So long, Starsucks

See that thing Alan's pointing to. It's our very own wifi antenna. Actually, we're just borrowing it, but it's made our lives soooo much better. No more hauling our laptops every morning to get our free wireless connection at the Starsucks on Las Ramblas, where they try to upsell you on the 8 euro caramel-whipped cream macchiatto when all you really want is a simple espresso with a touch of foam, no more screaming teenagers sitting next to us in said Starsucks, no more too-loud, (un)easy listening disrupting our train of thought, no more getting caught sneaking in one's own bottle of water or banana, no more having to punch in a numerical code every time you want to use the restroom. I used to think Starsucks was OK once in awhile, but seven days in a row and I've had enough!

Not going to Starsucks isn't the only reason I'm happy. Back home, I always longed to be less wired. But spending over a week without reliable phone or email or anything has made it clear that I'm clearly not meant to go off the grid for long periods of time. In fact, as soon as we got online I felt more human. It's weird, but true.

--JENN

Espana from the inside

Alan with chapstick in our apartment
It's been colder than a dead conejo in Barcelona the past few days. Rain's been coming down in sheets and the chilly air goes straight to the bone. After a few hours of exploring under these conditions, we tend to retreat to our cozy little apartment. Although it's not quite the same as being out and about, I find that one can experience quite a bit of the culture and ambiance of Spain from behind closed doors.

Street Sounds
We live on a very noisy one-lane street! The symphony begins very early in the morning, as the rumbling of delivery trucks fills the narrow cavern between the tall stone apartment buildings (many of them, including ours we suspect, former monasteries). After that a small army of men roam about the neighborhood banging on orange propane containers. They wheel stacks of these things around the uneven stone streets on rusted metal hand trucks, which causes me to wonder why I don't hear more loud explosions. Every now and then a little old lady will poke a perfectly coifed gray head out the window and yell down to one of these guys, "Si senor." The children here squeal all the way to and from school and at lunch time as well. It's not uncommon to find kids playing (loudly) outside unsupervised as late as 11 at night.

By night, a whole different set of sounds erupt from the street below. There's a university nearby, a transvestite club next door, and a popular bar across the street. Every fifteen minutes or so one of these institutions belches out a loud group of revelers onto the street. Last night, massive thunder and lightning added to the excitement. After each peel of thunder, came uproarious cheers. Don't these people care that they're getting drenched? After what seems like an eternity of drunken exclaiming on the sidewalk, they all hop onto their motorized mosquitoes with megaphones (aka mopeds) and head noisily home.

Sleep Patterns
During my first private Spanish lesson yesterday, I explained that I usually get up a las ochos (8 AM), an hour that has caused me no small amount of Puritanical guilt back in the States. Upon hearing this my teacher Paula's eyes grew very wide. "Es muy temprano!" she exclaimed. Apparently in Spain, one does not rise until 9 AM at the very earliest, which of course allows one to stay up until 3 AM every night. Jet lag seems to have landed me right in the Spanish zone. I don't think I've fallen asleep before 2 AM (see street noise above) since I've gotten here, and rising at 10 AM has felt completely natural. As I type this, I am just shaking off the last drowsy vestiges of my afternoon siesta.

Fast Good
No, I’m not going to go on and on about food again, except to say there's this awesome place in the market where you can buy Spanish side dishes, take them home, and serve them up as though you knew what they were called. This is pure brilliance.

Delightful Duche
Our shower has more nozzles than a Boeing 747. It is, in fact, a European massage shower. Switch to one setting, and a warm downpour drenches you. Hit another and you can use the portable nozzle to get at those hard to reach spots. A third setting is akin to a bidet for your torso. Six sprayers work you over from the shoulders to the hips. Alas, the first thing to come out of these sprayers is very cold and the shower is so small, there's no escape. Over the past couple of days, we've seen quite a bit of Gothic art depicting torture of the saints, and I for one think this feature of our shower should be added to the cannon. After the blast of cold, you're transported straight to heaven.

--JENN

Dispatch from his Rappness

the view from our apartment balcony

It’s one of the world’s great cities, we’ve been here for days, but at first a lot of it was devoted to things that concern continuity from our lives in the States. Namely, sleep and computers. Not like we are on the other side of the planet, more an ear-to-nose geographic relation, but it’s taking way too long to adjust to the sleep cycle. We keep wanting to get up early…and we do…around five or so. Then try to get back to sleep and do so after a few hours, finally rousing around eleven. Good thing much is still to be experienced well into the night.

And not to say that our lives are now largely defined by online connectivity…but it’s been frustrating. Our landlord does have wi-fi, but it reaches up to the threshold of his apartment, feet from our door. He’s tried a number of solutions, including a Linksys amplifier that seemed like a great idea, but it had a number of impenetrable steps to it as well…he ended up returning it. Now he’s going to call the guy who wired the apartment to get him to extend the line…we dread the process, in that it could easily take more weeks. We’re getting sick of Starbucks (free node) and the skeevy internet place a few doors down. Great that we’re not indoors all day online…but there’s downside. Jenn has a book review to file, wants to email friends, post more regularly; no can do. There are tons of things that I see and hear casually all around me, and I want to look them up in the instant, but it’s impossible.

Easy internet access is what I didn’t have when I studied in Spain 15 years ago; I made great friends, learned the city well, but in retrospect, my studies would have been *so much easier. And it’s like that again here; looking up common Catalan phrases, learning more about the roiling political situation, translating “fennel” into Spanish (more on that)—all would be available at the flick of the wrist. Would that it were so.

