We're a Happy Family

I was at a party with Magalee a few weeks back, and she told me that when she comes home to our flat from work, she feels like she's coming home to her family. That might read like a Hallmark moment in print but it was a really special moment, because I realized that she's right: we have morphed into a warm, cozy family who like to spend time together. Ruth recently came back from a business trip, so her and Pablo are now forever teasing each other mischievously and cooking up great feasts for each other, which the rest of us always get to share. And even though I had a crush on Magalee (pictured above, right) for a month or two, I'm much happier around her now that I don't feel any pressure to hit on her, because I know realize I was forcing her to keep me at a distance. She, Andrea (pictured above, left) and I have spent many an afternoon drinking coffee and telling funny stories in the eating room, especially because my and Andrea's rooms aren't worth spending much time in. Before Andrea moved in the eating room had essentially become my room alone - now it's become a social meeting place we can all feel secure in. If we've become like a family, I'm not sure who the parents are, but I'm definitely the youngest of the children. Although Pablo and I are the same age, the fact that he works full time for a living makes him seem slightly older than I, and everyone else spoils me with the kind of nurturing kindness of an older sibling. Especially now that Elena moved out - she's the crazy Italian woman who fit the mold for Evil Stepmother - I really get along perfectly well with everyone I live with to the point that I don't feel lonely if I go a week and a few days without seeing any of my American friends. Although our overall living situation in our apartment may not be perfect - we all share a bathroom and a kitchen and things have been breaking a lot lately - our overall chemistry couldn't be better right now.



It was against this backdrop of near-utopia that Pedro (our deadbeat of a "landlord" who is illegally subletting us the apartment so he can travel around the world with our over-charged rent) decided to go and fuck everything up. You see, since Elena left we've had no word on who our new roommate would be. Lo and behold that Pedro would inform us that we have *two* new roommates coming in, and that he would tell us the day before they arrived. The Chilean couple who would live with us, he said, were people of confidence, although he couldn't remember their names or how he had met them. The couple - named Alejandro and Laurena - are actually quite nice people and get along well with everyone, but they bring the number of people in our apartment to a whopping seven, and the apartment was already overcrowded. So we've somewhat collectively come to a decision: we will find another apartment from an official, legal agency and rent it out together. We've already found several listing for apartments where we would all, on average, pay 240 euros each, which is half of what many of my flatmates pay now. The best part of all, of course, would be the revenge, because if all of us move out at once without a word to Pedro, he'll be left twisting in the wind while we move on to higher ground. Naturally, if Pedro were a decent landlord, this would not work. But since he has *never* shown his face in the apartment as long as I've lived here, there's no way he'll know anything (unless he finds his way to this blog...).

Four Long Days

Going to Naples the weekend and Paris the weekend before that, I was getting bit stressed out going into this weekend excursion I had planned with Cristina to her home town in Girona. While another weekend without studying didn't exactly help my midterm scores, at the very least it was the most relaxing mini-vacation I've had in a while. After listening to me ramble on and on about Paris and Naples Cristina was eager to prove how great her region, so she went to ridiculous lengths to organize our weekend together. All I really had to do was show my appreciation, help her cook a little bit and convince her that I'm not going to move to Italy anytime soon. It's funny to think about, but she legitimately wanted me to enjoy myself more in Girona so I might eventually want to live there with her, and she would rather I don't learn any Italian because I'll be less motivated to learn Catalan. She's become incredibly attached to me in rather short period of time, and of course that's both really amazing to me and a little frightening. I've had a few scattered relationships since I began traveling, but none quite this serious or committed, and having a weekend to spend together just solidified how close we've become.




We stayed in her mom's spacious, immaculate house, though we never saw any light of her, as Cristina had planned. Her parents are divorced, and though her dad gave us a ride to the house, Cristina didn't even introduce us because she has a rather shaky relationship with him. Her mom, on the other hand, is like her best friend, so I know meeting her will have to be a pretty big deal. I'm looking forward to meeting her sometime - it sounds like she's where Cristina got her feisty attitude - but I was thankful to avoid seeing her quite so soon. I did get to see a good deal of where Cristina spent her childhood, though, which I could tell was a pretty important and sensitive moment for her. It reminded me of that scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen and Dianne Keaton are looking at each other in different stages of their youth and making wry comments about how different they were. It's always strange revisiting places from your childhood and trying to gauge whether it's you or the place that has changed so much, and it was flattering to me that Cristina would have me along for that. Walking down those sleepy suburban streets and seeing the kids playing in her old elementary school, I could see her having the same sheltered and confusing childhood that I had in America. In that moment of shared emotional baggage, I felt what few cultural differences there might be between us fade a little bit.

