the prodigal son returns home

Nope, I'm not dead, just haven't had time to post in a while.

I'm at home (Toronto). Actually, I've been here on-and-off for some time, but my visits have been more like 10 day stopovers in between Cuba (September 1 to 24) and my road trip out East (October 12 to November 12). So that's why it seems like I've fallen off the map (being in Cuba's sorta like falling off the map, not to mention Moncton).

It's starting to get pretty cold here, but that's fine cuz I'm making some money snow-shoveling with Crazy Jon—more on him later—and raking-up leaves in Forest Hill. Apart from driving a pickup truck around with an illegal Mexican, a fallen woman whose rich Jewish dentist husband screwed her out of her million dollar house, and other occasionally-employed types, I just got a “real” job! By real, I mean that you show up regularly, at an agreed-upon time, for a set wage, and there’s no crazy guy throwing garbage cans at your head one minute and offering you a joint the next, and not receiving calls at 3 in the morning from a guy who starts the conversation off with: “so it’s going to snow…” That’s all well and good, but I need something a little more predictable, the snow is just the icing on the cake, as it were: when I get the call I'll be ready, but I can't count on it. So, I'm pretty stoked. The new legit job’s at a place called The Spanish Centre, conveniently located 3 streets north of my house, is full of Spanish chicks and involves no heavy lifting.

I had been getting pretty tired of half-filling out 3 page Starbucks applications, then tearing them up and storming-off to another 40 minute interview for an $8/hour sales associate job (apparently they wanted someone less educated and more committed to cotton/wool blends: fuck 'em!). In contrast, The Spanish Centre pays $12/hour, three evenings a week (Mon/Wed/Thurs) from 4:30pm to 10:00pm, and I still have time to bum around all week. I get to speak Spanish and take free Spanish and salsa lessons, and all I have to do is welcome people to the centre. Cool!

I start January 7th, so until then I'm free to update my blog and other stuff, like re-reading George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, probably the best, most morbid and wickedly funny fantasy series ever written. I bought the fourth book in the series while I was in the States in paperback for $7.00 (the only thing to do in Providence, Rhode Island is shop, plus it was raining). Other than that, I'm just hoping it snows a lot. I'm trying to write some articles about "my travels," see if I can get my head around Cuba, maybe throw in a piece on Crazy Jon, play a little hockey, been drinking a lot of Gin & Tonics, and Christmas is coming, so I should be fairly occupied in the coming weeks.

Amanda's here until December 11th, which means she's going to be in town for Ev and Will's annual Christmas Party. I've been attending Ev & Will’s Christmas Party since I was of age to make a decent Gin & Tonic, that is, about the age I learned to read and write, say, five years old. Amanda and I’ll be the youngest people there by about fifteen years, the average age being about 68, but that's ok: those old people really know how to party!

I went out the other night to the Old Mill with Ev and her friend Miriam, as a sort of an escort for their 72nd and 75th birthdays, respectively. We hit the dance floor no less than six times! I had a blast. Talk about a dry crowd, though (the rest of the strangers dining at the Old Mill, that is, not my two dates). All these white bre(a)d Kingsway wraiths shoveling steaks into their guts and bobbing their heads to the stagy big band. Makes you want to get up and just give a particularly smug and ignorant one of them a good slap, spit in their food, and pull down your pants, but I suppose there’s something to be said for their well-fed decorum and respectability; it keeps the riff raff out and maintains the illusion, if only for a few hours.

Afterwards, having said goodnight to Ev and Miriam, Will, who’s Ev's degenerate and incorrigible husband—as well as my longtime friend and financial advisor—and I stayed up until 6am solving the world's problems and sampling liqueurs. Well, Will drank the liqueurs; I had a coffee pot full of tea, as I was driving home. Strange that. Will’s always warning me about how alcohol, liqueurs especially, is "terrible dreadful stuff...to be avoided at all costs," before rubbing his hands together eagerly and pouring himself the first of many glasses. Before you know it he's polished-off the Panama Jack and is heading towards the Courvoissier with a sly grin on his face.

Coming soon:

Cuban travelogue
Maritime memoirs
Notes from the Security State (ie. my creeped-out impressions from 10 days in the U.S.)
Crazy Jon Special

O.

Back, again, in Salamanca

Behind the old cathedral, at the bottom of a certain street, there´s a garden. It´s the loveliest, most peaceful little garden you could wander into.

I read the inscription over the entrance as I pass under its stone arch: Huerto de Calixto y Melibea. It´s the first time I´ve noticed the inscription. Until now, I´d wondered if what I called ¨the secret garden on the wall behind the cathedral¨, were more in the romantic or the religious tradition of secret gardens. But that seems to clinch it: Calixto and Melibea are the Spanish equivalent of Romeo and Juliet, this must be a romantic garden.

And yet, the harmony of the garden´s distinct little flower sections, its quietude and orderliness, conjure images of nuns, barefoot, pluming rosebushes before their midday prayers. The garden´s setting, behind the Albergue de peregrinos, lends credence to this notion, as do the multitude of seminaries and nunneries hatched in around Salamanca.

But, in the corner, under the shade of the blackberry tree, within reach of the damp touch of the ancient walls, there´s something mysterious, oneiric, about the garden. The running water of the lonely fountain, set in it´s own mini-clearing, adds to the feeling of timelessness and loss. There, beyond the murmur and clang of tourists, beneath the interlocking vines that cover its pathways, the garden lives. At it´s edge, overlooking the River Tormes, the walled precipice suggests a secret gathering of lovers at sunrise, while the drops of purple syrop from the blackberry tree mildly dispossess, hinting at an older, hidden presence.

I came here to be silent, alone, to gather myself for a moment between touristic sorties in and out of the medieval centre of the city. But as I sit in the corner, with two vine-covered walls at my back, and the blackberry tree providing a somewhat threatening shade, a man with a black guitar case approaches, and asks would it bother me if he sat down. Of course not, I say, with a nod of my head, watching as he pulls out a honey-coloured classical guitar, and begins to play, flawlessly, in the Spanish style.

