I’m like that foreign exchange student you made fun of

Remember that kid in high school? The one whose English you laughed at, not to mention the way she dressed and wore her hair? Maybe you said a few words to her in the lunch room or if her locker was located next to yours, but you usually didn’t bother chatting with her too long because she had trouble understanding you and, let’s face it, you had nothing in common. Now take that same situation and make her a couple decades older, add  couple of degrees and 5 additional countries to her list of places once called home and make the setting not school but work, and you have me. Well, first subtract all of her charm, and then you have me.

I write intensely in English all day and then must communicate and listen in Spanish. Sometimes people speak about what is going on to me and other journalists in languages I don’t understand and sometimes they speak Spanish, but sometimes I am not listening during those Spanish language moments. But if I am, I still have difficulty understanding (*sometimes. Let’s stick with the theme).

This becomes especially troublesome when unspoken rules regarding the particular content I am working on are present. I inevitably discover many of said unspoken rules by making mistakes. In fact, it is the only way I discover many of the rules, secret or not. This method of “training” is fairly standard here in Spain. And while the new kid on the block is floundering through said training, the cool kids are sitting back and rolling their eyes as mistakes pour in.

I am not suffering the cruel tricks that you all played on the exchange student, like helping her out with responses to teacher’s requests with phrases such as “why don’t YOU sit down, woman?”  In fact, the people I work with are nice as well as talented and capable. But  European corporate culture generally has remained old school in that there are no processes defined for how work gets done. Some have emerged organically, but nothing is documented and therefore nothing exists to pass on to any newcomers.  Meaning: There is nothing to base any training on, no way to share knowledge or lessons learned nor anything to base required skills and abilities on for a job that opens up. Those jobs are largely defined around the person that previously held the job. Which means when that person goes, so does special job knowledge.

Of course, there are old school water cooler conversations for knowlege sharing that happen…but because of the subtelties of language that I am incapable of picking up on and producing, I don’t attempt to initiate casual conversations about work, that in itself is too much work. And since I’m the weird language exchange kid, I am not included anyway.

I realize this is kind of a big bitch-fest, but in a roundabout way it is also praise for the US corporate model. Not something you would generally consider when you think of the word ‘homesick’, but for me it ranks big. Like the exchange kid, my best friends, confidants and family are in my country of origen. If I have a bad day or feel lonely, I don’t have a community at work to fall back on, at least not yet anyway. (As it happens, I am feeling particularly lonely after a fantastic time with my best friends in the US.  To top it off, one of my only two good friends here is leaving in July.)

So I don’t know what the exchange student did when she felt isolated. Probably nothing. Just waited to go home. Or maybe she called her mom. Me, I am just going to keep at it, there isn’t much I can do about the corporate culture and I don’t care if they think I am a crazy American. I am unmotivated to improve my Spanish because I am too tired, I am working hard. We will see this year if the trade off is worth it. If not, this exchange kid might just be heading back to her friends and family in her country of origin. (!!)

It is winter and that means cold/flu/phlegm ball time!

I have just been mountain biking 3 out of the last 4 days, which normally would not be something worth noting except that I was sick for nearly a month straight and could barely manage more than a walk to and from the supermarket.

‘Tis the season for passing around germs here in Barcelona. I wasn’t sick for a year, and then as if on cue, I caught a cold. Well it started as a cold, but then morphed into strange and irritating forms. As soon as I would start to feel better, I got hit with some variation of the thing. It probablydidn’t help that I have a 30/40 minute freezing scooter ride to and from work every day, and no matter how many clothes I piled on, I was still an icicle when I got to work/home. And that it poured rain on me for around three of those early days. Also that half my office was suddenly sick as well.

The first variation of said cold was fever related body aches and some kind of viral(?) related back pain that shot daggers through me when I turned or stepped a certain way. Then just as that subsided, I got a nasty and painful mouth blister near my tonsils and some kind of pulmonary infection that had me coughing up vivid green balls of phlegm. The other week I worked out something that made me think of the start of that Stephen King novel, where all but a handful of people die of an airborne disease to set the stage for the story. The beginning has descriptions of the illness developing in people and I guess it made their mucous membranes work overtime, and well, if you read it, you know the disgustingness of which I am talking about. If not, it’s probably for the best.

