The Avatar (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} saurik) wrote,@ 2004-04-05 12:35:00 |
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Barcelona Stinks... In the Literal "Sense"
(Local Time: 22:35.) Barcelona smells horrible. I'm quite serious. The entire city smells like a combination of cigarette smoke, car fumes, and shit (I'm not sure what from, but there _does_ tend to be a lot of it on the ground). You'll be walking down a side street and suddenly a gust of foul smelling wind will gush past you from an alley. It's quite horrible.
I ran across another Bob Marley infestation. This time in a store called "Indika Spliff": one of those "look at me, I'm all earth-friendly" stores (you know, with the incense and the thick weave handbags and such). They had Bob Marley drums and Bob Marley "cigarette papers".
I spent some time today looking through really old books at not one, not two, but three really-old-book stores. I found only a few books of any interesting. Two of them were in English: One of them was "Goldsmith's History of England", which was way too expensive for what it was (150 Euro). I think that particular store was a little crazy.
I liked the first store I had been to better, and ended up going back there as I hadn't been looking for long when they shut down for lunch. They had a book called "The Book of Days" (by Chambers), which looked _really_ cool and I was actually contemplating buying it. It was like 90 Euro, though. I just wrote down the title and author and decided I'd look it up online for other opinions of it.
It turns out that University of Wisconsin (Goguls university...) has the _entire thing_ online, so no need to buy that one ;). It's quite interesting. If you have some time to burn I recommend reading through parts of it. I actually think I've run into it before... probably while researching wedding rings for some reason (I actually ran into that section of the book while I was flipping through it and it seemed somewhat familiar).
The keyboard issues are getting _really_ confusing now. This Internet cafe only has two language settings installed for Windows: "Spanish (Traditional Sort)" and "English (British)". English (British) is the same horrible layout I was complaining about from the airport lounge at Hethro. So now my physical keyboard is Spanish, my mental layout is American, and the half-way approximation I've been stuck with is British. I think I've finally managed to randomly find most of the keys I could possibly need, *sigh*. (Ok, I take that back... I just needed a pipe and couldn't find it so I switched back to Spanish to type it.)
And it doesn't matter what your language setting is or what computer you connect from, Google does it's stupid language setting _based on IP_ so I need to start remembering to type "http://www.google.ca/", per Mika's suggestion, to get English. I keep forgetting so I've just been putting up with Spanish.
Most of the music I've heard here is in English. It reminds me of that funny video with the Japanese people bopping along in the car to the rap music, having no idea what's being said. The restaurant Mark and I went to on the first day was playing U2. The music playing at the Internet cafe as I am typing this paragraph is one of my favorites: Sting's Mad About You.
Ok, I think it's finally time for me to find some dinner :). (Spanish people eat late, so I was waiting for it to get a little later before going anywhere today. Yesterday, most of the few other few people at the restaurant at the same time I were other Americans or Brits.) Actually... damn... I just noticed as I put together my local timestamp thing for this entry that the entire Internet cafe is on London time for some reason. *Wonders if restaurants will even still be open, hehe.*
(Local Time: 22:35.) Barcelona smells horrible. I'm quite serious. The entire city smells like a combination of cigarette smoke, car fumes, and shit (I'm not sure what from, but there _does_ tend to be a lot of it on the ground). You'll be walking down a side street and suddenly a gust of foul smelling wind will gush past you from an alley. It's quite horrible.
I ran across another Bob Marley infestation. This time in a store called "Indika Spliff": one of those "look at me, I'm all earth-friendly" stores (you know, with the incense and the thick weave handbags and such). They had Bob Marley drums and Bob Marley "cigarette papers".
I spent some time today looking through really old books at not one, not two, but three really-old-book stores. I found only a few books of any interesting. Two of them were in English: One of them was "Goldsmith's History of England", which was way too expensive for what it was (150 Euro). I think that particular store was a little crazy.
I liked the first store I had been to better, and ended up going back there as I hadn't been looking for long when they shut down for lunch. They had a book called "The Book of Days" (by Chambers), which looked _really_ cool and I was actually contemplating buying it. It was like 90 Euro, though. I just wrote down the title and author and decided I'd look it up online for other opinions of it.
It turns out that University of Wisconsin (Goguls university...) has the _entire thing_ online, so no need to buy that one ;). It's quite interesting. If you have some time to burn I recommend reading through parts of it. I actually think I've run into it before... probably while researching wedding rings for some reason (I actually ran into that section of the book while I was flipping through it and it seemed somewhat familiar).
The keyboard issues are getting _really_ confusing now. This Internet cafe only has two language settings installed for Windows: "Spanish (Traditional Sort)" and "English (British)". English (British) is the same horrible layout I was complaining about from the airport lounge at Hethro. So now my physical keyboard is Spanish, my mental layout is American, and the half-way approximation I've been stuck with is British. I think I've finally managed to randomly find most of the keys I could possibly need, *sigh*. (Ok, I take that back... I just needed a pipe and couldn't find it so I switched back to Spanish to type it.)
And it doesn't matter what your language setting is or what computer you connect from, Google does it's stupid language setting _based on IP_ so I need to start remembering to type "http://www.google.ca/", per Mika's suggestion, to get English. I keep forgetting so I've just been putting up with Spanish.
Most of the music I've heard here is in English. It reminds me of that funny video with the Japanese people bopping along in the car to the rap music, having no idea what's being said. The restaurant Mark and I went to on the first day was playing U2. The music playing at the Internet cafe as I am typing this paragraph is one of my favorites: Sting's Mad About You.
Ok, I think it's finally time for me to find some dinner :). (Spanish people eat late, so I was waiting for it to get a little later before going anywhere today. Yesterday, most of the few other few people at the restaurant at the same time I were other Americans or Brits.) Actually... damn... I just noticed as I put together my local timestamp thing for this entry that the entire Internet cafe is on London time for some reason. *Wonders if restaurants will even still be open, hehe.*
