The Rum Raisin Affair

I have a sweet tooth.  My sweet tooth is the size of the Empire State Building, approximately.  If I could eat processed sugar at the expense of all other foodstuffs I'd consider it.

I was at the local SPAR grocery store the other day, an establishment that could fit inside the dry cereal aisle at your local Wal-Mart.  I decided on ice cream for dessert; the selections were limited: Vanilla, Chocolate, and Rum Raisin.  I rejected the Vanilla outright as it needs a lot of shit dumped on top of it to make it a real dessert and I wasn't going to waste any valuable sugar eating time on more shopping; briefly considered Rum Raisin; and purchased the Chocolate.  We ate the container over a few days, finding it middling.  For a few subsequent days we took a tour of other dessert options: Milka bars, digestives, and choco-croissants.

Then I was back at the SPAR.  I looked at the ice cream and purchased the Rum Raisin, without any malice of forethought.  The Vanilla was still staring back at me blandly and the Chocolate sucked.  The packaging for the Rum Raisin looked vaguely caramel-like, the product studded with raisins.  I wasn't thinking of drinking when I  bought the product.  I was looking for dessert.  I was looking for a   processed, refined white sugar delivery system.

"Are you crazy?" SuperK asked me when I got home.  "What are you thinking?"

I looked at the package.

"It's ice cream," I said.  "I want something sweet."

"I don't know why you'd even mess around with something like that," she replied.

I opened the ice cream which had been in an ice cream freezer because ice cream is meant to be . . . you know . . . frozen, finding it kind of half-frozen.  I took a small spoon and put a bit in my mouth.  I spit it back into the sink.  The taste of rum was overpowering.

"Oh, we're not eating that," I said.

I looked at the ingredients which were in French.  It appeared to me that the rum content was actually 35% - I had purchased 70 proof ice cream.  You gotta love the French.  That additive would definitely counteract the sugar effect of small children.  Here, Little Jonny, have some more ice cream.

I dumped the ice cream in the sink and started to run hot water on it - I didn't want that shit even in my house.  The raisins clogged the drain and the hot water dissolved the rum-saturated ice cream.  I swear it smelled like a distillery.  I'm trying to spit the rum taste out of my mouth, rum fumes filling the apartment, as I try to unclog the drain.

I was a bit rattled for a while.  While I wasn't pondering drinking, it did not escape my attention that this happened in an area where The Fellowship isn't present.  It reminded me of the story in our literature where one of our early members convinced himself that a shot of whiskey wouldn't hurt him if he just took it in a glass of milk.  The Book talks about strange mental blank spots.

I'm having a big bowl of vanilla ice cream tonight.

A Square is ALWAYS a Parallelogram

Parallelogram:  A convex quadrilateral in which each pair of opposite edges are parallel and of equal length.  

Our little apartment doesn't have a washer and dryer.  This is normally no big deal but we packed light for two months, counting on having a washer and dryer.  The whole Nimes scaffolding debacle left us out in the cold - in our scramble to secure a place for 3 weeks on short notice that we could afford we couldn't afford to be too picky, and we were washer and dryer-less.  I'm not overly fussy about clean clothes but after a couple of days there are a couple of items that I'd rather not put back on, if you get my drift.

Our temporary landlords allowed us to use the equipment in the more sumptuous apartment upstairs while it was between tenants.  We were immediately faced with the French language controls - these were nicely translated by Google as long as you don't require your translated words to make sense in a washer-dryer fashion.  I'm happy to "recharge the squeeze" and the like but it leaves me clueless in the actually getting my clothes clean department.  Plus, there are graphics that just make no sense and Google doesn't offer a graphics auto-translator.  What the hell is a little leaf blowing in the breeze mean?  Or a little parallelogram?

We're pretty sure the first load didn't actually get any soap delivered during the washing cycle.

Of Ibogast and Spasmocalm

I've always liked the adder "thy will be done."  It makes my praying a lot easier.  I'm wary of any praying that includes a list of things that I want or don't want because what I want or don't want isn't in my best interests a lot of the time.  But I've heard a lot of people talk about the power of prayer over the years and I don't want to short myself on anything that's going to help me get better.  I have a history of turning up my nose when prayer is the topic and this has been to my detriment.  Prayer can be powerful and I think my higher power listens to what I say and I bet he grants my wishes from time to time but never when I'm demanding things go my way.  So I want the benefits of praying while avoiding the pitfalls of praying.  It can be a tricky line for an ass like me.

When SuperK was suffering from her stomach virus BarcelonaK offered to accompany her to a pharmacy to seek a fix.  After some back and forth we bought a product called Ibogast.  It smelled kind of funky so we had a conversation about whether or not it had any . . . you know, alcohol in it.  

"It can't have any alcohol," BarcelonaK proposed.  "It's OK for kids."

SuperK took the medicine for 5 or 6 days - a very small dosage of 20 drops in a glass of water.  It didn't really do anything to make her feel better.  That's typical of most simple colds or flus - you can take medicine and it'll go away in about 2 weeks or you can do nothing and you'll be well in 14 days.  SuperK - on the cusp of her 26 year sobriety anniversary, kept insisting that the smell was just too weird.  Finally, we dug up some info on the internet and discovered that it's about 30% alcohol.

Not a worry - that's about the amount of alcohol that occurs in fruit that's overly ripe and it's going to make a great story for her to tell on her 27th anniversary.  Plus, I think with sobriety you add up all the days you've stayed sober and that's your total - it doesn't really count if you drink a little in between or smoke some medicinal marijuana or shoot some non-addictive heroin. 

I'm not gonna check that with my sponsor.

I also bought a product for her called Spasmocalm.  I made the purchase after a long and spirited discussion with a couple of French pharmacy employees.  The reasons for selecting this product were that I was too embarrassed to leave without buying something and how cool a name is Spasmocalm, anyway?  Pretty cool.

We're trying to get some laundry done using a French-themed washing machine and a French-themed dryer, which may or may not be working.  There has been a French maid bustling around the whole time throwing out helpful hints and ominous warnings as we've been doing this.   It is taking a really, really long time.  It makes SuperK miss her hometown washer and dryer with the English instructions and voluminous cavity that would hold all of the laundry of the People's Republic of China.

I'm staying the hell away from that operation.

Please Contact Us As Soon As Possible

I received an email note a few days ago from my car rental company asking me to contact them as soon as possible.  I picked up my phone with an American phone number while in France and tried to call Spain with predictably hilarious results.  Finally, after a series of rejections for a wide variety of violations I got through to the agency and spoke to a guy who told me that my car needed to be exchanged for a different one.  I explained that I was a few hundred miles away.  His English was better than my Spanish but not by much - he relented on his request since I was so far away, assuring me that there was nothing the matter with the car, that there was some kind of internal requirement with his company.

The next day I got a f/up email asking me where in France that I was, exactly.  I told them and asked what the problem was, exactly.  

Well, sir, the car that I was driving had been sold and needed to be delivered to Madrid by the end of the month, a few scant days away.  Madrid has to be 500 miles from my little apartment.  We are now trying to figure out how to get someone from the car agency to come to St. Remy to swap my car out for a different one. And, by the way, please make sure that the tank is full of gas.  I thought that was a little pushy.  I explained that there is no gas station in this town - which is, technically, untrue - and told them I hope this wasn't a problem.  

