so i rode a bike into the future the other day...

and this is what i found:



watch out it is only 6 hours away!

p.s. this entry is dedicated to jaden

walking in spirals

my objective these last few days was to find other radicals, hopefully participate in thier projects and possible find a travel compainion for the trip to barcalona.

it was a beautiful bread crumb trail. the locations i found on the A yellow pages directed me to two small streets only one block long nestled in a tangle of others on opposites sides of town. monday night´s community center unearthing produced a semiformal (2h)lecture over european art and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries and a disscussion over a shared meal. excellent! it was a older crowd, but this also ment they spoke castellon and without much slang. i understood the whole lecture and manged to express some thoughts during the discussion. oh man was my brain tired that night.

yesterday i walked a giant spiral, which lead me through gardens, forgotten neighborhoods, a beach, a port, a small internet cafe, a university neighboorhood, what felt like the chelsea district, and then the same half adozen streets for the last hour as the spiral closed in on my end destination. (less poetic translation: i spent most of my day a bit lost but enjoying my wanderings) this day uncovered a radical community center with projects that need manual labor during the week and gender related activites this weekend. p.s. why are radical kids, in genral and well... in particular, extremly attractive? i know im bias because i adore extronectricites, but really... -sigh- it was a long 3 months in ronda.

today i have been offered the bike of Hada. sweet sweet boonies!

also the website for the Off_Pride festival, which i was calling a conferance because there are workshop, is up and now multiple langueges not just german. hooray! check it out: http://www.offpride.ch/en/start p.s. my workshop is called body conversations. ahhhh. im so excited that the fear just blends in as more adrenaline. i will be speaking about queers, bodies and sex; my three favorite public speaking topics! i swear my skin wont be able to contian me.

*love me and my inability to spell*

and a ray of sunlight warms my lonely heart

oh valencia... ha. oh vincent and hada since i have not really spent much time in the city. of my last 36 hours here i have spent every minute with these two and of couse their dog, bartok. every delicious minute.

first and very important i ate a rice, vegetable soy dish with chopsticks. oh how i love vegitarians!

there was a big band concert that they performed in. after which, there was a comped dinner with the band and thier professors from the conservatorium. ha. where i toasted with the condutor over the positive effects of having sex while using drugs. he was attempting to make a joke that would make me uncomfortable and when i went with and one step further we bonded.

today i visited the sleeping dragon with bartok and we all had lunch with a few of their friends. my head is spinning because the whole time i have been speaking in spanish and listening to the valencian dialect. oh the range of topics, oh ideas complex and intertwined. i miss my metaphores! i miss using double antandras...

i miss you all. im also very glad to be here. i find this space revitalizing.

p.s. i also have no access to spell check or as it seems skype. ha. i barely have gmail.

the devils hands

while reflecting on the last three months in spain, i was surprised to note how many things i have made in my free time.

-a peter pan costume with belt, hat and zipper side pouch
-a poco yo costume for a small child, which entails pants, a long sleeve shirt and a hat
-a 7 piece hacky sack
-converted a pair of old man pants into shorts, retaining the cuff
-extensively patched a pair of jeans
*note: i have no access to a sewing machine. thus my fingers are now well calloused*
-41 postcards and half a dozen letters/packages
-a wide range of sketches, from accordion players to deep fried fish heads
-and i just finished a formal drawing of my host family´s grandchildren, which is below. it is far from perfect, but i am satisfied considering the time and supplies. it is my thank you gift to them.

hawked and happy

i post with word has been along time coming. sorry for punking out on blog updating, i hope to go back and explain the trips those last sets of pictures are from.

on to the string of positive events that began with hair clippers...

my conversation teacher let me borrow her clippers and with the help of a hair cutting novice i now sport my badger hawk again. its a very refreshing change.

received an incredible book in the mail and read savored it over two days.

i shared a meal and a movie (in spanish without subtitles!) with a canadian couchsurfing couple. because they are from Quebec spanish is easier than english, so i was pleased to find myself in animated spanish conversation for a good few hours.

there is an excellent arabic tea house here in ronda that was the setting for a friday night memory share.

