19:08 (like in the army)
 
There have been two weeks spent in our fair (pentagonal shaped?) land near France.  I am finally housed, temporarily though gratefully in a little flat decorated so as to embrace everything that should have been forgotten about the seventies.  I share this mission brown heaven with a nervous Peruvian and his more arrogant but thankfully more absent friend.  Each morning, I am greeted by the former wanting to talk and talk and talk.  At this point, clad only in pjs and the sleep from my eyes, I want nothing more than to shuffle past him and splash some overly calcified tap water onto my face…but he’s just so ‘i want to learn English’ that this is nearly impossible!  Unfortunately, it’s hard to answer his questions, and he doesn’t really understand mine…so our is a mutually unbeneficial relationship.
 
Before I was employed and housed, I walked everywhere and saved on food (and health) by surviving on pasta, tinned tomatos and the included breakfast of white bread and cake (yes) at my hostel.  Now that both issues have been rectified, I can afford the metro, and so no longer fall out of my skinny jeans with each step (though part of me found that mildly enjoyable!).  So while I have yet cooked only one decent meal during my stay here, I have been kept fed due to the fact that my work backs onto a Subway store which is under the same management.  I am averaging 2m of sandwhich per week.  A statistic that both pleases and disgusts me.
 
Employment has it’s benefits as follows:
* i get to enjoy the fact that blonde hair is a relative novelty in Spain
* i now mildly understand the rules of rugby
* the blank, non-English speaking cook gives me lessons in loosing my ‘whitest girl on earth reputation’ via handshakes and Spanish ‘wat up dawg’ style gibberish
* i can rank the world’s nationalities in terms of rudeness (surprisingly, Ireland needs to work harder)
* there is a motorbike above the bar, which causes me great amusement
* the look from people when I tell them I’m Australian and the never failing ‘why are you here?’ that follows is even more amusing
 
And negatives.
* i certainly cannot carry a platter laden with four plates atop my shoulder while effectively unfolding a serving table without causing serious alarm and possible arrest
* i have to wear an unattractive t shirt
 
All is well in this land.  Dogs run free on the metro, human castles and street-long fire fights are staged to celebrate local saints’ days, girls have shaven mullets, verbs are conjugated 18 different ways and the change in temperature (I can only imagine) has caused a 10c piece sized section of skin on my right shoulder to scab, heal and rescab with rampant abandon.
 
I hope you are chirpy and delicious.

 A fair bit has changed in the last few days…warnings to anyone thinking of traveling to Spain.  It will suck you in!  Last Sunday, having been in Barcelona for five days with the fabulous Anita (and preparing for our 5am departure for London the next morning), we were walking down the main stretch when I decided very randomly and in a matter of seconds to ditch Glasgow completely (my intended next stop) to remain in Barcelona to work and gather hilarious memories for the next few months.

So here I am.  I have been here minus Anita for the past six days, piecing together the place and becoming accustomed to hardly hearing an English word spoken (unless it´s an annoyingly American sort of ‘Oh look Harry, that’s the Sagrada Familia.  Apparently it’s really famous or something.  Harry, what’s paella? Is it icky?  You know I can’t stomach shellfish.  Oh Harry, my fanny pack and giant map have gone missing!  Our granola bars were in there.  What will we snack on now?’).

I’m working in one of the more odd places I could find myself, a sports bar on the main stretch of the city.  Odd as I never ever know who is playing what, with who, when or why and it will always come around to a grand final or world cup and I wouldn’t have even known that the said sport’s season had even begun!  But the place is constantly filled with mildly pissed tourists splashing their beers and hollering loudly at the tv (and occasionally, the staff) so that’s cause for amusement every hour of the shift.  My next stop is finding a flat – like the rest of Barcelona it seems – which I can’t wait for.  I want more than the floor space under a creaky single bed to call my own!

Though I can barely comprehend Spanish (the Spanish win over me for super fast talking) and my contributions to conversations are basically recognising numbers or locations, agreeing/disagreeing and saying see you later or yes I understand.  But I remain hopeful that it will make sense soon.  It’s ridiculous though, as there are 18 different forms for each verb, encompassing tense and who is the subject.  So I have my work cut out for me.  It’s like being back in year five or something!

Living in Barcelona means many things.  Being amazed everytime you look at the Sagrada Familia.  Sitting in plazas nursing a coffee and laughing at the tourists who continually fall down what to you is a very obvious  stone step.  Being chastised for beginning a night out at the ungodly early hour of 1am.  Watching old men ride bikes while smoking cigars.  Speaking Spanish.  Mildly understanding Catalan.  Living near mountain and sea. 