This is one of those situations that I would handle altogether differently if I was back at home, as in: "For this inconvenience you can stick the gas tank where the sun doesn't shine" but I'm having trouble translating this into French or Spanish or Catalan or whatever the hell language these people are speaking here.  I took the opportunity to say something to an English couple who was ordering pizza at the same restaurant as me the other day because it felt so damn good to say something in English.

Totally Reassured

French is one of those languages that sounds smart.  I walk by a group of blue collar guys eating lunch and listen in for a minute.  I imagine that they're discussing Cardinal Richelieu or an obscure variety of Bordeaux when in fact they're musing over the latest football match or the most excellent cure of constipation.

One of the most interesting things about the US to EU transition is adapting to the pace of life here.  At home everything is lightning fast - here it's much more deliberate.  I'm always surprised when my food is made to order at the simplest places.

And back to the bathrooms  . . .   I talk about food a lot - being a food guy, someone who enjoys shopping for food and buying it, preparing meals, eating what I've made - because I think it's a universal language.  I learn more about a culture from what they eat than anything else.  The French spend a LOT on food - it's amazing.  

Anyway, we toured this great old ruined castle perched on top of a sheer cliff face yesterday. On the way in I entered a bathroom.  Inside, it was all stainless steel and everything was wet and dripping, dozens of nozzles protruding from every surface - a self-cleaning WC.  I felt like I was in an escape pod attached to the space shuttle.  As I was . . . you know, peeing . . . the whole thing began to growl and rumble a bit.  I thought that it was going to go into self-cleaning mode while I was in there which would have been a GREAT travel story.   I never did figure out how to flush the toilet or run the sink.  I got the hell out of there.

There's a big weekly market setting up right outside my window.  It is a thing of beauty.  These people are professional food folks and I live in the fruit and vegetable capital of the United States.  In Barcelona I passed a small shop that only sold legumes.  That's one of the best shops I've ever passed.

We stopped at a little restaurant yesterday for a post-hike coffee.  Two euros or about $2.60.  We did, however, order large coffees which doubled the price and asked for milk which added some more.  Nine euros or about $12.  I believe that was the most expensive two cups of coffee I've ever ordered, ever.

Entrance fee: 5€ (reduced 4€) | School groups: 3,50 € | Free for accompanier (10 students) 

Reserve on-line from now on, in a totally reassured way, by clicking the button below.

Never a good sign when you're told you can do something in a very reassured way.

Good Stuff

I smile a lot.  It's a big smile.  I don't know if it's a nice one but it's large and it's coming right at you.  Most of the time I feel like smiling but I do it even when I don't.  I look people right in the eye and I smile and I hold the smile.  There's no mistaking what I'm doing.  

When I was getting sober I saw a counselor who asked, after several weeks of listening to me bitch about the same things over and over: "Are you happy?"

Offended, I replied: "Yeah, I'm happy.  I think."

"You don't smile," she pointed out.

"I do, too, smile," I countered.

"You never show any teeth," she said.  "You should try showing some teeth.  It's one of the main things about the smile."

After visiting a dusty, decrepit archaeological museum today that looked like it had not been visited by anyone since 1944 - every creature in there was snarling, including a beaver and, strangely enough, a housecat - we stopped by a small kebab restaurant.  It had pictures of the food - we find this to be a critical feature of the restaurants we frequent.  It ensures that we know in a general sense what we're ordering.  I smiled in a big way to the two young women behind the counter.  I got the food ordered and it was cheerfully delivered, big smiles all around.

After lunch we felt like coffee and dessert.  I went in and got the coffees successfully ordered but was rebuffed in my attempt to get a piece of baklava.  I tried to get across the idea that we wanted something sweet - anything sweet - to no avail.  No big thing.  When our coffees were delivered there were a couple of excellent brownies on the tray, totally gratis.

As we were walking home I stopped in at a small fruit and vegetable seller to stock up for dinner and breakfast the following morning.  Grocery stores are good because I'm in control of the process.  I like the small ones, too, because I'm dealing with a fruit and vegetable professional.  I grabbed a head of bibb lettuce.

The shop owner asked me something in French.

I furrowed my brow and said apologetically: "I'm sorry but I don't understand."

"For a salad?" he said in heavily accented French.

"Oui," I said.  

"Do you want one better?"

I shrugged my shoulders and smiled: Sure.

He disappeared into the back of the shop and came out with a beautiful head of lettuce.  I sat my basket on the counter and he began to ring up the items.  He looked askance at my two tangerines, walked over to the bin, and replaced them with two that he first carefully inspected.  He let me know, I believe, that it was the end of the season for this piece of fruit and that I needed to be carefull-er with my selection.

The products I purchased were excellent.

My last stop of the day, to buy water, was at a small chain grocery store.  The same young man had been there every night when I stopped by and knew I was not a local.  I smiled, with a friendly wave, and said: "Bonsoir,"; he said: "Good evening."  When I brought my purchases up he said: "I speak English un peu."

"A little," I said.

He collected himself: "Are you American or Anglais?"

I told him where I was from.  "Goodbye," he said when I left.

Good stuff.  Not stuff I get in Vacation City. 

El Bano

Compulsive:  Uncontrolled or reactive and unconscious.

There are some things I like better about the places I visit and there are some I like better about my home but I'll tell you what: we dominate in the bathroom department.  Being 6'3" tall with size 13 feet I've had to be a contortionist to do anything associated with showering, something I do compulsively.

In Barcelona the bathroom was sized nicely - commode and washer/dryer in the same room as the shower, which was tall and only remotely tomb-like.  It did not have, however, a door or a shower curtain.  The logic of this escapes me.  It was not possible to shower without unleashing the wellsprings of a new river.  Soggy bathmat at night, in the dark, and socks do not mix.  We supplied our own toilet paper, flimsy and transparent.

In Nimes the shower and sink were in one room, the commode in another, and the washer/dryer combination (both machines were self-contained in one unit) was on the porch.  The shower was the size of a cigar tube - it was not possible for me to maneuver my stork-like arms around to wash my back without either opening the shower door - an occasional liability in this case - or adjusting the flow of water.  Turning off the water was most common although there were instances of scaldings and freezings.

The commode was housed in a room so small that we instituted an open door policy.  I could not get in, position my feet properly, and close the door without an hour of limbering up exercises.  The toilet paper was of an outstanding quality and was abundant.  Half of the selection was pink, however, producing an eery blood-like quality to the toilet water itself.

In St. Remy du Provence we're staying in a very old building that has been converted to contain 3 apartments.  The toilet is in one room and the shower is in a different room clear across the room.  The toilet is electric - yes, electric.  You push a switch to activate the device and it rumbles and growls and thinks, building momentum, before sucking the water down with a mighty vacuuming noise.  It's impressive.

The shower room has a shower pit, with the water supplied through a flexible metal hose.  This I do not get - why not hang the shower head from the wall?  Nothing like turning the water on and unleashing a blast of water against a non-shower wall.  The whole bathing procedure involves wetting down a section of body, lathering furiously, and rinsing.  There is no luxuriating under a stream of hot water.  If the idea is to save water and the energy required to heat the water the whole thing is a colossal failure because all of the switching between using the water hose, lathering, etc, etc. takes like twice as long.

