The Bologna Process: repression and police brutality

If you don´t know what the Bologna Process is check out this website: Bologna Process Official Page. This website gives quite a good, succinct summary of the project to create a European Higher Education Area. I´ve attached some links below to some videos of recent anti-Bologna protests in Spain and the police response, as well as my take on it all (I think it´s BAD).

Owen.

There has been considerable criticism of the Bologna Process in Spain, which many consider to be an attack on the traditional conception of the university as an independent space of free and disinterested learning. Bologna is presented as a plan to increase student and graduate mobility by harmonizing degrees across Europe, which will require restructuring of degrees in Spain along the lines of the N. American system. It´s difficult to argue with more mobility and access to jobs across Europe (nobody does), and this is entirely the point: the Anti-Bologna movement does not disagree in principle with these ideas, rather in the manner of their implementation and the deeper institutional changes that they mask.

In reality, Bologna is an attack on the university as we (well, Spaniards anyway) know it; a sneaky attempt at privatization. The result will be a larger, more malleable European workforce, pumped out by universities that will no longer be at the service of society´s needs but the narrow economic interests of big business and the multinationals that will soon control them. Rising tuition costs and the steady marginalization of the humanities will only be the first and most obvious of the changes to come. The result will be an ever more integrated and precarious wage slave-force incapable of criticizing its own enslavement. That´s the idea, anyway.

The students and other citizens who are clear-eyed and courageous enough to see this and demand that it stop have given us considerable hope as well as ample evidence of the lengths to which this democracy will go in order to stifle dissent.

The links to videos of recent demonstrations attached below show students being ejected from university campuses, beaten, and detained by police. There is a video of a demonstration in which numerous journalists and other innocent bystanders were injured by the police. Predictably, the Bologna process has received poor coverage in the media, with explanations being short and vague, emphasizing hostility between university administrators and students without really explaining what the process implies. The media´s superficial treatment of the Bologna Process and the police´s harsh treatment of protesters should prove instructive when asking yourself which side of the struggle you are on. What could be so scary as to justify beating students off the grounds of their own university?

This link to ANECA (National Agency of Quality Assessment and Accreditation) explains the Bologna process nicely from the perspective of those charged with supervising the conversion of the Spanish university into a private enterprise, of students into "clients"-- Bologna directly from the horse´s mouth, as it were. See also this link to the LOU http://www.aneca.es/ingles/docs/lou_eng.pdf: the 2002 Spanish law that officially initiated the Bologna process in Spain and created the ANECA. You´ll have to sift through a fair bit of neoliberal jargon to get the point. Just remember: flexibility is precarity, competitiveness is insecurity, knowledge is ignorance. http://www.aneca.es/

Videos & Images:

La Rambla, Barcelona. Journalist, mother and 10 year old child not involved in protest attacked by police:


Students being thrown off campus of U. of Barcelona 18 March:

Protest against police brutality (80 wounded, including reporters, ie. the guy with the black bloody eye, and police):


Students being ejected from Palau Robert campus:

Demonstration against the police violence directed at journalists and photos of University of Barcelona protestors being beaten off the campus: http://www.publico.es/espana/210743/13/desalojo/palos/anti/bolonia

Some questions to consider:

-Is it possible for universities in different European countries to satisfy the demands of a continental capitalist economy (i.e. made-to-order workers) by adopting a homogeneous educational model, without sacrificing their own unique character, and while at the same time fulfilling their own society´s specific needs? Is it even desirable?

-Mobility for whom? Roughly 1% (150,000) of European students take part in the Erasmus exchange program every year. This is a significant but very limited chunk of the population. You might ask yourself how many students can afford to go abroad for a year, which students tend to be selected (usually those with decent marks)? Which students get the best marks in Spain? Usually the ones who can afford to have gone to private schools. Now, imagine that tuition rises significantly, and you can see the pool of potential Erasmus participants rapidly shrinking. If we expand our circle a little bit and think of all the people living precariously (usually illegally) in Europe and those who are prevented from even entering, we begin to see that mobility quickly losses significance when the term is a little more generously applied. This is, of course, assuming that mobility is really intended for students and not the workers they will become, either forced into jobs abroad or among the privileged few who will be able to move across Europe according to the demands of business.

-Mobility for what purpose? Aside from second language acquisition, the Erasmus program has been touted as a culturally-enriching experience that opens new perspectives for students and exposes them to different educational systems. If we adopt a universal, increasingly centralized and privatized university model, one of the more convincing arguments for mobility will have been eliminated. Erasmus will further degenerate into an international frat party for the privileged few.

-Is Bologna really necessary to increase mobility? Does it even have anything to do with mobility, or is this just a cover? Would mobility not be more meaningful in the context of a rich variety of European education systems and in a society that does not deny mobility to some while granting it to the privileged few?

-What is a university? Where did it come from, where should it go? Should its main purpose and function be to produce workers? Should it be wedded to or protected from private interest?

D.M.R. Bentley´s discussion paper´s on the nature of the university and the function of the humanities: http://www.canadianpoetry.ca/discussion_papers.htm

And for those of you who can read Spanish:

http://www.noabolonia.org/

Dossier informativo sobre el proceso de Bolonia:
http://pdfmenot.com/store_local/eeff88ad73e58833091e09af5c11bfdb.pdf

letter to the editor published in March 7 edition of the Toronto Star

thestar.com / Opinion / Threat or legitimate free speech?

Source: www.thestar.com

"For civility to mean anything it must apply in all universities, including those in Palestine and Israel, as well as our own privileged academic enclaves."

