slowly collapse

I'm trying to make flan right now. Actually, since a friend texted me for a drink, I'm practicing to make flan right now, since I won't have time to cook it. I'm currently melting sugar for caramel. It didn't appear to be burning, but there was a very unpleasant burning smell, which I was a bit puzzled by. Turns out I didn't take the pan's label off the bottom, so I had waxed paper over a gas flame for about half an hour. Did I mention that my apartment has no smoke detector?

or I could install a hidden camera

My building's bike shed doesn't really have room for all the bikes, although I've only ever noticed one other bike being absent from the shed -- the one in prime position, directly opposite the door. I've now left my bike in that spot twice, when it was vacant. Both times, the following morning I discovered that my bike had been moved to the back of the shed. It's locked to itself, so it's a pain to move it, but apparently someone really likes that spot. I'm considering locking it to the bike rack and seeing what happens. I don't want to antagonize my neighbors for no reason, and it's possible that I'm just unaware of some etiquette as regards bike spaces, but it seems like a douchey move to pick up someone else's bike and move it because you think you're entitled to the best spot (unless you are, in fact, so entitled). Also, locking it might lead to an awesome passive-aggressive note.

seasonal

I haven't spent an autumn in a place that actually has autumn for 7 years. I'd forgotten that fallen leaves are pretty cool. Rotting fallen leaves, less so.

It's not racist if it's true

Readers of my dearly departed livejournal (hi Mom!), will recall that I wrote about being Indian in England, and how it was a little weird being the approximate equivalent of black in the U.S. Barcelona has a lot of South Asians, who seem to be apportioned among the jobs of restaurant owner, bodega owner, beer-seller, and drug dealer, at least in my sketchy neighborhood. I learned what that meant for me on my first night. I was with Jon Wolff and his friends in a locked park, and we found a set of keys by a statue, and then a plastic bag shoved into a crevice. We were joking about the meaning of the keys, and a very nice, fairly drunk Dutch girl said, "It's probably drugs. The Pakis hide their drugs all kinds of places." I didn't really have any desire to be offended, or to make a big deal out of it -- my first reaction to "Paki," as Rushdie says in Satanic Verses, is to think it's spelled "pachy," and associate it with elephants. But I was also uncomfortable, and my body language presumably showed it. We were in a group, so I hoped that the conversation would just move on, but Charlotte continued, in what I thought was an unaware fashion, but which turned out to be far too aware. "I mean, it is true, so many of them in Barcelona are drug dealers . . ." Beat. To me: "Where are you from, originally?" Why not, having put your foot in your mouth, just stop talking? Is it really necessary to then ask someone else, "did you notice how I put my foot in my mouth? Because I think you did, but I'm not totally positive." But Charlotte, if you ever read this, don't worry about it -- we're square. It was just funny.

Barcelona

Barcelona's a great city. European cities tend to have two things American cities don't have -- really narrow steets, and really wide boulevards. I like the former and dislike the latter, and sometimes I think that how much I like a city has to do with whether or not I'm in a narrow area or wide one. I was in a narrow one in Barcelona, hence, liked it. But, honestly, what's not to like. They have beaches, and pedestrian "ramblas," and very pretty architecture, some of which was not even designed by Gaudi. By the way, I assume this has been said before, but Pan's Labyrinth definitely has some Gaudi echoes in the design of the dream-world, although I'd have to see it again to confirm, and I'm not so sure I want to.

The weather's good too, and Barcelona is apparently all about being arty. I'm not, but it's cool with me if other people want to, so long as they don't spend a lot of time talking about it. In Barcelona, it was hard to tell the difference between shoe stores and art galleries, and even the graffiti adorning shop shutters looked pretty cool. They also have a walkway that basically seems to be an excuse to walk into the sea with cool lights


Apparently, Barcelona resurged after the Olympics, and did things like put sculptures up everywhere. One was a giant cat.

locked in

I spent Election Night in a Barcelona bar. After some wandering around, Meghan and I found our way to a bar that we'd seen before that promised to have election results until it was over -- a promise that turned out to be truer than I thought. We got there at 12:45 am, 6:45 pm EST, just time to settle in for the countdown to Indiana's poll closing. The crowd in the bar got steadily more American as the night wore on, which you had to expect, given that the first mildly interesting result, Pennsylvania, came in at 2:30 am, and Ohio was called near 3:30 am. The foreigners just didn't care enough. (Props to fellow post-doc, o-minimalist, and guy with a long last name, Serge Randriambololona, for staying up all night despite his being a Frenchy.)

Most bars in Barcelona close around 2 am, which I call a crock of shit, given the reputation the Spanish have of eating ham and occasionally embracing fascism partying late, but this bar stayed "open," in that it had a lock-in. The concept was quite literally foreign to me, since it's British, but it's apparently common there, and since the bar was, of course, Irish, they knew how to do. The wikipedia description is a bit sketchy, but basically accurate. The key point is that the solid metal shutters at the front of the bar were pulled down and locked. Thus, the bar looked (although it might not have sounded) closed, and the patrons couldn't get out without the owner unlocking the shutters. One more example, of course, of Europeans' flagrant disregard for fire safety. When Jon Wolff, who'd been having a grand old time at a bigger bar but with no TV view, came to our bar and called me, the owner very kindly let him and his one seven other friends in. I don't know your name, owner of the Quiet Man in Barcelona, but I salute you.

Right before 5 am, when CNN (the owner refused throughout the night to put Fox News on, for which I salute him again) had already called Ohio, I realized that, if they had called Pennsylvania right when the polls closed, they would also call California, Oregon, and Washington right when the polls closed, pushing Obama over 269. CNN's countdown was on the screen until the next poll closing, and I started a chant, which broke off at "3" when they put on the graphic for "CNN PROJECTION." Clever bastards, they knew the projection would take three seconds to queue up. Of course, everyone has that moment of the race actually being called for Obama, and this wasn't any different, despite it being at 5 am, locked in a Barcelona bar. It was amazing. No matter what Obama does over the next four years, that moment of elation will remain.

did they not have shirtwaists?

For an American, brought up in the tradition of fire drills, smoke detectors, and safety matches, the cavalier European attitude towards fire safety is a bit mystifying. No smoke detectors, no sprinkler systems, no fire escapes, and no law about always being able to exit a room -- front doors usually need a key to undo the deadbolt, so you can easily lock your pesky 7-year-old in the house to play with matches while you go off to work. When I brought this up, the astonishing claim was made that European houses are so old that fire safety isn't such a big deal -- they're made out of stone, so it's fine. I think that a history of plagues and other ravages so inured Europeans to catastrophic fires that they just don't care anymore. To be clear, I'm opposed to fire safety in the U.S. -- in college, I would stay in my dorm room while the deafening alarm system went off, just on principle -- but I didn't expect this to be the area where Europe didn't regulate squat.