Postcards From Itally

If, as I mentioned in my last post, it's truly difficult to "do it right" when taking a weekend excursion to Paris, then I would imagine that it's nearly impossible in Naples. For one thing, it's not a very well-known city outside of Italy and very few of the people speak English (or Spanish, for that matter). For another, it's impenetrably chaotic and tough to navigate, with people driving through the narrowest streets at the fastest speeds that I've seen since I went to Tehran when I was ten - when Mexico seems tame by comparison you know you're seeing true insanity. However, all that being said, thanks to my immensely cool roommate Andrea, I was able to fully experience one of the most wonderful cities I've ever stumbled upon, Barcelona included. Actually, I probably loved Naples so thoroughly, at least in part, because it resembles Barcelona. Like Cataluña's crown jewel, Naples is situated on the Mediterranean coast and is absolutely-stuffed with people, many of them left-leaning students who like to congregate after hours in the many bustling plazas that make up its historic center. In addition, Naples has a strong regional identity apart from (and in many ways, in opposition to) it's parent country, which is reflected in the strong regional dialect of the Italian language called "Napolitani"(?) - which, coincidentally, strongly resembles Catalan in both its vocabulary and pronunciation. If Barcelona is best personified as a whimsical art-school dropout, Naples could be its brash prankster of a little brother.




But as I indicated above, the biggest reason for my immense enjoyment of this metropolis of good vibes was that I got to spend it with friendly locals who showed me all the gorgeous sites and fed me their incredible cuisine for free. And what incredible cuisine it was: after all, Naples is the city that first spawned what we Americans cynically call pizza, although what we refer to as such has about as much in common with the original as it does to taco salad. As Andrea told me (with no shortage of his overflowing hometown pride), even the "pizza" in Rome has no right to bare that title, because everything from the method of baking it to the air and water that go into the dough make pizza a uniquely Napolitani invention. And you know what? The dude is completely right. As you can tell from the picture above, the pizza in Naples is thin, with smoky, over-toasted crust, and features far more tomatoes (and other vegetables) than fatty cheese. Not only that, but you can get a large one at any of the famous pizzarias there for about three euros, which isn't even enough to buy McDonald's in Barcelona. Add that to all the wonderful pasta they eat for *every* *friggin* meal, I'm truly shocked that everyone in Naples isn't grotesquely fat.




But the wonderful thing about food culture in Naples is that although everyone loves to eat well, they also love to cook well, which isn't always the same thing. Andrea, a professional chef in his own right, brought us to a party thrown in his honor where ten of his friends - girls and guys alike - contributed to own of the best feasts I'll likely ever take part in. Smiling dark-eyed Italian girls laughed and sipped wine while they crushed walnuts to throw into the salad. Pepe, Andrea's best friend, grinned at me mischievously as he marinated pumpkins for a truly succulent pasta sauce. I had previously thought of dinner parties as solely a right of passage into boring twenty-something-dum, but Italians have got that one figured out: you drink plenty of wine, yes, but you never get too drunk because every second someone's handing you a new dish that makes you thankful for being born. Seriously, I don't know what life of good deeds I've led to deserve all of this good karma, but I lived like a King for this past weekend, and - unlike Paris - I (almost) didn't want to leave.



It helped immensely that Andrea has a host of interesting and hilarious friends who talked to me drunkenly about everything from the insurmountable greatness of the British post-punk band Joy Division to the moral relevancy of French social theorist Michel Foucault. Chalk it up to whatever you want - being close-minded, watching too much of the Sopranos, whatever - but I had never imagined that I could meet so many Italian dudes with the same exact passions and world view that I have, and that revelation was inspiring. This was embodied perfectly in the universal reaction I received from everyone in Naples once they discovered I was from America: "You're from America? Obama! Yes-We-Can!" It as if, by sheer virtue of our electing a black man to the presidency, the United States had become an ahead-of-the-curve symbol of hope and optimism instead of the last, worst world-empire. In the packed plaza we stopped by every night next to the city's main university, complete strangers overheard my accent and couldn't wait to congratulate me on my country's achievement, and for the first time in maybe my entire life, I felt a genuine pride to be American. I was afraid that my being out of the country had robbed me of the chance to witness what was surely a triumphant and cathartic moment, but - thanks to modern mass communications, I guess - it felt even more special to me because I got to see the universal joy and admiration it inspired in nations that used to strongly resent the United States.