After he leaves, I hear the birds again, and it becomes clear who the mysterious forest presence is, dropping blackberries on my head. I hear again the sound of the fountain running, I remember that from the garden, one has a unique view of the new and old cathedrals conjoined, from behind and through the leaves of the blackberry tree.

The garden of Calixto and Melibea—like so much of what one sees etched in the golden stone of Salamanca—is a facade. Inaugurated on the 12th of June, 1981, the garden was designed to evoke the setting of La Celestina, to encourage contact with nature, as well as to give the zone a ¨romantic air and medieval aspect.¨ Like Salamanca, what the garden presents is a cultivated romance. But somehow that doesn´t matter, the proportion and craft and care put into the project overcome its affectedness, leaving visitors to the city enchanted and coming back for more.

For me, however, on this, my fifth return visit to Salamanca, the artifice and charm has worn off. I genuinely enjoy my moment in the garden, marvel at the primitive-looking wooden desks the students kneeled at(?) that I see in the old university, and happily lick my ice-cream as I stroll, yet again, through the Plaza Mayor.

But by 2pm, I´m hot, I´m bored, and I wanna go home. I've been in Spain for 14 months (2 of which were spent idle and jobless in Salamanca), taught english to indifferent kids for 10, and I've just spent 28 intense days as a teacher/monitor at an english camp in Ciudad Rodrigo, on the border of Spain and Portugal; the last thing I want to do is return to Salamanca for another 3 days to pass the time wishing I was at home in my own bed. I don't know what I was thinking when I booked my flight home for 5 days after the end of camp. I thought I might travel around this corner of Spain for a couple of days, maybe catch a boat to Portugal, but I was just too tired to do that, so I chose the easiest, cheapest option, and came back to Salamanca.

It's wierd being here, again. I feel not only as if I'm retracing my own steps in Salamanca, but as if I'm following in my mother's footsteps too, taking cues from her scribbled annotations written on the loose leaves of the ripped-out pages of the Let's Go guide she left me. I think I´m beginning to better understand the crisis she experienced here, while travelling alone (most of the time) through Spain earlier this year: when you´re out of your home, or something you can call home, for long enough, whether or not its by choice, and you begin to feel kept away from home, the pleasure seeps out of travelling. There´s also the sad little fact that beyond eating and drinking there´s very little to actually do when you´re travelling (especially if you´re on a low budget). You can only read for so many hours a day and eat so much... you begin to feel isolated, an outsider, and somewhat irrelevant; cut-off from the responsibilities, routines, hobbies, places, and people that centre your life at home. You consider the avenues through which you derive and create meaning in your daily life, and to question if you would really be lost without the cotidian structure you've come here to escape.

I´m just putting in time before I can catch my flight home. And, beyond drinking, eating and reading (on the backless! public benches—these should be outlawed, or at the very least, severely restricted) there´s not much to do in Salamanca, hence my presence, here, in the internet cafe. I´m also simply tired. It was a long month in Ciudad Rodrigo and sleeping in the stinky hostel (HI Albergue Salamanca 12.90€/night, not bad) could only do so much to recover my energy and zest for exploration. Moreover, I can´t seem to break the rhthym of the camp: sleep very little, eat a lot, eat more, go go go go: collapse. So, I´ve been wandering around Salamanca like a madman looking for something to do, or eat. Yes, I can´t stop eating: I´ve had two ice-creams today, not just because they´re good, but because I´m still too tense to do anything else, like relax. Working back-to-back two week sessions at camp this year was too much (the other monitors took it even worse, but since I'm generally laid back and tend to disconnect too easily when silly problems arise, I suffered less).

I really enjoyed the first two weeks. They were intense, exciting, difficult and hilarious, but the second two were tiring, boring, and full of conflict. So, I can´t wait to go home: there are no kids there (I hope).

benimaclet, a picture diary of my neighbourhood, part II

The main drag in the old part of the village of Benimaclet. Man, am I going to miss my little morning walks to the panadería and frutería, staring occassionally at stereotypical old world sights I'd once thought lost, like the old ladies chewing each other out and waving their breadsticks at the sky in reprimand.

With the sun shining down and the blue sky overhead, you can´t help but be in a good mood here, especially if it´s 11am and you know you don´t start work till 6:30pm...suckers!

Ah yes, the garbage bins. A figure on just about every city block, these yellow (plastic), green (glass), grey (garbage), and blue (paper) bins stick out like sore thumbs to the western eye, but I've nearly come to appreciate their tidy out-of-placeness. I suppose they must encourage a certain awareness of recycling, for what that's worth, but I'm not sure how environmentally-friendly chucking your beer bottles into pieces is, especially when they could easily be re-collected and re-filled—as they are in Ontario: The Beer Store reports a bottle return rate of 99%. Fuckin eh!

Benimaclet has what too many of the newer neighboorhoods in Valencia—and places in Toronto like Bay Street—lack: light. The buildings, even the four-story post-war flats, are just low enough and far enough apart to create a sense of coziness without blocking out the light, or one´s view of the sky, a friendly dose of which every day is, I think, necessary for the maintenance of a certain degree of mental health.

The houses in Benimaclet also sport larger-than average windows: they're nearly floor-to-ceiling, unlike the typical modern Spanish flat.

Small windows suck, especially when you can't even see the sky out of them standing up—and you're only 5'9'. Floor-to-ceiling windows are probably too much to ask, but, maybe we could settle for at least ceiling to thigh, instead of forehead to knees, like in my flat where, though the light of day is clearly discernible, only a vague sense of sky actually creeps in around shoulder height. I have to bend down to tell you if the sun is shining, and snuggle up close to the window so that the light falls on my page when I'm reading. Apart from being a pain in the ass, this can be really depressing.

