Ugh

It's been ages since I've done anything. Sorry. I'm still working like a sucker for some fool...ish company. I'm going to Spain. I don't like seeing St. Georges Cross. Not just because I've seen this is england, I just don't like seeing it. I want to see the spanish flag. Or the catalunyyyyyan one. Oh well. Jeez. I sound american. I'll write something better soon.

mmmmhmhmhmhmhm.

  Instroductus=2 by tomandrewjackson

's been a while.

It has. Like with most things, I set out to do something, got distracted and didn't achieve that very something. Just so happens that that so something is this so blog. So what. I'll pick up where I left off.
I left you in Catalunya. That was over eight months ago. And I'm reflecting on this now. Hopefully as I type the following excuse I might make some sense of this:


I spent more time underwater during July and August of 2010 than I spent underwater at the age of eight-ish, when I trained to compete in cross-county swimming races for plastic trophies. And that was alot. This underwater was better though, I couldn't even hear myself think about unrelated issues, I didn't even think. I just heard the water. And saw the fish. And rocks. I couldn't smell anything, not chlorine like before. But that's what the sea is for. Here's that picture I promised anyway:

I met a met a nationalist and some laid-back musicians. I thought about staying and working. I probably should have stayed to extend that summer, but there wasn't enough demand for me. If I spoke the language I'd have been more soughtafter I'm sureafter.

My mum had seen the world. I asked her about it and she said it was small. I still don't know how I feel about that. I suppose everything is small when you've seen it all.

At home I wasn't happy. I got there in September. I'm still there. I eventually found a job.That was in November. I don't want to type about looking for work. Or how work has been. Or how work is. I'm interested in typing what work will be like, but I'm at risk of plagairising the future. Ol' pasty stays off my case, because by the time he's reacted, snr. present goes to take his place.

I have had some good moments in those four sixths of a year since, but they're not easy to recall under winter's maturity beanie. I no longer wear it without reason, it serves a sensible solution, to a problem.

On a less sombre-shell bombre-shell, here's a nice bit of work from a Barcelonian Balcony:

Week Five

Sitting with my back to the window of a third floor piso, listening to fountains and fans, the kids and grans. Starlings and satellite receivers interrupt the post-sunset pastels and the breeze brings fresh baked bread to my altitude.

Enough with amateur poetry. Here's what I've been up to. On Friday I said goodbye to nearly everyone I'd met over the last four weeks out here. We spent the day at the beach in the company of my €45 guitar, had some authentic but cheap food in a tiny Italian restaurant and headed for the back to the beach armed with cheap bottles of beer to finish the night before each going our separate ways the next morning. Aside from a brief interruption in the form of a rude, threatening immigrant who referred to himself as 'The Shark', I ended my stay in Barcelona on a high. Waking early the next morning, I packed my clothes, guitar and laptop back up and made my way to the bus station. On a side note my upset tummy returned with a vengeance, which wasn't helped by a Northern Irish kid a few rows behind; who chundered, evvvveryyywhere. After two hours on the bus, Nadine (a girl from the same program who's also working in the same place as me) and I made our way to the estate agents to pick up our keys before siesta time kicked off. So, our place is great. It's a family-sized flat with one spare bedroom and loads of space. I'm currently sat on the balcony writing this (no steal-able wifi, so I'll copy and paste later), which has a great view over the North-East side of the town. You can almost make out the sea in the distance...but its a long way off; more on that later! I had a wander around the town on Saturday afternoon, making mental notes of where all the supermarkets and cheap-looking bars are, but went to bed nice and early on Sunday, as I had to be up to catch the first 6.30 bus to Girona, to fly back for my graduation in Bangor the following day.

Shame I missed out on the Sunday evening over here though. As much as the Catalan people seem to hate the country they're in, I bet Spain winning the World Cup final would have made for a good night out.