Paris, je t'aime, mais au revoir

There are many ways to experience Paris, but I'm guessing there's only one way to "do it right," and since it's the Most Romantic City In The Entire World, you can probably guess what that is. But since Cristina had missed two weeks of school (due to that whole Pneumonia episode) and couldn't possibly accompany me, I was forced to feel her absence in every dimly-lit, cobble-stone ally and rain-soaked garden that we came across. And we came across a *lot* of those. Not to mention that every one of those postcard-worthy scenes were predictably full of rosy-cheeked young couples nestling together like birds on a wire against the insanely frigid cold of the city. Speaking of which, Magalee had warned me of Paris' bone-chilling nature in the winter time, but still, underneath four sweaters and a cozy leather jacket, I was taken by surprise. It only reminded me further of the warm comfort I missed so deeply back in Barcelona in the form of my suffering Cristina, and made me look forward even more to the trip to Berlin we're planning together to make up for the lost opportunity for romance.



But as I joked to her when I got back, I certainly have enough photos to show Cristina more or less exactly what I did the entire weekend. As is a common occurrence with the crew of fellow-Americans I was traveling with, we saw a handful of rather touristy sights and documented them meticulously with photos. The group included Alex (or Blond Alex as I've come to call him; too many Alex's in my life) Ashley (who was in Mexico with me), her roommate and BFF Sophie, and Suzie - who I previously referred to as Out-Of-Control-Asian-Girl (embarrassingly enough, it turns out she's Mexican...). In short, this means I have a bazillion pictures of the Notre Damn and Arc de Triomphe but couldn't really tell you what Parisian people are like. But despite our complete seclusion from any non-touristy section of the city (which are certainly lovely, but also criminally-expensive), my travel-mates became completely enamored with the city and promptly revealed to me their rather childish bitterness towards Barcelona in contrast. Thus, my appreciation of Paris was almost ruined because every feather in its cap immediately became, for them, a black eye on our city of residence.



It wouldn't have bothered me so much if their complaints about Barcelona had actually had merit, but trying to compare two cities after having only spent a weekend in the most tourist-friendly spots of one of them doesn't really hold water in my book. Paris is a city well-known for its frigid, unfriendly citizens, and aside from the waiters and shop attendants (you know, the people who have a financial interest in being nice) we only met one: a drunk guy who talked to us for a while outside of a bar. Apparently this has never happened to the girls in Barcelona, which makes me wonder if they've ever ventured outside their rooms at any hour of the day there, or anywhere else, because it's certainly an experience unique to one (admittedly beautiful) French city. Their complaining reminded me of how petty and immature they can be sometimes, but it also made me realize how quickly I've come to develop a home-town pride in the city I've only lived in for about two-and-a-half months. Anyone who knows me and my virile distrust of any kind of regional or national pride should recognize this sense of belong as significant. Barcelona may not be as large, clean, fashionable, or bourgeoi as Paris, but it has a soul, I tell you, and hearing someone tear it down lit a protective spark in me that I didn't know was there. It may sound crazy, but I now know that Barcelona is my home, and after a weekend of rain, French, and over-priced... everything, I was more than ready to go back.

The Party's Crashing Us

Even for Barcelona, what a night! Having been at home sick for three days and knowing that I had midterms the following week, I knew I had to seize the opportunity to have as much fun as humanly possible (without dying) at the Of Montreal concert last weekend, and it didn't disappoint. Having officially decided that we are "novios" (boyfriend/girlfriend) it would have been more fun to have Cristina as well, but she was still holed up in a Girona hospital trying to recover from pneumonia (thankfully she only passed her cold on to me). As is life on a Barcelona Friday night, there were also a fine assortment of piso parties to choose from, and since the show started at midnight (it was at Razzmatazz, the same venue as that Cut/Copy show) I managed to make it to two of them before heading out. "Que punctual!" said Roxana - my friend Devin's tan, beaming Peruvian roommate that every guy seems to be in love with - when I was the first to arrive at the going-away party she threw for her old friend from Portugal. Since the party (captured in the photo above) didn't get going until late, I also had to be the first to leave, which is a shame, because I apparently missed out on seeing all of my friends embarrassingly drunk (no surprise there) as well as seeing my good buddy (and 20-year-old) Evan necking with a 31-year-old Columbian woman. Such are the sacrifices of leaving a party at 11:30 in Barcelona.