I've also noticed that, in general, the furniture here is lower, the kitchen counters, for example, only come up to mid-thigh, the toilet appears mischievously distant as I ponder it from above, and I have to bend down to wash my hands afterwards. Between leaning over to look out the window, wash the dishes and check for evidence of splashback, I've really put a strain on my lower back.

For me, this is a real design flaw, and given that I'm, at best, average height, I can only think that the kitchen counters must have been installed with grandma in mind, frying-up a storm, as she obviously does more or less from morning until night (when she's not brandishing bread sticks in the street, or hobbling over to the frutería to discuss tomato prices with Consuela and Ahmed, the Pakistani guy who sells us fruits and vegetables).

Spanish homes tend to be set up like personal little fortresses: equipped with practically light-proof persianas (blinds, which, I must admit, I am a fan of—apart from the back-rattling sound they make everytime you pull them up or down), they're the ultimate refuge from the street, which is great, because, as far as I can tell, only 3 things seem to go on in the average Spanish household, and none of them require outside imput: eating and meal preparation, sleep (both of the post prandial, and nocturnal variety), and television-watching. Thus, the lack of light and general unfriendliness presented by the blinds-down faces of the buildings doesn't really matter to people here.

When the blinds are down they're not out on the street taking a stroll remarking to themselves how cold the area seems during siesta or at night. Only crazy foreigners or people running home late do that...No, they're either asleep, nearing sleep, or watching tv, as far as I can tell from the street that is, noting the tell-tale buzz of the buk-tube and the peaceful stillness of happy citizens vegetating away...

The design of Spanish flats does (as I've perhaps made clear) bother me, which is why I spend most of my time either inside doing my best to imitate my sometime compatriots, or outside, basking in sun amid the openness of the street and Valencia's cafe culture.

Calle de la Alegría, or, as the Spaniards say, en Cristiano: HAPPY STREET. Fuckin right! This is the happiest little street in my neighbourhood, mind you he doesn´t look especially happy, neither, for that matter, does she, but that´s par for the course here. Back to the street. Nothing much happens on it, really. It´s just a quiet little, particularly content-seeming, street. Cool!

benimaclet: a picture diary of my neighbourhood, part I

Benimaclet used to be a village in its own right; it is now a neighbourhood in transition, existing in a strange flux between village, neighbourhood, country, and city. About 200 metres from my 10 year old apartment block—a 12-story C-shaped structure with a semi-public patio garden in the centre—Benimaclet ends and the farm fields begin. The change is not softened by any musical flow into the country, there´s no soundtrack and Beethoven´s 6th symphony does not gradually and triumphantly usher you into the pristine, pastoral countryside. It just ends. You walk to the edge, there´s a huge empty roundabout, its 5 shiny black asphalt lanes throwing the sun into your eyes. Beside the roundabout there's a (famous) Horchatería, whose semi-paved parking lot fills up every Sunday night as Valencians from across the county come for their Horchata and Farton fix. On your right, beyond the green overgrown (cultivated?) ditch, which the Horchateria's patio (with it's farton frying hut!) looks out on, you can see green fields;

they're so flat they seem nearly to be set in a depression. On your left, there's a—rather decrepid looking—football stadium. Straight-ahead and beyond: an 8 lane road, some semi-abandoned-looking fields, and, behind that, what looks like more city, or maybe suburbs, or maybe something in between. What you see in the distance is actually Alboraya, which, like Benimaclet, also used to be a village in its own right, and still remains more self-contained than Benimaclet, but appears also to be rapidly losing ground to development.

This photo is pretty representatitive of the low country surrounding Valencia. You can see the sea in the background. The distances look closer because of the flatness of the land. Don't ask me what they grow here, but I've seen some cucumbers and watermelons. There's a horrible smell that occasionally invades the city from the North. We call it the chorizo queso podrido smell because it smells like a mix of rotten cheese and salami. I've figured out—one particularly pestulent day when jogging through the countryside—that this odour originates from the fields, specifically, out of the irrigation chanels than run alongside them and which carry the spent drain-off from the fields. That's why the smell comes in waves and only on certain days: when the farmers decide to get their revenge on the city dwellers.

Some people are angry about this (not the watermelons—I stuck that part in after, nor, for that matter, the smell, which was a still later addition). A community group called perlhorta ("for the Garden?"—horta is Valencian for huerta, which means garden. It's the name of this county in the province of Valencia) http://www.perlhorta.org/nova/ has been fighting to save La Huerta, organizing protests, workshops and even a "mini-university" out in those green fields beyond the Horchateria. Their graffiti, as well as their website, is written in Valencian: "save our land!"..."Live Benimaclet!" I discovered this group a few weekends ago at the Alternative Fair in the Turia gardens. It was encouraging to see so many dirty hippy types buying organic produce, eating vegetarian at the food stalls, slugging cold(ish) beers bought from entrepreneurs toting ice-filled garbage bins, talking to representatives from GREENPEACE, the local Palestian rights organization, etc. There seem to be lots of people in Valencia who care about saving the world, eating healthy food, and having a good time. I've never seen the Turia so dirty as the day after the fair though. It smelled like urine, beer bottles and broken glass were scattered across the ground, and each and every one of the skylights of the new subway station under the bridge (both of which are designed by Calatrava) were smashed into pieces. I grabbed some photos off the perlahorta website (the two pictures of fields and the last picture of a construction site). You can see the fields of La Huerta as well as some of the buildings typical of those being thrown up around Benimaclet.

Cuba Trip

I´m going to Cuba!!! (September 1st to October 3rd). Amanda and I just got back from a weekend in La Sierra Pobre (the Poor Mountains), which is located about an hour outside of Madrid, where we attended a pre-departure meeting of Sodepaz (http://www.sodepaz.es/), the NGO with which we will be travelling to Cuba. It was a lot of fun. There were people from all over Spain who will be travelling this summer, in various groups, to Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Palestine.

