Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Al final

I'm down to the last few days here in Barcelona and already sad to go... despite the fact that I've been looking forward to moving on for a while now. Barcelona's a tough city, like New York. Tough to get to know people, to get into the flow of the place. And there are so many foreigners that often it seems you could be in any big city: London, New York, Amsterdam... And, much as I love the wilds of northern Catalunya, rather than feeling happy about my Spanish, I've mostly just been embarrassed to not speak a word of Catalan (the widespread push for Catalan independence makes language a matter of political import here). So I've been looking forward to moving on to Andalucia, with its smaller towns and its reputation for warm hospitability, for being "real Spain."
But I'm ambivalent. The guys at the bike shop have finally gotten around to inviting my on their rides. I know the folks who run the corner store. I can time the stoplights on my ride into school. And, the hardest thing: I just said goodbye to my Bikram yoga teacher. The studio opened days after I arrived in Barcelona, and I've been a regular ever since. I've learned a lot there (all the body parts in Spanish?), wrung out the exhaustion I carried away from New York, and have some budding friendships there that mean a lot to me.
I'm going to Grenada next, where I would be lucky to find any kind of yoga studio. But the city is cradled by the Sierra Nevada mountain range. It showcases a mix of Spain's three religions, reflected in strikingly varied architecture (the Alhambra, for instance). There are coastal towns to discover. And it will be very much not New York.
Until then, a few more days in Barcelona. Tomorrow is el dia de los santos, yet another national holiday. I'm going to Montserrat, a 1000 year old monastery up in the hills not far from Barcelona that was erected in 1025 after someone had a vision of the Virgin there, was wrecked by Napoleon in the 19th century, rebuilt, and now is home to a community of monks. The guidebook tells me there are "truly weird rock pillars" on the mountain; who could resist that?
And here's another picture of Girona. The city, an easy train ride from Barcelona, is hands down my favorite place in Spain so far. It has a medieval warren of narrow streets with small arches, winding staircases and flower boxes. It has a city wall, crumbling at parts, with ivy curling out others, showing views of the national park (with volcanoes!) in the distance. It has a city park with what seem to be the remains of old old buildings at odd and crumbly angles, mostly overgrown. It has two cathedrals that ring out the hours in cacophonous harmonics. It has a river running straight through the center separating the old city and the new and spanned by too-picturesque-to-be-true stone footbridges. Surprisingly, despite all this, the city feels like Seattle. It's overrun by students in dreads and various configurations of metal. There are athletic supply stores at every turn, vending all manner of equipment to be used in the outdoor cornucopia a stone's throw away. It is, of course, a celebrity spot for cyclists, and the ocean is not far. There is music. There is energy.
And (sigh) a lot of Catalan.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Girona y Catalunya, otra vez

Beautiful, lonely...




Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Güell, sort of

Here's a picture of the people I'm spending a good slice of my time with these days. Left to right: me, Alicia (one of my morning grammar teachers), Xian from China, and the two Marianas, both from Brazil. The four of us have been in class together for over a month now, though various other students have passed in and out. Today we went on an excursion to Park Güell because Alicia has an appointment with a dentist tomorrow during class time. We persuaded her to persuade the "jefe" of the school to let us go for an excursion this afternoon to make up the time. (Rather than have a substitute in--who wants that?)
We've just started level C1, which is billed as "superior," but really just means that we have superior knowledge about how badly we speak Spanish (or how badly Xian and I do--the Brazilians are better than us and have a lilting accent that's really fun to listen to in Spanish). But we all know more than enough to get by, which made this excursion giddy fun. We flitted through the park on a picture-taking spree that turned out way more pictures of us than of the oddly beautiful surroundings.
I want to go back to the park though. There's a lot to ponder. For example, a shiny stained glass alligator splayed out over a staircase. A gingerbread(ish) house. A lot of bright mosaics. And those muddy swoops and chunks that somehow look more natural than the trees and rocks around.
I don't think I'll ever be able to do Gaudi justice in photos. Here's another stab at description: bright sprightly joy in a thin veneer over ugly. It's a little circus-clown spooky. Or maybe fairytale eerie: equal parts sweet and garish, and sometimes unsettlingly true (if you can get away with calling architecture "true").

