Viviendo en Barcelona

Not posted for ages time for a catch-up

Well it is indeed time for a catch-up. The summer blew by and here we are in December and it is almost two years since we came to live and work in Barcelona. Seems incredible but that is so. What will I remember most...

1. The sheer pleasure, frustration, excitement and delight of learning to speak and communicate in Spanish
2. The role and responsibility of a Head of Sales and my gratitude to GW for throwing yet another career curved ball at me and their confidence in my abilities
3. A sense of wonder, awe and humility about life and the world
4. Seeing Bobby Dylan with Pete, under the stars of the Pueblo Espanol
5. Sailing out of the Port Olympic

Barcelona Go Tournament

Tomorrow is the first day of the Barcelona Go Tournament and I am very excited... Its been a long while (well October actually) since I had the chance to sit down and play Go across a table with the edge that a tournament brings. I am hoping for 3-4 wins out of six games to give my European ranking a boost but we will see. It will also be interesting to spend a couple of days with other Go players of various nationalities. I think that at the moment there are only three Brits registered but I am sure it will be fun.

Too long a time...in the sun

Ok so there's the deal, its been far too long since I commented on this blog and as time goes by it becomes harder and harder to remember the things that I wanted to talk about. Its now been a year (7th Jan 2008) since I first arrived in Barcelona and decided to keep a record of thoughts and feelings as the time went by. Clearly somewhere around the middle of the year something happened...

Although it looks like I had nothing more to say, in fact the opposite was true, there was so much to say that the process of editing and selection became of overwhelming that torpor set in...ah well

The themes that affected me most in the past, language, culture and observation are still dominant but they have become over time simply part of life here and that makes them all far less egdy! (valiente o atrevido). However they still all impact on a day to day level.

One of the new themes is the difference between public and private spaces. After a year here, I have still to inside another Spanish or Catalan home. It appears that this is something that just does not happen and that the home is reserved for family and very close friends. The climate and the culture here mean that when you meet with people you find them in the street or a bar or a restaurant and that these are the places where you pass time with your friends. This is in complete contrast to the UK where we live in very private spaces - individual houses with often front and back gardens. Here people live in flats and apartments and so the public spaces - plaza's, parks and streets become an extension of that space. A kind of shared communal garden.

The result is that these places become genuinely 'public spaces' rather than the 'no-man's land' that they are in the UK. 

For example, cycling home at night I will often pedal through neighbourhoods where elderly people, couples with families and young people are all out on the street, on benches, chatting, snacking and just hanging out. The young people are like young people everywhere, obsessed with mobile phones and with faces full of metal, but there is no war between them and the jubliados. They share the space that they have always shared and they all value and protect it equally.

You only have to walk though Nottingham Market Square to feel this difference between a public space and a no-man's land and it is just one other reason why I love the life here.

OK Paul...random thought for the day...more blog to come...

Mmmmm, not blogging often enough and it makes the place go stale. Just been out of the office for a second quarterly meeting with the team. It was as it should be, some tough talking and some laughs but we have the opportunity to build the kind of successful business here that we all want to work in. Who is going to fuck it up...only we can do that and so we need to stick with the truth.

Language and language

Blimey it seems ages since I've made the time to sit down and have a go at blogging some thoughts. By the way the past post about the Grateful Dead was one of the reasons that I have not been writing. I've been lost in an absolute psychedelic wonderland of joy  and if you haven't yet followed the link (and you know who you are...then just do it!)

I digress the subject of this blog is language as one of the most common questions I get asked is: "How are you getitng on with the lingo?" Its a simple enough question but the answer is remarkably more profound. The question is really..."how are you getting on with re'programming your brain...." as that is what it comes down to. After years (over forty now since my last short trousered attempts at French and Latin) I am indeed re-programming my brain. Not only does my mouth have to find ways of making new sounds and build up the necessary neural and muscular connections, but my ears (brain) has to also learn new ways of interpreting patterns of sound and assign meaning to them within the rules and structure of a grammar. Its alll pretty mindbending...its daily...its frustrating...its enlightening...its...I don't have the words.

And that is part of the problem. As I found it is far easier (at this stage) for me to understand what is being said than to speak. The brain and its language centres have natural ways in which they can follow, jump ahead and anticipate what is being said to it. When we listen we don't have to hear and understand every single individual word, some kind of gestalt thing happens and we are able to simply extract meaning from what we hear.

Now look around you...go on take a couple of minutes to look around your desk, or your room, or wherever you are. Now start to name the obejcts...desk, pen, paper, book, chair, door, window floor...etc. Now think about the relationships...the pen is under the book which is on the table. 

Now imagine that you have no words to use to describe these objects or more realistically that the ones you currently use don't work anymore and you have to learn new ones. Start again and look around you...everything is new and has to be learned...and the relationships and the actions and the tenses...past, present and future for starters and that's without the imperative, indefinate past and the rest. All of this has to be learned...and although you can talk like a small child with parts of it, you need a lot more big words to sound proper grown up like wot the others are.

So there it is...its a scary, big exciting journey into another way of thinking...and it really is. You don't learn how to speak another language, you learn to think in a new way, to express thoughts, hopes, ideas, wishes and dreams in another way. To see a new poetry of expression with different rhymes sounds and all the time you learn.