Sodepaz is an NGO that focuses on international cooperation and solidaridy. This means that they're not a charity, nor are they politically aligned. They do, however, encourage a closer, more open look at some of the regimes we traditionally approach (at least in the main-stream media) with a (usually negative) pre-formed opinion or bias, such as that of Fidel Castro in Cuba. With this goal in mind, Sodepaz organizes trips to, usually under developed, countries in order to come closer to understanding the reality lived by the people in those places. Some of these trips involve working in some sort of project that the NGO is developing in that country, others, like the trip to Cuba, focus on education (ours) and making connections, as well as more traditional-style tourism. We will be travelling in a small group, meeting-up with academic groups, citizens groups, members of the Communist Party, as well as visiting various projects being developed by Sodepaz and their partners, such as CubaSolar, a group that is installing solar panels on rural doctors offices, or to an agricultural school in the countryside.

The idea of the, supposedly mandatory, meeting this weekend near Madrid was to get to know the organization, learn a few things about the country we're going to visit, and meet the people we´ll be going with. Unfortunately the other 4 people in our group didn´t come, so Amanda and I had to do the touchy-feely team-building drills in pairs. We—among other stunning achievements—successfully climbed a tree (working in-tandem) and developed a strong sense of team membership, as well muscling-out some impressive group dynamics. We also threw some tennis balls around in a circle, demonstrating impressive coordination, and applied face paint while detailing our deepest travelling fears. Anyway, we met lots of cool people (from other groups)—that was the only real drawback of the weekend: that we didn´t get to meet the other members of the group we´ll be going with—,enjoyed the tropical-themed mojito disco, and left the weekend pretty pumped: the trip sounds AWESOME. It's 21 days (traevlling with the SODEPAZ group). We start in Santiago and wend our way through the island, finishing in Habana, then we´re going to stay on another 10 days or so wandering around on our own.

Fruit & Veg

6 pears
2 lemons
2 grapefruits
1 cauliflower
¼ cabbage
4 spring onions
3 leeks
5 celery sticks
10 carrots
2 red peppers
3 white potatoes
5 red potatoes
1 zuccini
9.10€ (roughly = $13.50CAD)
Went to the central market the other day, as I typically do at least once a week, and bought some produce. It seemed like an awful lot for the price, but I can't remember how much fresh food costs in Canada. Apples are certainly cheaper there, and better: I remember buying big bags of them at the Hamilton Market for $2.50. Bought fresh clotchinas (Valencian mussels, which are just beginning to be in season) last night and made a nice pasta/seafood dinner. They were also really cheap (2.50€), and can probably be bought more cheaply, purchased as they were at my local supermarket. Delicious!

Kick in the rear, Part II

Woke up in a wonderful mood Monday morning to find this on my doorstep. Not the Audi—some middle-aged moron no doubt wields it daily between here and his cubicle, struggling to pay his car bills—no, the shitmobile locked to the tree, which is now missing its rear wheel thanks to some other shithead, who stole a broken wheel off the back of a bicycle that hardly rides at the best of times. Why didn't he steal my basket? At least it works. The back wheel, on the other hand, was wobbly, missing a couple of spokes, and prone to fall off on occasion...but it served. Just the week before, in fact, I had been riding to work when the same rear wheel suddenly fell off. It was the first time this had happened in 6 months and I took it in stride. I'd just put it back on on Thursday, which, for a technically challenged bastard (literally) like me, is no mean feat. Not to mention that it was a real pain in the ass...

That bike cost me 50euros. I got it from Alan, the director at my school, and he's going to buy it back from me when I go for 40euros. Well, it's going to cost me 45euros now to replace the fucking wheel, which really rubs me the wrong way, especially considering that a brand new bike only costs 100, but, it's in my interest to fix the fucker and get back on the seat, since the repair basically pays for itself when I sell it back to the big guy.

Incidentally, I'm not bitter (I'm just fucking angry!): what really fucking pissed me off was precisely that I was in such a good mood, even after I walked past my crippled bike and continued on to work resignedly on foot. It was only when I realized how much it was going to cost me that I really got pissed off, I was actually grudgingly content this afternoon as I carried the bike on my shoulder the kilometre to the shop, until I recieved the second half of the second kick in the face of the week.
Ride on.

O.

underwear mishap

It´s the small things in life (I hate those stupid commercials that increasingly seem to begin with "it´s" without previously establishing the noun for which the pronoun stands): morning coffees in the sun, a damn good sandwhich (with toppings—the traditional Spanish bocadillo, while delicious, is sometimes, dishearteningly, basic—while the delicious and unique combination of jamón serrano (cured ham) and grated tomato with oregano and olive oil really hits the spot, what one all too often gets is simply ham, or ham/cheese. ie. no lettuce, tomato, no sauce, etc.), a cold beer after work, finely-spun soft cotton undies.

Well, here´s where it hit me, the first shit in the face of the weekend—a small piece of shit, as the little dogs of Benimaclet are wont to lay, but shit nonetheless: hoping to save a little cash, I decided to head to the seconds store to buy two packs of discount, but high quality, underwear. Having planned the stop for the half hour window that falls in between my Spanish class and the dead time of 1:30pm to 5:00pm, when the whole city shuts down, I had stuck a 10€ bill in my back pocket before leaving the house, already relishing my (cheap) squeeky-clean new polyester undies (the ones that dry really quickly and are really convenient when you´re travelling, or strutting around the house).

Going out of my way to get there, I get there, struggle through another embarrasing conversation with the girl in the shop:
"yes, the size 32 socks."
"but socks don´t come in that size"
"well, those things with one hole on each side for your legs that...yeah those..exaaactly", ...only to find that I´d lost my money on the way there.

