City of Thieves

I went running today; obviously my shirt was popped off. Since I didn't have a rout or plan I decided to still bring one with me in case something went down. At one point I stopped to tighten up the laces, and I still had my shirt. Two blocks later I noticed it was gone. I ran back and did not see it on the ground. I checked all the trash cans - no luck. Furthermore I would like to thank the citizens of this town for saying nothing when my shirt fell out. YOU KNOW WE'RE LIVING IN A SOCIETY... And now some bastard is walking around with my t-shirt on.

This whole city is filled with a bunch of thieving, twisted bastards. The same thing happened with my keys a while ago. I was working, dropped them and I knew within 50 yards where they should be, no luck. I checked the city lost and found 3 weeks after I lost them, no luck.

I just don't get it; Regarding the keys, it takes more effort to pick them up and do something ass hole-ish with them than to just leave them on the ground. How pathetic is your life that you get your kicks by doing something weird with someone else's keys. The shirt is just weird. I mean I was rocking it all day in the sun and had it down my pants during a run. Who would want to wear that. BCN is a fun city but what the fuck is wrong with the people who live here? I don't know.

*No related pictures to the post, images are from the best week ever, bro.

Ibiza

As many of you know Greg, Kelsi, Kyle and myself had quite the time last week. Greg and Kelsi to a greater extent. Either way I am not going to try to do the trip justice on here. If you would like some details I will do my best to sift through the blackout to give you some specifics.

The Biggest Party in the World

Well guys and gals, Spain won the World Cup and I can safely say Kyle and I were at the biggest party in the world last night. But lets back track an extra day to let you know whats been going on.


I have no idea why but my short term memory is totally fucked. As a result I will give you a few highlights. On Saturday kyle was hosting a pub crawl with one of our buddies Alex. I tagged along to get drunk and meet some random people. I had heard stories that if you go on those as a host/just take tourists out with you then they buy you drinks. This proved to be very true. I was sitting in the bar and within 10 minutes people were coming up to me to talk. For some reason people are very impressed/envious if you tell them you are just living in BCN. This envy resulted in me being bought about 4 tequila shots at the first bar. Ill sum up the night by saying I had a good time and got wasted. It was our buddy Ben's birthday and we all went out after the pub crawl was done around 2. I went into survival mode around 4. Saturday night done and done.


I woke up Sunday morning in my flatmate Silje's (pronounced Celia) room. She is dating this dude and spends most nights there so Kyle and I have been alternating sleeping in her room since its nicer than both of ours and has a breeze which is incredible when you have no AC. Anyway, it was about 4PM and I woke up pretty hung over to an icing. My other flatmate Armanda decided it would be a good way for me to start the day.


Kyle and I both felt like shit from the night before but we had to get it together for the World Cup Finals. We finished a bottle of Loch Ness whiskey. Its bottom shelf - 5 euro whiskey. After that we headed down to Plaza Espana to watch the World Cup on a screen outside. Again we met up with our buddy Alex and a few of his flatmates. It was at this point that we joined the biggest party in the world. After 90 minutes of regulation play and 30 of OT Spain finally won the World Cup. I really cant even explain how loud and crazy it was. I jumped in a fountain fully clothed with a ton of other people and we just generally celebrated in Pl. Espana for a while. After about an hour the crowd started to descend on the rest of the city. We hit a few bars on the way to the beach and kept our drunk up. One of the bars was a gay bar so there was an interesting crew in there. Meanwhile I'm popped off since my clothes are soaking wet, and frankly I take every opportunity I get to pop my shirt off in public.


Long story short I jumped in another fountain in Pl. Catalunya, I was the only one who did that and frankly it was gross and I'm surprised I did not get arrested. Slowly buy surly we made our way to the beach hung out there for a bit and embraced the last few hours of the celebration. It was an epic night. I can't believe we were here for it.

4th of July celebrations....and icing

Dave and I decided to enjoy our 4th of July like any normal American, by waking up and eating red meat (we think it was ground beef). I made sure to purchase Heinz ketchup, French's mustard (which is American), Ruffles, and Dave used Oscar Meyer bacon on his burger and had a Sprite. We continued our day of Americanism by heading to the beach and picking up some Budweiser along the way. Of course we felt the need to shotgun the majority of our beers in the name of our country.


After depleting our stockpile I went to purchase more beer. Dave didn't see the need to come with, thus exposing himself. I returned with more Budweiser and a Smirnoff ice for Dave. I thought despite being in Barcelona I could keep up with current American trends on our country's independence day. Needless to say people around us looked puzzled when Dave got on one knee and took an ice to the face. By the way I'm anticipating some pics from our friends across the pond of some epic icing.


Hope you all had a happy and very American 4th of July. This one's for LeBron.

Mike is Back

I can only assume that this is the one year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death. I think in terms of honoring the man Greg, Pat & myself set the bar pretty high. However today I saw some people taking a shot at the title.

Right now its about 10:45 on Friday night and I am admittedly being lame and not going out. I was in Plaza Catalunya less that 20 minutes ago reading a book about the founding fathers (I'm a patriot) when i noticed a large gathering in the center of the plaza. Normally I just avoid these things because its either political demonstrations and I would probably not agree with whatever communist propaganda they are promoting or some tour group. Anyway, as I sat and read the group broke out into a rendition of "We are the world." They were not just singing but swaying and clapping as well. I ignored this at first then they started singing again so I got up and walked over.

