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.