Item #22 - Try New Foods (Round 2)

"You do not like them, so you say. Try them! Try them! And you may. Try them and you may I say."  Sam-I-Am
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About a year and a half ago, my friend Katie was throwing a surprise birthday dinner for her husband Doug. Doug apparently has a taste for Himilayan food, whatever that may be, so Katie held the dinner at Annapuna in Cambridge. You can check out the menu here. It is . . . not Alan-friendly. None-the-less, I showed up, hoping to concoct some kind of Alan-friendly substitution-laden plate. I think I ordered some type of fairly generic beef dish.  Beef, sauce, maybe some peppers or onions.  For sides, the menu gave us the option of either rice of french fries, and not surprisingly, I ordered the fries.

A few minutes later, the waitress came out and said that the menu was old. They no longer had fries, and I was stuck with the rice. Fine. I'll survive (I think). So the meals came out, and I had my beef, as I mixed it in with the rice. And it was acceptable.

And it was also the first time in my life I had rice. A staple for 2 billion people. And I was 29 years old.

If there was a single story to explain why simply trying 6 more foods with my freakishly "discerning" palette qualifies as a new list item, I think that's the one. 

Food #1 - Falafel

This is one I'm actually surprised I hadn't tried yet. It's apparently deep fried. It's been shilled for by my man crush Tom Brady.

And there's a place in Central Square called Falafel Palace, that I've drunkenly passed 100 times, that's stolen it's architectural design from my favorite fast food place, White Castle. The laws of drunken food probability state that I should have at least eaten there once by now instead of Hi-Fi Pizza (to be fair, it does have the highest fidelity pizza you can get).

Alas, I haven't had it. So when it was offered to me at lunch post-snowshoeing, I accepted. And

 3 Blech's out of 5. Not horrible, but not something I don't need to eat again. Overrated. Most of your opinions are wrong. 

#2 - Roast Lamb

I've been to Olga's 100 times, and I've probably gotten the chicken roll-up and burger-like roll-up 98 of those times. Never an Original Olga, and I've never had a gyro. Basically, I don't think I've ever had lamb (again, just tried rice less than 2 years ago). So while in Barcelona, at fancy-pants Casa De Comida, the roast lamb was probably my best option available.

A mere 1 Blech out of 5. Fairly benign. Actually tasted like a burger, just in an odd form and texture. Not clamoring for more, but not against having more.  However it does get props for basically being meat on a stick (though as my ole pal Ted says, there really should be more meats in cones). 

#3 - Tuna Steak

This is actually one I've been wanting to try for awhile. I've been told it's basically like a regular steak, but since I was never going to risk a $30 meal on something I might immediately spit out like a 2 year old, a tapas restaurant in Barcelona was the perfect chance to give it a try.

1 Blech out of 5, and the only reason for the Blech was that it was fairly dry. It was cooked all the way through, but the rest of the crew said it's better when it's just seared. So I guess this one also gets an Incomplete until I see some pink (yes, I'm still talking about food). 

#4 - Foie-gras

Now it's time to get exotic. At the same tapas meal as the tuna steak, I learned that this is duck or goose liver.

AFLAC Duck does not approve

And thus, this was probably the food I've tried to far with the biggest mental hurdle. Not just a new animal, but a new body part (though I guess I should say this is the first time I've tried liver by itself, as I'm sure hot dogs have liver, intestines, lips, anuses etc).

2 Blechs out of 5. I think I may be grading a curve though as the foie-gras was covered in caramelized onions, which ended up being the dominant taste. So that helped . . . along with the fact that we had been drinking sangria and wine along the Mediterranean for the majority of the afternoon.

#5 - Alligator

My buddy Ryan has a Mardis Gras party every year, and every year, he goes balls out. Embracing his Louisiana roots, he flies in some real Cajun food for the extravaganza, and last year that included alligator. It was deep fried, and basically looked like popcorn chicken. But Ryan tried to be cute, and as he went around offering it to everyone, he told me it was indeed popcorn chicken, from southern icon Chick-fil-a. I . . . . was not amused by his ruse. And thus Ryan learned that I have no problem not trying something purely out of spite.