Bicycling home dejectedly, underwearless, through the obstacle course of old ladies doing their daily shopping right at rush hour, just when the stores are about to close and all the working people head home (or to the stores so they can make their lunches), I reflected on my nasty surprise: 10€ may seem trivial, but losing them really was a kick in the sack: I´d set aside that money especially for new underwear—an altogether functional, if stylish, item that nevertheless seems frivolous when it comes to laying down 7.50€ - 12€ (euros!) a pair (regular price). Isn´t it ironic, I thought, that just when you try to save a bit of money, you lose it? Whatever. It´s the first time in a long time I´ve lost my money. Bound to happen at least once in awhile.

*I have since purchased a pair of edgy silver boxer/slips, which I found hidden behind the regulary-priced (7.90€) underwear at H&M, for 2.90€. This has somewhat made up for Friday´s disappointment.

frankfurt hahn

If you ever get a chance to fly through Frankfurt Hahn, take it. What a lovely little airport. This is the second time this year that I´ve been through the airport and it really is a treat: tiny, comfortable, nestled in the German agricultural heartland, it boasts cheap pretzels and coffee (.90cents), 2 outdoor patios – one of which has a view of the landing strip, the other of rolling farmland – and a golf course. It´s just small enough to feel like home for a few hours. – Bryan! I´m really sorry I didn´t contact you. Had I known we´d be in Frankfurt for 6 hours, and brought my cell phone with me to Sweden, maybe we could have had a coffee/beer in town. As it happened we had more than enough time since our flight (from Stockholm) landed at Frankfurt at a little before 9am and our flight to Valencia left at 3:30pm. Next time buddy. Oh, by the way: I have your double CD set "Edad de Oro del Pop Español", which you left behind with Alan, to which I have been rocking out for the past week or so. Don´t forget to pick it up next time your here!

Incidentally, these pictures are NOT of Frankfurt Hahn Airport and surrounds – it´s not that nice. Rather, they´re from my trip to Sweden! I didn´t take so many pictures. The first three days in Stockholm my fingers were too cold to want to take out the camera, and the rest of the time, I dunno, just didn´t feel like it. But here are a couple photos from in and around Kalmar, the city of 60,000 where Amanda´s mom is from. Kalmar is about halfway between Stockholm and Copenhagen, in the South of Sweden. The first photo is a Purple Nun Flower, a unique flower that can only be found in a tiny valley on the island of Ohland, which I think means Island, called The Valley of the Nuns. The third photo is from this lovely little place: it´s an outdoor chapel. Really beautiful spot. The middle photo is of Kalmar castle, minus the castle – oops! But you can check that out online if you really want to.

Awesome.

-Awesome- replied one of my 10 year olds today to my, by now must be growing stale, greeting of -Hi! how are you?- Cool! I thought: I must be teaching them something after all, it’s only taken 6 months for a kid to a) reply to me, and, b) use the word “awesome.”

And awesome’s how I felt today. It’s how I responded this morning to the same question when I was buying olives and feta cheese at El Raco de Ferri, a booth at the central market run by an exceedingly friendly Greek guy with really frizzy hair. -Estoy muy bien, pues…un poco resacado, pero de buen humor. - Translation: -I´m Awesome, but I´ve got a bit of a hangover. I am, however, in very good humour.

Yeah, I had a great night last night. Having a half-empty bottle of wine, I felt obliged to “echarme una copa...o dos” and “terminarla.” I did so in a very civilized manner, while watching the fifth instalment of El Quixote... Then I got drunk and cleaned the house. Had a wonderful time. My rationale for cleaning the house in this moment, if you´ll believe it, was this: since I´m drunk I may as well clean because I sure can´t study Spanish in this condition, moreover, I may even enjoy the cleaning, and then tomorrow, when I´m sobre, I won´t have to waste time cleaning and I can study. The mirror-image of this thinking would, of course, be the one habitually invoked by my mother: “sure I might as well be drunk as I am.”

This kind of fundamentally economic thinking has characterized my decisions more and more of late, especially when it comes to time management. Referred to as “opportunity cost” by economists, it implies the necessary surrender of one choice in return for another. If, for example, I´m reading a book, or speaking in english, I´m not reading or speaking in Spanish; If I spend money on lunch, I won´t eat dinner, and so on. Which brings us back to cleaning the house with a bottle of wine: aside from representing what, at the time, was the best allocation of my resources, it sure is a nice surprise to wake up and find your toilet´s sparkling clean, and you can´t even quite remember why…

Soooooo slow

76€/month for phone and internet is unacceptable: now that I´m semi-retired that´s like 1/6th of my income, so I don´t regret cutting my internet connection at all, but I sure do miss it. Casa Americana´s computers are dying a slow, stress-inducing death, which has stolen at least 1 and a half of my halfly-written blog entries and attempts to upload cool photos.

Not that I don´t have time to post: I´m not terrribly busy here: my days aren´t exactly full, but they sure do fill-up pretty quickly, to the point that they seem to gather a momentum of their own. In fact, I think it´s taking me longer to do stuff now - that, or stuff is taking longer to do. For example, I tried to bake some cookies and make some dinner one day after work and freaked out when I ran out of time. Somehow in the 2 hours between 8pm, when my class finished, and 10pm, I managed to not make cookies - that is, I tried and failed. I mean, not that I tried and they sucked, rather, I failed to organize myself sufficiently into a state of cookie-making preparadeness.

Let me explain myself: the supermarket closes at 9:15pm, which shouldn´t be a problem because I live beside the supermarket. So, I biked home, which takes 10min, opened the fridge, realized I needed chocolate, went to Mercadona and bought chocolate. Fine up until here. Return home, start mixing, and, Fuck! Eggs! The supermarket has now closed, so I head down the street to the Consum, which closes at 9:30pm, fifteen precious minutes later, but do I make it on time?... Nope. Great. What now? Aha! the 24hr supermarket/gas station! Off I go, but do they have eggs? Nope. What time is it? 10pm...Screwed yet again. All this is to say...what the fuck?!!

