homeless mussels

Just another day in La Coruña today: I had my early and best classes this morning from 9:30-1:00 with half hour breaks in between. I usually snooze about 5 times before getting up, but today I had one of those accidental shutoff moments, but luckily woke up with half an hour to spare. I biked over to school with my hands frozen to the handlebars and my head stuck to the ocean. No matter how cold it is, it's a good way to start the day. I arrived 10 minutes later with enough time to head to the school cafe to grab a cafe con leche (au lait) and some churros (spanish stick-shaped, crispy begneits). My classes on Tuesday are a bit older and much more talkative and responsive than the others, and I usually leave them more energized than I enter. I count that as a success.

(I'm giving David Bowie a try while I write this and I'm not really digging it. Ah, but Under Pressure just started.)

I left work and headed to the big cultural center that is nearby. This has become my getaway this year. It's a huge public space with high glass windows, wood beams, a theater, leisure areas and a nice library. A grabbed a layman's science book and the Woody Allen film Sweet and Lowdown, did my homework and then hussled home in the freezing rain. My lunch was a cabbage, chorizo and chickpea soup that I tested out the other day and some porkchops that needed to be cooked.

The interesting part of the day came at 8:30 when I was walking home with my bike in hand. I passed by the grocery store, Gadis, that I frequent when the stationary homeless man stopped me suddenly and handed me a bag of almejas (mussels). I was wary at first, but he was a jolly fellow and asked my name and then if I was Italian when he heard my strange accent. "No, Americano," I said. He said he was Jesus and advised me on how to cook the mussels and that they'd give me a hard dick if I did it right. He laughed and said I could visit him at the nearby Soup Kitchen whenever I wanted.
I hailed a little bit the rest of the walk home. Weird. I just cooked the mussels. They were good; I hope i don't get sick.

oh shit, it's 2013.

i'm picking this thing up again. i was disillusioned with it before, but i've seen the light and realized that there is some value to it. the problem with leaving off for so long is that I have a lot to catch up on, but I don't want to burden you guys down with too many long posts. Here goes for a summary:

Time has flown, but shit, when doesn't it now. This year has been substantially different than the last, mostly I think because I'm more settled and, well, more Spanish in some ways. It took me a couple of months to shake off my summer beach bum behavior, but now I'm working a lot more than i did last year which should be good come summer. I don't spend much time with many of the other Americans again, although I cherish the time with the select few. There are the lovely Mary and Bridget, my girls from last year with whom I do El Camino, amongst other cool things. Tacked on to the group are Jay and Monica, two great people from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We met them in the early goings, they came on a hike with me and the outdoor club, and we've all stuck together since then. Jay's a great guy that, for me at least, is a catalytic person. I talk about a lot of things, he does a lot of things and together things blossom. We brewing beer together and take medium to long bike trips together and are even planning a 10 day trip from Paris to AmsterDaaaam-it's-gonna-be-cool! 

I've taken climbing to a new level, and my group of friends from the gym has really solidified, while simultaneously offering some great experiences one of which was road-trippin' 4 hours into central Portugal, camping under the pavilion of a church in a really small town on the edge of a valley before going to climb it's walls the next day. Epic!

Work is also a lot better than last year. I liked working with the kids, although i felt inexperienced and ineffective much of the time, but working with adults/felling more comfortable and confident is great. I teach Advanced 2, the highest level of a 6 year curriculum, at the city's official language school. I love it. I really enjoy being surrounded by people learning languages and studying, not to mention that i have access to a ton of resources and am even studying French in my free time. I still can't help but think of the French candlestick in Beauty and Beast or Peppy Le Pew when i speak it though. C'est bien!

I think this is a good length for a blogpost. I'll do my best from now on to fill in the spaces with anecdotes, recaps and even some philosophical meanderings. 

As Spanish as Canarian can Be.

Los Canarios, the people of the Canary islands, are a proud people. These small islands that belong to Spain, even though they are nestled against Africa some 1200 kilometers from the spanish peninsula, are a world apart from their patria. They seamlessly blend African, Spanish, Caribbean and now English and German cultures. They feel like tropical islands, with bright colors and palm trees everywhere, but also keep surprising landscapes hidden in their interiors. The aboriginal people, los Guanches, once lived in cave houses in the dry, mountainous heart of Gran Canaria -- and this is where I had a brilliantly authentic experience with a group of their distant descendants.

It was my first week on the island and I found myself looking out of our cave hostel into the crag-like canyon that spread out before me. Myself and Tom, another American, were on cave duty for a few days because a couple from Barcelona were staying there. We had just finished the mid-morning cleaning and decided to go for a bike ride down the mountainside to a traditional village tucked under an ominous overhang of a rock. Our first mistake, and we knew (which was worse), was leaving at 2 in the afternoon, being overconfident in our biking abilities, and carrying just enough water.