And its hard, people have said to me that it must be easy to pick up the language living there. Well it is because you get continual feedback, but I still sit with word lists to be memorised and grammar books to study and texts to read and translate from english to spanish and from spanish to english and poco poco, cada dia it somehow starts to seep in and your brain responds and new neural pathways are formed and your mouth learns new shapes and patterns of breathing and your tongue no longer feels like a fat unruly serpent that refuses to obey...but easy it is not.

Its work, hard work, long work but liek all work it leaves a glow inside.

Hasta pronto

Rings on her fingers and bells on her shoes...

After the jazz, I have once again found my muse in the endless rock, folk, blues, jazz, space... groove of the Grateful Dead.

Without a TV (or with only a TV in Spanish) the web becomes a highly focussed source of entertainment and information. A couple of weeks ago I came across this site and have been there every day since for another show.

Grateful Dead Streams and Downloads

Its an endless source of really high quality audience and soundboards from the early 60's Acid Tests right through to the last ever gigs. Its great to type in a venue - like Wembley or the Ally Pally - and there are the shows. Relive those old memories or discover new grooves. I'm currently running through an almost endless series of 69/70 'Dark Stars' together with the full on romp through 'St Steven' and the 'Eleven'  but its all there for the listenng. Long strange trip indeed!

Churros y Chocolate

Mmmm much more of a photo op than a blog, but here goes... Last Thursday we went to Madrid in a combination of work and play. Linda had to meet with her students and I had to make a visit to all of the GW stores in the city.

After a busy Friday, zipping round the city on a borrowed Brompton, our Saturday morning chill-out was to go to Madrid's most famous 'Chocolateria' for breakfast where you can eat 'churros y chocolate' You might well wonder what this combination is, but first of all let me set the scene... Imagine a set from a 1930's Hollywood film noir, all gilt and mirrors with marble topped tables.

Then add in waiters and staff all dressed in black tie serving at tables...and finally add churros (a sort of extruded, freshly fried doughnut but crispier on the ourside and not so cakey on the inside...) and chocolate (a deep brown hot, drinkable, liquid, that semi sets as it cools...) and you have the combination.

As you can see, the churro is dipped into the chocolate and then eaten as a delicacy, and washed down with a glass of water (in my case) or a rather sweet and woody smeeling spirit in the case of some of the other clients. Boy does it set you up for the day. Just an onother example of the compelling wonder of being a stranger in a strange land.

Anna and Henry's Autostop

Anna and Henry arrived in Bedar last night on route to Morocco, I say arrived as they got stranded in Murcia and so we arranged to meet in the car park at Ikea at 10.30pm. They are in good shape and although tired have had some fantastic adventures.

Putting yourself in the hands of strangers enables you to find the very best in people and they have had some of that as well as the highs and lows of life on the road. The lows after standing in one location for hours on end watching car after car drive past and the high when someone finally stops and you are once again on route.

They are going to hang out today and then tonight they get the midnight ferry over to Morocco...

¿How did I get here? - let the waters hold me down...

I’ve just had the weirdest experience…but at the same time it was clothed in the mundane and perhaps that was what fooled me.

 

Last night, I flew down from Barcelona to Almeria to spend a week on holiday in Bedar. Linda is in the UK at the moment, and so she is coming out with Sarah on Monday and Anna is going to meet us later in the week after her marathon hitch-hike to Morocco (...thank you all you sponsors)

So what was so weird about that…well is was both the process of arriving in Bedar not from the Nottingham, but from Barcelona and also the reality of THIS. What’s this? Well to be honest, the past three months have gone very, very quickly.

 

I first flew out on the 7th Jan and then spent the rest of the month commuting back and forth as we sorted out the house, life, everything.

 

Linda and I then flew together on the 7th Feb and lived for a month in a hotel and then we moved to the Gran Via on the first weekend in March. Its now the 12th April and so we've been in place and functional in Spain for ten weeks. For both of us its been pretty full-on, me with the work at GW, learning to comunicate in Spanish and navigating a whole new life situation and Linda the same (but without the problem with the Spanish - we'll talk about Catalan another time...)

 

So a large part of the weirdness is that the reality of what we are up to suddenly came home very powerfully when I flew down here last night. (…in part induced by the fact that it took only an hour in the air in a tiny jet - a lot less than Nottingham to London)

The title of this blog refers of course to that glorious commentary on life – Once in a Lifetime, by Talking Heads. But the conversation that Linda and I have had many times over the last few weeks as we look out over Barcelona, or cycle round the city on our Bromptons is “¿How did we get here…?”. Being such an obsessive planner (…what´s the plan lads?) Rob will particularly understand how odd it appears to be doing something that feels right, but which we didn’t really plan at all. Back in September I simply sat down for a cup of tea with Mark our CEO who asked whether I would consider moving to Spain for a couple of years to help out the business…and here we are. Everything…and I mean everything else simply fell into place. Linda’s work, the apartment (we only looked at one, how sloppy is that…but it is perfect!) the location, the girls being both at Uni, the list goes on and on but we planned none of it, it just all clicked into place.

 

And maybe that’s what´s weird…I have known all this…for weeks now…but have never quite felt it. Life, the work, living in the city all seems a bit strangely strange, but oddly normal, Flying down here from Barcelona, last night felt weird and now that I am here it is weird, but with a wonderful, exciting, glorious edge.

 

So how did I get here? “…and you may find yourself in another part of the word…watching the days go by, let the water hold me down…same as it ever was…same as was…same as it ever was…

The Gran Via

This is the Gran Via with the trees in their spring glory. I posted it here as when I put the picture into the photo album, I couldn't get it to pop to full size