Alright, already, we went to see some art. Two art things, actually. On Saturday, we went to see the Fundacio Antoni Tapies, which is a large home that Antoni Tapies, a Catalan artist, bought and turned into a museum for his work. The Lonely Planet guide says he is one of the most important Catalan artists, especially among those still working today, but that doesn’t explain why he had to buy himself a museum.

The Lonely Planet used phrases like, “the bulk of the collection comprises,” and “among the remaining works,” and these led us to believe that there would be a lot of art in the place. After all, one would assume that Señor Tapies could put whatever he wanted in there, and why open a museum if you’re just going to keep all of your art at home?

Well, perhaps the purpose of art is to ask unanswerable questions. If so, this museum was worth the €3 (it’s normally €6, but we bought a special ticket), since we’re still wondering where the “bulk” of anything was in the Fundacio Antoni Tapies. Now, let’s be clear: the art was nice. We walked into a beautiful old building that was designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, who is often mentioned immediately after Gaudi on the well-known “list of famous Catalan architects.” It was originally a ritzy publishing house and is most notable for the wild rooftop. Atop the building is a rat’s nest of barbed wire that looks like nothing in particular. One of us actually thought the building was under construction. (I won’t say which one, but her name rhymes with…oh, that would be too easy. You’ll just have to guess.) But it’s not. It’s just modern.

So there we are, inside. In the front entryway, which later we would come to call “the museum,” there were some funky painting-ish type things that included clay, rope, and rice, among other media. Smack in the middle, there was a cement desk with a lot of math carved into it. The most “artsy” of the carvings said, simply, “√♥” The square root of love? Are you kidding? Can a real artist really get away with something like that? After examining the piece for a few minutes, we determined that the square root of love equals the opposite of brown eyes (see earlier posting if this confuses you), but we could get no further.

Downstairs, there was a special exhibit: a retrospective of another artist whose name we have forgotten. It was called, “Ida y Vuelta.” This title got us pretty excited, because we knew what it meant – “Coming and Going.” The accompanying flier explained that the curator had a hard time getting the show together, because the artist had said that a retrospective would be pointless. His pieces were only worth seeing in the moment of their creation, apparently. Somehow, he was convinced to put the show – described, like the museum itself, with a touch of hyperbole: “his entire life’s catalog” – together for the Fundacio Tapies. In a nearly empty basement, we found three boxes that resembled drawers from library card catalogs, but much longer. They were suspended from the ceiling by metal cables and they each held roughly 10,000 notecards. One held all black cards. You were allowed to touch them, but since they were all black, flipping them around got dull after a while. Another set was entirely white. The third had words on them, sort of poetic dictionary definitions of various Spanish words. This one was fun, like something one of our Spanish teachers had substituted for the real art to make sure we practiced on the weekend.

Then we went upstairs to the third floor. A striking, colorful painting caught our eye. Much of it was dominated by the very hip lime green color that’s all the rage these days. Oh, that color. It had been haunting us for days. Do you know how sometimes you get a song in your head, and you can’t get it out? It was like that with this shade of green. Sometime in the middle of the week, I had said to Leah, “What was that color we used for some of our thank you notes?”

“Gray?” she said.

“Gray’s not a color,” I said. “It was green something. Not fuschia…that’s pink. What’s that funny name for lime green?”

“The one that sounds like it should be pink?” she said.

“Yes! Yes! What is it?” I said.

“Ambergris?” she said. Leah is reading Ahab’s Wife, and everything makes her think of ambergris these days. If you haven’t read it, you ought to. It’s not so bad, thinking of ambergris.

“No, not ambergris. I’ll know it when I hear it.” But I didn’t hear it. So there it was, staring across the gallery at us. We ran over to it, as if the little cards say things like, “Guernica. Pablo Picasso, 1896-1973. On loan from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Mostly done in greenish-gray. Maybe olive?” Of course it said the title in Catalan and little else. But it was a fine painting.

