SISBN#342

Standarrd Issue Spanish Bureaucratic Nightmares are becoming so ubiquitious that they are now hilarious to me. I've decided to periodically document them for you. We'll start with # 342 for no good reason.

Monthly train-metro pass: so if you commute by public transport, it makes sense to get a monthly pass. In Spain like alot of places, this requires a special photo-id card. In Spain you also need a little paper ticket that is supposed to last a month. If the process were sensible you would go to a train or metro station, fill out your application, they would take your photo, charge you a small fee, and hand you your laminated card in about 5 minutes after it has cooled down form the machine.

So I went to the metro station. The guy told me that they do not issue these cards in the station, or any station. Instead you have to round up some things and go to a tobacco shop. First, nobody ever takes your photo, you have to round up your own passport photo. I have a really nice pasty sickly one, and for some reason i look really happy (and ill). And you are supposed to make 2 photocopies of your ID (this is familiar to me, everything requires two photocopies of everyhting. You will be told you have to go get copies of something even when there is a photocopier clearly visible behind the person). So I've already made 2 trips to get these things, then its time for the tobacco shop...which did not issue the train pass. Nor did the second one. Finally the third one did! They never asked for the photocopies i made a special effort to get, they just made up my card and gave me the ticket. Now, there must be a special reason this is done in a tobacco shop right, and in only specific ones? Like they have some special piece of equipment or a special computer database? No, its just a piece of cardboard with an adhesive cover that you use to attach the photo, it is assembled by hand in 5 minutes. Meanwhile in every metro station, there is a person sitting behind a window with nothing to do for the whole day, unless the turnstile malfunctions.

Prague: do I ever work?

the cosmographical clock, old town square

inside the ossuary at Kutna Hora, near Prague. creepy.

the view from the national museum toward old town.

Ted wants to know if I ever work. Yeah, when I feel like it. Nobody wants to read a blog about work do they?? ...."Today i revised the first half of the manuscript and developed the design for my experiment in december. I scanned the excel files for missing cells and converted the format for analysis"....LAME. I only write about fun stuff. So here is some pics from Prague and vicinity. Prague is the premier gothic city. I'll spare you the tiresome descriptions, theres a million cool things to see: the obligatory cathedral, numerous Dracula churches, random castle like towers at the end of every major street, the Charles bridge, the cosmographical clock, and on top of all that it is the city of Mucha and Kafka. Nearby is the somewhat dismal town of Kutna Hora which has an ossuary, where for centuries the remains of thousands of dead people have been arranged in a church interior: in four large pyramids, for example. There are skulls strung along the ceiling, like popcorn on a christmas tree. Theres even a crest of the family which owns the property that contains at least one of each bone in the human body. The place was a treasure chest of photo ops but i had a hard time getting pictures without flash-and flash is only good for ruining photos in my opinion. Alright, thats it for my vacation last month.

the grotto, a fake cave in a castle garden

random church facade, can't remember the name

The ossuary again, the cherub appears to have skulls radiating form his head

do what you gotta do

Alemania 2: Larry Bird lives on on the Berlin wall

Berlin was cool for its historical sights. Because it got bombed silly in 1945, theres not a ton of stuff to look at, it's just not beautiful anymore. I enjoyed the east side gallery, a remnant of the inner wall which was the site of an international mural project. Since then people have chipped away pieces of it and layers and layers of additional art and scrawling have been added. Definitely, the old art is completely compromised, but when the medium is a wall part of the piece is that it will change over time, heterogeneously and for both better and worse. I like Che in the Che T-shirt. We went to the holocost memorial, a grid of conrete blocks of various heights. You can walk among them. Curiously, the interpretive museum said it was unlike most such memorials in that the sculpture itself does not emply symbols. WTF? Each concrete block has the approximate dimensions of a grave. The blocks are tall in the center, in fact the whole monument has a shape reminiscent of a heap od mass-disposed corpses. When you stand in the middle they tower over you. Each block is gray and drab, implying anonymity. I forget thee number of slaps but it was some odd number that I'm quite sure was not chosen at random. No symbols my ass, I wonder what they meant by that.
We were sort of looking for Hitler's bunker, which is, we were told under a parking lot. In the place where we thought it should be there was a new building. The Bunker is quite close to the memorial, and also to the Brandenburg gate where Hitler put on some of his famous rock concert light show speeches. The gate is a significnt site to say the least. Napolean made a big show of marching into it, and Hitler made a big show of marching out of it. The arriving American troops also came into a bombed out wreckage city throught the damaged gate. it was stranded in the death strip between the two parallel walls for decades. now you can walk through it again. Also nearby is the parliament building with its recently added clear domed roof to replace the one destroyed by bombing so many years ago. As we left a group of 100 people in costumes sort of danced into a line on the lawn, playing loud techno music and mooned us. I think the government was the target but we got caught int he cross fire.

