Do You Know the Way to San Sebastian?

It´s also a three-day weekend here in Spain as Monday is All Saints´ Day. It just hit me yesterday that the reason we celebrate? commemorate? All Saints´ Day was because we were colonized by Spain. In fact when we say Todos Los Santos, we are saying "all the saints" in Spanish. People from all over Spain will likewise go to the cemeteries to pay their respects to their dearly departed. But I doubt if any of them will plan on bringing mahjong sets, boom boxes, karaoke machines, and coolers full of beer like us Pinoys do every year. Well, except for the coolers full of beer probably. I first thought that the culture of beer has seeped so deeply into the Philippine psyche but when I got here I was in for a shock. The Spaniards love their beer. It´s available everywhere here, even in places that would be deemed unacceptable to us - the cinemas, zoos, sports arenas, museums, malls. I´ve seen people drinking beer as their breakfast beverage. There are groups of women at lunch time which drink the stuff. It´s also a source of pride for me that San Miguel is one of the two biggest beer brands in Spain. This achievement is more impressive when one considers that the other is a Spanish brand - Estrella Damm.

My Singaporean colleague and I thought that it´d be a real waste to be here in Barcelona for the three days we don´t have to go to work. Don´t get me wrong, Barcelona would be a perfect place for a long weekend but we both feel that we´ve more or less experienced what it can offer for the ordinary tourist. So we thought of going away to San Sebastian.

San Sebastian is a city at the northwest Atlantic coast of Spain. It´s a stone´s throw away from Biarritz, France lying precisely at the border of both countries. It just had an international film festival weeks ago where Woody Allen was given some big lifetime achievement award. Well, that´s all I know about San Sebastian at the moment - yup, just three sentences worth.

We went to the train station last night to buy tickets but we were shit out of luck. It shouldn´t have surprised me that the whole of Barcelona was also itching to get out of the city for the big weekend. We stood in line for about forty minutes only to be told by the ticket guy that there was only one ticket left. My friend checked out the rental car companies but, wouldn´t you know it, there wasn´t a single car available too. I tried the bus company in the train station but the ticket guy was taking his break (an employee taking a long break in Spain? Nah, that´s impossible!) and so we had to wait for the ticket booth to reopen at 10 in the evening.

I was bitching about how I couldn´t see San Sebastian in any of the bus destinations when this pretty lady asked us in a British accent, "Are you going to San Sebastian too?" And that´s how we met Neera who had to head off to San Sebastian that very night. She´s a British exchange student here in Barcelona and was going to meet up in San Sebastian with her friend from the same university in London, but who was studying in Madrid. Neera couldn´t get a ticket too for tonight because there was one-day strike by the workers of the train company (train workers staging a one-day strike in Spain? Get outta here!).

When the bus ticket guy reopened, he told the three of us that his company wasn´t selling tickets to San Sebastian. Dramatic pause. But another bus company outside the train station was.

Well, we all got our tickets - Neera´s for that night and ours for tonight - thanks to Neera´s fluent Spanish. She said she´s pretty good with languages and I could tell she didn´t try too hard to learn how to speak Spanish. Her ancestry´s Indian and she was born in London. She´s crazy about musicals and the three of us ended up talking about "The Jungle Book" and even singing "Bear Necessities" under the full moon.

The bus ride will take about eight hours. I asked both of them what´s the longest time they´ve spent in a bus. Neera said that her upcoming trip to San Sebastian would probably be it. My Singaporean friend, being Singaporean, had to one up everyone - 22 hours, when he was in Brazil. I asked, "Was this a moving bus?" Neera thought that that was really funny.

We waited with her for her bus to depart and exchanged numbers so we could all meet up in San Sebastian. So, this weekend´s shaping up to be pretty exciting - British exchange students, San Sebastian, the rugged Atlantic coast, and San Miguel beer. Now if I can only find a mahjong set, boom box, and karaoke machine, it would almost be just like home.