That’s one thing about going to museums in another country, though. We don’t know too much about art (except that when we pay €3, we want a lot of it), and so much of “looking” at a painting is actually reading the card and seeing when the thing was painted, what it’s called, and so forth. Someone told me once, actually – Mike Basta, was that you? – that the titles are often dreamed up by gallery owners and museum curators, and they’re often meaningless in terms of the art itself. Even knowing that, words are a lot easier to decipher than a modernist painting, so without them, it was a new sort of museum-going experience.

It was yet another new challenge: to make something of the paintings without the option of being satisfied with their historical information. It was sort of an extension, actually, of something that a lot of the illiterates we know report about Spain: there were no distractions. When you can read without effort, you have to read a lot. There are words everywhere. Ads, bus routes, flyers selling furniture and offering services. We see those things, but without effort, they don’t get into our brains. It’s like walking around in a little bubble. So it was with the painting captions. Since they were sort of meaningless to us, we were able to ignore them much more easily than we would have been able to do if they were in English. Maybe we got some more out of the paintings as a result. Either way, we enjoyed ourselves. It was a worthy museum, and we will take you there if you visit.

And then we congratulated ourselves on have done something more noteworthy than talking to the water company or buying some forks, and went out for coffee. Actually, one of us had coffee, and one had hot chocolate. If you were not planning to go to Spain, and then you heard about how they make hot chocolate, you might change your mind. First they heat up some milk – just like us! Then, they melt candy bars into it. It sort of turns into pudding, which is the best dessert in the whole world. (By the way, if you visit, you can go out for hot chocolate even if you wish to skip the museum.) It was so pudding-y, in fact, that we had to send it back for whipped cream. This annoyed our waiter, but people getting mad at you can easily be turned into just another distraction that you don’t understand. Sometimes living inside the bubble is a chore, but it has its benefits.

And then we went to another museum. This one was free. More on that later.

By the way, the next day, on the Paper Source website, we found the name of that green color. Sitting in the vile internet cafe amidst the teenagers playing video games and the sketchy men surfing porn, we both raised our arms in victory and shouted, “Chartreuse!”

It´s Thanksgiving in Barcelona, just like everyplace else. Tough to be overseas on our favorite holiday, but we´ll make it nice. The English pub where we watch football (real football, not soccer) every Sunday will be offering a Thanksgiving Dinner, complete with cranberries imported special from Holland. However, pumpkins are tough to find here in late November, so the cook told us that he may go with a mince pie. We think, but we´re not sure, that mince is a vile mix of cured fruits. We´ll let you know how it went. Hope you´re having a nice turkey.

It’s been a big week for us. We got furniture, gas, and the past tense, in that order. For furniture, we did what one-stop, low-income shoppers do all over the world: go to IKEA. Here they call it EE-KAY-UH. They also call Euros AY-OO-ROS, for that matter. When they say “Nike,” they try too hard to remember how exactly American’s pronounce things and say it as if it rhymes with “bike.” It’s easy to learn to pronounce Spanish, because each letter only has one sound; in other words, there’s no way they would have words like “wood” and “food” that don’t rhyme. Of course, it’s a killer to learn the grammar, so we can pronounce things that make no sense correctly. When Spanish speakers learn English, they get the grammar very quickly, but they can’t say anything the way they want to pronounce it. Or so they tell me.

But anyhow, we went to IKEA. This was our second trip, actually, to the place. The first time, we went on a Saturday of a holiday weekend, or, as they call them here in Spain, a weekend. A saint had either been born or died, or maybe had his bar-mitzvah. Traffic was standing still on the highway. “Where could everyone be going?” we wondered. “Aren’t they all away for the holiday?” No, no they weren’t. They were headed to IKEA. (A friend of ours left his house a little later, encountered a twelve mile backup, and went home to read the paper. Sure, that’s a great plan, if you can read the paper.) Everyone, that is, except for the people who were already there. People were parked on sidewalks and grassy knolls. Inside, it looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. They were out of everything except a few shower curtains.