That, my friends, is that.

Anyone Here From Out of Town?

The Fellowship doesn't have a big presence in France.  When I was home in Vacation City I tried to find English-speaking meetings to attend during our stay.  I was so astoundingly unsuccessful that I widened my search to include any meetings with roughly the same results, and I was on the French program website.  

So SuperK and I have been having our own mini-meetings - half an hour of reading from our literature and chatting.  We're always visitors from out of town.

Anyway, this popped up yesterday: ". . . we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives."  I really like the idea of asking god for help with my thinking.  I'm better at asking for help in behaving well.  This is probably more important but it doesn't help much with worry.

The selection continues: "When I put God in charge of my thinking, much needless worry is eliminated and I believe He guides me throughout the day."

Help me think good thoughts.

Dinner Plans

Tasting advice. Cold with milk, yogurt or cottage cheese. 

                          OR

Shuffle with hot milk. Put in the microwave. 

Vary the pleasures adding your ingredients preferred: mile, honey, gold fresh glass of Tropicana juice.

I'm sorry - clearly I don't have anything else to do here but use Google Auto-Translate.  What makes this truly sad is that I find it hilarious most of the time, mostly because it's a very serious exercise, trying to figure out how to prepare a meal, and then the instructions are: "Shake the Goat."

Paella or Chinese Water Torture - You Choose

The recipe we made yesterday was for paella from a can.  The directions I painstakingly, laboriously tried to translate was for the rice part of the recipe.  What I did was put some water and the rice in a pan and cook it until it was done.  I mean, it's rice, right?  The paella part was a bit more interesting.  One of the components of the seafood paella was chicken, the universal meat.  Except this was chicken with skin, still on the bone.  Cultural oddities, indeed.  In The States that chicken would have been genetically bred to have zero fat; ground in an industrial grinder; reconstituted as a chicken-like patty; and inserted in the paella, except there is no WAY you could buy paella in a can in The States.  It's hard enough buying cooked-from-scratch paella in a restaurant.

As we watched some TV last night - a rainy night in St. Remy du Provence - we started to hear a rhythmic pounding outside.  This was Sunday night - Easter Sunday night - so the noise was unexpected.  We kept opening the windows to peer outside to see what was up.  I had noticed a big sponge sort of super-glued to the balustrade outside the window of our what-I-must-assume ancient house.  Aha.  Water was dripping from the eaves far above and hitting this tin stripping.  Most of it was landing on the sponge but there were a few rebels dancing to the left and to the right.  I found the most egregious violator and put a cup under the stream to catch the water, which I snagged just before it slid off and down to the street below.  I put a piece of cloth under the dripping to see the dripping shift left.  This was a smart-ass drip.

I understand the concept behind Chinese Water Torture now.

People really do walk around with long loaves of bread here.

Dinner Tonight Per Google Translate

In a large skillet, pour 1 tablespoon of Hulle fauites and heat over low heat. 

Pour the rice and sauté 2 minutes leaks stirring. 

Off the heat, add 30 cl of boiling water and the bag of spices.  Put on low heat and hold a boil 4 minutes. Pour topping over rice ensuring a good start songs. 

Cover the pan with a lid.

Quit reading instructions.

Hope don't get botulism.

Thomas Fowell Buxton

I can feel my brain trying to force everything into a recognizable format.  It's trying to make sense of the all of the newness.  It obviously doesn't like it that much.  It wants to be running the show.  Generally speaking, this is not in my best interest because it does such a shitty job of it most of the time.  It sure thinks that it's got it all going on.  It's got something going on, alright, just not it.

There's comfort in control of the routine - getting up at the same time, eating familiar things that agree with me, regular meetings, regular exercise, where the goddam grocery store is. . . 

I have a little trip notebook whose cover is emblazoned with this quote from someone called Thomas Fowell Buxton: "With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance all things are attainable."  There's a picture of who I believe is Gale Sayers, one of the greatest running backs in NFL history, trying to blow by some member of the Cleveland Browns.

An OK quote with a bad graphic.

I get mad at god all of the time.  A priest once told me: "That's OK - god can handle it.  God has big shoulders."

95% of SuperK is better than 82% of all other women most of the time.  This is what passes for a compliment in the Seaweed family, or a smack.  

One or the other, I'm not sure which.

Different - Not the Same

Different:  Not the same.  (Ed. Note: Duh.)

It has been great to see the world from a different viewpoint.  This is one of the most compelling reasons to travel - it's natural to slip into the mindset that the way I live my life in my home country is the only way, the best way to live life.  While I enjoy where I live I also get to see that a lot of other people are perfectly happy under a completely different system.  This is exactly what The Fellowship has done for me - it makes me consider doing something different.

Where I'm from I hop into my large car and drive to a huge retail establishment where I can quickly and easily buy everything I want at very low prices.  There's a lot to recommend with that system - it's very convenient and I get a bang for my buck.  In Barcelona I would get up every morning and do the shopping - bread and rolls at a bakery; fruit and vegetables at the market; a cheese shop; a meat shop; and some sundries at a larger store.  I don't think it was the cheapest way to get my stuff or the quickest but it was a very satisfying exercise.  I interacted with people who seemed to enjoy their work, to take pride in their products,  and were making a living.  I'm not sure I would thrive under such a system if I had to do it all the time but it gave me pause: there are other ways to do things.

In France there's a pride in country-ship, so to speak.  The French are more reserved than Americans which I think can be confused with arrogance.  And the French, in my opinion, are of the opinion that when you're in our country you speak our language.  Fair enough.  I was trying to imagine a French guy walking into a Seven Eleven in my home town and spewing out a ration of French.  THAT would go over big.  

I don't speak English when I enter an establishment.  I greet my host in their native language and do a lot of pointing.  I have never been treated with anything but respect and kindness.  I do believe that an attempt to be considerate of a different culture is appreciated.  

Yesterday we went to a small brasserie that had a menu that I could sort of interpret.  I greeted the proprietress and pointed at a sandwich and a salad.  What I was given to understand was that there were no salads.  I pointed at a piece of pizza - same reaction, and the proprietress bundled off cheerfully to help someone else.  In efficient America, at this point, I might have suggested that she just tell us what was available but she wasn't inclined to do so.  Eventually, we got something ordered and had a lovely meal in the sun on a public square.  It wasn't a cold reaction - it was a bit formal.  I didn't feel like I was treated poorly - it was a bit more work than it had to be, but so what?

We keep walking around and saying: "Can you imagine doing that at home?"  

For some reason their aren't toilet seats on public toilets in France.  THAT I don't get.

Industrial: Word of the Day

Industrial:  Massive in scale or quantity.

Our last day in Barcelona was full of the little experiences that make travel such a joy and such a burden. The challenges that I don't want to face followed by the joy of transcending the challenge, of finding that the challenge wasn't so challenging and what exactly was I so wrought up about anyhow, goddammit?  There's easy - which is easy - and there's a challenge - which isn't but is so satisfying later on.