The Butterfly Defect

I am fascinated by Chaos Theory. This is the idea that a very small change in conditions can monumentally impact the long-term behavior of systems. This is also known as The Butterfly Effect where:

The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)

The Butterfly Effect is also the reason for the prime directive for time travellers which strictly prohibits making any changes (no matter how seemingly miniscule or insignificant) to the conditions found when going back in time. Any changes done in the past will cause a different future to happen.

Say, you travel back to Braunau, Austria on April 20, 1889 and drop a bottle of olive oil on the street where Adolf Hitler´s mother´s just about to walk through. She slips on the oil and has a miscarriage. Adolf Hitler would never have been born and all those jews would not have died because of his Final Solution. That ordinary bottle of olive oil is responsible for saving twenty million men, women, and children.

However, I think that this prime directive can now be suspended for time travellers in order to effect the following change: the movie "The Butterfly Effect" starring Ashton Kucher must not have been made. Why? Because it´s the stupidest piece of cinematic crap I´ve ever seen my whole life. If I was personally able, like Ashton Kucher in the movie, to go conveniently back into the past to change the present, no, the future, wait, yup, the present, I´d go much further back in time than last Sunday when I rented the DVD, to the exact second when Ashton Kucher decided to become an actor. I´d do everything in my power to jeopardize this moment and spare all of us this movie. Sure, I´d also cause Ashton Kucher´s body of work ("That Seventies Show" and "Dude, Where´s My Car?") to disappear as well but it´s a chance this time traveller is willing to take. The stakes are just that high in doing this service for the whole of humanity.

Delusions of Guapo

I was one of two people from Asia who were sent to Barcelona to work on the project. The other guy is Indian. I was a little lucky in being chosen because my boss was chummy with the project director. Otherwise, I´m pretty certain that another Indian would have been chosen because quite a number of the regional and even global senior positions are held by Indians. I may be in danger of being politically incorrect when I say that Indian bosses generally promote other Indians to the exclusion of other races but, fuck it, it´s the awful truth.

I shall call my Indian colleague Shrivanam for the purposes of talking about him on this entry. Shrivanam is a pretty stand-up guy. He works hard and is extremely confident of his abilities. However, there are one or two things he does that really annoy the fuck out of me.

He´s so confident of what he knows that he gets testy when you even try to imply that there may be one or two things that he doesn´t have a fair grasp on. For example, I pointed out to him a street which I said was the shortest route to the Picasso Museum. He goes, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But I don´t want to walk to the museum, I´m taking the train." O-fucking-kay. Two months in Barcelona and you´re already Ferdinand Magellan.

He also gets testy when you demonstrate your ignorance on something which he feels should already be part of your stock knowledge. One time, I saw this ad on the side of a bus advertising Basiq Air´s airfare ticket to Amsterdam for as low as EUR39. I just go, "Oh look, that´s really cheap. I´m gonna check out the website." He had this irritated look on his face when he said, "No, no, no. It´s only cheap because you have to book in advance and once you do, you can´t change any of the booking details. We can´t make any plans a month in advance because we´re still busy with the project." I said, "Hey, I´m just gonna check out the website. Don´t get your panties in a bunch!" What the fuck? What´s all this "we" stuff anyway? I wanted to kill him with my bare hands right then and there and chuck his body to the fountains along Plaça España. Knowing him, the fucker would probably have something to say about that. "No, no, no..dump my body in that construction site along Carrer Joan Carles I. It´s less public."

That´s the other thing with Shrivanam. He doesn´t do his yeses and nos singularly - they always have to come in threes just so he can ram these further down your throat.

Right now, there is something going on which really takes the cake on the list of things I hate about Shrivanam. It all started when I helped him go to Zara because he said he was looking for a jacket. Zara´s the biggest retailer in Spain and the guy who owns it, Armancio Ortega, is the country´s richest person. Zara´s outlets are as ubiquitous as Spanish women who grow armpit hair. Around Plaça Catalunya and La Rambla, I counted three Zara outlets - an area smaller than a square kilometer.

Actually, we went to three stores before going to Zara and Shrivanam couldn´t find his perfect jacket. If one wasn´t in the right color, the others were too formal, too casual, too fucking thick to wear back home, or too damn expensive. It´s a safe bet that Giorgio Armani would check himself into a mental institution if he had to make a jacket for Shrivanam and his rather stringent requirements.

