And on

We spent a day in Salamanca with Maria Jose on our way out of La Alberca. She was amazing. Andrea met up with us in a hot pink number and three inch heels. She had forgotten all her English within two hours of leaving the exchange program.

Salamanca is beautiful. The buildings are all golden coloured thanks to a local stone that has been used for centuries in the construction of the city center. New projects in the city center must use the same stone. We walked around, admired the astronaut carved into the cathedral and had a great seafood meal at the Pulperia de Paco across from the train station that evening. The next day MJ took us to the bus station and we were off to Sevilla in the south.

Six hours and 400km later we reached Seville where legend has it that the city was created by Hercules. This is also home to Christopher Columbus´tomb. The monument is quite grand immediately inside the cathedral doors. The Santa Cruz neighbourhood with its windy streets was home to our hostel.

Seville is also home to some of the most famous bullfighters. We went to see the museum and then a bullfight one evening. The show was quite varied. It is a cruel sport and for some reason the fact that six bulls die during one evening escapes your mind when you buy a ticket. I think the woman sitting in front of me had no idea what she was getting herself into. She started crying and made her husband leave. There's quite a bit of ceremony that accompanies this event. People wait outside for the matadors to enter and then take their seats in the arena. There was lots of blood and not all of it spouting from the animals. It used to be that the horses involved in the event would get disembowled by the bull. In 1930 they started putting protective armour on the horses making it less gory.

Each matador fights two bulls. The fight begins with the matador on his knees in front of the bull gate. He shakes his muelta and the bull charges him. He then gets up and turns following the bull into the centre of the oval ring. One of the torreros (matador) danced with his bull and killed it without much bloodshed. For his skill he received an ear and the crowd got out their white hankerchiefs for their standing ovation. Hats were thrown into the arena which he picked up one by one and threw back into the stands amongst cries of "Ole". Excellent bullfighters receive either one ear, two ears or two ears and a tail (the top price). Their poses resemble those of ballerinas at times. Their shoulders are usually thrown back and their torsos stick out in a sharp curve. The look on their faces is of absolute intensity.

Among the objectives of the fight is to get very, very close to the bull. Having their blood wipe off on the torrero's clothing shows the crowd how close they get. However, the bull can't be danced around the muelta (the cloth held by the matador) too long because they soon figure out that their actual target is the guy holding it and not the cloth itself. The guy following the standing ovation wasn't so lucky. He got shanked and not just once but twice. He bounced off the horns the second time and the bull managed to turn him and tear through his arm. He was pissed and pushed his teammates off him. He finished his fight bleeding.

I like to dancing

The week in La Alberca on the exchange program went by quite quickly and, strangely, also felt like an eternity. We spoke in English, ate ham, drank wine, danced, played, went on excursions and napped. The group of Anglos consisted mainly of retired people but they weren´t all without their particular brand of charm. There was the alcoholic newscaster from the Maritimes, an old lady with a tatoo who turned out to be a little dim upstairs, the woman who lived in Bahrain for 25 years and never learned Arabic, the man with a prostetic arm, the lady traveling with her mother who was not only a monologuer but also a chain smoker who, every once in a while, would start a hacking, phlegmy cough without covering her mouth. I really thought I was going to get a slimy substance propelled at me from her side of the table a few times. Sadly, there was also a woman dying of cancer. This I didn´t learn until after the program ended from Maria Jose, one of the Spaniards. On the non-retired end of things we met Michelle, a wacky Australian, who in a past life had worked on some ´dicey´movies and also done a few episodes of Neighbours, Liam who was as proud a Scotsman as any and Doug.

Everyday someone would come up to me and speak rather slowly. It always took me a moment to catch on that they thought I was Spanish. At the end of the program an exceptionally old woman came up to me and told me she didn´t get a chance to speak to me. I told her I wasn´t Spanish and she just kept speaking slowly to me, so I repeated myself and then she just stopped talking mid-sentence when she realized what I had just said. Cathy was on the market for a Spanish stud and said ¨I haven´t done him yet¨ pointing at a rather young man and then to me ¨and you, of course.¨




The schedule for the week was busy. Days started at 8:15 with a wake up call and then 9 with breakfast. Attendance at mealtimes was mandatory. We went straight into one-on-one conversations at 10 through 1pm and then had a group meeting until 2pm. Lunch started at 2 and we were given free time until 5pm. More activities followed in the afternoon until dinner at 9pm. After the first day most Spaniards were wiped out. They had to speak in English the entire day without stopping.

