Barcelona V- CSO La Gordissima

Cris hipped me to a website that kept a schedule of the events going on at the okupas in town.  Some have bike workshops where you can bring your bike and they´ll help you fix yours, in theory.  I finally found one that I could get to called CSO LA GORDISSIMA near Sant Andreu,When I arrived at their ancient, huge building located in a cluster of nice shops, I found only the volunteers of the okupa with their 2 bikes and a bag of wrenches and a couple of bike-specific tools that needed wrenches larger than what they had.  The two guys were really nice and interested in learning what I had to show them as far as adjusting derailleurs, brakes, hubs, etc.  I began to explain in Spanish, and after about 10 minutes realized that one of the volunteers named Guillermo, whose bike I was working on spoke, more or less, perfect English and was working on a PhD in ocean science or something and had taken a scientific cruise out of Astoria this year, which I´m pretty sure my homie Drew D Hill was also involved in.  I tried to show the dudes how to adjust a hub, but they were missing the 13mm cone wrench that was necessary for the job, so it went unadjusted, still crunching up a storm.  I stuck around for a couple of hours talking about how the okupa worked and its history, how it´s there for the use of the community, how it turns into a bar after 8 selling local beers and such. I don´t think local beers means the same thing in Spain as it does in Portland.  Apparently it was initially occupied by three ladies who trashed the top floors which were still trashed and unusable and the owner realised that it´d be more expensive to bring the building up to code (as it´s a historic landmark or something and its maintenance needs to be done in a specific, costly way) than it is to let the okupa do its thing and serve beers to the community.  There was a dude smoking at a table where a baby was sleeping in a stroller.  I guess the surgeon general in Spain has different priorities than does ours (perhaps masturbation promotion).  
Put that in your improperly-adjusted skull-bong and smoke it.

Barcelona IV- Biciclot

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.

Barcelona III- bike rental

I decided to rent a bike for a few days to see more of the city and give my feet a rest.  There were a ton of bike rentals in the city, all more or less the same.  I found one place that wasn´t especially close to Cris´s place, but they had a couple of cool vintage bikes and some track bikes in the window so I figured they were a better bet than the cookie cutter bici joints.   Keep in mind that the following and all things I write about bike rentals are from the perspective of someone who takes pride in being the No. 1 bike rental guy on Going St.  Anyhow, I went by and dude wasn´t terribly interested in renting me a bike, but did so nonetheless and hooked me up with a total piece of shit cruiser with one of those garbage Shimano derailleurs that you see on only the shittiest bikes that make me cringe whenever I see them.  One of the pedal spindles was bent as well which gets kind of annoying after a minute or two.  I rode around for a bit and then decided I didn´t want to have to keep riding this piece of junk for 5 whole days and returned it later that day before heading to my next couch surf.

When I dropped off the bike and left I saw an old man carrying a bike frame and wheelset  towards me.  It looked like...an ALAN!  Holy shit.  I asked him what he was planning on doing with it and he said he was gonna sell it to the shop where I´d rented a bike.  I looked at it and it had a full Campy Victory group and the whole thing was fuckin´minty.  I asked how much and he said he was asking 400€ for it from the shop, but said he´d take 300€ if he had to.  Obviously out of my price range on this trip and still a good deal for anyone who wanted a piece of aluminum bike history.  Expressing my excitement, I asked him about it and why he was selling it.  He said that he bought it in the 80s and paid a bunch for it and won the European  firefighter´s bike racing championship in the 50-70 year old age bracket.  And now he needed money more than a bike he didn´t ever ride.  As we were standing in the street at a corner a van turned the corner grazing the back of the frame and I clenched my teeth and gasped, ¨dios mio!¨ but all was well and the old man didn´t even blink an eye.  What are the chances of an encounter like that happening???  Put that in your first-generation aluminum skull-bong and smoke it.

Barcelona II- Urtica and Malva

Cris´s 31st Birthday was 2 days after I arrived and she was kind enough to invite me along on a big ol excursion.   I took the Metro to meet her 2 friends, Alvaro and Pep near their house.  They picked me up in their silver Peugeot and we headed out to a town on the other side of the mountain to the west where we picked up Jose.  Alvaro and Pep were both real nice and interested in getting to know me.  They both spoke good english and after trying to communicate in Castellano for a while, English was clearly more efficient.  We picked up Jose who had two baguettes sticking out of his backpack and stopped for a coffee in a typical little bar (which I would describe as borderline tacky and serving low quality food and bev) to wait for the rest of the crew.  These bars are ubiquitous in Barcelona and it´s rare that I ever see anyone actually eating anything in them, despite the advertised menus.  Usually there are an old guy or two sitting at the bar nursing a beer and talking to his bartender pal.  As far as I could tell, they only served various arrangements of cured pork on white bread.

