they don't fuck around with condiments or vegetables or overdo it with the meat, he hates. Somehow we remain friends. We had plans to have lunch today but didn't get around to meeting up until around 5pm. If it's 5pm in Barcelona and one member of your party vetoes bocadillos and the other vetoes fast food, your lunch options are extremely limited. The only people who reliably eat meals at times like 5pm are tourists, so after blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks of closed restaurants, we eventually ended up at a Lebanese place near the Sagrada Familia. No bocadillos, and the service was dead slow, so we both kind of got what we wanted, within constraints. And lentil soup and beer is good for the flu, right?

Imperial stout

I don't feel like imperial Russian royalty. But I was thinking about imperial Russian royalty as I convalesced in the little mountain town, hoping the clean air and good tap water and extra sleep would help me finally kick this flu or whatever the hell virus I have that doesn't want to go away. When imperial Russian royalty got sick they would take the reeeeaaallllly long trip from St. Petersburg to the Crimea to convalesce. The Barcelona-Viladrau trip on Cercanías plus bus clearly doesn't compare, but getting home today was a little bit of an adventure. The bus, which is the only public transit way out of the little town, wasn't running because the road was closed for some kind of bike race. Luckily I wasn't the only one waiting on the bus, and when the other two figured out what was going on one of them decided to go by car on a different road. "You coming?" (or something like that) the driver asked me in Catalan. So I saved the bus fare and got a little tour of some Pyrenees back roads. They are super twisty. I sat in the back and tried not to get nauseous and really tried to understand the conversation in the front but I'm pretty terrible with Catalan. At one point they were definitely talking about Chinese-owned bars and the price of beer, but I couldn't even tell if they were complaining or praising.

And now I'm back. I didn't even fuck up Cercanías this time. Still not 100% convalesced, but I bet the Crimea would not have done any better.

Beginning to see the light

It finally dawned on me why being surrounded entirely by Catalan feels so weird to me. I didn't expect it to be weird because I've been to non-Barcelona parts of Catalunya before -- this wasn't really supposed to be all that new. But what I just realized is that all my other adventures in Catalunya happened in my first few months of moving here the first time I lived here, when I spoke so little Spanish that I could barely distinguish between it and Catalan. Non-Barcelona Catalunya didn't seem that different then because I was used to not understanding much of anything ever; I probably didn't even realize I'd gone from hearing mostly Spanish to hearing mostly all Catalan.

So, there was a time when I couldn't distinguish between Spanish and Catalan and now I can. It doesn't say a whole lot, but my little world makes a tiny bit more sense to me, anyway.

Also, the little mountain town is full of nice dogs. That is all.

A street in a strange world

"It's weird, a lot of foreigners are actually quite hostile to Catalan," someone here told me once. I don't think I'm hostile to it, but I don't speak it and, unless I end up marrying a Catalan and staying here forever (which I probably won't), I probably never will. I recognize that it's an integral part of Catalan culture and I respect that it's what they speak here and all that. But as a foreigner who can get by in Spanish, learning Catalan would buy me some Catalan respect and a slightly increased chance of getting a public sector job in Catalunya. As a foreigner who's not very good at learning languages, that's just not enough, especially since I may not be here long term (and they're recort-ing the hell out of all the public sector jobs anyway). If I'm going to invest the time, etc., to learn another language, I want that language to buy me a huge body of great literature (Russian); or the better part of a continent (French/Africa); or at least one huge diverse country that might be the best place in the world, plus Portugal and Mozambique (Portuguese).

The Catalan issue is usually not much of an issue: Barcelona is so full of foreigners (both from the rest of Spain and the rest of the world) who don't speak Catalan that Spanish often feels like the predominant language. (Especially if you want Spanish to feel like the predominant language...) Here in the little mountain village, it's all Catalan. I can mostly read a Catalan menu, and I can order coffee in Catalan, and everyone here speaks Spanish, even if they'd prefer not to. (Maybe they don't all speak it perfectly, but it would be hard to find a Catalan who doesn't speak Spanish.) So it's not like communication is really a problem. (No more of a problem than usual, anyway.)

But it's weird. I feel like soooo much more of a foreigner here than I do in Barcelona. And it's not because I don't know anyone here -- I go to places in Barcelona where I don't know anyone all the time. But here if I want to do anything besides order coffee, I'm suddenly the only one speaking Spanish in a room full of Catalan and I feel like there's a huge spotlight on me. I've come to terms with the thick accent/bad Spanish spotlight, but the wrong language spotlight feels a lot bigger. I don't really mean to be as whiny as this last paragraph makes me sound, it's mostly just sort of surprising (although it shouldn't be) to be here and not hear Spanish AT ALL unless it's a conversation that I'm a part of. It will make me more appreciative of the language situation when I get back to Barcelona, anyway.

I can't complain but sometimes I still do

The trains in Spain are either longish distance, which feel like the "normal" trains, or Cercanías, which are more like commuter trains and feel like mad chaos. If you can find a schedule at all it's usually about a mile long and a mile wide and inevitably on the wrong side of the turnstile, and it's almost never clear what track your train leaves from, even if you've managed to figure out when it leaves, and if it turns out there's a transfer you're even more screwed because your ticket won't tell you and there's almost never anyone to ask.

