January 24, 2008. Today the family went to the German Consulate here and acquired German citizenship. We are now dual citizens of the US and Germany. We managed to take care of this, which with some foresight we would have done years ago, with the help of our friends in Germany, Jahudi and Stefanie. This enables us to be in Spain legally, which we never planned to do and most likely would get away with, but… The idea is if the boys ever want to work in Europe or live here, they don’t need a visa. I could also work here, but that’s unlikely.
They were very nice in the German consulate tripping over themselves explained why I am considered German (you know, the Nazis). What’s amazing is everything was in English with both women we dealt with speaking it perfectly.
January 25, 2008. Now that I’m German, I am finding I have a strange desire to take over the world. It may pass. Also, I want to wear black (black T-shirt) and take breaks to dance. Again, it may pass. Finally, I want to eat fattening potato-like foods and sauerkraut and weiswurst for every meal. Again, hopefully it will pass.
January 26, 2008. I’ve been fighting a cold for close to a week, unsuccessfully it seems. Anne and David have it too and maybe Joshua. It doesn’t matter, I had to get out so I did my usual ride which takes about 1:40 to go from the house round-trip to Moulins del Rei, a small town via a very curvy road. The rides, actually, has some very “sweet” turns and twists that are world class. They showed a video last night that someone had posted to youtube that had some motorcycles and cars going over 100k/h on another road I ride on. Thus, today, I saw two police cars patrolling on the road.
January 27, 2008. We made our way down to Placa Cataluna today and went to the Palau de la Música Catalana to see a percussion thing (INSTRUMENTS DE PERCUSSIÓ) that was a sort of a “tour de force” of the world’s music as presented by a group of percussionists. It was entertaining and the kids seemed to like it — it was clearly geared to kids. David is on a reading binge and read through the entire performance. He’s reading a lot now, which is great. We met Dan and Amy and their kids and went to Buenos Migas, a sort of fast-food place that has a bunch of locations around Barcelona and is expensive a not great quality. Oh well.
Of interest is that we were sitting across the aisle from a couple of handicapped kids and what appeared to be their young caretaker. The kids had fairly serious handicaps with one of them moving back and forth through the performance. What an angel the caretaker, who looked like a hippy that hadn’t showered or shaved for a while, had to be. To care for kids that have these problems shows that there are people out there who are really selfless. A lady sitting behind the kids, who in normal life looked like she would have been disturbed by their restlessness, reached over and kindly touched one of the two. I wanted to reach over and hand the caretaker 10 or 20 Euros just for being such a kind, decent person; I sat still until the urge passed. (It seemed like a strange thing to do, anyway, since they weren’t begging or even looking like they needed it).
Seriously, Barcelona is a great city in terms of being friendly to people with challenges and the patience of people here comes through in situations where patience is often called for.
January 28, 2008. More of the same; nothing insightful or otherwise to report.
January 29, 2008. We had lunch today with Dan and Amy and discussed politics, mainly. Dan is a student of government (not of Spanish, though) and talked about the State of the Union Address that he read, in toto. According to Dan, Bush even mentioned that we (not he) have to do something about Global Warming, acknowledging that it exists. To which Anne replied, “Yea, he said, ‘Is it hot in here.'”
January 30, 2008. Yes they have people sleeping in the streets here. I found out last night, when at 1:00 a.m. I walked Rocket (I was up and couldn’t sleep and he was too and had to poop). As I exited our building, Rocket walked over to what looked like a rolled up carpet and right away after about five minutes I realized it was a body (presumably alive) sleeping behind the garbage container. Then I walked down the well-lit main street next to the park and another person, more evidently alive, was sleeping on a store-front. It reminded me of Rue St Honore in Paris, one of the most expensive streets around, with homeless people who slept there. Probably, by the way, because it’s safe.
Rocket then pooped and we returned to our piso.
I went to soccer practice with David and met and spoke with my friend, a septegenerian named Josep or Jose or Victor. In any case, we spoke about (I understood about 50 percent and made up the rest) the state of the State of Spain. He’s very interested in politics and likes to talk about how bad it was under Franco. It’s a lot better now, he says, although his neighborhood apparently is riven with drug dealers.