Iit seems like when I get sick here it just hangs on forever. I know that a densely populated area and using public transport (including public bicycles) means one is touching other people’s germs all day long.  A few people recommended I visit the doctor when I got my mystery spinal pain, but I resisted. I am lucky to have had only one hospital visit in my three plus years here, which was only to get an x-ray to confirm a broken collarbone, which was an emergency room visit like any other, with people waiting around forever to be seen. But when it came time for treatment, I stood in a hallway for probably two hours with 15 other people waiting for an x-ray. That gave me a lot of time to inspect said walls in that hallway, and they were not particularly clean, nor was the treatment room. Which made me glad I had no open wounds.

This is not the first time I have lived in a country with socialized medicine, but I would rather pay for health insurance any day. The saying that  you get what you pay for is true as far as healthcare is concerned here. It isn’t much of a mystery either as to why I see so many people with only half their teeth in their head. The thinking is, hey, if you can still chew, then any fix would be considered cosmetic and anyway, we don’t care if you look like a Jack-o-lantern. Maybe you should have brushed your teeth more regularly. (which, to their credit, the Spanish people do very vigilantly. Every bathroom in my office is full of personal toothbrushes.)  And the kicker is that it isn’t really “free” healthcare. The money for this system comes out of every working person’s already incredibly small paycheck, and yet plenty of freeloaders enjoy leeching off the social security system while legally living in uninhabited buildings. On the plus side, over the counter medications and even prescriptions are incredibly cheap.

But I am getting sidetracked. You want to know how I finally got well, don’t you? Well I will tell you anyway. Hand cleaner, no touching any part of boyfriend for a week, a week off of work (not for my illness, it was basically a week long holiday here) and a kickass round of antibiotics –that cost me less than 2 euros over the counter. It is finally gone, nasty mouth blister and all. Tomorrow however, I go back to that sick bed of an office.

I am hopeful that I can stave off any new developments before I head to the US on Friday.  I will employ what the Germans call “preventative medicine” – that is, a shot of booze with the morning coffee. Here, though, they just call it breakfast.

Note: I know my last post was kind of boring, but I had that thing waiting as a draft since summer and I got tired of looking at it sitting there all forlorn and like it wanted to get out and mingle, so I had to set it free. This one probably wasn’t much better. I apologize.

Circuito de Montjuic

Here in Barcelona is a former street circuit around a mountain that butts up against the sea, called Montjuic. The Montjuic circuit held sprint motorcycle races starting in 1933 and then 24 hour moto races from 1955 to 1986. There were a few F1 races too: in 1969, 71, 73 and 75, and although it is considered one of the best Formula One circuits of all time, further F1 races were cancelled after a spectacular crash in 1975 killed 5 spectators and injured many more. (You can easily find footage of the wreck on youtube if you are curious.)

I’ve known about the motorcycle races on the mountain for years, in fact I know more than one person who participated in them in the 70s and have a coffee table book about them, but a few months ago while mountain biking, I came across this 3D plaque I never knew existed:

Next to the plaque is a list of every winner of every race:

And the Formula 1 winners:

Here is the circuit superimposed on a satellite image. It’s a fast, counter clockwise, 2.35 mile circuit that circumnavigates the small mountain, with elevation changes though none of them are extreme:

I have been on most of the circuit, as it is just comprised of city streets, but never in a complete loop. I think I am going to take my scooter and make some laps and pretend I am in a 24 hour race. Since there was, and still isn’t, any nighttime lighting on the mountain, for the night time segment in my imaginary race, I’ll just close my eyes.