So anyway, this is the first weekend since classes ended and I've been telling myself since January that this weekend I would go to some little town in the mountains and look at the stars and decompress, and that meant Cercanías (plus a bus). And I fucked it all up. Half an hour out of Barcelona in the wrong direction, with a bus to catch and not a lot of extra time for fuck-ups, I decided that someone was going to help me, god dammit. So I waited in the ticket line instead of using the machines and held up the line to ask exactly when and from what track my train would be leaving. He shuffled some pages of hand-written numbers and his microphone started fading out, and the volume came back just in time for me to hear him say that I just had to listen for the announcements. Joder. I managed to get myself on the right train, sort of, except that it was running express and not stopping at the place where I wanted to go. Did I mention that I'm only about 70% over whatever virus has been ailing me? Whine.

But then it all came together. I got off the train in the wrong place and on the way to try my luck at what looked like some kind of bus station, there was a bus showing the name of my little mountain pueblo and the driver let me on even though I wasn't at a bus stop or anything. And here I am, in a little town with snow-capped Pyrenees in the distance. And they have surprisingly good beer in this little town and I made friends with a dog. And I'm done teaching. Life is pretty good.

Out to dry

Sometimes, when it's warm and sunny and there's just a little bit of a breeze and you're not in a hurry to do something else, hanging laundry out to dry has a certain old-world charm. When those conditions aren't met, hanging laundry out to dry mostly blows. If it's cold, your hands freeze. If it's not sunny, you worry that it might rain, which would obviously fuck everything. If it's windy, the clothes hit you in the face. It takes for fucking ever, and that's on top of the for fucking ever it already took to get the clothes washed because washing machines outside the United States and probably Canada take for fucking ever. And a load's worth of clothes pins doesn't fit in the pockets of your jeans, so you need more pockets or a bag or something to put them in. And if all of your roommates decided do laundry in the last 36 hours or so, leaving no room on the clothesline, well, that's a whole other complication.

I know this is all good for the environment and I know I'm being super whiny about something quite minor. But oh god do I miss dryers.

W(h)ine

I stand by the wine a drank on Monday. It was the last day of class and I maintain it was well-deserved and I didn't even finish the bottle. It's not like I went on any kind of actual bender or anything. But apparently what my body (apart from the pleasure-seeking part of my brain) wanted me to do on Monday was eat soup or something like it and get a lot of sleep. And, in protest, it's let the flu back in.

This is supposed to be the fun part. I have some free time now; I'm supposed to be spending it on adventures, not naps and trips to the pharmacy. God dammit.

Office hours

"I wasn't sure how to do this question."

The question was about the probability of making a Type I error under some circumstances.

"Ok, do you remember what a Type I error is?" I asked.

"No."

So I told him, and then he understood the problem, and was all thankful and grateful. So, he had taken the time to study the problem set, and had taken the time to come to my office to ask about something he didn't understand, but had not taken the time to look up a simple definition that's easy to find in the textbook or in the class notes that are posted online. And he's one of the better students.

They are just not adults.

Woohoooo!!!

When I first got to the cafe where I'm writing this, at the table next to me was a swarthy-ish French dude (I know) with whom I imagined myself exchanging looks, even if it's more likely that he had a stiff neck or a mild form of Tourette's syndrome or something. But then he left and Monsieur Swarth has been replaced by a guy in a bad suit who won't stop hiccuping. Loudly. Sigh. In the grand scheme of today, though, Monsieur Swarth and Mr. Hiccup don't much matter at all. Because...

Whew. Joder. R-O-L-A-I-D-S. And any other words of relief you can think of. It's done. Terminado. I did it. Holy crap.

The course isn't really over. Tomorrow I have to listen to some presentations and there's the final exam plus some office hours and after all of that plus grading there will be a day when the students get to come and complain about their grades. So I'm not done with the little fuckers, but I am done with lecturing them and holy fucking christ does that feel good.

They were really loud today. Sort of understandable -- I was crazy excited about it being the last day of class, too -- but still I wanted to strangle them. But then they saved me from having to do any sort of review by having no questions whatsoever, and then when it was all over the little fuckers clapped. It's what they do here, so it doesn't necessarily mean that they actually like or respect me or anything like that, but still I got a kick out of it. I also got all awkward and didn't know where to look or what to do with my hands and would have definitely turned bright red except that I was already all red because it was about 400 degrees in our classroom. While they were clapping I remembered an announcement I forgot to make so I started yelling "Wait, wait, I forgot something," and one of the guys in the front turned around and really exaggerated the clapping, as in "Hey, if we all keep clapping loudly maybe she'll stop talking." It was cute. They really are endearing little assholes. Endearing little assholes that I never have to try and make shut up ever again. Whew.

24 and there's so much more

Liking Leo Messi is like liking Picasso, or the Beatles, or puppies: It doesn't really set you apart. Especially not here. If you don't know him, Leo Messi plays soccer for Barcelona and he's really really really really really good. He scored five goals in one game the other day, and lately people have decided he's probably the best ever, or at least up there with the greats that even people who don't care about soccer have heard of, like Pelé and Maradona. He has a big nose and messy hair and a growth disorder and a girlfriend from his hometown in Argentina even though he's lived in Barcelona since the team snatched him up at the age of something like 13. He doesn't talk trash or step on people, and he attributes all of Barcelona's success and most of his own to their coach. He's a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. (Of course if I met him in real life I'd never date him -- he seems to actually be a decent human being, after all -- but I can love him from afar, anyway). And he's only 24.