This year, Ryan learned his lesson, and when he made his rounds, he offered up the truth, and I obliged.

And it was pretty darn close to actually tasting like popcorn chicken, though it gets the one Blech because it just had a little . . . funk to it? I don't know. Maybe like popcorn chicken that was left out overnight? Though I did have it without ketchup, which is really a sin in the Book of Alan (hmmm, does deep fried falafel go with ketchup?) 

#6 - Thai

Yes, I am getting real specific here and just listing "Thai". I think I may have had it before, but I'm pretty sure it was the aforementioned meat-on-stick, in both chicken and beef varieties (and it done was so out of necessity. My work gets a catered lunch once a month, and one month they lost their minds, and decided to get a thai buffet. So what was I to do - go out and PAY for lunch? Crazy talk).

And while I can't find the menu online for the place Jill, Alycia and I went to, I do know this was probably a little more authentic than meats-on-stick.Some type of ground chicken. Peppers. Onions. Tomatoes. Basil. Maybe even some curry.  And to give myself a little more adventure, it was given 2 out of 2 on the menu's spicy pepper rating. 

 

No Blechs!  I could have done without the stems on the basil, but now I'm just being anal retentive for the sake of being anal retentive. It was quite delightful, and I handled the spice like a MAN. . . and then walked out wearing purple shirt and scarf.

Item #21 - Take a Trapeze Class

An estimation of my overall trust in people, with a few key moments.

Point A

When I was a kid, like most people, anything an adult said was taken as gospel. Vegetables are good for you? Sure, even though they taste like ass. Babies are brought to mommy and daddy by a flying bird. Sure, seems plausible. A fat man in a red snow suit flies around the entire world with 8 reindeer, dropping off toys via chimneys to every child in the world, all in single night? As long as the presents keep coming, sounds good. I love you mommy and daddy.

And then the horrible truths are revealed, and you find out that Santa doesn't exist - it's really just mommy and daddy spending hundreds and hundreds of their hard-earned dollars on toys and staying up ate to wrap the gifts themselves. Damn you mommy and daddy! How could you do this to me?!?  LIARS! And the myth of all adults being omniscient is exposed


Point B

Ahhh, first love. As I mentioned in the last post, I landed my first girlfriend Christy during my junior year . . . and then she dumped me the night before soccer tryouts. It sucked. Who knew the dating world would be tough? But if she wasn't into me, then she wasn't into me. C'est la vie. However, just 2 weeks or so after, she had already landed her next boyfriend, Paul. Christy and I went to different schools (it would have been tough for her to go to my all-guy high school, considering her utter lack of a penis), but Christy and Paul did not. And while their were no rumors of cheating via the friends network, I now certainly had reason to believe she wasn't the most trustworthy of girlfriends over the last month or 2 while we were together.

Being a nice boy that I am, I invited Christy to one of our first soccer games that year. A few minutes into the game, I noticed her sitting in the front row. However, she wasn't alone, and I got my first look at her new boy while I was playing. That . . . sucked. Though one of our very next games was coincidentally against Christy and Paul's school, and Paul just happened to be on the team. We won 2-0, and vengeance was MINE! 

Point C

While Christy never actually cheated on me, when I was a sophomore in college, my girlfriend Kim actually did. Or so I've been told. I didn't actually find out about it until months after we broke up, and for the next 6 or so years after, we basically ignored each other. Apparently there was a little bit of a Ross and Rachel episode, as we went on a weekend break in which I thought it meant 48 hours apart, while she thought it meant a chance to put her tongue down someone else's throat (what bitterness?)

I assure you, this will be the only reference to a Friends episodes in this blog's existence. Frankly, I'm ashamed that I brought it up. Those 2 years I actually watched Friends . . . a dark time in my TV viewing life.