I like 'em both, for different reasons.  When I'm in the easy stuff I get bored but when I'm in the difficult stuff I start thinking: "What the hell am I putting myself through this difficult stuff when I could be doing something easy instead?"  It's never the right thing with me.

Anyway, we got up and walked down to the car rental place which went very well, ruining my attempts to make it very stressful.  We forgot to bring our passports but lovely Esther at Eurocar came up with a work-around.  I'm the driver and I piloted the car out into the Barcelona traffic.  I had worried about this, too - roads in Europe are approximately the size of an alley in the United States and roads in the Medieval quarter are approximately the size of my left foot in a tennis shoe.  It was a no-sweat experience as well and we found the parking garage pretty close to our apartment.  The garage was a beautiful example of managing to fit 2,000 cars into a space approximately the size of my foot in an over-sized tennis shoe.  We loaded up our stuff and hit the road to France, using the directions Barcelona K had given me.  Smooth sailing, no obstacles, no problems on a list of several things that I had queued up to worry about.

Before we left the owner of the apartment in France had sent a note, poorly translated as: "Work has started out front.  I didn't know about it.  It shouldn't be too bad."  We decided it would be OK.

We pulled up in front of a 10 story building completely covered in industrial scaffolding.  There was an overwhelming smell of paint or solvent.  The small porch was sealed up with plastic sheeting.

This was the first evening where I really could have used a meeting.  I was not happy and overwhelmed by my unhappiness.  I plopped down on the couch and tried to calm down.  SuperK is the Make The Best Of It member of the Seaweed team and she skillfully steered me away from phones, computers, and any other possible way I could contact . . . you know . . . any living beings.

I went to the Worst Case Scenario: the owner knew about this work, lied to us, and would be most uncooperative about any remediation.  I emailed her before we went to bed.

At 7:30 the next morning a worker appeared in our living room window, startling the shit out of me after a long bout of trying to figure out a new coffee system, and sealed it up with industrial plastic, entombing us.  A racket started up in the bedroom where SuperK was sleeping in . .  . you know . . . pajamas.   She staggered out groggily.

"Jesus Christ," she said.  "They're right in the bedroom."

I walked in and, indeed, a man had wrenched open the shutters which he was attacking with an industrial sander.  One of the hallmarks of the industrial sander is its size, power, and speed.  It's one of the noisier sanders available.  It rattled the bedroom windows.  He was standing right there on the industrial scaffolding, pointedly not looking at us.

I got some excellent video  of this - unpleasant at the time, priceless as a story.

Grocery Shopping

I went grocery shopping for our dinner tonight.  SuperK is still being plagued by an upset stomach and requested some soup, a universal foodstuff.  I like grocery shopping in a foreign country.  Food is something that is shared by everyone.  Ya gotta eat.  I like looking at different things in different places - I can really get a sense of a place by what people eat, and often they eat very different things than I'm used to, which is occasionally frustrating but also a big part of the adventure.  It's very fun.

I looked for cans of soup but was stymied.  I found boxes of soup which I bought for, I believe, the first time in my life.  The instructions were, as you might imagine, in French.  I've traveled with my friend Little Westside Jonny - who is fluent in French, if by "fluent" you mean "hides behind his menu when the waiter arrives," but he was 6000 miles away so I was on my own.  There's an app on Google called Autotranslate so I plugged in the instructions for preparing the box of soup, and it spit out: "Step One: Shake the goat."

I did NOT shake the goat.  I WILL not shake the goat.

I tried again and got: "Step One: Shake the red brick."

You can't make this shit up.

I also noticed in the grocery store that had no cans of soup that there were a couple of different kinds of snails in a jar.  Perhaps the goats, once shaken, would enjoy a nice meal of snails, but I would not and in this rare instance, I believe I could speak for my wife.  There was also a hellacious selection of canned legumes, crackers and digestives and biscuits out the wazoo, and a bewildering array of fish products, floating in oil. 

I threw the soup away and had biscuits for dinner.

Fumbled Toast

In my experience the tourist areas are where you find the tourists and service providers who treat tourists like crap.  Not all of them do but a lot more than in the non-tourist areas.  I can't really fault them all that much - they're dealing with people in a big hurry to have a good time who aren't being all that polite or understanding.  I bet it's easy to say: "I'm never going to see that person ever again and he's kind of a jerk, anyhow."

We had a very nice experience with a taxi driver that I hailed in an obscure square far from the tourist area.  He estimated a price and that's what the price was.  Every few blocks he'd tell us how close we were getting - he wanted to reassure us that the price was going to be about what he said.  I gave him a nice tip.  We also hailed a taxi right in the middle of the tourist area and this guy was rude and unhelpful.  He charged us a lot more than the nice guy did to go a shorter distance.  I gave him roughly no tip.  I got out my tip calculator and multiplied 12 euros by 0.00% and gave him the full amount indicated.

We've mostly eaten on side streets and quiet squares.  The food has been good and reasonably priced.  Today we ate on the world-famous La Rambla.  It is quite the spectacle and we knew we would pay more to have a table with comfy chairs right in the middle of the chaos.  We ordered two meals and two drinks, declining the offer of bread.  The waiter brought the bread anyway, dropping one piece on the ground, and charged us $5 for some of the food we did not order.   He did not replace the fumbled toast.  Our two small bottles of water cost us about as much as a two bedroom apartment in downtown Berlin.

It was still fun but we're not going back.

The SATs, Fully Clothed

I rarely remember my dreams.  I either enjoy the sleep of a man with an untroubled mind or it's the sleep of the damned.  I awoke this morning right in the middle of a dream that dominates my subconscious mind - I experience few variations to this theme, and unfortunately it's not that kind of dream.

I was in a entry hall of some kind of school or university, preparing to take the SATs, a college preparatory test common in The States.  I felt unprepared and vaguely anxious about it. I wasn't sure where to go or if the test had already started.  I entered the large testing room and took a seat at a high table, but my chair was of a standard height so the table hit me about chin-high.  I was too self-conscious to move right away but eventually found myself a different seat.  I was startled to discover that I hadn't brought my reading glasses so I couldn't see the test paper.  I squinted as best as I could.  

Each question was followed by an area to mark an answer.  There was a great deal of variation here - some of the spaces were grayed out, some were in different languages, and other such bullshit.  I had heard that the test had been modified to make it more current and to remove any cultural or class bias that might have existed in the old test.  Fair enough, I thought, until I saw that the first question asked me to identify the boy band associated with a particular pop song.  It went this way for a while.  I felt like I was slogging through thick mud.

Control or Out of Control - it's all a variation of that for me.

I was not naked, in case you're wondering.

We went to Joan Miro Park today, a park in honor of Joan Miro, the famous sculptor.  It was a highlighted area of Barcelona.  There was precisely one huge sculpture there.  It wasn't a memorable park.

I watched a baseball game with Barcelona K last night.  It was weird, being 6 hours ahead of the actual time where the game was being played.

"Has it been good speaking English tonight?" I asked.

He sighed.  "You don't know how great it is watching this game and not having to explain every single thing that's going on."

Try it.  Try explaining a simple rule from your favorite sport to someone who has no idea what the rules are.  It's surprisingly hard.

Huh

Huh:  Used to express doubt or confusion.