Barça beat Santander 2-0 last night , with both goals from Messi. I watched the game at an old man bar; there are a lot of them here. I'm not sure I'm entirely welcome in them, but old men are usually nice enough to me. And old men watching soccer say ¡Hostia! (fuck) a lot, even when their team is winning. I like it when old men say ¡Hostia!. At this particular old man bar, by the end of the game one of the old men was singing love songs loudly to no one in particular. And the bartender called me guapa and the old men wished me Buen Proveche, even the ones who were noticeably confused by my presence.

Adoring Leo Messi may not mean that much around here, but I bet I like old man bars a lot more than most people. More than most people who aren't old men, anyway.

Whiiiiiiiine

The grocery store is never really where I want to be. But today I wanted soup or something like it and restaurants don't reliably serve soup here and I felt too crappy to really go to a restaurant anyway. I've been feeling lousy for a few days now so I already knew that the smallish manageable grocery store across the street doesn't really sell soup. So I went to Mercadona, which is the closest biggish grocery store. I fucking HATE Mercadona. I can never find anything and the workers are usually mean and the other shoppers, of whom there are usually about 6,000, are usually angry. The exit from the main checkouts doesn't go to the street it goes to the parking garage, and that scares me. What if you can't walk out of the parking garage, what if you can only drive out of it? What if I got stuck in there?? So I always end up waiting forever in one of the super long lines at one of the two checkout counters that has an exit to the street. And seriously, I can never find anything I need there, even though it's big and appears to sell lots of stuff. It's like some kind of ironic breadline, with all the pushing and shoving and waiting and ill will, plus tons of actual products, just none that I want. Shampoo, check; conditioner, no. Giant boxes of weird-brand cookies, check; normal-sized boxes of good cookies, no. Broth, bullion, cream of pumpkin, every ingredient one might use to make soup (probably, not like I make soup), check; soup, no.

I get that normal people cook more than I do, especially outside of the United States in general and New York in particular. But is there really no market here for premade soup that comes in a can or microwaveable container? Other people must get sick and want soup and not necessarily have anyone around to make it for them out of raw ingredients. I'm sure I bought soup when I lived here before, and I definitely used to buy microwave lentils and garbonzos that would have served the same purpose. Fucking Mercadona. Fucking flu. Whine.

Illin'

My body waited to get sick until the first possible time that being sick wouldn't be a giant huge borderline-tragic problem work-wise. So, it could have been a lot worse. But it could also be a lot better. Whine.

Stare into the vacuum of his eyes

On the way to the bakery around the corner from my apartment this morning, three of the four corners of an intersection had panhandlers. To be fair, or something, one was a gypsy who might have been there regardless of the estado-Spanish economic situation. (Europeans can get really racist about gypsies. It is true that they panhandle, but it's not true that you'll get attacked and robbed blind if you ever go near them.) But the others looked like locals, and I see people like them a lot. They're usually not that young -- 50ish, say -- and don't typically have the grimy look that people who've been on the street for a while get. They may not actually be homeless, but the looks on their faces suggest that they're in actual bad shape and are not just people who lost bets or are doing research for a screenplay or something. Outside of my neighborhood, I usually see them in neighborhoods like mine: not posh but not poor, and not touristy. Maybe those are the places they live(d)? I dunno. I don't think that would be my strategy if it came down to the kindness of strangers, but thankfully that's a pretty big if.

I wrote this one a while ago

...but it's still basically accurate.

This is really hard. Writing, I mean. I whined about it in Bilbao last summer and I feel even whinier about it here. I spend so much of my time trying to force Spanish, but I'm such a simple tool in Spanish that I don't have anything to show for it writing-wise. I could tell you about how briefly excited I was today at lunch when I said No, es la suya (No, it's his (card)) in real time. It was a little high, but it's not a good story. I could tell you about how sometimes when I'm teaching I have these "Holy crap, I'm doing this" moments and it's almost like I'm floating. Or about how painfully, shamefully stupid I feel when I don't know how to say something and rambling nonsense comes out instead, or how I sometimes feel like no matter how hard I try I'll never speak this stupid language at any level above being able to reliably buy bus tickets. It's a lot of ups and downs and for me that's exciting and entertaining and exhilarating and a pretty good adventure. Even if it doesn't seem that way to anyone who's reading.

The kids are all right

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying my job has gotten easy. It's still hard and stressful and I'm still not very good at it. (Speaking of don't get me wrong, insert usual disclaimer about how I'm not looking for sympathy, I just like to complain, etc.) But it is getting a little easier, and in particular it's getting easier to make the students laugh. I just have to give up on trying to be remotely clever ever and focus on things that are silly or goofy or accidentally sound like I'm talking about fat asses.

The other day I had two consecutive slides with graphs of two slightly differently shaped bell curves, so that if I clicked back and forth between them it kind of looked like the plot was pulsating. They cracked up. Today I had this example of how the number of shark attacks per day and daily ice cream sales are correlated (as in correlation is not causation) and that cracked them up a lot more than it seemed like it should have. Later I told them I was going to skip a proof because I didn't feel like doing it (I didn't) and that cracked them up, too.

There is a problem with these cheap laughs, though, and that is that once they start laughing about something it's hard to get them to stop. And they laugh loudly. They really are like little kids. Is 20ish still in the age range where the brain hasn't fully finished developing? I think it might be.

Holy crap. As much as I sometimes hate them, I do also kind of like the students. And if they are basically children, which they kind of are, that means that I like some children. A lot of them, actually. Yikes.