11 years later, and now me and Kim are cool. But all it really takes is one good instance of cheating to really drop your faith in the opposite sex. Combine that incident with a 4 year college stretch that included a whole lot of questioning of why I listened to the Catholic church verbatim for so many years (a post in and of itself down the road), and what you get is the swan dive shown in the graph. 

Section D

I've slowly regained my overall trust in others since then, and you kind of have to if you ever really want to get close to someone again. I've definitely kept a cynical side, and probably always will, but at least I no longer subscribe to the Stone Cold Steve Austin DTA theory - Don't Trust Anyone. And yes, I feel much better about myself referencing the WWE than I do Friends.

While I may not have needed the relationship trust to take a trapeze class, I definitely needed to show up with a healthy dose of trust in my fellow man. At the start of the class, they keep it pretty simple. Listen to their calls while you're up there. Get your knees on and off the bar when they say so, and kick forward and backwards when they say so. Now get your ass up to the 3rd story of the scaffolding so you can jump off.

Once your up there, your safety belt gets clipped into the harness. When you fall, it obviously helps to slow you down, but you can definitely come down wrong and get hurt.

Once secure, you grab the handle to your left, get your toes on the edge of the platform, get your torso out past the edge, and lean out to grab the bar with your right hand. At this point, it's time to hope you've never pissed off your instructor in a previous life, as the instructor grabs the back of your belt (which you really don't feel at all) and tells you to reach out and grab other side of the bar with your left hand. Now as I mentioned, at this point your entire torso is already over the edge, so as you let go of the handle with your left hand, your entire body is in the the hopefully good hands of the instructor. If he lets go of you, you're falling. And that first time that you finally let go with your left hand is one of the freakiest feelings I've had in a awhile.

Now that you've put your entire weight off the edge of the platform, the instructor says "Ready . . . . HUP!", and you're off ("Hup" is what in the biz use instead of "go" or "jump". Yeah, I'm hip to the industry jargon)

 

 The knee hang, with a backflip finish

For the first hour and a half of the class, we practiced the above. Swing out. Swing back, getting your knees above the bar. Swing out, reaching backwards as if you're going to grab someone. Then get back down to a standard swinging position so you can do a backflip dismount. Pretty cool for our first class, but what was even cooler was the last 2 attempts, in which your trust once again gets put on display. That part where you pretend to reach out and grab someone? Yeah, now you get to.

The knee-hang, with a catch

Now not only do you have to trust that the person will actually be there, you also have to trust their timing, because the catcher is the one giving you the signal to leave. And if you don't leave at the exact moment they say so, or don't get your knees on the bar in a half a swing, you're shit out of luck, and down you go. Lucky for me, I went 2 for 2 on catches. 

$75 for a 2 hour class (which took place in a furniture store), and well worth it. Enjoyable enough that my friend Alycia and I spent another $50 and signed up for 2 more. 

Also at that location of Jordan's furniture? An IMax, a Fudruckers, a Jelly Belly store, an Ice Cream parlor, and a mini-Bellagio water fountain show. It's f'd up. 

Round 2 was this part Thursday, and we had yet another variation on the trust fall. The move basically consisted of getting your ankles to rest on the bar, getting your ass up, and sticking your head in between your knees. A nice and compact ball of blindness. And rather than reaching out while hanging, seeing yourself into the arms of the catcher, and gracefully transitioning into their snare, you instead explode out of your tuck, change your line of sight 270 degrees by going from straight up to straight forward (the long way around), and then hope that you can find the catcher's hands and hold on in about 0.1 seconds. And once again, you're completely reliant on the expert timing of the instructors . . . which wasn't very expert-like on my first catch attempt. A complete whiff as the catcher was already in her backswing as I reached out into the nothingness. Try #2 was better, though it basically ended with us slapping 5's and heading our separate ways. My way was down.

Our 3rd class is in another month, and hopefully I'll get my average back above .500, as I currently sit at 2 for 4 on catches. I've regained yet another smidgen of trust in my fellow man, but sadly, the net and harness are only metaphors in the frustrating world of dating.

