NYC update

I haven't posted for a while because I've been crazy busy and way too tired to do anything after work. But, tonight I realized that I should put some updates before I forget.

First, I've been driving around one of my boss's cars. I don't particularly like having to drive places only because the subway is faster sometimes, but I like the driving itself. But, today I managed to either get his car stolen or lost. I have been calling a few of the dozen or so numbers to call and checking online and it hasn't been reported in anywhere yet. Hopefully it's stolen so I don't have to pay an outrageous fine.

Fortunately I had a nice day at the beach and a BBQ in my friends back yard in the South Bronx yesterday, so I wasn't crazy exhausted while dealing with the car thing this evening.

I haven't left the office before 8 for the last week at least. Friday I was there till midnight trying to resolve a problem with one of the events we had. The guy who was supposed to organize it lied and is apparently a flake so John and I had to gather media contacts and local contacts for people to invite to an impromtu event as well as make sure the 13 people on that bus had a place to stay and eat. That's the short version.

Last week John had an immigration meeting in CA and Manolo and Alison both left to be speakers on the routes so I was the only one in the office doing the caravan work. It was insane. I think I had my ear away from a phone for a collective 30 minutes from 9 in the morning to 8 at night and every moment was spent multi tasking. It was kinda fun in a strange way.

Saturday i went to the post office and as I walked out I saw something I haven't seen here before. Some dude tried to steal this lady's purse. She wasn't gonna give it up and fortunately two enormous dudes were right there. A bunch of other people helped them wrestle the guy to the ground and he was screaming as if they were the ones doing something wrong.

Then, at the bbq last night a ton of teen kids were playing ball on the courts next to this school and suddenly out of all of their fun a fight broke out. It seemed like every person was fighting. That was pretty insane.

Other than that, I managed to stay at this nice place in Brooklyn up until the day I leave and I'm stoked. I'm a little bummed that I'm already leaving in 4 days though.

New York City!

I arrived in New York City yesterday to do another month this summer working in the office for the organization that I go to Cuba with. I'm staying in Brooklyn for these first two weeks. I have a place in a rad little neighborhood close to rad pubs, a Trader Joe's, and two blocks from the subway. The ride to work is about 30-40 minutes as opposed to the 20 minute walk last year, but it is good reading time so I'm still stoked.

I have a nice back garden and an entire apartment to myself. I'm right across from a fire station and I have a door that can stay open at night--I like the white noise of the city. It helps me sleep well. In two weeks or so I have to move to south-west harlem, and harlem is where I want to be anyway, partially because there is lots of diversity and it's way closer to the office I'm working in.

Last night when I arrived I had the thought that it would be fun to show up to my first day in the office dressed as a dutch-reform woman, but all of the thrift stores were closed so that didn't work out. I did get volunteered to do a radio PSA tomorrow, so that's interesting. I also might end up driving a box-truck on one of the 14 routes that go through the US. We'll see about that one.

It's a safer neighborhood than I was in last year...for a white guy that is. Again, that's part of the reason I'd rather be in Harlem. Nonetheless, it's a good place, free, and has a garden with a fish pond (plus three turtles).

I worked from 10 to 7:30 this first day. That's the reason I'm up at 1 am writing this blog. It's nice to have plenty of time to unwind no matter how late you work. Sleep will come someday. When, I don't know.

As of now, that's it. I'll definitely have to post some pictures of this place before I leave. Ha! -- I've said that before.

Use the whole pig. There is this stuff called crackling. It's crispy pig fat. Good hot, not so much cold. I've had it homemade and it was ok. Yesterday I bought in a bag, like crisps, and i thought I was going to vomit all over everyone around me. It's good to see that it doesn't go to waste though.

I woke up this morning to the sound of my door brushing across the carpet, followed by a "RRRRROOOOBBBBB!!!!!!" It was Joseph coming to see if I was still sleeping. With that tactic he should have figured out by now that I'm never asleep when he does that. Apparently 8:30 in the morning is play time. I had no idea.

So, he likes to use my window as a pirate's den. He can yell out to the neighborhood and kinda feel like he's outside because it's a low hung skylight. I was pretty much still in the mood to sleep, but he was obviously having fun so I didn't want to disturb that. It didn't stop me from sleeping. Eventually he jumped on me and woke me up. I asked, "why on earth did you come up here." "because I wanted to see you." Aaaahhh. What a cute little terror.

I'll miss that. I'm not really looking forward to going back to the states. When I left I wasn't sad because I knew that I'd see everyone in a few months. Many of the friends that I've made here I won't see for at least a few years, if ever. I certainly won't miss the weather. I won't miss the coffee one bit. But I will definitely miss the ale. I will miss the Royal Oak.

My friend Justin played last night at the Oak. He's really really good, but pretty much just plays for fun. Well, he likes to have fun when he's playing, so he tailors the songs he plays to the crowd. Sometimes its a sing along, other times there's a naked man running around pretending to be Guenevere from the Camelot story.

Pints of ale here are served by pump, not pressurized tap. Today I'm going to get to pull my own pint. I'm stoked.

