Day 10 - Barça Museum

I know almost nothing about soccer (hereinafter referred to as “fútbol”), and almost nothing is slightly more than how much I knew about it this morning before our class took a field trip to the Barça Museum, which pays homage to the Barcelona fútbol team. 

Fútbol is almost like a religion here, with the added bonus that it has a much more wholesome backstory than does the actual religion, Spanish Catholicism. And going to the Barça Museum immersive experience is more fun than going to church.

We all met at the school and were about to leave when someone realized that no one had remembered to buy metro tickets, which meant someone had to walk to the nearest metro stop and buy a ticket for everyone. With 20 minutes to kill I jumped into action and did a review of fútbol-related vocabulary, undeterred by the fact that I don’t really know any fútbol-related vocabulary, in English let alone Spanish. But I came up with a few words and for each one I drew a picture. By the time the class figured out 3 or 4 of the words, spelled them and used them in a sentence, the tickets appeared and we left.

This is about half of our class. Almost everyone is from Algeria.

I run 6km almost every day, along this route because it minimizes the number of cars I have to dodge. The first time I did it, I was sleep deprived, cold and wet, but as I got going I felt terrific, breezing past people right and left, feeling like I could run forever. But once I turned around to come back, I felt like an old man, running slower, breathing harder. 

When I looked at the recording of my run, the elevation view showed that my neighborhood is slightly higher than the rest of the city, so all the way out is downhill and all the way back is uphill, possibly the only thing I hadn’t accounted for when I rented this place. 

Day 7 - Dia Internacional de la Mujer

Much of the city shut down today to accommodate marches and demonstrations in support of International Women’s Day. “International” in the sense that it’s a huge deal in almost every country, but not in the U.S. because in our country women already have all the rights they could possibly want.

In a time-honored tradition of liberal politics worldwide, the two main women’s rights organizations in Barcelona couldn’t agree on a common platform so there were two large marches, each starting and ending in different places, and concluding with fiery speeches by women’s advocates promoting slightly different messages. Lucky for me, the more inclusive group started its march much closer to my apartment. Along the way there were signs, songs and speakers advocating not only for women’s rights, but also for Palestine,  affordable housing and trans rights, and against racism, colonialism, capitalism and war in general. I guess they figured since we were all there anyway, why not cover all the main topics.

But almost as important as racism, sexism and war, the sun reappeared for the first time in almost a week. The difference in terms of how the city feels is, both literally and figuratively, like night and day.

Here’s what happened yesterday on my street. One observation is that this person will probably never park their motorbike illegally again. Another is that this same thing happens right here every single afternoon, so why people keep parking here during rush hour is kind of a mystery.