Needless to say, 2 hours later, after seeing this..., we were dying of thirst, heat and exhaustion after climbing some pretty steep ascents without much shade. We arrived to the main road, still a ways from home, and saw the same group of men sitting under some trees that we had seen while passing by earlier. Tom spoke up for salvation and asked for water. They offered us wine. We took it and then they jostled beer, cheese, chorizo, mangos and finally water into our hands. They were a group 5 hunters having a good ole' Heminway-esque time getting drunk under a tree while their dogs barked in their cages nearby. They were jolly, loud and funny. They made sure we knew that they were true-blooded islanders and showed off their knives and singing abilities. One that was the oldest, drunkest, and most toothless, sat next to me and mumbled traditional ballads into my ear. He stole my heart. They explained how they had helped re-forest this part of the island, gave us business cards to eat at one of their restaurants, and yelled at the cars that were passing by. They saved us and enriched us, and I'll forever remember them for it.

Modern Booty: Experiences

I've been away from home 33 of the last 84 months. That's almost 3 of the last 7 years. Seems more impactful when said the latter way. I started when I was just about 18 and suppose I really only stopped in between for university. I'm not sure where the instinct comes from, if it's even some kind of inborn quality, but I'll just say I fit into the category of people with an adventurous spirit. Aaargh! I'll also give some credit to my lovely parents who possess similar spirits and took us road-tripping around the Southeast when we were growing up. Everything has a beginning, and this one is right after high school graduation.
      There was something about that first taste of true independence when I was 18 that changed everything. It was the catalyst that came at the right time, as so much of life depends on circumstance and developmental experience.  It was Rehoboth Beach, Delaware (the first state) in the summer of '05 when Mario and I arrived after our typical senior trip in Cancun, Mexico, which was a time when I didn't even stop to think, "Wow, I'm in Mexico." Fresh out of high school, Mario's long lost biological father began to reconnect with his maturing son, and advised us to spend the summer working at Funland, a beach-side, family-oriented, amusement park. It was our first communal living experience, and the moldings of our future began then.
      That summer we were endlessly stimulated and enthralled. We had escaped Southern Louisiana and we were making friends from all over the world who were equally open and excited to new experiences. In the end, that's the essence of traveling I think. The underlying group consciousness, the "we're in it together and we're all loving every second of it." We shared stories from Colombia, England, Scotland, Germany, Kenya, ate together, laughed together, were embarrassed together, roamed the boardwalk together and admired each other for being so different but similar all at once. We weren't each others friends from back home. We were young, free and enchanted with life.
      Now, 7 years later, I'm in my shadowy kitchen in Northern Spain processing the circular green tile patterns on the wall in my periphery. My cup of coffee is going cold next to me, it was too weak anyways, and I'm waiting for the right time to go surf at the city beach. I'm again living next to a cold, northern, Atlantic beach. I'm still living communally by having an "open" apartment and accepting couchsurfers when I can, and by trying to assure friends that they can drop by whenever they please. I've taken immersion a step further by deciding to live in Spain for 2 straight years and realize that I'm still chasing and catching that initial experience from Delaware. That's what we travelers are, right? Experience chasers, it's why we can't stay put in the same place for too long. At least for now. There are too many open, interesting, interested, free and fun people to meet and learn from. I know it won't last forever, and don't think that I want it to, but for now let the adventure continue. 
   

Something I hadn't considered before

I just read an NYtimes article about the consumption and waste of energy by data centers around in the U.S. that illuminated something for me that I had not stopped to consider before: that every e-mail., blog, video or song that we store online in "the cloud" is kept on a disk drive in a factory building somewhere in West Virginia. These data centers, or factories, are what were inspected by the newspaper, to determine how much energy they use and waste. Unsurprisingly, it's a lot. Our constant need for instant access to anything and everything online has created an industry-wide paranoia of system failures, which would delay us from watching the next YouTube video for example, and create an uproar of complaints and criticism which would then put some data storage company out of business. Therefore, these warehouses stocked with serves are run at full power 24/7 and furthermore connected to diesel burning generators to back them up in case of emergencies. Damn that's a lot of energy. The journalist found that quite often the servers are not running efficiently at all, often using energy to power operations that are no longer needed, or that are running at 12% utilization, a measure of the percentage of the entire system needed to operate, while 100% is being fueled. These energy-sapping safeguards are to satiate our need to access info, however useful or mundane it may be, at anytime. Also, though, it's caused by us growing into a system that most don't fully understand. I for one didn't think twice about the space and energy my 500 stored emails were wasting, or even the space that this maltreated blog is occupying on a disk drive somewhere. For me, this was another lesson of how important it is to be a little more conscious of the things happening around us because, however seemingly impossible they are to change, a bit of awareness always helps. Maybe in the future people will be forced to store the majority of what they want on their own external hard drives that can be powered on and off instead of kept on eternally running servers somewhere. The more time passes the more I'm convinced that things would be better with a small reset to a past state of things. A hybrid of sorts that mixes the new and old. The problem is that the mass perception of how the world, similar to how religion works, will not change anytime soon.  

