Ew! Gross!

As many of you know, when it comes to cleaning, I’m extremely lazy. I first encountered the cleaning service phenomenon in San Francisco, when my roommate, Dan, who was as assiduous at cleaning as I, said, “Even though we can’t afford it, we can’t live in filth. We have to spring for a cleaning service.” The entire time that I was a grad student, when I really, really couldn’t afford it, I can’t imagine (because I can’t remember) what my living quarters were like, but I’m assuming awful because I don’t remember cleaning ever. In Long Beach, after about 6 months of trying to clean, I just gave up, and got a cleaning service.

Here in Barcelona, I’m supposed to have cleaning service once a week, but for some reason, which I’m not so sure about, a have yet to see anyone. So I’ve been doing my best. Well, today I turned a corner in the cleaning sphere. As I sit here now, at 2:30 p.m., I have been cleaning for 3.5 hours, and the apartment is spotless, if I must say so myself. In fact, it’s quite possible that this is the cleanest the apartment has ever been even since I moved in.

The biggest issue for me has always been the bathroom, and I remember watching some cleaners scrubbing my tub in Long Beach with a brush and thinking, “Huh? You can use a brush.” I was pretty sure that there was some mold in my shower, so I bought a brush to scrub and see what happened. Ew, gross! I cannot believe how much junk I got off the walls from that shower. It really was disgusting, and it was prodigious. It ends up that my shower was covered in mold. I’ve always, for some reason, never believed in mold. I just thought people were just big complainers, but I can now vouch for the existence of mold.

I’m ridiculously proud of myself (considering that I didn’t do anything that millions of people do every day).

Meanwhile, I’ve been having interesting interactions with Barcelonans. At the grocery store where I bought that brush, I was filling my canvas bag (that I brought from the U.S.), and another guy was trying to find a plastic bag for his groceries. He pointed to my bag and said something in Spanish. I was afraid he was saying something like, “Give me that bag!” but in fact, he was saying, after he switched in English, “It’s always foreigners who bring their own bags.” I asked him what he meant, and said, “Spaniards don’t care about anything, just as long as the weather is nice and the sun is out. Only foreigners care about the environment.” (Two German women behind me had also brought their own bag).

So Toni lives on my block, and so we walked back together. It’s an amazing thing about Barcelona that everyone basically shops in their neighborhood, so you can do that – just meet someone at the store and walk home. Anyway, Toni is Mexican, but he’s lived in Barcelona for 20 years. He had a lot of bad things to say about Barcelona – how it’s too expensive (which it is), how it’s impossible to find a good job, etc. He came to Barcelona for university; his grandparents had fled Spain during the civil war, and so he was eligible for Spanish citizenship. I think most of his family lives in Spain now. But like many Barcelonans that I’ve been talking to, he thinks the city has become unlivable since the euro – more about this later. He was a nice guy, and I’ll probably run into him again just in the neighborhood.

Then as I walked into my building, following another resident, I pushed open the security gate, which has been broken for 3 weeks. As I walked in, I said, “El puerto todavia no funciona,” the door still doesn’t work. Ana, which is her name, than launched into a lot of Spanish that I didn’t get, but the gist of it was, what the hell, why haven’t they fixed it yet. We introduced ourselves in the elevator. I said in broken Spanish that it was amazing that the door still hadn’t been fixed when there are tons of workers working on apartments in the building. She rolled her eyes and said, they’re only good for cleaning.

That night, I went to my first English Speaking Club event, which is run by a British man, of course, named Gary. They have events throughout the week; most of the big ones are during the weekend, but I wanted to try one, so I went. It was near Sagrada Familia, and, by the way, seeing the cathedral at night is the best way to see it. There are no workers, no tourists, no gypsies, and the cathedral is all lit up. It’s beautiful, although as I was walking by it, I realized that it really is a monstrosity and probably a waste of money.

Anyway, I went to this restaurant, and there was only one woman there, so of course she was really popular. She was from Santa Monica, if you can believe that, and I can’t remember her name right now, which is embarrassing. She was very nice, and she’s trying to figure out a way of staying in Barcelona. She basically abandoned everything in the States to come here.

The other people were nice men, all about my age. Martin runs his family’s publishing business in Barcelona; it’s based in Mexico City, and most of his family lives in Mexico. Ramon just got laid off from a hotel, so he’s looking for another job. There was this guy from Switzerland, whose name I can’t remember now, who is married to a Bolivian, and they are also trying to stay in Spain permanently.

Gary, the organizer, was an interesting guy. He’s a doctor and has been living in Spain for about 14 years. I can’t tell, either he absolutely hates Barcelona, or he’s a typical Englishman (I’ve noticed that the English complain a lot). At the end of the evening, he launched into this tirade about Barcelona, most of which was based in fact, but he took the extreme view. Barcelona is ridiculously expensive for what you get. The police are essentially useless in combating the city’s out-of-control pickpocketing problem. Tourists do come here for all the wrong reasons – partying, drugs, prostitution. But still it’s a nice place. But I’m starting to understand that Barcelonans who have been here for a long time are really sick of the direction the city is going ever since they switched to the euro, but there doesn’t seem to be any political will to change things. In fact, the city government is so assiduously working to boost Barcelona’s image, that anything that could make the city look bad – the cost of living, the crime, the sex tourism, the suicidal abandoning of Castellano in official business – is ignored. El Pais had an interesting story the other day about how the Spanish now have the highest personal debt of any nation – including the U.S.!! And Spain’s economy is much weaker than America’s. I think for someone like Gary, a doctor from Great Britain, the whole thing is so exasperating because it’s so inefficient and stupid, and he’s raising his children here. But it reminded me of what Juan Ramon said in Madrid, the country seems to be sticking to a path of unbridled debt acquisition in order to spend ever centivo of money they can get without thinking of the future.

It makes me glad to know that I’m not here forever. I can enjoy my stay in Barcelona, glory in my clean apartment, and know that in August I’ll be back in California, which is a pretty damned nice place to live.

P.S. Today I got a Barcelonan library card. The library near my house is so beautiful, I can´t believe it, and they have free wi-fi.