The Visitors

By order of appearance: Dre, Jordi, Adelina, Dee & Peter, Cheryl, and the locals.

I first saw Dre as I invited him to join me and a few friends for the massive general strike protest on March 29th (29M). He had to leave early as his friends would have been worried otherwise, as it was expected that “anti-sistemas” could cause havoc. And they did. I had a hard time myself trying to get back home, as all of Plaça Catalunya trains and subways were closed, and my next nearest station was on the other side of the pokice lines.

The day Jordi arrived, April 1st, Victor and I also picked up Dre at the hotel as he had finished his training at FCBarcelona, but after dinner at Rekons, they went to spend the night at Albert’s in order to play some indoor soccer at 7am the next morning. 

Jordi got to play tour guide to Dre for a few days. He whines about not knowing how to get around, but you toss in a buddy and he becomes an expert. This way I had my time to do classes and line dancing.
We went to have lunch with Edward, Carmen and her daughter Ariana where David works the tables at lunch in Mataro.

I wanted to give the guys a glimpse of the catalan countryside, so we took the train to Ripoll, where my friend Maite came to pick us up and go back to her home in Borreda. Other than her husband, there were three other friends of theirs. 

After a late, late lunch, we strolled to town to watch the Barcelona-At Bilbao game at one of the town’s bars. Both Jordi and Dre fell in love as I had done last summer with this special place.

Maite is working on an idea to introduce bird nests on tall poles, since there's one local species that will "occupy" these, since locals and immigrants will do anything for work/money, so there's been an ongoing problem when it comes to tree clearing, and that is they've been cutting down the tallest pine trees, that are the ones local bird species will nest in; and since these taller trees are going bye-bye, so are the birds, which has created a plague of tree killer worms (the picture of a typical worm nest), thus more trees become kindling.

Dre went back home, and Jordi went to Camp Nou with Sol. Not only was the company nice, but Barcelona scored big against Getafe.

I still had Jordi for 3 more weeks, we went on long walks with Wilbur to neighboring towns, we went to see the colored fountains of Montjuich, which I had to drag Jordi to, because he didn’t think they would be that interesting to him, and because I had pulled him away from Maite and Xavi who he very much enjoyed, in hus words "they are both exceptional people"; but I think he changed his mind about the fountains afterwards.

 On Earth Day at the same fair we had visited the year before, but first we managed to get free tickets for the Aquarium.

We went to recieve Adelina upon her arrival, and then met her, Peter and Dee for lunch one day; and again after Cheryl arrived as we got together to visit the Sagrada Familia. And then it came time for him to leave, it went by so quickly. 

Cheryl went back to Manchester, Adelina went to the Costa Brava with Peter and Dee, before they continued their trip to Madrid and the Canary Islands. Now Adelina had a few more days left to visit local friends and me.

And since everyone left, Gascon took me to Palau Sant Jordi, that was built for the 92 Olympics, and large venues like last week’s Bruce Springsteen, however I had not yet been inside till now. This event was “Biocultura” much like San Fracisco’s Green Festival. Where we would use the word “organic”, most Europe uses “biologic” and here they use the word “ecologic”, particularly with food and produce. They do use the word “organic” when referring to compost waste.

I also met up with Juanjo at Placa de Catalunya last Tuesday 15th to celebrate the first anniversary of 15M; it was good to see more and more people participating, not just younger unemployed, but a lot of elderly, as they are cutting back on healthcare (keep in mind they actually have healthcare here), still not enough people though, but it’s getting there. Along with all this mess, the different autonomies (similar to states) and in this case Catalunya is threatening the central government (Madrid) with independence because the treasury won’t pay back the fiscal debt of the past years, today hundreds of vehicles displaying the “estelada” flag of independence, blocked the tollways as they are refusing to pay the tolls. People who have been paying tolls for 40 years to get to work, when they had promised no tolls after these roads were paid off. This collection goes to Madrid. All roads going from Madrid to any city south or west is a freeway, no tolls, yet all catalans must pay and the cash goes elsewhere. Same is true of the fast speed train, the AVE has trains going to where nobody goes, yet the one to Barcelona is just now getting built, never mind that it is the main traffic route to the rest of Europe.

oops! I almost forgot, as I was tossing compost into these old pots of dirt during the winter, and had abandoned the project, before I got back to it I was surprised by some very determined tomatoes.