Barcelona overview/Scooters
I drew myself up a rudimentary calendar just now.  It´s the first one I´ve seen for weeks, but it tells me that I´ve been in Barcelona for about one week now.  It was last Wednesday, the 11th, that our train pulled in to Sants-Estacio (these calendar things aren´t so bad).  At that time we were talking to a guy from New York City named Devin.  He´d been testing himself against the bulls in Pamplona, too, and he had made friends with some highly sociable guys who had also befriended us, and who seemed to enjoy playing matchmaker.  These two California guys let us know up front of Devin´s hardcore traveller credentials:  firstly and lastly, he had come to Pamplona with only the shirt on his back, no bag.  Now, a giant, unwieldy backpack can convey strength and dedication, but on the other hand luggage can definitely be a sign of weakness in certain circumstances.  It pretty much broadcasts:  ¨I enjoy changes of clothes and soap.¨ Devin was cool to hang out with, though, because when we shared a nice meal, he was just as irrationally excited about it as we were, leaving the waiter no choice but to conclude that we´d never seen a plateful of food before.  And he had no problem sleeping with us in our tent on a kids´playground in the middle of the city.  Some people´s body language would have made us feel pressure to apologize:  ¨sorry, it´s not much, but you´re welcome to join us...¨ No, Devin was laughing with us, and he made us feel like we could make exactly the same decisions we would make if it were just the 4 of us, without embarrassment, and even enjoying the absurdity.

Devin rode off into the sunrise on the morning of the 12th.  We spent the day wandering around, for the most part aimlessly, wearing our heavy backpacks and carrying on an endless, exhausting debate about what to do.  We all know by now that a backpack in hot weather affects your brain:  you don´t really know what you think or what you want, and you don´t really care about anything.  But that doesn´t make you compliant.  It´s more like no options sounds really good to you, and for each suggestion there´s always somebody irritable enough to shoot it down.  And we were so tired from Pamplona that we didn´t even care to unstrap ourselves and correct the problem.  All we did that day was swim in a pool, and that was by no means unanimous.  Sleep on the night of the 12th was good, though.  We were walking down Barceloneta Beach, figuring we´d be pitching our tent on the sand, but when we got to the end of the beach, what had looked in passing glances like your everyday rocky outcrop wasn´t actually made of rocks.  It was a collection of really big man-made concrete cubes.  Now, I know when I say ¨concrete cubes¨, you immediately think ¨comfortable sleep¨, and you´d be exactly right.  Actually, it was pretty great.  A few of the cubes had one side facing up making an almost level surface, and we slept 2 to a cube, our bags safely zipped up with Johnny in our tent (sans tent poles), and the Mediterranean Sea lapping up the sides of our beds.  

The blazing sun friend us awake the next morning.  It was pretty hot by 9 a.m. and very bright.  Walking back down the beach the same way we came, some of the visitors were not wearing anything at all.  Sorry, I´m not going to stretch this out for comic effect.  It´s been done.  And it´s not even like ¨oh my gosh, we accidentally slept on a nude beach!¨, because I don´t think ¨nude beach¨really means anything here.  I think swimwear is optional on every beach.  Do please grow up.  I know I, for one, entirely extinguished 25 years of cultural training to sexualize nudity near instantaneously.  I beseech you to do the same.

We spent a couple of hours on the 13th at the Picasso Museum.  Without meaning to, I had overstated my familiarity with and love for Picasso when I was talking the other guys into going.  I learned so much at the museum that I realized I didn´t really know anything before.  My favorite thing to learn about was the Blue Period.  I had heard references to it in pop and high culture, and I´d probably even heard it lucidly explained in no uncertain terms once upon a time, but the concept struck me with new force.  For 3 years, every painting Picasso made was blue.  He had an idea, a conviction, and he followed that sucker for 3 years.  And the paintings I saw from the period were brilliant, and I believe it´s because they were completely in line with what the artist believed and felt in his heart.  The second most intriguing part of the museum for me was the room of pornographic scribbles Picasso did at 21 years of age in Paris.  Like most great art, Shane not only claims to be able to do it, but contends that he already has in fact done it, when he was much younger.  Although the nude sketches came from the relatively late Horny Period, as opposed to the more abstract work of Shane´s grad school days.  Hmm, I guess I just implied that Picasso´s drawings of menses and defecation are great art.  I don´t know about that.  I guess I´m just interested in the private parts of Picasso´s young mind that are disclosed in them.