Of course they edited this key sentence out of my letter, but I suppose this shouldn´t surprise me: normally The Star doesn´t even publish my online comments, let alone letters to the editor in print. Unfortunately, by removing that line (which obviously hit just a little too close to the bone) they subtly divert the emphasis away from my criticism of the empty rhetoric of "civility" and "security" on Canadian campuses, to my indignation over general slandering of protestors. Bastards.

The full text of my letter to the editor:

The protests sweeping global campuses are a response to Israel's recent invasion of Gaza and its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories. It's not about "student security and campus civility." What space can there be for Palestinian civility when their universities are closed or cut off by checkpoints, settlements or the creeping wall enclosing their land; when they are destroyed by Israeli missiles, their students killed and their civil and human rights daily curtailed?

For civility to mean anything it must apply in all universities, including those in Palestine and Israel, as well as our own privileged academic enclaves. Diverting the issue from the Israeli occupation, and urging professors to teach their students that the real issue is security and civility on campuses, makes a mockery of your idea of engagement. Obviously, violence has no place on campuses, which is why the great majority of activists opt for non-violent forms of protest. Lumping thousands of conscientious activists together with a few racists and hotheads by only mentioning "radical student hooligans" is unfair. If it's true that day after day we read about aggressive student protesters, maybe it is because they are angry; they certainly have every right to be.

Palestinians do not need to "try equating Israel with the now-defunct racist South African apartheid regime." Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and other prominent activists have already let us know that life under Israeli apartheid is much worse.

Owen Rafferty, Toronto

letter to the editor

Re: Canada´s Lone Gaza Vote
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/570481

By insisting on balancing our censure of Palestinian and Israeli actions, we contribute to the impression that this is a conflict between two more or less evenly matched states who share similar levels of responsibility for the ongoing violence. This is patently not the case. The Palestinians are stateless; they have been suffering under an illegal blockade for months, subject to abuse and interrogation by Israeli soldiers. To pretend that Israel invaded Gaza in response to Hamas rocket attacks is either extremely naïve or an outright lie. Israel has been slowly squeezing the life out of the Palestinian territories; this invasion is merely the latest and most violent example of an ongoing genocide.

The Star´s defense of Canada´s shameful vote against a UN resolution that condemned Israeli for aggression in Gaza, human rights violations, and targeting civilians, is pathetic. What else do you call it? We are witnessing the massacre of a captive civilian population. It is not a war, or a conflict as it is sometimes called, between two legitimate aggressors. If that were the case, Hamas would be justified in launching rockets at Israel; we would call these attacks self defense and not “terrorism”. Nor is it the selective assassination of Hamas political and military targets, as if murdering soldiers and politicians in another country could ever be justifiable, less still when their children and neighbours die in those attacks. The Israeli invasion of Gaza is state terrorism; it should be unequivocally condemned.

email exchange and statement re: Palestine

There are 3 separate articles in this post, taken from some emails exchanged with a friend of mine. They follow below in chronological order.

This is from a group email I sent on January 4, 2009:

Dear Friends,

We are told that the latest attacks on Gaza are perhaps "disproportionate" (Toronto Star), but that Israel has a right to defend itself, provoked as it was by Palestinian (Hamas) rocket attacks which broke a year-long ceasefire, that the attacks were directed at military targets and supply tunnels. This is part of the mainstream media´s ongoing effort to normalize the Palestinian-Israel situation: we are supposed to accept that living under occupation, effectively stateless, with access to food, fuel and other supplies radically reduced, when they are not cut off entirely, their elected government handicapped by sanctions, a creeping wall eating away at their land and freedom, that the Palestinians will only engage in "appropriate" levels of violence, that, instead, the Palestinians just can´t get this peace thing, stop acting like thugs and terrorists, and organize a peace treaty, they can´t even observe the terms of a ceasefire. This is supposed to be normal. Here are links to 2 websites with a different perspective:

http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/
http://electronicintifada.net/new.shtml

"And it will all seem, in the end of the day, that they are somehow a response to something. As though the situation were not only acceptable- but normal, stable, in the period prior to whatever this is a response to. As though settlements did not continue to expand; walls did not continue to extend and choke lands and lives; families and friends were not dislocated; life was not paralyzed; people were not exterminated; borders were not sealed and food and light and fuel were in fair supply.But it is the prisoners' burden to bear: they broke the conditions of their incarceration. They deviated. But nevertheless, there are concerns for the "humanitarian situation": as long as they do not starve, everything is ok. Replenish the wheat stocks immediately.The warden improves the living conditions now and then, in varying degrees of relatively, but the prison doors remain sealed. And so when there are 20 hours of power outages in a row, the prisoners wish that they were only 8; or 10; and dream of the days of 4."

from: Raising Yousuf and Noor: diary of a Palestinian mother
http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/

Owen .

This is a response I received from a friend of mine:

I'm just wondering (out of pure curiousity - not trying to be sarcastic here) what exactly you are trying to communicate to us in this message and what you are trying to accomplish by it. What exactly is the problem, who is mainly responsible for the problem (if this can be identified), where do you stand, and how do Israelis and Palestinians move forward? We are all aware that war sucks and that the media misrepresents people, places, and things. So, what next? An online petition?...I'm a little skeptical that mere awareness and consciousness-raising stands a chance against conflicts that have ancient origins...or maybe I'm just hungover and bitter, lol.

And this is my response:

I´m not sure exactly how to respond to your questions, or where to begin. I sent you, and many others on my contact list, this email because I was angry and sad at what has been happening this week in Gaza, and I was frustrated at the gross misrepresentation of these events and others in the media. After hours reading various independent media sites, I wanted to share some of these alternate stories of events with my friends in the hopes that they might find these links helpful and interesting, possibly even changing their opinions, while for others they will only confirm what they already know or refuse to acknowledge.

