It’s funny that if you are having a good time, that same time seems to fly by so quickly. Can’t believe I have been in Barcelona now for more then 2 weeks already! I guess being busy with study and getting to know new people fills up the time in the day quite rapidly.

In just 2 weeks I already met lovely people from Sweden, Australia, France and Spain. In just 2 weeks I ate so much tapas that yesterday I already had to eat something else because I couldn’t see more tapas again! And that even though I am a great fan!! :-)

In just 2 weeks almost the complete staff of my favourite Starbucks cafe where I do my homework each day knows my name. And the best thing about that is that it gives me the opportunity to practise my Spanish on the local people every day! Ok, it’s still quite basic conversations, but bit by bit it’s growing! It started with just the basic “How are you?”, but now I can already add the weather to the conversation! We are learning about family (parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, uncles, etc.) and giving directions at the moment, so I bet you can guess tomorrows topics besides the weather! ;-)

Haven’t been much of a tourist so far. Last weekend it was raining quite heavily, so that wasn’t very appealing to go out and see lovely buildings or parks. But let’s wrap up what I have seen so far:

Las Ramblas: Well… just watch your wallet… It’s ok to walk over and take a look, but just very touristy and actually not that much to see… Or maybe if you are in need of buying a pigeon or chicken at one of the little kiosks…

Montjuïc: The Olympic “mountain”. Just been up a little bit, and that was already rewarded with a great look over the city. Should be even better with nicer weather.

View from Montjuïc

The old town: Great stuff! Really nice to just wonder through. Lovely buildings and very cute little streets.

La Sagrada Familia: Just a quick peak outside so far. Impressive. Although the stories from people who have been inside have not been very positive so far… It’s mainly commented as to be a pretty ruin.

La Sagrada Familia

Parc Güell: Nice park. But was there on a dark day with nice company. So have to go back on a sunny day with bad company to see if it was really as nice as I thought it was.

Parc Güell Entradas		Parc Güell View		Parc Güell Cross

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Oi… I know I am getting older, and aren’t the least bothered by it, but spending long days between “kids” makes you just feel so old… I can’t go out clubbing every single night and then expect to learn anything at school the next day! *hahahaha* that is indeed just for the kids! ;-)
I also seem to be bothered by small things. People leaving the kitchen messy, not cleaning up the tables, leaving trash in the classroom… Silly of course, but I guess it comes with being among a lot of 18 year olds.

But hey! I should not complain to much! As it ain’t all bad by far!! Still having a great time here. Learning more and more Spanish, and meeting more and more fun people. And have been tasting the local cuisine on a number of occasions already! Great stuff!!! Sure, tapas were good in Stockholm, but can’t really compete with the local stuff here! The less English is spoken and understood in a restaurant, the better the food seems to become! And, lovely side-effect, the lower the prices become! :-)

Met the last of the Haggren brothers last Friday, Magnus, who has been a local in Barcelona for almost one and a half year now, and is only to be recognised as a local as well. Not only does he finish every sentence with “…, no?”, but even with a lovely 16 degrees outside, blue sky and a warm sun, he walks around with a big scarf and complains it’s cold! What kind of Swede is this?!? :-) Well, a true Haggren! That’s for sure!! And I mean this in the most positive way possible! It’s hard to find a nicer and friendlier set of brothers! Mamma Haggren may be very proud! :-)

Have only done some sightseeing so far. I am here for a while, so I don’t have to see everything in the first weeks. Although there is A LOT to see… oh my… even just walking through the old town is amazing! It’s truely a beautiful place! Also bought the Lonely Planet from Barcelona. Mainly because I knew about the Ramblas and big cathedral before arriving here and wasn’t aware of all other nice things. So great thing to have the book, were it not that I bought the Spanish version… and that just proved to be far, far, FARRRR to ambitious for now… so maybe by the end of the course I will finally be able to read a bit in it…

