Lost At Night

I woke up today, looked out the window and noted that the sun had set. Oh well, there is a first time for everything. It took me twenty eight years, but I finally succeeded in sleeping through an entire day. Last night/this morning was manic at work, and topped off a very busy weekend.

Last night was everybody's favourite night - gay night. A particularly special one, as it is a bank holiday today. An ideal chance to let your hair down, darling. I spent five hours chained to my bar, along with Guilliano the friendly Brazilian bartender (and ladies man par excellence), without a chance to scratch my bum with angry patrons squeeling "tsk, I have been waiting the longest". Jesus, we were overwhelmed. Glasses ran out, vodka ran out, Red Bull ran out (this disgusting shit is people's mixer of choice here), my patience ran out (more than one nasty patron copped a bit of articulate bile).

So, remember, when you are in a bar and it is really busy, take the time to look at how hard the bartender is working and realise how impossible it is for him to keep track of exactly who has been waiting the longest, or for him to pour fifty vodka redbulls a minute. Then avoid the following behaviour

• Yelling. You will be ignored, or told to shut up then ignored.
• Leaning over the bar. You will be told to get back on the right side of the bar, then ignored.
• Waving money. You will be laughed at, then ignored. That money isn't going into my pocket, and I assume that everybody who is lining up has money for their drinks.
• Touch the bartender to get their attention. He or she will get very angry, then make a point of not serving you.
  
• Do not, under any circumstances, try to walk behind the bar. You won't get served for the rest of the night... and you will probably be ignored next Sunday too.
• Don't ask for an Irish coffee, you muppet. And if I make you an Irish coffee on a busy night, I expect a tip.
  

If you want to get your drinks

• Wait patiently, then don't rush when giving your order.
• Give a tip, and you will be served first when you come back. We are not about equal opportunity, and we get minimum wage. Money talks.
  
• If you are an attractive woman, go to the bar that Guilliano is working on, he will make sure that you are well looked after, but beware, he might try to liberate you of your phone number (though he is a strapping lad and you might be well tempted to oblige).
  

Fancy a Drink?

I was waiting for traffic at the busy intersection on Aston Quay, where the bridge from O'Connell Street Crosses The Liffey. I admired the billboard for Cork Dry Gin on the building over the river, then noticed the 1970s style advert for Ireland's Own Baileys Liqueur above it. I recalled The Heineken Building directly behind me, and as I turned to look at it I noticed that the building next to it had huge letters announcing Irish Liver Assurance. A Guinness truck trundled past.

Show Me The Money

I got paid for the first time today. Hooray. It is a bit difficult getting that all important first pay in the bank - because before that can happen one has to organise a PPS number (like a TFN, SSN or whatever-your-country-calls-it number) and then get an account from the bank. Before that one needs a permanent address, but to get a permanent address it helps to get paid so that you can afford the rent.

A Roof

Lucky for me Rory, the wonderful Irish chap who "hosted" me on his couch when I first arrived, wrote a letter claiming that I was his new tennant, thus giving me a permanent address. When I first arrived in Spain I stayed on the couch of somebody that I met through the Couchsurfing website. I didn't need to use the site after that in Spain because Kiko and his friends did a wonderful job of accomodating me.

But arriving in Dublin without any local contacts I got back onto couchsurfing to line up some accomodation and open doors in the new city. I got in touch with Rory, AKA DublinGuy, who offered me a couch to sleep on for a couple of days. We got on great-guns, and I ended up staying for over a fortnight.

He is an ex-priest, now studying law and working as a lawyer. He has stacks of people, over four hundred a year, who stay in his place. When one arrives they get a map, as much local knowledge as they can absorb, and a feed. He is a fountain of information, knowing everything about from how to get a PPS number to finding a good live music venue (just don't ask him for any good vegetarian restaurants). We got on very well, and I just ended up staying until I found a place to stay. He was very busy with work and exams, so I started to take over some of his role as welcoming party to Dublin.

Now I am sleeping on another couch - that if Inez, a Swedish girl that I work with. She and her boyfriend have a great little apartment in Christchurch, just down the road from the Guinness brewery. When I first met her I thought that she was Irish - her Irish accent is perfect, and she understands the Irish vernacular far better than I do.