2 questions immediately present themselves: 1) Owen, what the fuck is wrong with you*, why don´t you just chill out and buy the cookie mix pre-made like the rest of the male heterosexual world? 2) Where the fuck did the time go?

*Ed. note: Erin, my ex-girlfriend, once asked me a very simple yet significant question. She was pretty mad at me and somewhat frustrated with what she viewed as my inability to organize and restructure myself into a smooth and well-functioning, punctual, glitch-free make myself a sandwhich, tie my shoelaces, remember my keys (oh yeah, it must have been the keys) machine. She asked quite simply and incredulously: ¨How do you get through a day?" i.e. You seem to be a perfectly functioning human being on the surface, but, (oh shock!) you forget your keys!? Thus, how do you, on a daily basis, manage to get from point A to B while completing all the little steps that make the trip possible? The answer, of course, is to go through the back door, or leave an extra key in the mailbox, or whatever. I didn´t know what do say though, I mean, how much of a fucking achievement is it to get through a day? What´s to it? So I´m apt to lose a few things along the way, I may have to return home once or twice to forget something I left there, I occassionally replace the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the fridge, but, what´s the worst that could happen? I´m not going to explode, at least, not unless someone else were to blow me up. Anyway, I found this question quite humourous, both because it conveys a certain truth about my shoddy organizational skills and general absentmindedness, and because it seems to define her version of a successful day as some sort of a well-organized and productive journey that only ultra-capable people achieve. In retrospect, it also hints that days can be pretty damn hard to get through sometimes, I´ll give her that (but we were talking about normal, privileged, attend classes and feed yourself days).

This is one of a few recent incidents (we´re back talking about the cookies now) that have left me anywhere from confused, late, indignant and even incensed. Time just seems to go faster now. But this incident and another similar one that I have since forgotten made me think: they say that ¨time flies when you´re having fun.¨ Could it be possible, I asked myself, that this saying, which I have always taken to be a metaphorical comment about our perception of time passing, actually contains a literal truth? Could it be that it takes longer to do some things than others? Could it be that time moves at different speeds during some activities? For example, when attempting to arrive home, buy eggs and chocolate, (admittedly in two trips), and make cookies, than it does when, say, driving from Toronto to Waterloo, ON (150 odd - the last 5 or so especially, we always get lost - kilometres) where my cousins live? It sounds strange, but I am becoming more and more convinced that this is the case.

I think the phenomenon could have something to do with productivity differences between Canada and, say, Spain. I think it also explains how my days have managed to fill themselves up. You see, when you block off short bits of time in a strange and slow-moving country, you actually speed those hours up, which, as any worth his weight in soya sauce mathematican can tell, means you do less... Thus, an 8hour Canadian 9-5 workday followed by a 6hour post-work freedom/recovery period actually moves faster, yet manages, at the same time, so to speak, to accomplish more than an 8hr Spanish workday that begins at 9, breaks for 2hours between 2 and 4, and returns to work till 7ish. There are practical explinations for this, such as the time-erasive effects of driving in 2 rush hours/day. For me, personally, it seems to come down to a complete inability to divide time into productive chunks. Blocking-off time just doesn´t work for me.

Firstly, I can´t concentrate enough in a 2hr block of time to do 2hrs of work (I´m talking about intellectual work here, reading, studying, thinking). I need to be in the zone, and that means that I need spaces in between my blocks, big spaces, otherwise I´m thinking about the next block and everything falls to pieces, I forget the eggs and I burn the cookies.

Secondly, if I have 2hrs to, for example, do the shopping, I end up in a hurry, flustered, and caught in one of these wierd time warps I´ve been talking about. So, that´s why I feel like my days have a nasty tendency of filling themselves up so easily without properly compensating in that satisfying, you´ve done a shit load of work today feeling. And that´s why after my, I have to admit, almost pathologically relaxing day of a) 9am wakeup, yoga on the roof, brief halting run through the building sites north of my house, breakfast, or b) an hour or so of studying Spanish, then Spanish class till 2pm, 2hrs to prepare and eat lunch (don´t ask me how, but it always takes at least 2hrs - the sandwich has a lot to be said for it, but they eat those for dinner here, or for el almuerzo (snack)), I end up trying to squeeze writing a post into the space between my evening classes - and that brings me back to the slow computers, and that´s when ...the fucking computer crashes! Deep breath. The world will not end if you don´t publish your post, but you´ve just sucked an hour an a half of time out of the day. So that´s why I haven´t posted yet in April. I´ve also been in Sweden for two weeks having an awesome time.

Ah well, the barbarians are once again knocking at the gates, and I´ve got to run to class, but I´ll fill in the rest of the details tomorrow or the next day, or the day after that. For now, I´ll leave you with this wonderful image of me eating a mashed potato-wrapdog in Sweden. Dig it.

making paella

For me, the highlight of Fallas was easily the Paella competition on my street: chatting up old ladies for recipe tips and techniques, sipping cold beers, inhaling the smoke from the orange and pine wood fires...it was awesome.

What the hell is Fallas? Fallas is a festival that coincides with the Christian celebration of San Jose (March 19). It´s really the pagan side of a very Catholic, traditional, staid holiday - what´s leftover of the rituals of spring renewal at the solstice. During Fallas, sculpted figures are erected throughout the city representing or alluding to various public, uh, figures or recent events/controversies. On the 19th, the last day of Fallas, all the figures are burnt to the ground, save one (the winner of the best Falla competition). The burning of effigies to mark the spring solstice clearly recalls the festival´s pagan roots and adds to the almost carnivalesque feel of the celebration, however, it does have a more recent Christian, and even cuotidian, origin. But, as the sun sets and after all the good little Christian families parade down the street during the day, the craziness begins (at night, duh) and all hell breaks loose.

