Imagine we were all living in a world where almost everyone was carrying a book in their pocket. And was intently engaged in its consumption. And pulled it out of their pocket to read more at every interval and sometimes stood stock still in the middle of the grocery aisle because they had become so lost in reading their great book.
Blog
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Olé au lait
When I travel I am never alone because always there is the companionship of my shyness. This sometimes feels like a long shadow I drag over things (‘allo, scuse us, thank you, pardon me’) and sometimes like a large soft yielding mass I work my way through to reach people, to reach the surface: the world, spiky and free. Cities are terrorising for a shy person. At the same time I fall into this kind of trance of exploration and love where I can spend a whole day feeling my way up hills and round corners and scurrying joyously from one shadowed alcove to the next, under trees feeling the spent light curl up inside itself and sleep on its own downy belly, like so many dormice, striking out into the sunlight and forcing myself – by dint of a good hard short talking-to, you can do it c’mon just do it, to stride across the diagonal length of the largest square in Spain for example where hundreds of people in throngs stand about pointing their implements at the view (stonemasonry, cafes rooved with white umbrellas, and the freemasonry of each other). Most mornings it takes some courage to leave the sanctuary of my room. I walk into the breakfast bar. People in Germany and Spain seem to greet each other in such situations, in Australia that would be only me. I gather my comestibles: yoghurt, tea, fruit. I put the room key in my pocket and step out into the day.
In Madrid the days are blue and whole. The sky runs freely with very often no clouds of vapour dissolved in it. From the vantage point of the ancient city you can see mountains, towns, all of Spain. Coming on this vista unexpectedly down a narrow alleyway between the little high houses I catch my breath and start to cry. It’s wonderful, it’s beautiful, it’s reached through an endless twisting byway: like the past.
On my second day I fell into a little bar and cafe called the Cafe Olé. As well as cafe au lait they serve spirits, wines, beers, and a raft of different kinds of open-faced sandwiches including one variety loaded with solid chunks of solid Spanish omelette, tortilla. It’s almost Germanic, that one: potatoes on bread. The lady who cooks brings out tray after tray and people wander in out of the sunlight and order, familiarly, stand there and eat. I discovered the sweetest, lightest pastry on earth. I went back another day and had it again: the coffee and the pastry cost two euros. The third time I ate it I discovered it is made from a transverse slice of baguette soaked in egg and milk, what on an English menu we would call French toast: a babyish kind of comfort food with just the right amount of sugar through it. The bread dissolves into light, fruity custard. They serve it with knife and fork. I was so happy there, eating my torrija and soaking up the atmosphere like bread sucks milk, the soft feeling of being included.
Later in my long visit I found other places where I felt at home. The city itself felt welcoming, ancient, its splendour laid open and well-worn. Finding oneself tripping down a turning side street with some enticing view hovering at its end, finding oneself saying out loud without really intending to, “I just – feel – so happy here!” You know the affinity with places. I noticed the needling cypress trees and their green dark clots; the way they seem to sift the wind and sough it into a cradle song that reminds me of islands, distant and far-offshore islands, and afternoons spent on my own as I wandered the hillsides of my grandfather’s old farm and laid my face reverently, familiarly on the warm stones with their mottled discolouring like an old lace badly stored, greenish purplish blueish white grey colonies. And mosses, the velvet of ancient things and my favourite plant. It all feels so personal. Like the fold-down table off the back of a stranger’s seat on the airplane I seem to have been boarding and reboarding every month or two since I was a baby. That private space unseen in the public glass, the back of the mirror, inside of the knee. The pinkish smell of my own fingertips. The plants that grow in between stones.
A lady who runs a shop in a large, chill, drafty barn halfway up a steep hill with an unfamiliar flag hung out the front told me, in labouring English far better than my almost-nothing Spanish – español silencio, the Spanish of silence – these things are from Malawi and she visits every year, they are running their own school in this community and the school children and their families make these products – apart from those over there (her white arm waving, a hanger of bead necklaces and assorted things), “Those are from French.” “French?” I said, “so, a colony?” Yes, she said, “things of my French.” Looking closer I could see of course she meant second-hand, these were things friends had donated: a handbag with the tag still on, an ornate belt, a necklace of shells. “This,” she said, “I make myself. In my terraza,” the courtyard of her home. It was a cake of clay soap which she wrapped for me in newspaper, explaining, “Is very good for the soft sky.” For the sky. “My sky,” she showed me, stroking the belly of her forearm invitingly, “very soft, very soft.”