The program coorinators Jez, Erika and Sabela had it pretty hard. Their days ended after we went to bed and began before ours. Peter, the Dutch bartender, was happy to have a week off partying. Apparently the other groups for this program are party animals. Usually the median age of the English speakers isn´t 70 as it was this time around.

My first one-on-one was with one of three Rafael´s. I don´t remember if it was Rafa H or Rafa B or Rafa S. Rachel nicknamed him Movie-star Raf. We chatted for a bit about his bike trip in the States and he proudly showed a picture of his kids and his bike. The hour went by quite quickly and then it was on to Carlos, a rather unusual Spanish engineer. He seemed a bit grumpy and sarcastic. He hinted that his wife was a mama´s girl. He told me he hated Madrid, a city he had lived in for the last ten years. Upon arrival at the venue he had threatened to leave immediately when he saw the group of elderly Anglos I was told. Over the course of the week it became quite evident that the man was completely unhappy in his marriage. Any jab he could take at his wife he would. We´d say something like ¨Do you think Spanish women are beautiful?¨ He´d answer ¨All Spanish women are beautiful except for my wife.¨ One evening at the bar he just blurted out ¨All Spanish men have 2 women. They have a wife and they have a girlfriend. I do.¨Rafa, the man that made me touch his golfclubs in the parking lot, disagreed. Most of the other Spanish men I asked also didn´t agree with Carlos....

Isabel was a rather, uhm, butch lady. Her hobby was collecting American army vehicles. She fixed them up with her son, the only good thing to come of her marriage. She hates her son´s girlfriend of five years intensely. She hasn´t seen her ex-husband in 10 years but is still married to him. She said she refuses to get divorced because she wants to make sure that she never gets married again. After all, you can´t marry if you are already married. She also hates Muslims. All of them. In one of the exercises we had to choose people to come on our ark. Among the list was a man named Abdul Bedouin, a medical doctor. She just flat out refused to get on an ark with a Muslim man even if he was the only medical doctor on the list. That was charming. She was funny though in her own flannel shirt, straightforward no bullshit way.


I soon figured out that most Spaniards don´t look kindly upon Muslims (or Moroccans) and Gypsies. It seems to be sort of universal for the Spanish people of this program to dislike these two groups. I thought Isabel was strange but I guess she was just less PC about the whole thing.

On the second day of the program word got out that Chris was nearly impossible to understand. We had a few accents in the group. Even the accents that I thought were understandable, like the Boston accent, threw some of the Spaniards for a loop. Chris asked Javier about some photos and after repeating himself three times Javier just turned to me and asked me to translate. Javier had a few stories from his university days. He was a political prisoner who fought against the Franco regime. His wife was a diplomat who had also been jailed several times in her early twenties.


The cutest of them all was Andrea, 22 years old, tall, beautiful and completely lost in the English language. Andrea has a job interview in June. In English. She couldn´t even keep a story about Harold´s Chicken straight. Doug explained to her that there was 2 inches of bullet proof glass between you and the person behind the counter from whom you ordered your chicken. Andrea looked at Maria Jose completely confused. He explained again. Then I tried. Maria Jose was in tears laughing. In the end we let Andrea believe that in the States you go to Harold´s, choose a chicken and the lady behind the counter then shoots it with a semi-automatic before deep frying it for you. I wish her luck on the interview.

We danced...

...then I fell and I think I broke something in my posterior. The dance cave of choice was Jamboree in Placa Reial on a Monday night. It definitely wasn´t hopping but that clearly didn´t stop me from attempting something that required more balancing than I was able to do.

The Spanish hipsters have not yet moved on to a new hairdo from the mullet. They have tried to combine it with a mohawk and a Bart Simpson style spiked haircut right on the crown of their skulls. No dreadlock combination sighting yet. It is mucho horrifico to encounter these hipsters. They do have more style than the Parisians though. Surprisingly so. Although in Paris some of the young dudes looked like Bob Dylan in the 70s stylewise.

It is also quite a surprise to see so much smoking here and not in Paris (where as of January you can no longer light up indoors). Smoking does make the population here look more macho and diva like (depending on who´s sucking on the stick).