Cyrus

"Everyone benefits if we can leave our cars, walk, bicycle and access other transportation alternatives."- President Obama

Cyrus has spoken suckas! That's why I voted for the guy.

Alemania 1: learning how to eat

Several weeks ago we went on vacation. We had to “sleep” on the hard linoleum floor of the airport prior to our early morning flight because the metro doesn’t run at night, and a taxi would probably cost as much as the plane. In Europe, the kings of budget flights are Ryan air who seem to save you money but put you through all kinds of scams first. For example they fly to Frankfort-Hahn airport and call it Frankfort. It’s not. So we flew in almost sleepless, and commenced taking buses to Bonn, Germany. The plan was to meet up with Becky’s friend Liz in Bonn, at the house of their mutual friend Hagen and his girlfriend Lena. Hagen, Becky and Liz had all lived in a communal flop house in Michigan for stoners and skallawags. Someone asked Hagen his favorite memory from the house and it was some time he was so wasted that he didn’t remember it…he only knew the story from what other people said. So in other words he couldn’t remember his favorite memory. Good times. I call mine “the lost years”.

Neither of us had actually thought much about Germany, it was primarily the place where we would meet up with people and launch our journey to Czech, Hungary and beyond. It turned out to be really beautiful and we were catching it in full fall colors. By pure chance, our initiation was the Rhine valley which is dotted with castles and blanketed in deciduous forests, in addition to having nice cliff faces from time to time. I didn’t really know what Germany looked like…really nice actually. We ended up staying four or five days in Bonn because it was simple, easy, and a totally pleasant place to hang out. I had a vague and totally unfair image of Germans as being uptight and robotic and always one step away from attempting to take over the world (the true motive behind the European Union as you may know). They were not, not and not. Actually totally courteous and perhaps not outgoing, but friendly. All around a very civil society. And stuff was comparatively cheap there, which was a nice surprise when travelling Europe these days.

Hagen and Lena became our part time tour guides which was great. Hagen did display some funny German traits. For example, meticulous precision and a desire to control: we ate pasta one time and he said he liked the pickled cabbage with it. I promptly started mixing it into my pasta, when he clarified that the way to enjoy it is with the cabbage on the side, and perhaps mixing in a little with each bite. He was very clear that German bread should not be eaten with peanut butter. The barley bread was not to be toasted because all toasted bread tastes the same, and that would ruin the unique flavor of the barley bread. It was the most rigid, and amazingly specific eating regimen I have ever seen. Besides learning how to eat, we also went to Koln, which is nearby, to see the cathedral, the chocolate museum (never quite made it there) and have the local specialty beer style: Kolsch. As a brewer I have tried and failed to get my head around Kolsch, first it is fermented warm like an ale, then it is lagered. So it starts like a steam and finishes as a typical light lager. It is served in really small glasses dismayingly reminiscent of the Spanish cana. The KEY difference is that there is a dude walking around who takes note of whether you have finished your beer. Unless you place a coaster over the top, the default is that you want another, and it arrives in seconds. To be honest I thought the light German lagers were about as lame as the American counterparts. But I was enjoying the BIG food…finally a place where people eat enough for an adult, instead of child-sized tapas reminiscent of cat food with an olive in it. Later I sampled some German dunkel beers which were generally damn good, the Weisse were good too, the best in the world if you are into that sort of thing (a little sweet for me but Becky likes them).

On one of our last days we all went to Berg Ells, a castle in a beautiful river valley. The castle came about gradually as a series of large houses with a shared inner courtyard and shared walls. The tour was the perfect level of information and interp, really pretty fascinating. You usually don’t think about how things like castles came about. In this case, according to their version, the castle belonged to a family which regulated the trade route, i.e. the river valley within which the castle seemed to be sort of a guard station. What they didn’t say, but is likely to be true, is that traders had 3 choices: 1) travel really slowly over roadless hills and forests, 2) pay these people for safe passage, or 3)be killed trying to pass without paying. Repeat this cycle a few centuries and you have have a family rich enough to build a castle and still rich today after the collapse of 2 German empires.