Monday, October 23, 2006

Of Stupidity and Serendipity

Saturday morning I was standing by this volcanic lake 10 miles or so from Girona, with picture perfect rowboats, early morning sun glimmering off the water, and the Pyrenees guarding the distance, all of which would, I suppose, have felt rather remarkable if it were not for the fact that I was way too frustrated to enjoy the scene. I had gotten up super early to begin a ride that was much more ambitious than it was feasible, and immediately spent the first two hours getting lost no less than half a dozen times, turning circles in Girona and ending up on a endless stretch of harrowing highway, trucks and all. On top of which, I had inexplicably decided to leave my bank card at home, only to find that the pension I had chosen didn't take credit cards, leaving me with so little cash that I knew I was facing a long weekend of hunting through remote pueblos in search of that one restaurant with menus in enough languages to offer me a "tonnyfis sandwic" for 15 dollars, and yes, to accept a visa. And I was feeling the Octoberish lonely, wondering why the hell I thought it was a good idea to be here, alone, miles away from anything and anyone who cares about any of the above.
Pero bastante, no? Si. Hubo un cambio, por supuesto.
A troupe of middle-aged cyclists on sturdy mountain bikes rolled up out of the blue and stopped to ask me a few questions about my cyclecross. At first I thought they were just interested in the bike, but it soon became clear that they were trying to figure out whether it could manage the trail they were headed towards. When they decided it could, and to my immense relief and delight, they invited me along. I spent the next four hours being treated to all the wonders of a gorgeous valley, history included. These folks were amazing. They spoke Catalan with each other, but were kind enough to switch to Castillian whenever I was in earshot. I was regaled with stories about Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis, both of whom keep houses in Girona and frequently train in this valley and in these hills. I heard about how the people in the valley sheltered people from Banyoles (the cyclists' town) during Franco's sweep of the region during the civil war. They told me about the evangalists from the United States who had taken up residence in the valley, and asked whether it is true that estadounidenses don't believe in the virgin. They pointed out a miniature "golden gate bridge" dating from the 10th century, told me how the colors in the valley change with the seasons, and took me to a natural fountain with (they assured me) potable water (I was not so sure the next day). And when we came to a particularly tricky rocky descent that was iffy for my cyclecross, they all got off their bikes and walked down with me. We eventually parted ways, they giving me advice for the road ahead and passing on extra energy bars, me summoning up every expression of joyful gratitude I could muster in Castillian.
Afterwards, I returned quickly to the effects of my over-ambition. 80 miles into the first day I was thinking: four more times around the park--I can make it (and then beginning to fear the hill--utter stupidity, oceans away from the park). I think I cycled around 150 miles this weekend (and today can hardly climb stairs), but I'm not so proud of that figure, seeing as I was suffering too much to enjoy 11th century monestaries tucked into hills along the way.

I did, however, enjoy an exquisite moment back in Girona at the end of Sunday, sitting in the old cathedral (siglo XIII, spire here to the right) when a choir shuffled in to practice, sending marrow-harrowing echoes off the old old stone walls.

Que suerte tenia, que suerte.

Today I am back in Barcelona, in class, throwing out mistakes with every phrase. October again, como siempre.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Figueres, Cadaques

