Pot and Kettle

The most difficult and expensive part of arranging this entire trip was getting Duke here.  Today I went to the Barcelona Airport.  It took me 8 HOURS to take him home and I missed my first day of class.  The paperwork and the language barrier were not as problematic as I thought.  The most difficult part was the intense lack of organization.  My feet are sore from walking back and forth between 5 different organizations that absolutely do not communicate.  I wanted to take over everything and actually use my MPA degree on that madness.  An extreme silo situation and a Spanish perception of time - I never thought I would crave a good ol' American bureaucracy that operates on hierarchy and efficiency.  Everyone I interacted with was sweet and tried their best to help me, but they didn't use email or telephones and when I the animal importation guy pecking at the keyboard with his pointer fingers, I thought I would squirt blood out of my eyes.  Seriously.

Of course, this really is just culture shock...or maybe it's Blackberry withdrawal.  After I finished fuming about the situation, I got to thinking.  Barcelona has the best transportation infrastructure I've experienced.  There is no schedule because it runs what seems like every 2 minutes.  The stations are all over the city and they are wheelchair accessible.  I can get across town in about 15 minutes or so.  Everything is in English, Spanish, and Catalan.  There are about 5 different ways to get to the airport by mass transit.  There is no bad traffic despite being a  huge metropolis with tons of pedestrians that walk wherever whenever because they have a really effective one-way street system with lots of roundabouts.

I had to check myself and think about what exactly each culture prioritizes in terms of efficient design.  There are days when I've idled in my car on I-5 for a couple hours and only passed a few exits.  I've also cried out of frustration when trying to navigate the streets of Seattle.  Oh yeah, there's also The 91 (you so-cal people know what I'm talking about).  It seems so obvious now that I should have recognized this as a situation where different cultures value different things instead of jumping into a snotty cultural critique.

I always thought I was more culturally aware and flexible than the average American, so I'm going to be gentle on my ego and call this a "learning experience".  Apparently, I need to work on my chillax skills.

Pride!

Today I went to Barcelona's Pride Parade.  It was pretty amazing.  I took the metro down to the beginning of the parade route.  As I emerged from the tunnel I was suddenly enveloped in warm sunshine and Lady Gaga.  There are a lot of things right with this parade.  Let me call out a few:

1. Police Prius escort.  This does not top dykes on bikes, but it was kind of cool.
2. Fetish fags on stilts.  That's right.  Gigantic chariot-horse mohawks, Marilyn Manson makeup, and bondage gear.
3. The floats - muy grande.  They don't use the average American flatbed truck.  Imagine a semi-truck full of BEARcelona gays (that's really their name) and double decker buses blasting "It's Raining Men" and actually raining men. 
4. They got rhythm.  Every other group was a kick-ass, dancing, samba-percussion group.
5. Nipples are legal.  'nough said.
6. Everyone is tan, fit, and unbelievably gorgeous...and they all smoke.  It's like I really don't have to have any standards here.  I also don't understand how everyone parties hard and still looks amazing.
7. No alcohol restrictions left over from Prohibition.  Even though people were slinging beers out of their backpacks, hardly anyone acted wasted.  The focus was not on getting totally trashed.  EVERYONE was just out in the streets looking for an excuse to dance.  
8. Not a lot of corporate sponsorships.  The floats all seemed like they were for local gay businesses or activisty groups.
9. The parade began at 5 pm.  This would be a plus for my nightowl gay friends.
10. There really is universal gay music (i.e.Lady Gaga and Madonna).  This made me feel all warm and squishy about being connected to a global queer community.

Despite all these amazing things I experienced today at Pride, I gotta say Oly and Seattle definitely have an edge with representing the queer, female-bodied  individuals and communities.  The event was very male-dominated and as far as I could tell there wasn't a super visible presence for female-assigned people.  I missed my butches, dykes, tranny bois, drag kings, FTMs, and genderqueers.  

I also met a cool group of Filipinas!  This is really exciting for me.  We, of course, ended up talking about food for an hour.  I got to practice my Taglish and we will be meeting up soon to have dinner.

I am really sad that I don't have a digital camera so that I can show all the amazing things I'm seeing!  Hopefully I can figure that out soon :)

I'm here.

I think I have been awake for over 24 hours.  It's hard to tell with all the time zone changes.  I am stilll feeling a bit overwhelmed and frazzled.  I flew with Delta/KLM and it was the worst flight I have ever experienced.  Actually, the flight itself wasn't that bad, but everything leading up to it was.  The customer service is horrible.  The first leg of my flight, which began at SeaTac, I was shuffled around to 4 different lines just to get my ticket.  Then, my bags got searched at the security checkpoint, which seems to be a regular occurrence for me.

It is now Sunday at 9 am.  I wrote the paragraph above really late last night and felt too wiped out to finish.  My baggage will arrive between now and 2 pm.  The airline will deliver them to my apartment, but that means I can't really leave the house at all until they get here.  That really bums me out because today is Barcelona Pride.  I also don't feel confident interacting with the locals in dirty clothes.  I brought a clean change of underwear and a toothbrush in my carry-on and that's about as good as it's going to get for the time being.

I don't know my way around yet and wasn't present enough yesterday to pick up a map of the city (got lost twice already).  I did manage to get a pay-as-you-go cell phone and a few groceries.  Living in the godless U.S. for so long, I neglected to plan for the fact that everything will be closed on Sunday.  It looks like I'll be having potatos and bananas till tomorow.

Itinerary Seattle----> Barcelona

SERVICE               DATE  FROM           TO             DEPART  ARRIVE
 
 
KLM ROYAL DUTCH AIRLI 25JUN SEATTLE WA     AMSTERDAM      520P    1210P
KL 6024              FRIDAY SEATTLE TACOMA SCHIPHOL AIRPO         26JUN
L ECONOMY
                            DINNER                        NON STOP
                            RESERVATION CONFIRMED         9:50 DURATION
 DL 0224                    FLIGHT OPERATED BY DL DELTA AIR LINES
            AIRCRAFT OWNER: DL  DELTA AIR LINES
                  AIRCRAFT: BOEING 767-200/300

CLICK HERE FOR AMSTERDAM CITY INFO, TRANSFERS & EVENTS
 
KLM ROYAL DUTCH AIRLI 26JUN AMSTERDAM      BARCELONA      115P    330P
KL 1673            SATURDAY SCHIPHOL AIRPO AIRPORT
L ECONOMY                                  TERMINAL 1
                            SNACK                         NON STOP
                            RESERVATION CONFIRMED         2:15 DURATION
                  AIRCRAFT: BOEING 737-800