The course class are often quite fun. Even though I do struggle a lot with all the new words. The pace is quite high, everything in Spanish from the start and English is more or less forbidden. But my creative mind keeps me on track. As, for example, even though I don’t know the Spanish word for meatball, I do know meat (carne) and ball (ballon), so therefore am able to create meatball: carneballon! :-) Yes, indeed, that was way off, but there is other ways to success! While talking I seem to crash in French and strangely even Swedish words whenever I don’t know the Spanish word. And if that doesn’t help the trick is to make it sound Spanish by just putting “os” on the end of words! And that even gets you a correct Spanish word from time to time! :-)

Oh, just one little sad thing… my neighbour doesn’t keep the internet line open 24/7… At random he seems to turn it off… So since last Thursday it has only been back twice for a short while… :-(

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It has begun. Yesterday afternoon I arrived in Barcelona and today I followed my first classes of the Spanish language course. The trip actually started with little disappointment… first the weather in Barcelona. I left Holland Sunday afternoon under a clear blue sky, and arrived in a rainy Barcelona. Actually only have seen the city in rain, as today it has been raining again. Gotta love the irony or going south and just seeing crap weather. But well, it’s just a matter of time before that will clear up.

The initial room they had put me in contributed to the disappointing feeling at arrival. My lord it was small! Oi… I didn’t expect that. Well, didn’t expect anything, but maybe I was only hoping for a room with a nice balcony! ;-) Well, a balcony it had not… just one window with a view to… yes… a dead wall… Lovely! :-) But that wasn’t the worst… there was some really weird dirty smell in the room… really strange, and quite disgusting I may add. Together with the constant running water noise coming from the loo, that was for sure not going to work. Complaining was not an instead success, as the Sunday evening watch didn’t seem to have the privileges to move me to another room. I just had to get through one night in that room.

Even though the morale was a bit low because of the shitty room, talking to some friends at home (Mette, Judith and Bastiaan) made me feel quite ok again. Especially seeing the faces of Judith and Bastiaan while they were looking at the little video I made from the room was quite a treat! :-) But indeed. Not much to do about it at that point, so I just had to deal with it for one night.

And what a night it was… I almost didn’t sleep at all. Quite annoying. And strange. As usually I have never problems sleeping in new places. Eventually I started blaming the running water… What seemed like a sound that I could deal with early in the evening, turned out to be as loud as the Niagara waterfalls when the lights were out and there should just have been total silence…

So the first school day started a bit rough with the lack of sleep… Everything is in Spanish from the start, which is quite essential as well, as not many people in Barcelona seem to be familiar with the English language. At some times it proved to be a bit to much when having been awake all night, but I guess that’s quite normal.

The class is 8 people; 1 other Dutch, 1 French and 5 (!!) Swedish. And I must say, for one of the first times in my life, I feel old… :-) All Swedish seem to be just 18 or 19… Same with the Dutch guy. Just the French guy seems a bit older, about 25 or so. He actually seems to play squash as well and was already up for an “after school” game! That should be good fun. And not just because I am in bad need of the exercise! ;-)

After classes (that run from 0900 until 1300) I was able to move room, and now I am in a somewhat bigger room now, with a huge bathroom, silent toilet and to top it of the room is not smelly! Lovely! :-) Am even able to log in to the neighbours wireless network to use the internet! Yesterday I had to go down to the kitchen to use the internet, but in this room it works fine with the neighbours network! Well, if I ever bump into him, I can thank him now: ¡Muchos gracias! :-)

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March 9th, 2005. The new laptop arrived.
January 12th, 2006. I have started to use it. :-)

No, it has not just been laying around all that time. My mamma has been using it. Mainly to play her favourite card games. When I got the new laptop, I had just gotten my old Dell laptop working again and couldn’t be bothered at that time to transfer everything to the new laptop and set-up everything as it was on the Dell. So until I was ready to transfer my stuff, my mamma would use the new laptop to play her card games on and occasionally use MSN, email and internet.