Barcelona was cool. Where else do you see a church that has been under construction for the last few decades while a mother yells at her 8 year old daughter that she is an absolute bitch and wants to kill her because she spilled the McDonald´s fries she just bought her for lunch and then storms off to leave her daughter and husband? I tell you where: across the street from Sagrada Familia on the McDonald´s patio. Also, I don´t know that Gaudi would much approve of the cash grab the Spaniards enforce at the church and the apartment buildings he built. The man got hit by a tram and taken to a poor man´s hospital because he was dressed in rags in 1926. Once the recognized who he was they offered to take him to a much better hospital. He refused and died at the hospital 3 days later at 74. They then buried his body at the Sagrada Familia.

We arrived in Madrid to be whisked away to an English exchange tomorrow. Most of the other Anglos on the program are retired people. One of them speaks "American" and not English. He said it twice just for emphasis. Another told him he was sorry for him. I thought I was going to see a seniors fist fight for sure but no such luck today. We were then informed that we are not to speak about the Spanish civil war with more than one Spaniard in the room as it can create a HUGE problem. We are also not to talk American politics with more than one Spaniard in the room for the same reason.

And that segways nicely into a joke Chris told me earlier today: A man goes into the washroom. He´s an American when he goes in and an American when he comes out. What is he while he´s in the bathroom? ... European.

Get it? Ur-o-pee-an.

Aside from hanging out with some seniors for lunch we went to see the Plaza Mayor where we watched some great flamenco performers. First it was musicians only and then two girls in sweats joined them to demonstrate how one would dance to such passionate singing. They soon had a very appreciative contingent of middle aged Asian males park themselves at one of the patio tables across from the musicians. I really thought that the one girl could have attempted to at least wear a clean sweat suit if she was going to show off her moves and the other one I thought was going to loose her pants right then and there which I´m sure would have distracted the guitar player a little. Again no such luck. At least the Guernica painting by Picasso at the Reina Sofia National Museum was great and lived up to my expectations. Earlier though we saw an Egyptian temple that was much smaller than I anticipated. Templo de Debod was given to Spain by Egypt for its role in saving another temple in Nubia in the 60s. The Egyptians were so grateful for their help they took this smaller temple apart, boxed it and sent it without instructions on how to put the thing back together. It took the Spanish 2 years.

I´m trying to keep warm by breathing hard. Time to go back to sleep. Pictures here.

One day...

we walked so much Chris got tired and hopped on a bike right on London Bridge.

Barcelona continued

There´s something awefully charming about a place with no smoking signs on all the doors and yet, the first thing you see when you enter is a 70 year old man smoking a smelly cigarette behind the reception desk. Hostel Avinyo is in the gothic quarter of Barcelona. I never thought my broken French would get me so far in Spain but it has been a lifesaver especially after Chris´ little escapade to find accommodations the first night.

Barcelona is like an unassuming high class hooker with a heart of gold. She´ll charge you through the nose for everything Gaudi but then come back at you with a lot of little surprises you didn´t expect to find in the back streets. The city boasts Europe´s largest intact mideaval centre. Add the hundreds of little backstreets further north of Stag haven Rambla and you have yourself a party like no other. I must say that the Gaudi buildings have been a bit of a downer. The apartment building costs 16 euros to enter and the church, Familia Segada, is filled with scaffolding and charges you 8 euros still. The Park Guell was great had it not been for the hundreds of teenage school kids. Everyone was ruining my perfect shot of Gaudi architecture!

I also taught Chris the three words that I need to hear from time to time while we are in a relationship. Although simple they help to strenghten the understanding between us. These words were especially necessary after our fist night here: ¨You are right.¨ It also works in the past tense. He laughed long and hard and didn´t think I was serious at first.

After many hours of walking we found ourselves a perfect park bench yesterday. It turned out to be one of our best meals: a baguette, salami and beer. Who knew you could have so much fun with your back to the Mediterranean, watching the sidewalk of people and the patrons at the grocery store.

The city has grown on us each day we´ve been here. I think Chris likes it more than Paris.

Tonight we go dancing.

Pictures to follow.

Barcelona

Here I am at the Hostel Avinyo. I have a lovely little room with a single bed and a wash basin all to myself. Chris booked it a week ago over the internet for the two of us. He´ll be sleeping in a dormroom at another establishment for the night. Yup, we´re booked into two different hostels.

