Today began late and ended early, due to a hangover from the night before, but in any case today I wrote around 1500 words. I wrote a little at a coffeeshop while eating a ham sandwich, but I mostly wrote in the evening at the hostel, with three French girls chattering next to me. For some reason I was too nervous to talk to them, probably because of various deep-seated preconceptions about French girls.
They are still sitting there, in fact, as I write this. I think they are very young, high school age, even. They are watching Youtube videos on their phones and eating spaghetti.
I went to the beach today, and while I was there I was offered a massage by six different middle-aged Asian women. They all charged five euros. They were extremely aggressive; one of them started massaging me without my consent and I had to swat her away, but despite their vigor I didn't observe a single person forking over five euros to any of them.
It seems that everyone is always trying to sell you something in Barcelona. The city is something of a tourist trap, although I hope that quality lessens as summer ends and fall begins.
There is a South Korean student close to my age at the hostel who I don't think has gone outside in the last two days. He is constantly on his laptop or on his phone, even in the late hours of the night, and I wonder if he is suffering somehow, for example if he chose to visit this place only to discover that he is completely terrified of it. I sympathize with him, if only a little.
Near the beach there are numerous outdoor restaurants. At one of them I witnessed a waiter drop an entire container of silverware on the ground, probably all of the clean silverware that the restaurant had, and then the waiters at a neighboring, perhaps rival restaurant began clapping and cheering. A crazy old man on a bench joined in too, and even began loudly heckling the poor, clumsy waiter, who quietly gathered up all the silverware and then disappeared. Naturally my sympathies lie heavily with him, as I have been in his shoes countless times in the past, and probably will be many more times in the future.
A cultural oddity to Americans such as myself is that the women at the beaches in Spain go topless, a few of them, at least, but the moment you witness it in person it becomes as banal as anything else in the world.
Not much happened today, although I think tomorrow will be more eventful.
Friday, August 29, 2014
Day Two
Technically today's post is for Day Three, as Day Two was lost entirely to jet lag. All I can remember from Day Two was seeing nuns riding Segways in circles around one of the city squares as they howled like children. As people were photographing them, I assume this must not be a common occurrence.
Today I wrote around 1500 words. Some of them I wrote at a small coffeeshop on Via Laetana. I got the sense that it was not a very nice coffeeshop, and yet the coffee there was supremely good, which leads me to believe that there is no bad coffee in Spain, unlike America, in which there is no good coffee at all.
The rest of the 1500 words I wrote at the hostel while eating a baguette. The supermarket has confused and frightened me so far, and so I have chosen to safely purchase bags of bread, at least for the time being.
I went to the Pablo Picasso museum, but the cocktail waitress from first class was not there, or if anything I could not find her anywhere, and I found myself to be terribly disappointed. In any case, I began moving through the Picasso museum with a grand sense of purpose and intellectual fortitude, but by the end of it I was exhausted, lost, and defeated. This is what always happens to me at museums. I believe I could do quite well in a museum that is ten feet by ten feet and only features four very fine paintings, but anything larger is unbearable. The security guards at the museum were all women, strangely, and even stranger was that they were all beautiful.
I was scammed out of five euros by a couple of very nice-looking ladies at the Parc de la Ciutadella. They were at the top of a large number of stairs, and they asked me to sign a petition to establish a ramp for handicapped people to make it up said stairs. I signed it, and in the course of signing it I found myself handing over five euros to them as well, don't ask me how, and then suddenly I was being asked to show them my passport in order to "verify my signature," and that was when finally I decided I needed to get the hell away from them immediately, and did.
I went out tonight to the bars with an Italian from the hostel named Julio. The most culturally interesting moment of the night was when I tried to describe the Ku Klux Klan for him, which, it turns out, is impossible to do without sounding like you're telling a hilarious joke. I also told him how I'd been scammed by the petition ladies, and he laughed and called me a fool and told me that I should never have gone near them, and I suppose that I am a fool, but then I have to ask: how can you look at a person and know instantly whether they are an angel or a demon? I am reminded of an incident in the story of Don Quixote, in which the mad knight sees two friars in the road and believes them to be wicked enchanters. But is he so mad? They are men riding horses and wearing black cloaks. They look like friars. But you could say they look just as much like wicked enchanters. Of course, yes, he is mad.
Today I wrote around 1500 words. Some of them I wrote at a small coffeeshop on Via Laetana. I got the sense that it was not a very nice coffeeshop, and yet the coffee there was supremely good, which leads me to believe that there is no bad coffee in Spain, unlike America, in which there is no good coffee at all.
The rest of the 1500 words I wrote at the hostel while eating a baguette. The supermarket has confused and frightened me so far, and so I have chosen to safely purchase bags of bread, at least for the time being.
I went to the Pablo Picasso museum, but the cocktail waitress from first class was not there, or if anything I could not find her anywhere, and I found myself to be terribly disappointed. In any case, I began moving through the Picasso museum with a grand sense of purpose and intellectual fortitude, but by the end of it I was exhausted, lost, and defeated. This is what always happens to me at museums. I believe I could do quite well in a museum that is ten feet by ten feet and only features four very fine paintings, but anything larger is unbearable. The security guards at the museum were all women, strangely, and even stranger was that they were all beautiful.