Playing games with the faces

On the way home tonight I walked past the bus station. Well, one of them. I like bus stations more than anyone I know, especially estado-Spanish ones. They feel like travel, and they're usually not that gross or sketchy, and you can usually find something decent enough to eat at the cafeteria, especially if you want something breakfast-y like toast with olive oil and salt, and even if not they will at least have decent coffee and beer.

Anyway, I walked past the bus station and man did I want to go in and buy a ticket to anywhere and be looking out the window on a bus pulling out of town. Not that I want to escape from Barcelona exactly -- I like it here quite a lot and I'm not in a hurry to move away -- I just want to go on an adventure, different from the adventure that the last two months of teaching have been.

I don't know why I'm telling anyone this, but I felt so drawn to the bus station that I ate dinner in a big empy mediocre Chinese restaurant so I could watch the buses come and go. Probably a very good thing my course is almost over; I'm not actually going insane or anything, but I do feel like I'm getting pretty weird.

Barcelona is a pueblo

Don't get me wrong, I'm not being down on my social life. Given that I'm shy and antisocial and don't speak Spanish fluently or Catalan at all and have only been here two months and work longish hours, I'm pretty pleasantly surprised by the fact that I have made a few friends. But still, I don't know very many people here. So when I get home from a run to find an email from someone saying he saw me as he came out of the bank but that I must not have heard him calling my name because of my headphones, it feels a little weird. I like being anonymous, at least some of the time, and it's hard to do here.

Bon appétit

Aside from the super obvious things like "Where are you from?" and "How long have you been in Barcelona?," I think the question I get asked the most here is "How do you say Que aproveche (the Spanish version of Bon appétit) in English?" They're not asking for a translation, they're asking how we in the English-speaking world or in the United States in particular wish someone a good meal. It's a question that seems to genuinely interest not just Catalans or Spaniards, but Europeans of all stripes. Southern Europeans, anyway.

It's not just that the person serving a meal always says it; everyone here wishes you a good meal when you're eating. Strangers in restaurants say Que aproveche (or sometimes Buen provecho). I've seen people walking and talking on cell phones stop themselves and their conversations to say Que aproveche to someone. On one of the rare times that I was eating dinner at home (why do my roommates have to be so goddamn gross in the kitchen?) one of my roommates was halfway out the door when I guess she realized she had forgotten to say it, and she came all the way back to the dining room, wished me Buen provecho, and then left.

The answer is that there's not really an English equivalent, which I guess is why they ask. You might say something like "Enjoy your meal," or if you're being goofy or pretentious you might say "Bon Appétit," but stopping what you're doing to go out of your way to wish a stranger a good meal is not really part of our culture. I feel like I'm doing well if I stop what I'm doing when I'm the one who's eating.

I know I may look like a real person...

Holy crap, I did it. Well, kind of. I explained power three times in Spanish today, and at least one of the 50ish students that I explained it to even sort of understood, I think. And one is more than zero. (Incidentally, Europeans write the number one differently from how Americans write it. I try to copy them so the students will have one less thing to be confused about, but I only remember about half the time, which probably just confuses them more.) And, now no mores seminars! Just two more lectures and then the teaching part of this course will be over. And the administrative stuff can be done in the comfort of my office (i.e., not in front of 200 loud adolescents), so it barely even counts. And, in one of the seminars today, the students actually talked to me. They've talked to me before, of course, with questions here and there that they often ask at a time when they're supposed to be listening to someone else, but today they all had lots of questions (about boring stuff like grades and the final exam, but still), and then I realized that we were all sitting around talking and that I felt like a regular person instead of some kind of strange circus act. It was pretty cool.

Don't get me wrong, I'm mostly just ecstatic that the seminars are over. But ending them on a relatively-not-bad note is pretty nice, too.

Vaga!

The students are on strike. University faculty and staff are also in theory striking today, all over Catalunya, but at least where I work it seems to be mainly the students. Tuition at public universities is increasing by 7%, and some employees' salaries are being cut by 3%. Vaga! (Vaga means strike in Catalan.)

At first I was bummed that they are striking on a day that I don't teach, but apparently I would have been expected to teach anyway (or make up the class later, I guess, if I went on strike myself), and the striking students sometimes barge in on classes and are loud and disruptive and in the end it didn't sound like much fun at all. Although in the end, the students here aren't doing much, aside from maybe not being in class. Most of the action is happening at the University of Barcelona, which is more centrally located and a lot bigger than the university where I work. The students blocked a highway and made a huge traffic jam this morning and there was a rally at the Plaça Universitat this afternoon, and now some students are occupying the UB rector's office. (The rector of a university is like the president.)

On the one hand, university education is incredibly cheap here (less than a thousand euros a semester), and the country is broke. Cuts like this are inevitable, and 7%-higher-than-before tuition is still super cheap. On the other hand, no one likes having things taken away, and people are mostly broke and often unemployed to start with, so it's not surprising that they get mad about every cut.

Since I got here it's been a fairly regular pattern of cuts and strikes, and once the latest day or two of strikes and protests is over people go back to being mad but not on strike and talking off their roommates' ears at every opportunity about how bad the economy is and what shit the government is.

I wonder what comes next.

"Disaster? What are you talking about!? We're drinking cider out of a bottle with a mechanical apple on top of it."

I basically live in a dead zone for restaurants. There is the Basque place that I love not too far away but aside from that one place, which isn't exactly cheap and has strange hours, a decent bocadillo or adequate pizza is about as good as it gets. Which is basically fine, but I have this friend visiting and I really wanted us to be able to eat good things in the neighborhood and it's not really working. Tonight I tried to take us to a (different) nearby Basque restaurant that has good reviews on a few different websites, only to find it replaced with some kind of Catalan/Chinese fusion-y place that was trying too hard to be fancy, especially in my neighborhood. Dammit.