Speaking of cured pork (my 3rd favorite topic), there are these fucking pig legs EVERYWHERE in this city: at the crappy supermercado, at the nice supermercado, in bars, at meat shops, and they´re generally around 70€.  I would totally buy one and play tennis with it, but there are no tennis courts nearby, except the ones on top of Montjuic in the old olympic village and I don´t know anyone who could afford to buy themselves a pig leg to play against me.  Anyway, I appreciate the hoof being attached ´n all.  In AMERICA that shit´d be as least leg-like as possible and wrapped in some impenetrable barrier to keep the sneezes and subway hands of people like me from coming too near.  Instead the legs and layer of fat and mold (I guess) are right there for the poking.  And poke I did!!!  Once.  THere´s really no reason to do it thrice.  

Alvaro asked me if I was dreaming a lot, as he found he did when he was in an English speaking country and I realized that I´d been sleeping really soundly and having pretty vivid dreams, I guess from all my Spanglishing.  When the others arrived at the bar we all introduced ourselves with kisses from all the ladies, and handshakes for the fellas.  It´s a lot easier to remember someone´s name when you kiss them.  Twice.  We got back in the cars and drove up to the vast state park which was situated among sheep farms and a type of oak trees I´d never seen before.  We arrived at the ancient house of one of the group´s uncle and aunt where we dropped off the lunch foods. 

 On the way to the trailhead I saw some nettles and got all excited and went to eat one when a few of the group were all, ¨No!!! That shit stings!¨ I was all, ¨this shit´s fine if you roll it up, see?¨ even though I took a couple stings when picking it.  Alvaro and Pep (both biologists) and a couple others called it Urtica, which when pronounced with in Spanish doesn´t sound anything like when I heard it spoken in American.  Oh!!!  I realized.  The name is Urtica, like Urtica Dioica, Latin for Stinging Nettles!  THen I saw a bunch of mallow and went to grab some and said, ¨Malva¨and they were all, ¨ÿup!¨  and I realized that all the Latin names I learned are the names that the Spanish use!  Finally, some applicable education!   I also told Pep that my naturalist teacher was all ¨ Ït´s an extinct language so you can pronounce it however you want¨ and Pep was all, ¨That´s some bullshit¨ and all was well.  Now when we go on plant walks I´m gonna tell you plant names in Spanish and you´ll think I´m pretentious, yet correct.  

As we hiked along the trail, I got to talking with Pep about plants n stuff and he pointed out strawberry tree, an Arbutus which is related to dogwood or somethin´that I´d read about on Becky Lerner´s blog, but had never seen in real life.  IT had some ripe fruit on it and it was pretty tasty!  Now I´ve eaten wild foods in 2 countries!  Our hike led down to an neolithic multi burial site that had been reconstructed into a little stone slab building with a bunch of rocks strewn around it.  We climbed around on it and took some birthday photos then moved on to a spot in the trail where a string was tied leading off up the wooded hill.  We followed the string for a ways, ducking and ´schwaking til we got to a huge boulder pile upon which we climed to see the valley below and the mountains in the distance.  It was pretty neat.  On the hike back to the house I had a nice convo with one of the dude´s who´s name I can´t remember about his travels in India and what it all was like, and I came away from it feeling excited to be going.  It was all in Spanish and I understood him perfectly, which was the first time so far on this trip that that had happened.

When we got back to the house we set up the upstairs of the house which functioned as a sort of visitor´s/educational center and overnight house for kids coming on field trips to the park.  We ate tons of toasted white bread, delicious squash soup Cris had made, cured meat, and tomatoes.  The conversation was mostly in Catalan and I sort of just laughed when they laughed and smiled when they smiled and occasionally someone would explain to me what was going on, but I couldn´t for the life of me understand the conversation.  I could pick out words here and there, but normal speech amongst Spaniards, or Catalunyans in this case was not intelligible.  It´s also super tiring trying to process all that information so I mostly tuned out to save my mental juice.

After lunch, tea was made and a box of different tea cookies was set out right in front of me.  I don´t think anyone noticed, but I´m pretty sure I ate half the box.  I have no self control when it comes to sweets I have not tried before.  Because, seriously:  when am I going to have the opportunity to try them again?  WHEN???  Exactly.  Reason and sugar are good friends.