today, i finally made it to a beach. it is not swimming weather, and actually it was rather cold and impressively windy. however, it was better in my opinion because no one was on the beach. i walked along the sand in the Mediterranean sea out to a rocky pier where the wind accosted me like a long lost lover. i stood out there for half an hour or so, just soaking up the positive energy. it was by far my favorite part of the day.

however, post-pier i found a Dalí statue garden! "elefante cosmico" is my new favorite Dalí piece. randomly, there was a bonsai tree museum in Marbella, so set out to find it. it was more of a walled in garden in the middle of a nice park, which i explored while waiting for the siesta hour to finish and the museum to re-open. bamboo really can grow just about every where. the museum housed some very impressive trees. the oldest was 450 yrs. old, with two 400 yr.old ones close behind. there was an excellent variety of types and ages from all over the world. i was the only one there so i indulged myself to converse with the trees about the history they had lived through.

i forgot my camera, which is bad luck for you guys but good for me because i ended up drawing all the things i found astounding.

only a link

here is a link to the pictures i uploaded because i can not get them on the bolg as static photos or as side shows.

p.s. the internet and i are in an eternal battle

the photos i am intending to share in this post correspond with two adventures.

the most recent of the two was a trip to Sevilla, the capital of Andalusia. i went with a group of students and we visited a disturbingly beautiful church. disturbing because i had just seen "las fantasmas de Goya" so i had the Spanish Inquisition on my mind. this church was originally a mosque, as are most of the churchs in Andalusia, and was definitely a place of power during the Inquisition. my strange way of recognizing the thousands of people that died by touching the small locked doors that lead to an untold somewhere. this church also housed the burial monument of Christopher Columbus. i still dont know how to feel about that. i have to confess part of me idealizes a history where the peoples of the Americas continued their way of life and progressed to an unknown present, with out being conquered and western powers claiming these lands. the photos highlight the awesomely tall tower. after the church there was park traipsing and plaza visiting, which ended with a glass of wine in the small Jewish barrio. Hillel, i want you guys to know i told stories of your awesomeness during our sharing of a drink.

the adventure before Sevilla, was an attempted camping trip in the mountains surrounding me. i went with jim, a 52 year old teacher from CA, who actually is most often my travel companion, when i have one. we were heading to Jimera de Libar, but got caught up in conversation and missed our stop. thus, we spent our first day and night in Cortes de Frontera. it was old man camping, so at Jims request we went to a campground. it felt very strange to pay to sleep on the ground, but i wanted company. so we made camp and headed out to find a trail head for a day hike. the Spaniards we encountered, including the tourist info folks just looked at us strangely and re-recommended that we spend our day in the "white village" with the rest of the tourists. we ended up just pointing at a mountain and finding a way up, which included much trespassing and fence surmounting. it was a beautiful hike, with old some walls hidden in goat pastures, freedom twisted in to one of the barbed wire fences and a surprise skull formed from stones in a field that we viewed from the top of our designated peak. we transformed the skull into a cat pirate for the next travelers. i only took a photo of the skull... it seemed better that way.

well that night was not filled with much sleep since i was only optimistically over my sickness, not actually recovered. we managed to pack up camp minutes before a heavy rain storm and spent the morning in the cafeterria, which boasted all you can eat breakfast for 2 euro. ha. in spain that equals all you can eat toast with olive oil or jam and coffee. but the spaniards are serious about thier morning toast, and i had to fight to get my 2 euro´s worth. i ended up cutting up a tomato i had with me and ate four tomato sandwiches to sooth my conscious for spending money on food i could have obtained for free. the rain stopped and we headed to Jimera de Libars. this campground was really awful, i cant even pretend and once again the trails we had been told about did not exist. this trek up the mountain was short lived because the whole way was full of fierce brambles sporting inch long thorns. also i had woken up with a toothache that got progressively worse and morphed into a full on tooth infection and ear infection. lets just say i didnt even try to sleep that night since daggers in your head are less comfortable when laying down.

i returned to ronda the next morning at 7am, which was the fist available train. i enjoyed a socialized medical care system and was full of antibiotics and pain meds that i was not allergic too in a 1 hour flat. the next few days were spent sleeping and chewing soft food.

worry not im better now. and as a whole enjoyed the camping adventure.

the video

here is the video of fireworks in valencia.

p.s. the internet hates me.