Dig,

Christmas time has been very different for me this year. Christmas Eve I didnt have anything to do. My friends and roommates were all with their families, so I was left alone by myself at the piso. For most of the day I just sat around on the computer, but around late afternoon I decided I should go do something about my lack of place to stay in Madrid.
I called around a few places that my roommates gave me and then a few in the guidebook I bought, finally finding a cheap one in the center of the city. Hostal Cosmopilitan. The cost is 18euro a night for a single room and its literally in Puerto del Sol, where all the action is. I booked two days there, the 29th and 30th, but they were already sold out of rooms for the 31st. So, I still dont have anywhere to sleep New Years Eve. I didnt book anything after New Years because I figured if I can find another room for then easy enough and if I dont like the one Im in, it wont be a hassle to leave. We’ll see how smart this logic is soon enough.
Christmas Eve night I spent same as the morning, doing nothing, and talking with friends on the computer. Christmas day I woke early and waited outside of my piso for Juan and his family to pick me up and take me to his parents house for Christmas lunch. Spaniards don’t typically give gifts on Christmas day, that is reserved for the Three Kings Day (Los Reyes Magicos) on January 5th. Instead Catalans have a very strange tradition called the CagaTio.
Literally meaning (politely written) pooplog, the cagatio is a log that is dressed up to look like Santa Clause, with a face drawn on it and everything. Before christmas you are supposed to feed the log Turron (chocolate nougat) and place a blanket over its backside. On christmas day all the children gather around the log and take turns beating it with a stick while singing a song. It goes something like… Cagatio, tio de nadal, no cagas arangadas, que son saladas, caga turrons, que son mes bones… (pooplog pooplog, pooplog of christmas, dont poop dried sardines, they taste really bad, poop out turrons, which we like much better). After everyone has had turns beating the log, the blanket is removed from the backside of the cagatio and small presents are revealed. Its supposed to be magic for the little kids. Isnt that the wierdest tradition you have ever heard?!
On the ride to her grandparents house, Lily told me the day before she found out it wasnt magic because she sneaked into her aunt’s bedroom and saw the parents filling the cagatio blanket with presents. Ahhh, just like Santa, the mystery lost for another child. When we got there, I actually got to participate in the festivities by taking a turn beating the log. (See attached pictures). After the cagatio had excremented a nice book about Catalunya for me, we all sat down and had a great lunch of salmon and ham and chicken stuffed with dates. It was great. We spent a good deal of the day there watching movies on television, taking a walk around Badalona, until we finally left around 9pm.
At home, I was feeling a bit lonely again, so I spent a good 30 minutes walking around my neighborhood trying to find a working payphone to call Cindy. On my search I encountered an american girl Jamie from my program and her sister walking over to another person’s piso for dinner. They kindly invited me along and after I made a quick call to Cindy’s house, I hurried after them. I ended up having a great night. I was so lucky to have encountered her on the street.
The next day I was invited to Juan’s house for another Christmas lunch, this time with Mayte’s side of the family. Again, I was blown away by the food, and I had wonderful company. I spent the rest of the day there playing with the girls and watching Monsters Inc. After Juan dropped me off that night I invited all my friends over from the night before and watched L’Auberge Espagnole. I honestly have been blessed this christmas, from the random friends I encountered on the street to Juan’s family. I went from having nothing to do to having too much to do. I dont know what I would do if I didnt have Juan here. I would have gone crazy during this Christmas if it werent for him and his family. In fact, right now I am off to see El Senor de los Anillos (lord of the rings) with Juan.
If I tell you a secret will you promise not to tell anyone else? As of now Im kind of nervous about Madrid. I leave tomorrow. Its going to be quite an adventure, certainly my first all alone. I promise to take lots of pictures and have them ready for you on the website when I return. Maybe Ill even log into an internet cafe while Im there and tell you how its going. I hope everyone had a merry christmas.