I agree with you that mere awareness won’t change the situation in Palestine & Israel, but awareness is the first step in taking action, and it is a good starting point in the face of our feelings of complete powerlessness. By informing ourselves carefully we can refuse to be on the side of the executioners. I think that if more people, I mean massive amounts of people, really understood what was happening in Palestine, then we could stand a chance against this inhumanity. The ancient origins of this conflict are largely irrelevant; what is preventing a solution is human actions (support of, or participation in, the occupation of Palestine, continuing propaganda in the media, U.S. funding of Israeli violence, etc.), and human actions can build a solution as well. This is encouraging because it means we—not history—can make change. We need to put pressure on our governments to change their actions. This is how civil rights were won (not granted) in the 20th century, how we won a minimum wage, and how the war in Vietnam was eventually stopped. It’s important to remember that we can intimidate our leaders; police beat up protestors for a reason: large numbers of people taking to the streets scare them, it means the masses are getting angry. At the moment I feel powerless, like sending you an email about Palestine is a meaningless gesture by a frustrated white kid whose friends are sick of his disenchantment with the world. But, maybe I won’t be so out of touch some months or some years from now. The politicians and bankers (usually the same people) should have reason to be scared. There’s an economic crisis of an unprecedented scale and extension, huge numbers of Americans have lost their homes, even as our governments spend billions destroying Iraq and Afghanistan. What happens if they take to the streets? Will they turn violent like protestors in Paris 2 years ago, like protestors last month in Greece? Will people begin to connect the dots?

What is the problem? Where do I stand?

The most immediate problem is that as Israel continues its land invasion of Gaza, more than 540 people have been killed and more than 2,450 have been injured. There is, of course, also the ongoing problem of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and all the barbarity, violence, and injustice that it implies. In the face of these facts, I stand on the side of the victims, who I take to be the Palestinians subjected to this terrible bombardment, living under Israeli occupation. This invasion is a massacre of a captive civilian population. It is not a war, or a conflict as it is sometimes called, between two legitimate aggressors. If that were the case, Hamas would be justified in launching rockets at Israel; we would call these attacks self defense and not “terrorism”. Nor is it the selective assassination of Hamas political and military targets, as if murdering soldiers and politicians in another country could ever be justifiable, less still when their children and neighbours die in those attacks. The Israeli invasion of Gaza is state terrorism; it should be unequivocally condemned. The occupation of Palestine is genocide in process.

Who is responsible?

Israel is directly responsible for this invasion; it is the Israeli military dropping bombs on Gaza. Israel is also responsible for the reprehensible treatment of Palestinians under “normal” (no bombs dropping on them) conditions, in which Palestinians are confined to shrinking portions of land, denied access to food, drinking water, electricity, medicine; prevented from participating in their elected governments, from carrying out their lives as they might like to, free from the constant threat of violence and abuse, etc. Other states, to varying degrees, are also responsible for the invasion of Gaza, principally the U.S.A. After Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2006 elections, the UN—under pressure from the U.S. and the EU—imposed sanctions on the Palestinians (always a good way to radicalize a population), withholding funds from Hamas—and effectively preventing them from governing the Palestinian territories—and refusing to recognize the Palestinian government (presumably because they didn’t like the results of the elections). Meanwhile, Israel incarcerated enough elected Palestinian representatives that the Palestinian parliament couldn’t achieve a quorum, and the U.S. began to fund Palestinian “contras” (Fatah dissidents), resulting in the brief civil war in June 2007 between supporters of Fatah and Hamas. These interventions in Palestine are inexcusable, however they are not unprecedented. One need merely take a brief look at the history of CIA interventions in Latin America to grasp the extent of US responsibility for the escalating violence in Gaza.

I’m not sure how there can be a way forward after this nearly unprecedented violence, however, asked before the most recent invasion I would have responded that the only possible solution would begin with the lifting of sanctions and the recognition of the Palestinian parliament, the recognition of the 1967 borders and the end of Israeli aggression. The continued occupation of Palestine is only possible because of the implicit support of the U.S. and the E.U., and therefore change must begin in Europe and America if there is to be a lasting peace in Palestine.

españa tercer mundista

Moving back to Spain is a bit like returning to the third world. There are parts of Valencia that could pass for the dilapidated streets of Centro Habana. Mind you, one could say the same for the slums of Philadelphia. Still, there is something about Spain that is just insistently third world...Like, for instance, when people start the ignition of their scooter (which is inevitably parked on the sidewalk, probably somewhere between the rubbish bins, the dog shit and the crosswalk, or in what would seem to be an otherwise pedestrian-only area, such as a plaza), just as you walk past, sending a cloud of exhaust into your face, then they fly down the sidewalk cutting-off or dodging whoever may be in their way (what self-respecting developed country sends its people to work on scooters anyway? Italy you may say, but I said self-respecting, not self-enamoured). The haphazard flow of motorists knifing their way across the city, like the antennas planted atop the city´s rooftops, scream third world: Valencia from above looks more like Cairo than Paris.

None of this has really started to bother me yet. Nor, perhaps, should it. I make ¨third world¨ sound like an accusation, which it is, and it should be: it means hopes crushed, people beaten back into their holes (by their own police, if need be), development halted, sovereign states overrun by foreign military or capital... I suppose I´ve been throwing ¨third world¨ around a little too loosely then, but my use of the term is not entirely feceitious. Partly, I´m just pissed off because it doesn´t seem Spain can get its act together. But, there is a creeping sense here that we´re losing ground. There is dirt on the streets, bums on the street corners, outside the glitzy cocktail bars and the re-developed port that hosted the America´s Cup, there is poverty. And it has caught my attention. I think it was Carol Goar, the columnist for the Toronto Star, who asked: what good is your $90,000.00 BMW 4X4 if you need a 24 hour private security guard to protect you from the poor bastards waiting to slit your throat?
Forget keeping the third world down and out so we can keep on happily exploiting it, we´ve got to keep it out of our own back yards. And by that I don´t just mean that the third world is literally creeping through our national borders, though the waves of immigration Spain and Europe are experiencing may mean just that to some people, but that the first world seems to be becoming a smaller and smaller place. There are first worlds within first worlds.