After the drive through dacqueries and the drive through cigarettes and the drive through banking we found ourselves in London where it was damp and grey for the most part. One day we woke up and it snowed. I thought I had escaped the winter but apparently it found me across the water.

It was nice to hang out with Hilda who was sick for a few days when we were there and then to have that one day with Lulu.

Paris was belle in a ghetto way. It´s a lot like NYC that way. Covered in grafitti and litter. The subways were cramped and old but there is a charm to that. People were friendly and the sights were well, Parisienne. We stayed in Montmatre with Sarah´s friend Mariane for the entire time. She was kind enough to leave us her tiny but beautifully cozy apartment.

The first night in Barcelona was well, loud. People here really don´t go to sleep until the wee hours of the morning and the walls at the hostel are paper thin. It´s clean and it´s comfortable though.

The King is Dead

Memphis is a 7 hour drive north of New Orleans. The city itself isn't much to look at. It seems like a boring place to be but surprisingly enough, lots has happened here.

One day spent here and we managed to see Graceland, the Lorraine Motel where Dr Martin Luther King was shot and the Sun Studios.

Graceland was sort of a Disneyland for grown ups. The ride to the mansion is along a road of fast food joints and all sorts of motels named Elvis this or Heartbreak that. 27 bucks gets you on a tour bus across the street to the mansion with an audio guide dangling from your neck. It's hard not to feel like herded cattle for most of it as the entire thing is filled with tourist in one long queue walking through the various rooms. Elvis had some bad taste. I did like the 15 foot white couch in his living room but the rooshed fabric walls in the poolroom and the shag carpet on the ceiling of the jungle room where a bit much.

There was also that creepy monkey in the TV room with the mirrored ceiling. The house wasn't as big as I expected and I was absolutely shocked that they kept the upstairs closed off. In his lifetime the King never let anyone upstairs as those were his private quarters and for some reason Lisa Marie and the corporation that run Graceland kept it that way.

His shooting range and many platinum albums were impressive. Especially when you consider that he never toured outside North America in his life.

I knew this somewhere in the back of my mind but the King had a twin brother that died at birth. He also didn't name Graceland. It was named after the middle name of the first owner's wife (some wealthy couple).

We hopped in a car and headed for Sun Studios, by far my favorite of the sights. It is basically one small room with a drum set, 2 pianos and a bunch of guitars. The tour was great. Worth every penny of that 10 bucks. It's amazing to consider that so much great music came out of that tiny little room on Union Avenue. Plus, who woulda thunk that Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins all hung out together jamming....

Sam Philips, the man behind Sun Studios, made most of his fortune investing in a little hotel chain called the Holiday Inn after selling Sun Studios.

The Lorraine Motel in Memphis stands as a reminder of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement of the sixties.

The museum was interesting but the film they showed was...well, bad. Everyone was confused as to why Clinton appeared in it. The displays were really wordy and, although informative, eventually became tedious to read. There was a bus you could get on to read about Rosa Parks and the museum continued across the street from the building where the sniper shot Dr King. The man-hunt and accounts of the shooting from across the street were almost better laid out than the many displays in the motel section of the museum.

The tour guide at Sun Studios recommended a place called the Barbecue Shop on Madison Ave and Cooper. It was by far the best barbecue ever. The meat melted in your mouth and the place was filled with nothing but locals (it wasn't downtown but rather near a record shop we visited called Shangrila).

Beale street where you can get a five dollar spray on Elvis tattoo was next. The street, like Bourbon in New Orleans, was pedestrian traffic only with loud bars. We managed to find a place with a great blues band and an extensive harmonica collection. They played some great music in an old school bar atmosphere but by the third time the Dr Feelgood Potts played the "tip song" we had to leave. The night was just revving up for the guy in front of us. His wife took off on him and partied in the bar next to us and brought back an entourage. She also commanded him to pay 20 dollars for a CD by the band. My prediction is that this 60-something year old couple is definitely on the outs. At this point they're sticking around for the insurance money.

We left Memphis early the next day. 9am we drove through some heavy rains and by 5 we were looking for an Indian restaurant in Louisville. We got back to Toronto at 7am the following day.