I told Barcelona K about our experience at the Modern Art Museum.  He seemed perplexed.

"Huh," he said.  I'm not very confident when someone starts a conversation with "huh."  It's a very skeptical word.  He didn't make me feel like I was on the right page.  Little did he know that I can't even find the book.

"That's the Parliament Building," he said.  "I didn't know the art museum was ever there."

"It's on the map I just bought this week," I pointed out.

He shrugged his shoulders.

SuperK and I had a big fight.  We're not speaking to each other in Spanish.  We're fluent in not speaking to each other in different languages.

Zee Mental Anxiety

Worry:  To be troubled; to give way to mental anxiety.

I was looking over my notes from the big travel day - Vacation Town to Barcelona.  Almost nothing worked as advertised but we ended up here in one piece, none the worse for wear, except for some frazzle and tatter on the fringes.  Once again - worrying about things is the hugest waste of time in the history of mankind.

I've made a deal with my Higher Power which I break on a daily basis - I do the work and hp handles the worrying.

Barcelona K accompanied us back to an excellent restaurant where I had worked on my Spanish a week or so ago, despite our waiter's willingness to speak English.  Dude remembered us and tossed a few goodies onto our table - no charge.  Made me feel good about my attempts to honor another culture, butcher-style.  One of those little instances where I felt like I made a difference even though it didn't feel that way at the time, being a Big Splash kind of guy - you know, treats everybody like shit most of the time and then does something nice when it's going to be noticed.  There are lots of little instances like that in the course of a day and I ignore them at my emotional peril.

The street outside our apartment, two floors down, is narrow and very Medieval, and there is no strip of grass or nice median - concrete street and two sidewalks.  The four or five story buildings are closely spaced.  Sound is intensified and bounces straight up and out to the stratosphere.  But there aren't any cars to speak of so what we hear is this kind of gentle shushing, murmuring sound, almost as if we're in the foyer of a symphony hall before the Bach starts up.

Of course, there's construction going on in a 200 year old building across the street.  The jackhammer sound is also intensified right into my brain.  We've been tired enough that we can sleep through come nap time.  It's been pretty funny.

A GREAT Definition of Time

Time:  The inevitable progression into the future with the passing of present events into the past.  

Everything seems so consequential when I'm traveling.  I guess I'm out of my element.

I learned a new word in Spain recently: cerrajero.  Roughly translated as he who can open locked doors.

Time is very definitely being screwed with.  It is a weird concept - the 5th dimension.  Why is it that eleven hours in coach lasts forever while a pleasant couple of hours dozing in the sun goes by in the blink of an eye.  Perception is a peculiarity.

Talk about powerlessness.  Wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.  There is nothing that is familiar - not going to a pharmacy or a grocery store, using a taxi, reading signs, using a washing machine.  It's all new.  It's all kind of work.

I was served coffee today at a lovely restaurant in a sunny square guarded with an old church standing guard by a man with long hair, in a skirt.  He had a nice off-the-shoulder top on,.  It was a large Catholic church.  He was nice - not very nice but pretty nice.

We Are Fam-uh-lee-ah

We tried to visit a big tourist attraction today called the Sagrada Familia.  We had a nice walk through nice neighborhoods to get to this world renowned place.  It was actually kind of funny to see just how many other people were there, because a conservative estimate would be a million.  There were a million people in line.  The line started in front of the church, stretched the length of one long block, and curled around the back.  There were seriously a lot of people queued up.  We seriously didn't try to go in.  I did, however, walk back to the entrance, start my video camera, and follow the line as it snaked around the building - it felt like I was shooting pictures of a concentration camp based on the facial expressions and body language of those poor souls.  Those people are still standing there today.  There is no way they got in to see that place and if they did, it must have sounded like a jet engine test center in there, with sounds bouncing all over the stone, high-ceilinged interior.

We sat outside for a while, musing over the fact that the cathedral has been under construction for a hundred years.  The guy who designed it died before he completed all of the plans so someone else drew some stuff up and they got to work, mashing the different visions together, in slow motion.  It was almost as if the construction was the attraction.

"I think they need to go into therapy with this church," SuperK said.  "They don't know how to stop."

"I've lost some respect for them," she added.

"How could they not finish this place in a hundred years?" she asked.

I stood back and listened respectfully for my wife was on a roll.

We took off for another world renowned attraction - a park with sculptures by the world renowned architect who designed the church.  On the way we stopped for coffee and had a great conversation with a nice man who gave us all kinds of tips and information.  It was a lot of fun.  The church was no fun.  We grabbed a taxi because the park is at the top of a steep hill - an extravagance for the chronically cheap - piloted by another nice guy.  It was a fun taxi ride up to the park where we found all of the people who couldn't get into the Sagrada Familia.  They were all there, shelling out another stiff entry fee - the "Gaudi Gouge," SuperK called it - to see attractions that seemed dubious at best.  It looked like the centerpiece was an empty bull ring with people sitting on stone benches.

We walked back down the hill, toward our neighborhood.  We peeled off on a little side street and had a nice pizza lunch, in the sun, at a 4 table local bar.  I trotted out my Spanish and befuddled a businessman eating there. It was fun.  We walked home, stopping to sit at a park and over a coffee at a small bar. 

Fun, fun, fun.

All of the Things We Did Not Do

We had an excellent time at the Modern Art Museum today.  All of the walking and getting lost and walking a lot further than we should have because we were lost left us weary and foot-sore so we decided that it would be wise to have a "down day" which meant that we only only planned to walk until our feet were bloody stumps.  Normally, there would be medical amputation involved by shady characters in back alleys using rusty hacksaws.  We are on our fifth or sixth set of prosthetic feet.

After a few days of wandering around hopelessly lost - which is kind of the idea, actually - we invested in a thing called a map.  It lists streets and attractions and the like and can be very helpful if you can actually figure out where you are on the map - a key requirement of the map - which we could not until we had wandered way off of course.  This map clearly lists the location of the exact building housing The Modern Art Museum.  When we didn't go to this museum for the first time the other day we circled it like Apaches, checking out a large tour group standing in line, holding entrance tickets, and peering into a hallway with a metal detector and several armed guards.  It did not have any markings listing it as a museum nor did it have any markings detailing prices, hours, or fees for entry.  This should have been an indication that something was afoul.

Today we were stunned to see that the entrance was crowd free, except for several Policia and several Policia cars.  We were going to actually get to go to a museum, real like.  As we strode purposefully toward the entrance one of the Policia peeled off to intercept us.  His eyebrows rose as if to say "Eh, what the fuck?"  I pointed toward the front door.  He shook his head once, no, and flicked his finger in another direction as if to say "I don't fucking think so."  As a recovering alcoholic I'm fluent in several languages in police gestures so off we went.

I expected nothing else.  We thoroughly enjoyed the rejection.  I was initially upset that I was going to have to actually go into a museum.  We bought a sandwich called a "Bikini" and sat outside in the park instead.  Later we did some research and discovered that the Modern Art Museum had at some point been moved miles away, probably to a building that had a sign on it saying "Modern Art Museum."  Fortunately, the large park where the museum may or may not ever have been located had several other museums in it.  We were in museum central.

