La vida Loca

How would you say it 'vivir la vida loca' or 'la dolce vida'. Or does madness make every thing taste sweet. I suppose it takes a certain amout of madness to always look on the bright side. So let me tell you a bit about how sunny things are and then not consider the rest.

The journey ended at the airport in Athens, a modern airport for a modern Olympic city. At 3am the play ground of the modern hippy, where seeing world on the charity of others is still possible. My backpack and front pack where not out of place after the witching hour. Rather I was short a roll up mattress, and could not seem to find anyplace to hang my hammock, those poles used to keep people in queues just did not seem strong enough. So instead of joining the majority (as someone once said when you think like the majority start to wonder), i wondered the halls of the airport and found a bookshop to buy something to read, something scientific and technical for 3am.

The flight was rather uneventful, did not sleep, does one ever the night before you landing in a foreign city where you do not speak the language, know what the day ahead holds for you? The landing was uneventful, the airport was a modern airport for a modern Olympic city. Luggage loaded, only about 30kgs. and off like a well balanced porter to the train station. Off to Sans, sans what I wonder. Sans metro from the airport. A quick change at Sans and I was in the epithelium veins of the city, of to an address I found less than a week ago, and knew only in hypertext.
With luck I got lost, and took me a while to find this place in real life. Ring the bell, humm which floor was it again, actually I don´t think I even know the floor, let alone the apartment. Ah someone in coming, "Hola, perdona do you know D__".
"Yes, that me."
To have traveled a thousand kilometers, and walk into your flatmate at 9and a bit am. as he was leaving has the probability of 20 to 1, none the less a good sign. To have him tell you you are on the forth floor is not. To discover after counting down your four flights of stairs that you cant dump your bags and crash into a bed is not. To discover you can't do this after walking up the 5th flight makes you question if you are so tired you are going loca. After getting there on the 6th you are informed that the old buildings in Spain have the "Priniple floor" or what I would call the ground floor, above the ground floor, and then they start counting!
Alas a bed! actually a triple mattress spring bed. After losing some mattress I passed out. My first day in Barcelona City of Art, Culture, beaches, design, style!
Well I have made the point of not visiting anything until I have a tourist to visit it with. I don´t see the reason to see the same places over and over again, so just so you know when you visit, it will be as new and wonderful to me as it is to you.

Sometime between now and then, some sort of chronological order. Mr D took me on a stroll around the town, the town of Barcelona, not the city, the town. The heart of where people live. This is where the culture and the tourist go, where all the immigrants from the east and west stay, where the artist meet the anarchist, where skate boarding takes over the squares of the museums where drug addicts sit on street corners and artist flourish where style is created. This is where the nouveau rich want to live. This is where they destroy buildings of character and quaint style to root out a cancer that is the life, to fill it with pills of plastic and chemicals. A chemotherapy that will I believe one day make the area as decrepit and acrid to creativity as to living. For at the moment the streets are alive with people who flock from the city and around the world, to meet. To listen to the man playing his trumpet on the street corner at 1am, which draws you from blocks away, with no fear of disturbing the peace.

This is not my neighborhood, but the hood that I neighbor. 30 second walk to cobbled stones and scented air of incense and hashish. To good food and good jazz. I will be sorry to leave it one day which may be to soon.

To date my greatest regret is that I have not taken 100 paces in the other direction. Because there lies the place that stimulates the sensors. The market. I make this vow that I shall from now by all fresh produce from their hallowed ground. But granted I have not bought much fresh produce yet, and have got no idea what I am asking for I will forgive myself, at least in the suppermarket they have a picture of the animal on the cover, but thats no excuse.

Remind me to tell you about the stroll along the beach, the first trip inland, my other flatmate who watches a movies once a week (-: we just watched "4 minutes") and why when you lose contact with friends, you only meet them again when they are pregnant. 2am time to make dinner...