Uhlfelder News

November 14, 2007.  Went to Starbucks with Anne, then Anne went to Class.  I went on a huge 1:40 run through the hills and dales.  It was nice except I got home and consumed everything in sight.  I took David to soccer practice and hung out with the Spanish soccer moms.  They are not well traveled, and pretty nice and curious about my situation (are you single, want to fool around) no, no – I mean, why are you here?  To learn Spanish – didn’t you know we speak Catalan?  Anyway, it’s a good Spanish lesson, sort of.  Anne is studying her head off, she’ll probably have it down by next week.  I am taking my time. Here is a photo I caught of an affliction here in BCN.

For me, I’m at the point of the guy in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl8FTdjNri4

November 15, 2007.  Off again to a different Starbucks this morning.  I like to cross the street once in a while; I had to go there after Anne insisted we try a Spanish place which had lousy food, was loud and too crowded.  We tried. 

I’ve got a weight work-out I do with the minimum of stuff.  It will keep me in shape, more or less.  I am thinking of doing some running races since winter is traditionally the time I try to do them (cross-country skiing, uphilling).  Since the only reasonable thing is running races, I did some research, read up on some Catalan websites and found a 10K running race in a couple of weeks. 

The on-line race sign up in general is definitely not as smooth as in the US for the smallest race and this one had 2,800 participants last year.  I also told my running friend Kevin about it.  He tried to sign up but they wanted his NIE number – that’s the number you have if you are a citizen of an EC country like a social security number.  Basically, it’s asked for frequently and you don’t really have to give it out.  I just make up a number and give that one and it always works.  In my mind it’s very Orwellian, and only the Germans might be organized enough to do something with it.  As for the Germans, as long as you don’t mention the war, they don’t care either.

November 16, 2007.  After a Spanish class this morning, I went to sign up for the running race and then took David to his soccer game.  It’s gotten really cold here, about 40s or so.  David scored the first goal and although they still lost, it was an exciting well-played game.

November 17, 2007.  I have spent at least the last 24 hours trying to get this blog to work.  It’s been a huge hassle and certainly would have been much easier to use an off-the-shelf program that is supported.  Why did I do it the hard way?  Good question.  I guess the main reason is I want it to be on uhlfelder.com and second is password protection (which is probably available on the other sites).  This is sure to burn some time just trying to get everything to work correctly.  I’ve tried to post all the material from the time we got here until now on the blog.  You can receive comments from others so it’s similar to a forum.  

• November 18, 2007.  David had a birthday party to go to today and I went to the park, after getting some coffee at Starbucks (why can’t anyone make a decent filtered coffee in Spain?).  Joshua needed to eat (it was lunch time) so I sent him upstairs since I had the dog who probably needed to do his duty.  In any case, after watching him get humped by every Tom, Harry and Dick, I let him off the leash and off he went, never to be seen again.  Some Jessica who had a young, hung dog who was one of the humpers talked to me in Spanish, which is nice and eventually we captured the little varmants in flagrante delicto, almost.

November 19, 2007.  Class after coffee, more Spanish speaking (poorly), not having time to memorize the verb conjugations, etc… David to soccer, speaking Spanish (sort of) with soccer moms, cold, home, very good Indian food that Anne made, day’s end. 

• November 20, 2007.  Anne has organized a language trade with Laura; we speak English for half an hour and she speaks Spanish for half an hour.  She is very Catalan and told us something revealing about Spain — she would be embarrassed to have a Spanish flag on her property; a Catalan flag is fine.  It makes me realize that there is no Spanish nationalism.  This of course goes to the language issue too — they want their children to learn and be taught in Catalan, a language spoken only within 100 miles of Barcelona.  This seems more than impractical, it seems a problem in terms of integrating a country.  Lots of calls with Aspen, including business and personal.  I sent out an email reminding both of you about this blog.  Hope you saw it.  Greg Shaffran completed his bike trip and came through in the middle of the night to pick up his bike case — we didn’t even see him since he had to immediately go to the airport to catch a flight back home.  He biked through Spain and Morocco for almost two months!