10/1/07

The Horror, the Horror

Christ you know it ain’t easy
You know how bad it can be
The way things are going
They’re going to crucify me
-John Lennon

Well, tomorrow I teach my first class, part of my 8 hours of student teaching. They are an intermediate class. This lesson is about visiting DC, seeing the Washington monument, going to a DC United game, etc. You need to ham it up and gesticulate a lot because the entire class is in English. Should be fun. Our teacher is very good, even if he is a spooky Norwegian.

But NOTHING is as scary as this flat. I’ll start looking for a new place this weekend. Janet, the owner who lives in the living room, cooked some crazy fish stew and the house has stunk for two days (probably still will tomorrow). Add to that the fact that there is a pelt of some kind drying on the kitchen radiator. It’s smaller than Fripp-size, but has black, brown and white on it. Scary. Then there’s the fact that the kitchen table and the toilet looked like they had been cleaned for the first time ever yesterday, by me. There’s a toaster oven that is tall and thin – it kind of looks like a counter-sized grandfather clock. It has bread crumbs in it left over from the Spanish Inquisition. Add to that that I tripped the breaker and blacked the whole flat out (all 50 square feet of it) just by plugging my laptop in with a surge protector last night. Other than that the place is swell.

Except yesterday morning I brought my personal case into the bathroom to shower but realized I forgot my towel. In the 2.3 seconds it took to fetch it from my cell, Janet jumped into the bathroom. At first I though the slum lord was going to cut me in the shower. I heard water running for a while, but she was out 5 minutes later. Bewildered, I went in and shut the door to take the poop du jour. Staring down at me in the bedee were rivulets of water. She had just cleaned her coochie in the weenie washer! Now, while I’m not proud, I will admit to smelling the panties of women I was dating or married to. But this just freaked me out. When you’re on the throne your head is practically in the bedee. Ugh!!! And I had actually entertained the idea of using it when the shower was having a freezing day instead of a mildly tepid one. Fuck that.

I do have a little balcony off my room which would double my square footage if my Swedish flatmate, whose room also looks out onto to it, didn’t have a drying rack out there that takes up the whole thing. But I guess I’ll dry my clothes there too. If it ever gets dry. No rain but it’s been as foggy as London for four days, very rare because Spain normally has dry winters. We are so buggered with global warming. And Germany and Sweden are dying for snow. Seems like the only place on the planet that has any snow is Denver.

Tonight I instant messaged Mel from my kitchen on a contraband wireless connection. I’m jaygreco333 on Yahoo. I have internet access at school too. I also found a great little mom and pop place that I went to at 11pm for drinks and tapas. People were dancing to Latin stuff and drinking some home specialty wine mixed with something I can’t pronounce that was really good. They give you free tapas with a drink. One was a piece of French bread with a blue mold on it. It looked hideous but tasted delicious.

So other than the typical lumps you take when you first go to a foreign country, things seem to be going pretty well. It’s so different it’s unreal. I forgot how different things are here. Everything moves very slowly. My big accomplishment yesterday after work was buying another bath towel. No wonder why these guys haven’t won a war since the 1500’s. But I guess they have better fish to fry. Also, 3 out of every 5 people smoke like Joni Mitchell, one after the other. And tonight was the first time I saw someone light a joint in a bar, which I heard is quite common. They’ll smoke anything – road tar, hard wood, ham – you name it. If it burns they smoke it.

Madrid itself is expensive – and it doesn’t help that the dollar is getting pounded compared to the Euro. It’s a crazy place but very fun. It’s so different from the District I don’t even know where to begin, so I guess I’ll just continue to give it to you all piecemeal. It’s been a real eye opening experience and I already have some new story arcs to weave into the next novel, so all is well.

Beware, when I return I may ask to rent your walk-in closet. It’ll be an upgrade.

And I purchased a six-pack of Geniuss Beer the other day, made in Barcelona. I think it makes you smarter.

12/1/07

Fanny

Nope. Don’t feel any smarter. False advertising once again.

One of my classmates is a smoking hot woman from Belgium (I guess she’s a Bell, or a Flem – neither sounds so good.) For reasons I don’t really understand, other than she thinks I’m devilishly handsome ( and who could argue!), she told me that fanny means ‘ass’ in America but ‘vagina’ in Belgium. I knew her for three hours and she said “vagina.” I’ve known women for twenty years who never said the word “vagina” to me. The conversation was completely unsolicited, which begs the question; “Does anyone love me for my brain? Am I just another hot bod?” I left the States because women only saw me as a piece of meat. Can’t I be handsome and intellectual? Goddamn you all, goddamn you all to hell.