I have one paper left to edit. Everything else is finished. It's nice to know that I never have to write a paper again unless I choose to. Also, I can finally read for fun.

Wednesday was a great day. It was sunny, Lola and I took the kids to the park. Me and Joseph were racing on the way back and we had to slow down because of a man on a bike (which turned out to be his dad) and Joseph stopped paying attention and fell. It was a good fall. He has a nice mark on his face now.

Yesterday was better than most. The bad thing about English weather is not that it rains all the time but that it constantly threatens. It's as if there's a villain outside waiting to blast you in the face with a water canon right as you walk out the door. "Oh man, it looks like weather. I'm not sure I want to get stuck out in the rain." The next morning you wake up and it never rained. You realize that you've wasted the entire day indoors. That is normal English weather. Yesterday it really rained, that was a nice change.

Today is a nice day. But not so much a good day. It's my penultimate day here. I only have two more nights to hang out with my friends. I have one paper to finish. Lola seems a bit frustrated today so I might take Joseph off her hands for a bit if she wants me to. I don't envy here sometimes. But, man she's a killer cook.

I'm not stoked about leaving.

The lost post - no, not Ireland or italy

THIS IS WHAT I STARTED TO WRITE ABOUT TWO WEEKS AGO WHEN I RETURNED TO BATH.

On Wednesday I caught a train from Seville to Malaga...a town on the Mediterranean coast. As I was laying out on the beach (that's right, tanning like girls do...minus the bikini) I looked over and saw a thermometer sign that said 29 degrees celcius (85 F). Within 3 or 4 hours I was back in England. It was cold and wet! The day before Lola invited me to Hugo's christening but the flights were too expensive so I told her unless I changed my mind about paying that much that I probably wouldn't be coming. I slept at a friend's house in London that night, took a train to school the next morning, then went home and did some homework. The whole I time was missing Spain a lot. The weather didn't bother me here until I went to Spain and got a reminder of what warmth is like. As soon as Ian got home from work we started talking about Spain and the christening and how it was too bad I wasn't going to be able make it. Then I decided that I didn't care. So, next week I'm going back to Spain to enjoy the sunshine, friends, and the food.

Before that, I spent about 9 days working on a little farm. This lady Angela I was staying with was a rad lady. She had good food, a nice room for me to stay in, and all the beer that I could want. The stone workers that worked for her would start at 8 take a break for breakfast and beer at 10 work til about 1 or 2, return at 3 then work til 5. In a day they drank about 12-14 beers. It was a great work culture I thought. One friend told me that if the spanish aren't offered beer when they work they won't work much. I built a chicken coup out of used materials, some removable screens for her window in the bug season, and did a bit of garden work. All in all I had a great time.

Almost every night I went down into town, about a kilometer away, to a bar called cafe jardin. The first night I went in there I met these English dudes. The thing about the European Union is that you can go to any member country and work, own property, whatever. So, one of them had come as a wwoofer (the organic farm thing I was doing) about 10 years ago and stayed, had a kid, bought property, and is just there now. For the rest of the week we all hung out almost every night after I was done working on Angela's place. I went to a rad hippie party with then and all kinds of other things. It was a blast.

On a monday I took a train to seville and got a hostel. I met up with Lola and her friend one night, then hung out with the kids (baby Hugo and Joseph) then went out again that last night I was there. I managed to arrive in Seville during Semana Santa (holy week -- the week before easter) in time to see the processions. Basically, there is one cathedral and tons of smaller churches. Each church has a float that represents some point in the biblical story of Jesus. These things are huge...many of them take 40 guys to carry them. They are accompanied by music, marchers that look like KKK members, and all sorts of other things depending on the church. They march from their church to the main cathedral and back. Often it's more than a 20 km walk which takes maybe 24 hours of so. It's nuts. Even if you're not a religious person you can't help but be a little moved by the art and ceremony of it.

From there I went to Malaga, the beach, and the bad weather of England -- as the story begins.

Below are pictures. I didn't feel like taking the time to add caption or give the narrative journey by pictures as I normally do. Go ahead and make up your own captions.

The first NINE are of ORgiva, the others are from Seville and MAlaga

more on politics

That last post about what's really going on with the world got me to thinking about all kinds of things that governments do. Now, I'm going to be talking about politicians here but I do not mean to make politicians the bad guys and not governments. The job of the government is simply to perpetuate itself. The politician is simply a tool. Now, that leaves the question of who the government is if the politician is just a tool for it. I could answer that but I'll let you think about it.

The more time I've spent over here the more I've begun to hate the British government. Recently there was a scandal where Members of Parliament were using legally allocated money for their living and travel expenses to enrich themselves if they live outside of the main London area. One woman claimed her sister's house as her primary residence and got something like 100,000 pounds per year for it even though it was not her primary home. Her real house would have gotten her significantly less.