dug,
Gabe

Dear Friends, Dear Family,

These past few days have been cold in Barcelona. Colder than death I tell you. Ive spent most of my time huddled in my room, staying close to my tiny space heater. All of you from Chicago or whatever can go ahead and make fun of me, because 8C (~40F) might not be cold to you, but it sure is to me. Don’t laugh to hard though because its Christmas Eve and I still have no plans. So, I decided to spend some time writing all of you a nice email describing the first part of this week.
After I wrote you all that long email on Sunday morning I realized how little I had to do now that all my friend’s were either gone or with their own families here. I moped around a bit, unable to sleep, finally deciding that I should take a run around the city with the new running shoes my parents had sent me. A little bit into the run I stopped by a pay phone and made a long overdue phone call to my friend David in Kentucky. It was really nice to chat with him again, but it made me a little sad when he told me he might have to return to Iraq next month. After the phone call I finished my run up to the top of Parc Guell north of the city. There i wandered around a bit and then sat and watched the sunset. It was beautiful.
The next day I was more constructive. I got up really early, by an accidental setting of an alarm clock, and went to work fixing up an internet router I had borrowed from a friend. After a couple hours of fiddling around with it I finally got it to work which I am super excited about. I now have internet on my long time communication deprived laptop. Daniel (roommate) invited me on a run around the city and we spent a good 2 hours running along the beach and exploring the new Forum area. Its a lot different from traditional Barcelona, much more like an american city. Daniel hates it. The weather was very warm and sunny in the morning and Daniel put it perfectly by saying, (children under 18 who understand spanish close your ears) “es un dia de puta madre”. Palabra tio, palabra.
After the run I decided to do a bit of shopping. I went to the heart of the city and walked up and down the Rambla. After buying some warm gloves from H&M and a Lonely Planet Spain guide book I became really cold and lonely all of a sudden and made a few phone calls, first to CIndy and then to everyone in my family. I went back home where Daniel told me some of his friends were coming over for dinner and I was invited to join them. It was really nice to hang out with a bunch of spaniards and spend an evening practicing spanish. Afterwards I did a little little bit of studying, copying some notes for Economia de la Empresa. I becoming petrified of my finals. Only one month.
Yesterday I slept peacefully until 11am or so. I woke up and made a trip down to Estacio del Nord at Arc de Triumph and finally bought my bus tickets to Madrid. The total cost was 41.35euro I think. I leave midnight on the 28th and return the night of January 2nd. Does anyone know anybody in Madrid I can stay with? Besides not having a place to stay yet, Im excited. Everyone who hears I am going thinks its going to be awesome to spend New Years in the Puerto del Sol (like NY Times Square). I went to lunch at the central University bar, which is by far the best and cheapest bar I have yet found, and then did a bit more walking around Placa Universitat. Came home and screwed around for a while until I decided to go buy some junk food. Hey, everybody needs some junk food once in a while. In the Mercadona across the street I came across Daniel and one of his friends choosing a bottle of wine for dinner. Once again I was invited to dinner. After the dinner of frozen pizzas and wine (awesome I tell you) and having in depth conversation in spanish about politics (whoa) we watched the latest James Bond movie. It sucked. Daniel’s friend hooked me up with a number to a Hostal he often stays at when in Madrid. I spent the rest of the night on my computer where I unnecessarily stayed until 5am. Well, maybe it wasnt too much of a waste of time. You might even be glad I deprived myself of sleep. I made you all a Christmas present! My website has now been updated with a whole new slew of pictures along with a few minor things. Go to the journal page and click gallery 2 >>>. That should keep you going for a while.
I woke up today after only 5 hours of sleep and here I am writing you an email. Today I need to call Hostals around Madrid to reserve a room for my stay. I hope I find a cheap one. Tomorrow I think I am having Christmas dinner with Juan and his family. I should call him too. Anyway, I hope all of you are having a Merry Christmas. Im still accepting presents, but if Santa’s sleigh has already departed, a phone call will work just the same. 0034605950715.

