9/30/2003

Joy and Fierceness :  It was with a sense of pride that I watched my brother complete the last mission in the best video game ever made, Vice City. I worry about him though - he will now have that confusing mix of pride, accomplishment, and joy in his head. But then he'll have the void. No more Vice City missions to do. No goals, ambitions. People seek structure to their time. As many before him who have finished the game, he has already thought about buying the previous games in the series, but we all know this is a sign of desperation, and will ultimately lead to disappointement and despair. I hope he pulls through, without resorting to excessive football simulation games.
posted by Garreth at 5:30 AM

9/29/2003

Seduced by something repulsive :  Many years ago, if someone asked me how I wanted to die, I would say that I wished to die from the be-fanged kiss of a beautiful vampiress. To be seduced, surrender myself for eternity and then die.

This year, I read a book called "What do you say after you say hello" which deals with parental influences on kiddy-winks and how parents give the kiddy-wink a script by which to live her later life. The book talks about fairy tales and how a person's 'life script' can be related back to their favourite characters in fairy tales they were told as a kiddy-wink.

I haven't met any vampiresses since reading the book, but I have been seduced. Seduced by something which would normally disgust me - some darn-fangled new technology. This is what happened.

I enjoy using MSN Messenger to pester people I know when they're working and I'm sipping rum in far away lands. (rum is the new vodka) But this requires some sort of computer and a connection to the internet. Having just finished five years 'working' for a technology company, I obviously won't have a computer in the house, or in my rucksack in the aforementioned foreign lands. So internet cafes are the order of the day. Or internet bars.

But yesterday this all changed. I can now use a messenger on my phone through some fancy pants AgileMessenger software. So now I can annoy people who are working when I'm in any bar, toilet or train station in any state of inebriation. Hurrah.

I'm not sure if this is in my 'life script'. Little Red Riding Hood didn't have a mobile phone. I'm confused but happy. I think I might even get a laptop.
posted by Garreth at 6:40 AM

9/26/2003

Lake Garda, Italy - facts for the visitor : 

• Don't bother to learn Italian. Most resorts resemble the 'Baden-Baden Wurst and Schnitzel Fanciers Club', and German is the language of the tourists as they pull up in their Mercedes
  
• All bread is stale. An Italian will tell you that there are many local breads, but don't get your hopes up. This basically means that you are free to choose your stale bread in a variety of shapes
  
• All local non-wine drinks are foul. Resist the temptation to order one of the colourful aperitifs, digestifs and emetics on every menu, and ignore your companion's advice about things that taste nice. Short cut the whole scene by having a Campari and assume that all other drinks that aren't wine or beer will taste as horrible as Campari, but perhaps be a different colour
  
• When out strolling on a weekday evening where Italians are present (Sirmione seems to have slightly more Italians than Germans on a Sunday), make sure that you look everybody up and down to check for surgery and clothing choice. Just to fit in
  
• You can buy a bottle of alcohol in some shops - look out for it. When I say alcohol, I mean 95% by volume alcohol. Remember that there may technically be stronger drinks in the desert, but since ethanol is deliquescent, any such drinks would absorb water from the air to remain at most 96% by volume alcohol. Also remember that drinking pure alcohol in the desert is a recipe for disaster, especially if you smoke, or like blowing up oil pipelines, or your hair is on fire
  
• You will need to wear a bathing cap in your resort swimming pool. This is apparently because getting your hair in the bleachy water will infect everyone with bubonic plague, whereas all other bodily orifice exposure and expulsion is quite alright. And the caps don't even keep your hair dry. Swim in the lake instead - it is the cleanest in Europe - unless you really want to see leathery obese Germans in speedos taking post-pool showers
  
• You can't buy tins of Hienz spaghetti in tomato sauce, let alone Spaghetti Hoops, so take your own
  

Cheap wine, sex price bet :  I was in a state of bliss in the back of the taxi for several reasons. There was joy when I realised a litre of drinkable wine could be had at a respectable restaurant in Peschiera for a few quid. There was the joy from the drinking of the wine. I was so intently trying to make these points to my companion that I failed to let her point out the women touting for business at the side of the road back to our apartment.