Sparing you the details of my short stay back in the UK, I flew back even earlier on Wednesday morning, leaving me enough time for a nice long siesta before going to work at 5pm that evening. The place I'm working in and what I'm actually doing as work are notoriously difficult to describe. Its a government-funded company that tries its best to entertain kids during the summer months. In the main building itself there are classrooms, a climbing wall, a recording studio (which is where I come in) and various other entertainingment infrastructures. For this week though, the company's main task is sorting out the four-day festival down the road. So I've been on with that today and yesterday... putting up signs, moving tables, chairs, bins etc. The festival runs Friday through to Monday, so I'll be working every night, doing similar things and by the sounds of it, they'll let me get involved a bit more with the lights/sound stuff too, which'd be grand. With me just working evenings then, I got up nice and early this morning and made my way to the beach on foot. There's a bus every 45 minutes, but I was too stubborn; it looked such a short distance on Google Maps. After my massive walk and seeing that my belongings were safe under the watchful eye of a shirtless 40-something tourist reading the sun and sporting 'Yorkshire' and 'Sheffield' tattoos on his respective left and right arms, I donned my snorkel and mask and did, well, snorkelling, for the first time in a good few years. The water is incredibly clear up here and there's literally shoals of fish just swimming about. You'd think they did it everyday or something. I'm hoping to get hold of my mum's waterproof camera in the next few weeks so I photograph a few beneath the blue. Well that brings you about up to speed. More soon. x

What's New? What's Old?

What's new? Well, I've been sick as a parrot this week. What's old? England are out of the world cup and Spain are still in. En fin.

Aside from feeling awful for most of the week, I have still managed to get quite a bit in. I've been swimming in the sea a few times, and I've even found the strength to throw myself off one or two of the artificial concrete, yet razor sharp breakwater rocks at Barceloneta beach. On Wednesday I was driven up to Palafrugell, a small seaside town about an hour and a half north of Barcelona where I'll be spending the remaining nine weeks of the exchange program. I was looking forward to going, as I'd get to see where I'd be working, the sort of facilities they'd let me be in control of and the folk I'd be attempting to start conversations with. I should explain. I'll be working thirty-five hour weeks in this company, helping out and doing, well, whatever needs doing. Although I was feeling gosh-awful and the sun up to one of its old 'let's see how hot I can make it today' tricks, and the 'Catalan or English, but never Spanish' philosophy was unfortunately even more pronounced that I had expected, I really liked the whole set-up. I switched to Permanent Grin Mode when they showed me the recording studio they wanted me to be in charge of during August; imagine an evil genius in a room full of WMDs type situation...

On the drive back, things turned from Guatamala to Guatapeor (phrase of the week, meaning 'going from bad to worse'). I'd not eaten in two days, and I thought I could just about get one of those cereal-type smoothie yoghurts just to get some nutrients inside me. It wasn't staying down. I endured the rest of the journey without chundering but suffered a 'both-ends-at-once' (forgive the explicit detail) explosion as soon as I made it to the bathroom at home. 

I made it out to the pub on Thursday, which was a great little spot as reccommended by my teacher from the language school. Despite the great surroundings I was still a bit on the haggard side, and the atmosphere was somewhat ruined by a drunk, jealous and rude French girl. Let's forget about though, just look at the nice picture.

By Friday, I'd made a full recovery, thanks to a few heavy doses of Sulfintestin Neomicina and Ibuprofen, and thanks to the people that were sick of me moaning, who told me to stop being so stubborn and actually sort myself out.

Saturday saw the second out-of-the-sity excursssion. Poblet:

And Tarragona.

So that's that. Oh, and I went to this last night too. The bands were good, the crew controlling the sound weren't as good, and the local people, as usual, were great... more than anything I wanted to start up conversations with all the umpteen-thousand of them. One step at a time I suppose.