So we went back on a Monday. It was empty and quiet. We bought up everything that was dirt cheap, a characteristic that tends to correlate, at IKEA, with primary colors and lots of plastic. The apartment looks something like a nursery school classroom – orange bathmat; red, blue, and yellow rugs; bright blue tables; a dresser made out of that weird translucent cardboard that the post office makes mail cartons from – but we no longer have to sit on the floor. Done and done.

But as the old song goes, of course, a bunch of plastic chairs is not a house, and a house is not a home, without hot water. That was a mystery, too, especially since the gas company’s phone reps were reluctant to speak anything but Catalan. If you know some Spanish and think that, by extension, you’ll understand some Catalan in the way that you know what people from Toronto are talking about, you are wrong. Catalan is a language that, to us, sounds like it was created by capturing a lost American, finding out what Spanish words he knew, and then changing those words to a mix of Italian and French. Then they added about 43 pronouns that can all mean the same thing, depending on context.

We had given up on calling them, and then our portera, Gloria, got involved. Her job, as we´ve mentioned before, is something of a cross between doorman and guardian angel, depending on how much she likes you. We think she likes us a lot. She called the gas company and found out that we needed a technician to come do something or other. It took her about a week to find one, which means that if we didn’t have her then we would have gotten our gas hooked up shortly after President Nader nominated Ken Lay to be Secretary of the Treasury.

The guy – Xavi - came by, all smiles, and looked under our sink. He said something in Spanish, then opened the window, leaned out, and turned a valve from closed to open. “Ya teneis gas,” he said, which means, “That’s going to run you 100 Euros anyway. Not too shabby for 12 seconds of work.” Then he poked a pipe cleaner into some of the stove burners and something on the water heater, took the money, thanked us (who wouldn’t?) and left. Never mind that the gas company doesn’t have our names or bank account number.

If those sound like big victories, think about this one: the past tense. It probably doesn’t sound very exciting to you all, but it is to us. Our lives have been like a cross between Memento and The Sopranos. If something happens to us, and then later we want to tell someone about it in Spanish, forget it. Either we go over the story right then or not at all. We had even thought about carrying a Polaroid, just so we could make ourselves understood when we needed to report on an event that had already finished happening.

When we did talk about the past, it came out like this: “So I’m in the store, right? And I says to the guy, ‘I’m in here two days ago and you tell me that I can return the radio if I don’t like it. Then, yesterday, the radio doesn’t work. And now, you tell me I can’t return the radio without a receipt. But two days ago, you don’t give me no receipt. So what can I do?’” You can’t talk like that for very long before you have to off somebody for the disrespect, if you know what I’m saying, then head down to the Bada Bing for a relaxing drink with the fellas.

The other thing that happens when you’re locked in to the present tense is that you can’t justify your requests with anything but wants and needs. There are no real reasons. You can’t say, “The woman on the phone told me to call today,” or “I just moved into an apartment and…,” you have to say, “I want gas in my apartment.” You can’t explain that you were in the store a few days ago and they had no cheap radios in stock and you asked the other guy when they would be in and he told you that they would be in today. If you say all that in the present tense, you sound like you’re just thinking out loud: “I’m…I’m in the store…you…you don’t have radios.” It’s just easier to forget about ever having come in before and act like you’re four, which is easy if you live in a nursery school: “I want a radio. I need a radio. Give me a radio, please.”

Because if you don’t, Paulie Walnuts over here is going to break your freaking legs.

Yesterday in my Spanish class, we were learning about parts of the body. Fair enough. We labeled a big chart of a body. Still reasonable. We got cards with the names of different body parts written on them and were instructed to find the person who had the opposite. I got "brown eyes."

If anyone has a good idea about what the opposite of "brown" might be, please advise.

Also, for those of you keeping score at home, we got water yesterday.

Now we´re cooking. We own a bed, which was delivered to our house, but not carted up the six flights of stairs. The portrera - sort of like a doorman - told me not to buy any furniture, because it is very expensive and she had some to give us. It turned out that she had one single mattress and two bed frames of different heights. She said, "Don´t worry, people throw away mattresses around here all the time," at which point I asked her where I might find a cheap bed store. She told me to come by Saturday at 10 and we would go to buy a bed.

