Episode 11: Barça 5-0 Levante, Gavin 2-4 Barcelona, and why it’s always inglés and never ingles

So last week I’m in class and it’s the end of unit exam, with the most hilarious listening part ever, when it came along Carme put the CD in the player, and then the voices came on, luckily I was stood at the back of the room so none of the students could see my reaction, but they just sounded like utter goons, just phrases like “it’s reeeeally exciting being surrounded by huuge mountains every day” (on about snowboarding) and even Carme who isn’t English looked at me like ‘yeah, this is totally how you guys speak(!)’, but before the exam she took in all their notebooks to mark them, they did their own front covers and everything, some said “English”, others said “Anglès”, and others said “Angles” which means, well, angles. No, seriously. But anyway, we then got talking about what it was in Castellano, where inglés means English, and ingles means bikini lines, apparently…so talking about bikinis instead of English…works for me!

And along came another ‘I don’t speak Catalan, honest!’ moment when the advance copy of the school’s magazine came in with an exclusive interview with the new English person, now we had the interview in English but it was all translated into Catalan, and I’m looking through it like “I think that’s mistranslated, that’s not what I said” etc. this was at the front of the room with Carme so away from the students, until some of them decided they needed help with something and figured the best course of action was to go to Carme, in full view of me reading this interview, I’m not sure this whole ‘I no speako Spanish’ thing will last much longer.

This is two rows from the very top.

But anyway to the 4-day weekend, along came Saturday and my sixth trip to Barcelona, no official business or anything, just going to get drunk and watch some football, then get drunk some more, then get a bus to Olesa, then drink a few more, simples. So got there, met George, went straight to the Irish bar where we’d watched the England match, and I had pretty much the perfect seat: screen on the left – Wigan v Arsenal, middle screen – Wales v Australia, screen on the right – Scum v Norwich, right then, get the beers in and let’s watch some sport! About 10 beers and 4 matches later we leave and make our way to, first of all Burger King, where they did beer, highly impressed, and then the Camp Nou and got in the queue for tickets, and there were guys there in the queue trying to sell tickets! Yeah because that’s real for 10 Euros mate, although I’m honing my pronunciation of “Ich spreche kein Spanish” because I figure less of them know German than English, but yeah we got to the window and made the mistake of not asking for our tickets together, meaning we ended up almost at opposite ends of the ground, but there were plenty of free seats up in the very top of the stadium so we ended up sat together anyway, then I went to the toilet figuring it was too early in the match for me to miss a goal…or not…bloody Fàbregas. So a while later into the match we decided it was beer o’clock again, and it wasn’t badly priced at all, the top stadium in the country, one of the best in Europe, and a beer was 3,20€, alright I’ll have one of – wait, alcohol free?! The fuck is this?! Cervesa sense alcohol? And it even had it in English underneath as if to just rub it in, there do not serve alcoholic beverages at the Camp Nou. I don’t even… So we went for the next best thing, a massive tub of popcorn. Yes, popcorn. This was also 3,20€ but somehow that much less satisfying, and saltier than the Dead Sea, leaving us gagging for a drink that we didn’t want because it had no friggin’ alcohol! Give them their due it’s one way of making people spend money, but I was resilient and refused to spend anything else save for the bus ticket to Olesa, then drinks, many drinks, think we must’ve stayed out ‘til about 4 or something, and this is just in the smaller bars, not a nightclub in sight, and just like last weekend I somehow functioned on about 5 hours sleep and la madre de todas las resacas, it was a case of ‘this place looks good for a huge fuckoff bacon sandwich and a huge coffee with plenty of sugar’, which it was, and got me through the day about as far as arriving back in Barcelona, bloody George gets his trains into Barcelona for 3,05€ where I’m paying upwards of 11, but anyway I bought my ticket back out to Amposta, got on the train and slept, only this time I’d know where my stop is when the speakers practically yell “PROPERA PARADA L’ALDEA-AMPOSTA” in my ear, it really was that loud, so slept as best I could, then got to L’Aldea and just couldn’t wait to get home, but from what I knew about the timetables I’d have to wait about half an hour for the bus first, I would have known more but some twat thought it’d be funny to rip down the timetable at the bus stop. So I’m there waiting and not knowing how much longer I actually will be waiting, turned out to be an hour, could’ve been worse, but I got on, got sat down, and really wanted to sleep, but we know what happened last time I did that now don’t we? So I braved it until getting home, where I finally just crawled into bed and slept like a baby.