It was much later that Monica managed to interupt long enough to tell me of the ladies of the night - and she filled in my hooker-blindness with descriptions of the white fishnets, leather mini-skirts and general spray on-clothes they had (unsuccessfully in my case) been using to attract the attention of drunk men in passing cars. We estimated prices - I bet it was 80 Euros for half an hour, Monica priced the services slightly cheaper. We resolved to find out, and then promptly forgot all about it.

On my last night in Peschiera, I went for a run along the lake at night. I went back to the room with the ominous task of finishing the remaining vodka, and from there proceeded alone to the respectable restaurant with the litres of wine, Monica having gone home to the South of Italy earlier in the day. It occured to me that we had not resolved our bet and set off into the night to get some competitive quotes.

On the outskirts of town, I found the pink neon sign indicating the Viper 'disco' bar, which Monica had described as the general area of her red light observations. I reasoned that there was probably some law against writing 'brothel' in six foot high letters on brothels in Italy, and went in to investigate. I got an expensive drink I didn't want from the lady at the bar while some rather unpleasant Italian vocals punished my ears. Not a brothel - Vipers was in fact a karaoke bar. I drank and left disappointed, no further in my quest.

Weaving as I walked back into town, it was not long before the ladies of the night swam into view. Minding my price check mission, I approached the second nearest, so as to appear as a punter feigning a selection process. She wore white knee high platform boots, a white leather miniskirt matching the description that I had been given, and a skimpy blouse.

Foruitously, some days before I had been flicking through an Italian copy of Charles Bukowski's 'Women', which had afforded me the chance to learn a vocabulary appropriate to such circumstances. I asked for the price of 'un pompino', and learnt that 30 Euros was the going rate. Or perhaps the coming rate. Realising that this was a goal-based billing scheme as opposed to a clock-based one, I searched for other goals to get the prices for. My new Ghanian friend realised I was English, and then explained that 'ficky ficky' would set an eager punter back 50 Euros. I asked where such lewd acts took place, and she took my hand and led me to some roadworks, and indicated that un pompino would take place by the large mound of gravel. Before I could ask about 'ficky ficky', my eyes were distracted by a couple jiggling away as they stood on the other side of the gravel mound. I had no need to ask. I walked off into the night, thinking that I had lost the price bet.

As I got right to the outskirts of Peschiera del Garda, I noticed more short skirts and decided to do a bit of comparison shopping. The slightly more modestly dressed ladies sported an English speaker. Six cars had pulled up and departed by the time I had enquired about the services on offer. This pricing model was different - 100 Euros for twenty minutes, 200 Euros for an hour. On of her colleagues asked to listen to my headphones and I obliged her request as I asked the English speaker about the location of the acts. My guide explained that five minutes away was a house we could use, and then admonished me for having spoken to the cheaper ladies down the road, explaining that she had seen me from a car she had been working from. She asked if I had a car, and I pointed to my rather grubby running (and drinking) shoes. As an Italian, she held strong opinions on stylish footwear, and pulled a face at my shoes. At her request, I let her get back to work as I stumbled back to my hotel, thinking that I had in some ways guessed closest to the price and won the bet.
posted by Garreth at 4:28 AM

Only winners get the bus :  After a month away, what better reintroduction to England than Luton airport with a hangover. Actually, I could think of many better introductions. Having fish and chips fired at you with a leaf blower at a refugee camp in Dover would be an improvement, as would being immersed in a seven foot deep pukka pie. Luton airport is grimness itself. There's even a song about it by Cats UK, which mocked a Lorraine Chase Campari advert. Campari and Luton airport - a depressing combination.