We probably would have wandered back out of the cider place we wandered into when we realized it was a bar that serves cider and not an actual Asturian restaurant (Asturias is in the north of Spain and they make cider and good cheese there), but by then the owner (?) was talking up all the food and telling us we must stay, and it wasn't so much that we believed him but at that point leaving would have been awkward. So we had cider and adequate Asturian-ish tapas and tortilla that Sr. Asturias insisted passionately would be the best we'd ever had. I like Spanish tortilla, but his talking it up so much was almost as silly as someone talking up toast. Anyway, he was enthusiastic and fun and the food was ok and the cider was good. And we had chupitos of some brown liquor that he allegedly made -- homemade liquor is almost never very good, but I usually like it anyway. And they can't all be good modern Catalan meals, I guess. Especially in this neighborhood.

Don't bother with this one

The subway strike didn't happen, by the way. I guess that's for the best.

Anyway, class today was mostly uneventful, which we've well established is as good as it gets. And now only two more lectures left! Plus three seminars on Thursday, where I'm going to have to explain statistical power in Spanish (if you don't know what that means, good for you), but I'm not thinking about that just yet.

Watching a Spanish-subtitled German film about architecture in Berlin after the wall came down seemed like a good weird Barcelona thing to do. It turned out to be dour and boring, which in retrospect I guess was pretty predictable, but there was free beer. And it was even pretty good beer.

That's all I've got.

Cloud and chair

Antoni Tàpies was a younger contemporary of Catalan artists like Miró and Dalí. I like to imagine him tagging along like a little brother, although he's actually a pretty big deal in the Catalan art world. Anyway, the plan today was to go to the Picasso Museum but for some reason (probably the 65,000 people the Mobil World Congress brought to town) the line was about 400 people long. My friend likes weird modern art so we went instead to the Antoni Tàpies foundation, where the art is very modern and very weird. Some of Tàpies' stuff has nice colors or interesting textures and would look nice on the wall of the kind of apartment I might like to live in someday. And, some of his stuff looks unfortunately like things you can find in the apartment where I currently live, like dirty laundry piled up on a chair.

Anyway, Tàpies died recently, at the ripe old age of 88. In fact, he died on the day I went to the Barcelona soccer game. I know that because they had a moment of silence for him before the game. Well, they tried to have a moment of silence; people were mostly not silent. It doesn't really help, but when the students won't shut up I remind myself that people here don't shut up for Antoni Tàpies, either.

Linen and sequins and silk

Spain has a royal family; this is Europe, after all. You might have read about the King Juan Carlos saying "Why don't you shut up?" to Hugo Chavez a few years ago, or their less-publicized make-up a while later when the king gave Hugo a t-shirt with ¿Por qué no te callas? written on it, but mostly you don't hear too much about these Bourbons outside of Spain. Here in the estado español, the royal news coverage is mostly gossipy magazines showing glossy photos of pretty people doing things like being on vacation. But they've been in the news a lot lately, because one Iñaki Urdangarín, Duque de Palma and husband of the Infanta Cristina (doesn't infanta sound so much more dramatic than princess?), is in all kinds of trouble. He's accused of doing a bunch of sleazy stuff like laundering money through this foundation that he used to run.

...really? You're a goddamn duke and you still think you need more money? Joder. I guess it's possible that he didn't do it, innocent until proven guilty and all, but that seems unlikely.

People are understandably a little pissed off. They're also mad about most everything related to money right now. Iñaki spent something like 16 hours before something like a grand jury the other day and people gathered outside the courthouse to be mad at him together. (Protest doesn't seem like quite the right word, but they were definitely mad.) They were chanting "Urdangarín, trabaja en Burger King," which I imagine doesn't need translation.

In this economy, I bet Burger King already has about all the overqualified employees it can handle.

Talking to some rich folks that you know

The Mobil World Congress is next week and it's bringing something like 65,000 people to Barcelona. It's the place to be for everyone who does anything with cell phones, I guess. Barcelona really isn't equipped to deal with with that kind of influx of humanity. Hotels are charging 500 euros a night and they're still all full. (My roommates and I maybe could have made some extra money renting out our little heroin den of a spare room, but it's more fun to have my conference-going friend stay there.) Starting Monday, along with the conference, might be a subway strike. (The subway workers are mad. Everyone is mad. Same story.) And, I'm kind of pulling for it. I know it makes me an ass and I feel a little bad for that, but what a fantastic shit show it would be. Probably no one would get hurt, and I love a good disaster. Plus, I can walk to work.

A mullet and a moustache

The students in Valencia are mad. They're mad for the same reason everyone here is mad lately -- recortes -- and they've been protesting for a few days now. The police in Valencia are mad at the students for being mad at the recortes, and it's all playing out about how extended protests usually do: Some of the students maybe got violent and some of the police definitely got violent and both sides are pointing fingers all over the place and the news has it all on extended repeat. The cafe where I had coffee and jamon for breakfast today had two TV's worth of repetitive coverage. The other cafe-goers were pretty animated, but in Catalan; they were talking about fascists in general and Franco in particular and I couldn't understand much beyond that.