(Cheesy ending? . . . cheesy ending)

Item #20 - See Soccer in Europe

"Half back passes to center, back to wing, back to center! Center holds it! Holds it! Holds it!!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says that for someone to become an expert, they need to work on their craft for about 10,000 hours. For some reason or another, I brought this up with my friend Aaron over Christmas break when we were talking about soccer. He thought we may have put in the requisite 10,000 hours by this point in our life. So of course, I had to nerdify this theory and create a spreadsheet, and estimate the amount of time I spent practicing and playing soccer throughout my life. The results:

 

Elementary School

Though I don't remember it myself, my parents have told me that for my very first game, when the coach went to sub me in, I started crying and sat out. Anyway, from kindergarten through 6th grade, I basically play on 1 team in the fall and 1 team in the spring. By 4th grade, I'm filling in the rest of the year with summer baseball and winter basketball. By 6th grade, I had gone from a sobbing pansy to a fairly decent player. 

Junior High

Games get a little more intense. The number of practices increase. I become a captain for the mighty St. Anne Eagles. I feel like a stud, sometimes playing striker, sometimes playing sweeper.

High School

I go to one of best soccer high schools in the state and no longer feel like a stud. I feel out-classed.  The number of practices and games skyrocket, as I discover indoor soccer in the winter, dropping basketball in the process, and drop baseball for more soccer in the summer, as soccer becomes a year-round gig.  

As a back-up forward on the freshmen team, I score a measly one goal and my ego really gets brought back down to Earth. However, as a sophomore on the JV team, I find my calling and start playing defense. I'm a starter again. Hooray.

Going into my junior year though, I was terrified. As I said, my high school has been fielding one of the best teams in the state for the last 25 years, with 5 state titles, 1 World Cup player, and countless players that end up playing in college on scholarship. And in high school, my least favorite day of the year was the first day of tryouts. Our coach was a stickler for 2 things - discipline and stamina, and the stamina was put to the test more so at our school's tryouts than any other. We didn't touch a soccer ball the first morning of tryouts, which typically consisted of being timed in a 2 mile run and then running sprints until lunch. And while I may be a decent runner these days, I was an asthmatic disaster with any sort of distance running back then (and yes, I'm counting a 2 miler as a distance run). We were supposed to break 12:30. I ran 14:10. It was not pretty. But somehow, the miraculous happens and I just barely make the team, as our coach tells me I was the last player to make it. It was a confusing day for the ego. I ride a lot of pine that year, we get ousted in regionals, and 12 years after it first happened, soccer once again makes me cry. 

Senior year sees one of the great examples of the "what doesn't kill me only makes me stronger" theory. On the eve of tryouts (again, my most hated day of the year), I get a phone call at 11:00pm. It's my girlfriend Christy. My first love. A fellow soccer player who's been by my side for 8 months (an eternity in high school relationships) . . . and she's dumping me. Yeah, that sucked. But I end up going out that week and absolutely KILLING tryouts. I earn a starting spot on a team that finishes the regular season with no losses and just a single tie. We dominate . . . until we play in a monsoon-filled mud-bowl of a game in regionals. Our stud players get neutralized by the weather and the field, and we lose 2-0. Tears are shed again, as my varsity jacket with an empty line on the back never gets filled out with "State Champs." That team becomes my Al Bundy "4 touchdowns in a single game" moment.

College

Time spent playing obviously goes down, but I still play a shit ton of games, in intramural leagues and in a city league. I start working for the intramural department, and start playing even more. "Oh, your team is a down person and needs someone? Well I'm an intramural supervisor, and I'll just supervise myself onto your team while I'm still on the clock." It was a nice perk.