Episode 8: Gavin 1-3 Barcelona, an ever more complex scoring system, and why late trains are a good thing

So this morning I had prepared for everything that could possibly go wrong today, because usually if it can, it does, I had on 3 layers, 2 of which quickly found themselves in my bag as soon as I got on the bus to L’Aldea. So I get to the station and buy my ticket to Sants, 11,25€, the cheapest available, good start, so I wait for the train, get on it, and travel to Barcelona, get there, and decide to walk to the meeting to save money on the Metro, and buy my ticket back straightaway to save any mishaps causing me to miss my train back. And now for Google Maps to come into play and screw me over, with roundabouts and first lefts and what have you, when I thought I was going the right way I went and spent my last note on a (bloody huge) sandwich and bottle of water, hoping to kill time before the meeting which would later turn out to be a mistake. Then the fun part started; I thought I was to take the road I was on straight to the Departament d’Ensenyament, nice, clean and simple, until it abruptly ended at a T-junction, I hedged my bets going one way and luckily enough saw two police officers, so I asked them where Via Augusta was, and they mentioned Avinguda Diagonal, now the problem here is that I thought I was already on Diagonal before turning onto the road that I thought went to the building. But I took their instructions and eventually found myself somewhere familiar, Carrer del Bruc, only Carrer del Bruc is actually the place where the CTA is where I went to (try to) register as a referee, so no wonder it was bloody familiar! So now I was totally winging it, I went over to the Metro stop across the road and deciphered from the map there where to go, then found myself at Provença, hang on, didn’t I come through here for the other meeting when I bought the wrong ticket? How big really is Barcelona? Oh well, outwards, upwards, and inlandwards, as I knew that Provença is on the same line as Muntaner, the stop closest to the Departament, so just head in that general direction and I’ll find it, oh look, there’s 15 minutes until the meeting, what was that about killing time? After a few more twists and turns I saw Muntaner and eventually the building, arriving at 3PM on the dot, time management at its finest. So we had the meeting which actually proved a lot more useful than the other ‘meeting’ last week, and it finished at half 5, next challenge: either get to Sants on foot in time for the train that leaves Barcelona-França at 17:48, or have to wait another 90 minutes for the next one.

Given that I now knew where I was going it was a lot easier, I walked down to Diagonal with Dan who lives in Vinaròs and was getting the bus straight from Barcelona, that goes through Amposta, but it was marginally more expensive and I already had my train ticket anyway, get to Diagonal and I had 5 minutes before my train left França, and I could only assume it’d leave Sants 3 or 4 minutes later, so now down the road from the roundabout where I should have turned off to go to Diagonal, but don’t really know how I managed any different, even trying to retrace my steps on Google Earth right now I just simply cannot figure it out, but anyway it got to 17:48 and I could just see the top of Torre Catalunya, the hotel across from Sants, and decided to start running, in my jeans, after having done deadlifts yesterday, let’s just say my hamstrings don’t really like me right now. Then me and some other guy ended up basically rugby tackling each other, you know that awkward as hell moment when you and someone else are walking opposite ways and you go one way, they go the same way, you go the other way, they do, one of you goes the other way, and you eventually get past each other, well we were both running in opposite directions with very little time to actually get past each other as opposed to through each other, especially with 6 lanes of traffic coming at us, hurt a fair bit, but anyway, I ran into the station, got through the barrier (as opposed to queuing up, buying my ticket and then getting through the barrier :D) and looked on the departure board, “oh crap, it’s not there, it’s not there, it’s THERE! IT’S LATE! YES!!” Literally could not believe my luck, waited for the train, got on, sat down, and went to sleep, waking only near L’Ampolla to think “hang on a minute, it’s gonna be past 8 when I get to L’Aldea, will there actually be any buses?” Fortunately after a few texts to Kerry I found out there would be at 8:25, again raising doubts about getting to the stop on time, fantastic, but as it happened I got to the stop with about 5 minutes to spare, plus it was late anyway.

So I got home, had some tea, and opened my laptop to blog about today, and check Facebook, and see a certain update along the lines of “I’ve been paid”. Interesting, so if I were to, say, go to my online banking and have a look at my balance…

Yeah, they know their memes out here.