What cheered me up slightly was my new found ability to get roughly what I wanted from shopkeepers, having spent the last month ordering stale bread and ham made of pig snout from sadistic storeowners in Spain and Italy. What cheered me up further was the readiness of the coach drivers to jape and joke about with people who didn't understand English. One Italian made the mistake of ripping his own ticket counterfoil off in front of the coach driver. The coach driver then protested between life-saving drags on his roll-up that he could no longer accept the document - that it was destroyed. A word not apparently in the Italian's dictionary. A French lady presented her ticket, but this too was unacceptable, as her delayed flight had made her miss it. The driver helpfully informed her that he could not change the ticket time, but that the distant ticket desk should be able to do this for her. No doubt the grateful French lady expected the coach driver to be waiting for her return with the rebooked ticket.

The driver made a few jokes about him only accepting duty free in exchange for tickets to me. The coach company does actually not allow drivers to sell tickets - an absurdly backward idea from a company that can't adequately manage bookings. I knew this. The driver knew this. The assorted Europeans on the bus did not. I gave him a tenner. He went through the motions of pretending to write out a ticket for the benefit of the other full price passengers. He kept the tenner. I got a cheap ride home. The technologically challenged coach company lost out. The French lady is probably still at Luton airport.
posted by Garreth at 3:57 AM

9/16/2003

Only losers take the bus :  Why do I always forget that sleeping on overnight buses is impossible unless your body is the right size for the seats, (about 4 feet tall) and you have your own gravity system which makes the reclined seat appear something less than vertical? Ah well, going between Spain and Italy at night meant I didn't have to speak to any French people, but I did get to piss in France. Which is always nice. Shame I missed the scenery though. Maybe I should join a coffin-dodgers daytime bus trip one day to contrast and compare.

Currently my mood means that I think 'Italian style' just means that people wear sunglasses that don't suit them, and Milan is a filthy nasty city. Must go and have a lie down, in contrast to the lie up I was having on the bus for 14 hours.
posted by Garreth at 3:15 AM

9/15/2003

Morning Wouldn't :  I was multiply surprised when I was awoken this morning. The first thing that surprised me was my mysterious landlady's voice. I opened my eyes in terror, and found that she wasn't in fact standing over my bed with a megaphone. She was in an entirely separate part of the building, but her armour-piercing voice was ricocheting at full volume along the naked corridors in all directions, making her seem omnipresent. She was evidently pleased that she had found someone who spoke her native language, presumably someone else from planet loud, and was yelling at them for all she was worth. Or perhaps her partner in dialogue was deaf.

A second surprise was in store for me. The drumming of the landlady's voice wasn't sitting too well with the throbbing in my head, so I decided to seize the day, and get out into the street. I threw off my bedclothes, and looked at where my body and legs would normally be. But someone had replaced my legs and torso. After all, my trunk and lower limbs don't have words written all over them, and big arrows pointing to their features and attractions. My knees aren't announced by black biro boxes with the word "knee" scrawled in them. My belly button doesn't normally have "navel" written upside down next to it. Nevertheless, the muscles in these gloriously labeled body parts responded to my desires. I managed to dress these new parts of anatomy, step over an empty vodka bottle and a guilty looking biro and make it to a bar for a beer. Over the beer, the limbs and I became best of friends, and I'm taking them to Italy with me later today.
posted by Garreth at 6:07 AM

9/13/2003

Revelation :  I started eating again yesterday, after three days of water fasting. Some fasters get strange revelations and divine insight. One book has a character called Moses who comes back with the law after 40 days of fasting. The only illumination I had was actually during my first proper meal, where I struggled with a bottle of hideous mongrel red wine. Determined, I finished the misbegotten concoction, and departed the scene hiccuping. My revelation was that vodka was the way forward. Far less volume. It never did Yuri Gagarin any harm, even when he was "completely drunk".
posted by Garreth at 9:55 AM

9/12/2003

The legal age of consent for sexual partners in Spain was raised from twelve to thirteen in 1999. :  On 11-9 as the British call it, much of the world was thinking about the impacts of the planes that crashed into the buildings full of people a few years ago. Not so the spunky Catalan people in Girona. They were having a fiesta, with six foot wide pans full of public paella , and music and dancing. I asked someone what the schedule was, and planned to turn up to two music events in Plaza de Catalunya, where some big men were quickly erecting a stage.