And you can see this in Valencia. Even Amanda, having spent the past month in Stockholm, commented on it.
—Don´t you think this looks like the third world? It´s horrible. ¡Dios mío! It´s like 1 Franco 14 Pesetas, when the family returns to Madrid only to find how dirty and backwards everything looks [is]. Admittedly, this was her opinion as expressed on a particularly frustrating day in our search for a new apartment, and just after climbing 5 flights of stairs to look at another god awful flat built for midgets, in a semi-abandoned extremity of the city. But, the fact remains, this place is a bit backward.

Maybe it´s like baseball.Baseball is an attitude. Half the game is scratching yourself in a really macho way, spitting, and fucking being on the ball, man. So is being backward (an attitude, that is). It´s that intangible quality that can perhaps only be conveyed by stereotypes and anecdotes (but is later reflected in the overall productivity and quality of life of a country): the men who, Amanda assures me, run the gamut from construction workers to suits, and make kissing sounds and yell, "GUAPA!!!" (or worse things) at the passing women. The way nobody lets you get off the train when the doors open. The newly renovated buildings whose windows leak when it rains. The dog shit all over the place (what´s up with that? Come on, guys.) It´s the general disfunctionality of stuff here (nothing works). These things are difficult to articulate, to even put your finger on, but I think every ex-pat (from N. America, anyway) must be to differing degrees aware of or bothered by them.You just have to take it with the right attitude.

Just finished reading:

Freakonomics. I´m sure those guys could come up with an interesting explanation for the quantity of dogshit here, something about the incentive structure (moral, social, economic) not being sufficiently strong to encourage people to stoop & scoop. If you ask me, we have to start whipping offenders (the people, not the dogs), or at least forcing them to step in the poo (the punishment should suit the crime, after all). 200€ fines wouldn´t hurt either. Also, we should yell at offenders and wave our arms the same way we do at the corner fruit store when you touch the fruit without your little plastic gloves. Shame on you!

a window fell on me

Got to start posting on this thing more often. I get caught playing catch-up all the time, filling-in the blanks of my ongoing personal narrative to make sure it makes sense later on, instead of just posting what´s up at the moment. Hey, Check out the eucalyptus trees!
Whatever. I´m in Toronto for a month (until Sept. 21). I decided to come home before classes start up again in Valencia, seemed like as good a time as any. The weather´s perfect, not too hot, not too cold. Wasn´t doing much back in Spain, anyway. I finished working at Pendueles English camp back on Aug. 22. All sorts of stuff happened to me there—I nearly didn´t get out alive. I could´ve gone with Amanda to Sweden (she´s spending 4 weeks there learning Swedish), but I didn´t really feel like spending another month at somebody else´s house, tip-toeing around and pretending like I´m not doing nothing. Also, she wants to practice her Swedish. Enough said. Actually, if we´d already had our own place in Valencia, I probably would have just headed home to catch up on sleep and chill out in Valencia till October.

Turns out I´m really glad I came back to Toronto. It´s been nice to spend some time with my mom and have some beers my dad, to see my friends, though, I haven´t been able to see as many people as much as I would have liked, or even at all (sorry Andrew, Chris).

My foot´s feeling a lot fucking better than when I started physio in May). Actually, looking back on my scant posts over the last few months, I realize that I haven´t even said anything about my stupid bum foot. Here goes: shortly after arriving in Gran Canaria at the beginning of April, it started to really hurt (this isn´t really new, I injured my post tib tendon playing lacrosse in my last year of university and it´s never really healed). So, after getting X-Rays and seeing the doctor in Las Palmas, I spent the next 2 months going to physiotherapy, which meant getting up every day, 5 days a week at 6:30am to catch the bus down to Las Palmas, where I received treatment for an hour and a half (massage (painful), electrolysis (weird), magnetic therapy (also weird, kind of buzzy feeling...), ultrasound, anti-inflammatories: the works). The therapists were super cool, especially Dany, who took full advantage of me to practice his English. After all that, I´m more or less back to how I felt before injuring my foot, which is to say it hurts, but not that much. I could go into further details but I can´t be bothered and it´s probably really boring.

My 3 months in Gran Canaria certainly weren´t all bad, though. I headed to the beach everyday afterwards to work on my tan and do aqua aerobics with the old ladies. But it slipped-by a little too routinely, and instead of doing stuff like heading over to check out Tenerife (12€ boat ride), I sat around nursing my foot and drinking gin and tonics. It was nice to experience living in Gran Canaria for an extended period, isolated out there in the middle of the Atlantic and, all in all, I´d say I had a pretty good time.

a window fell on me. I´m still not very comfortable admitting this. I feel a bit like a first time AA member struggling to declare that he´s an alcoholic. And I didn´t even do anything.