I assume the Valencian drama explains the police who have been hanging around the university where I work lately. Yesterday there was a knock on my office door and two dudes came in. One was in a police uniform and the other had a mullet and a moustache. "We're the police," said the one in the cop suit, "can we take a look around?" "Okaaaaay....," I said. It's not even my office, really. "Is anything wrong?" I asked them. "In principal, no." They took a look around, which meant standing in the middle of the office and shifting their eyes a little, and then they thanked me and left. That's gotta be the most "cop-mullet-moustache-can we have a look around" story ever.

Continuing with the food theme

...salads here suck. It's sort of a stupid complaint, since one of the things I like about estado-Spanish food is that they mostly don't fuck around with vegetables. But every once in a while I think about how much cured meat and cheese and pan con tomate and tortilla I eat here, and I'll decide that maybe one salad will balance out all that fat and starch and lack of vitamins. And then the salad comes and it's a plate of wilty lettuce and some sad tomatoes and maybe some olives if you're lucky, and I kick myself a little for not having ordered any other first course. If you're thinking that I shouldn't be complaining about the tomatoes in February, trust me: If the tomatoes are in an ensalada mixta, they're not much better in June. And I'm barely even complaining, really, even though I know it sounds like I am. In the land of jamon and pan con tomate, I mostly don't care that the salads suck. I just have to remember to stop ordering them.

Hopeless yesterday

Oops, my blog kind of fell off the planet. I'm still around. Will catch up.

A week late, I finally made it to beer and tacos. Mexico City taco truck tacos they were not, but they were also not bad. Don't get me wrong: I'm not sick of Spanish food. I still love jamon and Spanish cheese and pan con tomate and cortados. But I'm eating so many bocadillos that sometimes when I think about getting a bocadillo, I wonder what I could eat instead. I'm still mostly content to eat (Spanish) tortilla (as in potato omlette) several times a week, but corn tortillas tasted really good. Yikes, that didn't take long.

It makes me sigh

The countdown continues. And starting now, this should get a little easier -- starting this week I only have to give one lecture per week instead of two. I dunno whose idea this schedule was. (Ridiculousness in estado-Spanish higher education usually gets blamed on either Bologna, which is the EU's attempt at unifying European university education, or the estado-Spanish lack of any money whatsoever -- I'm not sure which of them, if either, is responsible for this particular weirdness.) But I do like working less, so I'm not complaining. And now I only have three lectures left.

The students continue to inexplicably grow on me. They do a lot of things that bug me (well, really just one thing I guess, which is talk, but they do it a lot), but they really never make me feel like I speak horrible Spanish or like I can't do my job. (I do a pretty good job of that myself, but that's not their fault.) They ask me if they can come to my office hours, as if I might say no, and I swear today when I got a little triumphant about saying estadísticamente significativamente correctly, they were laughing with me and not at me. And, here's the part where I sound really self-loathingly ridiculous, I know, but they talk the most when I'm being boring and incoherent. They should still be quiet and respectful, but how can I really blame them? I would probably be doing the same thing if I were them; probably at a lower decibel, but everything here happens at a louder decibel than what I'm used to. "Everyone shut up and listen while I fuck up this explanation of a boring concept." I just can't bring myself to demand that. And I'm mostly ok with that. I just can't own up to it in front of any authority figures.

Note to self

So you were working until almost 10pm on a Sunday night. And that blows. And you didn't even finish preparing the stupid class for tomorrow, which means you'll have to wake up at a reasonable hour and keep plugging away, and you'll probably be even more awkward and flustered than usual during class since you won't be very well-prepared. Yup, that also blows. But remember Friday, when you didn't feel like working and so you left at 1pm for beer and burgers and never made it back? Yeah, so stop whining.

Oh fuck it, you win

The sun came back, and joy spread throughout the land.

...except that it's my blog, dammit, and I'll whine if I want to. I've had two bad Spanish days in a row. Sometimes it just doesn't work when I try to talk and sometimes when other people talk it just sounds like garbled noise (some of those times they're speaking Catalan so then it's not really my fault, but only some of the times) and sometimes both of those things happen in the same conversation and I wonder why I didn't admit defeat long ago. Whine.

A lot of people here talk a lot. I usually don't talk all that much even in English, so sometimes I end up listening to monologues. It's almost never as boring as it would be in English. But sometimes I'll be listening to a monologue, understanding it, nodding along genuinely, and then the monologuer asks me some question that I don't understand. I hate it when that happens. "But I understood everything else you said!" I want to yell. "I wasn't just nodding along not understanding; I wasn't." And fuck you, brain, for picking now to flake on me. It's like the conversation just turned pass/fail and I failed and I really think I deserve some partial credit.

I know I overthink this shit, but it's really hard not to. And it's also sort of interesting, if confusing and maddening. How come sometimes I can have actual conversations about Catalan politics or religion or the joys of Basque cider and other times I have to ask What? three times before I realize I'm being asked whether I studied here in Barcelona or somewhere else? (The inconsistency is partially explained by the attractiveness of the other member of the conversation, but that only explains a little of it.) Even within a single conversation with the same person, the things I don't understand are not necessarily more complicated than the things I do understand. It's all such a crapshoot that it's hard not to think that I'll never learn.

Sometimes I really want to try and explain to people that I'm smart and funny, just not in Spanish, but I bet it would sound a little too much like a loud slurring person trying to convince you she's not drunk. Which I'm not, by the way.