Then we played a variation on what Drew D. Hill call Salad Bowl where everyone writes a famous person, an object, and a movie on pieces of paper and throws them in a bowl, or in this case, a bag.  There are two teams and one round is description, the next is charades, and the next is a one word description.  Being preoccupied with pig legs, I wrote pierna de cochon, thinking that cochon is spanish for pig, but it turns out, much to the amusement of everyone there, that it´s French, and possibly Galician, but not Spanish or Catalan.  Cerdo is Castellano, whereas in my previous experience in Guatemala, it´s Coche (much to my disappointment as it ¨coche¨ is much easier to say than ¨carro¨ for CAR).  We had a great time playing and the girl team won.  Then Pep and Alvaro drove me to a suburb where I could take the train back to Barcelona, but not before talking a lot about the USA, telling me about a guitar bar I should check out that night, and inviting me to hang out with them and eat Tapas a couple of days later. ¨Holy shit,  I´m making friends in another country!¨

When I got back to Barcelona, I stopped into a Locutori, or internet cafe that smelled quite a bit like urine, though it was packed and no one seemed to be bothered by it.  Then I wandered around as per usual looking for the place Alvaro had told me about with the guitars and I found it, but it was packed and I had my backpack.  It was also in a small square populated by north African fellows, moms with kids in strollers and a bunch of what looked to be, no, actually were a bunch of hookers.  I made eye contact with one of em which I knew would result as it did in her following me around for a bit til I made it out onto the Ramblas (the main touristy drag) and found a nice falafel joint.  I figured this would be a good way to lose her since hookers typically don´t like falafel.  Falafel is usually the one hooker/meat-free thing I can eat while traveling and this would be the first of many.  I walked back to Cris´s house with the intention of dropping my backpack and going back to the bar with the guitars, but instead ended up talking to her and her housemate Xell, who has a V'drum kit in their living room.  Xell was real intense in a good way and real kind, though hard to understand through the Catalan.

Put that in your favorite hooker´s skull bong and smoke it.

Barcelona I

I arrived in Barcelona via the Wonderful RyanAir then took a bus to the neighborhood where I was to meet up with my CS host, Cris.   I tried calling her from the Airport using my skype on my phone though the airport´s intermittent wifi.  Since I didn´t buy a pricey simcard in London (literally pennywise and pound foolish) and was only able to communicate to her that I´d meet her in front of Solmania in 50 minutes.  When I viewd her area on streetview, Solmania was a brightly signed shop so I figured it´d be an easy place to find.  Turns out Solmania is a suntan and skin cream shop or something, definitely a weird choice for a commie such as meself.  After realizing that the directions I wrote myself weren´t accurate enough, I asked around for Solmania, but no one knew what the hell I was talking about (I should have asked some guidos, but I guess they were all out clubbin´it up), but finally I went into a restaurant and they directed me to the joint, a couple blocks away.   I got there before Cris did and was all sweaty from lugging my backpack dressed in lots of layers so RyanAir woulnd´t stick me with a 50 pound fee for having a bag larger than its lilleputian limitations.  I took off some layers and took a second to relax when Cris came up to me and gave me the kiss on the cheek, pausing before the second one explaining that,  ¨here we kiss on both cheeks.¨  ¨Oh, ok!¨ I said.  We walked back to her place so  I could drop off my bag and we spoke in Spanish about general stuff.  It turns out my spanish is actually pretty bad.  Fortunately Cris spoke more English than I did Spanish so we were  able to communicate just fine.  I spoke in spanish when I could and she spoke in Englilsh when she wanted to, or when I didn´t understand what she´s saying.   

We walked with her bike-boom era step-through bike (yet with a really nice Miche rear wheel!) 30 minutes through town to a cultural center housed in a typical old town building. There were 2 big main rooms, one with a bar, and the other with a stage and space to salsa.  They had a giant plate of paella with whole shrimp and mussels of which we bought the last plate of for 4€ and shared.  She informed me halfway through the plate that she had had a fever that morning and still had a cold.  I guess the Catalunians aren´t as paranoid about germs as I am.  Beer was cheap from the tap at €1 per small glass. 

As the folks danced (all between mid 20s and mid 30s it seemed) I was blown away by their willingness to engage each other and smile and laugh.  Partner dancing is so foreign to me, as my experience at parties is that everyone dances by themselves without relaly engaging anyone else´s body movements.  Although I guess specifically going somewhere to salsa is different than going to someone´s rager to get wasted and moonwalk.   

After I hung out watching for a while Cris found me and said that she was ready to go.  Before we left her friend Jose insisted that she and I dance.  So she showed me the basics of Salsa (she was taking lessons and considers herself to be intermediate) and we shared a bit of a dance before the song ended.  By then I had caught on and was getting into it, but´twas time to go.  She borrowed a Bicing (the local bikeshare) card from Jose and we left, grabbed a bike for me (sorta clunky 3 speed with 26¨rear and 20¨front that rode well enough) and meandered home, talking about this´n´that.  