On one of my giddy wanders through the town though, I happened upon an assembly which was described as "Catalunyan Singing". Not understanding many words of what was going on, I could only gauge what was occuring by my eyes. There were hammers and sickles. Catalan flags. Fists punching in the air, and books on independence all around. It transpires that Catalonia wants to be independent of Spain.

I wandered off as the crowd dispersed, and mused on what it would be like if California declared independence. I quite liked what bits of California I saw. It would be a nice place to live apart from the danger of it disappearing into the sea. Maybe the Catalonians should dynamite a big trench between themselves and Spain, and fill it with water, claim it was tectonic movement.

Later, I headed towards the stage to hear some music. I expected it to be dismal based on my experiences of shiny-waistcoated, middle-aged men singing in a boat racing fiesta in Cadaques. What I didn't anticipate was a bunch of black clad mercenary types with long truncheons. Or ten riot vans parked on just one of the streets towards the playa.

The reason for the iron fists in not-so-velvet-more-like-leather gloves soon became apparent, as I turned down a few streets and met a very lively crowd of young revolutionaries in a protest march. I never got to the front of any of the anti-war marches in London, but I bet none of them was led by a vehicle like the one here: a tractor. The tractor negotiated the tiny streets flanked with scooters and curious punters like myself towards the playa. People fired inordinately loud fireworks along the same tiny streets, just above people's heads. Scooters were moved out of the way of the mighty Massey Ferguson, that worldwide symbol of independence. A short old woman with her shopping bags walked down a tiny street in the opposite direction to several thousand young protesters, as they emerged into the playa and waiting beer stall.

I had to go to lie down shortly afterwards, as I was feeling weak and giddy. From my room I could hear commotion until about 3am. Unfortunately I can't find any coverage in the regular western media, so I can't figure out what happened. I couldn't see any blood in the streets this morning though.
posted by Garreth at 11:04 AM

Small flat to let, riverside location :  David Blaine is some kind of 'magician' who is staging a 'stunt' in which he drinks only water for 44 days in a box above the Thames. The 'magicion' fears that he will do some permanent damage by fasting for so long. Pansy. 72 days is more like a challenge. More interesting are the completely under-awed London residents, who are attempting to annoy him with lasers, and flying McBurgers strapped to model aircraft next to his box. It almost makes me proud to be British. I almost want to be back in London so I could strap a big microwave to a crane nearby and try to cook him. Londoners have already been hitting golf balls at the box. Nice one. As Adam Ant said, "This is blatant Blainism, he's putting nothing back into London".
posted by Garreth at 10:18 AM

9/11/2003

North South Carolina :  The most detailed advice I've received so far about where to live in a trailer park cites experiences from both North and South Carolina. Selling various locations as "pure hillbilly" and "awesome scenery in Asheville". Another said that Oklahoma was no go. Another that Austin Texas was as good a place as any. Any more offers?
posted by Garreth at 4:59 AM

9/10/2003

The Arse Of Travel :  Alain de Botton wrote a very entertaining book called "The Art of Travel". I bought a copy in an airport departure lounge, hoping it would tell me what on earth it was I was doing there. I put the book in my bag, went to the bar and forgot all about it.

A few days ago, I rediscovered the thing, and started to read it, and I'm still thoroughly enjoying it. One thing I particularly like is his description of his time in Madrid. He woke up there and really couldn't be arsed to go and see anything. When he did, his guidebooks would attempt to force facts and opinions into him - how tall the cathedral is, how this is the best building to see in Madrid. It wanted to leave him nothing left to discover, but instead he found his own questions about Madrid. These he found part of his 'life-enhancing' tourism. He asks himself why vegetables so under-represented in the Spanish diet, why are Spanish feet so small? Anyway, it's very thought provoking.

I have abandoned my guide book to Girona, and tend to wander around. Today I wandered past the History of Cinema museum and went in on a whim. The man selling tickets to see a screening of a brief history of cinema in five languages asked me if I spoke Spanish. I replied that I spoke a little, just for a giggle, and being able to understand, "The goose is quick," from my two minute Spanish tutorial. I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. But he then went on to ask all manner of things, which I nodded and shook my head at unconvincingly, until finally he pointed me towards a mirrored panel, which I thought he said was a door.