Ultimately, however, it means becoming accustomed to being harassed in the street by night.  Or day.  Or twilight.  It means walking along with you bag under your jacket and your bank card stuffed down your bra (the theory being that you would surely notice if someone stole it from there!).  It means listening to the *ppsssssssttt* sound that emits from the mouths nearby leering street urchins (a sound which apparently is translates as ’Hi obviously naive foreigner, why don’t you come and talk to us a bit?’, but really, just sounds like someone rudely calling their dog to them).

Last night, on the way to meet a friend, I experienced one such – mild – encounter.  A car, slowing down beside me, and the driver emiting the now well-known chalkboard-scraping *pppsssstttt*.  I ignored him.  A further *ppsssssstttt* combined with an ‘Oye!’ made me turn to see what was up with this dude.  The Colombian, as I believe him to have been, wanted directions to Plaza del Sol; a plaza which any idiot, no matter how drunk, or how new to Barcelona, would know wasn’t in El Raval.  He seemed unimpressed that I ‘couldn’t direct him through this suburb very well, as the streets are mostly one-way’ and dismissed my directions from the main road completely.  He wanted, it seemed, to talk about my eyes. 

‘And so…go along that road and ask someone there for…’

‘Yeah, yeah.  Do you know what?  Your eyes are full of negative energy.’

I look at him incredulously.  I was in the middle of negotiating direction-giving in Spanish, which is something that I should never be trusted to do in English.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yeah, the white part isn’t clear.  It’s not clean.  It’s full of negative energy, it’s really bad.’

‘Well, that’s just excellent for me then isn’t it?’

It was clear that he didn’t get sarcasm.  He looked at me blankly.  A little maliciously.

‘I was in Brazil, they taught me how to recognise and clear negative energy.  And yours is terrible’

It was my time to look at him blankly.  Even a little maliciously.  Of ourse I didn’t look like a bowl of icecream.  I was talking to a weirdo alone at 11pm, hands gripping my bag lest he grab it and speed off.

‘I’ll do it for you.’

‘Ahhh.  No thanks.’

‘Why not?  Nothing weird.  You did me a favour, and I could return it…’

I was already walking away….

This isn’t much, but did make me question the motives of road side medicine men in general.  In Thailand several years ago, I was travelling with a friend when we came across a small, tanned, leathery fellow in Koh Phangnan.  This island, famed for the monthly Moon Festival, is a veritable mixed bag of odd sorts, and so the site of this guy wasn’t anything particularly special.  However, his brand of introduction was.

He was, it seemed, a medicine man.  The details elude me somewhat (I had participated in a vodka bucket or two before meeting him, and years have passed since), but the essence was that he was able to remove bad spirits and energy from people.  A lengthy sort of self-promotion followed, through which we learned that he had a room (I guess we could call it a practice) conveniently nearby.  Ahhh.  No thanks.  We were far from home, counting our little bahts and not willing to spend then on the questionable skills of a leathery medicine man sitting on a rock in downtown Koh Phagnan.

Fast forward a week.  Anita and I had met the group we’d be travelling to the Golden Triangle with, and are enjoying our obiligatory pre-journey bonding party night on Bangkok’s Khaosan Road…when who do we run into, but Mr Medicine.  While our new friends wait nearby, we ask him a few questions of the small-talk variety ‘How’d you get here so fast?’ ‘Why are you here?’ ’Where’d you get that tasty looking fried banana dessert you’re holding?’.  Soon however, he steers the conversation towards his profession, and almost before we’d had a moment to digest what he’s saying, let alone reply, he’d offered us a free mini-on-the-spot-bad-spirit-removal-test, lept over, clamped his mouth over mine and proceeded to suck an entire lungful of air out of my pulmonaries.  A 3-second eternity later, with the leathery man removed, I was left to recompensate my breathlessness (literally), by quickly breathing in a mouthful of sooty Thai air.  The next two minutes alerted us to the fact that the rest of his treatments occured in private, and would involve not only clothing removal, but the placement of withered hands in areas where the sun doesn’t shine .  A German lady had thoroughly enjoyed his treatment, we were assured.

We declined.

We never saw him again, though if he did managed to suck anything evil out of my lungs, I’d like a word or two with it…

Some friends started a trend wherein each would write 25 random things about themselves, and send it to 25 friends.  Such a task in boredom and self absorption actually took longer to complete than I imagined, making me wonder if there were even 25 things to say about myself!  Knowing that it was an exercise in vanity didn´t stop me having a go however….