First, we stopped by the Museu Zoologica.  The front door was chained and padlocked and had not been accessible since Medieval times, if the condition of the padlock was any clue.  Next, we went to the Museu Geologica which had a slick, modern entrance staffed by a uniformed guard. After some bad Spanish to bad English repartee we gleaned that the geological museum had moved.  She wrote down an address which may or may not have been an actual address containing an actual museum with opening and closing times, restriction free, and reasonably priced.  We did not seek out this address.

We did not go to three museums today.

Off To The Store

This today to my friend: "We're tired of not going to the Picasso Museum.  We're not going to the Modern Art Museum again today."

Yesterday my friend said this to me: "Your experience with the apartment was more of an authentic Spanish experience than any stinking museum you're not going to visit.  Congratulations!  You're one of us now."

On our first day we bought some shampoo and conditioner at a grocery store.  Spain is very particular about where you can buy things of a hygienic or medical nature, and it's very particular about what items you can buy.  There aren't 300 brands of mouth wash in 219 sizes sold in 1,980 stores.  I think I can buy deodorant but I don't think I can buy aspirin unless I go to a pharmacy - marked with little green crosses - and try to explain to a white-coat clad pharmacist - very reassuring, that white-coat - what I need.  Almost everything is behind the counter so you can't just go in and snatch up whatever you want.  I could get anti-PMS medicine instead of aspirin.  I might have to put up with any headaches I get - my feminine side is a little too developed as it is.  God help me if the dude gives me anti-seizure medicine or Oxycontin or more Ex-Lax ("Ex-Lax?  Que es Ex-Lax?") or something like that.

Anyway, the shampoo was great.  On the bottle, in Castelan, it said: "Champu."  I don't speak Castelan but I managed to figure it out.  Unfortunately, on the conditioner bottle it also said: "Champu."  It was the same brand and same color bottle as the conditioner I buy at home but it clearly did not contain conditioner.  I saw the familiar shape and made my buying decision  based on that.  When my Castelan conditioner foamed excessively I knew  I was on shaky ground.  I figured it out.

I also needed lotion.  I stumbled around a different store - it appeared to be more of a cosmetics store than a pharmacy if the lack of white-coat clad employees was any indication - and selected a brand that I knew.  The store owner came over, turned me around, and pointed out a huge bottle at a much better price.  Ah, wonderful, thank you.  When I tried to pay I pantomimed what I thought was the motion of putting lotion on my body, which was a pretty weird thing to do to a female clerk in a public place.  I'm lucky I didn't get slapped.

The clerk said something along the lines of: "You idiot - that's body soap," and fired off a long string of gibberish at the owner, who then selected a very small bottle of the what-I assumed-was-lotion.  I pantomimed what I thought was "Help, please let me buy whatever the fuck I have in my hand and get out of here."

It was excellent lotion.  Either that or I'm lathering up with soap after I dry off from my shower.

Calamari

I got to spend a long day yesterday with an old friend from The Old City, his native-born wife, and young son.  It was a great day.  It was a great day.  We walked through the a warren of ancient and confusing streets to a restaurant located in the Maritime Museum.  We never would have found the place without a local guide and if we had been able to find it, we never would have been able to get back to our apartment.  We had a long meal which included black rice with calamari, mushrooms and calamari, and calamari pastries.  I'd kidding about the last thing - it was actually a long pastry filled with cream, garnished with raspberries and blueberries - but the calamari was so good I would have considered it as a dessert selection.  There was goat cheese and local ham and other goodies.

SuperK thought: "Oh, god, I'm ordering black rice with squid."  She inhaled every morsel. This is part of the fun, the not-knowing.

We swung by an old market where a total renovation had been put on hold when some Roman ruins were uncovered by the construction.  I wouldn't have gone in there, either.  It wasn't on any "Must See!" tourist guides so there weren't too many tourists in there.  As a tourist, I'm not totally opposed to tourists but I don't want to see nothing but tourists.  When a place is 100% tourists I call that "home."

In the morning I had wandered out to a local square and sat in the sun and watched church-goers drift by.  I texted SuperK and we had coffee and rolls outside, in the sun.  It was lovely.  It was quiet.  It was not a tourist attraction.

The journey is the destination.

Seaweed Watch

Justified:  Having an acceptable explanation for.

I was put on a temporary Seaweed Watch today.  It doesn't happen often that I get frustrated enough to get mad enough to be put on Seaweed Watch but it happens.  SuperK is the arbiter of The Seaweed Watch.

We spent a pleasant morning drinking cafe con leches in a neighborhood bakery and came home to gird up our loins for another day of going to museums and tourist sites with impossibly long lines that we wouldn't actually get to see but instead would do something else that we inevitably would enjoy more.  I locked up our place, noticed that I had forgotten my sunglasses, and went back upstairs to collect them.  The key spun smoothly in the lock, making all kinds of reassuring clicks and thunks, but not actually opening the . . . you know . . . door.  This is the main function of the key as I understand it - releasing the locking mechanism that prevents the door from being opened by just anyone.  It would make no sense if someone with no key could open your door.  You might as well not have a door at all.  You might as well sleep in the street.

Being mechanically inclined I spent some time repeating this locking and unlocking process - with no variation whatsoever on the original unsuccessful attempt - without getting the door to open.  I think I believe that if I keep doing the same thing over and over that I'll get different results.  I have some experience with this type of circular logic semantics.  It didn't compute in my very mechanical mind that the door wouldn't unlock - I had worked the unlocking function successfully not 20 minutes earlier.  I could see no reason that it wouldn't continue to work.  Things are not supposed to break and inconvenience me.  I tried one more time or maybe three more times.  It's possible that I pushed on the still locked door and then banged on.  I'm not saying.

I went to the small shop nearby owned by the father of our temporary landlord.  He wasn't there.  The woman at the shop didn't speak any English and I didn't know the Spanish phrase for "my fucking door won't fucking open."  After a series of phone calls with whom I assumed was the father of the landlord - with a lot of pantomiming of "yes, I know how a key works, I used the key today, I've been in and out of the fucking apartment 50 times already " -  I gleaned that he would arrive by motorcar to rectify the situation in something less than an hour.  The exact amount of time required remained a mystery.

Now Spanish time is not a time I'm familiar with.  There's a great deal of slop in the numbers, quaint when you're waiting for your 5th cafe con leche, less so when you're waiting for someone to let you in your fucking apartment.  Papa eventually shows up, tries the lock once, shrugs his shoulders in an "Eh, it's broken" kind of gesture, and informs me that someone can fix the lock in about two hours.

I hear this: "Go and enjoy yourself.  You don't need to be here.  I'll handle it."

This is not what he said.

We return home in three hours to a still inoperable lock.  Once again we visit papa's store and he takes us to some kind of metal working shop.  A guy there loads up some files and screwdrivers - not locksmith looking things - and we all bundle off purposefully to the Fortress of Solitude.  I can see immediately that this guy has approximately no experience with locks.  He peers at the lock and shines a flashlight in the lock and works the key in approximately the same fashion that I did fifty times or so  - all very unlocksmith-like - and then shrugs his shoulders as if to say "Eh, I can't get it open."

I hear Papa say this: "We're calling an expert.  He will arrive in approximately 20 minutes by motor scooter."  He may have said this, approximately.

