Search engines suck

WordPress, the platform that hosts this very blog, offers me the functionality to view some statistics, such as the number of visitors per day, the most popular posts and the search terms that people have used in search engines and eventually reached my blog.

So, apparently, today a guy was searching for the term “first time fuck chicks with blood video” and a not-very-smart-search-engine thought that my blog matched his query… Ok, there is a post in this blog that contains the word “fuck”, but I mean, how desperate was this guy trying to find videos of virgins having their pussies torn apart that he browsed I don’t know how many pages of search results to reach this highly irrelevant blog…

(BTW, I was really intrigued to use this query as the title of the post, but that would only lead more people who are just looking for porn to my site…)

The Fratellis are back!!!!

And here’s a link to the album version.

Θέλω μπουγάτσα

Σκατά… Βγαίνεις από το κλαμπ στις 6 η ώρα ξυδιασμένος και δεν υπάρχει ούτε ένα μέρος ανοιχτό να αγοράσεις κάτι να φας…

Και όχι τίποτα άλλο… Καταλήγω να περπατάω στο δρόμο ξυδιασμένος όπως είπα, πεινασμένος και να βρέχει λες και η κωλοσκωτία με το βρωμόκαιρό της ακόμα με κυνηγάει….

Αυτά είχα να πω… Τελειώνω το πρόχειρο σάντουιτς που έφτιαξα για να αντικαταστήσω τη μπουγάτσα (με τυρί φυσικά) που ονειρευόμουν και την πέφτω.

Hasta luego…

Ο άλλος μου εαυτός

Φανταστείτε την έκπληξή μου όταν άνοιξα το Gmail μου και είδα το εξής mail:

I don’t espeak espanish

(Update on the bottom of the post…)

One of the things I enjoy doing is observing how the Spaniards speak English and some little mistakes they tend to do.

One of the common mistakes they do is using the words ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’ as a verb: “Do you want to lunch now?”. This is because in spanish the nouns ‘comida‘ and ‘cena derive from the respective verbs ‘comer’ and ‘cenar’, whereas in english you have to say “to have lunch/dinner”.

Another one is the use of the word ‘couple’ to refer to the other member of the couple… In spanish, a couple (ie a group of two people) is a ‘pareja’, but you can also use the same word to refer to your boy/girl-friend: “ayer salí con mi pareja”. So you can hear a native spanish speaking person say: “yesterday I went out with my couple”.

But the one I like the most is this one: it is practically impossible for spaniards to pronounce a word that starts with s + a consonant; they just need to add a vowel in the beginning of the word. For example, they won’t ask you “do you speak english”; instead they will say “do you (e)speak english?”.

And what makes this more interesting is the fact that this thing is not actually a difficulty they have while trying to speak english, but it is built into their language… All the words that are common in english and spanish and in their english form start in s+consonant, in spanish they have an e added right in the beginning. There are many examples: student-estudiante, stress-estres, style-estilo, stupid-estupido, scotland-escocia.

Update: OK, a couple of days ago I heard the best one on the tv: Esteven Espielberg. Btw, really, who said that we needed another Indiana Jones movie, with a 60yo Indy??

Sant Jordi’s day

Last Wednesday it was Sant Jordi’s day here. Sant Jordi is the patron saint of Catalunya, so it was quite a big thing over here… And apparently, Jordi is the Catalan equivalent for George, and not for Jordan (which seemed more likely to me).

So they’ve got this tradition here: boys have to buy girls a rose and girls buy them back a book. This tradition started with only the roses part: Sant Jordi supposedly killed a dragon, and the blood spilt by the dragon turned into a flower which Sant Jordi gave to the princess (and they lived happily everafter…). The book twist was added later by a clever book salesman, who found a way to expand the festivity of this day, taking advantage of the death of Shakespear and Cervantes that happened on the same date. This whole thing grew up so much, that April 23rd is celebrated as the World Book and Copyright(!) Day. This day is so important in Catalunya, that it is estimated that 50% of the yearly book sales take place around Sant Jordi’s day…

More info: Saint George’s Day on Wikipedia.

So this is a really nice day to be around. It is not a public holiday, but things are pretty loose (this is Spain after all…). There is a very nice atmosphere in the city. People are walking around holding flowers, both men and women: women who have just received one from their other half, and men who are just in the process of delivering one. There are stands of people selling roses in practically every corner of the city. And closer to the city centre (especially in Las Ramblas) there are lots of book-stands.