New Orleans

The drive down to Missouri took forever. For the most part it went well. We had to drive around a section of the highway that was flooded by the Mississippi. The littel towns we headed through were quite beautiful. The weather went from Toronto winter to spring, to rain, to snow and finally, sun.

The day in Springfield was pretty much spent eating. We hit Lambert's, America's number one spot to pig out. They throw the bread rolls at you in this establishment. Those rolls were like butter. They slid down my throat and before I knew it I had eaten four. Later, Chris' sister let me know that each roll was 300 calories which explained why I felt sort of full by the time the main course arrived. The evening was spent at a habachi grill where our private food artist Louis was a little stiff with his food tricks. Aisha was afraid he was going to accidentally throw a knife at her during is chopping extravaganza at the grill at our table.

10 hours later the next day we arrived in Lafayette. Home to the football sensation known as Nasser. He took us to Prejeans (pronounced properly with a southern twank as Pray-johns). All the crawfish was deep fried, the hot sauce flowed and there were lots of square dancing elderly couples. We left with a bottle of hot sauce snuggly tugged away in Aisha's purse.

Nasser had the time of his life at the Walmart later that night. He nearly had a breakdown in the frozen food isle when he confessed that Aisha and I were "stressing" him out with the multitude of choices we were providing in terms of pillow options and tuna varieties.

Avery farm is home to Tobasco island. Not much happened there other than the discovery that Hasina really loved chipotle sauce (or chipo-totly as she likes to call it). The drive to New Orleans was beautiful. Much of the drive is on a bridge above the largest swamp basin in the world. I watched a vulture fly out of the trees and feast on some road kill along the way.

The French quarter seemed pretty much untouched by Hurricane Katrina. The quarter was back to its middle aged tourist splendor. I've never seen so many 40 year old couples in one place in my life. Decatur street was a favorite with us. We headed to Angeli for dinner the first night. The bars and restaurant at the edge of the quarter on these streets were among the most interesting.

We got used to Nasser being catcalled by men passing us quite quickly. "Hey big guy" "You been working out?" and "Raging Cajuns, wooh!" was the usual. He seemed used to it.

That first night we bored Nasser to tears with our choice of Fritzle's with its jazz music. Jazz was born in this city. The name comes from the perfumed jasmine oil the women used to wear around the musicians in New Orleans.

Bourbon, where we spent the majority of the next night, was...well, just like you expect it to be. Closed off to traffic with loud bars from beginning to end. Nasser didn't get Id'd at a single place and somehow we all had to pull out our driver's licenses once he entered the establishment in question ahead of us. A slap on the back by a 300 pound guy gets you in anywhere. A few hand grenades and beers on the street got Aisha & Hasina the courage to ask for beads. After the first string graced their necks they were hooked. The hookers on the balcony of the Barely Legal club kept showering Bourbon street patrons with beads. Half the crowd was standing with its camera pointing at the crowd of bead fans while the other half was photographing the jiggle fest on the balcony. The night ended with pizza at 13 on Frenchman street off Decatur.

The voodoo temple on the edge of the quarter drew us the next day. Priestess Miriam was working in the shop while her Canadian husband surfed the net in the back. We managed to get past the paraphernalia to the temple in the back with its many altars. It was one of the most colourful rooms I've encountered in a long time. Priestess Miriam was a funny lady. She took various strange phone calls and gave Chris a mojo bag that will protect him on his travels. The priestess pointed us toward the St Louis Cemetery after handing me a prayer for the road in 2008.

The cemeteries were a little disappointing. Not because there was a lack of tombs but because I didn't realize that so many people had died so recently and been buried there. Something had given me the impression that the cemeteries were filled with corpses from the 18-9th century and not 1967. Also, I thought these places were filled with sculptures? Lafayette Cemetery was located in the Garden district. One of the more beautiful places in New Orleans with huge homes featuring beautiful gardens and extensive wrought iron fences and balconies.

By far the most relaxing day came with our trip to Audubon park. Huge. Beautiful. I want to live there. We picked up some groceries consisting of rotisserie chicken and various other treats for our picnic. The sun was warm and the trees were stunning.


The last day was spent eating. Craw fish followed by espresso at Khave off Frenchman street followed by middle eastern on Magazine in the Garden district followed by bread pudding. Hmm.

Nasser got on the bus back to Lafayette.