Well, it’s over. Last night we had dinner with Gloria and then dragged all six or eight of our friends to a bar called Dow Jones, in which they sell beer based on principles of yield management. It was pretty empty, which, in the end, hurt us. Then we slept on an air mattress lent to us by our friend Matthew. He bought our bed and couch, so it was the least he could do. Now we are sitting in a basically empty apartment, which helps with the closure and all that.

Barcelona, over the past month, has been a different place. No one hangs around in the summer, preferring to scoot to the country for the steamy days of August. This is a big difference from the US: people that own little stores and bars, for example, can shut down and go on vacation for a month. When we told our local wine man that no one in the US did that, he asked why. I said, “Maybe it’s a question of economy – they can’t?”

He replied that it was more likely a question of stupidity, something that rhymes with economy in Spanish. Maybe so. Either way, it’s very quiet. You can park on the street, a big deal for the people with cars. All the restaurants, even those featured in last week’s Times magazine, have tables available. Or they’ve shut down. We called everyone of Ferran Adría’s disciples on Saturday, getting answering machines at all five or so. Nothing’s going on. But you can still see everybody’s underpants.

Anyhow, we’re about twenty minutes from heading to the airport, and so that brings us to something we’ve been awaiting for months now: the blog equivalent of the clip show.

Best Spanish word: jubliación (it means “retirement”)
English word we’ve most missed: get (Sorry. But it’s so darn useful.)

Best Spanish food: butifara (It is, like everything else here, a kind of sausage.)
American food we’re most looking forward to: brunch

Best day: Hard to say. So many fun visitors. I’ll go with the weekend in the country.
Worst day: Maybe the tenth of October? Vacation time had ended, we still couldn’t communicate. We were at our pitifulest.

Best thing about moving here: Easy. New language. Or maybe sausage.
Worst: So, so, hot. So hot. Don’t listen to Spaniards: in the summer, Spain is hot. Pushing unbearable.

What we’ll miss most: The schedule. Everybody always wants to do something fun, go out to eat, zip over to the beach. Can somebody get on this in the States, please?
What we’ll miss the least: Such bad hair.

Weirdest old person: The lady who defined “blue” for me in the street.
Weirdest young person: Guy across the hall. German.

Person we’ll remember with the most annoyance: The jerky woman who was going to buy all our stuff and backed out at the last moment.
Person to whom we owe the most thanks: A toughie. José and Melissa taught us to order coffee our second day, Gloria found us an apartment, Raimon Grande sat through endless meetings trying to get us to understand our apartment contract.

Coolest new fruit: Reina Claudia plums. Not to be confused with Claudio Reyna.
Worst new food, overall: ear of pig

Most disappointing experience: Discovering that Monsoon Wedding wasn’t entirely in English.
Nicest surprise: Understanding maybe a third of my wine class.

Best trick we’re bringing home: Ask us about porróns.
Worst: Mixing Spanish and English. You can smack us if we do this.

Best idea we’ve had in eleven months: Moving to Spain.
Worst: The clip show idea.

See you tomorrow.

Man, have I been slacking. But we´ve been so busy. First, we finished the trip to Italy. Venice is a wild place. Water everywhere. Streets just end at a canal, without a bridge. Maps are useless. But they were filming a movie with Mandy Moore, so we might have seen a famous person. If we knew what she looked like.

We got home, hung around for a week, and then headed out for a weekend on the Costa Brava with Jose and Melissa. It is so unbearably hot here that staying in the city was not an option. It´s pushing 100 degrees every day. When we drove, it felt like a hair dryer was blowing in the windows. The Medeterranean was, therefore, hot, and not so refreshing. We snorkeled anyway, at these little rocky islands called the Medes. It was a good time, even though the Spanish idea of a snorkeling trip is something along the lines of shoving people onto a boat, tossing some old equipment their way, and pushing them into the water. It made for a lot of people floundering around and kicking us with their flippers.

The next day we went to a little beach town called Palamos and went sea kayaking up the coast. The Costa Brava is lined with tons of tiny coves, only accessible by a long walk or a boat. Mostly we found naked people sunning themselves on pristine, deserted beaches. Since we didn't want to risk bringing the camera on the kayak, the only porn you'll get here is the David.

This week has been occupied by our, um, new business. Jose has a few weeks off, and has come up with a wild plan: He has long wanted to keep tourists from eating bad food by organizing a tapas tour, and now he's convinced us to help sell it. We wandered around, being friendly and asking people if they´d like to join us for lunch. Jose got a bunch of backs turned in his face. I got people to talk to me, but only to say such gems as, "Not in the least. Now go away."

Leah, though, wins the sales prize. On our first day of operation, we ran two tour with 14 people. Leah sold 14 tickets. One group was five guys from San Francisco who had sold a dot com and were celebrating. They were pretty mellow and mostly wanted to know where to meet 18-year old backpackers. The next group was a gaggle of 18-year old girls (rotten timing for the guys on the first tour) from a Swedish-speaking island that is a part of Finland. They were so happy to be told what to eat and not get cheated that one of them actually cried. Now Jose has to figure out how to sell tickets without Leah.

Also, we´ve been infected with a "worm," which makes the computer turn off about a minute after you turn it on. It is very annoying and so we are ending the trip as we began, in internet cafes. All this to (sporadically) keep you posted.