While playing intramurals though I suffer my one of only 2 injuries to ever sideline me extensively. I break my shin playing in a coed game. Clean play. 50-50 ball. He just happened to get the ball and all of my shin,  breaking it in 2, despite me wearing shin guards (the same pair that I had been wearing since junior high, and the same pair I wear today. I think they've been washed about 5 times in their lifespan. I love them). I spend 6 weeks in a full leg cast, 6 with a cast on just my lower leg, and 6 in a walking boot. Sadly the casts don't work like magic with the ladies like I hoped they would.

Post-College

I play in some fairly hardcore Boston leagues. The league winners typically end up winning the state cup (ummm, that's not us).  We practice in mid-March with snow on the ground. We nearly end up in fights in about 1/3 of the games. One game ends 15 minutes into it as an opposing player, slightly disgruntled with a call, throws a punch at the ref. Eventually, I decide these leagues are more work than fun.

Grad school sees a whole lot of pick-up soccer with other grad students. We play in the Purdue intramural league and end up playing a team of freshmen in the finals. Youth and speed vs experience, and experience wins out. It was gratifying . . . stupid punk kids with their FaceSpaces and their hip-hoppy music. 

However, while playing indoor I suffer side-lining injury #2 - a badly sprained ankle. While not actually broken, it keeps me from playing for 6 months. Lethargy starts to set in.

After grad school, after moving back to Boston, I continue to not play for awhile. I get fatter. Eventually, I say "what the fuck am I doing?" I join several coed-yet-competitive leagues, drop the weight, and once again appreciate the love of my life. Yeah, that sounds lame, but I'm ALWAYS happy playing soccer, so deal with it.

Results

If you want to get nerdy and see the spreadsheet, it's HERE.

Estimated # of games played:  ~900

Estimated # of practices:  ~750

Estimated total hours:  ~2,000

Wow. That's a shit ton of soccer, but its still WAAAAAY short of the 10,000 required for being an expert. Even if I was short by 50%, and even if you count every hour I've spent watching games or even playing soccer video games, I'd still be only halfway there. The dream of playing professional soccer? . . . Dead. Sigh.

But what those numbers do mean is that I fucking LOVE soccer, and it means that since I was about 14, I've dreamed of seeing a soccer game in Europe. I've been lucky enough to see 3 international games so far, 1 of them being a World Cup game, but since they all took place in the US, the atmosphere was "good" at best.

The friendly game between the US and England in 2005 actually had a better atmosphere than the World Cup game between the US and Switzerland back in 1994, thanks mainly to the 20,000 or so English fans in attendance. They were outnumbered, but they ran Soldier Field that day. Drunken singing and chanting all game. My personal favorite was them signing "George Bush is a wanker", to which we responded . . . . by also singing "George Bush is a wanker". 

Thus, a European league game has been #1 on my bucket list since early high school. So when Yaneeka asked me to meet up with her and Buddy in Barcelona, before I even checked the cost of flights, I grabbed my phone and checked FC Barcelona's schedule. They were playing at home that weekend, and money immediately became meaningless to me. I was going.

The Game

As if Yaneeka scoring a hotel room wasn't enough. She was able to get her company's corporate tickets to the game. So we weren't just going to see the world's best team, with the world's best player in Messi, we were going in style. The tickets (valued at about $400) gave us access to Snooty Central - a lounge that served free food, wine and beer an hour before the game and an hour after. It was ridiculous, and I literally had to buy dress shoes while over there so I could get into the lounge. But $70 dress shoes are small price to pay for fulfilling your #1 lifetime goal.

 $400 worth of Snooty Pre-Gaming. I'm 90% sure we ended up sitting next to guys in the Russian mafia

But before we even got up to the lounge, I had my Christmas morning moment. We got our tickets scanned, and I immediately ran to the first entrance I could find, walked out, saw this . . . 

 

. . . and was in heaven. It was absolutely surreal to finally be standing there, less than an hour from game time. Absolutely . . . surreal.