Go upstairs right now and try on that present

"Clown was not that kid's first choice of costume," said my friend. And there on the sidewalk was the grumpiest-looking 8ish-year-old kid you've ever seen, wearing a colorful wig and a huge nose and some stupid clown outfit, and I felt bad for laughing at him but I'm still cracking up every time I remember it. Maybe his mom really likes clowns or maybe the costume store was out of cool costumes or maybe it was a gift from some ridiculous relative. I hope he at least got some ice cream or something for being paraded around in that stupid costume.

Anyway, it's Carnaval, which isn't a super big deal here but it does mean that there are lots of kids in costumes. The happier ones are dressed as things like butterflies or cows or medieval-looking soldiers with swords. You also see the occasional adult dressed up. Like just now, when I looked up from my little notebook to see, standing at the walk-up window at the cafe where I'm sitting, an adult clown, bored and smoking, who looks almost as unhappy as the kid clown did. I don't think she noticed me burst out laughing -- I bit my tongue and pulled myself together pretty quickly.

These grumpy clowns are way funnier than any happy clowns I've ever seen.

"You have a very strange system of sympathies" --my boss

I'm not saying that Catalans or Spaniards are nice -- they're not mean, I just wouldn't describe them collectively as nice, the way I might with Mexicans or Portuguese or Canadians -- but when they're being nice, they sound really nice. Like when I buy something and say think you and they say A tí, guapa, it makes the person saying it sound like the nicest person in the world, even if I was just mad at them for ignoring me for minutes (minutes!) before getting me a bocadillo or the check or whatever. A heartfelt-sounding A tí, guapa makes the bad service almost not matter, that's now nice it sounds, even if it is really just the Spanish-language equivalent of no prob.

The students are never that nice, but the situation is similar; sometimes I get such an inexplicable kick out of them that it cancels out how much I usually hate them. They had this test today and it was a multiple choice test and when they take multiple choice tests here they have separate answer sheets that they write on but I fucked up and forgot to pick up the answer sheets. I was going to grade them by hand anyway, so it actually seemed easier to not screw around with answer sheets. But they were all so concerned about whether or not they had marked their answers right. Who doesn't know how to take a multiple choice test? One guy, a burlyish fraternity-looking guy, circled his answers and put little dots next to them and then showed me what he did to make sure it was ok. Am I the only one who finds that hilarious and adorable? (Is that maybe the very definition of charm -- the ability to make people forget that they actually hate you?)

Ok, fine, so I have terrible taste. We knew that. I'm not going to change those little fuckers, so I might as well settle for any little shreds of entertainment I can get from them, right?

Not waiting on a lady

Yesterday was Valentine's Day, and I even had plans. It wasn't a date; it was beer and tacos with a friend. But beer and tacos and friends are like the best things in the world (ok, tacos in Barcelona may not be the best things in the world, actually, but let's not get picky) -- I was feeling pretty fortunate. Except that I guess I ate something bad and then my stomach tried to kill me in retaliation and I ended up watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on YouTube alone in the dark. And it started pouring rain right after I hung a load of laundry out to dry. So, fuck you St. Valentine.

On the bright side, I mostly feel better today. On the even brighter side, I don't live in Poblenou. Poblenou is where I lived when I lived here before and where I wanted to live again this time around but it didn't work out that way. (It's closeish to work and closeish to the beach without being touristy and it has good abandoned warehouses, etc.) If it had worked out, I might be one of many people without hot water for the fifth day in a row, because some kind of gas line got cut and everyone associated with that gas line is blaming someone else for cutting it and it's not getting fixed and holy crap I would be grumpy if I were hot water-less for five days. I'll take a night of intestinal distress over that any day.

Those kids have no idea whatsoever of what went on at Stalingrad

If it's a class taught by me, it's almost certain that at some point I will end up standing there in front of everyone, my head in my hands, saying something like "What the hell am I doing?" It happens in English, so it was bound to happen in Spanish. I was trying to say that something was statistically significantly different from something else, which in Spanish is estadísticamente significativamente diferente. They're not hard words, really. I know them and they don't have hard sounds like rolled r's or anything. They're cognates, for fuck's sake. But significativamente is just so fucking long that I kept getting lost in it. I said joder and a few of them laughed and I started over but then I still kept fucking it up. So I put my head in my hands and had a little millisecond-long nervous breakdown and then I started saying important instead of significant and the kid who looks like the bully from A Christmas Story except that he's always smiling gave me a big "Way to go, champ"-type smile and we all moved on.

The End.

Hey, I lack self-esteem in English, too

Whew. The first hypothesis testing lecture is over, and no one (i.e, not me) died or cried. I'm not at all sure that anyone learned anything. But, if we were to remake Maslow's hierarchy of needs as it relates to teaching a hardish boring class in a language you don't speak very well, the students actually learning anything would be somewhere in the middle I think, maybe even up towards self-esteem and respect by others. The food and excretion equivalents are not pulling the fire alarm, or quitting, or having an actual nervous breakdown. There are still five lectures left, and the material is getting more complicated and harder to explain, but it's starting to look like I might actually pull this off. There's still the very-real-feeling possibility that my students will all fail the final exam because I've failed to teach them anything. But even if they do, by that point I will be so ecstatic to have survived the semester I probably won't care. And, in the grand scheme of this particular misadventure, the foreign-language-teaching equivalent of lacking self-esteem is probably a good problem to have.

¡Oye!