I'm beginning to stew.  I was miffed that papa waited for us to return before starting the sleuthing process and miffed that he got some gorilla from a metal working shop to look at the lock.  Unbeknownst to me Seaweed Watch had started.

We wait for a bit in a spare room in the apartment building before I head back to papa's shop.  His assistant says what I hear as: "He left."  This is what she said, too.

Back in the spare room I'm beginning to boil.  After a few more minutes I stand up and proclaim the following, and this is a direct translation: "I'm going to go back and stand in the shop."  I was beginning to worry that this guy was going to go home and leave us hanging.  What was my recourse?  I didn't have a recourse.  I rented an apartment from a guy.

SuperK says: "Don't make this worse."

Intuitively I knew I would get back into the apartment eventually but it wasn't happening to my liking.  Because it wasn't handled very efficiently the whole enterprise fell into the "Justified Annoyance" category, a very bad category indeed.

Papa shows up with an honest-to-god locksmith who's in the apartment in 2 minutes and has repaired the lock in 5 more.  I hugged the locksmith.   

Badda bing badda bang.

Discombobulation

Discombobulate:  To throw into a state of confusion; to befuddle or perplex.

It's not that travel is particularly easy.  It's that the massive upheaval changes you somehow - the fighting through the change and newness makes you different.  SuperK isn't sleeping and I haven't been to the bathroom in a couple of years but I still wouldn't change it for the world.

I hate getting lost - it's discombobulating.

I am simply somewhere else.  I am sitting in a room somewhere else.

I have disconnected almost completely from the news, from the politics of home, the stuff that bugs the shit out of me when I'm  there.  I assume it really isn't that important to me or I wouldn't be able to forget about is so easily.

Recovery Always Trumps Food

I'm glad that I speak a little Spanish.  I think the locals appreciate the effort.  I usually start by saying: "My Spanish is bad," as if they couldn't tell.  They usually assure me that it isn't and the bilingual or trilingual or multilingual  often say: "You can speak in English - it's OK," but I soldier on.  It's a little sign of respect from me, for them, for their culture.  I don't think it's very considerate to say, in essence: "I'm here - accommodate me."  It's their country, for god's sake - I'm the visitor.

That being said one of the pitfalls of stumbling through a few Spanish phrases is that some people overestimate my ability and launch into a staccato, rapid-fire stream of venomous trash-talking.  I can see that my mind tries to keep up for a minute and then says : "Ah, fuck it," and throws in the towel.  I'm getting better but I'll be a long way from competent before I leave.  I've become a master of the blank look and the pleasant nod.  I've probably bought an apartment or committed to a life of male modeling, for the geriatric set.

Last night we went to a speaker meeting.  I'm from Vacation City and the guy who led was a Swede, speaking English, in a Spanish city, where Spanish is a secondary language, subsumed by Catalan.

Is this a great program or what?

We had plans for the meeting and then dinner with my friend at a local restaurant.  He posed a question: skip the meeting and go the restaurant early as it was completely booked later in the evening, or make the meeting and go somewhere else.

Recovery always trumps food.

We found a restaurant after the meeting and had an excellent meal.

Spanish Pharmacy Crisis

Yesterday I was forced to use the Spanish equivalent of a popular medication to alleviate certain distressing GI Tract symptoms.  I went to a Spanish pharmacy and spoke to a Spanish pharmacist about these symptoms.  I speak enough Spanish to really screw everything up if my restaurant ordering-and-food-receiving experiences are any indication.  I was kind of able to make myself understood and I kind of understood what was being relayed to me, relying on a series of facial expressions and sound effects and hand gestures.  I got home with the medication.

"Did you get it?" SuperK asked.

This would have been an excellent follow-up question from the old days, except I would have been returning home with coke or pot or worm-infested mescal, relieved that I hadn't been arrested and thrown in jail for 10 years by venomously trash-talking gendarmes.

"I did," I replied.  "I think.  God help us all if I got the medicine for the other situation that occurs sometimes in that general area of the body."

"Did you make some good facial expressions?" she said.  "And some noises?"

I was vaguely worried that I got something which would make my already distressing symptoms worse.  It would be like throwing up a lot and then getting something that made you throw up more.  The hair is standing up on the nape of my neck just thinking about it.

SuperK was in good shape in this particular department - and I'm sure she's happy that I'm passing that along - but she has been unable to fall asleep.  Actually, she falls asleep so quickly that you might think I'd hit her with a bat - which I have NOT done - but she can't stay asleep.  I have trouble falling asleep but after that she could hit me with a bat and I wouldn't wake up.  

Full disclosure: we don't even own a bat and I did get the right medication.

Trash-Talking Locals

The great thing about this trip is that we are staying for a couple of months rather than a couple of weeks.  It's hard to beat the jet lag and the time change and the circadian tampering all while trying to go go go.  The first day we slept in.  I'm not much on sleeping in.  I'm not a big fan of sleeping at all, figuring it to be a waste of my precious time although I have to admit that's an old tape because I now very much like to sleep if my bitchiness level when I don't sleep is any indication which it is.

The great thing is that I'm able to be in a place instead of trying to wrestle the place to the ground and conquer it.  Much of the time I feel like I'm doing it wrong, that I'm missing something very important.  The funny thing is that the big attractions are usually crowded and something of a disappointment but I remember in great detail the being part of my trips, much more so than the doing part.  

The big highlight today was sitting in a tiny neighborhood restaurant full of locals jabbering at a high volume - unintelligibly to us, trying to order something off of the menu, eventually giving up and going to the food prep area and pointing at some stuff that looked good and still not getting what we pointed at anyway, in the midst of two vicious games of dominoes that were being punctuated by the dominoes being slammed on the table with the report of a Kalashnikov, accompanied by what I must assume was some venomous trash-talking.  

The big cathedral?  Eh.  Looked like your average big cathedral.  The big art museum?  100 people in line because it was a rainy day.  The small modern art museum?  Inexpensive and empty.  

The Pre-Dither, Unnecessarily

I love to travel but I can sure get myself all worked up about it.  As you might imagine, I don't tend to visualize pleasant outcomes when I manage to think about the outcome at all.  I'm usually so obsessed with the steps leading up to the outcome - all of them buried under layers of difficulty and chaos - that I can't even get to the outcome itself.  This is a pity because the outcome is often pleasant.

I worry about my stuff when I'm gone and I worry about the getting to the place and of course I worry about the place itself.  I'm sure that my car won't start when I get back or something will break or leak or gush or catch on fire.  Something blowing up is not out of the realm of possibility, and then catching fire of course.  I'm always getting cheated or robbed or swindled when I arrive and the weather is bad and the hotel sucks.

None of this ever happens, unfortunately.

A few days ago I decided to verify the seats that I had pre-selected and paid extra for on the flight were still the same ones I had pre-selected.  I figured the dastardly airline was going to pull the old switcheroo.  I got the seat numbers and I googled up a seat configuration of the aircraft we were going to be flying on and found that the seats had been changed!  I had two really nice exit row seats and the goddam things we know had were in the middle of a row in the back of a plane, probably in the bathroom and with two screaming babies pre-inserted on either side of us.

