Bright Lights, Big City

¡BARCELONA!

I made it, and it was no easy feat. For as hard as it was to get here, and for as different as this place is, I might as well have traveled to another country. I knew that things were going to be different here before I even left Sevilla. There was some confusion regarding my arrival date, and unanswered questions about the keys to my new house. Well, I´ll be danged if Enforex in Barcelona didn´t have a 24 hr Hotline, and IN ENGLISH, no less. The only thing in Sevilla that ran 24 hrs a day was the horse and buggy station.

Getting here turned out to be a massive ordeal. First of all, I´ve got too much stuff. Last thursday I mailed myself a package (some souveniers, some spanish books I´ve now outgrown, all my undershirts and all my ´...for Dummies´books, untouched). Didn´t matter, I still had about 35 kilos of luggage. Converting that to English measurements, my luggage weighed A THOUSAND POUNDS. Add to the luggage problem the traveling with another guy (Benoit, hereinafter Ben, or Frenchie, or Lance) who also had too much luggage.

And just for funsies, sprinkle a bit of ¨we have no idea where we are going, nor how to get there.¨ shake the mixture vigoursly, bake in the Spanish Summer for four hours, and you´ve got me, scarily mimicking Ken´s experience in Barcelona, wandering about in a new and strange city. We ended up flying on Vueling Air (Motto: We make Southwest Airlines C Boarding Group feel like British Airways World Class) On Vueling, you have to PAY for your soda and crappy pack of peanuts. Once we got to Barcelona, we had to take a bus to a subway, a subway to a plaza, and then had to look at 5 maps and ask one kind soul where a street with 3 different names was. And all of that, just to meet someone to give us our keys to our house, which was another cab ride away.

The flight was 80 minutes long. The door to door time was about 8 hrs. I was hurting the next day. I hadn´t been that sore since I moved into my current house, and my neck froze up for two weeks and I walked around with clenched teeth muttering ¨No, I´m not ´doing the robot´i´m just paralyzed from the waist up¨ By Monday, I was moving more like a G.I. Joe than a Star Wars figure (elbows? why?) but my neck is still kinda stiff.

But whatever, the apartment is great. Its newly renovated, and I mean NEWLY. They just installed the second bathroom and washing machine yesterday. I´ve got a shelf in the fridge all to my self (first purchase? ICE and Frosted Flakes) and better TV reception (although, the TV is still the same size as the one I had first year in law school. there is a chronic shortage of big tv´s in this country, i wonder if Best Buy knows this). Benoit agrees that this apartment is much nicer than his last one, ESPECIALLY since, as of yesterday, he doesn´t have to share a room with me anymore. Poor bast-rd didn´t realize he´d traded old and busted for new and impossibly loud. (I think I just gave Mike ´Nam flashbacks, and I bet he just broke out in a cold sweat, sorry bro.).

School is a different world as well. In Sevilla, the school was in a converted aristocrat´s house, complete with winding staircases, enclosed terrace, ivy running down the walls, and colorful tile rising up from the floor to meet it in the middle. A/C was on a room by room basis, and was usually off. Sevilla only had one remote control for all the A/C units and harried teachers and panting students would go room to room looking for it. I also taught my teachers how to get --just a little-- more juice out of the rusty batteries by rubbing them back and forth quickly...judging from their reaction, you would have thought I´d brought back the sun. There were maybe 10 class rooms in total, each named after a different character from Don Quixote. Since the A/C was generally off, classes were taught with the windows and wooden shutters thrust open. Our earnest and funny teachers shouted over barking dogs and mothers taking wayward daughters to task in the streets below.

Classes were more like a social gathering, with the teachers openly disparaging the text and preferring to squeeze all of the gossip from our foreigner bodies. The teachers were our friends, and by the end, they were going out with us, if only to better understand why we were always late for first period.

On Planet Barcelona, the Enforex School is nestled between a 4 star hotel and government offices. The school has a long, neon lit, opaque glass and shiny metal foyer and blond wood, free floating stairs in between the three floors. The class rooms are numbered, and I´ve lost count of how many there are. There is central (freaking) A/C and nutty exterior shades that automatically (and I´m pretty sure completely randomly) move up and down, shading the classrooms for 5-37 minutes at a time.

The place reeks of business, and the teachers follow suit. No dilly dallying in this school. Our teachers are focused and commited to the text. Ben complains that it ¨doesn´t feel like vacation¨but I have to admit I kind of like it. Reminds me of home. But then again, so does the Metro here, which has the exact same graphic design for its maps as the DC Metro. I would not be surprised to board the L1 today, bound for Sagrada Familia, accidentally miss my stop, and exit at New Carrolton.

All in all, I´m really happy with the move. I pretty much was from the second I arrived in my apartment. Saturday night, Ben and I went out looking for some food and stumbled across Plaza Espana. Milling around Plaza Espana were more people than in the entire city of Sevilla. As soon as we finished our first loop of the place, we were greeted, as if on cue, by a spectacular water and light show, set to music. We sat on the ground amongst the blinking trinket selling set, drank a couple of Estrellas and shook our heads.

When had we gotten to the future?
Who are all these people?
(And, after a few more cervezas)
Where do they all go to the bathroom?

RANDOM THOUGHTS

**There is no blue tooth technology in Spain. If someone appears to be talking to themself in the street, they probably are.
**I miss quoting things, nobody here gets ¨okay, no deer for a month¨or ¨do you have anything besides mexican food?¨
**I am going to spoil the surprise now and tell everyone what they are getting as souveniers: .01 and .02 euro coins. I´m bringing them all home, because here, I can´t even give those tiny b-stards away.
**Why do they show dubbed A Team reruns in Barcelona? That show shouldnt have been on network tv 20 years ago, forget about now, and in a foreign land. Its still kind of fun to watch though. As Ben and I sat on the couch yesterday watching BA Barakus duck tape a machine gun to the side of a truck, to which Face had welded metal plates for protection, Ben turned to me and said ¨Siempre las mismas cosas¨ Couldn´t have said it better myself.