When we got to Zara, he inspected every jacket it had to offer and to his credit he did find a great looking black one which went for EUR25 only. I too decided to buy the exact same one eventhough I had my fair share of jackets and didn´t actually need one more.

So Shrivanam and I had the same kind of jacket. The next day, he asked me if I was wearing the jacket out to lunch. I had a different jacket on and so said no. He said he wouldn´t wear his jacket if I was wearing mine as he doesn´t want to be seen with another guy wearing the same jacket - it´d look like that we were wearing uniforms. Motherfucker. Who does this guy think he is? Fucking Brad Pitt? Are people actually gonna give a shit about two fucking foreigners wearing the same jacket? Give me a fucking break.

Knowing this, I now only wear the Zara jacket to work so I can determine his threshold for the cold - that point when he´s forced to lose his delusions of guapo and allow the people of Spain to see us wearing identical jackets. He doesn´t have another jacket that´s not too thick for the Barcelona autumn and is too cheap to buy another one. Today was cold in Barcelona - the temperature only came up to 17 degrees. I went ahead of Shrivanam for lunch and made sure that he saw me wearing the Zara jacket. I waited for him at the restaurant with anticipation - was he gonna let foolish pride deprive him of the warmth that the wonderful piece of black apparel in fleece would afford?

When I saw him walk into the restaurant, I was so happy. He wasn´t wearing the Zara jacket. As soon as he sat down, he bitched about how cold it was outside.

Ah, the contest of wills continues: Philippines - 1 India - 0.

Tamis ng Unang Halik

So, everyone´s been telling me to check out this restaurant called Les Quinzes Nyts in Plaça Reial. This place is supposed to be the most popular in Plaça Reial or even the whole of Barcelona because of its mix of good food and inexpensive prices.

Last Friday, I and my usual Friday night dinner companions headed out to La Rambla to experience Les Quinzes Nyts. Its name is Catalan for The Fifteen Nights. I guess it comes from that fact that you have to wait that long to get a fucking table. I´m not kidding. We waited in line for over an hour outside at the plaça. Good thing it wasn´t very cold that night and I was more than comfortable wearing short sleeves.

I noticed since last week looking at the restaurant (the other Friday we ate at the restaurant next to Les Quinzes because we saw the line to get a table and we said a collective fuck it) that the majority of the staff looked like Filipino and I remembered that a colleague back in Manila said that she knows a Filipino waiter there. True enough the waitress who led us to our table at the second level was Filipina. Another Filipina waited on us the whole time. Her name´s Mylene and I got to shoot the breeze with her a bit everytime she´d serve our orders.

I asked her if she´s seen any Pinoy artistas who´ve been to Les Quinzes. She was happy to say that Tina Paner´s a regular there as it looks like that she now lives in Barcelona. Tina Paner? How can she even recognize Tina Paner now? It´s been a good fifteen years since "That´s Entertainment" went off the air. I´m wondering if that´s the easy way to get a table at Les Quinzes, that is, by telling all the Pinoy waitresses there that I am an alumnus of That´s. Para quatro, por favor. ¿Que, una hora? ¿Tenemos que esperar una hora? ¡Pero soy Smokey Manaloto de la Jueves edicion de That´s Entertainment!

I also had lunch at Ba Ba Reeba along Passeig de Gracia last Saturday. The maitre d´ looked vaguely Filipina and I was only confirmed that she was when I overheard her talk to another Filipina waitress. Our table was near the bar and that section of the restaurant was where the appetizers were being prepared. I saw a guy wearing a chef´s outfit there who was surely Pinoy too. He gave me a nod when he saw me looking at him.

I had rabbit for the first time in my life. It was grilled and was surprised to discover that the meat wasn´t gamy at all. It tasted exactly like chicken. If you´re ever bullshitting a girl and making grand claims of the exotic things you´ve eaten your whole life, tell her you´ve eaten rabbit in Spain because, believe me, if you´ve had chicken, you´ve had rabbit - just embellish on the Spain part (here, rabbit meat is next to chicken and pork at the supermarket).

