So, as I said earlier people here don’t freaking die they just rot away in their skin until their skin becomes one with the concrete that we have to walk on every day which is why we freak out when we get “dead people”on us (what we call dirt or any substance that gets on us when we’re outside). Kate seems to get tortured by the “squirting stones” every day. Since every sidewalk and street here is made of cobblestones or bricks that are irregularly laid out, water and dead people collect under the stones and if you’re a lucky bitch, you step on the stone and it juices your leg. On the other hand, if you don’t get squirted by a stone you could always be dripped on from above. I say its people’s laundry dripping dry but we’re not sure, and it always seems to drip on Kate’s face. Our neighbors, old man winter and his wife scraggly throat and the questionable third voice we sometimes hear are prime examples of death walking. Old Man Winter takes his daily stair climb to go to the market in the morning, and we usually are lucky enough to get stuck in the stairwell with him during his climb back up (which takes a minimum of 2 hours). Finally, when he gets to the top we have to listen to old black lungs hack and spit and die a little until he eventually has enough strength to eek out “hola, bon dia” to us. His wife, Scraggly Throat, rarely faces the stair climb but is quick to scurry out to the balcony we share if she hears one sniffle from Kate or me as we hang our laundry. She then proceeds to ramble in Catalan even though she KNOWS we only speak English. So far, from what we’ve gathered from her soliloquies she thinks there are a lot of stairs in our building, she covers our hanging laundry with plastic when it rains (bless her old carcass for that), and her single dead flower needs to be watered “thiiiis much” (in Catalan of course) every day. Old Man Winter is a tiny skeleton of a man with a semi-youthful looking face. He smokes like ten packs of cigs a day and hacks, snores, spits and any other nastyass dying sound effect a human can possible make. I of course am on the same schedule as OMW when it comes to using the bathroom. I get to have the pleasure of looking in his saggy face every time I walk into MY bathroom because our windows look into each other. This reminds me of a crazy true story that happened while I was hanging out with Ed in Ohio. He had this apt and this cat. One week or maybe two he left the cat and I was sort of cat sitting for him. When he got back he said he walked in his apt. and the cat was nowhere to be found! I knew I had fed the damn thing and saw it so I knew it was there the last time I was in the apt but Ed couldn’t find her. Later he tells me the crazy story about how his neighbor crawled through the laundry shoot that was between their apts. And stole the cat (because it was crying) and how she looked after the cat at nights and forgot to bring her back that day before he got there! I almost freaked the Hell out when I heard this and had to see this laundry shoot for myself ! This shoot was literally a hole to the basement but I guess she put a board across it and shimmied into his apt. The reason I recall this amazing tale is because I have nightmares of OMW sliding a board across our windows and crawling in my bathroom!! Ewww.
Mrs. Scraggly throat could be over a hundred years old and loves to dye her hair a wonderful shade of red and let her gray roots shine through. She can’t stand completely upright because her skin and skeleton don’t align anymore and because her daily activity consists of sprinting out her door once a day to scream Catalan to us. Last week Kate got to witness a seriously disturbing sight…OMW and Mrs. Scraggly throat in the shower together! All I heard was “Vale Vale Vale Vale.” (Pronounced ball-eh) So, we’re guessing Mrs. Scraggly throat is Vale. Every time I walk down the streets of Poble Sec I have to dodge left and right to miss all the dying souls that live near us and are venturing out to buy fruits and veggies. The sidewalks here are slanted, cobblestone, and downright skinny lil places to walk. In the states if someone is walking towards you on the sidewalk or on the street you see them, move out of their way, and then continue on your way…oh no not here! I am the freaking invisible woman here in BCN. I walk down the streets and people just run me over, knock me down, and all together don’t see me. I decided that I was going to yell something sarcastically at them like “DO you see me?’ But, then I remembered they probably won’t speak English so I learned the phrase “No Me Ves??” It literally means do you see me in Spanish and it doesn’t exactly translate but Javier said they would know EXACTLY why I was saying it so I’m excited to use it. Wait, I’m about to go to school so I’ll get to use it today! Oh, one more old person story. There is a blind man who has a cane and he walks around every day and I have so much respect for him because I can’t believe he’s lived this long with all the crazy driving, messed up streets, and the people who can’t seem to see other people.
Kate wrote some of this, if it doesn't sound like I did..I prob didn't!
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