cordoba

So now I am in cordoba, in a rather pricy internet cafe, so i´ll offer only the highlights. From Barcalona we flew to Granada but we almost did not make it. My mom organized my whole trip and so she made all the bookings and what not. So we had a plane for 6 from Barca to Granada. We went to see Park Guell and the muisic museum. We went the the airport and were there at around 5. We were looking at the big board trying to find our flight and only after asking the information guy did we realize that what my mother thought was 6 was actually 6 and not 18. The plane had gone almost 12 hours before. We wanted to buy plane tickets for the day after but there was another flight that had been delayed for a couple hours. Waiting in line a guy from ryanair hear my mother talking romanian and decided to get us on that plane since he was Romanian. After about half an hour of back and forth we were finally through inspection.
We arrived in Granada in the middle of the Easter Parade there. Our hotel was right in the middle of the procession, on a hill. So we had to fight our way to get there. The day after my mother since childbirth had this desire to see Alhambra, the Moorsih court in the last Muslim stronghold on the iberian peninsula. So we cauually strolled up a mountain at noon hoping to get tickets. Despite the dire warnings of the voice from above in the ticket office we thought we were going to get tickets. We were in the credit card line and when were ready to pay for the tickets we realized we did not have a pin for any of our credit cards. So we went to the cash only line who´s tickets ran out before we could buy them.
We haded into town to walk around an look and the excessive amounts of Indian imports. By and by we realized that we would need more cash so we headed to a bank. All the banks in town were closed, actually all the banks are closed until Monday. So we had 50 euros cash a hotel cash only bill of 80 euros and no banks. I did not wnat to use my credit card so finally on the second day were were open to find an exchange house that gave us the very reasonable rate of 1.47...
The second day we finally made it to Alhambra albeit in the rain and waiting in line for another 2 hours at 7 in the morning. I must admit is was very worth it.
We next traveled to the rather sad city of Malaga and dipped our feet in the Mediterenian Sea.
Now we are in Corboba and headed for Saville tomorrow, Easter. Apperantly that is the place to be on Easter, after Rome of course.

I´ll write more when I have time and clean this up eventually, perhaps.

i hate tourists

almost as much as i will miss spell check by the end of this blog

i am in spain right now, in barcalona, in a hotel on their computer with my mom, i´m leaving for granada

the time on the computer is flying by and i´ve done the usual things and i´ve come to the realization, again, just how much time ui waste on the computer while at school

my mom on the other hand has come to the realization that the dollar no longer has the same repute it once did, and everything in soain is double than it is in the states

i hate tourists i absolutly cannot stand them, i hate being one, when i was in vienna i hate romanian tourists, now americans with their sneakers and ray bans and ugh, idk know why i bear them such contempt but it some how seems fitting

i have always loved the metro and i use it to guide me around the city, i hate having a map and thank god that i have a decen sense of direction otherwise i would not know where i am going

i love walking around the streets to see what people have on their balconies

i on the other hand hate going to the touristt destinations and looking at art, i like art but once in its in a museum its so stale that its not worth visiting, museums are mosuleums* for art

what else, they do have a nice fountain here which is a tourist destination to no end

it is a very beutiful city, it is defintly like the kind of place which iw ould like to live in when i am finally done with this whole education thing

i´ve made it through the first two esseys in my kant book... a whole 20 pages yes...

Been A While

Haven't updated this thing in a while, haven't had much to write.

I'm packing today and tomorrow I'm leaving for London with my mom. We are going to Spain until the 29th and after that I take off on myself. Tentatively Vienna, Amsterdam, Paris, Poland, Athens, Rome.

Maybe I'll write some more when I become bored of myself. All I'm bringing with me are some of Kant's writings his "practical philosophy." We shall see.