When we got up to leave I gave the Pinoy chef one of those stupid one finger salutes which implied, "Hindi ka nagiisa." or "Pautang pagbalik ko rito ha?". He smiled and said, "Adeu" which is the traditional Catalan way of saying goodbye. Wait a minute, I thought. Why didn´t he say the traditional Filipino way of saying farewell which is "Ba-bay." Didn´t he think I was Filipino too and that was the reason why I was looking at him? Or did he think I was actually checking him out? What the fuck?

It looks like that the food service industry has fully embraced the Filipinos here in Barcelona. And that could be a source of pride in its own inimitable way. When we were at Les Quinzes, my Singaporean colleague said that he was wondering why he hasn´t seen a Filipino restaurant anywhere here. He´s been to restaurants serving Thai, Indian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Chinese food but no Filipino. Well, I said with a mixture of hubris and condescension, "Dude, you´re in one right now."

Requiem for a Dream

I´ll include director Darren´s Aranofsky´s "Requiem for a Dream" with movies like "Mystic River" and "21 Grams" under the category "Movies That Make Me Feel Like Shooting Myself After Watching." It is as heavy as the feeling you get when you break your mother´s heart – which happens to be one of the movie´s subthemes. The main theme is about addiction and its damaging and irreparable effects on the physical as well as the mental condition.

Jared Leto plays a heroin junkie named Harry Goldfarb. His bestfriend Tyrone C. Love (Marlon Wayans playing it serious) and girlfriend Marion Silver (a pre-Oscar winning Jennifer Connelly) are likewise hooked on scag. The other main character is Harry´s mother Sara (an absolutely brilliant and Oscar-nominated Ellen Burstyn in the role of a lifetime) who also becomes an addict in the course of the movie when she unknowingly takes speed prescribed by her doctor because she wants to lose weight.

There are no plot twists nor grand themes in this movie. It just shows in a brutal fashion the effects and the wages of addiction from different points of view but with the same pathetic outcome: the loser son who loses an arm, his mother and beautiful girlfriend; the black man who loses his liberty; the girlfriend who loses her dignity by turning to prostitution, and the mother who loses her sanity.

Aranofsky has made a movie that I actually sat through (unlike Pi which I thought I´d like with all the hype it created but I ended up being bored when I watched it) and which remains with me still after watching it. I can´t seem to forget about the film´s characters because each of the four actors have given a haunting performance. They totally nailed the requirements of the role that I had the sneaking suspicion that these actors themselves have had intimate or even autobiographical knowledge on what it´s like to be a junkie.

Oh, there´s also a scene with Jennifer Connelly without any pants on - just in case you´re addicted to that sorta thing.

Jessie´s Supremacy

I bought a DVD player here because if I didn´t, I´d go fucking nuts. My apartment doesn´t have cable and so I´m limited to whatever the local channels can offer. This means that all the programs they show on TV are all in either Spanish or Catalan.

My comprehension of Spanish has gotten a little better in the one and a half months I´ve been here. I can now say that I understand about 70% of what I watch on TV. One of the local channels show “The OC” here and I´m a bit updated on what´s been happening with the Newport gang. Although, I have to pay special attention to what they´re saying because I´ll fucking miss something even if I just blink. Can you believe that? I´m probably the only person on the planet who has to focus on an episode of “The OC” and kill valuable brain cells trying to understand what´s going on.

My spoken Spanish is not as good as my comprehension. I ´m still having trouble with putting words together but I try not worry so much about grammar. What the fuck? I´m not here to negotiate a peace treaty with Portugal right? The locals tell me my accent is quite good though. Yesterday I first asked a cop if he spoke English before asking him for directions, he said that he didn´t speak English but my Spanish was pretty damn good. When I was buying a ticket to a museum, the old guy in the booth (the taquilla – no, you can´t buy liquor from there, believe me, I´ve made several attempts to inquire) asked me whether I wanted the map in Spanish or English. I said English and he said he thought that I spoke Spanish because of accent.