Only when time went by, there never was a real reason for me to switch back to the new laptop, other then the fact it is much nicer then my old Dell. So my mamma kept using the new fancy laptop while I was still using the old one. At one point in time I got close to reclaiming the “new” laptop. I transferred the card games to the old Dell and … damn! That didn’t work… Ever since I had the Dell computer, the screen resolution had not been the best. It was totally fine to work with but with some applications you could notice. Indeed, with the fine application of the card game you could notice it badly! I actually tried to play a couple of games but was quite quickly developing a serious headache… That was not going to work…

Even when in October from last year the Dell laptop screen broke, the time to reclaim the “new” laptop had not arrived. I was able to borrow an old big monitor from my brother, hook it up to the laptop and work with that as a screen. Not a lovely solution, but it worked! :-)

But now there is simply no turning back. Leaving for Barcelona it would be nice to bring the laptop. And as I simply can’t drag along the huge monitor. So today I moved my stuff to the “new” laptop. Actually turned out to be far less work then I expected… So all is up and running again and this is the first post on the blog from the new laptop. And I am already loving it! And the Sony wide screen already proves briljant for watching DVDs as well!! :-)

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No, not diarrhea! Diary!! A pronunciation mistake I often make when talking about my diary. My buffalo leather diary. It cost me a true fortune when I bought it 3 years ago… I think I paid almost 150 euros for it… but hey, it’s real buffalo leather!! :-)

Unfortunately I haven’t used it at all the last year, but now I found it again and as I am going back to school on Monday, it might be handy to start using it again! Finally it will start paying back the investment! ;-)

Well… actually that is still to see, as for some reason I have never been much of a diary person. Even through school I hardly used a diary. Mainly because I always figured that if an appointment was important, I wouldn’t forget it. So there was no real benefit in writing it down. Helped by the fact I hardly missed an appointment, I often just couldn’t be bothered.

But when I was just going through my diary from 2004, I must say it was quite fun reading little notes I did write down that year. Small things I had already forgotten about again, but when I read them they made me think of those almost forgotten fun times! So maybe that is actually a good reason for writing in my diary more often. Not because I don’t wanne forget things in the short run, but because I wanne remember them in the long run! At least this time I will try to make a serious effort again to actually keep using it! I already noted down my flight to Barcelona, and some birthdays. A good start. I just hope I will be able to write down a lot of fun things and not just notes about all the school homework! :-)

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I guess a holiday in Spain is the best way to describe it. The Counting Crows (great music by the way!) said it in the following words:

“I may take a holiday in Spain
Leave my wings behind me
Flush my worries down the drain
And fly away to somewhere new”

That probably sums it up for me as well. Next Sunday I will leave for Barcelona to study Spanish for 12 weeks. Exciting! Not sure about the holiday factor yet though… Just know that I will study Spanish for 20 hours a week (with some optional extra hours each week) and I will have to report for my first school day at crazy-o-clock 0800 on Monday morning. But I am quite sure it will leave time enough to enjoy it like a holiday! :-)

Don’t really know what to expect from the course yet, but I also don’t spend so much time worrying about it. I’ll just see what happens. The school (don Quijote) advertises the course as “Spanish for life”. Maybe a bit ambitious, but we will see. If they can teach me the ability to think in Spanish in 12 weeks, it must be a mission accomplished. But again, we will see what happens. I will just try to pick up as much as possible.

As the school was recommended to me by Martin (his brother went to this school as well to learn Spanish), I more or less went quite blindly with his recommendation and haven’t looked any further at all. So I know where you live Martin, if this school sucks! *hahaha* ;-) Just actually looked up where the school is located in Barcelona (see map), and it seems to be a nice location close to “Las Ramblas”. And even though I hardly know anything about the Barcelona city, I do know that the Ramblas is in the center of town! Yes, it’s probably about time I start to read up on that!! ;-)

The don Quijote school location

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The families new years reception. A good time. Fun conversations. Easily excepting any challenge in that good mood and before you know it you are committed to joining the “Fifty Fit+” gym class at 0900 on Monday morning! Doesn’t that sound familiar? Well, maybe not, but for me there was no way back and this morning I joined my Godfather, aunt and about 15 other local seniors at their gym session.

A lovely bunch of people. Quite fanatic as well. Not bothered much by plastic knees, hips, sugar disease, bad backs… and so on… Just still going strong! All smiles, good humor, coffee and sauna after the workout, so hardly any complains. Nothing but respect for the elderly! :-)

The workout turned out to be much tougher then I expected it to be. After a joint warm-up with the a little “course” through 9 different exercises. Two minutes each. Little spinning. Some lifting with little weights for arms, shoulders and back. Some floor exercises for stomach, back and legs. And one with running. I do have some sort of regular exercise on the squash court or the gym, but never ever do I lay down on one side and have to move my leg up and down in the air for 2 minutes… DAMN!! That is though!!!