Shaheen Bros. market across the street provides the basics, and then some. Like a lot of people in the neighborhood, they’re Pakistani, so we can get flatbread, fermented milk (I think it’s kefir, but it comes in an unappetizing plastic bag), and harisa if we so desire. There’s also a five-and-dime a few doors down, and everyday I go with a shopping list, to supplement our sparely stocked apartment: café coratdo glasses (also good for whiskey and cooking salt), paper towels, clothes hangers, key rings, shoe horn, slippers, etc. The only patrons I ever see beside me are old matrons. The shop is staffed by several bored teenagers, stationed dutifully at intervals up the aisles. They’re probably family, but when I’m there, they don’t speak. The already packed but highly regimented stock on the shelves is further adjusted, a few centimeters here, there.

The task now is to normalize (which means get the wi-fi up) and get out of this apartment. Not just Starbucks to send emails. Not just the Gràcia neighborhood to find La Casa de Apple to insure that using a mere US-Euro electrical adapter won’t fry my machine. We got to the cathedral two nights ago, and the underground (Roman ruins) tour last night, but we haven’t made a proper, aimless, what-time-is-it sort of paseo. We know the road to the Ramblas well. But as for the clubs and bars around--SenSes, Burdel 47, and Bar Muy Buenas, all within thirty feet of our building--we haven’t yet had the pleasure.

My command of Castellano is coming back, but still all over the place. I tried to think of how to ask for two salmon steaks from one of the dozen of fishmongers at the Boqueria last night—the dictionary (which is never on me, but I consult habitually after returning to the flat) just says “bistek” for steak—as in there is no other kind of steak but beef. Slice—what is slice? Not yet in the vocab. You end up pointing to the half fish carcass and making the saw gesture with your hand. I thought I was past this. Fennel—not even in the dictionary. The grocer said it to me, but it’s gone. I write enough random stuff in the notebook, but I can’t have my face in it constantly…But at the least, I am reacquainting myself with some odd and beautiful words. I leave you with them, for now:
Relámpago
Tonterías
Muchedumbre
Tenebroso

--ALAN

Blending in!

When shopkeepers address us, they seem to assume we're Spanish. Upon responding, several have then asked if we're French. When we've finally let on we're from Los Estados Unidos, they've seemed surprised. We'd like to think it's our fabulous scarves and Alan's excellent Spanish that make us seem oh so Euro, though perhaps it's just our lack of baseball caps and sneakers.

I made the mistake of reviewing Dr. Andrew Weil's "Eight Weeks to Optimum Health" and Dr. Walter C. Willett's "Eat Drink and Be Healthy" before departing on this trip. I thought I could somehow psyche myself into eating sensibly while here in Spain, perhaps even once and for all ditch the twenty-odd pounds that seem to hunt me down every time I manage to lose them. Silly, silly plan.

The forbidden processed wheat flour is ubiquitous here. Ask for whole grains and you might as well be saying, "Senor, could you please make it rain frogs?" (Frogs are "ranas," in espanol, appropriately.) One may drink alcohol, but only in moderation. Si, si, but moderation here is defined as less than a bottle a day. Hiccup. Vegetables! The Barcelonans do seem to know from "verduras," but the ones I had today were served up in a stew of melted butter dotted with bits of blood sausage and I don't know what that other meat was, but damn if it wasn't really tasty. Red meat is apparently only to be consumed occasionally, advise Weil and Willett. Alas, if you are what you eat, then based on the last two days, I am one ginormous cured pig leg. (Ooh, but isn't pork the other white meat? Ha! Take that, fish-pushers!) Avoid solidified fats, they warn. Well, let's just say that the moaning coming from our flat on Carrer Carme tonight was not the sound of amorous passion between man and wife but between man and manchego. And I won't even get into the delicious slab of barely-dead beef I had at the nearby Silenus during our celebratory post-flight dinner. Let's just say, thank-moo god for slaughtered cows, and leave it at that.

I have comforted myself with the idea that in Spain the main meal of the day is lunch, a reversal of order the experts would most assuredly approve of. But would they also applaud the fact that it's midnight and we just had our not-so-light dinner, during which the aforementioned frisky manchego and his ruddy-faced amigo, the 3.5 euro tempranillo, were our most-welcome guests? I think not.

The good news and the bad news is that we are a few stumbles away from the Mercat de la Boqueria Sant Josep (pictured above), which is according to our fine guidebook "Style city Barcelona": "the best place to buy fresh produce in Barcelona." Indeed, it is a cornucopia of healthy delights, and our little fridge is now stocked with escarole, brussel sprouts, broccoli. Still, let's not kid ourselves. The cheese and the meat came from the same place. They looked so lonely in their refrigerated glass cage. What could we do but invite them to join us?

There is hope. Alan and I walked all over this city looking for "la casa de Apple" (that's the Apple Computer store, lest you think we were seeking a highly recommended red, fibrous fruit), so that we could make sure said machine wouldn't blow up the second we plugged it into the European plug with its higher voltage. I did a full hour of yoga in our flat today and have located several Ashtanga yoga studios, which I fully intend to patronize, language barriers and all. If nothing else, our book "Culture Shock!" declares that the Spanish diet "is healthier than that of any nation," which I take to mean I can eat whatever I please and still make it out of this place alive. (And thanks Brian and Ken for the book!)

Oh yes, and we arrived safely, we're here, and welcome to our trip blog! Alan and I hope to keep you up on our adventures at regular intervals. There's a wee matter of our wireless access not being quite up to snuff, but surely this can be resolved. In the meantime, who's hungry?

--JENN