My Catalan´s a little better than my German but I don´t speak German at all because, really, who in their right frame of mind would actually take the time to learn to speak either?

Anyways, I digress.

I wanted to write about the pirated DVD of “The Bourne Supremacy” which I saw recently. (Another aside: There are pirated DVDs here in Barcelona being sold by Africans on the sidewalks. However, they´re not a ubiquitous as they are (sniff, sniff) back home. A pirated DVD here will set you back EUR5. That´s PHP345!) I just borrowed it from one of the other foreigners whom I work with.

The movie itself was pretty good but I kinda liked the first one directed by Doug Liman (one of the producers of “The OC”) better. Why? All of the action scenes in the movie seemed to have been shot while the director of photography was having an epileptic seizure while filming with a handheld camera. Every time, he was also atop a limping elephant with a left hindleg ravaged by polio. Oh, and there were also earthquakes going on with a magnitude 8.3 on the Reichter Scale. Basically, I fucking abhor fast, jerky, choppy COPS-style cinematography because I CAN´T SEE ANYTHING. And I´m watching a movie bootlegged out of a cinema.

I digressed again. Here´s what I wanted to point out all along. It just amused me so much that the pirated DVD of “The Bourne Supremacy” had one bonus feature. No, it wasn´t the usual trailer of the movie YOU ARE ALREADY GOING TO WATCH. It was the video to Rick Springfield´s breakthrough hit “Jessie´s Girl.”

I´m not even gonna begin to explain what “Jessie´s Girl” had anything to do with “The Bourne Supremacy” but it made me miss Asia - the mystical land of pirates who are still big fans of Rick Springfield and who´ll tag on his videos to bootleg DVDs in an insidious and unsolicited (I´m guessing here) plot to revive his career.

Tidbits

I still can´t get over the fact that people here in Barcelona stop me on the street to ask for directions. It´s happened about four times already. One time, this guy asked me if he was headed in the right way going to Balmes St. I knew that there was a short-cut he could take if he just turned around and went straight through Princemp de Asturia Ave. instead but I didn´t know how to say, “Turn around and go straight through Princemp de Asturia Ave. instead,” in Spanish. So I ended up saying, “Si, todo recto esta Mitre para llegar a Balmes,” because, well, I knew how to say, “Si, todo recto esta Mitre para llegar a Balmes,” eventhough it would take twice as long to get there. I remember thinking if you´re Spanish and you ask an Asian guy for directions, then you´re more lost than you think, amigo.

I was riding the subway on my way to the Picasso Museum recently (I never miss the chance to get in for free during the first Sunday of every month) and I found myself standing next to this very beautiful woman. She had long blonde tresses, sparkling blue eyes, an aquiline nose, a cleft chin, and the body of someone who´s never had cheesecake all her life. She also had on the uniform of the company which operates the subway line. I remember thinking, dude, this vision of ethereal beauty and absolute perfection beside me works for the subway. I imagined talking to her and offering her the golden opportunity to go the Philippines, be her svengali, and make her rich starring in movies with Aga Muhlach and endorsing Dari Crème margarine. When I broke out of my reverie of her holding a FAMAS award, she had already gotten down from the train and out of my life. Mierda.

Our Spanish language teacher named Daniel is the nicest guy in the world. He´s fucking brilliant when it comes to European languages. He said he was born in Berne, Switzerland and his mom´s Catalan. And because of his upbringing and family background, he speaks Spanish, Catalan, German, Italian, and French fluently. So fluently in fact that he can teach a course for each language. One time, he asked all of us foreigners in the class how we say hello in our native tongues. For the life of me, I couldn´t think of the Filipino word for hello because I always say either hi or hello when the occasion called for it. When my turn came up, I just said, “Tang na mo.” Daniel repeated it, “Tang na mo? Am I saying it correctly?” I said yes and he wrote it down on his notebook along with the other hellos of various languages. I remember thinking, dude, his white Swiss Spanish-speaking ass is in for a surprise if he ever finds himself answering the telephone in the Philippines.