And the only other thing that was important about the 13th was that we set ourselves up for the best of good times on the 14th.  Between the afternoon of the 13th and the morning of the 14th, we did some research, some shopping around, some document fabrication, and lots of little things to get ready for 24 hours as the proud, defiant lessors of mopeds.  Between the 4 of us we rented 3 scooters.  Johnny didn´t meet the age requirement to have a scooter of his own, but he meets all the requirements to ride be-yotch with me anytime.  Carl met all the requirements, but ideally he should have had an International Driver´s License, which is just an overpriced document translating one´s own driver´s license into other languages.  It´s a language cheat sheet for a police officer struggling to read your license when he pulls you over.  Carl and I arranged his driver´s license and several relevant pages of my international driver´s license, folded just so, on the face of a photocopier and put him together a pretty mean makeshit international driver´s license.  This doesn´t relate much to the story, I just mention it because I was proud of our end product.  It was clearly not an attempt at forgery, but it did everything an international driver´s license could do.

I was a little shaky on the scooter in the beginning.  Johnny put his faith in meñ  it was my hog he chose to straddle first.  We had to go through a series of alleys to get from the rental headquarters to the open road, and it was difficult to stay steady at those slow speeds.  Johnny´s weight on the back felt awkward, and my coordination with the gas and break was nowhere near the subconscious comfortability of driving a car.  I was smiling a wide smile, though, because it was fun already, and I felt like my balance and feel for the scooter were improving.  So we pulled up to a ramp leading from the sidewalk down just a little ways onto the street.  Shane merged, and Carl made the turn as well, and I crashed my damn scooter and had it and Johnny laying on top of me before I knew it.  I was trying to get out onto the street before oncoming traffic got too close, and I guess I turned the wheel too far with too much gas, and we went over kind of headfirst, after a brief series of wobbles trying to recover balance, reminiscent of a wounded duck.  The cars behind me coasted easily to a stop while Johnny and I picked ourselves up.  Johnny lifted his weight off me with his arms, but his foot was trapped under the bike, so we worked together to get that free.  I felt pretty awful.  My left leg hurt where the bike and me and Johnny had all fallen on it, and my right elbow was scraped a bit, but that was just the beginning.  I was embarrassed, really sorry, and worried about Johnny and, of course, my deposit.  I could see right away that the scooter was scraped on an exterior panel, and Johnny´s left knee and foot were bleeding a little bit.  I rode the scooter to the end of the block, looking for a ramp back onto the sidewalk, and returned to the scene thoroughly pissed off at my own incompetence.  Johnny and I bothed seemed ¨okay; we were walking around and bending joints and doing okay.  We turned down offers from passers by to call for help.  Shane and Carl found their way back to us before long, and we took an official inventory of the damage.  Johnny had scraped his knee, pretty much like a playground injury, and we bandaged it.  And there was a little cut on his foot which required no attention.  I had abrasions on my elbow that weren´t bleeding enough to need to be covered, holes in my pants in two places, and a charley horse that made me limp, but didn´t feel too serious.  I´m still limping, 5 days later, but it´s getting better every day.  I think it was just a really deep bruise of  a really big, useful muscle.  And then, finally, the scooter seemed to have only cosmetic damage.  One panel was scraped top to bottom, but everything else seemed okay.  The mirror had a tiny spot where it was roughed up by pavement, and so did the brake handle, but these weren´t especially noticeable.  