I stumbled into the warm night of the Pakistani-dominated Raval neighborhood and grabbed a falafel to eat on the way to Ross's place, where he and some of UCLA friends were pre-partying before the show. Despite being frat-dudes all, they were all seemed pretty well-adjusted, and after a few cheap Spanish beers there, we all headed out together and packed into the already-crowded metro to get ourselves to Razzmatazz. We got ourselves inside and almost immediately got separated, which is usually impossible to rectify in Razzmatazz's labyrinth-ian maze of terraces and stairwells that connect four massive dancing-rooms. But by some miracle we found each other as well as Sophia and her righteously-soused Parisian friend (that's the three of us pictured above). I didn't catch his name the few times he accidentally stumbled into me, and generally I just tried to keep him from doing the same to other people holding expensive-looking cocktails, of which there were many. Sophia was rather tipsy herself and consequently flirted with me a great deal, which made me rather grateful that Cristina wasn't there to get jealous and protective, which is sometimes her way. We all danced (or something resembling that) until Of Montreal took the stage in all of their bizarre, eccentric glory.




As for the concert itself, well, I suppose in this case the pictures might just describe it better than I can. As you can see, mere words like "bizarre" and "eccentric" don't quite give proper justice to the acid-trip theater that is an Of Montreal show, which uses a revolving cast of musicians and performance artists, to flesh out singer-songwriter Kevin Barnes fractured, funky, electro-psychedelic pop songs. In all the hysteria, I didn't quite make out what some of the costumed characters were supposed to be, exactly, but seeing them jump and tumble around was half the fun (In case you're wondering, the ones in the picture above are a man in a tiger mask trying to pile drive a man in a chicken mask). Barnes is probably the only guy in pop music peacockish enough to stand out in such a crazy circus, prancing around androgynously like a slightly more geeky, sensitive David Bowie. He rarely said much to the crowd, but his crazed-genius charisma never faltered and his wardrobe changes produced increasingly shocking results. Near the finally of the show, he stripped down to a golden speedo and had his ninja friends spread fake blood all over his body (as you can see below). After tearing throw an hour and a half set, the crowd didn't seem like it good go any more nuts. Then the band went into a cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" like was 1993 and the crowd went even more nuts. When it was all over, I couldn't think of anything left to do but sleep as if I had just had enough fun for an entire week, which is basically what happened.

Homecoming

Things I've done instead of updating this blog: got a Catalan girlfriend, got a cold (consequently), spent three hours renewing my student visa, six hours at an extreme sports festival, and went on a nice hike with Alex, Andrea and Magalee. It might not seem like a lot, but that - and some breaks of sitting around - easily managed to fill up the ten days since I last bothered to write anything down, and it's frankly still hard for me to process all of it. Since I only have pictures of the hike and the extreme sports festival and only words for my new romantic pursuits, I'll divide them evenly that way: I met Cristina at a language exchange event at the University of Barcelona that I arrived at late and almost didn't bother going to at all. The Education Abroad event was supposed to help us meet more Spanish students, but instead of pairing us up with students one on one to explore the city (as they did in Morelia), we were all on a balcony together and told to make nice like infants in the play room at an adult party. When that didn't work, they introduced a ridiculous charades-type game where we each got a word that we had to describe in our non-native tongue to find the other person who had it. Zander, as is his way, was so disappointed by how the event was progressing that he decided to leave after twenty minutes. And I, as is my way, was almost swayed by his skepticism to do the same.