Long story short: a window pane from the second story of the house we were living in during July and August at English camp, fell on my shin. The house this gorgeous, kind of glassed-in balcony, which covered the ground floor front entrance (in Canadian, we call it a ¨porch¨). I was sitting on the stairs with a bunch of 11 year old kids making kites out of wool thread and kebab sticks, when an 11´ by 8´ slab of glass landed on my shin. I can still remember it perfectly and I keep having these intrusiones mentales of the moment when the glass hit my leg. There was an instant of shock as the kids around me began screaming and I focused on the seemingly frozen and intact pane of class crashing on my shin, the little trickle of purply black blood seeping out of the gash, my skin, white, then, my brain, working faster than my nerves, I thought, oh shit, hope my leg isn´t cut off. I must have said something along the lines of "Aaaaghh, fucking shit!" as the pain shot up my leg, and immediately realized that I was basically O.K., and confirmed that there were no dead kids lying on the stairs, then I hoofed it up the stairs to get some first aid and some chocolate. It´s the first time I´ve ever seen stars (in my head). It´s not a nice experience, but it´s interesting to note that what I saw were rows upon rows of neatly arrayed stars. They weren´t moving, or lifelike or anything, and seeing through them to the people in the room whose voices sounded another room away made me want to swoon and vomit. Looks like Ireland, but it´s Asturias.
As it turns out, I only needed 2 stitches, but had the pane of glass fallen at a slightly different angle, or hit a different part of my body, or a kid, it would have been much, much worse.

The day after the incident, the director of Cursos Internacionales, Dan, arrives. Asks me how I am, asks to see the window, scratches his head and tells me, as I stare him unbelievingly in the eyes, that we have to "agree on a story", that "this can´t go out like this." So, he heads across the street to Concha, the bulging matron in charge of everything physical at the Casona, including its upkeep and bringing the unending parade of kids and monitors to the medical centre, and doesn´t come back until 2 hours later. Tells me he´s just had coffee with Concha´s son, whatever his name is, who saw the whole thing. ¨Apparently¨, there were towels hanging—and, by the way, you know you really shouldn´t let the kids do that—in the windows, and a gust of wind blew the towel, and that´s what broke the glass. End of story. Pay more attention to your job. Towels´ll get you every time.

No fucking kidding. I really didn´t know what to say. Still don´t. But I´m going to put the incident ¨in writing¨ and make sure that next year when a window or a ceiling or a brick kills somebody, my experience is on record.

I´m pretty sure that if this had happened in Canada, they would have cordoned off the area and had some sort of official inspection. But, Dan just told us to try and keep the kids away from the area, which just happened to be the main entrance to the building. Then, after buying us a crate of cider, he headed off home to Salamanca, apparently content and unconcerned.

The next week, however, while we were out on a trek, dutifully avoiding the Casona, a whole chunk of the ceiling in the girls bathroom above the showers collapsed, nearly wiping out one of the cleaning ladies in the process. I couldn´t help but laugh somewhat hysterically and snap some pictures in case they try to deny it happened. After that, I spent the rest of the camp, cringing whenever the chandelier´s shook and eying the damp spots on the ceiling of the dining room (right below the showers) and half-expecting another swath of ceiling to come crashing down on some kid´s head. See crime scene photo below.Back in Toronto, I decided to go see Hamlet with my mother at the Stratford Festival, and I can´t stop raving (internally) about how awesome an experience it was. I can believe I´ve never gone to Stratford before. Must be my parents fault. I suddenly feel let down, like they beat me or didn´t give me brand name peanut butter as a child or something. The actor who played Hamlet, Ben Carlson, was awesome. It was a strange decision to set the play in the 19th century, though. I guess they´ll do anything to draw a crowd, but it´s kinda hard to create that dark, grim, cold, brooding atmosphere that only the nighttime ramparts of a medieval castle in Denmark suggest. Cocktails and shirttails just don´t quite cut it. But hey, it was probably more interesting than seeing the same production of Hamlet for the umpteenth time would have been.

Stratford itself really surprised me too. It´s very, very nice. We saw ducks, swans, geese, lots of white people and pretty houses. We even ate really nice, overpriced Indian (i.e. Pakistani) food.

Just finished:
A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (should be mandatory reading for any english speaker along with Funk and White´s style guide),

Ian Rankin, Exit Wounds (Rebus´swan song - is that what that means? - typical Rankin, I digged it).

gathering resolve

"Captains of industry, great generals, artists of genius, even politicians are often just people who have discovered that alcohol can enable them to make economic, tactical, creative, or political decisions whose implications would paralyze a sober individual." Your assignment, Capricorn, is to find an alcohol-free way to make such a decision. It's time for you to summon visionary courage from your soul, not from a bottle, as you catalyze complex blessings that will ripple through your future for a long time.

-Owen's horoscope this week in NOW Magazine.

I saw this and thought it very apt. I´m really bad at making decisions and have probably been putting a lot of things off recently, sort of paralyzed by the magnitude of the small decisions we´ve all got to make, in spite of not being an entirely sober individual. I´m going to try and take the assignment head on, little by little, and I´m going to start with a cocktail.

Fuckin´ right.

Just finished:
Ian Rankin, The Black Book. (funny, that was the title of one of my short stories)
Gabriel García Marquez, Cien Años de Soledad (in Spanish!)

Gijon, Asturias. Raining

Hope it stops soon so I can check out the city a bit without getting soaked. I´ve been milking the free breakfast and newspaper at the hostel all morning, but I think I´ll have to leave soon. This evening, I´m catching the bus to Oviedo to stay with Amanda´s friend Agar, who is there studying the MIR (Civil Service Exam for Doctors). I´ll spend the weekend there, then head down to Madrid, where I´m meeting Amanda. I´d prefer to keep poking around in Asturias, but we have to be in Salamanca on the 1st to meet the Little Angels with whom we´ll be sharing 3 weeks of english camp in Pendueles...

