i am not an mc.
the traveller expects his friends to help him out
first of all, i just want to say, somebody tell me how to post images. now for the rest.
yesterday i found myself being consumed by the biggest department store i´ve seen, the corte inglés. we went up escalators from level to level to levels full of levels. to the best of my knowledge, we never even reached the top. we discussed mobile phones with a non-english-speaking assistant who was reasonably impressed with spanish but less so with my fellow students' attempts to convince her to speak english. when we finally reached the street, fourteen escalators of alternating directions later, i found myself in a corridoor of street vendors. maybe forty or fifty of them. in two perfect rows, almost militaristic. each with just a piece of cloth on the ground to protect and display their wares: belts, scarves, dvds, cds with names like estilo hip hop. i walked up and down for a little while, checking out what they had, until eventually i was sick with rage. i realised that for every greenday cd that these guys sell, a scrawny british artist misses a meal. metallica misses out on another visit to san quentin. louis vitton lies emaciated on the rues of paris. while these moroccans, egytpians, latinos, suckle at the teat of international corruption.
that said, there's a real sort of attitude to this black market underside to barcelona. it's like they set up outside the department store because they think they can take it on.
later on in the day we headed out to some flea markets that we'd read about in, of all places, lonely planet. when we arrived we found nearly all the stores closed or closing, packing their shit into crates and boxes. but then we followed it around to what looked like a delapidated sort of parking lot. and it was incredible. there were just piles of shit everywhere, with moroccon dudes standing around the rubble saying barato barato barato (cheap). this seemed a sort of obvious statement considering that it seemed that boxes of clothes - looking like they'd been pilfered from church clothing bins - old bits and pieces of homewares, electrical circuitry, broken glass, old letters and postcards, sent fifty years ago and books falling apart with age, had just been emptied out onto the gravel. it was really bizarre because there were eldery, well-off looking spanish couples rummaging through, getting a quote that they were assured was barato, like €5 for a glass bottle that looked like it had been used to store faeces. they'd say 'no, es caro (expensive)' and keep walking. i found a huge pile of old stamps in one stall/section of gravel. i rummaged through for five minutes for something that really caught my eye. eventually i settled on a stamp that said MARIN SANCHEZ. i asked my friend kim how much she thought i should pay for it. she suggested 50 cents, which she thought was stretching it a little. i asked the guy how much he wanted for it and he says €3. now that's about five or six bucks australian. considering that my name is not marin sanchez and the stamp had not been made for me, i thought that was a bit much. he asked he how much i thought i should pay, and i suggested 50 cents. he gave me the filthiest look ever. he lowered his price to two euro and insulted me a couple of times. i turned to kim and she was like, no way. so i started to reject it, and he started throwing some more insults at me, telling me i must be a poor fucker if i can´t give him two euro for the stamp. he picks it up off the ground, puts it back in my hand and says, give me the money, one euro. so i hand it over, all the time with him saying in spanish, something along the lines of, you cheap piece of shit.
now this is not my story of how i was savvy enough to avoid getting ripped of by a conniving arab salesman. because as i left the markets, i realised i agreed with the guy completely. who the fuck am i to not pay him three euro for my stamp. first world white-boy piece of shit travelling to spain at the expense of my uni telling him i can't pay it. i'm with him. fuck off and get out of my sight.
but this is the stuff that i'm finding really incredible about spain. all first world countries contain moments of intersection with the third world. in sydney you find it mostly with indigenous communities. but when people come from the suburbs and see poverty in sydney, it tends to create a kind of rupture. it seems incongruous, an exception to the rule. in barcelona it seems like this third world underside is everywhere apparent. it's not just an underworld, it sits hand in hand with it. the street vendors are outside the department store. it's like, did the vendors choose the spot because it's near the department store, or did the department store build its behemoth to cash in on the trade from the vendors.
A little heart beats with pride.
it´s australia day and i´m in cataluña. we flew for a long time so i will pick out a couple of highlights.
1) finding out that vegetarian meals come out way before everyone else´s. in fact, on lufthansa, vegetarian and vegan meals come under the category of `special meals´.
2)singapore air is better than lufthansa in every conceivable way. so much so, that if one changes directly from a singapore air flight to a lufthansa flight, it seems like some kind of sick german parody. like hogan´s heroes. i half expected them all to admit half-way through that they weren´t german at all, were just speaking fake german, and that we were still sitting in singapore airport in a big cargo container, not a plane.
3)the only thing lufthansa going for it is the cutlery. and if i knew how to post images on this blog, i would show you a picture of the teaspoon i stole.
4)looking out the window past the vegan german with a blanket over his face as we floated over what i guessed was afghanistan. the desert blanket mountains dropped end to end, creased and crinkled. wonering how many people died as i flew over them.
hopefully i´ll be able to get this thing going properly when i figure some more stuff out and get settled in a little.
barcelona´s pretty cool, including some amazing street art that i´d like to post up at some point.
for now, i have to get ready for my australia day celebrations. one of my companions has a shirt that says `young, hot and aussie´. her friends gave it to her. i was thinking for the occasion i might kill the first refugee i see. just to make it feel momre like home.
so it begins, perhaps.
so i'm starting a blog. but i don't know how to use it. and it will be ugly. until i figure out how to use it. when, hopefully, it will transform into something beautiful and fantastic. and everybody will praise me and love me. and they will be putting my link on their blogs saying things like:
what an awesome blog!
this guy's really cool.
check this one out!
and people will like the blog somuch more than they like me. and when they meet me they'll have that unmistakeable i'm-trying-to-pretend-i-wasn't-expecting-you-to-be-cooler thing going on. and they'll say 'yeah,i really dig your blog man' (because the kids are saying things like that now). but once they've said that we'll both exhale slowly, and no one will say anything for the next hour.
always with the comix
cranky as fuck
hon rox a little
please to be restful
postman pat
who has wylie for a first name anyway?
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