So, still without proper accomodation - but now I have funds with which to pay a deposit and get a room. Getting a room in Dublin is a nightmare, with far more punters looking for a place than there are places. A friend of mine has just found a place, and offered me a room, so we will see what happens. But it might be that I end up crashing from couch to couch until I finish my time in Dublin. That would certainly see me save lots more money.

Where's The Free Beer?

Versatile Vodka

My second shift at the new job was student night. The school and university year has just kicked off in The Northern Hemisphere after summer holidays, and the city is filled with fresh faced kids starting their higher education. Not that they are too concerned about learning right now; drinking and the opposite sex are getting far more attention than the books.

My workplace has taken it upon itself to fleece the kids of their pocket money by overcharging for horrible vodka (when the back label of a vodka bottle proudly boasts that it is a "versatile vodka" you should be wary). One of my workmates commented that you certainly wouldn't get away with serving that rubbish to the gay crowd on Sunday nights.

But the kids are ignorant. They lap it up. Some of them had that rabbit in headlights look in their eyes as the approached the bar - I had a sneaking suspicion that this was their first bar experience.
"Can we have some free shots?"
I reply with an impassive stare.
"Well?"
"No"
"... how about some 2 euro beer then?"
"No"
"Oh well, it was worth a try."
"No it wasn't."

Some of them are fast learners though, and they figure out that being friendly to bartenders and/or giving small tips gets you much better service (and serves). One might think that they are too poor to give a fifty cent tip, but that tip can guarantee that you get a better-than-50-cent top up next time, ahead of everybody else. And when it is all about getting as much alco-pop for your money as possible that is worth keeping in mind.

Contemporary Cave Living

I met a French guy named Fred on the beach, sometimes labelled Fredo Frog, or Fred the Feelthy Frenchy. A funny guy, who had been living in Granada for the last sixteen years, working as a teacher and organising school trips for children around Andalucia. We struck up a good friendship, and I went to spend the last week-and-a-half at his place in Granada.

He had a place in a little village named Pueblo Monachil, right on the edge of Granada. It is typical of the Moorish Spanish towns that one sees on postcards - whitewashed little houses clinging to either side of a valley with a river tumbling (a colourful verb like tumbling is required) through the middle of town.

Many of the houses, such as Fred's, are extensions of caves that have been dug into the side of the valley. The front of the house is like a normal Spanish house, and the back half is a soundproofed, irregularly shaped and naturally insulated cave dwelling.

The mountains of the Sierra Nevarda - the tallest mountain range in peninsular Spain - tower over the town. It is around thirty kilometers from Fred's house to the top of Los Tres Miles - a line of mountains all over three thousand meters high. I know exactly how far away they are because I had to walk all of the way back from them to Fred's house due to the unwillingness of Spanish people to assist hitch-hikers.

Getting High

on my back and started up the road from Fred's house to spend a couple of nights in the mountains - the first time in some real hills since my adventures in Nepal. I spent the first hour working hard to climb the hill, cursing every car that wouldn't give me a lift, and stopping under every fig tree to gorge myself on fresh figs. I finally got a lift from and English guy who had just bought land in the area. We had a good chat, and he took me to the top of the first rise, from where I could make my way to the main road up the mountain.

Once on the main road I found it easy to get a ride from a jovial German fellow (note that none of my rides were from Spaniards) who was test driving for Volkswagen. The road to the top of the sierra is the highest road in Europe, and as used by all of the European car manufacturers for testing their new engines. I lost count of the number of prototypes that I saw driving up and down the mountain. The prototypes were covered in big blag bags so that one couldn't see what make or design the car was, and they looked fairly sinister racing up and down the twisting mountain roads.

The road cut out at 2500 meters, and from then on I had to start climbing on foot. Last time I was at that altitude I had worked my way up to that altitude slowly on foot and had been in much better shape. This time I got a ride to the top, and wasn't much chop after some months of fairly epic idleness on the beach and in England. My body, and in particular my lungs, let me know what a silly idea that was. Still, I managed to get myself to the top of the ridge that runs along the range, and setup camp near some beautiful high-altitude lakes.

