I learned a few new Spanish words yesterday — ones I’d rather not have had to learn. Among them: la fiebre (fever); el malestar (discomfort); vomitar (pretty obvious); la diarrea (also needs no translation, but should not be confused with the benign word diaria which simply means “daily”); agarrotado (stiff); tener escalofríos (to shiver); el sudor (sweat); mareado (dizzy); desmayarse (to faint — which I actually did yesterday!). It was a strange experience to be so out of it that one moment I was sitting at the table and the next I was face-down on the floor with a voice screaming my name and no idea how I got there. Turns out there’s a stomach virus going around here, and I was “lucky” enough to catch it. I slept almost the entire day and night and am feeling much better today, though am obviously still a bit delicate.

Between my personal troubles and the outside world, it was an “exciting” weekend — there was a huge snowstorm that covered large parts of Spain (including snow on Tibidabo here in Barcelona), causing many accidents, road closures and collapsing trees and power lines.

Last night we went to see a great show at Barcelona Teatre Musical, one of the biggest theatre venues in Barcelona (which unfortunately means we weren’t particularly close to the stage, but still…). Renowned flamenco starlet Sara Baras and her company presented their show Sabores, as part of the VII Festival del Mil.leni de Barcelona. I think it’s safe to say it was the best flamenco show I’ve seen in my life. It really made you want to move and dance. In my case I just had to give the guitar a few rasgueados when I got home, even though it was late.

In fact…their energy made you want to move and dance perhaps a bit too much. Sitting down the row from me was a teenager who had some kind of mental illness that (in my layman’s terms) caused him to wave his arms frantically and erratically when he got excited. I must say, the performance was very exciting — to the point that, at times, my heart did somersaults in my chest. This fellow really got into it; it was exhausting to him move his limbs faster even than Sara and her dancers on stage. I’m glad he seemed to be enjoying himself, but I have to admit I’m very glad I was not sitting directly behind him…it would have probably caused an epileptic seizure trying to watch the stage through the stroboscopic fluttering of his arms!

Speaking of musical inspirations…a big “Happy Birthday” shout-out to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who turns 250 today. Wigs off, gentlemen, a genius!

Why don’t we have these in Canada? Sure we all know about “Persian blinds”, but it seems nobody in our cities actually has them (they’re more a country-cottage kind of thing)… Here in Spain, it seems every building has them. The roll-down kind on the outside (with a convenient cord inside for raising and lowering).

Shops have the industrial-strength metal roll-down persianas that make the streets look deserted after closing hours (but conveniently prevent people from smashing large objects though display windows). In Canada I’m used to seeing our stores lit up all night. They look warm and inviting “twenty-four-seven”, as the expression goes. Do we do this because the light prevents burglars? Makes us feel less depressed? Helps keep our energy economy chugging along? I know plenty of shops along St-Laurent and St-Denis in Montréal who probably wish they had large industrial-strength metal covers over their windows — windows there seem to get smashed fairly often in innocent night-time drunkenness or good-natured post-club rioting.

In Barcelona (and other places I’ve been to in Spain), the houses and apartments also have persianas — the discreet off-white plastic versions — on all their windows. They’re great to reflect out the summer heat, to reduce noise, for security(?) and to provide millions of blank canvases for graffiti artists to tag. But most importantly, they block about — oh, I don’t know, this is just a wild guess — 100% of the light!

To someone like me, used to awakening to 4:30am summer light (even in winter it starts to get light in Montréal before 7am, though it’s dark again by 5pm), they are an amazing “discovery”. In fact, they work a bit too well. My body must rely on light cues to regulate itself because, given a perfectly blackened room, it appears I can sleep for an indefinite period of time. It’s always a shock to look over at the clock and see that it’s 10am or — oops! — noon. And even more shocking to find that behind those magical blinds, far too high in the blue sky, is a brilliant sun.

Indeed, our pilot did announce the preliminary election results to us on the plane, as we made our approach on Frankfurt! To close the parenthesis I opened with the last post…we indeed ended up with a Conservative minority — a minority with even fewer seats than the previous Liberal one. Our new PM-elect is 46-year-old Stephen Harper. Here are the results:

For fun, you might take a read of Blog Boy’s blog. These hilarious entries were posted — on the official Liberal website — every day of the election campaign, by (ex-)Liberal Leader Paul Martin’s speechwriter, Scott Feschuk. I found it amazing that he was “allowed” to write so humorously and candidly about the behind-the-scene goings-on. Politics needs more humour and more poetry. To whit, more wit.