Germany has a sort of web-based ride share board which is totally cheaper than the train. Any traveler should use this, but our first experience was pretty flipping insane. With our German translators’ help we arranged a ride to Berlin after a few days. Lena was given a description of the guy that sounded like a personal ad: SWM, 6’0’ sandy blond hair, slim & athletic, 30 years old, enjoys Nordic walking, seeks like-minded passengers to Berlin. So we were planning the ride to be Liz’s first date with this dude. The driver was a freaking maniac. He was in his 50’s and the first thing he did when I recognized him and tried to wave him down was nearly run me over. Really! The autobahn sounds really cool, but actually it is terrifying. If someone was driving too slow in front of him (less than 100 mph), he would pull up beside them, honk the horn and make sure they saw him flip them off. All of this was done on the autobahn at 100 mph or so…that’s right no eyes on the road just finger and angry face aimed at some haplessly same person who doesn’t want to drive that fast. He was a retired trucker than took a van load of people back and forth from time to time. The roadside gas stations had robot pay toilets which cleaned themselves after every use. I peed in the bushes instead, i don't pay to pee...but nobody told me about the robots before hand, that might have changed my mind. I might pay for robots. When we arrived in Berlin, the maniacal truck driver turned into a really friendly chatty guy, cheerily dropped us off at the hostel which was in his neighborhood and bid us goodnight. Schizophrenia.

Toledo....not in Ohio

These are a few pic's from Toledo. We were so disappointed when we got there that it wasn't Ohio. Actually it's a medieval walled city built up on a crag, which was occupied by Moors for a long time and reflects their architecture. It was also famous for sword-making. It's got one of many cool gothic cathedrals in Europe, which you can only see from a distance. This is because all buildings share walls and streets are just windy alleys which always smell like pee. So from half a kilometer away you may see the pointy spires. But unless you wander down the right alley you could never encounter the thing. It's a totally cool place to visit and is only a short 30 minute train from Madrid. I almost had a meltdown in the train station. We arrived in time for a train to Toledo, only to find out that the machines do not vend tickets for the high speed trains and you have to go to the ticket office which was a SISBN (Standard Issue Spanish Beaurocratic Nightmare). We actually had to take a number and wait the better part of an hour to purchase a ticket....as a train with empty seats left for Toledo. I felt that having a few more people manning the empty counters would have been a better expenditure of resources than the number dispenserr and digital paging system, but what do I know. We talked to a couple who had tried to get a train ticket to Toledo the day before and had just given up. But its ok we made it.

Anyways Toledo was a month ago, since then the guy I voted for and actually like really got elected. I thought it was the first time ever, but then I remembered that I voted to re-elect Clinton. I didn't really like Clinton, but the guy who ran against him was such a douche that I can't even remember his name. Some old white man. Douche. So that one doesn't count, because I was mostly voting against a douche rather than for somebody.

Turns out voting abroad is a total sham, to make you feel sort of OK like it matters. I got everything I was supposed to receive, and got it sent off. My problem is that the official receptacle for the ballot is an envelope which has both my name and my registered party on the outside. I thought the United States had a secret ballot system. What if the mail carrier is a racist? Or what if I live in a small town and he/she knows me and doesn't like me. Becky was way on the ball, and well in advance requested her absentee ballot. It turns out that her request was sent to the old address of the voting registrations department (or whatever the hell its called) which was changed. Seems pretty important to forward these things right, or notify people that the address changed right before the most anticipated election in decades?? She didn't discover the problem until it failed to show up, and then it was too late. What a load of shit. At least this time it wasn't very close. Maybe my vote counted, and Becky's didn't but in our respective states it didn't end up mattering.

I´m totally not dead!

no posts because no internet. no tengo internet.

!que mierda¡ ¡hijo de puta! ¡Joder!

i am living well enough however. my girlfriend has moved in, we comiserate about how rude madrileños are on the metro, we went to the medieval city of Toledo (really neato), and we went on vacation to germany and the czech republic. I think if I hadn´t already payed the extortion, i mean rent, I would have actually saved money compared to Madrid. I´m a little down on Madrid right now after seeing how civil Germans are (they wait for you to leave the train before barging in like the running of the bulls), how efficient things are (i really doubt it takes 2 months to get your internet installed in Germany) and how comparatively cheap life is (we stayed in what seemed like a swank luxury spacious apartment for rich yuppies, and found out the whole place cost only 40% more than what we pay for a room in an apartment with no living or dining room....and we routinely and easily found decent vegetarian meals for around 3 euro) . Maybe I should have gone to Germany? It was getting cold but the fall colors were amazing. Also my daily commute is making me exhausted all the time, it seems like all I do is work or travel to work. I underestimated this.....but the alternative was to stay in Mostoles which is plenty boring after 2 weeks or so. Can´t win. Becky is still on vacation in Budapest. I´ve got pics, keep checking in they´ll show up one of thes days. I´m coming to the states this winter, just bought the ticket. I fly on Xmas day to detroit with Becky, then at some undisclosed point I will come out west.

Oh yeah, i think prague might be the most beautiful city I´ve been to, you should go.