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.