There is something very special for me about high mountains. Once I started to get up into the barren landscape with clouds rolling around and below me I had a big smile on my face and a great sensation of freedom. Unfortunately the altitude was affecting me quite strongly, and I wasn't able to sleep very well that night.

Disaster struck that evening when I went to cook on my camping gas stove. I had packed two lighters in separate parts of my bag to ensure that I would not forget them, but somehow I had managed to unpack both of them before leaving. There were some neatly chopped onions and garlic, tins of tomato and packets of pasta ready to go and no fire to warm them up. I was reduced to trying to get sparks by hitting rocks together. My attempts at bushtuckermanning (not a real verb kids) were unsuccessful, then I had the genius idea of using my knife with a rock to make sparks.

Thirty seconds the blade of my knife had been broken in to several pieces and I was mighty pissed off. That knife had travelled around the world with me, cooked countless meals, cleaned fingernails, opened tins, impressed chicks, sliced fruit, made flutes and carved my name into trees. I had lost, then refound, it countless times. But I put it behind me and ate raw onion with sausage and bread.

The next day I rose early and struggled my way up Mulhacen, the tallest mountain in Spain. It was a struggle, and the top was covered with clouds for the length of my ascent and descent, but the feeling of height and solitude was still overwhelming.

I decided that a second night at high altitude was not very desireable, so I put in a long hike to get back to the ski resort. From their I planned to hitch a ride back down to Fred's, but as I stood beside the road with the light failing and bad weather rolling in the Spanish drivers were true to form and wouldn't give me a ride.

As it started raining I found a flat bit of grass just out of sight of the road and pitched my tent in record time. I got a great nights sleep, back down at a more sensible altitude of 2400 meters. When I emerged from my tent at sunrise the next day I was rewarded by crystal clear skies and perfect views of the Tres Miles. I started to walk down the national trail that followed the same ridge as the road, and since it was such a nice day I walked all the way back home, also avoiding any further hitch-hiking-rejection embarresment.

Is That a Sausage In Your Pocket?

If you were living in a hippy community in Australia you would expect the majority of people, particularly the women, to be vegetarians. But sit around a campfire a group of peace-loving Spanish folk and get out a chorizo (spicy spanish sausage pronounced choritho) and nobody will refuse to eat a bit, particularly the women. God bless 'em.

My Sister Isn't Gay

I was working on the top bar in the club on Sunday, gay night. A girl and boy walked up to the bar, and the boy asked in an effimanate accent
"I have to ask, are you gay?"
"I'm afraid not"
"Oh well, hmph."
He looks to the girl at his side who smiles and he says,
"Well, my sister isn't either"
She picks up the converstion
"So, where are you from?..."

From A Couch In Dublin

It is grey outside, rain falls intermittently and the cars have their lights on. Dublin in Autumn. But the pubs are open, warm and cheery. Of course they are, that is Dublin at any time of the year.

I met a friend yesterday afternoon and we decided to go do something.
"We could go and look at a museum"
"Hmmm, they will be closed in half an hours time."
"Any sites of interest we could check out?"
"They are all grey."
"We could go to the pub?"
"I know a good one in the Temple Bar."
....
"I'll have a Guinness."
"Make mine a Heineken."

Reality Bights

I arrived in Dublin from Madrid, via a hit-and-run visit to my old friends Annamarieke and Marlene in Holland. I was woefully unprepared - though I had organised a couch to sleep on via the couchsurfing website. With a couple of hundred euros in my back pocket I had to organise work and accommodation.

It didn't take long to find work - bartender and waiter in a restaurant and bar in the Temple Bar. Accommodation has proven to be harder to come by. There are more people than beds in Dublin, and competition is fierce for every free room. Prices reflect this - one pays silly money to be crammed into a shoebox.

But, on a positive note, there is a lot of money in Dublin. Stacks and stacks of the stuff, and I plan to get me some of it. I am bartending for the meantime, but I intend to find some more lucrative employment that gives me free nights.

The Post That Wouldn't

I have tried to write a post in this blog over the last couple of months since the last post. Each one has been half-finished and discarded for various reasons. Now the adventures are far too many and funny stories to numerous for me to tell all - if I tried I would not finish and this would become another discarded post. So, here is a collection of stories and ancedotes that by no means cover all of my comings and goings over the last couple of months.