Today´s Fallas evolved out of what had been a long and very practical tradition in Valencia: Carpenters, on the eve of the day of their patron San Jose (Joseph - he was a carpenter, remember?), would place a wooden figure covered in painted-on paper strips, on the street in front of their workshops. This rite was initiated by the carpenters´ guild as a way of cleaning out their workshops before spring and getting rid of old shavings and pieces of wood, which they later burned in a purifying bonfire. What used to be a utilitarian and even reverential custom changed at some point in the 18th century, when some of the carpenters began creating more elaborate and satiric figures, exposing and shaming real people to the public. Today, the figures include monuments up to 4 or 5 stories high.

¨Fallas¨ also refers to the neighbourhood group and the activities surrounding the actual figures. During Fallas, each neighbourhood group, or ¨Falla¨, organizes activities and events for their members, including this wicked cook-up (the Paella competition). They hire an artisan to construct the falla (and raise money throughout the year in order to pay him sometimes as much as .5 million€), hold parties every night on the street, march around the neighbourhood in traditional folk dress or aristocratic outfits (these people are called Falleros/as), banging drums and playing the same song over and over. There are more than 300 Fallas in Valencia and each one of them hosts its own local celebration as well as participating in the city-wide events (like the Ofrenda, or Offering: each falla marches to the Plaza de la Virgen bringing flowers, which they offer to a giant wooden statue...of the virgin, the flowers are placed on the bare wooden skeleton, forming the virgin´s dress, or, we might say, clothing the virgin), and of course, on the night of the 19th, each group BURNS their Falla. It´s an environmental disaster. The Polytecnic university is actually conducting an environmental study on this, because all the figures are made of polystyrene...

Anyway, I took some photos of what I think was the best part of all this. More than the nights spent shoving through hoardes of people and knocking old people into the gutters, guzzling rum and dancing to Shakira, I enjoyed wandering around the city looking at the monuments, buying buñuelos (deep-fried pumpkin donuts), oggling falleras, and: Paella. On my street there was a 25 paella cook-off. I settled in with a few beers to enjoy the spectacle:
This women in particular seemed to know her stuff, so I stuck by her, watching and learning: First, she fries chicken and rabbit in olive oil, adding chopped tomatoes after about 10mins. When the meat is browned, she adds artichokes and green beans, which she then fries for another 5mins or so before adding the water. The water should go up to the rivets, a little higher than you see in this picture because she tossed some more water in a second later.
When the water reaches the boil add the rice, roughly 100g per person. Stir initially, then let sit. That´s basically it. Except for spices: rosemary, paprika, safran, salt, pepper. Add during the add water stage. It´s really a lot harder than it sounds, especially if you´re cooking over a wood fire, but you can make a pretty good go at it at home on the stove or on the barbecue. I found this whole process fascinating.

¨So I´ve just made myself redundant at one of my jobs (Wall Street), let´s see how long it takes for them to notice and fire me…¨

I cut and pasted this out of a rough copy I had scribbled in between classes 10 days ago and didn´t have time to post. The plan was to make myself unavailable for certain inconveniently far away classes and let myself be pushed slowly and comfortably out of a job — while continuing to collect my monthly salary, naturally. That didn´t fly. So I quit. No more riding the immigrant train Mon to Thurs to Fuente del Jarro, the biggest industrial polygon in Spain, to teach a 1.5hour class. Well, actually I´m completing the last week of my ¨two weeks notice¨ from Tues to Thurs next week, but that´s it.

So, that leaves me with my Spanish classes everyday from 12 to 2pm. Evening classes 6:30 to 9:30 at Casa Americana, and a pair of private classes with some snobby rich kids. Wicked.

valencia from the hills

This picture is from Lliria, a village about an hour away from Valencia. You can see the city in the distance, or you could if it was bigger (the photo not the city, well, ok the city too). As you can see, it´s REALLY flat here, the city included. There is a ring of mountains that surrounds the fertile Valencian plain, on which (the plain not the mountains) grow oranges. Em, you can see where the mountains meet the sea to the right of my right shoulder, they do the same thing on the other side. Maybe I´ll take some pictures facing the hills next time. The plain is dotted with farms and intermixed with light industry. Yes, I have lost weight, thank you for noticing. Seriously though, I feel really greasy. There´s oil in everything. If not, then it´s cheese or meat, and even then you´ll probably find oil on it.

valencia from my roof

took these pictures the other day while I was having some beers up on the roof. It´s uglier than I had imagined. The first and second pictures are looking towards the city centre, but in between are all the barrios (neighbourhoods) uh, in between. It´s about a 25 min walk from my place to the centre. This would be fine except that the metro doesn´t work past 11pm at night here, in Valencia, in Spain. People don´t eat until at least 11pm here on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night. Where are they supposed to go after they eat dinner? How are they supposed to get to dinner in the first place? There are cabs. A few, but most of them only operate during normal Spanish hours. Arriving at the bus station in the creepy part of town after 10pm? Good luck getting a cab. Or on the 11 O´clock express train from Barcelona? Yer fucked, think again. I get around most of this by riding my bike, and I like the little village I live in, but this is ridiculous. Get your act together Spain. Geez.

And another thing. Between where I live and downtown are five decades of disgrace. I mean this is fucking disgraceful! You can see what I´m talking about in the pictures, all those really ugly buildings they threw up on the fertile fields that used to lie between here (the village of Benimaclet) and the city. The worst thing is that the last two decades have been especially disgraceful, especially considering Franco´s been long gone for at least 20 years. You guys have to stop using that as an excuse. Are you telling me that town planners couldn´t see how they should have been building the city by looking at the older, far-nicer buildings? Or going somewhere else to find out what they were doing there? There is no residential architecture here post 1950s, and as you get closer to present day the buildings just get worse. They seem to simply throw up the cheapest thing possible without giving any thought to design, use of space, materials, innovation, nada. Sometimes I think Spanish architects have a toolkit with like 5-7 models in it, they sell these models to construction companies, and these guys throw them up as fast and as cheaply as they can. Actually, someone does seem to be cluing-in though. I read the other day that they´re considering a law that would limit some of the out of control construction. I fucking hope so.