I fussed and stormed and moaned about this before noticing that I had googled up the seat configuration of the correct plane of another airline, who used a different numerical configuration.  When I found the airplane flown by the airline that I was actually booked on, I saw everything was fine.  The dastardly airline, although destined to bedevil me, had not yet done so.  They normally wait until they have you firmly in their clutches before screwing with your serenity.

I figure I spent a half an hour worrying about this, for no good reason.  I was excited about getting screwed that I pre-screwed myself into a dither and a tizzy. 

Tripe!

Tripe:  The lining of the stomach of ruminating animals, when prepared for food.

I always have to remind myself when I travel that jet lag is real.  I'm not sure I get it, exactly, but my body lets me know.  It's weird to be hungry at odd times, wide awake when I should be tired, and totally lost in the bathroom.  Something about circadian rhythms being disrupted.  I forget to eat regularly and drink too much caffeine and sleep poorly.

Being a man of immense power I think that I should be able to overwhelm biological processes that were installed at the dawn of time.  I should just will my body to change.

Culture shock is a thing, too, that I forget about.  I don't really understand this, either, but I do feel out of sorts until I get my bearings.  On our first night here we decided to stroll a bit before rendezvousing with our friend and hitting a meeting.  We're staying in an old Medieval district, a warren of narrow streets and alleys angling off indiscriminately.  It's not an area for directions - you know where you are or you don't.  

So we got lost.  We tried to make our way back to our apartment using my stellar sense of direction until we were hopelessly lost.  It seemed that we were so close but we weren't recognizing anything.  We stopped and asked at a restaurant and no one knew where our street was, let alone the address on that street,  never a good sign.  We backtracked all the way back to where we first got lost and then went all the way back to where we started.  Our higher power must have been laughing because we were precisely one block away from where we wanted to be when we began the backtrack process.  The 2 minute, one block jaunt ended up taking an hour.

There is something about being forced into new adventures that must do something for the soul.  I think about how hard it is to order a new dish in a restaurant that I go to all the time and compare that to going into a restaurant for the first time, in a new city, in a new country, maybe being able to read the menu or talk to the waiter, and trying to get fed.  I ordered tripe once, not knowing what I was doing.  

I now know the correct spelling and pronunciation of "tripe" in 87 languages.  I'm not going to make that mistake again.

The Last Leg Is No Piece of Cake, Either

Hallucinate:  To seem to perceive things which are not really present; to have visions.

The last leg of our flight was uneventful although both of us were tired enough that we had begun to hallucinate.  Hundreds of screaming newborns began to populate my peripheral vision.  We were weighed down with the heavy yoke of a nine hour time change, about 20 hours of continuous travel up to that point - and we weren't done yet - thumping on our none too young bodies, all accompanied by a barrage of toilet flushing and bathroom door slamming that would have drowned out the Allied bombardment of Normandy beach.

Our country of temporary residence is not known for its extraordinary efficiency so we landed a little further from where we took off if the bus trip from the plane to the terminal was any indication.  This wouldn't have annoyed me half as much if I had known that it would take an hour for the plane's luggage to show up at baggage claim.  There is nothing as invigorating as a dimly lit baggage area at 1AM, marinating in my now skanked up clothes, surrounded by people who probably did something to annoy me on the plane. 

Voila! our luggage arrived.  I'm sure I spent a chunk of time on the plane worrying about that.  I worry about almost everything over which I have no control.  We were vomited into the airport terminal itself and Voila! there was Issa, our cab driver.  I had definitely worried a lot about our driver not being there unless I was worrying that if he was there, he was going to cheat us or kill us or something.  Plenty for me to worry about.

"Mr. Seaweed, Mr. Seaweed," he said, scrambling over the ropes to help us with our luggage.

I motioned him over and gave him a big hug.  His reaction indicated that not too many people lunge at him to deliver big bear hugs.  He was a multi-lingual immigrant working at 2AM.  When we arrived at our apartment - on a dark, gloomy looking street - I tipped him outrageously and I hugged him again.  I think he giggled at this point.  He was probably eager to get away from a disheveled man trying to hug him in the middle of the night.  I'm not even going to tell my sponsor about this big tip.  Right away, anyhow.

My last big, big worry was that the owner of the apartment we had rented wouldn't be there to let us in.  The area in which we're staying is very vibrant during the day but very buttoned-down and security-doored at night, ominous to a very tired worrier.

There he was, prowling the street, looking for us.  In we went without a hitch.

I probably should make a big, old gratitude list.

The Longest Leg is Always the Longest

Our trip to the airport began at 3:30 in the afternoon, courtesy of our driver from Albania, Ben, a devastatingly good-looking guy in shades who spoke in a low monotone.  I couldn't understand what he was saying about half of the time.  Always agreeable, I nodded and smiled encouragingly.  He could have been telling me how he killed and dismembered his mother for all I knew, although he always had a pleasant look on his face. Maybe my acquiescence drove him to more murders.  .Maybe he stopped on the way home and bought a large freezer in which to store all of the frozen body parts.  I wouldn't put it past a guy from Albania who looked like he could break me in two with one hand.  

He knows where I live.  

Ben arrived early.  People here are really wound up about traffic even though there never seems to be much.  I felt a bit rushed and only noticed upon our arrival at the airport that the coat and vest I had so lovingly laid out was still resting on my couch, a place far, far from where it could do me any good.  We were grateful that we avoided all of that non-existent traffic so that we could arrive early at the airport to for our flight that was delayed two hours.

For some reason having to wait for something over which I have no control distresses me unduly.  I'd rather drive myself 4 hours in a downpour than sit in a comfortable chair at an airport, reading.  I get the feeling that it isn't going to work out.  It almost always works out and when it doesn't all of my worrying buys me squat.  Control.  Powerlessness.  I'd rather pilot the plane myself than wait a few indeterminate hours.  If they tossed me the keys I'd take the thing up in the air for a spin.

Our flight lasted eleven hours.  That's a long time to sit for someone who suffers from restless ass syndrome.  We did have exit row seats which meant my legs weren't jammed up into my pelvis - a good thing - but they (the seats, not my legs) were near the bathrooms (although, come to think about it, my legs were near the bathrooms, too) - a bad thing.  All night long with the slamming doors.  I wondered if everyone was so pissed at having to use the bathroom that they slammed the door shut with all of their might.  It distracted me from the odor.  I did manage to sleep a little if by "sleep" you mean "partially digested distraction."

We got a cup of coffee at our first airport stop.  I flirted shamelessly with a couple of fluent baristas young enough to be my granddaughters who were very impressed by my residence in Vacation Town.  I don't think I had any other qualities they found attractive.  But I thanked them for being so nice - it was a lovely way stop on a stressful trip.  It made me feel I was on the right path.  I like to let people know when they've made a difference in my day because so often it's the little things that make a big difference.  I'm under the illusion that I have to make a big gesture all of the time. 

It was a good thing I worried about getting in two hours late because our connecting flights were also delayed two hours.  I'm pretty sure they delayed both flights for two hours just to fuck with me.  I'm that powerful.  But the potential problem was that we had reserved a taxi at our final destination.  Would he be there?  Would he wait?  And if he did would he cheat me out of my pre-paid credit.

I'm sure he will!