Fresh Off The Boat

My first night working in my new job was a steep learning curve. I started on the floor at six for the Sunday evening dinner crowd. Simple table service, and I was comfortable with most of my assigned tasks after half an hour. The bar was serving drinks to the people sat along it, and the floor staff took food and drink orders from the people on tables around the bar. There was a folksy guitar player bashing out tunes in the corner - easy stuff.

At nine food service stopped, the dinner crowd left and we started preparing for the night ahead. The two floors above the ground floor where the main bar is are devoted to a tacky 90s night-club setup, which are opened up at eleven. Sunday night is gay night, so around ten stacks of men and a trickle of women descended on the bar. The folksy music was replaced by nasty 80s and 90s pop that gay men apparently like (I don't think that we give them enough credit for taste in music). My job got a lot harder - try taking drinks orders for drinks you haven't heard of from men who speak with an effeminate Irish accent over the sound of very loud pop music. At least the tips were good! Whenever I made a mistake I would just wink and say "sorry, I am fresh off the boat".

The Little Things

On the whole I didn't enjoy Morocco - I would go so far as to say that it is a bit of a shithole. Of course plenty of people will say that I didn't find the real Morocco or the real Moroccans, - "because you know man, it is a state of mind and you need to get off the beaten path". Well, we were robbed, with Jamie losing his passport and me my camera. One gets harassed all the time, it was too hot, and I just didn't have much fun.

You can tell a lot about a people from the little things - such as how they stamp your passport. Look at each page in your passport, it is divided into 4 equally-sized spaces that are perfectly sized to fit one exit/entry stamp. When I was leaving Holland the woman who stamped my passport started on the first page and carefully flicked through it until she found a free space and neatly placed the stamp inside the allocated space. In Morroco they went to the back page and placed entry stamp right in the middle of the page at a funny angle, wasting a whole page. On exiting the same was done for the second to back page of my passport.

It might seem that I am making a mountain out of a mole-hill, but these little things reflect the attitude of many Moroccans in general. And this sort of thoughtlessness gets on my tits, big time. I will not mention Morocco again.

Private Village

Word got around that heavy rain was on its way to the beach for the weekend. People were moving their campsites to more sheltered locations in the forest, or making alternative plans. Gory, a crazy little Andalucian guy, who I could hardly understand despite my best attempts at learning Spanish, was heading to an abandoned village. I took up an invitation to check it out with him.

The village was at the end of a dirt track through the forest, next to a small hydroelectric powerplant. Originally the village had been for workers in the plant, which generated electricity from a waterfall. But now the powerplant was automated, and it had not been occupied for the last fifteen years.

Three days prior to our arrival it had been used as a set for a film, so everything had been cleaned and repaired. There was running water in the houses, plentiful firewood chopped and stacked up and fruit trees (figs, grapes and oranges) loaded with ripe fruit. The surrounding forest was full of old cork oaks and rhododendrons. We wandered around muttering "no falta nada", which means "not missing nothing" (in Spanish one uses double negatives all the time, which gives many English speakers guilty pleasure).

On our first night we sat at our fire, cooking food, trying to comprehend what the other was saying, and looking at the stars when we heard a car approaching. This was a problem, because the only road to the village was protected by a gate that needed a key, so we assumed that this must have been some sort of security patrol. We extinguished the fire, and spent the next half an hour sneaking around in the dark, avoiding the two guards who were inspecting each of the houses with lashlights.

We eventually decided that we should go and have a talk with the guards when it became apparent that they were going to be staying for a long time to keep an eye on the place. We approached them, and what followed was an amicable conversation between the guards and Gori in thick Andalucian Spanish that I couldn't understand a single word of.

One guard kept looking at me as though I was suspicious, due to my quietness and the silly "me-no-understand" smile that I had painted on my face. Then he asked Gori if I had a football team, and Gori replied that I supported Liverpool. All of a sudden he was pumping my hand and singing the praises of said football team. Obviously I wasn't such a bad chap after all.

We were given unofficial permission to camp in the village, and got regular visits from the guard over the next couple of days to chat and check up on us.

Till Next Time

Now I have to run and look for accomodation with a friend. More stuff will follow... sometime... I promise...