Days 10,11

Over the past two days I wrote nothing. This means that if I write nothing today after finishing this post, I will have to commit honorable suicide.

On day ten I planned to rest before heading to Madrid, but instead I went out with a Russian girl named Lilya and a Turkish girl named Basak. The two of them had become friends at the hostel, but their temperaments were so shockingly different that they argued with each other the entire time I was out with them, which was uncomfortable at first, but eventually became rather amusing. Basak is a skateboarder and architecture student who told me she never slept, and so far as I could tell all Lilya wanted to do was sleep, which eventually she did, and then I was left alone with Basak, with whom I got along with very well, and who gave me an impromptu architecture lesson through the streets of Barcelona. We went to see a very striking building that is lighted blue and red at night and looks like a two-hundred foot tall penis, or cucumber, depending on who you ask.

On day eleven I rode the bus to Madrid. Buses in Spain are the same as buses in the United States, except that there was a TV screen hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the aisle that every single passenger slammed their head into, except, miraculously, for me, and so for me it was an extremely funny thing. I sat next to a Mexican named Diego who smelled incredibly bad but who was very friendly, and who told me much about his life. Apparently he had not had a job for the last two years, but kept finding girlfriends who were willing to finance him completely. He said to me, "I used to do crazy stuff for girls, but now I've got it figured out. I find girls who will do crazy stuff for me." The last girlfriend he lived with he did not have a sexual relationship with. Her entire family had died in a car accident, and so she'd wanted Diego to remain as a kind of brother to her, and she supported him like a loving and dutiful sister. Why did he tell me these things? Who knows? The TV screen that everybody hit their heads on played Looney Tunes episodes for about nine hours.

I planned to go to sleep as soon as arriving in Madrid, but instead I went out with some Argentineans who were much too cool for me, and we went to a tapas bar where I ate too much and made myself sick.

Today I must write.