25 RANDOM

1. I have only recently (as in, during the past two weeks), learned how to make good rice. Before, it was either gluggy and gross, or one mass of charred grain. I had asked many people and received as many different methods so as to almost drive me insane. Suffice to say, current rice cooking successes are making me very happy… 2. I cannot roll my ‘Rs’, despite living in a country wherein a Romantic language is spoken, and this skill is necessary and intrinsic to the hotness of the words. 3. Because they’re easy to wear, and everyone likes a little breeze, I declared last summer the ‘Summer of the Dress’. This proved to be so awesome that summer ‘09 will bear the same name, only be better. 4. If a room is completely dark, I will sleep so deeply and will simply not wake up until someone roughly pushes me. Being left alone, sleeping and unpushed in a darkened room may prove to be my untimate undoing… 5. Waking me up is very difficult indeed. 6. I really want to learn Japanese and am peeved, though find it appropriate, that the only sentence from school I remember is ‘Would you like a drink?’ O nomimono wa, ikaga desuka?? 7. When motivated, I will give absolutely everything until the project ends, at which point I suddenly crumple, lying on the ground like a shivering foetus. When not motivated, or when in the beginning stages of being waaaaaay out of my comfort zone, I freeze a little. But I just need good expresso or a strong hug to get up again. 8. I think I could happily be a student for ever, accumulating a great number of degrees in differing areas and a giant swollen cerebellum to match. 9. I believe coffee to be the juice of the gods. 10. I was named after M*A*S*H character BJ Hunnicutt´s unseen daughter. 11. ‘I’m Yours’ by Jason Mzrak (or however you might spell his name) will always make me smile, despite others believing it to be corny dribble. 12. My second toes on both feet are longer than my big toes, even more so on my right foot. 13. South America is calling me. 14. I’m fairly physically uncoordinated. 15. If made President, I would introduce a ‘travel and lifestyle’ grant for all young people. Like, a year’s wage to fund an overseas jaunt to any country for any purpose before that age of 30. 16. I hope that becoming President wouldn´t make me drunk with power. 17. Upon stepping into a train or Metro, I will immediately become really sleepy. I think it’s all the warmth and rocking. This makes me think that I must have been a great unborn baby, sleeping the entire 9 months before birth. 18. I was a little obsessive compulsive as a child. Went through a phase of having to touch things with both my left and right hand. Also had one of those touch lights that goes through three degrees of light intensity when you touch the gold parts. That provided lots of stress I can tell you, as of course, I had a certain number of times that I had to touch it. I didn’t actually believe anything awful would happen if I didn’t touch it though. All this, has thankfully passed…. 19. I’m so very, very indecisive. Give me options and I’m lost, as all the pros gleam like new tins of Milo, and I don’t know which metallic lid to whack with my spoon first making that delicious *pop* sound. But once sold, I’m so sold. 20. I like the concept of tattoos, but doubt very much that I’ll ever actually get one. It’s not the where (up the spine), so much as the whaaaaaaaat would I doooooo?? 21. I have three brothers, and always wanted a sister. When I was at primary school, my very catholic friends started praying that my little brother would be born a girl, even after science had proved that impossible. Mum and Dad took me to Mt Cootha, feed me silly on a pizza and Coke twilight picnic, and broke the XY news. I bawled. 22. Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is, but I do actually, truthfully, really, truly think it’s all going to be just fine. 23. Having realised that the world is geared and designed for those with computers, I’ve decided that I must partake of the convenience of owning one. Mac it shall be. Money shall be sought. 24. Being almost 180cm, I never learned how to walk in heels as I look positively giant when encased in them. Yet, as they’re hot, I occasionally try. Yesterday was one such occasion. I went out clubbing with friends in heeled boots and towered a head and sometimes shoulders over the small Spaniards who habit these parts. It was simultaneously fascinating and off-putting. 25. I totally wrote these 25 things over four sessions.

Last Sunday night, I was walking to work in the rain (my Metro ticket had recently expired, but that´s beside the point!) when I was alerted to a strange, uncomfortable, even unpleasant sensation in my shoe.  No more that a few seconds interlude was needed to identify the source as being a healthy dose of sludgy, street-born rain water, seeping ever so carefully through a hole in my boot´s sole, that up until that point I hadn´t known existed.  Carefully staunching the cry that attempted to escape my lips (these were not only boots, but old friends…black, slouched, pointed-toe wonders that had cost me $8, 5 years earlier and survived international travel, snow and the physical attacks of small children), I wandered on, feigning a sort of dry-socked comfort and dodging the night’s first wave of battered, drunken tourits.  Arriving at work and changing my old friends for a pair of grubby sneakers, I wondered if I should thank the winter rain for alerting me to the fact that my boots had succumed; or curse it for allowing that information to penetrate my happy relationship with them.  This was not the first time the rain had advised me of a well-formed hole in a loved pair of shoes; and the fact that the first pair lost to me were still sitting in my wardrobe 18 months after their demise (so unenthusiastic was I to part with them), seemed only to suggest that my mourning period for these boots would be long indeed.  Friends (particularly those whose finances, like mine, limit them to bargain shopping) suggested becoming close friends with Gaffer tape.  But, as my boots’ lining carked it several months ago, I’m wasn´t convinced that the supposed thousand uses of our friend Gaff could stretch to breathing life back into footware so clearly past its prime.