I was scammed out of five euros by a couple of very nice-looking ladies at the Parc de la Ciutadella. They were at the top of a large number of stairs, and they asked me to sign a petition to establish a ramp for handicapped people to make it up said stairs. I signed it, and in the course of signing it I found myself handing over five euros to them as well, don't ask me how, and then suddenly I was being asked to show them my passport in order to "verify my signature," and that was when finally I decided I needed to get the hell away from them immediately, and did.
I went out tonight to the bars with an Italian from the hostel named Julio. The most culturally interesting moment of the night was when I tried to describe the Ku Klux Klan for him, which, it turns out, is impossible to do without sounding like you're telling a hilarious joke. I also told him how I'd been scammed by the petition ladies, and he laughed and called me a fool and told me that I should never have gone near them, and I suppose that I am a fool, but then I have to ask: how can you look at a person and know instantly whether they are an angel or a demon? I am reminded of an incident in the story of Don Quixote, in which the mad knight sees two friars in the road and believes them to be wicked enchanters. But is he so mad? They are men riding horses and wearing black cloaks. They look like friars. But you could say they look just as much like wicked enchanters. Of course, yes, he is mad.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Day One
Today was not really a day, but more a nebulous mass of time spent at airports totaling close to twenty four hours.
Today I wrote about 2,500 words. I wrote them at the Toronto Airport, where there are public iPads everywhere, practically an iPad for every person, and the iPads tell you your flight information and let you surf the Internet and encourage you to buy liquor from the airport bars.
I spent about three hours writing. My quota initially was to spend four hours each day writing and to write at least two thousand words within those four hours, but now it seems possible that I am able to do more. But this might quickly change.
Canadians apologize for everything, even for things that aren't their fault. This is called politeness, but really it's anti-social behavior. A woman, a passenger on my flight to Toronto, apologized to me when I couldn't fit my suitcase in the overhead bin. Who are you? Did you design this plane? In any case, I forgave her.
On the flight to Barcelona I sat in first class due to Air Canada's gross mismanagement. I've never sat in first class before. I sat next to a woman named Tara, who is a cocktail waitress in Los Vegas. She is taking a weeklong tour of Europe by herself. Within the first hour of the flight our conversation became suddenly intimate. She told me that being a cocktail waitress drains her emotionally and that she has nothing to say to her co-workers. She has a degree in fine arts. She has an obsession with Ernest Hemingway, like many other people, and we were able to bond over this, as countless others probably have in the past. She told me that she is afraid that she will regret the way she has lived her life up to now. She says this to me in the middle of sky after knowing me for an hour and a half. This is what first class is like. Eventually I fell asleep on the plane, but the woman, Tara, did not, and I woke up four hours later to find her still awake and suddenly a stranger to me, as if we'd never spoken a word before, and so it seemed the time we spent in different states of consciousness had created a void between us.
We flew over the long, brown mountains of Spain, as Hemingway describes them in one of his most famous stories, but they were far less brown and less long than I had pictured them in my imagination, and I suppose I have him to blame for that.
Tomorrow I am meeting the woman from first class, Tara, at the Pablo Picasso museum, at three o clock. I was wrong about the so-called void, as I am about so many others things.
For the next ten days I sleep in the top bunk of a bunkbed.
Today I wrote about 2,500 words. I wrote them at the Toronto Airport, where there are public iPads everywhere, practically an iPad for every person, and the iPads tell you your flight information and let you surf the Internet and encourage you to buy liquor from the airport bars.
I spent about three hours writing. My quota initially was to spend four hours each day writing and to write at least two thousand words within those four hours, but now it seems possible that I am able to do more. But this might quickly change.
Canadians apologize for everything, even for things that aren't their fault. This is called politeness, but really it's anti-social behavior. A woman, a passenger on my flight to Toronto, apologized to me when I couldn't fit my suitcase in the overhead bin. Who are you? Did you design this plane? In any case, I forgave her.
On the flight to Barcelona I sat in first class due to Air Canada's gross mismanagement. I've never sat in first class before. I sat next to a woman named Tara, who is a cocktail waitress in Los Vegas. She is taking a weeklong tour of Europe by herself. Within the first hour of the flight our conversation became suddenly intimate. She told me that being a cocktail waitress drains her emotionally and that she has nothing to say to her co-workers. She has a degree in fine arts. She has an obsession with Ernest Hemingway, like many other people, and we were able to bond over this, as countless others probably have in the past. She told me that she is afraid that she will regret the way she has lived her life up to now. She says this to me in the middle of sky after knowing me for an hour and a half. This is what first class is like. Eventually I fell asleep on the plane, but the woman, Tara, did not, and I woke up four hours later to find her still awake and suddenly a stranger to me, as if we'd never spoken a word before, and so it seemed the time we spent in different states of consciousness had created a void between us.
We flew over the long, brown mountains of Spain, as Hemingway describes them in one of his most famous stories, but they were far less brown and less long than I had pictured them in my imagination, and I suppose I have him to blame for that.
Tomorrow I am meeting the woman from first class, Tara, at the Pablo Picasso museum, at three o clock. I was wrong about the so-called void, as I am about so many others things.
For the next ten days I sleep in the top bunk of a bunkbed.
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