The game itself was pretty damn good. Barcelona took a 1-0 lead on a David Villa goal 3 minutes.  Athletico Bilbao tied it up in the 50th on a penalty kick, after a weak foul, but thy lord and savior Lionel Messi put Barca back on top in the 78th minute. He had magical moment after magical moment, but it was a fairly simple cross in the end that he scored on. On the whole, Barca DOMINATED the game. I checked the numbers afterwards and they held possession for 79% of the game. That's unfathomable. Those numbers are better than video game numbers. Ridiculous. Anyway, a few shots from the game:

 Messi and Dani Alves warming up. I could have watched this for an hour and been happy.

 One of my favorite players, Pique, going for a header (though he played like shit that game)

 

God, taking a corner kick

Pep giving David Villa a good-game-butt-slap

And my favorite video is probably this one.  Sometimes you watch a pro game and think "eh, these guys are good, but I might be able to hang for awhile." But then you watch them do a half-ass warm-up drill playing keep-away and your jaw drops. They're, ummm, really good. Really Really good. 

So the game was everything I hoped it could be, as I now search for a new top item for my bucket list. And if I didn't do another Do-52-New list item all year, I'd be OK, because the list helped me get to this formerly-unthinkable goal.  Again, absolutely surreal.

Though one of the most memorable scenes occurred immediately after the game. Sometimes after Red Sox games, you'll hear a "Yankees suck" chant on the subway ride home. It's amusing . . . for awhile. But in the subway after the Barca game, there was no hate. Only joy. Eight or so decked-out fans broke out in song. A good minute or so long, with lines for nearly every starter on the team. "Fiesta . . . fiesta fiesta . . . Andres Iiiiiiiniesta." And god damn it was beautiful. 

• Yaneeka . . . what else can I say? You rock. Thanks again for everything. The shot below couldn't have happened without you.

 Pure . . . Joy

Item #19 - Visit Barcelona

"En Espanol, my nickname es El Tigre!"   -Senor Chang!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When it comes to grad school, being an engineer is the way to go. I spent 2 years at Purdue, and after getting hooked up with the right program and the right professor, I basically had a free ride after my first semester (like most grad school engineers). Tuition and about $1400 per months stipend (and while that may cover rent about little else in Boston, in West Lafayette, I could live like a king in the land of country bumpkins. The Coors Light flowed like water).

In my last semester there, my professor was undergoing a project with some of his undergrads.The students worked on a design project in parallel with a similar team from the Dublin Institute of Technology, with the final goal being a pair of presentations in Dublin. Somehow, I got tabbed to be the grad student adviser to the team of undergrads. And somehow, when the time came for the aforementioned presentations, there was leftover money in the budget for me to tag along with the team to Ireland. And like the last 3/4 of grad school, the trip was completely free. Granted, it was 4-to-a-room-in-a-hostel free, but considering I had never been out of North America, that was cool with me.

So we went. We drank Guinness.  We toured around. We drank Guinness.  We gave the presentations. We drank Guinness. You get the picture (seriously, Guinness is cheaper than Bud Light there. Up is down. Black is white. . . ).  And after having explored Dublin for 5 days, one of the other students and I hopped over to London for a 24 hour whirlwind extravaganza, seeing every tourist trap along the Thames we could fit into a single day.

When the trip wrapped up though, and I got back the The WL (as the cool kids call it (note: no actual cool kids exist in West Lafayette)), and I processed the week, while I certainly had a great time, I was left thinking . . . that didn't FEEL like Europe. Dublin was kind of like visiting Frankenmuth, Michigan.  Cool. Relatively quaint.A different culture, but not THAT different.  Dublin just happened to be, ummm, authentic. And London (at least the heart of it) was basically like visiting New York City, but with much cooler, and less-douchey, accents.  In both cases, I never really felt like I was out-of-place, and for some reason, I realized I actually wanted that feeling. Up to that point, the most out-of-place I had ever been was in Cozumel, Mexico, and that was just 1 day on a cruise, and in a very touristy area (though our cab driver did take us to La Casa de Putas. I guess my American joke/sarcasm didn't translate). I wanted to experience being abroad, and Dublin and London just didn't give me that out-of-place experience (I probably should have worn a George W shirt the whole time I was there. I think might have worked and drawn some European glares)