But this experience made me inquisitive in a slightly tangential way. Why had the jews been expelled from Girona? What was the 1492 edict of expulsion? Faced with finding answers to these questions, I felt my life enhanced. If anyone can tell me why Spanish people don't like vegetables though, I'd be very grateful.
posted by Garreth at 12:12 PM

Transcendental Budget Travel :  You've probably seen those emaciated deeply tanned westerners hanging around beaches with dreadlocks, with all of their possessions in a small woven bag and thought, "How do those wasters survive?"

I figured it out. Drinking only water yesterday (1 Euro), staying in the ropiest flea ridden room in town (13 Euro) and doing not much in the way of entertainment apart from sitting, reading, playing solitaire and sending emails (10 Euro), I had my first day under the budget suggested for a scumbag at the front of the Lonely Planet.

Today, I'm feeling rather lethargic due to lack of victuals, so haven't even managed to spend much on email (though I have already beaten Solitaire twice on my iPod - a game I never thought I would play). If I keep this up for the requisite 40 days in somewhere sunny (Jesus managed it at my age and he had a beard too), I'll probably reach enlightenment, incineration, and emaciation, and end up sitting on a beach with a macrame haversack. Makes me shudder just thinking about it.
posted by Garreth at 5:16 AM

9/09/2003

New and improved competition :  Well, it certainly is new. Enter the new easy and free to enter amazing caption competition and win a prize. You've got to be in it to win it. Big money, big prizes etc.
posted by Garreth at 2:07 PM

Pension Perez :  My continued habitation in room four in Pension Perez is a miracle of faith. Initially, as the little lady led me to the building, I though her english accent impeccable. Only after trying to engage in basic stimulus response dialogue with her, did I realise that she was in fact repeating key phrases parrot fashion to me. Instead of replying to my questions, she would just smile. Like a museum audio guide made of flesh, she would ellocute perfect phrases when we reached points of interest.
"Toilet and shower here," she gestured, "this is the front door key."
"This is your single bedroom," she said as we entered what could just about pass for an enclosed space containing a bed, and thus fulfill its contract with the word 'bedroom'.
"Put your money here," she indicated a space on the diminuitive stand next to the bed. Lummy, sounds more like a knocking shop than a place you pay to sleep at.

With no real interaction possible, she had no idea who I was, or how long I was staying. I wake each night surprised that my photo isn't on the back of a milk carton, and my body in a shallow grave in the cemetery ("Where better to dig a grave?" I hear you ask). I tentatively put out some money on the table after a two days, and like the cheese from a defective mousetrap, it had vanished before I returned later in the day, with not a trace of any disturbance.

So it is with faith that I leave my room each day, expecting to find my possessions still there on my return. The arrangement by some unspoken contract with a grinning old lady. Most curious. I'm sure when I'm taken to flights of fancy on my fast, I shall imagine that I am being subconsciously willed to loosen my skin so that the people who run Pension Perez can cut off my face and wear it like a mask. Or maybe I've just been listening to the Bloodhound Gang too much.
posted by Garreth at 1:29 PM

Fast, faster, fastest :  I started reading sites about water fasting today. The commercial ones aimed at the US market quote the US Sturgeon General as saying that when most US citizens eat food, they might as well be smoking twenty filterless french cigarettes each mealtime. Perhaps boxes of twinkies should have UK style stickers ("Smoking isn't big or clever and it makes you impotent and bald and radioactive and turns you inside out"), telling people that, "Eating took much sugar and fat can give you a dizzying headrush and make you kill people."