The bed store turned out to be an open air market where one could purchase anything from furniture (new and used), to animal parts for eating, to gray market electronics. Very well. We also got electricity this week, which was exciting. We almost missed our big chance because he left us a friendly phone message in Catalan, which we handled in the same manner we handle most messages on our phone in Catalan: we ignored it. Luckily he called the portrera and told her that he would be coming by. Unluckily, we had the keys. Luckily, we were in the neighborhood. Lights.

But no gas. I´m off to the GasNatural office to sort that out. We recently learned a form of past tense that lets us speak about things we have already done. Pretty useful. Our lives were starting to feel like Memento.

Apologies for the focus on matters relating to utilities. We´re sure you´d prefer to read about old Sevillian towns and friendly bullfighters and fields of rioja. In due time. For now, we remain homeless and - finally - funcionally literate.

More later.

Exciting day for our heroes. Of course, it started off normal enough, with our Spanish class. Spanish class is the finishing touch on all the details that make Spain a lot like middle school. First, there are the obvious connections, like people we know, and us, going to “Spanish class” and having “Spanish homework.” But there are tons more. Take the clothes: too tight. Enough said. We’ve worked in middle schools, and we’ve seen firsthand that kids can’t dress themselves. We currently know more than we think is proper about the exact shape of various Spaniards. The current style for women, for example, seems to be wearing buttondown shirts that don’t fit, so the buttons pull apart in front and make it look like…well, like your shirt doesn’t fit. Tres chic. Or muy suave, I guess.

Then we have the other constant reminders of the late 1980s. People wear leg warmers here. Leg warmers. Outdoors, where others can see. The music – everywhere – seems piped in from my orthodontist’s office, and from the exact dates when I had braces. We were prepared for many surprises in Spain, but hearing “If This Is It,” by Huey Lewis and the News nearly every day was not one of them. Never mind that almost nothing else – except blessed football (football football, not soccer), shown over British satellite cable, but that’s a story for another day – is available in English. Even Seinfeld (Es una programa de nada.), which barely translates well west of the Delaware River, isn’t subtitled.

The other connections to middle school are more psychological. We never know what anyone’s talking about. When we address people in any sort of crowd, we’re sure the rest of the gang is talking about us. Everyone is looking at us, the dopes who have no idea that they just agreed to purchase an entire cow; or who just told the movie ticket cashier than they wanted to buy her, and, by the way, would she tell them how much she costs?; or who walked for forty-five minutes on one bright and sunny Monday to a particular museum, just to learn through experience exactly what “cerrat dilunes” means in Catalan.

Other than a place where you are the focus of everyone else’s conversations, middle school is remembered by many as a world where odd rules applied, where you could be accused, tried, and punished before you even understood what exactly you had done. Those of you who attended Roosevelt Junior High School will remember well the “Chocolate Milk Affair” of ’87, for example. (Leah went to very hoity-toity private schools where such injustices never happened.) Just yesterday, I wound up in the middle of one of those affairs yet again. I was trying to buy some groceries at the local vegetable store. When I handed over my 10 Euro note, the guy – or, as the Spanish say, El hombre de las verduras – whipped out a little blue highlighter and wrote on it. He showed it to me. There was a tiny gray mark. “Es falso,” he said. Even I knew what that meant, because everyone tells you to watch out for counterfeit Euros, as if we had any idea how to do that. But we needed groceries.

“Please,” I said in Spanish. “It is from the Caprabo.” The Caprabo is the supermarket here in Masnou, the somewhat ritzy suburb where we are staying until our apartment is ready. The store is about the size of a 7-11 (which they also have here in Spain for Los Eslurpees, by the way) and is a little expensive for vegetables, but it’s the only game in town for toilet paper and suchlike. “What am I to do?”