Summer's Over

Black sand, warm sun, cool waves, crowded hostel, dry canyon air, hard brittle volcanic rock, shimmering sea grass and cheap food are some of the sensations that I'll carry away from my time in Gran Canaria. It's flown by as expected, but it's been magical. There were times when it was a little demanding to live in a hostel with limited privacy and constant interaction or responsibility (since i was staff), but overall it was a great experience and I think that I've come away more open and with better social skills. The constant presence of the guests and perpetual social atmosphere almost completely removed that feeling of reluctance, nervousness, or fear that I once had to start a conversation or keep one going. I find it easier now to prod a person into speaking, to keep nudging them along so as not to have to speak so much myself. I find it's easier that way, when before I used to think too much about what I was going to say. Better just to keep bouncing the ball against the wall and letting it come back to you. Also, I learned from a TED talk that the number one reported fear is public speaking, while number 1.1 is merely saying hello to the person next to you. I fit into that category I realized and made a decision then to try to change that. Granted, you can't go around expecting everyone to want to talk to you and you can't awkwardly say hey and smile to everyone (that's a cultural perspective I think), but I am finding that quite often just throwing the ball once or making the initial crack in the ice is all that it takes. I'm also finding it slightly easier after the hostel experience to not worry so much about what the person I'm talking to thinks of me. After meaning so many people one begins to feel weathered, more comfortable with oneself. Connections are made faster, masks are taken off, you dig deeper quicker because you repeat it so often. Granted, these approaches aren't for everyone, for they hinge so much on uncontrollable factors like the culture you were raised in and what categories of the 5 main human traits that we possess.

 In retrospect, i wish that i had kept a guest picture journal, but i think that i'll remember the most important ones.

It was great to live so leisurely on the beach, and while doing so i learned that it's possible to live on 5 dollars a day and  be perfectly happy. a typical day consisted of doing my morning cleaning and having breakfast, playing on the internet, reading something informative, then taking a walk down the beach and stretching, maybe having a snorkel and another read, cooking lunch, laying about aristocratically, then going out in the early evening to surf or just sit on the beach and watch the sun go down and bathe everything in soft, golden light, cook dinner, socialize and finally watch a movie or read some more before bed. Glorious i tell you, but it will be nice to return to the working world and to have a schedule. I don't think the shift will be difficult. Big plans to finally travel a bit outside of Spain this year! woo hoo! I miss home and my peeps and fam, but i'm excited to get the second leg of this adventure underway. who knows what the future holds. in the meantime...

Check out this video of Gran Canaria.
 

summertime saunter

At last and once again, I return to this online record of my comings and goings. It's been a while, quite a while, and many things have happened since school ended on May 31st that I didn't capture in text as quickly as I would have liked, but maybe the good parts get weeded out of the excess of information when you wait a while to write them down. How about a quick list of highlights to get things started:

1. El Camino de Santiago from Oporto, Portugal to Santiago de Compastela, Spain (250km).
2. A leisurely month at home (A Corunya) with some good visitors.
3. El Festival de Ortigueira.
4. Festival de Percebes.
5. I bought my first roadbike.
6. Awesome dayt rip through Galicia and Asturias.
7. The Trip-- Madrid, Segovia, Barcelona, San Fileu with my main man Mike, his lovely wife, Danaya, and my sidekick, Claire.
8. Gran Canaria.

Looking at it like this makes me very impressed, although while everything happens, well, it just happens, and one doesn't often consider the greatness of  it all in the moment. I suppose that's why the ability to reflect is one of the supreme human characteristics (see earlier post with the poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"). I see clearly now, and I've been told that I would eventually, that the ability to look back on these times in my life will bring me much contentment later in life, and I remind myself of this frequently when I feel that innate guilt emerging from the depths of my mind when I'm overly bored or lazy and begin to question the merit of my current lifestyle. Everything is temporary, though, and this too shall pass, and I will undoubtedly miss it immensely when it does. But I'm in it now! And I'm in it deep! And I've read some good books recently:

1. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
2. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
3. Saltwater Buddha by Jaimal Yogis

All are highly recommended and it's a diverse fiction trilogy if you're in the mood.

Finally, to end this recap, the theme song of the summer...