In the middle of the plaza, probably 15x15 feet there were posters of Mike arranged on the ground with candles all over the place. This collage was being flanked on all sides by maybe 50-80 people, many of whom were dressed, in some way, like Mike. I saw lots of silver gloves, the hat he always more, etc. I watched on for a while while these people sang and got into in before finally leaving. I wish I had my camera, but no such luck.

Unique Barcelona laws

Ok here is a breakdown of some laws in Barcelona thanks to a tour guide from my bar.

*It is legal to carry up to 50 grams of weed on you as long as it is in a single bag (multiple makes you look like a dealer).
*You can carry 2 grams of speed or other forms of amphetamines.
*You can carry 2 pills of ecstasy.*It is legal to smoke weed on your way home or in the vicinity of your home. Obviously this one is pretty hard to enforce. People just smoke weed but do it discretely, i.e. not in front of cops or busy areas. Pretty much everybody smokes spliffs here.
*It is illegal to drink in public however this law is not enforced at all in the summer. Almost everybody is drinking on the street at night, even in front of cops, and they don't care at all. Also, Pakistanis sell it in the street for 1 euro/can. I can't emphasize how many times I get asked "cerveza/beer" when walking around, there are tons of them all over the city. If you go to the beach or Las Ramblas you will get asked dozens of times, but the beer is always cold.
*It is legal to be naked in Barcelona as long as you have shoes on haha. Strange but true, there is a naked beach as well. I have heard stories about a guy called the elephant man. Apparently he has elephant ears tattooed on both sides of his torso and obviously he is well hung, which is the trunk. Thankfully I haven't encountered him yet.
*The legal age of consent in all of Spain is 13. Surprisingly there aren't that many teen pregnancies. The tour guide told me the theory was since they're allowed to do it at a young age it isn't that big of a deal to them. Not sure about this but something about it is working.
*In reference to a previous post a thief can't be charged unless he steals over 500 euros. Often thieves will take just the money and leave your bag/purse/wallet and just keep the cash. This prevents them from taking ipods, cameras, etc that would push them over that limit. It also provides incentive to repeatedly steal because there is basically no punishment, which results in them getting even better with more practice. Also, the Spanish police do basically nothing so that helps.

(No relevant pics so here is a shot of Gaudi's Casa Batlló. It was designed as a house for a wealthy aristocrat and is now a museum.)

kms

Smartest Guys in the Room

Thats right, we're the smartest guys in the room. Last night we went to our first quiz night. It was supposed to start "between 21:30 & 22:00. Per usual it did not start till closer to 23:00. Anyway you could have as many as 8 people on your team, which most people did, we went with a solid foursome tho. 1 American (Me) 1 American/Brit hybrid (Kyle) & 2 Brits (Adam & Pete - bros we play futbol with).

While we were waiting for this game to get underway they MC walked around and passed out the paper you answer the questions on. Our piece of paper was some girls resume who had applied for a job at their bar. Naturally our team name was "Give Anais a Job". Apparently this was good karma for us because after the 4 round quiz we were in first place. But it was not over yet. Another team somehow managed to get on our level. At this point we went to sudden death. We had to nominate one member of our team to go up to the front of the bar and face off against someone from the other team. You always gotta play your hybrid out of the rough so we sent young sully in there.


Question: "At its deepest point, how deep is the Pacific Ocean in feet?" (closest answer wins)

Our boy Kyle wrote in his answer 33,000 feet. The other bro we think put something below 15,000 feet. Anyway the answer was thirty five thousand feet and change. As soon as the quiz master read the answer Kyles hands went up in the air like a champ, not even knowing what the other dude had written yet. Naturally our team went nuts and started screaming. Luckily for us it was not even close because that could have been embarrassing. Nevertheless we won a 125 eruo bar tab.

With this sudden windfall of cash (the only money we have made thus far) we started buying rounds. For some reason we were chugging them and drinking pints through straws. I cant really make sense of it now but it was happening. Anyway, we were on a huge high from winning our first tango with quiz night that we decided to keep the party going. We left the quiz bar and went to an absinthe bar in El Ravel (mentioned in an earlier post - sketchy as hell). Not the smartest move since it was now around 1:30. Anyway we got there alive and started drinking Absinthe. I had never had it before and we all ended up getting pretty fucked up. Kyle was asking the bartender if he knew what a flaming Dr. pepper was, he didn't so Kyle explained. Then the bartender called him a pussy and said you burn away all the alcohol that way....


Anyway we left the bar and went home at this point. Around 3:00. Of course at some time between 21:30 & 3:00 our landlord changed the locks on our door. GREAT! I cant even begin to understand that move. Anyway we pounded on our door until someone woke up to let us in. Not only did one of our flatmates wake up, but the crazy bitch across the hall did too. She is some senile old woman who literally just spends hours a day Screaming. I will record it sometime because its horrifying and it wakes me up at like 7:00 many a morning. Anyway Kyle and I started screaming at her while we were locked in the hall way to "SHUT THE FUCK UP". Finally we got let it and passed out. about 5 hours later the old bitch started up again. I was on minimal sleep and at that point had to get up for work. I decided to start today the same way I ended yesterday, by screaming out my window at this woman to shut up. All in all an excellent night.


*No pictures from last night, just some random ones*