Thanks to my eternal luck, I decided to give it another five minutes. Cristina first caught my eye when, after our program coordinator explained that it was "to help us get to know each other and exchange info" she laughed sarcastically "Oh really? That's the point? Cause I wasn't sure what we were doing, exactly, with this game." Had I been so bold, I probably would have made the same joke. With her cropped, raven-black hair hanging just below her ears, she looked like Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs but without the frigid, art-chick stare. She was nonetheless a little intimidating, though, being six-foot and joking around with everyone in the room like she'd known them for years. I thought "I have *got* to talk to her" and immediately found an excuse to ditch the neurotically-timid Peruvian girl I was speaking with. You know those moments of fleeting romance in which you feel a sense of déjà vu but then realize it's only because you've seen the exact same situation in five John Cusack movies? Meeting Cristina was like that. Everything seemed to flow so naturally that I felt like I'd fallen into a movie I would have scripted for myself: I was curious about Catalan identity within Spain, she happened to identify deeply with Cataluña and not so much Spain (later she told me that she found it attractive that I wanted to talk about politics; seriously!), she likes Cut/Copy, I had unthinkingly thrown on my Cut/Copy shirt before getting up that morning. Rarely have I ever had to try less to win over a girl, and that was made all the sweeter because I actually liked her, too.



When the event died down (I never bothered to find the person with my word, and I can't even remember it) we went out to the Obeja Negra for a beer with Marc and Incredibly Young-Looking Dude (whose real name I also can't remember), two guys from Illinois who I've never really talked to before but ended up being fun drinking buddies. Cristina kept ordering pitchers of sangria, and as the night went on seemed to pay more and more attention to me until she told Mark and IYLD that she had a problem: she wanted to take me out for a date but didn't know where to take me. I thought she was joking at first, but when Mark and IYLD went to play a game of foosball she took me by the hands, said she wanted to see me again, and asked me wouldn't I kiss her now that we were (temporarily) alone? It was enough to make me look around to make sure my friends hadn't set up some elaborate, Punk'd-style prank to squash all my hopes and dreams. Unfortunately, there was one catch: she was sick with a cold when I met, and now, a week later, she has been hospitalized for pneumonia and I have a cold of my own. Thus, we still haven't had that first date that she talked about, and I won't be able to take her with me to see Of Montreal tomorrow like I had originally hoped (if I can even make it myself). But I'm still riding high on that thrill of new romance, trying to forget that the romantic comedy déjà vu can't last forever and basking in how much more I seem to love Barcelona the more I immerse myself in it.

Strange Lights

In the week we returned from San Sebastian, my life has become far less solitary - I've made an astounding number of new friends and acquaintances, seemingly spent not a single night alone - but as things are wont to, this has made my life seem far more complicated. That is to say, life has gotten better and more exciting, but ever more busy and difficult to manage - hence, my continuing negligence of this blog. For instance, my new roommate, Andrea, has seemingly transformed my house from a sometimes empty and antisocial place to one far more united. Since he arrived, him, myself, Magalee, Ruth, and Pablo have all spent the nights together until very late talking, smoking, and generally acting like good friends. It's not that this camaraderie didn't exist before, but somehow Andrea's gregarious, teasing nature has brought us all together in a way we never were before.



They told me about the people who have stayed in the house before, how Israeli guy who stayed in my current room and seemed schizophrenic tried to awkwardly seduce Magalee. She told me they were far happier since I took his place, and for the first time I felt like I completely belong here. To twist an analogy from Woody Allen's latest zesty picture "Vicky Christina Barcelona" (go see it and be even more jealous of me), it's almost as if he's the missing element that makes all the others fall into place perfectly. I've known him for a short time, but already I feel like we're good friends, and he also shares much of my (as my friend Andrew would put it) esoteric music taste. He also has me (and the rest of the house, apparently) addicted to his delicious Italian coffee, which is now practically the only way I can get myself out the door to class on time.



Then there's the matter of Minnesotan Alex who happens to be the Spanish Lit class I have with my good friend Californian Alex. Minnesotan Alex has Spanish relatives, speaks the language impeccably, and often tries to pass himself off as a native - if not of Spain than of Europe in general - when meeting actual locals. Hanging out with him is refreshing because he prefers to practice his Spanish even when he's with Americans, which is something I've been trying to do more and more but just doesn't fly with some of my American compatriots. He invited me to my first Spanish house party last week, a birthday celebration for his roommate - and it was quite the language trial by fire, but also a heap of fun. The Spanish girls there were vociferous, bold and self-assured, and made fun of even Alex's stellar Spanish skills. But teasing seems to be the best sign of affection in Spain, and they quickly took to him and I as we strained ourselves mingle with the 20 or so of them who maintained a cacophony of chatter throughout the night and morning. By the end I had at least two who wanted to practice their English with me (none of them are very good) and at three in the morning, four of us went out in search of a bar to avoid having to go to sleep. We never found it, but just making it that far after a party made me feel like I'd passed my first real Barcelona initiation.