Waitstaff here almost never ask you if you need anything. Especially if you're at a crowded bar or a brunch place that serves unlimited mimosas (I had an expat-tastic day today but, note to self, if you order a bloody Mary in a place where people mostly don't like spicy food and don't drink bloody Marys, you should probably expect to be disappointed), but basically if you're anywhere: If you want something you have to get the waiter/bartender's attention. Eye contact never works, and a little raised finger or nod or something like that almost never works. You have to wave at them, or yell at them, or grab their arm, or trip them or something. And I'm terrible at that. I get all awkward and shy and quiet and weird, even more so than usual, when faced with waitstaff, especially in the wrong language. And plus it just feels so rude to yell at them. So I spend a lot more time waiting for drinks than I probably should. Partly it's just how things are here, and also tipping is mostly not done or expected, so there's not much incentive for anyone to get me my next beer more quickly. The waitrons of the estado español aren't likely to change, so I need to get used to being more assertive. I'll work on it. Right after I get my students to shut up and my roommates to clean the kitchen.

Another Saturday night

Another Saturday, another slightly tipsy long lunch at another Baque restaurant with another super nice waitron and another shot of patxaran. (Only the Basques could make me like anything anise-y.) And then good coffee, and then a long walk in the sun, and drinks with work people, and it was fun.

I should complain less.

Black, white, green, or purple

I don't think it's racist to have noticed that there are a lot more Chinese people here in Barcelona than there were when I lived here six years ago. But now that I've made a point to write it down, I feel like I should be apologizing or something. To make myself feel less racist, I'm going to tell you about how racist some estado Spanish people are. There's this. And this. It's not that uncommon to see people in blackface (like the street musician I saw in Santiago, blackfaced and surrounded by people who thought he was funny or cool or otherwise unoffensive). Soccer fans sometimes throw bananas at black players (although that's not unique to Spain -- WTF, Europe?). After getting beaten up here one night (oops, I mean, after fending off a street gang one night), a friend of mine went to the police and the first thing they asked was if the guys were South American or Pakistani. You get the idea.

Anyway, there are a lot of stores here that are owned by Chinese of Pakistani people that sell things like food or hardware or housewares or electronics and they're usually fairly cheap and often open at convenient times that most stores operated by estado Spanish people aren't, like Sundays. Whatever particular kinds of goods they sell, said stores are referred to as chinos or pakis. Joder. It just sounds wrong, even if it is ethnically accurate (not necessarily, since here the word chino is used to refer to basically anyone Asian) and even if everyone here had chino and paki friends (unlikely).

So anyway, a lightbulb burned out in the bathroom and I was thinking about where to buy a new one and instead of thinking about hardware stores or something like that, I caught myself thinking that the chino down the street probably has them.

At least I felt bad about it.

A word I can't remember

I like to tell pretty much anyone who will listen how hard it is to teach in a language you don't quite speak. And people are sympathetic and then I feel a little better. I'm almost never looking for help or advice when I bitch about my problems, but lots of people don't realize that. And soooo many people here have offered the advice that if something gets complicated I should just switch to speaking in English.

In what world would that be OK? You can't just change the language on people, even if the people in question are the little fuckers also known as my students, especially during the complicated parts. I may be incompetent, but I'm not negligent. Switching to English would be negligent. And it would take the Spanish practice out of the job, which is the only reason I even took the job.

Anyway, speaking of my students, on Thursdays I teach seminars. Three different ones, with 20ish students in each, and they present homework problems on the board. (Nothing about the structure of this course was my idea.) The first one is always a disaster (those students are particularly unruly and I'm tired and something usually goes wrong that I'm not prepared for, etc.) and the second and third ones are usually relatively much better. Well today the stars aligned or something and the second seminar was actually kind of enjoyable; I think it actually went well. The students were quiet and they paid attention and someone made a little joke about colas gordas while solving a problem and it was funny without leading to chaos. They were actually even volunteering to present stuff. I mean, basically they just acted about how college students in the US act all the time without having to be yelled at, but still it felt like Christmas or something. Bon Nadal, you little fuckers.

¡Visca Barça!

Sometimes things that are supposed to be super fun aren't as fun as they're supposed to be. Tonight wasn't one of those times. I went to the Barça game! (That means soccer.) I dunno how I pulled off knowing someone whose cousin has season tickets and sometimes shares them, but I'll take it.

My roommate said the game might be boring because it's mostly uptight rich people who go to the stadium. I've been to games like that, and they are boring. But this was a great crowd. They were singing and chanting and yelling. There was a group of Valencia (the other team) fans waving Spanish flags sitting not too far away, and our section chanted ¡Puta Valencia! and ¡Puta España! and flicked off (some people say flip off; I say flick off) their general direction whenever they waved the flag, and there was a tenish year old kid in front of me who kept throwing his hands in the air what-the-fuck style every time there was a call against Barcelona. And there was a Puyol chant going for a while. And Barça won! Very exciting.

Camp Nou, the stadium, is huge; it holds almost 100,000 people. It's pretty easy to get to on the metro, and even taking the metro home with 99,999 other people wasn't so bad. There is a major, major problem with the stadium, though, and that is that they don't serve beer. Not beer with alcohol, anyway. And that blows, especially because it was pretty cold out. (Does drinking beer in the cold really make you feel warmer? Maybe not, now that I think about it. Whatever.) Spain in general or Catalunya in particular is not a place full of drunks. But it is socially acceptable here to have a beer with breakfast in the morning, if that's what you want. Alcohol here is more beverage than vice, so basically everywhere that sells beverages also sells alcoholic ones. Except the football stadium. Joder. Maybe it's a hooligan thing? Whatever the reason, it's unfortunate. At least the crowd was able to pull off being loud and obnoxious and hilarious and entertaining while mostly sober.