Any sign of struggle on my side was immediately followed by laughter and comments from the seniors… which made me smile and comment back that they should not laugh, because they simply had much more years of experience with this! ;-) But proud they were, when we sat down for coffee afterwards and I had to tell them the workout was much tougher then I expected.

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“We need you to pick up some people at 1800. Possibly drive them to work at 0900 in the morning as well. Just for a couple of days. You will get to drive a Kia Picanto and you would do us a great favor!”
Sounds lovely doesn’t it? Who would say no to that? Well, not me! :-)

And although probably not the most challenging job in the world, fun it was for sure! The fun already started when picking out my temporary car. Besides the Kia Picanto there was a slightly better car available, this one with power steering, a Opel Agila… Oi… that’s a real difficult choice! The bad or the ugly. As the challenge seemed bigger with the Picanto, that was my choice.

And a challenge it was. It almost became a mission impossible after opening the door of the Picanto… oh my lord!! The smell that came out of it!!!!! My first thoughts went directly to many taxi-rides I have taken abroad… Often foreign taxi drivers would, for some reason, hang up a magic pine tree in there car… Well, anybody who has been in such a taxi will know exactly what I am talking about! These things smell absolutely horrible! And now “my” taxi had one! The previous owner must have either had a serious smelling problem, or been really smelly him/herself… but who could be more smelly then the pine tree?! You need a serious lack of personal hygiene to accomplish that kind of smell!

It turned out that my “work” was limited to just two pickups in the evening. And where the first day was all about getting to know the job, the second day I could only be distinguished from real taxi drivers by the lack of a meter, a taxi sign on the roof and the fact that I wasn’t driving an old Mercedes, but still struggling without the power steering in the Kia Picanto…

The taxi driver feeling flourished! The smelly car was for free, the radio bad and always on SkyRadio and I even developed the bad taxi driver version of English while talking and turning to my Polish passengers on the backseat. Their English wasn’t so good, and it’s amazing how fast, and with what great enjoyment you can adjust back to their level of English. Conversations all of a sudden sound like: “Work fun today? Yes? You like work? No? You here long time? Holland good? No? Miss Poland? Yes?”.

When the last pickup on Friday evening got cancelled because they had found a Polish friend who could drive them home, I actually felt a bit sad. Wasn’t I good enough as a taxi driver? I drove safely, for as far possible in a Picanto… The smell wasn’t me… I was able to cheer them up with telling them we have Polish supermarkets in Holland and one is actually close by to where they live… We had good conversations… I just hadn’t seen it coming…
Taxi Picanto no more.

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I guess the title sums up the great fun I had at new years earlier this week! :-) I was with Mette, Thomas and Kevin Arnold in Copenhagen and had a truly wonderful time! A short review.

The days before new years eve, just relaxing. New years eve with a lot of fun, a bit to much alcohol and a fun time dancing at 80’s music until the early morning. Then the first day of the new year… A serious challenge to get John Lennon out of the history books and give peace another chance, by having a Bed-In all day. Lovely, but as I wasn’t in a Hilton suite and my bed consisted of 3 big couch pillows connected together, doing that for a whole week would have been a serious challenge! Especially as the next morning already my lower back was hurting like hell from all the lying down!! :-)

After getting up and moving around a bit for the first time in the new year, in the evening there was the great fun of the Brush Aways™ Nordic Open Poker Championships! :-) Who could have expected poker could be so much fun! And not just because I was winning, it was just great fun to bluff, raise, re-raise, show cards, don’t show cards and go all in! Just the big cigars and bad whisky were missing! ;-)

As well as the poker chips… so we had to play with Brush Aways™ packages for chips. Hard to make little piles of, so maybe not so much fun as with real chips, but still it was great fun to play the game! I am already looking forward to the next poker tournament, when we will have the real chips for sure! I just need to work on my game and pokerface a little more! ;-)

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