But as my number of Spanish friends quadrupled, the situation with my American friends has suddenly become painfully complicated. Ashley is apparently falling for either Evan, Zander, or me (I'm pretty skeptical at the latter, but I'm clueless with these things), which explains her reclusive, testy behavior as of late. What's more, Peruvian Sophia, who I was about to ask out on a date, confessed to me that she fancies Californian Alex and spontaneously started necking with him two days ago at a metro stop. They haven't spoken of it since, and she's not sure she should make a move because she thinks he might have feelings for Argentine Sophia. If this makes your head hurt, imagine how I feel. Needless to say, I was more than a little bummed, but as I've learned from my vast experience in romantic disappointment, such things are usually obvious to us before we're confronted with them head on. At the very least, I'm glad I found out the truth without having to be directly rejected from Sophia, who I'd still like to be friends with. Whereas in the past I would have reacted to an event like this as though it were a car accident, this time I merely treated it like a speed bump. Instead of going home and moping, I met up with Zander and Ashley (thankfully not moody anymore) in gorgeous Plaza del Sol and forgot about it with a few drinks and some savory schwarma. As I rode my bicycle home and felt the air blow through my ever-longer hair, I sensed a new kind of freedom that Barcelona has imbued in me: it's a freedom that comes from realizing you're not trapped inside your life, but rather that you have the ability to choose how you react to what it presents you with.



To add a completely unrelated footnote, I usually keep this page dedicated to my personal experiences, but I felt compelled to post this music video because it's my favorite that I've seen in quite some time, featuring my favorite song by my favorite still-functioning band, Deerhunter. I posted onceonce about the blog of their frontman, Bradford Cox, but this video is the best introduction I can think of to the actual music of this unique and inspiring band. As for the song, "Spring Hall Convert" is the first one I ever heard by them, and it remains my favorite because of the way it seamlessly builds from brooding tranquility to climax after climax without ever losing steam, until it seems to envelope itself in a cleansing wash of echoed noise and disembodied phantoms of Cox's voice. The video captures this gradual drift towards sensory overload with beautifully-shot colored silhouettes of the group performing live, layering them with shots of wild animals until it's impossible to distinguish any of the images from the gorgeous smatterings of shade and color.

Senses Working Overtime

More and more each day I'm starting to feel like there just isn't enough time. Not enough time to take in the sights of Barcelona, not enough time to make friends to help me do that, and not enough time to make plans for traveling to other cities to do the same thing elsewhere. Hell, in a blink of an eye I went over a week without updating this blog. Whereas Mexican days always felt like they all moved at the same laconic pace, Barcelona time seems to only speed up the more you pay attention to it. It's all a bit overwhelming, and while it makes life pretty exciting it can also wear you out pretty quickly. For instance, just like week I heard about a trip to San Sebastian that my friend Ashley was planning. Ashley is a tour guide at UCSD and a born planner, so she wrote up a detailed pamphlet for us on facebook about the trip that required us to do little more than book a hostel and buy a train ticket. Naturally, I hopped on the bandwagon, and after a night of tutoring Edward, Sometimes-Problem-Child Roge and Mark (that's a post for another day), I got on a 12-hour train ride to San Sebastian, a gorgeous beach town up in the Basque country that I've wanted to visit ever since Zander, whose grandma lives up there, first told me about it.



It was nice to get a change of pace from bustling Barce, and traveling within a country is easily more carefree than actually living there. The train was the type in which they pack you together in beds like sardines, but luckily I was rooming with Alex, a really cool literature major from UC San Diego who I ended up hanging out with for most of the weekend, as well as two superfriendly dudes from Canada and South Africa, respectively. South African Surfer Dude (can't remember his name, sorry) actually didn't have a place reserved to stay, so he followed us to the completely awesome Hostel Olga, which in addition to being clean, friendly, and safe, was actually run by a benevolent woman named Olga. I don't think any of the girls we were traveling with minded that South Africa Surfer Dude came along, as he was quite the strapping embodiment of blond surfer masculinity. Ashley, one of those rare completely un-self-aware pretty girls who has never had a boyfriend purely on account of being too shy, lingered for a while by our room talking to him about surfing even though she's never been. It was quite adorable.