The smell of Malawi is like the smell of Java where I grew into my childhood and where I have never been back. The Java that I long for doesn’t exist anymore, the outer islands have been logged, the mountains hollowed for high rise and bridges, everything ruined and mined. We won’t talk about that. I went back afterwards to the Cafe Olé and sat there gazing and writing and that is where I gradually came to terms with the place and its strangeness and my strange attraction to it; the sense of knowing and belonging that I also found in old Lissabon, with its needled cypress trees, its castled mountain tops; its alleyways, its tiny, remote, yet intimate vistas. I gave the bar tender my careful request in Spanish, marshalling my few dozen words: “por favor,” “cafe machinata,” “decafinado,” “miel.” To order a pastry I could only say, pan bread and azúcar sugar: sweet bread por favor. All I can do in Spanish is eat. “Where are you from?” he asked. “Australia.” “Ah,” he said. “When somebody come in… who is friendly… open-minded, like you: open heart: they are always Australia. Or… Irish.” I smiled at my hands. He said, shrugging, “To us… you look English.”
In a flurry of Spanish he turned to the older man sitting at the bar, refilling his glass of some creamy liqueur. “Something, something, Australian,” he said and I tried hard to eavesdrop. The one or two words one gleans in a spume of an almost entirely new foreign tongue feel like shells vouchsafed by the sea: there is so much more, beauty, so colourful and alive, in the rolling deeps under this enveloping foam. The bar guy pointed at me, explaining something. They both nodded, their gazes resting on me as I ate. “Cafe delicioso,” I ventured, and he smiled: all warmth, no malice, free.
We sat in silence in the quiet cafe, which is dim and all clad in dark wood. Dusty things stand on the higher shelves above the rows of glinting liqueurs. Right up top is a wooden matador, proudly erect in his faded scarlet togs and with one hand rearing up almost to the yellowed ceiling. We sit like birds under the shelter of his masculine wings. The tomatoes on the sandwiches are very red, no white in them, their seeds a dark greenish orange and filling the gleaming segments like jam. I stroke the soft sky on my arms. A beautiful woman comes in, glamour clinging to her like light from the street. She reminds me of Jennifer Lopez, only older. Casting off her garments and bags she sits down on the stool next to mine. After a long long time I put my hand on her forearm like a moth. “Bella,” I tell her, probably in Italian: “muy bella.” I am? she asks, pressing her hand to her breastbone. “Si.” And she says, something something, your eyes: showing me by opening her own very wide and indicating me from one eye across to another. Very… something, much something else. I would love to know what the beautiful Spanish lady said about my eyes. But I can’t understand and say thank you, and we lapse into silence, the two men also, the bullfighter magnificent and motionless above us standing guard over the ages: he is holding up the ceiling, roof, the whole soft sky with only one hand and the cargo carved modestly in front of his matador pantaloons seems to my shy glance so imposing from below it is as though we are all drinking coffee in the shelter of its fruitful shade.
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hanging from lace
Walking home I saw a man clinging to the upper part of a set of ornate window bars, gazing intently upward. At first I thought he was doing parkour. Then I wondered was he maybe housebreaking, aiming to climb onto the balcony on the first floor. Then I saw four hands reaching from within, scooping motions, like some kind of performance dance piece. He was repairing the long window, which had stuck, with two helpers crouched on the turning staircase inside, one of them higher, one lower. Coming round the corner into the square where the man with his telescope busks for the stars and I learned the moons of Jupiter in Spanish (Io… Ganymede… Callisto…) there was as usual a clot of thirty teenagers just hanging round together, chattering and laughing. I had earlier seen a hundred people in a large circle, watching a series of fantastic show-offs demonstrate their circus skills with a soccer ball. Other people sat more singly or in smaller groups having divided their tribe from the everyone-who’s-like-me mêlée, having rather perhaps pain and disappointingly discovered those who are most like me and can tolerate all of me number a handful at very utter best. A family sat perched and hunched on two concrete bollards, one of the girls scrolling her phone disconsolately. I discovered the identity, kind of, of cardboard collection man, whom I’d photographed out of the window of a genial Thai restaurant upstairs a week back: towing his ship of folded boxes stowed in boxes he appeared from the dense shopping strip, and swept his cardboard pirate ship into the shadow alcoves of the huge Theater Real, the royal opera, where a companion greeted him and he went back to a large bag at the glass doors and fetched himself something of his own. Around town you can see the possessions and the bedding of homeless people stashed in between the close-spaced columns of the enormous quiet churches which are frantic with gold inside; you can see the grubbied slabs of cardboard leaning up under the bridge all ready to make bedding for another night. Yesterday I came off Plaza Mayor which is the centrepoint of Spain and a long row of people were sleeping down the medieval alleyway, some of them in small palaces of one large cardboard carton telescoped into another; a man who was concealed in one of these pushed back the lid and sat up, startlingly, gazing at the afternoon like Count Dracula.
