Here are my pirates bounty amount of food from the market. Notice the awesome wrap of parma ham, fresh “queso France” aka goat cheese, and fresh dates. You should try it… its incredible. But I digress.
The day of my half marathon I really planned on relaxing. It was sunny and I was reading “Of Bees and Mist” which was a really good book. I had seen every large site there was to see in Barcelona so there seemingly was nothing really to stop me.
I was thinking the ocean was closer to the metro station than it was… But sadly it wasn’t so I added 2 more miles of walking to the milage total for my day. When I finally got to the port I was on the prowl for the PERFECT picnic spot. I swore I saw tables when I was on the Fat Tire Tour but none were to be found. I also didn’t want to pay for a drink anywhere in order to sit at a table because damnit I wanted a FREE table. So I kept walking… and walking.. and walking? And walking… and I finally found this PERFECT bench area down by where all the surfers were and I figured it was the best I was going to get when no picnic table was readily available. I mean I was bummed out a LITTLE because I couldn’t lay out all my food but the sun had JUST come out and it was warm on my face and I was getting happy and relaxed.
Book in hand, I laid my food meticulously out on my lap and around me and I started to make my little rolled up date concoxtion when this BUM comes out of no where and just sits right plop down next to me. I look over in disbelief… What the hell there are benches open everywhere and he just chills out sitting there and rolls up and starts to TAKE A NAP right next to me. I’m sitting there looking around trying to catch anyones eye to say like, “You gotta be kidding me right? Can you believe this crazy guy?” I’m trying to get some sort of validation that I am not the nuto weird one. However, at this point I have like a crap load of lunch supplies on my lap and I cant very well get up and move so I sit there with my new best friend BarcelonaBob and eat my lunch.
Obviously this was not the time to relax and I rushed through my lunch creeped out by the hairy smelly sleeping man all up in my grill. So I got up like any normal person would and moved to another sunny OPEN bench that was a located little further away but still in the sun.
SIGH
Finally… the sun is shining still, all is not lost. I open my book curling my feet up under my body and begin to potentially read for an hour or so. All of a sudden this middle-aged Spanish couple come over and sit on the other side of the bench… Okay fine the bench is big enough for the 3 of us that’s perfectly fine. I look over smile and continue to read. Literally a few minutes later these two ANICENT ladies hobble over and plop basically on my lap smack-dab in between me and this couple. I get no “Hola can I sit here?” Nope, they just sit down with their little tennis balled walkers squished right in the middle of us to the point where I have to scoot over and half my buttcheek was now hanging off of the bench because the ladys thigh was touching mine. And my ration of thigh touching with strangers is very large. I’m still looking around thinking, “Wow I’m not crazy right? There really are open benches everywhere? Am I wearing a sign that says, “Come and sit here because I’m super fun and don’t want to relax with this big book I have here?”
This old lady just turns to me and starts busting out into some massive Spanish speech for like 3 minutes. And I stare at her blankly… and she finally realizes I speak no Spanish. But continues to try anyways. Her friend starts to pay attention to me and is trying to help her out by speaking more Spanish to me… And I continue to say, “No habla espanol, o catalan” and she continues to try to speak to me so I give up and smile and nod my head and say USA, California hoping that makes them realize I am incompetent. She finally comes to this conclusion on her own and reverts to talking to her friend and the couple next to me… about me. I knew this was the case because they kept using the word American and Ingles. I felt a little violated.
Finally she turns to me again and keeps trying to speak to me but I think at the end she realized that I’m language retarded and called me a church… or pretty. I’m not really sure which one beacuse she pointed to my face and I’m pretty sure said “Santa Ana Maria” which I think is a Church… but I said gracias because that’s all I really knew how to respond. Then abruptly she touches my face, laughs and scoots off with her scooty walker and her friend. And I sat there looking around me thinking… wtf just happened.
So you see I didn’t have a chance to relax because GOD DIDN’T WANT ME TO! I ended up walking and running a total of a full marathon that day. My legs can not move. I might as well call up my Spanish lady friend and have her loan me her tennis ball scooting device.
*NOTE* I took a pictures of the ladies sitting on my bench as a proper visual aid to the closeness of their bodies to mine.
