My second couchsurf was with 2 dudes named Ignacio and Alex who are buds, travel and web design biz partners. They were cool enough, yet quiet and I wasn´t sure how welcome I actually was, but Ignacio showed me around their old house which was situated on the north side of Montjuic, or as we say in English, Jew Mountain. When I arrived I realized that there was an okupa right next door! Ignacio said he´d be able to introduce me to them. There´s really not too much to say about this surf, but it was decent and comfortable and they had a couple of nice housemates, a Polish guy who was studying engineering and liked metal and white Russians and a very friendly Scottish gal who was teaching in an English-language grade school and rode a Peugeot that she bought from an American who was building up old bikes and selling them in the old town.
After going to their closed-for-the-winter beachfront shop to try and volunteer, I finally figured out that Biciclot (the CCC type non-profite bike shop) had another shop in, you guessed it...Clot! So one day I headed up there on the metro (which is super clean, efficient, frequent, ubiquitous, and fucking cheap if you buy a 10 ride card for €9.45, but it´s kind of a rip off at €2 for a one way ticket; like most things, it fucks over the poor!). When I got to the shop it was closed so I called the number on the door and someone answered to whom I explained that I was on the street and wanted to talk about volunteering. A lady came out and seemed totally confused with my proposition of volunteering as a mechanic at such community bike shops in my travels (then again maybe my spanish really IS that bad). She handed me off to the dude who runs the programs who said to come back at 4 if I wanted to help out. So I did what Dan Sloan usually does while travelling, which is wandering around eating croissants and poking my head in different shops while trying to find a Bicing station to take out a bike with the Bicing card Ignacio´s friendly Scottish housemate Katy had lent me. I got REALLY tired of walking around without finding a station and decided to hit up a Locutori (internet cafe) and find a veg friendly place to eat which I did. It was a walk to get there, but finally I found it and paid €12.50 for a lunch of squash soup, quinoa, veggies, and friend sardines. Fucking pricey, but it seemed that everywhere I went the alternative was white bread sanwiches of industrial meats and cheese. Whole foods are not available to the traveller in Spain! Damnit! I remember going to another mom-aged lady-run veg restaurant in Paris that was equally expensive, but fortunately this one was more flavorful.
I headed back to Biciclot and had a little interview with Marcello who was in charge of the shop and teaching the mechanic repair classes. I think he might have been central or South American, or maybe Galician because I was able to understand him fairly well and didn´t speak like the Catalunyans I had met thus far, really fast and wordsrunningtogether (just like I speak English!). He asked if I knew of a system of determining bottom bracket spindle length and I told him that I didn´t know of any such system, because the type of crank and the angle of the chainstay and the number of chainrings determine the length. I asked him if he was asking me because he wanted to see if I knew what I was talking about or if he just didn´t knowand he said he just didn´t know (which I found hard to believe) and was curious. Then he took me on a tour of the premises where they had a storage room stacked with bikes and another with their rental bikes that were in storage for the winter. He let me choose a later 90s MTB to work on which had a slew of small, yet fixable problems that I´ve encountered countless times (stuck trigger shifters, hubs out of adjustment, cracked tires, frayed cables, cranks that had been recalled by Shimano, you know the ones, etc). People started showing up for the repair class as I was finishing up on the bike. They were all working on mid lever disc brake commuter bikes from recent years that were in all states. I understood that they were being refurbished to sell to folks at a low cost. I later found out that BiciClot has an agreement with the city government that when the city recovers abandoned/stripped bikes they give them to BiciClot for their purposes. Pretty neat! I don´t think you´d ever see that in the US.
That night I invited Alex and Ignacio to tapes (Catalan for tapas) with Alavaro and Pep. I met Alvaro in a metro station where we took a train to his hood, Carmel on the north side of the city. We met up with Cris and found Pep and chilled out at a typical bar where we drank a beer waiting for Ignacio to show up on his scooter (moto). When he arrived we tried to go to Alvaro and Pep´s fav joint, but it was closed so we tried another which was empty and we were greeted by the bartender who I thought was gay, but Pep later told me that he´s sort of a homophobe and doesn´t like seeing Alvaro and Pep kiss each other, and that it´s just his Andalucian way that makes him seem a little gay from my perspective. That place was also closed, but this time for lack of customers, so we went to a community center where there are classes and a pool and such where there was a bar. We hung out there and ate the meats and patatas bravas that the nice barmaid brought us. I found, in my previous travels, that being too veg leads to a lot of hunger so I´ve decided to eat what the locals eat (generally), even if it includes pork products I´d never touch at home. I draw the line at severely processed animal products. We hung out for a while then, as it was after 12am and metro doesn´t run that late, I decided to stay at P&A´s house where I shared a big pull out bed with Cris. Alvaro said I could stay there anytime I wanted, which really took some weight off my shoulders as my pre-agreed-upon time with Ignacio and Alex was about to end.
Put that in your defective skull-bong and smoke it.
Put that in your defective skull-bong and smoke it.
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