The bottom picture is facing (South?) towards the sea, which I inevitably think of as South but is actually probably not South. Maybe it´s more like East. You can see smoke. That´s from fireworks. Valencia is the capital of fireworks. I have more to say about this. Below the smoke along the first line of the beach there are some new buildings.

There are no less than 31 cranes in this picture, I counted. And what look to be at least 16 buildings in varying stages of construction, each and every one of them the same as the next. Up close they´re even
more creepy because of the tiny differences they´ve concocted to play with your head, like there´s a sculpture in the courtyard in one of them and then not in the next, and as you walk past at siesta, passing nobody because everybody is inside, you can´t help but ask yourself, why? Why couldn´t you have altered the height of one of these buildings, knocked down a wing on one end to let in a bit of sun and break the claustrophobic monotony of the perfectly equal entrances? Fuck.

so long no post

so I forgot my password. I created this blog when I still had internet access at home, and my password was saved on that computer. I thought I knew the password anyway since it´s the same one I´ve always used, but, until now it hasn´t worked. Today though, for some reason, it has suddenly worked, the same stupid thing I´ve been trying to type-in at the log-in screen for two weeks.

Ok, well, blog´s up again. I took some pictures of where I live, will put those up here for you to see. By the way, looks like I´m coming back to Canada in August. My classes here in Valencia finish at the end of June, but I´m going to be working in a summer camp in Ciudad Rodrigo July 1-28, where I worked last year, then I´m coming home.

Walking in the Footsteps of a Child

This is a poem I wrote a couple of years ago for my dad. He´s in the hospital right now recovering from a mild heart attack. I called him the other day and he seemed in good spirits, not particularly surprised at what had happened. I wasn´t either. He´s treated himself like shit for years, smokes, drinks and doesn´t exercise, having been told that it´ll kill him. He had an operation a few years ago (5? 7?) to unblock some clogged arteries, and was told to give up his bad habits. I´m sure that operation cost Canadian taxpayers a few bucks and I´m inclined to say fuck it man, you had your chance, the next one´s on you. But hey, that´s not how it works, and I´m glad. I´m glad to say too that in the last few years my dad has finally found his groove. He´s found his path to ¨god¨, bought a sewing machine and makes quilts as well as his own outfits, he´s a local celebrity, well-known for his uncompromising committment to his own style of drag (he´s just a man in a dress, get over it, and no, he will not shave his beard), is on a baseball team, consistently avoids stressful situations, has the most long weekends per year out of anyone I know, spends more time sitting outside with a coffee in all weather than anyone I know, feeds himself, washes himself, and has his own MySpace website. The guy has a good time, seven days a week, and that´s fucking awesome.

My dad used to pick me up from daycare occassionally. Jesse Ketchum School is about 5 min walk from the Metro Reference Library in downtown Toronto, where he works. We´d walk down Bay Street and across Cumberland or Bloor Street until we got to Yonge St. and the Library entrance. On the way, there were always a lot of cars, it was rush hour. I´ve always had a strong sense of self-preservation and have, on occasion, attempted to injure my father. He was sort of like a new kidney, took awhile to get accustomed to, but after a few probing fork attacks was deemed acceptable and allowed to continue carrying out his function. One day when the traffic was particularly heavy, we were walking hand in hand along the sidewalk on Bloor Street, and I told him that, since he was older, he had a lot less to lose if, say, a car were to swerve out of control onto the sidewalk and wipe him out then and there, and that he should therefore switch places with me and walk closest to the road, absorbing any possible impact and saving me from an early death. He thought this was pretty funny.

Walking in the Footsteps of a Child

He told him once to walk on the outside;
It was because he was older, had lived longer,
And was therefore more prepared to die.

That´s what he told him, and that´s how he told it afterwards—
About a boy who wouldn´t walk on the outside edge
Anymore, when his dad, who had lived a lot longer,
Could take his place.

And that´s why when he was gone
His dad could never quite walk on the outside edge,
With nobody to protect but himself,
Nobody but a shadow of a boy, who once looked up to him
And smiled.

first past the post

October 2004...blogger since. This is my first post, it took me what, almost 3.5 years? I vaguely remember getting all pumped up one day about how I was going to have a blog and put stuff on it and write cool articles about whatever the hell I wanted, and develop. But I didn´t. Instead I kept at it, other things that is, I got a degree, I got good marks, I read a lot, wrote a little, but not on the blog, travelled, completed all the little tasks that comprise our everyday lives, yet, when it came down to sitting down regularly and writing something, anything, down, I just didn´t do it. I think I know why this is. Has something to do with a verging on obsessive compulsive perfectionism that I have let stop me from moving past the beginning stages of many things I write, not that I´m even proof-reading this stuff, but, I just want to do stuff that fits right, something you read and say yeah man, that´s it, you´ve hit it on the head, whatever you´re talking about, that´s how you have to say it, and you did. But I haven´t. So I hesitate and I stop and I forget about it. That´s why it´s taken me so long to post something.

It´s taken me since October 2004 to fucking sit down and follow through with a fucking blog, which is the most informal method of publishing available to us today. So, I want to write, or at least to try and fucking write and see what comes out, and I figure this is as good a place to start as any. I´m going to put a bunch of things on here. It´ll be a kind of diary/ notebook/ keeping in touch kind of place with a few creative writing pieces thrown in, but don´t expect anything spectacular. I´m going to try and post a little every week and see where it goes. We´ll see. As most of you already know, I´m living in Spain at the moment, so all those hours I´m not talking to you, you can read what I might have been saying to you. I´m going to try not to leave too much out.

O.