Day Three

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.