There and back again

Book title, album title, song title, cafe name, satellite launch mission(!) title, blog title - lots of adventures and ventures sharing the same, lovely name.

 

For me, February brought me to SLC and back to Sitges again, to Barcelona and back to Sitges again, and to Vilanova and back to Sitges again. So many kilometers stuffed inside a short, little month.

 

Started the month with a week spent in SLC for an all-hands company meeting.

 

Highlight: finally meeting in-person every member of my team. Terrific individuals online and even more wonderful in real life.

 

Low-light: ordering delivery from my favorite pizza and wings place and the food never arriving because their system was down. Next trip! 

 

Spent the week getting up, getting ready, going to an office, working and interacting, coming back to the hotel and repeating. Not terribly original to say at this point but it's still the truth that it's hard to come to grips with the idea that as tiring and unusual as it felt, this was normalcy for the overwhelming majority of my working life. Making the adjustment in real-time to a remote work culture was all encompassing and then it was just - normal - and living a vivid reminder of what used to be normal reinforced how adaptable we can be, how much we might forget (good and bad), how remembering can be good, and what feels right, wrong, normal, hard, unusual, etc. now might have been unimaginable in the past and very possibly might evolve or not be that way in the future. All we have is now.

 

Lost a weekend to lost luggage and jet lag on the return trip, both more an annoyance than a problem. The luggage arrived on the last flight that same day from Paris, and we were reunited after a very long wait in the Barcelona baggage claim area. I was delayed a couple of hours at CdG which gave me extra time to find a baguette sandwich and a pastry which I enjoyed tremendously.

 

The week after I returned, I had to go to Barcelona for a doctor's appointment. The lead to the story being I had to purchase private insurance as part of my visa application and now I am using it. I booked the appointment with the necessary specialist via an app in English, I selected one who spoke English, and upon arriving at the clinic I checked in on-line and received on-line directions to the examination room and went and waited without bothering anyone. Private indeed. 

 

I also remembered once again that Barcelona is only 40 minutes away and I should go more often, and every time I go, I seem to walk by a different cafe or restaurant that looks like it could be the coolest cafe or restaurant I've been to yet. And the novelty will never wear off that one of Gaudi's iconic houses is the landmark for where to catch my return train. But it must be the right one because I went to the other one this time and there wasn't an option for a regional train headed south anywhere to be found.

So then this week roughly forty-five days have passed since I applied for my foreigner's ID card (TIE) and my lawyer let me know my "lote" had come up and she had secured an appointment for me to go back again and pick it up. Back on the train, six minutes south to Vilanova, fifteen minute walk to the station, five minute wait, two fingerprints, and now I have a Spanish ID card. I can stay. At least until October. Good enough for now. All we have is now.

The things you'll see

Word from los estados unidos (EE.UU) is that it's officially the biggest snow season in 20 years. I haven't skied in the past three seasons so I can't claim to be missing anything, but it feels like I'm missing something.

Not so much a writer's block as a writer's blasé. I've been reading and reading and reading. The five book Jackson Brodie series "Case Histories" by Kate Atkinson was outstanding. All fiction. "Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on." I wish some of the novels I've read recently went on and on and on.

Christmas came and went. Then New Year's. Then Three Kings/Epiphany. And then the holidays were over and the rush, noise and thrum of everything restarting and starting back up again cranked in and in about ten days I'll be on a plane back to Utah for a week for work and then February is half over and that's basically the year done. Christmas is overshadowed by Epiphany and so it was quiet. I had Christmas lunch by the sea in the sun and a yule log for dessert. All of it? Perhaps. There was a delightful dinner at friends of friends for New Years featuring pad thai and cava. A loud parade and Three Kings cake for the last of the three.

Went to Barcelona between New Year's and Three Kings Day and the Epiphany is the bigger of those big three and the street lights were beautiful, and the city was bursting and all of us were walking and shopping and drinking and talking and my oh my there were a lot of us all trying to find our place in the same shared space. We had lunch at a British feeling pub serving breakfast. I went in one sportswear store and the ninth floor was a lovely, empty cafe with views of the city and the eight floors below were shoes, shirts, pants, shoes, bikes, shoes, shirts, hats, people, people, people. Upupupupupupdowndowndowndown on escalators. Ineedsomeairnow! And a coffee.

I got my first haircut last month from a Polish man named Emil. He works out of his flat which is next door to a very nice brewery. I tried a couple of the brewery's beers at a beer and cheese festival. I enjoyed their West Coast IPA which they were rightly proud of until they heard I was from the west coast and then they turned a bit shy. But no need. It's great. At a festival or at a bar. We share the same Spanish teacher. Emil and I, not the brewery and me. But I don't think my Spanish teach and I share them same barber. I need another haircut, but I haven't heard back from Emil. 

One Sunday back in December I went for a walk and strolled by the Bad Burro. It's a bar. The Bad Burro Bar = a bad ass bar. Tada! When I walked past I noticed the bartender drinking a pint and that's just the kind of bar I like so in I went. The bar is smaller than my living room and owned by a group of friends, all from England. As I drank my first, just me and the bartender, the place started filling up with a continent's worth of relocated folks who all seemed to know each other and definitely didn't know me. Italy. Scotland. England. Portugal. Spain. Ireland. Brazil. All represented. All there for Sunday Roast and somehow I was judged an acceptable sort and assumed to be staying to eat. We were more than a dozen for dinner, it arrived a couple hours late, served one plate at a time from a kitchen at a secret location, but we had empty stomachs, a bar, stories and grudges to tied us over. Dinner was delicious and allegedly they were all friends but the closer we got to dinner and the further we got from kicking off with pre-dinner drinks the more past grievances were aired. Terrific times.

I've begun Spanish lessons. There are two different "to be" verbs. My long dormant Italian is ascendant. Italian is not Spanish. The overlap helps a bit with memorizing and patterns but not at all with pronunciation or like speaking actual Spanish. I meet with my teacher Monday mornings in person at her apartment along with another student, a retired American. And then we meet one on one for an hour over zoom on Wednesdays. On Mondays I go early to a cafe, have breakfast and do my homework and studying last minute. Just like real school. On Wednesdays I spend an hour immersed in another language and immediately after it ends I start work. I'm so confused. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to be good at this.

I found a food delivery app. I work nights. I can't go out for dinner during the week. But dinner can go out for me. It's great. There's a minimal delivery fee and I tip the delivery guy. It's always a guy. That's it. No service fees. No convenience fees. And the food is always delivered a couple minutes ahead of the expected time. I love it. I'm going to order Thai food tonight.

I found molten chocolate cakes at the supermarket. Two of them for two euros. Ten minutes in the oven. Melty and molten. That's neat. I eat them with gelato. That's helado in Spanish.

I'm going to Utah for work in early February. Technically, that's my first trip but I'm not counting it. So, I booked my first trip. To explore. To be a tourist. End of March. Malaga. Costa del Sol. Andalusia. Andalusia is reputed to be Spain's hidden gem. Less crowded. Better food. Less expensive. Says who? What do I know though? I thought it was an island. I wonder if I'll be able to Africa if I squint?