Churches and Libraries

When I was younger my family used to clean the church we attended. It was an eccentric looking church, it looked like a elongated Hershey Kiss. As my parents used to wash the bathrooms, mop the kitchen, vacuum the alter, my sister and I would play games amongst the pews. It was an Orthodox Church so it still had the alter which separated the priest from the congregation, like pre-Vat II Catholic Churches. When it was full there was a sense of awe. But because I was so familiar with it it lacked that sense of awe. That pew over there, yeah, that's where my sister hid last Thursday. But the alter still preserved its mystery, it was strange to see my mother go behind it, women aren't allowed behind it. I would not go behind it, well only on the rare occasions I was an alter boy. The church was small, it fit about 70 people more on Easter. The choir was my favorite part it had that sense of mystery the alter contained, but it was more accessible. All the music stands made it a place of mystery, I can remember going up there a couple of times and singing. I remember the church better than any of the houses we lived in during that period, there weren't many three. Funny really, I think I miss that church. I went back when I was home but it was locked. I didn't bother coming back for mass, I wasn't there for that, just for the church. I once slept in the church with a teen christian group, and I can remember the adult leader, Andy if I remember correctly, telling us that we should become aquatinted with the church that we should see it as the house of god and we should be comfortable there. I was already very comfortable with it. Of all the things I did in that church, I can never remember yelling. I am sure I did yell so as to be heard over the sound of the vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner was this old thing that was just one big pipe and you plugged it into holes in the floor. Despite my familiarity with the church it still demanded an air of respect. Now when I walk into churches I have the same respect, you never yell in a church. There is simply something about it that lends itself to contemplation no matter how commercial the church. At school they would take us to this church twice a year to sit and go to confession if we so desired. It was a Catholic church, ugly plain looking thing, damn you Zwingle. It wasn't able to inspire the same respect. I understand that a church is not a building, and that we, or rather Protestant Christians should not be tied to material things, but once you strip religion down to its pietistical core, you strip religion of what makes it beautiful, and all you have left is the bullshit mysticism. There is a lot of beauty in the tradition of the Orthodox and Catholic faith, its a shame that it is so nutty.
As I was exiting the library tonight I realized that even though only the librarian and I were left I whispered goodnight. Libraries inspire the same awe especially the older libraries. The modern looking libraries lack the same umph especially when they look like they were build by FLW. It would be nice if libraries eventually replaced churches as places of worship, where people would have to go one day a week and read something or their souls would burn in hell. It probably wouldn't work it would end up being one giant reading group examining the depth's of the latest Brownesque book. People have a way of ruining things, making them familiar, removing the mystery.

Clubbing

So I had three cigarets today, with the one I had that one time and the pack I had for New Year's that makes 24 since I quit, actually in all fairness 23 because I didn't finish that pack. As Tom Waits says in Cigarets and Coffee, the great thing about quitting smoking is that you can have one every now and than and not be a smoker. There is something about rainy nights in Oxford that simply demands one or three cigs. And stumbling back from a club early looks very ungracefully without a well positioned cig, and as the last thing in the world I would want to appear ungraceful.
Tonight was the first time I went to a club. I thought hey why not live a little want' the worst that could happen. I generally tend to avoid clubs, they contain two things I tend to avoid people and bad music played loudly. All the pubs in Oxford close by 12 and there is nothing to do for the overworked students but to express that stress through dance and drink. Escape, the aptly named club, is in the covered market. The covered market usually houses produce and at night provides a home for the "big issue" vendors. The club had two floors one dance floor and of course the necessary pole. The very white female dj choose only the best of songs, not that you could hear anything more than the melody, the rest of the song was comprised of rhythmic beats. After spending too much on drinks these soon to be overworked kids started getting in touch with their more primal nature and started moving rather awkwardly. It seems fitting that they express themselves so awkwardly because the a whole situation is rather awkward and lacks focus. The tango can be considered a dance because its message is very clear. Kids doing their own thing, not so much. It was hilarious but who am I to judge? All in all going to a club isn't quite as bad as I thought it would be.

Back Home

Is it strange that England and Oxford now feel like home?

There are so many more Americans here this term, they are easy to spot because they are in large groups waiting inconspicuously at bus stops. The frat colors also gives them away.

Something I found on the internet last night that I thought was interesting, well me and a million other people.

My Grandfather

My grandfather died 13 years ago yesterday. The more time passes the more I regret not getting to know him. He was the first in my more immediate family to die, so I guess the blow came a little harder but its been a while, but than again I never really knew him.

I visited his grave when I was in Romania. He was buried on a hillside. I wasn't sure exactly where he was buried, but I bought some orange flowers and walked to the grave. I realized that that was my first time ever having visited a grave. What flowers are appropriate? Orange? somehow they seemed strangely appropriate. I walked in the snow amongst the graves for an hour. Somebody there helped me look but he didn't find it either. As I was almost ready to give up on the last climb down I stumbled across it. I cleaned it off a bit though took the ld flowers to through out. I didn't have any candles or anything else. There where some bottles of water, I don't know why they were there. I don't really understand why people have graves It most certainly isn't for the living. Perhaps when they are alive they feel comforted by thought thought that their memory will be reduced to a gaudy monument in a century. My grandfather didn't want to be buried, to be eaten by worms. The things that sustain your memory are the little thing that reverberate through the rest of time. If you leave this world a better or a worse place in the end it only matters to you when you go to sleep and die.

I was taken to a friend's house the night my grandfather died. It was one of the few nights of my childhood that I remember. Strangely enough the only thing about that night I do not remember his him.

As people go my grandfather was a great one. If there was any person in my family worth looking up to he is undoubtedly the one. I am not sure how much I know him is fact and how much is fiction, but the one thing I remember him a little. He was a calm, classy, and always seemed confident in himself, even through the months of chemo.