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desperate for literature
At ten o’clock at night I went out walking round the curve of the road under bright green trees lit from the lamps, everything beautiful, hot and radiant. A bookshop was open, or so I thought. When I pushed on the door two guys came running out from the rush-bottomed chairs where they’d been chatting. “Oh, sorry,” I said, “you look as if you’ve just closed, actually.” “No, no, come in, come in.” The books were in English down one wall and Spanish on the other, stacked on shelves which started out polished and neat and then wound up built from raw old wood and bricks. A beautiful woman came out from some back room and told me, “The books up the back are just as good as the books up the front here, keep looking.” They sat down and continued their chat. “What was the name of the girl in To Kill a Mockingbird? Cass?” “Was it Cass?”
I said, “I know people in Hollywood have named babies after her, so if we could just think of the right baby…” “Scout!” said the man with the beard who had Google in his hand. We talked for a moment about the new novel and how there is some concern Harper Lee may have been… persuaded into finally publishing it. “It’s about Scout’s life as an adult,” said the other guy, an American. A small crowd of people came in at the narrow front door. One said, I think, this reminded him of Shakespeare and Co in Paris, and the English man said pointing to his partner, whose name was Charlotte, “That’s where we worked! Up until three days ago!” Two hours earlier he and Charlotte had taken over this tiny store, which is called Desperate Literature, from their American friend, whose name is Cory. “So we’ve met!” said Charlotte, a gorgeous woman who acts as though being beautiful gives her no special status. The little man who had mentioned Shakespeare and Co gave a cry. “We’ve met! So you’ve patted my book!” “I’ve patted your book!” she said. “Wait – what book was it.” Without hesitation he named the book everybody buys when they visit Shakespeare and Co in Paris. “The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.” “That was you!” she cried. I was out the back laughing. The timing was so wonderful, the sense of willing group improvisation that is true conversation, as at the loveliest dinner parties. Charlotte was jubilant that they’d sold a copy of Wisława Szymborska (to me) on their first night and her partner Terry introduced himself and told me, as he had told the Paris customers, “We are having a big party here on Thursday night, come by.” He looked around the tiny, crowded rooms. “Well – a little party.”
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Spanish nights
Oh, Spain! Is so filled with amazing events! Walking home just now I saw a man busking with his telescope. It was pointed up towards the moon, a peach lying in dark glossy syrup, and his hand-lettered sign and the beast had attracted a queue of people eager to see the sky up close. His telescope was as big as three people bound together for the stake, which is what might have happened to a busker with a telescope four hundred years ago in this or most countries.
On my way out as the blue hour deepened I ran across an angry demonstration. With huge signs they marched until they came face to face with police, standing legs planted apart in their sexy motorcycle boots and cavalier pants. The anger seemed to dissolve and the two groups faced each other chattering and laughing. I couldn’t make out the signs, I asked a hipster who is always begging with his brass Tibetan bowl, “Hablo pocolito Ingles?” Do you have a little English? Oh yes, he said, and launched into an explanation in Spanish. I gathered that the protestors were anti-austerity, “like Greece.” He said something something about the poor. At least that’s how it sounded to me. I thanked him profusely, the first homeless hipster beggar I have ever met, and hurried on to the bookshop cafe open til midnight which is where I plan to spend the rest of my visit if not my life. I found it yesterday and spent an hour in there, resolving to come back with my laptop. So hushed and filled with concentration is the atmosphere that people entering the shop instinctively begin to whisper to each other. That is, nirvana.