Fasting.com goes on to say that, "Some drink deeply at the fountain of knowledge; others merely gargle." Oh yes, I´m a gargler. I can do the national anthem with Stella. But according to this site, "if you are called by the Holy Spirit to go on a water fast, in spite of how foolish it may seem to the world, we encourage you to be obedient." I have been called, I am on water. Maybe the holy spirit gave me a bout of spanish dystentery last night as a pre-calling card. If only I'd been called to have colonic irrigation. I might have been able to pull things like this out of my body.
posted by Garreth at 5:37 AM

Girona :  An ancient city, designed by architects who had no appreciation for the way cigar and two-stroke moped smoke lingers in high sided twisting narrow streets.
posted by Garreth at 5:08 AM

9/08/2003

Girona :  An ancient city brimming with history, laced with winding streets and pavement cafes. The scream of two-stroke mopeds roaring past echos around the five story buildings. And in the internet cafe, right opposite the toilet door is a slouching youth watching and listening to hard-core pron videos. Nice.
posted by Garreth at 6:17 AM

9/07/2003

You´re so special :  One of the most mis-translated words I have come across with my limited exposure to spanish has to be ´éspecial´, especially on a menu. Far from meaning your burger / rice / tortured baby cow steak will be in any way special, unique or superlative, it actually means that the cook will throw a fried egg onto your meal at the last moment. I have yet to find my fried egg in a can of San Miguel Especial, but ?´m sure it´s only a matter of time.
posted by Garreth at 4:12 AM

Dealers :  According to this article, even research projects with huge budgets can´t guarantee the quality of the drugs supplied by their dealers. They ended up injecting baboons with speed, rather than ecstacy, because their supplier mislabelled the drug vials. My arse. Some pikey lab technician had probably been cutting the drugs with icing sugar and rat poison and siphoning off kilograms of pure powder. Which makes the baboons just like any other sheep on drugs who don´t know what they´re taking. I say the scientists´ results are valid.
posted by Garreth at 3:18 AM

9/06/2003

Swings and Roundabouts :  You lose yourself on the way back to your pension (in a road with no name in a non-descript part of town) but you find an internet cafe (masquerading as a bar). Maybe I´ll find my pension by happening across it´s grinning proprietress as she wanders the streets trying to snare lost holidaymakers in the morning.
posted by Garreth at 5:05 PM

:  Maybe marriage in north eastern spain is more tranquil than that in the UK. I´ve not seen many men in spanish pubs wearing wife-beaters and guzzling pints of bitter, but this is not the reason for my speculations. Tonight, in a tranquil square in Girona, I was attempting a less than accessible menu and a nice merlot. The restaurant next door with the cheap and easy menu was full, mostly due to an engorged gathering of black clad ladies, celebrating the impending marriage of a lady dressed as a clown who they worshipped as Maria.

This was one of four hen parties I saw tonight, and it was passed by an apparently unrelated stag party. Although this was throwing out and throwing up time in the UK, the stag party was both impecably dressed and well behaved as they punted by on their foot scooters. No police were involved, no scantily clad punters were carted off, and there was no bawdy chanting. Quite unlike any single sex pre-wedding party I´ve ever observed before.

Perhaps it´s the spanish attitude to booze, or perhaps this is the careful plotting of a safe and virtuous marriage. The spanish booze scene is completely opposite to the english one whose motto might be little and often. In Spain, it is muchos and seldom. The restaurants seek to make money from food and sell liver-wrenchingly cheap wine, whereas the bars don´t count on a huge volume of trade. The bars seem to rely on the occasional purchase of heavily loaded cocktails, which they can then charge a king´s ransom for.

The hen and stag parties I saw seemed neither to plump for volume or potency in their drinks, preferring to blow whistles and enact strange rituals to the array of costumed characters instead of getting blottoed. Still it´s early hours yet. Maybe the depravity starts in a few hours time and I´ll get to use my dive computer and digital camera after all.
posted by Garreth at 4:44 PM

You drink your coffee while I sip my tea :  Arriving in Girona after a week with the hospitable Gray family in Cadaques, I couldn´t believe that I managed to find a room for about thirteen euros per night. That´s just nine pounds. I met the proprietress of the establishment on a street as I looked at another pension, and she was all smiles and pigeon English as she led me to a dark alley. My allbeit windowless void of a room seems too cheap to be true, and my naturally suspicious mind thoroughly expects some kind of swindle is involved. So I am carrying around anything remotely valuable just in case, which leaves me drunk and in charge of diverse equipment such as digital cameras and dive watches. A useful combination given that there seems to be some kind of young exuberant waitress convention mobbing the streets. On closer inspection, the 40 black clad chicas seem to be part of an outsized hen night which involves blowing kazoos and whistles while wearing yellow hats and creating a brouhaha.
posted by Garreth at 11:49 AM

