In Other News
Mar. 13th, 2008 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaAlso, I have been off work ill for most of this week and I'm getting bored of being ill now. This is probably a good sign, mind. I went in yesterday and pottered around with Omron heater controllers and their tiny add-in circuit boards which is always pleasing, but then I wasn't in a fit state again this morning, and this may have been due to talking too much and generally overdoing it yesterday in the cause of trying to find myself a new place to live. The whole idea with finding two rooms in one place looks pretty implausible from the current housing market so I've been trying to concentrate on finding somewhere usable for me, because let's face it, even living in the same hemisphere as Chris would be an improvement right now so somewhere in the same part of London should be entertaining enough to be going on with. And going to Barcelona and the being ill really haven't helped with the search, although I think I've dredged everything plausible from moveflat anyway, but nontheless I've not exactly been stacking up the viewings and thus I felt a bit daft when I went to see a place last night and they asked me if I've been seeing lots of places and if I was going anywhere else tonight and I felt I had to fluff a bit or at any rate not say 'actually this is the only place I've put the arranging effort in to go and see yet because the description sounds so exactly like what I'm looking for, and I'm a relentless optimist' and, well, I shouldn't say any more til I hear if they want me or not - there were a couple of other people had viewed it and they're supposed to be letting me know today and I'm all impatient again.
Also also, today it's struck me again that I'm missing being in a band. Partly the physical process of playing, making music, the physical experience of playing the drums and the like - I found myself pointed at a post on Stephen Fry's blog today about how much he fears and loathes dancing, and I felt quite sorry for the poor lad; I find it very satisfying to be moving around to music, flexing and gyrating and all these other things he records with faint horror, and I find it even more satisfying to be putting in physical effort that makes the music, to be enjoying hitting the beat with your dancing because your dancing *is making* the beat. And partly the interpersonal aspect - you know the thing where rock stars' girlfriends or wives get jealous of the band and start interfering? The only thing that astonishes me about that is that some people might not have got the idea that a band is a relationship, and in many bands quite a close, personal and interestingly-functioning one, all band-slash aside. I'm missing that, I'm missing being someone's straight man, I'm no good at the wild creativity side but I'm missing the people who've done that for me and being the one who gets to try and direct it into something useful. I've answered a few ads with initially promising results that have turned out not to be what I'm looking for again, it seems. Waaa.
Also also also also also, I have been to Barcelona with Jon. Some bits went better than others but all of it was interesting. It was cold and windy, although mostly also sunny, but Catalonia has a lovely landscape, based around sharp hills with unexpected little verdant plateaus, steep-sided valleys covered in pine trees and holm oaks, wide river beds that are mostly empty but which must be fiendish when they flash-flood, and a style of building that hasn't gone out of fashion for a thousand years; it's stone walls and red half-cylinder roof tiles all the way, unless Gaudi's got hold of it, in which case it's exuberantly organic and appealingly literal. I drove on the wrong side of the road and this all worked well enough, although I wouldn't claim to be an expert on how the Barcelonian traffic system works, still. I was particularly flummoxed by the toll gates on the motorway out towards Girona. At the first set of booths we got to I had to pay, and that seemed pretty normal, and then at the second set a few kilometres further on I couldn't work out what to do, and none of the booths were manned to be able to ask. There were no prices up, and nowhere obvious to put money in. There was a woman wandering round with a hi-vis coat and a walkie-talkie and when I found her and sounded bemused at her she looked resigned at me and punched something in the back of one of the machines and handed me a ticket and the gates went up and off I drove, not really any the wiser as to what I was supposed to have done. Was this some sort of special pass for idiots? When we got off the motorway halfway to Girona to go to Jon's half-sister's place (which is ace, and has woodstoves and chickens and guard ducks and a donkey and steep, steep tracks and cool kids and palm trees and just, ace stuff) there were more booths, with people, so I handed over the ticket and they charged me money and that one I could work out. It turns out, for any of you considering driving in that vicinity, that the first set of gates is just a €1.30 tax for leaving Barcelona, and the second set is the start of the tolled motorway, so all they want to do there is give you an entry point ticket, which you then hand in as you leave to show how far you went and therefore how much you need charging, rather like a timed car-park. What caught me out, of course, was the second set of gates being where they were trying to give me something. Toll booths are surely for taking things off you, not giving you them, right? So anyway the car was a dinky little Lancia Ypsilon of the wheel-at-each-corner school and this turned out to be useful for the amount of driving up little twisty lanes and over rough surfaces we did, especially its excellent turning circle when trying to escape from what we'd thought was a petrol place but was actually a car wash back in Barcelona, and it allowed us to visit many small outlying bits of landscape and find medieval buildings in them, which Jon took lots of photos of, although we didn't manage to find a way up to the castle at Gurb, which lurks on a particularly steep hill some way from what the road system signs think Gurb is these days, which is a modern set of housing developments on the outskirts of Vic. We also went to some city centres and saw the medieval buildings which are still being used in them, Girona and Vic and Barcelona, although we mostly failed at finding nightlife anywhere, having to resort to driving to a 24 hour service area on the motorway (getting lost is research, see) to find any take-out beer after 9pm in Vic. And Barcelona has Roman ruins under it, well preserved and presented as the basement floor of the city museum, complete with button labels in the lift that takes you down there of Barcelona for the ground floor and Barcino (the Roman city name) for the basement. Even trudging round allotments in the rain was informative; on the last day we went to Besalu, and there were allotments outside the city walls, and they have a complicated system of covered irrigation channels that trap and distribute rainwater in a way that's been used locally since years had three numbers in and Jon bustled about taking pictures of those too, for use in teaching.