Asturias is kind of like being in New Brunswick, except they´ve cut down most of the trees and scattered ancient, semi-abandoned villages of Spanish speakers all over the place. It´s really green, mountainous, full of cows and apple orchards, rains a lot. The landscape is a lot less hostile then central Spain, where you´d die of asphixiation if you were left out in the afternoon sun. Still, it´s got that kind of moping, heavy look that a lot of rural Spain has, with it´s fallen-in roofs and and stranded-looking villagers, who seem the same across the country (short, round, bald men with button-up sweaters, leaning on canes and standing around a lot), —except that here they wave at you eagerly from the side of the rode if you make eye contact from the bus.

The bus ride from Llanes to Gijon was amazing. The Picos de Europa on the left, the Cantabrian Sea on the right. It´s very rural, but I can´t help fixating on the network of transmission wires, tension towers, and telephone poles that cut-up the landscape. The people standing-out in their gardens are literally overwhelmed by cables. Even the "Rural Apartments" we pass at the side of the road seem like a joke, surrounded by more power cables then you see in most city neighbourhoods.

The sun is shining, sort of. Well, it´s stopped raining anyway, so I´m going to step outside and explore Gijon a bit.

Just finished:
Herman Scheer, The Solar Economy, lent to me by Amanda´s dad Fernando, and highly reccommended.

first week back in spain

O.K.

So here I am again in Spain, Canary Islands. I love this place. It´s warm. It´s more or less sunny all the time. From Amanda´s place—and nearly everywhere in the island that enjoys any elevation—you can see the city (Las Palmas) down in the distance, the mountains behind and to both sides with the little villages spotted across the valleys and peaks climbing up into the mist, the sea below... it´s Vancouver without 10 months of rain, or the Olympics.

Amanda must have read my mind because as we leave the airport and fly down the highway, I notice we´re headed South and not North, as we would do were we headed to her house in El Monte, as I´d expected. I point this out and she´s surprised that I´ve clued into this so quickly, but I remind her that she lives on an island the size of the GTA, and that from her house in the North to her apartment in the South is not even as far as Toronto-Hamilton. This is my third time here and I explain to her that I now know that if the sea is on my left, then I´m either headed South or I´m on the wrong side of the island.

Sweet! This means a weekend in San Agustin, lying on the beach, sipping cervezas on the balcony as I marvel at the deep blue of the sea below and the fact that I´m wearing a t-shirt.

The only hitch in the plan turned out to be the weather (horrible according to Amanda; "fucking alright!" according to me. What else do you call 23C, partly sunny?). Actually, that was fine, but on Saturday and Sunday, our second and third full days at the beach, it was really windy, so we had to return to her apartment and drink white wine and eat tapas (whooh...shitty). We´d planned to visit this secluded beach called Montaña Arena, which you can only reach by following a steep trail along the sea cliffs behind an encampment of Canarios, who spend their summers living beside the water in their trailors roasting in the sun, but we met a couple returning along the path who told us that the tide was so high there was barely anywhere to sit, and aside from staring at the newly arrived Kayak, still beached a day after bringing another load of West African refugees to Europe, there was nothing to do except freeze your ass off on the rocks. So we headed home.

San Agustin is where ¨the South¨of the island begins. Just beyond a small peninsula and bay begins Playa Inglés, where all the beer-guzzling Brits get dropped off for their holliers. It´s a beautiful, is somewhat strange, place. San Agustin has always been the beach for the locals, but it´s also home to an enclave of Swedes and Germans, who have built a comfortable community of 400 or so cottages, nestled in the green hills overlooking the sea. There´s a shopping centre by the beach with an odd combination of cheap dollar stores, Bars de Manolo, Swedish and German restaurants and casinos. It´s kinda like the low-key tourist resort, with a healthy dose of Canarios spread out anywhere they can, with their lawn chairs and folding tables, playing dominoes beneath their umbrellas and eating endless bags of chips, nuts and other high-fat/low culture foods. I like it. And the beach is marvelous. It´s not golden brown, or white like in Cuba, but coarse and grainy, with black volcanic streaks through it. The water is clear and cold, with a steady current. It´s 5 minutes walk down from Amanda´s apartment and extremely handy for those days when feel too lazy to drive to the more exotic beaches or the most famous stretch of sand here on the island: Maspalomas (Morepigeons?). Really though, I know it doesn´t sound tough, but getting into the burning hot car after a day at the beach is about as off-putting as things get here. You feel drained and energy-less and sun-baked. So, I´m happy enough ensconced at the local beach, just close enough to home to run up and get an ice-cold cerveza or have a nap in the shade.

Amanda seems glad to see me (this is good: that´s why I´m here, right?), but seems kinda stressed out between her new job, and living at home again (although this seems to weigh on her a lot more when I´m around), applying for grants, and generally not having a very clear idea of what the immediate future will look like. I´ve become pretty comfortable with uncertainty and indecision in the last few years, but when it is nearly constant it does begin to wear on you. For example, both of us have applied for grants to study abroad (well for me, abroad means here) in the summer. We applied in January and won´t know until May (at best) whether we´re getting the funding. The problem is, the Swedish school (Amanda is applying to study in Sweden in July) wants her to register and pay NOW. The Spaniards, on the other hand, at the school were I wish to study, thought I was extremely premature in calling about course calenders already. Afterall, they still don´t know themselves what´s on offer this summer. Bit of a culture clash. I´ve also applied for a grant as an English Language and Culture Assistant for October to May. In contrast, I find out exactly 2 weeks after the application deadline whether I have been accepted. I don´t know if they will give me a place in the Canary Islands, though, or in Valencia, or not at all, and I don´t know which place I would like them to give me a grant for either. Amanda has also applied for a really cool and wierd position on a National Geographic luxury cruise ship. If she gets the position, she´ll be off around the world for 2 months at a time, with 1 month break. At the moment she´s working at a Shipping Agency that handles foreign ships´paperwork and other problems, and that´s how she was pointed in the direction of the job. How will that change things if she gets the job? I dunno. Aside from all those considerations, basically we need to decide whether to stay here in September or go to Valencia.