I took a train Saturday morning to a town called Figueres, a couple hours north of Barcelona by train, with bicycle in tow.
Wait, rewind. This trip to Spain was another shot at immortality, as much as anything. Not immortality, strictly speaking, but teleology. That is, I'm always trying to scramble, more or less frantically, up the sheer vertical angles of an emptying hourglass, in fear of leaving behind this small, miraculous, bit of consciousness without...
something.
What? I don't know. But I can't shake the feeling that a life, yours, mine, is "for" something, in the most Aristotelian sense. Something more than talking of Michelangelo.
Now what, please? I would like to know. And I suppose I thought, when I came here, that maybe I'd make another stab at figuring it out.
I'm not making much progress, as far as the hourglass goes. But this past weekend I had a few moments of pure existence. You know what I mean? Those moments when just to breathe is enough.
Here's how it all went down. The trip started inauspiciously enough. I had kept myself up all night Friday with nervous excitement and so started out on two hours of sleep. And no sooner did I arrive in Figueres but my bike pump broke and I realized that I had forgotten my gloves. After finding a bike shop to replace the aforementioned, and two kilometers into my ride, my cell phone flew out of my back pocket and got run over, leaving me heading out into the mountains without any means of communication, solo. Stupid? Possibly, but would you have turned back?
I spent the next two days in the saddle and here are some of the moments that happened: I spent a lot of time going up mountains. The kind of mountains that make your heart audible. The second picture, up there, captures a moment where taking a picture was as good an excuse as any to stop for a second. But when I got to the top of a big rise and looked down--see the third picture--I started laughing like a wild woman and thus began this fit of existentialism.
The fourth picture is a moment at dawn on Sunday, when I was rolling over flat farmland making discoveries at every turn. Like an old man raking leaves on his farm into a giant bonfire. Like the sun rising over that old old monastery up there hiding behind an unremarkable cluster of trees. Like rounding this bend and seeing the ocean slap up against these rugged rocks near a place called Llanca, up near the French border. Cool, quiet, beautiful. The next picture is of Cadaques, a whitewashed fishing village near the easterly tip of Spain. Cadaques was beautiful, but I was particularly happy to find it because I had to climb a particularly beastly mountain to get there--which made the arrival all the sweeter.
So in short, I rode hard, and I lived hard, and found a few moments that were mine, as Ani DiFranco puts it.
of beauty blinding and unsurpassed/make me forget every moment that went by/and left me so half-hearted/cuz i felt it so half-assed.
That would be the end of the story, except the coda is Salvador Dali.
Who, it seems, likes to think about time, and our frenzied attacks on its passage. Have you noticed all the melting clocks? And forks and human flesh, of course... This picture to the right shows his house, peeking out over trees in Port Lligat. And the one above is the view of the cove in front of his house--these rocks and this bit of ocean figure into the background of so many of his paintings.
So there's a lot more that I could say about this weekend--here, in this next picture is a piece of Figueres, an overly touristified town that nevertheless is remarkable for its theater-museum housing all sorts of bizarre Dali splendors.

But for now I am back to a few more minutes of counting out my life in coffee spoons, albeit sans a little frenzy. Speaking of which, does anyone know how to cook fish or eggs? I am un cero a la izquierda (completely useless) at this, and having trouble feeding myself. Help? I have a pot, a frying pan and a gas range.

And here is a sweaty exhausted self-portrait, really damn happy.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

The Fourth of July

Yesterday was the Twelfth of October. El dia de la nacionalidad. The legendary day Columbus discovered the Americas. (That's him, in the picture, high on a pedestal surrounded by angels, triumphant soldier figures and lions. A detail below.) Columbus is a big deal around here, of course. Well, actually, that has surprised me. While celebrating Columbus makes sense here, after the vast expansion of Spain's empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, I hadn't realized the extent to which Spanish national pride is still linked to those years of empire.
In Madrid, there's a big parade. But it was a strange holiday here in Catalonia. The streets were virtually empty, save tourists, cops in full combat gear and circling helicoptors. Barcelona's parade was egged a few years back and that, apparently, was the end of that. The cops were out to prevent riots, in case anyone cared to display some nationalist sentiment. No one did, it seems.
I spent the day in Sitges, a town on the shore just south of Barcelona. The place is overrun by tourists in the summer, but the beaches were empty on this rainy fall day and the town seemed real, and beautiful. The town was hosting an international film festival; I was there with a couple of friends from school to see what we could see. Our first discovery was an Irish flick about vicious genetically modified exoskeletal cow fetuses that snuck around biting people. Thumbs way way up. The next left us stunned. It's called "The Fountain," by Darren Aronofsky, director of Requiem for a Dream. The Fountain is also about mortality, and provocatively so, but this film is as beautiful as Requiem was dark. The soundtrack alone is reason to see it.
And here, to close, is a gratuitous Gaudi picture. Slung mud; somehow also stunning.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Estoy aqui, ahora

After a week cavorting with siblings (this shot, top to bottom: Joanna, Carolyn, Timothy, Abigail, Olivia, Jeanine; the next shot: me cowering in fear of robot-Timothy (halloween costume fashioned by big brother Mars), with little sis Abigail looking on) and otherwise visiting family in California, I'm back to my Barcelona life, plowing back into this ever-elusive project of catching a language and keeping it.
To this end, I've been gulping down a half dozen cafe cortados daily to survive six hours of classes in the middle of a California night.
But the jetlag ain't all bad. This morning, after two or three hours "en blanco" (sleepless), I crept out to ride, sneaking past a swath of not-so-savory nightlife, and finding my way up to the hills behind the city in the pre-dawn full-moon hush. I finally found my way to a ridge overlooking the city. And then... Let me tell you: there should have been a soundtrack. Just then, the sun sprang. Color shimmered through the overcast sky. And as I stood there breathing, streaming sweat, happy, I thought: I'm here, now, and the rest is preamble.