The single most important thing to remember about Barcelona is that it's in Catalonia and Catalonia is Not Spain. The yellow and red multi-striped flags, stickers, graffiti and suchlike will remind you of this any time you're in danger of forgetting. Catalan is a language more directly arrived at from working Latin than Spanish and has a little more in common with French; 'please' is 'si us plau' not 'por favor', so even the basics will give you away. Catalan is very efficient as a language, I'm told, generally leaving out the long endings and frilly structures of Castilian Spanish; even the word for 'one' manages to be uniquely short, being 'u'. My favourite Catalan phrase of the whole trip is 'bikini amb ou ferrat', and as long as you aren't veggie this is an important phrase that will serve you well. A bikini, in Catalonia, is a cheese and ham toastie, not an item of beachwear, and an ou is an egg and ferrat is fried, in practical terms, although given that an ironmonger's is a ferreteria, I suspect it means something more like ironed, but ferrating an ou will join spiegeling an eier as a satisfying way to describe frying an egg anyway. And the one I had in a little caff off the Placa Mayor in Vic was well tasty too.
Good grief, I must be feeling better, or else the aspirin's worn off again and I'm raving.
Also also, today it's struck me again that I'm missing being in a band. Partly the physical process of playing, making music, the physical experience of playing the drums and the like - I found myself pointed at a post on Stephen Fry's blog today about how much he fears and loathes dancing, and I felt quite sorry for the poor lad; I find it very satisfying to be moving around to music, flexing and gyrating and all these other things he records with faint horror, and I find it even more satisfying to be putting in physical effort that makes the music, to be enjoying hitting the beat with your dancing because your dancing *is making* the beat. And partly the interpersonal aspect - you know the thing where rock stars' girlfriends or wives get jealous of the band and start interfering? The only thing that astonishes me about that is that some people might not have got the idea that a band is a relationship, and in many bands quite a close, personal and interestingly-functioning one, all band-slash aside. I'm missing that, I'm missing being someone's straight man, I'm no good at the wild creativity side but I'm missing the people who've done that for me and being the one who gets to try and direct it into something useful. I've answered a few ads with initially promising results that have turned out not to be what I'm looking for again, it seems. Waaa.
Also also also also also, I have been to Barcelona with Jon. Some bits went better than others but all of it was interesting. It was cold and windy, although mostly also sunny, but Catalonia has a lovely landscape, based around sharp hills with unexpected little verdant plateaus, steep-sided valleys covered in pine trees and holm oaks, wide river beds that are mostly empty but which must be fiendish when they flash-flood, and a style of building that hasn't gone out of fashion for a thousand years; it's stone walls and red half-cylinder roof tiles all the way, unless Gaudi's got hold of it, in which case it's exuberantly organic and appealingly literal. I drove on the wrong side of the road and this all worked well enough, although I wouldn't claim to be an expert on how the Barcelonian traffic system works, still. I was particularly flummoxed by the toll gates on the motorway out towards Girona. At the first set of booths we got to I had to pay, and that seemed pretty normal, and then at the second set a few kilometres further on I couldn't work out what to do, and none of the booths were manned to be able to ask. There were no prices up, and nowhere obvious to put money in. There was a woman wandering round with a hi-vis coat and a walkie-talkie and when I found her and sounded bemused at her she looked resigned at me and punched something in the back of one of the machines and handed me a ticket and the gates went up and off I drove, not really any the wiser as to what I was supposed to have done. Was this some sort of special pass for idiots? When we got off the motorway halfway to Girona to go to Jon's half-sister's place (which is ace, and has woodstoves and chickens and guard ducks and a donkey and steep, steep tracks and cool kids and palm trees and just, ace stuff) there were more booths, with people, so I handed over the ticket and they charged me money and that one I could work out. It turns out, for any of you considering driving in that vicinity, that the first set of gates is just a €1.30 tax for leaving Barcelona, and the second set is the start of the tolled motorway, so all they want to do there is give you an entry point ticket, which you then hand in as you leave to show how far you went and therefore how much you need charging, rather like a timed car-park. What caught me out, of course, was the second set of gates being where they were trying to give me something. Toll booths are