Leading up to Palm Sunday people were selling sprigs of rosemary and olive branches in the streets. In front of churches you could buy yellow palm leaves woven into fantastical shapes like candelabras and I wish I had. Then on Sunday I got caught up in a huge motionless crowd and by dint of being 18 inches taller than everybody else could see the parade, standing waiting, women in black lace mantillas and impeccable heels, men wearing tall conical hats that to me shrieked Ku Klux Klan but I suppose they have appropriated, as nothing else they represent is ever original. At the front was a large float the size of a four wheel drive, higher and taller, and banked up with candles and scarlet rose petals. I walked on and later that night found another, similar procession, this one carrying a bier for the Virgin Mary, whose velvet train embroidered in gold dropped behind her so far it needed four people to carry it.
I saw a man dressed as a Super Mario Brother with his blue foam head off, sitting gazing at one of the colourful balloons he sells, in a trance. I saw two giant Bart Simpsons with their heads off, feeding pigeons from a park bench and apparently unable to understand why I was finding them so delightful. I saw an immaculate lady all in tan with leather gloves lying back on a bench in the middle of a crowded square, her eyes closed to worship Sun. I saw a man crouched on a square of cardboard carving crosses from two twigs, his wares spread out in front of him. He was talking to a little girl. I saw two mounted police officers on their horses scrolling their phones. They were the centre of a circle of other phones as everybody stopped to take pictures. I saw the Museum of Ham that has whole hocks hung from the ceilings dense as balloons at a child’s birthday do. Another place called Paradise of Ham sells thin shavings of Iberian ham from pigs fed on acorns that costs 95 Euros a kilo. I saw a woman dressed as a bride hold out her skirts and curtsey, she too was busking, perhaps after the wedding had gone off. And in the midst of all this I saw a Swiss family eating an expensive dinner, their table facing into the milling night time street, and the parents drearily cheered each other in champagne as their girls, perhaps 14 and 9, sat slumped over their phones reaching for one potato chip after another and oblivious to all the glory that passes over us every moment.
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love in public
I saw two girls, two women, long-haired and standing round bags, close together on the subway and talking American. The train jolted round a corner and the girl nearer me fell against her lover as if accidentally, snatching a kiss as she fell. The lover was displeased, detached herself, stood gazing out at the striped blackness underground. I supposed that the kisser maybe felt, hey we are so far from home, we are safe here, and nobody knows us. I supposed the kissee felt, now: none of that, people are looking, we’re in public, we’ve got to lock it down.
I saw two men, two boys, in their middle-age running a bubble stall from a bucket on the crowded square. It is Saturday night and everybody is out. The incredible din. The shrieks and the rumble. A high bus goes past with no lid on its upper storey, crammed with tourists taking pictures who crane as their bus turns a corner then turn their backs, gazing ahead as though now none of this any more even exists for them. The bubble venders are busking, they have two long poles joined by a slack rope and a slightly shorter string, so that when they have dipped their poles and pulled them out and separate them slightly, one string pulls tight and the bubble forms and drifts up into the spangling dark. They must have newly learned this skill and are not very good at it. In between they sneak gasps off each other’s cigarette and the younger one resumes an endless phone call that has now been going for half an hour. I saw one family after another stop to take advantage of the play, their little children grasping after the bubbles to make them sprinkle into rain and the two men gallantly entertaining, letting each child take a turn on the poles, not even screwing up their faces when one after another the families left again, throwing no coins in their yellow hat.
I saw three girls in their teens chase a boy clear across the square and they were shouting at him, something, all of them laughing, the boy bolted over and collapsed at my feet as the three of them pelted on him and tore him down. They had him there on the stones screaming for mercy, his laugh interrupting him: he asked me for help in Spanish but I said, No, indeed, in English: You probably deserve it, I am going to sit here and take your picture. And I did and the old man in green on the table behind met my eye and we both smiled, in our different languages, a rueful smile. I saw Spring arrive, suddenly it seems across the span of only three or four days; all the delicate trees along the walkways are blooming and shimmering in the light.
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a fortunate wander
Today a very fortunate wander took me into a place I adored: several places and all of them new. I couldn’t handle the surly manner and derisory service, the lack of smiles from the waiters who work year in, year out with tourists treating their town like a fun park, nor my fellow tourists themselves, not even the six English ladies made up like drag queens with giant, winged eyebrows painted on their pink foreheads who got drunk at the next table on Friday afternoon and asked the man, Is the chicken salad thigh or breast meat? And then when he didn’t understand, their ringleader (biggest brows) insisted, Breast! You know? Breast? putting her cupped hands under her own mammoth bust and jiggling herself at him invitingly. They made me laugh and they made him laugh but also, enough is enough. I went walking and kept walking, without looking at the map, just following whatever alleyway or lane seemed inviting and counting the geraniums in people’s windows.
