First Impressions

So concludes my first week in the city of Barcelona, and if I have realized anything in my short time here, it is that a lot can happen in a week. After missing my flight in Baltimore and having to drive desperately into the malodorous high-pressure sodium lit chaos that is Newark, I weaved through airport security in record time, caught my flight and soon found myself seated uncomfortably amongst a sea of hirsute Mediterranean men. I drifted asleep and awoke to an orange band of sunlight gleaming over the curvature of the Atlantic's horizon and a blanket of swirling cream-colored clouds beneath the wing of the Continental airliner. We descended to a level of small village lights burning across the Iberian peninsula and then, with one unsteady turn, touched down in Barcelona. I followed the native masses and, with a few hand signals, managed to find the studio and then my apartment, where I fell into some bizarre timeless chasm that exists between our continents. The next few days were a strange haze, an alteration of time and a deluge of foreign linguistics and cultural oddities. The architecture was an unusual blend of handsome classical reminances of the past and modern expressions that bordered on psychedelic, void of codes and regulations. The city is condensed, filled with narrow alleyways, stores and bars and butcher shops. It seems a city of loiterers, people with no place to be, skaters and punks and rebels, paramilitary policemen who turn a blind eye to practically everything--a more than occasional hashish dealer, illegitimate beer vendors late at night. Thankfully, I have not been robbed yet, although our director has not been as fortunate, and I witnessed a tourist couple chasing after their stolen car to no avail. In only a week, I crossed more than four-thousand miles with a fervour that rivals an espionage novel; I have eaten pig intestines and baby octopi; come to appreciate why absinthe is outlawed in the United States; gone from back-alley bars to throbbing orgiastic nightclubs where the music sounds more like a car accident, British girls befriend you in hopes that you might sell them pills of any kind, and unisex bathrooms are as good a place to meet people as any.