 

Farewell #58…

We watched on the live feed as it happened, we saw all the angles, rewatched and gasped when we realized the gravity of what had just happened, and kept working, keeping our eyes glued to the screens everywhere, watching the feeds, the crawl, twitter, email. We heard some false positive news from twitter, ere was a reschedule, and we prepared for a race restart.

The next thing we knew it was canceled, and watched as the big boss went around to each team, one by one. We saw the nodding grave faces, bowed heads and clenched jaws – it became apparent that the worst imaginable was likely. And minutes later we had to clinically announce it to the world, in so many words:

Farewell #58…

No reflection, just get the words out right- but it was hitting pretty close to home for me. I made a few trips to the bathroom and pulled myself together and kept working.

11 hours after I arrived at work, I climbed aboard my scooter and cried all the way home, slowing when tears blurred my vision so much I could no longer see.

In this sport, most of us have experienced the loss of someone close at some point. But familiarity might just make it that much harder to accept. When I say my heart goes out to the family, friends, collegues and even 58′s rivals, it’s not a platitude. There just isn’t any other way to put into words how sorry I am for the shock and sadness those close to him now face and will continue to experience for a long time coming…

I went home and looked at photography of abandoned swimming pools. They resonated a hollow sadness and an absence of a thing once grand. Then I looked up and out my window, and in the fading evening, saw a rainbow appear in the sky.

Silence at last. And amor.

Oh goodness, it has been over a month since I’ve posted anything. But I swear I have a good reason, I really do!

You see, besides being extremely busy with work, including some very strange and loooong hours, I finally moved! It felt like nearly a lifetime of waiting considering the relentless noise I had to deal with the past few months at my old place, that, coupled with how akin to WC Fields I have become with regard to children (and boy are they particularly loud here) made the summer hellacious in the pursuit of quiet. You never realize how much you need it until you don’t have it.

The new place is quiet, with plenty of light and views and no buildings facing either of my TWO giant balconies! So while my double set of sliding glass doors are on display to the world, I have more privacy than ever. In fact, if the closest building, which is taller than mine, ever entices one of it’s residents out onto their tiny balconies, and if I see they might be looking this way (they are far enough it is hard to tell) I catch myself thinking “hey, mind your own business, this is my space and I’ll paint these chairs in my bathrobe and towel-turbaned head while singing Journey if I want to!” and I go inside in a huff. Quite the turnaround from could-not-care-less snacking naked in my kitchen while the gay couple pretended not to notice from before.

So when I am not working I am doing all of the many things one must do when moving into a (rare) brand new building here. I had to buy an entire household of furniture, which, as fun as that sounds, is quite an ordeal. If I never see the inside of another IKEA, it will be too soon. Ikea here is like Walmart in the US, full of out of control shrieking children and throngs of people shuffling around, albeit through much narrower isles and non regard for personal space – you just shove through grandma and her clan strolling 7 wide through the 4 foot wide aisle, go ahead! They don’t care. They don’t say sorry when they elbow you in the ribs getting by as you are pinned against the LJUSÅS YSBY lamps and NYVOLL dressing tables and you don’t have to either.

I also have been busy setting  up gas, electricity and water, getting the water heater lit, let’s not forget decorating the flat which I have done very tastefully (including a very zen fountain to go with the new silence. My clothes are still in piles on the floor, but I have a little fountain, damnit.) and finally, the challenging task of establishing a connection to that thing they call the internet, which, by the way, I still don not have – I am tethered to my iphone to connect. This is because Internet companies are fucking ridiculously incompetent. I’ve been waiting a month for the installation people just to call to set up an installation, which of course doesn’t mean they will get it right or even do it the first time. So on that front, yay Spain.

The neighborhood has welcomed me with lots of love, manifesting in graffiti of the same theme, which I share with you here.

Old factory wall that remains in the empty lot beside my building, soon to become a park. The wall is staying.

North side of the building next to me, will be one entrance to the park.

Same artist, a few blocks away

Letter slot on a storefront after hours.

This tag was up so high I couldn’t get a good photo of it. It’s much cooler in person.

I’ll post more Love as I find it around the ‘hood!