There were travelers from all over at Olga's Place, and it's easy to see why such people catch the travel bug: it's God damn fun, that's why. Upon arrival we met some bewitchingly beautiful Australian girls, along with a mountain of people from other nations whom I can recall in light of my lingering bewitchment. Quickly Alex, Suzie (formerly Out-Of-Control Asian Girl, now Suzie-Boozie, get it?), Zander, and the two Sophias were out taking in the majestic beaches and swooping mountains of San Sebastian. The city truly retains a feeling of timelessness and placelsesness because, well, Basque culture and architecture really doesn't appear to have much of anything to do with either that of Spain or France, where the the Basque Sheppard-folk have been living in relative isolation for centuries. Of course, they still have tapas bars, Castellano (or Spanish, for anyone outside of this country) and otherwise beautiful women with mullets, but there's definitely a different vibe entirely coming from the place. Like many beach towns, it's a little slower and more personable. Hell, we even bumped into Drunk Canadian Dude two nights in a row by accident. Barcelona, with its infinite amount of night spots, would never produce such a coincidence.



The more tranquil vibe also allowed me to bond quite a bit with some of my fellow American students, who I may have been a little too hard on in the past. Alex, for instance, is a pretty hilarious and unpretentious guy who just happens to also be very literary and up on his music. He also has quite the quarreling brother-sister relationship with Argentine Sophia, who is basically attached by the hip to Ashley and knows a ridiculous amount of knowledge about Futbol Internacional. Peruvian Sophia, on the other hand, may be my first viable love interest in my would be self-inspired novel about my time here (I've given up hope on Magalee, sorry). Like most girls with an extensive knowledge of the music I also love, I quickly wrote her off as a girl who would either annoy me or not have any interest in me, but I found out over our time in San Sebastian that we have a lot more in common beyond that and, at the very least, our friendship has certainly developed by leaps and bounds. It helped that you probably couldn't think of a more romantic city to discuss the literary genius of Haruki Murakami's



When it was all said and done, we returned the same way we came: on an overnight train that dropped us off at nine in the morning, barely rested and more than half-dazed. Lucky me had class an hour later, and I was just about to throw in the towel on that front when I met my new piso-mate, a wonderfully friendly, generous, and humorous Italian chap named Andrea. He made me some of the strongest yet best-tasting coffee I've ever had, and it gave me quite the boost to make to through an hour-and-a-half lecture on the Spanish Civil War. You see, lovely Juliana decided to move to Sitches, a beach-town about half-an-hour from Barcelona, but since she was never here to begin with I'm certainly glad Andrea replaced her. His presence already seems to have added a homely atmosphere to the place: he's already become friends with Magalee and Pablo (who actually talks if you prompt him, surprise) and the four of us along with Ruth actually spent the evening together last night. It was the first time I can recall such a thing happening, and though I'm meeting new people everyday and finding less time to spend with any of them, I pray it won't be the last.

Up All Night

Sometime around four in the morning, when Richie Hawtin ended his marathon, uninterrupted DJ set for a crowd of several thousand people, I found out why Barcelona truly is one of the coolest places on the planet: when I asked a hip-looking Spanish girl next to me if the party was truly over, she told me "no-no-no, in Barcelona, the party is *never* over, ok?" People say that about a lot of places, but as I found out in this exhausting weekend, it actually applies to this crown jewel of a city. It's also especially true right now, when the week-long Fiestas de la Merce have eight different concerts/events/parties going on simultaneously, every night until the sun rises. There's kind of a downside to this: I rarely slept this weekend, but I still feel like I've missed a lot. For instance, Friday night I accidentally missed out on a free show by rock/electro giants Primal Scream, and on Saturday I inadvertently skipped a ceremonial parade where everyone stampedes through the streets while spraying fireworks all over the place. Currently, I'm fighting the temptation to blow off class altogether so I can catch as much of the festival's events as possible.



It didn't help that I did much of said-partying with the roommates of my buddy Evan, who has the liability/advantage of living in a piso that is itself a never-ending party. Like me, he lives with a diverse group of foreigners (a French guy and girl, a Honduran girl, and an Italian dude) except they all drink like fish and constantly pressure anyone who goes over there to drink with them. Where as my piso is friendly yet tranquil, his is perpetually loud, dirty, and full of people, some who live there and some who don't. They're all quite nice (the Honduran girl even made me some Honduran coffee, which was just as delicious as I remember it from my volunteer work there), but I barely survived two nights going out with them, and I fear for Evan's liver if he actually plans on living there for a year.



