This is a bit older, but we can´t change the date.

From Friday, October 18

Hola. We thought you all might be interested in what the heck we have been up to now that we have fled the country and relocated to Barcelona. Hopefully, all this updating can take place on the danandleah.com site soon enough, but there a few more labyrinthine Spanish bureaucracies to negotiate before an apartment and DSL line for our heroes are realities. Telefonica, which controls all landlines, and, ostensibly (as in, we think so, but we´re not sure, since we don´t read so well over here) internet access as well, is a former state-run company, and they move at the pace you might imagine. So there that is.

We´ve been here about 3 weeks and our Spanish is improving. We now know pretty much what we are getting, for example, in grocery stores and restaurants. For those of you who might come to Spain and want to go out to eat, "cerebro" means brains and looks like them as well. Brains as food, in fact, aren´t scary to people here. In the open-air markets, one can see pigs, ducks, and cows arranged like in some sort of cross between Silence of the Lambs and AP Biology. I say "pigs" and "cows" and not pork and beef, because the heads and such are still there to remind you about exactly what animals you´re buying parts of.

Fish sold this way, though, is great. We bought the first actually fresh shrimp of our lives yesterday. Heads still on shrimp aren´t too gross, and they tasted a lot better than US frozen shrimp. The fish store seemed always closed to us, since there was always a big metal door locked in front of it when we did our other shopping, but then we got up the courage and the vocabulary to ask around and found out that it opens from 7 to 9:30 every weekday. Why such odd hours? Because that´s when the fish come in. Some of the critters next to our shrimp in the case - a lobstery, crayfishy thing called a langoustine - were still wandering around on the ice. When you want fish here, you ask for a specific fish - a whole fish. If it´s already cut into pieces (like filets at home), they´re hiding something. They weigh the fish, charge you for the whole thing, hack it up with a cleaver. and send you home with a sack of fish parts.

Perhaps you´re wondering about museums, architecture, and the like. Those things are here. We´ve seen them. Very nice. If you come visit, we´ll take you to see them. What I´d like to talk about here, though, is <>, as they call him her in Spain. Springsteen played here on Wednesday, in the same arena where the original US Olympic Dream Team showed such war-ravaged opponents as Angola and Croatia just who was in charge of the world basketball scene, thank you very much.

We thought it would be easy to get tickets, since we´re so darn far from New Jersey. And it was, but not because Barcelonians aren´t interested. In fact, the concert was front page news on two of three papers here the next day. The arena was completely sold out, but nice people sold us two tickets from some friends who couldn´t go. Few people sat during the show. They serenaded Bruce with the ole, ole, ole cheer commonly heard at World Cup matches. He spoke a little Catalan. He also took to the piano and played two songs without the band - Spirit in the Night and Incident on 57th Street. It was, all in all, a terrific concert. Afterwards, though, we were quickly reminded that we were in Spain and not East Rutherford, because the Metro had closed and we had no idea how to get home. It turned out that there are some "Nits autobuses," which show up on few schedules but do run every hour on the hour from midnight to 5 am to the small suburb where we are subletting for the month. Even though it took us about 2 hours to figure all this out, it was still preferable to sitting in traffic on Rt 3 in Secaucus.

And what else? The rest has been a happy blur combining moving, honeymooning, and job hunting (for Leah, anyhow). She has found a bunch of work, and we will move into our real apartment sometime around Nov 1. We have been gorging ourselves on tapas, which are either hot things like octopus in garlic sauce served in a little casserole dish, or bits of this and that on bread. Most of the this and that is some combination of cheese, prok products, and preserved fish. They are very cheap, but they are also the kind of food it is easy to eat a lot of while sitting around a bar.

And that´s that for now. Hope to see you in Spain this year.