We had all run with the bulls 4 days ago.  It was fresh in our minds, and since the completion of the run, it had been making everything else seem tame.  but now, with 2 of us wounded, and 23 hours remaining in a winner-take-all face off with pavement and traffic, we all agreed that this was far more dangerous.  Carl was all about ¨taking a minute¨ to think.  He was just as uncomfortable and inexperienced with the scooter as I was.  So, Johnny goes on teh back with Shane, by default basically, and we dust ourselves off and try again.  Shane and Johnny lead, Carl cautiously follows, and I manage to get onto the road this time, but with poor control and poor perception of traffic signals and lane markings and all the other complicated data inputs that become second nature with a little practice.  But remember we´d been pedestrians exclusively for about 6 weeks at this point, so obeying the laws of the road took some getting used to.  I wasn´t careening out of control or anything, but I felt like I was never in the lane I was supposed to be in, and I missed a lot of turns at first because I didn´t feel confident changing lanes on short notice.    Carl and I stuck together and helped each other out, letting each other in to different lanes, when necessary, and we took all the same wrong turns, like good buddies should.  Shane and Johnny had to keep pulling off to the side to wait for us.

But we got out of town, onto some more open road, and the fun came back.  It wasn´t all that hard, and we were all getting better at it by the minute.  The weather was beautiful, the sky was nearly cloudless, we were riding along the coast and the water was deep blue and the people were beautiful and bronze.  Our plan was to ride Northeast along the coast, spend the night somewhere, and ride back.  In the process, we didn´t mind if we proved the rental guy wrong when he said we couldn´t use up a whole tank of gas in a day.  We sure did.  We got at least 108 kilometers North and East of Barcelona, because that´s how far Barcelona was when road signs along the way back first considered it relevant to mention the distance to a town so very remote from us.

We ate up the road voraciously, and slept on reddish rock jutting out of the turbulent sea (a-gain).  We got skilled neough with the machines to see what they could do, and that´s about 85 km/hr on level ground.  we took the highway back to Barcelona, and I maxed out at almost exactly 100, on a downhill slope in a tunnel, where wind resistance was reduced.  

I guess there´s only one more event to report about our time on the scooters, and it´s not good news, but it went a long way toward saving my pride.  About halfway between Barcelona and the little town where we slept, we pulled over in a sandy parking lot by the beach.  We might have been stopping to think about directions, or maybe just to hydrate and take in the view;  but anyway, we stopped.  And when we were ready to start again, Carl was filming, and Shane was feeling cocky enough on the scooter to try some acting.  He was putting on a good show.  He had the bike properly angled for the camera, every little action was delayed, prolonged, and exaggerated for maximum coolness.  And then Shane took the sweet throttle in his gloved hand and gave her a twist, to make that bat take off outta hell.  But the wheel was turned a little too far, and what we got on tape was the tell-tale wobble of doom followed by another total wipeout.  

Johnny got up this time with an utterly incredulous expression.  His face unmistakeably said ¨what the hell is the matter with you guys?¨ He hit the ground with the same knee as before.  The bandage he had so meticulously tied around his wounds had slipped down to the middle of his calf, and he was scraped up all over again.  Who was he supposed to ride with now?  In the crash, the end of the hose on Shane´s hydration pack came off, so when Shane stood up, he had a stream of fluid pouring out from his torso.  It wouldn´t have been funny if it was an artery, but it was a huge relief and pretty damn amusing to find out it was just water, not lifegiving blood, that was pouring all over Johnny.  

So, we damaged two of the bikes, to about the same superficial degree, and we got separated on our way back to the rental place once we got back into the traffic of the city.  And, uh, we were getting back a little later than our contract specified.  Carl and I were together, but I´m told that as soon as Johnny recognized his surroundings in the city, he asked Shane to let him off, so he could walk.  I think he was just happy to survive, and didn´t feel like pressing his luck.  The people at the rental place were expecting 4 guys to return 3 scooters and 4 helmets.  but Johnny found the place on foot faster than Shane could do it on the scooter, so what they got back was 1 guy, no scooters, and a helmet, 2 hours late.  I´m not one usually to glamorize irresponsibility, but I found that a pretty comical shortcoming.

We´re all safe, the repairs costed less than I expected, there was no extra cost for being late, and we had an incredible day.