Coffee on Friday
Thank God it’s Friday. I have a decent amount of work today and I’m feeling very tired, but the day isn’t that long in Spain… I’m out at 15h which is a reasonable time. I came to the office on my motorbike, actually for the first time I’m in Barcelona. I used to get here in metro and that’s what always happens when you use the metro too much, you lose any kind of orientation underground. On top of that I’m a computer engineer, I will look at a manual if there is absolutely no alternative. So I jumped on my bike this morning without checking a map… It would take me 20min max, it took me 45 : I visited the Sagrada Familia, avenida Gracia, and a couple more famous places in Barcelona, all by accident. But is was great fun, so I’ll try another route upcoming Monday. At the end I can’t get too lost, there’s the sea at one point, mountains on the other side and a river on a third side …
At the end, it’s almost weekend… I’m trying to recontact with my people in Belgium and it goes surprisingly good… I actually hope to get things done as soon as possible… it will hurt a lot to move away, but I’m afraid it has to be done… and as it has to be done, it can better be done now… waiting is as terrible as well…
Yesterday, after waking up way to early, I grabbed a Belgian newspaper to check out if we have a government or not in meantime. Spend about 2 hours looking for one, but none to be found… not too bad, in Belgium they do already 175 days looking for one. Lacking any progress on that front I decided to walk to the center of Barcelona and maybe spend some time on the beach, but after 40 minutes walking I was bored and restless and jumped on the bus. Another 40 minutes later, I was bored and restless of the bus as well (too many trafic lights) so I got of, almost at the beach and decided to walk a bit more myself. Only a few meters though… were I found a streetmusician playing the guitar… I stopped listening to what he had to say and it took me about a minute to realise he was actually doing a Dylan song… very nice version on top of it.. really Dylan style : it looked like he was losing his rythm all the time, and he was singing way wrong, but at the end everything fell into sync… absolutely unique. I sat down for a while to find myself very good and relax and after about 2 hours, the man was still ongoing with several versions of Dylan songs… I couldn’t have spend my sunday any better way, so I gave the change I had in my pocket to the man, and requested in meantime if he could sing me a song. Jokerman. the man smiled at me, told me he’d do the best he can but he didn’t know if he could take his voice that high… I never realised that Jokerman was that high to sing, but then again, I can’t sing at all. It took the man a couple of minutes to get into the song and find the right atmosphere, but once he had it, it sounded brilliant. I went away with a big smile on my face, there was nothing left to be done to make the afternoon better.