Camil, his French roommate (above, left), also had two of her friends visiting her for the weekend named Julie and Maielise (above, to my left and right, respectively) and the whole lot of us went out on Friday night. As is prone to happen with that crowd, we were all far too drunk before we even left the apartment, and thus it took us close to an hour to find our destination, a bar called el Obeja Negra (the Black Sheep). Beautiful Julie and I had been flirting all night, but at some point I became a little too intoxicated and she started mocking my inability to remember things she had told me five minutes beforehand. By the time we arrived at a nearby dance club, I was so frustrated at being continuously shot down by Julie that I randomly began dancing with shy, pretty Maielise, who I was told is her best friend. We began dancing rather close (a rarity in this country) and before I knew it we were making out while everyone else (Julie included) gawked at us in shock. Needless to say, all of Evan's roommates drunkenly made fun of me for the rest of the weekend.



Despite all that debauchery, the highlight of my partying was undoubtedly the massive, outdoor, state-sponsored rave featuring Richie Hawtin and two other phenomenal DJ's I've never heard of. Just the spectacle of seeing so many people dancing, cheering, and jumping up and down for a DJ was enough to give me chills, and being in that crowd, feeling the bass thumping deep in my chest, was unforgettable. I inevitably got separated from most of my friends, but once I just gave in to ebb and flow of that teeming sea of bodies I had an even better time meeting random Europeans from all over who had come to Barcelona just for the festivals. I met a surfer from Belgium who told me where the best waves are in Spain. I met a French guy who DJ's at an indy dance club near my house. I met an Argentine dude who talked to me about the Pixies. I met some pretty girls from Amsterdam who told me where I could find the best underground afterparties in the city. It was a blast, and I finally understood why this city is so mythologized - it embodies a transnational sense of community where people from all over the planet can converge and celebrate the mere fact that they are together - and alive.

It Aint Easy

With all my American friends out of town for the weekend, I had plenty of time to casually explore the city (sadly not reflected in the quality or amount of photos I have), but also to get my affairs in order, so to speak. I've noticed that in Spain, getting rather simple tasks accomplished can sometimes take an entire day or more, because most businesses and government institutions tend to only operate on weekdays and also tend to close early. For example, it took me the better part of two days just to send in my request for an absentee ballot, which will thankfully allow me to vote in what is sure to be a a nail-biter of a presidential election in the US. To print something out, I had to search for an internet cafe. To buy envelopes, I had to track down a Chinese market (thankfully these almost *never* close). To buy friggin stamps I had to somehow find an open tobacco shop, which are only the only places that sell them. It just goes to show that if you want to live in a more laid-back society you have to trade in the "I want it NOW!"-style convenience of living in a hyper-stressed one. Fair enough, I suppose, but I'm not quite there yet.



I also got myself a job. Our program liaison here has been forwarding us e-mails from families who want someone to teach their kids Spanish, and after translating/updating my resume all of Thursday in preparation for applying, the first family that I called wanted to set up on interview, no resume required (at least I have it for future reference...). When I showed up for the interview who else did I find waiting but Deysi, a girl from my program, and Carmen - the mom - ended up interviewing us together in slightly awkward fashion. Carmen is a gracious Spanish woman who obviously thinks the world of her three boys and tends to package statements she feels uncomfortable saying as if they were jokes to make them go down easier. For instance, she told Deysi and I that she preferred a boy so that her kids could have an older role model to talk about football with (*laugh*) but later said that her boys get the last word on whether I get the job because they might find me boring, for instance (*big laugh*).



So now I have a job, just so long as I can convince a five, eight, and ten-year-old that I'm cool and know about football, more or less. I'm strictly prohibited from speaking Spanish anywhere near them (no problem there!) because they'll learn better if they think I only speak English. I get the impression the family is pretty well-off (they live in the quite-well-to-do Zona Universitaria neighborhood, pictured above and below), and thus the boys already have English classes in addition to sports and music classes, which I'll be picking them up from. The two older boys, Mark and Rogeio(?) were born when the family lived in New York City, so their English is already pretty good and a point of pride for them and Carmen alike. I haven't babysat in a long time, but if I can't bond with three little Spanish boys for a few hours a week, I'm going to seriously question my ability to ever deal with kids and thus, become a decent father someday.