Gordon Brown's statement was that the law for this kind of compensation needs to reduce the compensation and ensure that it cannot be abused to assure the voting masses that MPs "serve the public and not themselves." Well Mr. Brown, when a vast majority of people resent the fact that your government is closing down all of the post offices, you're not serving them. When you install CCTV virtually everywhere, you're controlling the population through fear of reprisal not serving them. When you allow the National Health Service to revoke the credentials of a nurse who secretly filmed abuse and neglect of elderly patients due to institutional failures, you are not serving the public. I'm amazed to say it, but the government here is worse than the government in the United States.

One thing I miss is the ability to talk cops and border agents however I wish. Although the constitution is a giant pile of crap, it serves me some good in that way. Here, I do not have nearly the same freedom as I do in the US in terms of that. However, encounters with the police are much rarer here. I don't think I've ever seen a cop pull anyone over and the only people I've seen them stop are people who are blatantly drunk and causing problems. And as a side note, they aren't allowed to carry guns or tasers, only mace and a truncheon (beating stick).

That's not to say that I like the US...even though the gods sent Obama to clean things up. First of all, and I've mentioned this before, his economic team is on the side of the wealthy elite, not the other 95% of Americans. Those guys have made an absolute fortune on Wall Street -- of course the plans they have developed involve no risk for the companies and no benefit for the tax payers. More than that, I recently read that Obama's new budget is going to actually increase military spending by 4%. The navy is going to get a bunch of this to fight a new enemy with some fancy speed boats -- PIRATES! I've said it before and I will say it again. WE CREATED THOSE PIRATES!! They first began pirating when chemical companies began dumping waste off the Somali shore because the "government" there had no ability whatsoever to patrol the shore with the chaos we destabilized, then started to fix then, tragically bailed on.


There's more than just pirates and rich bastards but I'll leave those for another time. For now, I'm going to write a few of my several final papers and work on a post about Spain with a ton of pictures. To the bar!!

The News

The news in the UK is absolutely flooded with the news of that ship captain who was recently released. Before that? It was all about how there is an American captain being held by pirates. Apparently when the navy people finally did their little offensive and got the captain back they killed three of the pirates. Something that is most likely being overlooked by most people is that in each statement by any pirates there, they start off by saying that they are only interested in the ransom mainly because life in Somalia is hard and this is a way that they can make money. Let me remind you that to a great extent we did that to them. In fact, our miserable failure there is the reason that your president Clinton sat by and refused to call the genocide that was going on in Rwanda exactly that.

The other thing I have to say about this is that IT DOES NOT MATTER!!! You have a president now who is giving a shit load of money to the exact corporations who got the US, and the world for that matter, into the mess they're in now. There are workers all over the country who make barely enough to live on -- not because of this whole financial mess, but before this. In fact, the majority of workers, in order to afford a place for their families to live. But, while Obama is pretending to get stuff done by saying 'it's in the right timeframe of the plan he laid out in his campaign', which somehow has a great pacifying effect, the financial advisors he hired are helping out their wallstreet friends. Anyone who thinks that each tiny upsurge in the market is a sign of improvement is an idiot. Let me digress a bit to say that at least he is putting some restrictions (though not many) so that the tax payers won't completely lose out unless the whole system absolutely collapeses...this is more than I can say for what I think the other guy would have done. And back to it. Even if things do get better financially the suffering has already occurred and it will continue to occur as long as people are forced to accept that the value of their lives can be determined by money.

Orgiva! La Vida BUENA!!

So, I'm in a small village about 40 kilometers from the Mediterranean right now called Orgiva. I'm here with a lady named Angela. She's been living here for 3 years and was in another part of Spain for several years. She English and lives here off her pension that she earned from working as a social worker for over 30
years.
This period before Easter is when Spain goes off. Yesterday, the day I arrived in Orgvia, was the day to celebrate the town's saint -- I don't know who it is and I didn't get the impression that many people in the town did either. The celebration was with fireworks and a huge procession of people carrying a big display of Jesus and one of Mary (dude's mom, not the hooker). Everyone in the town was there. As soon as Jesus came out of the cathedral this giant chain of firecrackers went off outside this little pub we were in. The windows were taped because they've learned that the noise is so intense that it even blows out the windows in the back of the place unless they're taped.


The procession went on until 2 in the morning as did the fireworks. Every time the procession stopped there were fireworks to greet it. It would stop at every crossroads and the fireworks went off to keep the evil spirits away. Plus each little neighborhood had their own display. Some were poppers some were Disneyland style fireworks.
















The it sounded like a war zone and it didn't look much different, minus the dead people...well, Jesus and Mary were there.











One of the coolest things was seeing all of the people there. I guess it's kind of like Santa Cruz on Halloween or New Years but fewer stabbings and less belligerent people (although they certainly had their share of "communion cervesa"). Plus the party wasn't contained to streets, anyone with a balcony, including the dentist office, had people up to celebrate.




Jesus at night was pretty impressive, but it really seemed like the main event was the firework -- no offense to the right hand man of course.




















Here's a view from Angela's house. Well, two. The second one at night is way rad. Click on the second one to see a big version. You can see the smoke...all of that is smoke, no clouds. Plus you can see the silhouette of the hill in the background. Now, past that hill on the right is how to get to the sea. Hopefully I'll get a chance to go there.