Feliz Navidad, Bon Nadal,
Gabe

Dear Sirs and Madames,

I regret to inform you… Whoa its been a long time since I wrote all of you. Im so sorry. First there was a problem with my website´s server and then there was a problem with laziness, but now its all sorted out and I have finally sat down to write you a rather long email to make up for it all. The following email is a good attempt to capture as detailed as possible the events of my past three weeks in Barcelona. Please forgive me for the lack of the normal witty humor, mistakes, and blankouts I had while trying to reconstruct it all. Its quite long, so I have taken the liberty of splitting it into two parts. Let´s begin, shall we?

SIDE A

I believe I left you off with the Spanksgiving dinner (Spanish/Thanksgiving; half spanish feast, half thanksgiving). It was awesome. There were actually decent sized turkey’s, some great mashed potatoes, corn, salad, and unlimited wine, all mixed together with some interesting spanish twists. First of all, there were sliced pears in the mashed potatoes, and why not I suppose. Then there was the substitute blueberry sauce instead of cranberry sauce which when we thought about it, was understandable. The word for blueberry (arandanos) is the same for cranberry in spanish and since cranberries don´t necessarily exist over here we all forgave them, but left the sauce alone. Lastly there was the frozen apple pie. Yeah it was frozen. A shame, but there was apple pie none the less. And the unlimited wine was a nice touch, but not too wise to serve for a group of 20 year old college kids away from home. I believe when we left our table had emptied 8 bottles of red wine and 2 cava, just about one for every person, and we didnt even hold the record. In addition to all the students from our group, the office had invited some of our professors from the ILP program we completed a few month ago. Our Literatura Hisp-Am professora bought us cigars. It was a very fun night. Yay for Thanksgiving in Spain!
Friday I went to see the movie Love Actually which was surprisingly actually good. Cindy and I tried out this mexican food place outside of the theatre that totally sucked. It was more like anti-mexican food than anything else. The next day I was invited to a little girl’s birthday party and because you cant arrive at a birthday party without a gift we then went shopping for a Barbie at the Corte Ingles toy store.
Saturday I woke up early and went over to Juan’s house for my second Spanksgiving dinner of the week. The day before, friday, was his daughter Lily’s 6th birthday, which apparently is a grand step in a little child’s life as Lily so clearly demonstrated by explaining that she now has to use two hands to count her age. For the joint thanksgiving and birthday party Juan had prepared a grand meal which
included some spanish staples of fish, potatoes, and olives, among other things. All the family came over to enjoy it and celebrate. Lily got a lot of Polly Pocket dolls, but her greatest gift, believe it or not, was a pirated VCD of Buscando a Nemo (Finding Nemo) which had yet to arrive in theatres here. Lily and Laura were surprised to hear I had already seen it twice in the states about 6 months ago. After dinner and before the wonderful desert we all gathered around the TV to watch. For desert Juan made a pumpkin pie from the ingredients my mom sent me a few weeks before. I dont normally like pumpkin pie, but on this occasion I loved it, as it symbolized an american tradition I was missing out on. That and its not really possible to dislike anything Juan makes. Since I was a bit tired from all the food I left a little early and caught the metro home. I had another church to check out the next morning.
My friend Danielle met me at 10am in front of cafe Zurich and we hurried off on the Ferrocarils to meet a friend at her church in northern Gracia. My friend Nicole had put me in contact with this girl Georgina right before I left the states and we communicated for some time emailing at first, then text messaging, and finally a few phone calls, but we had never really gotten around to meeting until this sunday morning. After a quick introduction in front of the church Georgina hurried off to teach sunday school and Danielle and I went inside to attend the service. Although it was in catalan and unusually formal for me this church was much better than the last one I had gone to. It was in a nice building, there were many more people my age, and it was all around just nice. Even though I understood very little of the message part of the service I still had fun singing Christmas carols in catalan and searching through the catalan bible. Next time I think I will use the headsets in the back which provide simultaneous castellano translation. Georgina was a double score for me, as I now had contact with one more spaniard and one who was able to set me up with a great church.
