Wally Lewis´ Match Preparation

My muscles are a bit sore today - I played my first "competative football" in a long time yesterday, and my body wants to know what happened to the vacation. One of Kiko´s housemates, Loki, was playing in a 5-a-side competition yesterday afternoon, and he invited me along.

Our team was a bit of an old-man team, with an average age of around 30, and it didn´t help that during our break between games we had a couple of beers in a bar near the pitch. Some players lit up cigarettes at half time. The other teams we played against were drinking coke and waiting for their voices to break. We got beaten in both games but gave a good account of ourselves, and there a few flashes of genius and past glories. Today we are going to do it all again, and hopefully come out on top in one of our games.

La Casa De Placido

After the game I got a lift to Placido´s place. Placido is a friend of Kiko´s who lives in Barcelona, and he was cooking dinner when I arrived. I was treated to dinner, cheese, bread, fruit and beer. I was one gratefull guest, particularly seeing as how I don´t know Placido besides a brief introduction from Kiko.

I have been in Spain for a week and a half now, and I have not had to pay for a hotel room yet (well, I did pay to put my tent up for one night, but I like camping so i won´t count it). I have received the best hospitality from the Spanish folks that I have met. They have been very big on "mi casa es su casa", so much so that I feel a little bit embaressed to be treated so well. I have to keep reminding myself of the good times that I have shown guests in Australia.

Kiko finishes work this week, and we will be driving down to Andaluccia in the south on Friday. I am going to be staying at Placido´s place until then so that I can have a good look around Barcelona.

Hablas Espanol?

One of the dinner guests last night worked for Nokia in Finland, and hence had very good English. It took me a while to start talking to him, even though we had so many nerdy programming interests in common, because I have become very good at listening and not saying much.

Kiko speaks decent English, but all of his friends have English that is on the same level as, or slightly better than my Spanish. Hence I have had to make a real effort to start learning Spanish, which is a good thing, though it can be very frustrating. It is terrible when you think of a good joke, or an interesting point, and cannot even begin to express it to the people around you.

I am starting to get by now, expanding my vocab and learning the different tenses (the hardest thing about Spanish is learning to conjugate all of the different tenses, it is a bit of a mess). Give me another couple of weeks and I will be much more comfortable. By then I will have been joined by Jamie, so I will be able to chatter away in English again... which may or may not be a good thing.

Camping

Last weekend we went camping in the mountains, near the Pirenese, with some rock-climbing buddies of Kiko. It was my first camping in ages... and it was fantastic to be out in nature again. It was also my first time sport climbing - that is climbing with ropes and put gear into bolts that have been strategically placed in the rock. Some of the climbs were fairly high, but I hardly noticed as I was concentrating too hard on not falling, and on my burning forearms. There is going to be plenty more where that came from over the next month or so, and I can´t wait.

Hola

The Wrong Foot

I sat down on the Air Ryan flight from Dublin to Madrid, and started to take my boots off. I was interrupted by the elderly Spanish gentleman next to me, who was clearly very distressed. He was pointing and waving at my shoes, yelling for the steward, and firing rapid Spanish at me.

But sir, I don´t have a bomb in my shoes, and I would appreciate if you spoke more slowly please, my Spanish is not very good. After plenty of arm waving, a distressed steward, and some assistance from the embarresed Spanish girl on the other side of the isle, it was determined that it wasn´t a bomb in my shoes that worried him, but their potential to smell. Now, I don´t have the best smelling feet at times, but I had fresh socks on, clean feet and I hadn´t worn these boots for three months, so they weren´t likely to be stinky. I kept them on though, in the interests of Australian-Spanish relations.

Madrid

When my flight arrived I made my way across the airport to the Metro (underground) station. I took my dictionary up to a ticket vending machine, and found what I thought would be a ticket to my destination in central Madrid. But something was wrong, it was far too cheap, only two euros.
"Excuse me, is that the price for the train to town?"
"It is, I am sorry. Because you are at the airport it is expensive, normally at ticket anywhere in Madrid is one euro."

Crickey mate, where I have just been this is a bargain.

Slack Bugger

So, not been the best blog poster of late have I? Pleny of ground to cover, literally and metaphorically in this post. I will do this quickly and painlessly...

A Sweet End

My much hoped for Irish visa materialised when I was in Liverpool, but I decided to stay a bit longer in Godalming so that I could save enough money to go to Spain without having to find further work in Ireland. Work was, as usual, the same old thing. Get up late, bolt brekky, start round midday, finish sometime around midnight and finish of a couple of beers, then bed.

Of course it wouldn´t be me to make it a simple exit. I had a bit of a crush on one of the girls at work, and I thought the feeling was reciprocated. I wasn´t going to do anything about it though, she was my boss. She was leaving too, and her last day was also my last day, and I think that threw the rule book out the window.

So for the last week there was an enjoyable affair and a juicy secret to keep from our workmates.Nobody figured it out, except for Ty, the general manager, who discovered it when he was reviewing the security camera footage one night... but he though it was hilarious. It all came out on Sunday night, which was our going away party.

Rachel was the deputy manager, and most of the staff were a little bit scared of her, particularly the poor Eastern European lads who found her an affront to their misogynistic views. I, on the other hand didn´t find her scary at all - intellegent, funny, good at hi-5s and very attractive. But, the irony is that we were both leaving, so we could start something, and then needed to finish. There was some feeling there, and I have been missing Rachel. Such is the nature of meeting folk when you are a transient wanderer. For once I had a plan, because I had to get to Ireland to sort my visa out and get to Spain to catch my budy Kiko in Barcelona.