Down a steep hill I rounded a corner into this long, elliptical square – a rhomboid square – just filled up with Indian restaurants. There was a grocer’s selling plantains and yams and cheap calling cards, and on the other side where the pavement swung out from the houses maybe ten or a dozen restaurants ran down the hill. About a hundred tables were crowded with afternoon revellers. I found a seat under a giant umbrella and read from the cheap, fantastic menu. All around me people were eating and chatting, it felt like a very laid-back party. I put my hand round my jarra of beer and a terrific commotion struck from uphill, drummers, dancers, forty or fifty lanky African men came bursting slowly out of the narrow road between the houses and they had skin drums, shakers, all kinds of noise makers and were dancing. Really dancing. They tumbled down the hill gradually like an intricacy of shells washed in the surf. Round the hems of this raggedy band half a dozen fellows carried pots and hats, which they danced among the tables to offer deftly round. People remonstrated, laughed, threw in coins. They were irresistible. When I had done eating I got up from my chequered table cloth and followed downhill the shaggy brown dog who was carrying a whole soccer ball in his mouth. The ball was saggy and deflated but he clearly loved it. At the bottom of the road where it met the next street was another plaza, ramshackle and traffic-stained, where dozens of people lounged on bollards and under trees, many of them African. And as I was coming up again towards, I thought, the part of the old town I know I found a little bookshop open all day until midnight, in which quiet prevailed and concentration reigned so much that when people came in from the street they instinctively lowered their voices. It was like the opposite of the meat cave I had found on the shopping street, Paraíso de Jamon: it was a paradise of non-ham. Three people in alcoves and under bookshelves were writing. They serve coffee and the windows are encrusted with flyers. I sank down by the cardboard carton of old vinyl and took out my notebook and my pen. People turned pages and moved very little. The guy serving sat behind his computer peacefully reading all afternoon. We were there for hours.
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king of little Thailand
Unable to stomach any more Spanish food I went out and found a tiny Thai place. It was up a narrow staircase from the paved street where people wander in the evening in great numbers; the combination of Thai intricacy with Spanish kitsch in the decor was eye-watering. The girl tried to seat me at a little table under a limeskin-green wall but I asked her: can’t I please sit and look out? “This table is reserved,” she said, indicating the last little window seat. The owner came out and asked her what was going on. He was a dapper Thai gentleman who reminded me of the portrait of the King above the bar. He came over and swept the chair back invitingly, ushering me in and then jamming the table back further into the alcove, saying ruefully, “For Thai people,” as I worked my legs in under it. “Or,” I said, “Spanish people.” “Yes…” opening a large menu in front of me. I sat eating my dinner all alone and gazing down into the street where people towed their children, and several tall black men down either side of the pedestrian zone were running an illegal market, holding their stalls (spread on canvas) by four guy ropes, one at each corner, and all of them looking around constantly, alert. There seems to also be a trade in contraband recycled cardboard; I saw one man towing a giant carton by a rope like a small boy playing battleships come speeding down the alleyway and hastily harvest the best, cleanest folded boxes from the large pile all the local shops had planted out under the streetlamp; without waste of time he towed his bounty away. Not five minutes later another man pulled up diagonally across the walkway in a dirty white unmarked van and jumping out threw his back door open; looking about him nervously he stashed several large cartons of folded boxes into the back of his truck and then drove away, still looking anxiously all around. The restaurant owner came back to ask would I like a “cocktail” “of the house”, “it is a kind of Baileys,” he said, in English, “so you digest.” Thank you, I said, I would. And when he came back with the bill (I think it’s “la quinta, por favore,”) I used the formulation taught me by eavesdropping on Germans in cafes in Berlin: “Just give me fifteen back, please.” As he turned to go I touched his arm as lightly as I could. He could have made four times the money on my table had he given it to a group. “You are a very cultured person,” I said, “thank you for your hospitality. I appreciate it.” “Oh,” he said, “oh!” and touched his open hand over his heart. I grabbed my bag and ran away shyly and at the top of the staircase he caught my eye as a large group of Germans came in and his hand went again unconsciously over his heart.
