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.