surely for taking things off you, not giving you them, right? So anyway the car was a dinky little Lancia Ypsilon of the wheel-at-each-corner school and this turned out to be useful for the amount of driving up little twisty lanes and over rough surfaces we did, especially its excellent turning circle when trying to escape from what we'd thought was a petrol place but was actually a car wash back in Barcelona, and it allowed us to visit many small outlying bits of landscape and find medieval buildings in them, which Jon took lots of photos of, although we didn't manage to find a way up to the castle at Gurb, which lurks on a particularly steep hill some way from what the road system signs think Gurb is these days, which is a modern set of housing developments on the outskirts of Vic. We also went to some city centres and saw the medieval buildings which are still being used in them, Girona and Vic and Barcelona, although we mostly failed at finding nightlife anywhere, having to resort to driving to a 24 hour service area on the motorway (getting lost is research, see) to find any take-out beer after 9pm in Vic. And Barcelona has Roman ruins under it, well preserved and presented as the basement floor of the city museum, complete with button labels in the lift that takes you down there of Barcelona for the ground floor and Barcino (the Roman city name) for the basement. Even trudging round allotments in the rain was informative; on the last day we went to Besalu, and there were allotments outside the city walls, and they have a complicated system of covered irrigation channels that trap and distribute rainwater in a way that's been used locally since years had three numbers in and Jon bustled about taking pictures of those too, for use in teaching.
The single most important thing to remember about Barcelona is that it's in Catalonia and Catalonia is Not Spain. The yellow and red multi-striped flags, stickers, graffiti and suchlike will remind you of this any time you're in danger of forgetting. Catalan is a language more directly arrived at from working Latin than Spanish and has a little more in common with French; 'please' is 'si us plau' not 'por favor', so even the basics will give you away. Catalan is very efficient as a language, I'm told, generally leaving out the long endings and frilly structures of Castilian Spanish; even the word for 'one' manages to be uniquely short, being 'u'. My favourite Catalan phrase of the whole trip is 'bikini amb ou ferrat', and as long as you aren't veggie this is an important phrase that will serve you well. A bikini, in Catalonia, is a cheese and ham toastie, not an item of beachwear, and an ou is an egg and ferrat is fried, in practical terms, although given that an ironmonger's is a ferreteria, I suspect it means something more like ironed, but ferrating an ou will join spiegeling an eier as a satisfying way to describe frying an egg anyway. And the one I had in a little caff off the Placa Mayor in Vic was well tasty too.
Good grief, I must be feeling better, or else the aspirin's worn off again and I'm raving.
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oooh
Date: 2008-03-13 07:08 pm (UTC)myspace post here ().
she's also playing her first ever london gig on sunday, at the Queen Boadicea (http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/29/29559/Queen_Boadicea/Clerkenwell) in islington, (likely just her playing guitar and singing). i'm going then hopefully onto pub, if there's time. she sounds a bit like suzanne vega, maybe, well, you can hear for yourself. probably not quite your thing, and she's based in cambridge, but y'know, since you brought it up, and since she's just recorded an album and is touring more than ever before to try and put it out there (she got arts council funding for the recording session so part of the agreement is Doing Something afterwards i think). anyway there you go.
get well soon.
link got eaten
Date: 2008-03-13 07:32 pm (UTC)Re: oooh
Date: 2008-03-13 08:29 pm (UTC)I've no idea what I'm doing this weekend apart from panicking about housing and being grumpy about being ill. Tomorrow I was planning on going either to a ceilidh or to a metal club, but since their uniting fun aspect is getting to bounce around to music a lot and I'm currently finding walking upstairs quite challenging, I suspect I have to choose neither.
Re: oooh
Date: 2008-03-13 09:11 pm (UTC)i only vaguely remember Girona. we had a project site there in 2nd year. it was very sunny. um. the site was a sloped garden thing with an amazing old wall down one side, i don't think it was part of the city wall. i spent most of that project trying to capture the beautiful plantiness and sunniness and old-wall-iness of the site and not really grasping the whole aspect of being expected to propose architectural things.
Re: oooh
Date: 2008-03-14 01:28 am (UTC)[I dunno about the rest of the weekend, though.]
no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 09:46 am (UTC)1) I shouldn't drive whilst there
2) If I want a fried egg, it's a ferrated ou
Thanks for the tips!
no subject
Date: 2008-03-14 05:35 pm (UTC)