The Second Week

As the title suggests, I'm two weeks in to my 14-week stay in Catalonia. I'm currently blogging from a Barcelona balcony, though not very successfully, as the heat, humidity, motorbike noises and background radio adverts have still not sunk in as the ignorable norms of a Sunday morning. So, a brief run-down of my week:
School's school. Same old relationships, gossips, lessons, break-times, rapports, homework. To be honest I've missed it all, and I'll miss it again when my course is finishes, in another two weeks time. The compulsory excursions have been fun, not from a tourist perspective, but rather for the half-an-hour sit-down outside a bar in whichever part of the city we're left in. Tuesday made for a bad bar experience however. After studying Spanish now for 6 years or more (and having a degree in it) I like to think that when ordering a drink, I can successfully get across the message of what drink I want. Sitting outside a bar on Tuesday, I ordered a 'caña' (a half pint of the most standardly priced beer, or thereabouts) instead of  the usual 'cerveza' (you wouldn't go in to a bar in the UK and ask for 'a beer', its just not specific enough.). I felt sorry for the waiter having to put up with all us English folk trying to order something, he obviously had to deal with tourists quite a bit. On his return, the waiter brought back three half-litre bottles of a 'reserve' estrella damm, each costing six euros (the other two lads had also asked for 'cañas'.)  In all fairness, I should have told him to take the bottles back. I wasn't worthy of drinking such a fine beer with my unemployed status, and the waiter/establishment certainly wasn't worthy of my six euros. For whatever reason, we drank them and paid up. Our loss. Its not even a big deal. Why am I typing about it then? Well to be honest, it really grated on me that, from the waiter's point of view, I still fit in to this 'guiri' (northern european tourist) stereotype: I want the biggest beer possible. I want to spend as much money as possible. I want to speak as little Spanish as possible. I want to avoid Spanish culture at all costs. To an extent, I'll never be able to break that stereotype (for example, sarcasm is not such a large part of Spanish culture!), and, to an extent, the guy was only after a few extra euros, like everyone. Still though, it ground my gears.

Wednesday was the big night, la festa de Sant Joan. The best part of the Catalonian population staying out on the beach until it starts getting light, drinking, smoking, lighting fireworks and just generally being sociable.On a Wednesday. Great.

 So, after drinking a two-and-a-half litres of beer, an energy drink and a litre of wine, watching the sunrise, buying some churros and riding home on the metro watching everyone with heavy eyes, I'd had an incredible 10-hour night out, spending about the same amount of money as I'd spent the afternoon before, on a short but sweet, over-priced bottle of 'Estrella Damm Inedit'. Thursday, as you can imagine, was about as written off as my old Peugeot 306 was two years ago, when it was struck by a rather large badger. Barcelona was shut down on Thursday anyway, and everyone felt a bit sorry for themselves, not in the least bit helped by the sad news of the train accident just down the coast.

Yesterday I went to Montserrat, a monastery up on a jagged, weird-looking mountain about 40km from Barcelona itself. The monastery itself, having been rebuilt several times wasn't particularly photogenic, so the mountain made for a nice little panorama after climbing a good few hundred steps.

Today is the England/Germany football game, so I'll be contributing a bit more to the good old guiri stereotype by going to a bar, having a few beers, and swearing at the telly.

Day 2 in Barcelona

So here´s the bit where I start blogging more often. I´m doing a work placement called ECTARC. Its funded by the welsh goverment and they sort me out rather royally with an intensive Spanish and Catalan language course for the first four weeks and the remaining 9 weeks I´ll spend working withing the local government of the costa brava seaside town of Palafrugell. I arrived yesterday to 25 degrees of sunshine, a damaged suitcase, a relatively pain-free transfer and a´host-family´´comprising of a lonely, old, heavily-moustashed hairdresser by the name of Emilio. He´ll be looking after me, doing my washing and cooking for me for the next month or so. Today I´ve been studying in the International House language school, had my first Catalan lessons and my first Spanish class (which I have to admit, was a bit Noddy-Speaks-Spanish-Por-Primera-Vez, but, we´ll see how it all pans out). No pictures yet, but if all goes to plan, I´ll keep you, quite literally, posted.