I saw my first clean car here in Barcelona today on the way to a restaurant for lunch. People here take care of their cars like they do about armpit hair – they just don´t give a shit about either – even the women. I remember thinking that it was a 2003 BMW 5-series station wagon.

Brad Pitt

Apparently, I´m Brad Pitt around these parts.

Last Friday, we went to this bar which was frequented by the locals (specifically pijos – rich kids) called Lincoln Bar. What has the 16th president of the US have to do with a dive in Barcelona? Is the bartender wearing a stovepipe hat and looks a lot like John Kerry who in turn looks a lot like Honest Abe? It´s called that because the Lincoln Bar is located on a street called Carrer de Lincoln. The discoteca Otto Zutz is also there and is actually next to the Lincoln Bar.. My friend who was in Barcelona in January said that Ottro Zutz is “the McDo” of discotecas – meaning it´s always packed. Well, Otto Zutz was really our destination last Friday night (or early Saturday morning, technically) but it was being its old McDo-self again as it was packed and the Lincoln Bar looked rather more inviting for a nightcap.

When I walked in, the place didn´t seem promising at first. It was small and crowded. The music playing was this generic Brother-Louis-Louis-type-Eurodisco-Aren´t-the-Eighties-Over? song that I hear everywhere here.

My American (who else?) colleague goes to the bar to get drinks. I follow to help and then there´s a tap on my shoulder. I looked around and there are these two gorgeous Spanish chicks. I couldn´t believe it. I thought I stepped on one of them or something and was prepared to say sorry in Spanish.

The tall blonde asked me what the time was. I just stare at her in disbelief and finally got what she was asking. I looked at my watch but for some reason had a lot of trouble saying “Ala una y media.” When blondie saw me struggling, she took my hand where the watch was and looked for herself.

Then, I think, both of them asked what was in the backpack I had with me. I told them it´s a secret and they just nodded to that.

Blondie asked me next where I was from. I was wondering if they actually knew where or what the Philipines was.

She started guessing.

“Chino?”

“No.”

“Japon?”

“No.”

“Filipino?”

I couldn´t believe. Blondie guessed it right.

I just blurted out, “Si!,” followed by, “Muy bien!” Where I was trying to say that she did a good job in guessing and not that it´s very good that I come from the Philippines. Well, it is very good that I´m Filipino but in the whole context of her trying to guess and…oh...nevermind.

They asked me in halting English what I was doing here in Barcelona. Was I a student here? Was this the reason for my backpack?

I dunno why they were so obsessed with my backpack but it was my ticket into meeting these Spanish chicas and that was very good.

I told them I was working here and then told them my name.

Both they´re faces lit up because I share my name with a famous American singer.

Blondie´s just so happy about this that she gives me the double beso. The other chick just shook my hand and wasn´t speaking much – she just waited for Blondie to talk and would then repeat what she said.

Blondie calls over the other girls and starts introducing me. All of them give me the double beso. I love this country!

One girl comes out from nowhere and gives me a kiss! Just because she saw me talking to all her friends and making beso to them.

Blondie´s dancing at this point and asked me to do the same. The same Eurodisco groove but female voice singing in Spanish this time.

I can´t dance for shit and my backpack behind me (where else can it be?) isn´t making me look any cooler.

Blondie tells me, “Dance! You´re ________!” (insert name of the singer with the same name as I do)

She then starts unbuttoning my shirt. Blondie´s screaming in Spanish over the beat, “Take your shirt off! Your´re ________!” The other girl repeats it but the sequence is reversed, “You´re _________! Take your shirt off!”

Well, the moment passed. I lost my Spanish chicas somehow. Some more people were coming in because it was already two in the morning and this is apparently the designated time for the hardcore partygoers to start having fun.

Plus my Spanish was as bad as their English. I couldn´t hold any conversation lasting longer than thirty seconds. I´m taking Spanish lessons twice a week with the other foreigners involved with the project and it´s just pathetic that after a month, I still can´t have a conversation in the language - eventhough it´s just bullshit with some girls at a bar.

Anyway, today´s Friday again. What does crazy Barcelona have in store for Brad Pitt tonight?