Forgive me, because I cant really remember anything that happened during the following school week except that I found out I got a B+ on my Lit Hisp-Am class and I had lunch with Georgina on wednesday. The lunch was super nice because I spent a good 3 solid hours talking in spanish and actually doing a decent job. Yay for me. It turns out Georgina spent about 6 months in Kentucky a few years ago living amoung the same people I am very good friends with. That blew my mind. Small world after all. Oh yeah, I also went to the christmas fair in front of the cathedral and checked out all the Caganers.
For those of you that don’t know (which is probably all of you) Catalunya has a very strange squatting figure set up in their typical Nativity scene. And for lack of a classier way to describe it, this guy is pooping in the middle of the scene, ussually behind the donkies. Im not even joking. No one really even knows why he is there anymore, its just been a tradition for a long time. Anyway, I went to the shops at the cathedral and checked them out. They really do exist, I have pictures.
On friday Cindy and I saw the Woody Allen movie Todo Lo Demas (which I think is Everything Else in english). I thought it was lame, Cindy liked it, whatever. Saturday (dec 6th) was a Spanish religious holiday, but since I couldn’t remember what for I just slept through it. That night a grand fiesta of mexican style burritos was fixed at Cindy´s place to celebrate her roommate Luisa´s birthday and her other Argentinian roommate Laura´s last day in Barcelona. For me the celebration was more for Laura than anything. She is such an awesome person who I would love to stay, but for starving artists reasons was moving back to live with her parents in Buenos Aires. She has a website (www.lauracodega.com) made by her boyfriend Gabo which you should all check out. I don’t know its been updated yet, but it also has some of my photos from La Merce on it in the miscelaneas/fotografia section. After the awesome mexican food, we all went out to this really awesome Jazz club in Placa Real. I don’t remember the name, but it is actually in a private flat that you have to ring the bell and be admitted in to. Way cool atmosphere, way expensive drinks. A couple of us left early because we were really early party poopers and headed for home. I really should have gone to church the next morning, but I went to Montjuic instead to do some sightseeing.
Montjuic is a small mountain on the coast of Barcelona that is home to a few meuseums, the Olympic Stadium, and a killer view of the city. Even though everything was closed because it was a sunday afternoon Cindy and I had great fun walking around and checking out the pretty buildings and views. This is once place I certainly recommend for anyone visiting Barcelona. At the base of Montjuic, near place espana there was a classic car show going on that I know my friend David would have loved. They had a ton of VW bugs and vans all in mint condition ready for display. Don’t worry Dave, I took pictures. I also saw some classic Italian sports cars which were pretty awesome. The following day was another relgious holiday, this one I think was either Mary´s assumption or the immaculate conception, but I don’t remember which so I will call it Mary´s consumption. Anyway, I bought tickets for the Strokes concert that was rolling through town and around 6pm Cindy and I left to find the show. The Strokes are humongous all over Europe except Spain I suppose, because the Barcelona show was the only one that didn’t sell out. In fact, most of the crowd were Britians who hadnt been able to secure concerts to the 5 england dates. We even met some crazy British guy in line who told us that the Strokes were the Rolling Stones of the day. Whether or not that’s true, they really did put on an amazing show. I stupidly left my camera at home and was bummed to find that they didn´t care if you brought them in. The opening band (teleronos) were a British band called British Sea Power who sounded a lot like a modern rock David Bowie. Cindy thought they were called British Beer Project, which I have to admit is a way cooler name. They rocked hard.