In a friendly voice, and with a bit of a laugh, he told me that I ought to bring the bill right back to the Caprabo and tell them to change it. While this sounded like a halfway decent idea for a money-laundering scam, I didn’t think it would solve my problem, and I really didn’t want to wind up charged with counterfeiting.

I wandered outside, pretty much ready to give up, but the next thing I knew I was in line in the store where I received the fake bill. When I wound up in front of the cashier, she looked confused, because I had nothing to buy and was holding out a 10 Euro bill. “Pardon me,” I said. “I do not have much Spanish. But yesterday I buy wine and bread here and I have this money for change and the man in the other store says it is false.”

She said some words that I understood, and some others that I didn’t. The ones I understood translated loosely to, “You want me to just give you another 10 Euros? Are you on crack?”

I smiled my most polite smile. “With a receipt?” I said.

She didn’t smile back. “I can’t change the bill, because I don’t know that you were here yesterday,” she said.

“To bring the receipt?” I said. “To change, to bring the receipt?” As I got more into the conversation, somehow my Spanish was getting worse.

“No,” she said. The line of other shoppers was getting interested. A lot of them said something about a receipt. I hoped it was, “Oh, give him the money if he brings a receipt,” but it just as easily could have been, “This nut thinks she’ll change a counterfeit bill if he has a receipt?” She pointed towards the bank, and I was out of words, so I left and went to the bank.

At the bank, I began the same story. “I am sorry, but I do not have much Spanish,” I said. “Yesterday, I shop in the store and I get that bill.” I produced the bill in question. “Today I shop in the other store and the man in the other store says it is false.” He seemed to be thinking hard about my questions, all phrased in the kind of broken Spanish that I though would elicit sympathy.

“So,” he said, in almost perfectly unaccented English, “you speak English?” I nearly hugged him. “Let’s see that bill,” he said, still in English. He waved it under a black light, drew on it with the same highlighter marker I had seen in the store, and tore the edge. “It’s real,” he said.

“It is true?” I said, forgetting to switch back to English. “The money is true?” He looked at me strangely, shrugged, and went on in Spanish.

“It’s good,” he said. “But I will change it.” He thought a minute, then decided that there was no way I would understand the next part in Spanish. “We send it back to the national bank, and they reimburse us. It’s no problem.” He took the offending bill, put it in an envelope, threw the envelope into his desk drawer, and handed me ten more Euros. I thanked him profusely and left.

Back at the store, I found my bag of groceries still sitting by the cash register. The cashier smiled. I took out my new bill. “I change,” I said. “It is new money. It is good money. Very good.” He asked how, I think. Maybe he asked where. My answer was going to be the same either way. I said, “I go to the bank and I say the problem and the man of the bank changes the bill.”

I paid for my groceries and he gave me change. “In the bank,” he said. “Bllllllth easy pthptphtphth to change the money?”

“Yes,” I said. “No problem.”

“Buena idea,” he said, looking at the bills in his cash register drawer and then skyward, as if deep in thought. “Buena idea.”