If Feschuk was providing the humour, what about the poetry? Well, since today is Robbie Burns’ 247th birthday (hold your own Burns Supper!), I thought I’d drop in a relevant bit of poetry from the bard…

Suppose I take a spurt, and mix
Amang the wilds o’ Politics-
Electors and elected,
Where dogs at Court (sad sons of bitches!)
Septennially a madness touches,
Till all the land’s infected.
  —Robbie Burns, from his Election Ballad

(cue the music) Today is the 39th election in our history — personally I think it’s my fifth. If we elect a majority, it could legally last until 2011 (five years)…yikes, let’s hope it’s not a majority government!

We’re not used to minority governments here, and the one we just had was relatively successful for a while (way more than I expected, which isn’t saying much). It lasted a year and a half until a non-confidence motion supported by all the opposition parties chucked ‘em out. For a while, anyhow, legislation was getting passed (after negotiation and compromise; just the way it’s supposed to work). But it degraded into posturing, threats and insults (yet another similarity to hockey? No — I think hockey players have more class…). To their downfall, the ruling Liberal party often behaved as if they still had a majority (were “entitled to their entitlements” and all that). As I said, people aren’t used to minority governments, here…least of all politicians.

Anyhow, there will be more than enough coverage out there, starting in four hours when the polls have closed (across our six time zones!), so I don’t need to say more…

As for me, I’ll be on an airplane as the evening plays out. Hopefully the Captain will make an announcement as to whether we should come back or not…

Well, I quickly polished off the chapter of las palabras de la vivienda, and have moved on to las de la ciudad. Here are a few from today’s studying…

la alcantarilla — sewer. Lovely, eh? I put it in here because it was the only word I studied today that rhymed with día!

la avenida — avenue. Easy one, eh? Besides the noun, it’s also the feminine form of an adjective that can be used with bien o mal to mean “harmonious” or “at odds” (or well-matched/mismatched). So you could say: Al principio, la creíamos una pareja bien avenida. Pero hoy, dos años después, nos parece que no… Están, Gabriel y Ángela, muy mal avenidos. — At first we thought they were a well-matched couple. But today, four years later, it seems that Gabriel and Angela are very poorly suited. Think of it as the two of them “at an intersection”, crossing each other rather than “running along parallel and smoothly” like una avenida…

la acera — sidewalk. ¡Menos mal que no hacen las aceras de acero! — Good thing they don’t make sidewalks out of steel! (though the kids on their monopatines would love the ultra-smooth ride)

el bloque — block. This is, in general, for all kinds of blocks and blocs (wooden, disk drive, city/apartment and political, as in the political party el Bloque Quebequense). But you can also use la manzana (apple) for a city block. And that applies to all cities, not just in Nueva York (La Gran Manzana). (But if you’ve been paying attention, you should remember that from before!)

la bolsa — bag. Ah, yes, true, it is a bag — but in the case of el capítulo sobre la ciudad, I think they’re referring to the fact that it also means stock exchange. In fact, in Barcelona there is a little bar called La Bolsa, where the prices of the drinks vary according to supply and demand. You can get a drink for very cheap if no one else is drinking it, but popular drinks will skyrocket in price! Kinda fun way for capitalists to…er…get drunk?

After another lengthy trek across the icy city, I got my camera back! Even better — it’s fixed! If you recall, it was giving me weird dark splotches, so I took it in for servicing. $270 later (erf!), it’s had an “electrical alignment” (a what?) and had its whole “optical unit” replaced. Now it’s snazzy and like-new, except for the scratches and dents in the metal body. I’m glad those are still there because they give it character and make it my camera. I can definitely tell that the lens is new — all those salt-water stains seem to have magically disappeared. But I really had to conjure up my grandmotherly/Scottish heritage to avoid plunking down $600 (plus tax) on a snazzy new camera.

At least now there’s a hope of more great photos coming at you soon-ish!