Just like the VHS lounge/cafe that sold fresh peanut butter that I frequented and loved in Xela (and had decided to open in the US before realizing that the profit would be nonexistent) I thought that it would be great for there to be an inexpensive paella bar that had salsa nights in, oh, I don´t know, Portland!  Maybe the inexpensiveness of the places was a distortion of my relative wealth, (Cris said wages are really low and  her place cost 180€ a month for each of the 3 rooms, which was not exactly cheap by her standards). Maybe such places already exist, but they sure as hell aren´t all Anarchisty like this place with a bike-tire-reuse-as-belts workshop. The only salsa club I know of in Portland isn´t as reasonably priced for obvious reasons, nor is it lefty.  

At 4 in morning, sleeping on the couch in the living room, I was instinctually pulled out of a dream by the sounds of someone puking to beat the band.  Oh, fuck, I thought.  I really hoped it was Cris´s housemate doing the puking and not Cris since we shared the same plate.  Then I heard Cris get up and go the bathroom, but there was no puking while she was in there.  When she returned to her room, I heard more puking and tried to go back to sleep, but the wretching continued until morning as did my prayer of ¨guts of steel.¨  Cris left early to go to work and I didn´t see here again until that afternoon. When I asked her if that was she who I had heard she said no but that the walls are SO thin that everything the neighbors do is audible, and it was her 50 year old shut in neighbor, who lives with his mom, who was emptying it out.  whew!

That day, on the way to the Frederic Mares museum I ate my first of many chocolate croissants.  It turns out it´s really difficult to pronounce croissant in Spanish and I would default to French pronunciation which  probably made me sound like an idiot. Some places call them napolitano, which I can say convincingly.  But I don´t think I was fooling anyone when I asked ¨¿como?¨ after pretty much anything they´d say.  Anyhow, the Mares museum  was supposed to have some ancient bikes and collections of random and weird things which sounded right up my alley.  It was in the old town next to the big Cathedral where all the tourists go.  The museum did in fact have numerous collections of numerous odd things, like keys, scissors, lighters, sewing machines, fans, yads,  5 strange ancient bikes made of solid iron and wood, etc.  The collections were overwhelming to look at, especially since each piece was so interesting to look at.  I sort of scanned the 500 keys, 400 scissors, 200 lighters, 50 life sized crucifixes, etc.  Each floor had a docent or two who guided you in the direction the exhibit should be viewed, some more forcefully that others by which I was mildly confused.  On the Jesus floor, a docent around my age followed and directed me around as though she though I was gonna tear down a Jesus for myself.  As this was the first museum I´d been to I wasn´t sure if this was normal Spanish museum staff behaviour, so I didn´t say anything sassy.  Besides my sass is best tasted in English.    

I had a nice conversation in Spanish with a mom-aged docent on the ¨old bikes floor¨ about the bikes and Catalunya before heading out to wander the old town.  I found a guitar store that had a bunch of new Tokai guitars and some Steve Vai Ibanez guitars with the handle cut out, so people know you´re a prick, complete with ¨do not play¨ signs on them.   Put that in your Mom-like-docent´s skull-bong and smoke it.

Terminal Attraction

Like Arnold Schwarzenegger to Jim Henson + Dottie Hinson. May Maywood. Betty Spaghetti. Dorothy Sue. Jimmy Dugan. 437 dingers in the first half of the century. Whoa are weeeeeee. Carolon Square. Glenview Boredom. Glenview Grayness. Oratoricals at the pancake house.

Diarheeeeah on top of ole smokey. All covered with.....Slash. I lost my poor ecosystem to the big timberman. I looked for a good tree, I looked for a stream, but the were all cut down and clogged with debris. Do you want to eat salmon or badger or Shrew? Well, you no longer need to cuz we've got a Fred Meyer not too far from here.

Nicotine Norman Rockwell on the moon shares a drink with a robot named Judy who wears a blue skirt hiked up to her mechanical knees, ball and socket joints, rack and pinion orgasms.

Tire Yeardly Smith. Hey you's cried the mathemagician, this is a square! This is a double dog dare! Golden globed. Cloudy with a chance of choices. You wouldn't believe how good is my impression of a certain neo-futurist architect. I've got them glasses and the grease pencil. I know the trenches and I"ll sketch with my gasmask through the mustard gas attack. I am the future of Industry and Hospital Complexes.

Augustus Gloop

August of 2009 has included:

gorging myself on blackberries in alleys

taking photos for the Mercury of cops on bikes with guns

playing baseball like a pro

camping at Green Lakes at the foot of the South Sister

selling lots of bikes