I was nervous as I dialed the number for the gas company. The transaction had all the elements of impending disaster. One, it was required. We needed gas turned on in the apartment and couldn’t abandon this task as we had, for example, getting a cell phone that didn’t cost fifty-nine cents a minute. Two, it could cost, well, anything. As far as we knew, there’s only one gas company here. Come to think of it, I can’t remember whether we had a choice of gas companies at home. But utilities have a way of charging for odd steps in the process here – recall the rental of the water meter – and you are required to pay for the previous tenant’s overdue bills if he or she has been smart enough to leave you any. Three, it required a phone call. I mentioned the wildly expensive cell phone plan we used for about two weeks before we found an English-speaking cell phone salesman who, in about four seconds, changed our plan to one that allowed us to make cheaper calls after four in the afternoon. Pay phones are even more ridiculous. They cost about thirty cents a minute – more if you call mobile phones, which makes no sense to me, since the largest cell phone vendor happens to be Telefonica, who also owns all the payphones. They also seem to switch pricing plans about three minutes into any call, when a small stopwatch appears on the phone’s digital screen, showing that you have twenty seconds left. At that point, you’re left to throw coins into the phone as fast as possible. After about seventy-five cents worth, the stopwatch goes back to twenty…and starts again. Given how long someone could be on hold waiting for the gas monopoly to pick up the phone, it could cost more to set up the account than to pay for gas itself.
“Hola,” said the woman on the other end of the line. “Blllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll. Thrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Sí?”
I knew exactly how to answer that one. “Is there anyone there who speaks English?” I asked her in Spanish.
“No,” she said.
“Ok, ok,” I said, continuing, as I would for the entire conversation, in Spanish. “I want to open the bill for the gas for my flat.”
“Sí.”
“Do I need to have the new meter, or can I change the ancient name on the bill to my name?”
“Blllllllllllllllllllllllll. Thrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Pllllllllllllllll.”
“I have the number of my passport.” Passports tend to cover everything. At first we were shocked at how often people wanted a passport number – in the bank, buying phones, putting a deposit on an apartment – but now we were used to using them as driver’s licenses. In this case, though, she explained to me that my passport would not be sufficient. I needed a residence card or a national financial identification number. She also told me some other things, but I have no idea what they were. For all we understand of most transactions, she could have said, “Or, you could just come down here to the office, which happens to be two blocks from where you are standing, and enter a sweepstakes, and then we’ll set the whole thing up for free. Plus we’ll give you a massage.”
But I just said, “I have the number for my contract of to rent the apartment.” She clearly didn’t want that either. Then she asked for my passport, I think.
“Yes passport or no passport?” I said. “Number of passport? I want the number of my passport? You want my passport? To have my passport. Yes?”
“No,” she said.
“I have the number of my bill in the bank La Caixa,” I said. “Is that good? I don’t need the number of the card of residence or the card of financial. Not to have that cards. This cards. I have the bank. The number. Twenty numbers.” Of all that I said, “twenty numbers” was probably the most meaningful. As far as we can gather, Spain’s unbelievably great social security system – it seems that everyone has a pension, no matter where they have worked during their careers – means that anyone who wants to make sure you will pay your various bills wants to get the number attached to that pension. For those who don’t have pensions – say, unemployed, illiterate, illegal aliens like the two of us – a passport is all well and good, but what they really want is your bank account, since Barcelona has long endured foreign visitors who hang around, drink a lot of cheap beer, and then scamper home without paying the rent or the gas company. And that account number, like the national financial number that is attached to pensions, has twenty digits.
“Sí,” she said, finally. “El numero, por favor.” I read her the number in Spanish, a necessary step, but one that slows it down, since I have to think before reading every digit. Especially sixes and sevens, for some reason. Somehow, with all the thinking and translating, I read her twenty-four numbers. She wasn’t pleased.
“Blllllllllllllllllllllllllll. Thrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Pppppththththththt,” she said.
“Pardon,” I said. “ I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry a lot.” I read the number again, faster for having rehearsed. “And I change the name?” I said.
“Sí.”
“I can change the bill from the ancient name to the new name?”
“Su nombre?” I spelled it carefully in Spanish.
“Ba Bacon?” she said. I spelled it again. This time it worked.
“No more?” I said. “Is it good? Please, is it good? Nothing more to change? I am…complete?”
“Sí,” she said. “Es bueno. Blllllllllllll. Thrrrrrrrrrrr.” Immediately after I hung up, I realized that she hadn’t asked when we were moving in. We wondered if we would be charged for the extra days. Then we wondered what sorts of charges the old tenant might have left us. Panic. We had to find out, somehow. And then...we had a sense, first, of having an enormous task in front of us, and then a sense like we had realized that that task was to change the weather – so impossible that it wasn’t even something anyone could worry about. The stress lifted, at least until we remembered that we hadn’t dealt with the power company yet. But for now, we had a successful morning under our collective belt. Satisfied, we headed off to a celebratory lunch of pig, cured in various ways.