END OF TAPE SIDE A. PLEASE FLIP TAPE TO SIDE B TO CONTINUE…

SIDE B

Most of the following week was spent Piso searching with Cindy. finally got tired of the dog peeing on her bed and decided to move. She didn’t find anything yet, but she has plenty of time after she comes back from her vacation in the states. For work on wednesday I was sent with 50 euros in my hand to go find a christmas tree for the office. You can imagine how fun it was to get paid to pick out a tree. I had Cindy go with me and together we found a nice one for 35 euros in front of the cathedral. The remainder of the money was spent for the taxi ride back.
Unfortunatly, this week was my last week of work with MarcusEvans and I finished it off with a bang at the company christmas party at the Hotel Hilton on Friday. Rather than having a traditional formal dinner, the company decided to make it a theme dinner. This year it was a P party and you were to come dressed in any costume starting with a P. Pirates and Punks dominated the competition, but my date and I came dressed as a Prince and Princess. It wasn’t my idea, but it was an easy costume to find, only a cheap crown and tiarra from the costume shop. All and all it was a great party and a good way to say goodbye to my three month internship. Cindy and I left after an hour of dancing amoung my then highly intoxicated coworkers.
The next morning I woke early to catch the bus for the excursion with my program to the monestary at Poblet and the traditional catalan picnic feast called Calzots. After a few hour drive we arrived at the medieval monestary of the benedictian monks. Like always, the monestary was amazing. The first courtyard was, obviously I suppose, like nothing I had ever seen. I don´t really know how to describe it all so I took a lot of pictures to help out. Our tourguide was awesome and expelled upon us mounds of information which was interesting at the time but Ive forgotten almost all of it. The real highlight of the day was the Calzots, which literally means leeks (like the onion) in catalan. We left the monestary and drove for about a half hour to a town, whose name I have now forgotten, to eat. The calzots are barbqued until their outside is a burnt black and then served with a sauce made largely from garlic and tomatoe. To eat this you strip the burnt skin off and dip it in a sauce then sloppily eat the green of the leek. The calzots along with the communal wine jug made for a very messy picnic and we were all glad they provided us bibs beforehand. Afterwards we headed inside where we had a feast of various sauasages (butifarra). Quite interesting, but I didn’t eat most of it. Those were some weird looking sausages, especially the black ones.
The next morning I went to church where the sunday school put on a way cute production about christmas´ around the world. They then sang some christmas carols to us. So cute. After church I rushed off to meet Juan at his house for lunch. We ate a great paella and then headed off to his parents house to spend the afternoon. His mother had just had an operation but looked perfectly normal and healthy. We ate the typical spanish christmas snacks polvorones, a soft and crumbly flour cookie, and turron, which is like a chocolate nougat bar. Wonderful stuff. I think I will have to stock up on it. Skip forward through the last school days and…
This past thursday morning I saw LOTR: The Return of the King which nicely capped off the spectacular trilogy and left me a little sad that there weren´t any more to look forward to. The theatre I saw it at was full of middle school to young high school kids who I can only assume were ditching school (hacer campana in spanish). Another strange thing was that they gave us an intermission in the film about half way through. Did this happen to anyone in the states or is it just that Spain is a little different? I liked it regardless.
Friday night I joined a few other people at my friend Danielle´s house for a wonderful pasta dinner and movie night. We watched Office Space, Slackers, half of Fellowship of the Ring, and some Friend´s episodes before we passed out from exhaustion.
Saturday afternoon, after helping Cindy pack her stuff for her trip home, I got a call from my friend Liz who needed a babysitter that night for her three year old son Marc. I excitedly agreed, but since Cindy and I already had plans, only if she could come along with me to help. We came over at six and spent a great night playing mama and papa monkies, giving a bath, eating dinner, and watching a movie. This kid was so cute, not only in the usual three year old ways, but because our comunication system was so strange. We would speak to him in english, which he understands perfectly from his american mother, but he would only speak back to us in catalan. Although we got the picture most of the time, sometimes we would just stare at him and have no idea what he was saying to us. At bed time, after three or four tries of not getting Marc to bed peacefully at the usual 9:30pm, he finally fell asleep on our laps around 11pm. The parents came home a bit later and we went back to Cindy´s place to finish packing for her early morning flight.
This morning I dropped Cindy off at the airport around 7am and after writing this humongous email I just want to say that I am very tired and it doesn’t feel a whole lot like christmas right now despite the christmas lights running through the streets and the freezing cold. Im excited though, Juan has invited me over for Christmas dinner at his place and Im sure it will be great. Im also still set on traveling to Madrid for New Years. Im going to work all the details out tonight hopefully. I hope all of you have a Merry Christmas. Send me lots of presents.

EJECT TAPE,
Gabe