Ireland

I spent a night in London, staying with Chops, a Kiwi buddy I met in New Zealand eighteen months ago. Then I got a flight to Dublin, capital of Ireland. I was a wee bit nervous going through immigration - I had put a lot of planning and effort into getting this work visa and there were some holes in my story if they wanted to question me about them. But I was waived through, and told to present myself to the Guiarda National (police) to get my permit. I used my best smile and the good ol´ blue eyes on the girl behind the counter, and my permit was granted without any questions asked.

Setting up a bank account was not so simple. I had payed the same company that organised my visa to set up bank account and a Tax File Number for me... but it turns out that the service consited of giving me copies of all the forms and teaching me how to use a pen to fill out my personal details. So I still don´t have a bank account in Europe, which means that I am carrying all of my savings from England around in an envelope. And English money is fat, if you have 1000 pounds in cash you know about it, unlike 1000 US dollars which looks like enough money for a sandwich and coffee.

I didn´t get up to an awful lot in Dublin. I was saving my funds for Spain, and doing all of the organisation I should have done a month ago. I did make a couple of observations, of course.

• The Irish do one of the best drunk-on-the-street routines. One frequently spots shabby characters with a bottle of something in one hand, and a cup for yer change in the other. If you are lucky he sings.
• Irish girls are pretty, and with that accent they are very dangerous.
• They are a very approachable and friendly folk, just like the Liverpudlians. And their accent is fantastic, I found myself asking people to repeat themselves - not because I didn´t understand, I just wanted to hear them repeat themselves.
  
• The weather is shite.
• The food is shite.
• Guinnes is good, but it stands to reason - all the young Irish men I asked told me that the only thing to do in one´s spare time was go to the pub you realise that they wouldn´t want to spend all of their spare time drinking shite.
  

Paint The Tiles Greeen

I was in Ireland for four nights, and I managed to avoid going out until the last night. Earlier that day I did the tourist thing in Dublin, which included going on the very interesting Guiness factory tour. Not much of one for tours, but this one was "self-guided" (read, no dickhead tour guide and ghee-whizzing Americans) and had a complimentary pint at the end. Over my pint I met a couple of young American girls, and organised to meet up with them at a live music place.

They never turned up, so I had to head in on my own. I ended up meeting half of Ireland and having a wonderful time. I received a half-hour sermon on how to order a pint of Guiness, got tutored on the Irish language, and got propositioned by half a dozen girls (the hair and accent I reckon). As I walked home that night I thought to myself, "I might be able to have a bit of fun when I come back here to work".

Spain

But fun in the sun was calling. I got me a cheap flight on one of those budget airlines that Europe does so well, the ones that are increasing the size of the ozone hole. I went to Madrid, as it was far cheaper to buy the ticket on short notice.

For accomodation in Madrid I decided to give Couchsurfers a go. Coushsurfers is a website where you can organise to stay on people´s spare beds and couches. All you have to do is set up a profile that makes you look like a better guest than you actually are, and ask for some couch space.

Andreas answered my call, and gave me a spot on his floor to setup my sleeping mat, right near the centre of Madrid. He was an experienced host, and pulled out a tourist map and explained all the sights I needed to see, gave me the lowdown on the Metro, explained how to buy hash from the Morrocans in the plaza... all the important things that one needs to know.

I only spent one full day in Madrid, checking out the sights and going to the modern art museum (Museo Sophia). There was some wonderful stuff in the museum, including a whole exhibition where artists had used mathematics based visual tricks and had set up enormous machines that created standing waves in different media. There was also a heap of stuff that left me cold, as one would expect in a modern art gallery, and lots of Picasso and Dali works. I have to say that Picasso is great, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Dali was a bit shit.

On my second night Andreas took me to a tapas bar, then we polished off the best part of a bottle of whiskey, talked codshit and played cards till the wee hours. But that was OK, because in Spain the wee hours are when people seem to kick their nights off. When they are closing the bars and kicking the drunks out in Australia, the bars of Madrid are opening their doors. Apparently the trick is to have a sleep in the early evening. What a difference having an institutionalised afternoon nap (siesta) programmed into your culture makes to the nightlife.

Barcelona

I called Kiko, a very friendly Spanish character that I met climbing in Hampi, and he encouraged me to come to Barcelona and stay. I was on a bus the next day. I had a horrible run getting the buses, and ended up an hour late - which is very unlike me. Luckily being late in Spain isn´t such a big deal.

In Barcelona entered my third subway system in the space of a week (London and Madrid being the others). Scanned the map, then headed for the appropriate platform. I love taking the underground. They have great maps, the best of which is the London Tube map which is one of the best pieces of design I have ever seen. Those tunnels under the ground that move huge amounts of people around very efficiently. People of all shapes and sizes, buskers, people minding their own business, people sizing one-another up, a mess of different languages, colour coded lines, little graphic designs that display what happens to people who don´t stand behind the yellow lines (Brisbane trains have the best, little cartoon characters who get attacked by trains and closing train doors).

I finally met Kiko sometime around midnight, and we drove to the farm he is living on in the hills on the eastern edge of Barcelona. I have been here for the last couple of days, going for a walk down to the nearest town which is on the beach, and wandering up into the mountains to climb some hills and get some views. Today is Friday, so after Kiko finishes work we are going to jump in the car and head off to the mountains. We have some climbing to do.

Plans

Kiko finishes his job on Wednesday next week, then he will be driving to Cadiz in the south, where the summer fun will begin proper. I will be sitting in the passenger seat, enjoying the views with the window down. I am looking forward to this summer. Before then I will spend a couple of days in Barcelona with some friends of Kiko (I don´t plan to stay in any hotels in Spain, that way I can get to know the people and have to improve my Spanish quickly).