So, everything is a little up in the air at the moment. Just trying to maintain as many options open as I can and chill out a little bit everyday along the way. I´m trying to find work here in the Canaries and will approach life here as if this is where I´m going to be living, just to give it a fair shot and keep myself sane in the meantime. I´ve dropped-off some resumes at some English academies and I´m going to put up some signs in the neigbourhood for private classes. There are lots of rich kids around who need english tutors, so that shouldn´t be a problem.

We´ve managed to get ourself a place already, only one week in. I have to admit, I was a bit surprised when Amanda first told me about some apartments for rent in her neighbourhood that were available NOW. I had thought we´d be at her place for a few weeks at least, but we´ve decided to move in together and avoid the imposition and slight discomfort implicit in showing up at your girlfriend´s house for 3 months, minimum.

Amanda´s (parents) house is in a neighbourhood called El Monte (The Mountain), which is located in Tafira, a suburb of the city of Las Palmas. Technically, she´s on the very edge of the furthest municipal district of the city, but she´s actually closer to the village of Santa Brigida, a 5min drive up the crazy winding road. Our new place is in the epicentre of El Monte: the main street, which consists of 2 or 3 restaurants, a bar (yes!) a pizza place, SPAR, a hairdressers´s, post office, gas station, bus stop, a lot of traffic and, right below our window, the taxi stand! We´ve rented in a place called El Monte Inn, a sort of short-term residence for husbands temporarily estranged from their wives, young couples, students and other rogues. We have a little terrace and free access to a washing machine. All that for 500€/month aint bad, considering it´s furnished and we don´t need to commit to any longer than 3 months. Not the cheapest thing around, or the largest, but considering the circumstances, I´m quite content. And since it´s located where it is, I should be able to host any potential clients at home!

I think Amanda´s folks are a bit dissappointed we´re leaving, and Amanda also seems quite content here and not-at-all-anxious to go, but it was really her initiative with the apartment: I think she´s afraid I will feel uncomfortable living in her parents´place for 3 months (probably correct) and that this will give us more freedom. I think it´s also the more "adult" thing to do, take a bit of responsibility, pay the rent, buy groceries, etc. We have to go by the apartment tommorrow and sign the contract and hand over a grand. Then we move in this weekend. Naturally, we´ll have to have a little celebration.

That´s it for now.
Take it easy, take it all.
Owen.

Wow, that's the first time I've ever been fired.

Actually, I was "let go", part of the "restructuring" of the Spanish Centre, according to Javier, the director of the centre, who so obligingly explained the situation to me.

Unfortunately for me, I've only been working here for two months, and so am not even eligible to be given notice. Nope. Instead, a little after arriving and— immediately—being sent upstairs to collate textbooks in the closet for the second day in a row, my manager Victoria gave a soft little knock on the door and informed me that today was my last day. "uh, you know. As you can see we're not very busy. uh, you're going to Spain, and uh, so we'll no longer be needing you."

Right. And, uh, what the fuck am I supposed to do for the next five weeks? I am aware that employers are not obliged to give notice to employees who have been working for less than 3 months, however, two weeks notice would have been the least of common courtesy, and the very same I would have given them had I been given the chance. In fact, it was for precisely this reason that I hadn't officially notified them about my imminent departure to Spain: because I suspected I may be premeturely let go.

Still waiting to see if they'll pay me for Family Day, or if I'm the latest casualty of Dalton McGuinty's ill-fated statutory holiday.

gray days; lonely nights

I had intended to stay at home until the end of June or July working and saving some ‘start-up funds’ with which to move back to Spain. But I found myself in bed—so to speak—after another fruitful, but solitary, day reading and studying some Spanish, thinking: why am I here? I’m just working a ‘Joe’ job to throw some cash together, so it’s definitely not for my career. Especially since the dickheads over at the Spanish centre recently cut my Friday shift, so unless it keeps snowing like it has, and aside from the few days a month that I organize John’s billing, I’m now working only two evenings a week: hardly a lucrative situation, even if I’m not paying rent. I don’t go out much and only rarely get together with friends. The weather sucks. Shoveling snow is terrible, back-breaking work—it’s only fun when a) you don’t have to drive the truck and can get drunk in the passenger seat and b) there are fewer than 10cm of snow (then you can just push it out of the way). Last but not least: Amanda’s in Las Palmas, not here: so what the hell am I doing? This is stupid.

So, I bought a plane ticket to the Canaries for April 5. Screw putting my life on hold, even if it is only for a few months. Because that’s what I feel like I’m doing. Sure, there have been some concrete advantages to returning home, but I think I’ve exhausted those and it’s time to get the show on the road.

Amanda and I have talked about it a bit, and I think we’ve both come to the conclusion that we might of ‘shit it’ in terms of our planning this year. We really didn’t accomplish quite as much as we’d thought by uprooting ourselves from Valencia and going off traveling without a specific timeframe or any concrete plan to go back to afterwards, so that, I’ve found myself back in Toronto thinking, gee, I could have gone to Cuba in August and traveled in Canada in September, and have returned to Valencia by October and been teaching for the last five months. Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20.

On the plus side, I’ve gotten some things done during my time at home, like get my eyes checked (nearly 20/20) as well as a new prescription so I can put those new glasses on my dad’s insurance before they finally figure out I’m not twelve years old. I've gone to the dentist, got new orthotics (you don’t know how excited I am about this: tendonitis sucks, ill-fitting and ugly orthopedic shoes may be worse), I’ve re-read the first four books of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and plowed through a pile of others, I think I’m back in shape again: shoveling snow and playing hockey four times a week will do that for you, and I’ve found myself mentally prepared to get on with it. Also, if it takes a few months and a few wasted trips to figure out: “oh, I may have had a good thing going there,” it may just be worth it.