Fast forward to 4 weeks ago, and I randomly got my chance, thanks to a friend (Yaneeka) traveling to Barcelona for work. Friend #2, Buddy, was heading over to meet her (and eventually friend #3 Ryan would too). They invited me, and after first checking to make sure FC Barcelona (the local soccer team) was playing at home, which they were, I checked flights. And with a free hotel room, how could I not say no to a 4 day Barcelona vacation for just the cost of a $650 flight? Thus, a mere 9 days after booking the flight, I was finally able to make it to mainland Europe, truly be an American abroad, and add a list item I totally expect expect to actually happen.

I could give a play-by-play of the entire trip here, but that's probably the modern day equivalent of showing off vacation slides with a projector to your neighbors in the 60's. And since I can't supply you, the lovely reader, with enough wine/beer/absinthe to get through that, if you want to check out my entire trip, you can see the whole Picasa gallery here (with the exception of the soccer game, which gets its own post later). Otherwise, some random thoughts on my new favorite city:

• This is one of the first times I got sticker shock on something being INexpensive. I expected to be raped by the exhange rate while staying in a ritzy Mediterranean city. And while it wasn't stellar ($1 = 0.7 euro), the prices in Barcelona kind of made up for it. 10 subway rides for about $13. The dress shoes I bought for the soccer game (again, to be explained later) were $70. And the fancy tapas meal we had probably cost less than Tasca on Comm Ave in Brighton. Comparatively, a very cost-effective trip.
• Cleanest . . . city . . . ever. Granted were stayed in tourist central, but everywhere we went was clean. And while we were warned a little about pickpockets, I never felt unsafe. 
• You could have survived not knowing a lick of Spanish, but it helped to know the basic stuff that I did know. But what was great was that NOT knowing a certain word or phrase didn't automatically get a look of disdain from the locals.  On the other hand, I spent 3-4 hours on a layover in Paris, and EVERYONE gave off the "silly uneducated American, get out of my country" vibe. I now have no need to ever visit Paris, and I have no problem basing that on a layover. Damn cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

 And a few random picture highlights:

LOVED the architecture. It seemed like every single building had a balcony with metal railing, which gave it that old-timey-euro feel, which London and Dublin didn't have. My new beautification plan for Detroit isn't to tear down all the abandoned buildings. Costs too much. Just add balconies to everything. Second floor, first floor, basements, whatever. More balconies! They just announced a $200+ million renovation for Cobo Hall in Detroit? Should have just spent $1 million and lined the outside with balconies.

 

The one semi-lame scenery picture . . . but I love it, so deal with it. When I pictured Mediterranean Europe beforehand, I pictured the aforementioned balconies,and the cityscape with mountains behind it. Getting up Montjuic gave me my moneyshot. And note the sign with the man falling down the mountain. We did not fall down the mountain.

 

The bar directly across the street/alley from our hotel was open until 3am every night and also had live music every night. We finished all 4 nights there (despite having a 5am flight the day we left), and how could we not - it was called Cheers. It was a sign.

One bar had Duff beer. Of course Buddy had it.

I've helped spread Shake Face across several states, and now, I've helped spread it to Europe. We taught it to the bartenders at Cheers, despite their lack of English. "Como se dice Shake? y con la cara. Si? Comprendes?"

 I don't know what the hell the movie Chico & Rita is about, but I'm not sure how they're allowed to advertise in a public subway for what appears to be an animated porno. Why is Rita giving Chico an HJ while he's trying to play the piano? Loco.

No great conclusion to this adventure other than that i LOVE Barcelona. If I were allowed to take a year out of my life and go and live anywhere right now, it would be Barcelona. Immerse myself. Legitimately learn Spanish (though they actually speak Catalan in Barcelona). Get season tickets to FC Barcelona so I can drool over Messi every week. Yeah . . . that would be nice.