Montréal photographer François Brunelle is working on an interesting project, looking for look-alikes who — other than their appearance — have no relationship to each other. Not necessarily famous people; just everyday folk. He got the project started after repeatedly being told he looked just like Mr. Bean. (Incidentally, that means he must also look just like José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the prime minister of Spain and a remarkable look-alike to Mr. Bean!) If you’ve seen someone who looks just like you, or like someone you know, get in touch with Brunelle — you could be part of the project!

Appearance and similarity can be pretty subjective. I’ve been told (at various times and by various people) that I evoke popcorn magnate Orville Redenbacher (c’mon!), King Juan Carlos I of Spain, Kermit the Frog and actor Ed Norton. King Orville Norton the Frog? Leaves a lot to the imagination, doesn’t it?

Thanks to chocolatina for pointing out this story, about the fact that Columbus may not have “discovered” the New World (ooh, shocking!). Instead, it seems the Chinese explorer Zheng He may have done so, sometime around or before 1421.

If you’ve got some time to kill, why not volunteer to help Berkeley University researchers discover stardust. They are seeking volunteers to hunt through 1.6 million “fields of view” for interstellar dust impacts in a spacecraft that flew through the coma of comet Wild2 — something they claim humans can do better than computers (goodness, will the wonders never cease?).

Today we are having just a lovely day. The streets and sidewalks are sheer ice — we’ve had rain and freezing rain all night, and it’s still coming down now (still expect 30mm more today). This afternoon, the winds (currently 30-60km/h) will reach 90km/h gusts, the temperature will drop and turn all that water into ice. Hmm, remind you of anything? (don’t worry, we’re a long way from being there…so far!)

UPDATE: So we had something like 65mm of freezing rain today — four times the previous record…in fact there were “only” 100mm of freezing rain during the entire 1998 Ice Storm (which was spread over five days!).

Once again, I thought I’d constrain myself by randomly picking a noun, an adjective and a verb (I won’t tell you which ones because that would spoil the fun) and also by forcing myself to use exactly 400 words (roughly one printed page) in a little rapid-fire fiction. If I can make a story out of it, all the better, but if it just ends up being a scene… Well, that’s fine too. Here’s the second one!

I Dreamed of an End to the Nightmares

by El Jardinero Zurdo, January 16, 2006

   Fred was the cause of my Technicolor childhood nightmares. He wore brown corduroy pants and ugly turquoise sweaters his mother knitted. They added menacing amorphous bulk to his more-than-sufficient silhouette. Why, I wanted to ask her — what is it about turquoise? Don’t you realize this colour enrages your son? We imagined her as a mad scientist, experimenting with mood-altering colours, excessive heat and persistent itchiness. Transforming Fred into a monster. The sweaters were knitted in a thick woollen yarn that pilled and frayed easily. It gave us terrific sweater burn when Fred coiled his arms around our necks. His armpits smelled oily, humid, sour. The smell of turquoise sweaters. On a good day we might struggle out of a headlock, but never out of his tyranny. We’d return from recess with hot red cheeks and ears, and the teacher would scowl at us — at us!
   I’m sure today they’d cry: “abuse!” and call in Fred’s parents. If we passed by the office we might finally see his mother, with her lab coat and Bride of Frankenstein hair. They’d expel Fred, or send him to a special school: a jail-school for bullies where the walls were painted in sick colours, like turquoise. Or they’d have mirrors everywhere, like a dance studio. The bullies would learn to face their own sweaters.
   If their reforms were successful, Fred would be released back into the normal world. He’d be intelligent and inquisitive, dressed in comfortable clothing. What is it about turquoise? he’d ask his mother (without our prompting). She’d explain something banal about bridesmaids’ dresses or birthdays in December. He’d laugh and — newly articulate and sensitive — explain to his mother that while he appreciated turquoise held happy connections for her, he’d rather wear a t-shirt, like other kids. Because he was thoughtful, he might promise to wear a sweater for a few hours when they were together, just him and his mother. That would make her happy.
   When Fred returned to our school, we’d avoid him at first, cringing when he passed by. He’d be dressed differently but his size would still be intimidating. He’d come over, smiling, to where we were playing and say: Hey, you guys, give me a chance. Then he’d tell us about the discussion with his mother. Oh! we’d say, laughing and relieved. We always wanted to know what it was with her and turquoise.