I was at Niall’s place last night. In a bit of a similar situation himself, having squandered/invested his time and money moving back and forth between Toronto, Spain, and Vancouver, he finds himself back in the city in a (really nice) new apartment and determined to get a bit of stability and continuity back into his life. Moving around can be disruptive, we agreed. It costs a lot. You don’t put down roots in the same way you would if you'd just stayed in one place. It can be difficult to feel fully invested in the place and the moment your in, knowing you're about to move across the country or to a different continent. There’s also the continual pressure of starting-out: making new friends and reviving old contacts; figuring-out where to buy your meat, your cheese and your Sunday breakfast; buying a new toaster, finding a suitable couch, that starts to wear you down.

So, off I go again to Spain, and I’m going for at least a few years. Amanda and I have agreed to think things through a little better in the future (although I don’t think we’ve done too badly, really!). Our next big decision will be: do we stay in the Canaries or move back to Valencia in September? Amanda’s got a job at a shipping agency and has a contract until June, so I’m going to see how it goes finding work in Las Palmas during the next three months. We’ll see how it compares with living together in Valencia and take it from there. For my part, I’m tempted to return to Valencia because I really liked my job at Casa Americana, it’s on the mainland, we’d already somewhat established ourselves there, have some friends, know some good restaurants…on the other hand, Grand Canary is really nice and Amanda’s friends are there—though I’m not sure if she’s sure that that’s a good thing. One thing I’m sure of though, I’m spending my first week there at the beach!

scratch that

OK! It's 8:30, the boss has left, and it's time to blog!

How's the job going, anyway?...Need you ask?

It's week three, they've paid me—one of those cheques that reads "casual labour" in the re: line, which means no nasty deductions (or Canada Pension savings contributions), and my first salsa class begins tommorrrow: so far so good.

Uh, on another note, I just read my last posting for the first time, and it's really insulting! So, sorry Jer, Andrew and assorted company. If you read the post it sounds like I'm completely disowning you, in fact, I just had a few too many beers and got carried away picking apart dinner formalities. Well, hopefully nobody's actually read it (the most likely scenario) and I can do a little re-write. But, judging by the vehemence of a recent email from Jer, I don't think that's the case.

17/01/08

Nothing much to report here: still plugging away... Christmas fairly-well flew by, as did New Years. In fact, I can happily say that I had more fun this New Year's than I ever have, which is not saying particularly anything. For me, New Year's is a notoriously big let down. I usually end up at some terrible, boring party with people I don't like, or wandering the streets freezing my ass off in search of a drink and a warm place, and, since my financial resources have not as yet caught up with my taste in champagne, I'm stuck drinking things like Irish Car Bombs and Labatt's.

*OK, this is where I went off on a rant about dinner etiquette when I originally posted this, unfairly taking a jab at my best friends and basically being a jerk.

So, what I meant to say was that this year somebody (Andrew, I think?) had the brilliant idea of just getting together for a meal, drinking a bunch, and bringing-in the new year the old-fashioned way: no grandiose expectations, no big let-downs, no cheezy bars or cougars, simple, cheap, intimate. Cool! Great idea!

It was nice to be all together again with my buddies from high school (minus Chris, who's off in Scotland studying) and get completely canned in the basement. My friends are a quiet bunch, on the whole, but I'm used to that, and as far as I can remember we had a bashing good time, mostly singing a lot and spilling beer on Jer's carpet. We had a few good conversations too, stepping out occassionally into the still, snowy night to smoke a joint or knock back another Irish Car Bomb.

Why the vicious-sounding rant I posted earlier? I guess I just found it a bit strange my friends had already started dinner without me—along with a few other friends I rather uncharitably tagged as "people we like to describe as 'acquaintances' (ie. people we know of but don't really like enough to become real friends with)." I suppose that description still holds though. I don't want to completely censor myself. Besides, I think it's kinda funny.

Also, call me old-fashioned and stubborn, but in my experience, dinner is served after the guests arrive (hence the cocktail, which conveniently fills the before dinner gap). I'm not sure why I insisted on mentioning this, and didn't mean for the criticism to be insulting, although I can see how it is. (I was late, after all). I guess I just couldn't help connecting it to something else I'd read recently in The Rebel Sell, about "a noticable decline in civility" in our society, and I probably just read too much into an insignifant event not worthy of commenting on. Why would I do that? I suppose I agree with that assessment and...I read too much into insignificant events not worth commenting on. Like I said, we had a great time.

Highlights of the night:
80's Karaoke
Guitar Hero
Irish Car Bombs
Christian's dad's tortellini

Let's see, what else has happened to me lately...not much: still shovelling snow, which I did both on New Year's Eve and hungover on New Year's Day, still playing hockey three times a week, and still thinking of heading back to Spain while I huddle inside away from the cold.

I guess that's good. I'm still alive and looking forward to another year, unlike John O'Keefe, who was shot dead after leaving the very bar in which Jeremy, Andrew and I were celebrating my birthday.

That's the kind of thing that just makes you despair, it would also turn you fascist pretty quickly, if you didn't resist the temptation. I'm referring here to what I'll tentatively call the "send 'em back to Jamaica" complex—even though in this case, and in many others, these were not blacks—as well as such eternally appealing measures as mass sterilization and forced labour camps. I'm sorry, but that's what comes to mind when two losers kill an innocent man on his way home to his girlfriend and son after a Friday pint with friends and as I open the Toronto Star website and read that another innocent victim has been shot again on our city streets.

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.