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hungry in Spain
I saw three Spanish boys doing parkour in the gardens. I have run out of money and am hungry: it’s temporary. To a Spaniard gardens means a large, bare, gravelled expanse with formally clipped hedges and dark, clotting trees. The smell of the cyprus is familiar from home. I sat on a bench under the trees and watched these boys for half an hour. They were trying to climb a sheer twelve-foot wall using their speed and hands and concentration and willpower. To my right a couple in puffer jackets were smoking some excellent weed. I sat watching the three boys in their baggy grey pants intently concentrating, doing it for themselves, and was overcome with dark sexual longing. I adored them. They went at it over and over, always exactly the same, one of them actually scaled the wall and stood on top clutching the railing with both hands before he dropped lightly back to earth like an angel, I thought: were it not for tree-planting and feeding the hungry I think this would be the noblest pursuit a young man can throw himself into, in this messed-up, traffic-scarred, urbanised world.
A child of four or five threw his teddy up in the air again and again for his mother to catch and hurl back to him. His teddy-loving days, I thought, are numbered, and not high. Another couple hid inside the boy’s parka hood and with intense delicacy grazed on each other’s faces. I saw a man cycle past guiding with one hand the back of his child’s tiny bicycle, he had a large paper butterfly she had hand-painted with sparkles attached to his backpack and flapping. Spanish girls with their luscious long hair. On every corner a hairdresser, a pharmacy. The underground train which is livid with voices laughing, chatting, like a big, relaxed club. The five elders sitting side by side, four men and one lady, formally attired and letting the last drops of sunlight fall on them along the lip of a large statue, in granite, of some soldier or some prince.
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madre de dios
Following a little family down the long walkways of Terminal One to reach Terminal Two and the mouth of the subway, I kept seeing how the little girl held tight to her mother’s hand and how the little boy held his father’s. She was scarved and wore a baby close against her chest. On the other side of the glass stood a queue of twenty-five-year-olds waiting to board our flight back to Berlin.
The Metro ticketing machine offered little flags: press which language you want. I put “Spanish,” because I am stubborn. The trains are suffocatingly heated. People kept climbing on board to beg or to busk. The four men from the Andes with their squat amp and teensy guitars, held high on their chests the way you’d nurse a machine gun or maybe a baby; people looked annoyed at the racket but I gave them some money thinking, these guys are only here at all because Spain built ships, and crossed all the way the world and found their Country, and stole millions and killed millions. Now with their long obsidian hair and their colourful backpacks and their Pan flutes they are back bringing a little music into everyone’s commute: an unfair and gracious exchange.
A man whose face has been eroded by what looks like an acid attack came holding out his two stumps of hands palm upwards, smiling and wheedling. A man whose right foot is crushed and slanted made his way painfully down the carriage, telling his story and asking… for bread, there was a young man beautifully upright in his wheelchair and begging and a Caribbean man playing joyous reggae and all of this happened in between airport and town.
I dragged my suitcase and changed trains twice. The driver came out his side door when I climbed out at Manuel Becerra saying, something something something descapacitado… seeing my expression he gestured, unmistakeably, repeating himself very slowly: the disabled staircase (an emphatic sweep of one arm) is reached by dismounting on the other side of this train: and I looked, and sure enough the doors on both sides were open. “Gracias,” I told him, struggling with my suitcase and box of books back across the open carriage in which everybody stared, “Muchas gracias” – how amazing that he should care. In the next train a man gazed and gazed. Another man next to me was reading the National Geographic in Russian. I bought, very carefully, something to eat from the man running his glass-front stall, and he taught me a new word to add to my existing Spanish stock of two (“por” and “favore”). Something something some? “Non hablo espanol,” I hazarded, awkwardly. He said it again with gestures: “caliente?” Blowing on his pursed fingertips to show how it was hot. Oh, did I want it heated? “Por favore.” He went on, helpfully: “friore” (I think) means “cold.” “Muchas gracias.” It just amazes me how people living in an ancient city awash with lenses can be so welcoming and go out of their way to be kind to a person who clearly knows nothing of their country and speaks barely one word: god love them for that. So far Spanish people are wonderful. Though it also made me proud that I found my way using a photo I had taken off google maps in Berlin at 5am from the Metro stop to my hotel without asking help of anyone. It was raining and I arrived wet and splashy. At the corner across from some huge splendid palace a car swept past drenching me and another man in rainwater and we shrugged at each other, smiling, starting to laugh. The “caliente” man gave me a little receipt with my 2€ pastie and I picked up off his counter another receipt, left by another customer, which had been folded into a boat shape, or perhaps a hat; I slipped it into my pocket and will take it home – all the way home to Australia, if necessary.