9/04/2003

Thinks he´s so fisticated. :  The flyer man approached Joe, Flora and I, as we wended our way through the streets of Barcelona. He handed out his flyers, fulfilling his contractual obligations. But then he took an interest in us, and told us what he thought we wanted to know.
"What kind of music are you into?" he asked in a friendly way.
"Er. Quiet music."
"Well bar 13 is kinda mellow jazz. And then there´s a few funky chilled bars on that street."
"Alright. What about the bars by the port with the scantily clad girls in the doors?"
"Oh you wouldn´t want to go to them. They´re all that way. Full of neon lights, tourists and overpriced drinks. Playing Will Smith. This club opens at 1am, you should go there after a few drinks in bar 13."
"Um. Just out of interest, roughly how long would it take us to walk to the tourist bars?"
"About ten minutes. But they´re dreadful."
"OK. Thanks. See you."

It really was uncanny when we arrived at the neon Tequila club in the port. The first song it played was Will Smith´s dancefloor filler, "Gettin jiggy wid it." Top quality dancing and overpriced drinks followed the fresh prince, and a strange but friendly Dutch man who took a shine to me and followed me around the dancefloor, and even between neighbouring clubs.

As we were lying on the floor next to a cathedral the following afternoon, our friend the flyer man arrived and asked us about his choice of chilled bars. We didn´t want to disabuse him of the notion that we were cultured city hoppers into mellow grooves and hip replacements, so we lied about how much we enjoyed the bars he had recommended that we hadn´t visited. It would have been bad for his morale if we had told the true story of jumping up and down with vodka and coke and standing on the toes of drunken Scandinavians in tawdry tourist discos.
posted by Garreth at 7:33 AM

Quote of the week :  "Please bring my daughter back safely." - Flora´s mother.
"Yes we´re too old to have another daughter now." - Flora´s father. When Joe had agreed to bring along Flora, his 17 year old sister, when we went out on the razzle in Barcelona. Flora returned safely at 5am, Joe and I made it back at 1pm.
posted by Garreth at 7:16 AM

Beach Life :  I almost forgot to get drunk before my flight to Barcelona. Late in the day on before departure, Joe reminded me via SMS that I should be drinking to ensure a sound hangover to fly with. I set about the task immediately, and forced down some lager while wrestling with the major decisions available to me at the time: was it better to watch Nigel Benn pummeling Chris Eubank, or Jeff Golblum turning into a fly on the available terrestrial channels.

The ensuing trembling in the morning made the plastic hours in the airport departure lounge more bearable, with only a few shandies to stop the shaking. I duly arrived in Barcelona and finally tracked down Joe, despite his protestations that the Ramblas was a square not a street, and in spite of his belief that saying, "Meet me by the three street performers who are dressed like trees," would be adequate information to arrange a rendezvous in a city of two million.

Joe had a boat and a plan, so last night we rammed a deserted beach near Cadaques in a boat laden with sausages, firewood, and San Miguel, just as the sun set over the mountains surrounding the bay. His plan was simple and readily we set about achieving the major milestones - fires, sausages being cooked, and San Miguel being converted into beach urine. But the desterted beach was anything but. We could see the silhouettes of a human couple being cast by a torch on a green tent along the pebbles. We wondered who our strange pikey beach cohabitants were as we stared at the stars giggling.

In the morning, as we were striking a camp that consisted of little more than sun-lounger cushions, we were to find out their identities. They sauntered past us and nodded their nearly naked hellos in our general direction. And then the nearly naked hippy woman became the naked hippy woman. The naked hippy woman sitting spreadeagled on a rock while her speedo clad hippy friend took photos of her. Sniggering like schoolboys we loaded the boat and left them to their explicit photoshoot.
posted by Garreth at 7:05 AM