Why is it that sometimes we don´t realise that a situation, relationship or hope is flawed until rudely awakened to the fact?  Why don´t we look closer, harder, more frequently, more fervently?  Through  earlier inspection, we may repair boots before holes develop; remember that we have a saucepan on the stove before the meal burns; maintain good relationships with friends before their previously cute idiosyncracies become itching annoyances; or with partners before potential cheaters succumb to temptation.  Or, could looking closer, harder, more frequently, more fervently be construed as obsession, as unhealthy…as an inability to throw up your hands and just go with the flow, seeing  how things work out.

For now, my black, slouched, pointed-toe wonders sit next to my zippy sky-blue Converse in the bottom of my wardrobe; my toast is still bread; and my friends’ idiosyncracies remain cute.

1)  Warm tea may as well just be dirty water.

2)  The world looks a little better upside down.

3)  The first few seconds of running and the feeling that you could keep going forever make up for the pain and blisters that will enevitably follow.

4)  When feeling a little emo about the world, get yourself up to the top of the nearest mountain, hill, building, or step ladder; as with height comes perspective.

5)  A day with 100 things on the to do list is easier to face than a day with 1.

6)  Belly laughing is an essential pleasure not to be thought of as a treat.

7)  Roast potato with all manner of vegetables and cheese kicks arse.

8)  It would be great to have the internet at home.

9)  $8 for a pair of boots that lasted 5 years is a bargain in the truest sense of the world, and mourning their passing is justified and right.

10)  Telling and hearing the truth is as difficult as pulling a fluffy toy through a barbed wire fence…but must be told and heard regardless.

It´s been a week since I arrived back in Barcelona, and I can finally almost claim competence in the art of rugging one’s self up against the cold.  Though I don’t do it as well as the almost spherical pidgeons (so fluffed up are they) that I walk past each day, I can now leave my front door without immediately gasping and hopping straight back over the threshold, ice-block hands sheltering in my satchel.  I arrived back to a naked city (in the sense of course of leafless trees rather than clothesless people!) whose criss-crossed streets seemed suddenly wider, pinker, emptier, after having been stripped of the canopies provided by their avenues of straight trees.

After the culture-slamming shock of exchanging 35 degree humidity and broad Australian accents for 8 degrees and a reminder that I would have to work on my Spanish, I retreated indoors for a day or two to recover from jetlag and psych myself up for the job hunt that promised to chase my curriculum-laden self through the streets for the next few weeks.  This served my need for rest well, and many an odd dream played through my mind…but upon awakening, my status as an informed citizen of the city proved somewhat questionable.  Having emerged bleary-eyed from my hibernation, I was rather embarassed to discover the extent of my ignorance regarding the wretched weather Barcelona – or really, Spain – had been suffering…and will here admit that yes, I was actually informed of the howling gale outside my window not by my own eyes, no, but by an sms sent to me by my father in Australia.  I was sleeping deeply you see, and sleeping deeply is something that I do very, very well.  Very well.  In normal circumstances; let alone flying and waiting and eating and scratching and stretching on delayed flights for 45 hours straight.  I returned said sms with another, whose relaxed air (‘yes, of course, the weather’s fine, no i’m not hurt, why should I be?’) breathed a sort of  confused, yet nonchalant unflappability which continued until I turned on the news that night to learn that four children outside the city had died when the small stadium in which they were playing baseball in fell on them under the pressing magnitude of 200km/hr winds.

This is a city in which it’s easy to forget ones self …never more so than when you have just arrived back in it.  It’s an anthill, a rabbit warren in those images’ realest sense.  A seething mass of humanity surviving, sometimes only just, in a series of vastly different, yet strangely identical neighbourhoods.  Tiny streets divide crumbling buildings upon which precariously pegged fluroescent washing hangs on for dear life.  Old ladies walk in twos, the same fur coats and slash of red lipstick that once attracted their long dead husbands still adorning their faces and bodies as they did 50 years ago.  The language is screamed, shot out of mouths like metallic, verbal bullets.  Bottles of beer sit finished upon terrace tables at 8am, not from the night before, but from the morning just entered.  I’ve returned, but it seems that my physical self, or my…something…is still following me; perhaps still sitting, waiting and wondering on the 6 hour delayed flight that brought the rest of me here.  I hope that it – whatever it is that is yet to arrive - is making itself at home on that plane: ordering itself another (this time unecessary) bottle of sparkling, going nuts with its teeny-tiny personal television and laughing quietly at the compartmentalised dinner it’s being served…because when it arrives here…I’m going to need it shiny, polished, glittery golden and ready to go.