After work (actually they let me go before the normal time… and despite the fact that I had arrived at work 1 hour late…) I went for a walk in the city centre. I was walking around Las Ramblas when I noticed lots of peoples walking up and down a narrow road. (In the picture below ou can also notice one of the stands I’ve been talking aboutm with the roses laid down over the flag of Catalunya).

I followed the crowd and I reached a square, where there was a band playing some traditional Catalan music and lots of people dancing a traditional dance.

Random thoughts on the video above:
1) Everybody was leaving their coats and bags in the center of the circle (a pile of them is clearly visible on the video). I don’t know if this symbolizes anything, or if they just put uit there because they just had to put it somewhere…
2) Yeah I know, the moves don’t seem to be in accordance with the music… not at all…

On my way back to Las Ramblas I encountered a group of independistas who saw an opportunity in this day, to demonstrate their demands for the independence of Catalunya….

Independientemente

One word I will never be able to say in spanish is the word for ‘regardless/irrespective’: independientemente. It is just impossible, especially if I try to distinguish the soft ‘d’ sound and the harder ‘nt’ sound…

And to make thing worse, this word is always followed by the preposition ‘de‘ – like there weren’t enough ‘d’s or ‘e’s already…

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Soundtrack for this post: Los Bravos – Independientemente

Struggling with my new laptop

My poor old laptop only lasted for two weeks here in Barcelona, so I had to buy a new one.

All laptops sold here, ofcourse, have the spanish version of Windows preinstalled (just like in Greece, where you can’t find a laptop with the english version). And they also have a different keyboard layout, which I find very uncomfortable to use. So I have set the layout to the standard English layout (but many times I find myself having to press half of the keys to find a symbol that I can’t remember where it is).

Anyway, at first I thought that having spanish Windows wouldn’t be a big deal, cause I had been already using them at work. Of course, at work I am using Windows XP and Ubuntu, which I am very familiar with. But the laptop I bought came with Windows Vista, which I had never used before…

So the first days were somewhat awkard. It took me ages to do some simple stuff. To begin with, I couldn’t find where MS had hidden the ‘My computer’ link. For example I was trying to watch some movies from a DVD and each time I closed the Explorer window, I couldn’t find how to reopen it, so I would just eject the DVD and re-insert it so the autorun window would come up… After two days I found what I was looking for: I was expecting for an option named ‘Mi PC’, just like in XP, or at least ‘Mi ordenador’, but instead it’s called ‘Mi equipo’…

I had lots of similar stories. Like many things that I wouldn’t click though they were clickable, because they didn’t look like proper buttons and I couldn’t really understand what they were saying…

But by far the worst thing I’ve done is this: I wanted to add some credit to my skype account. I launched the ‘Buy credit’ wizard, selected Paypal as the payment method and then selected the amount. I didn’t exactly remember that I had connected my Paypal and Skype accounts, so I was waiting to be asked for my Paypal account details. The application then took me to the initial view of the wizard without giving me a clear visual clue that the transaction had completed. At that time I was also having connectivity issued, so I followed the procedure once more. And then once more, and of course I didn’t stop there and did it a fourth time… (Just to make excuse for myself, I must say that I was a bit distracted – talking on the phone or something…)

So I ended up adding a full 100 euros worth of credit to my Skype account. At least it’s a good think that Skype credit doesn’t have an expiry date…

Rollerblades and bikes

Besides bikes, roller skates are really popular around here… Especially during the weekend you can see hundreds of jovenes skating around.

However, some people kinda overdo it. For example this weekend I’ve seen

• one old guy walking his dog on the bike and
• one yound dad pushing around the baby stroller (καροτσάκι) with his niño on his roller blades

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Soundtrack for this post: Robbie Williams – Me and my monkey

There was me and my monkey
And with his dungarees and roller blades smoking filter tips
…
Couldn’t help but notice this Mexican just staring at me
Or was it my monkey? I couldn’t be sure
It’s not like you’d never seen a monkey in
rollerblades and dungarees before

Kissing and hugging

In different cultures there are different ways of greeting people: a kiss on one cheek, a kiss on both cheeks, a triple kiss, hugs, pats, hi5’s…. I am not very good at all this, and even in Greece I tend to avoid kissing people. I dunno, I just can’t figure out when I’ve reached the familiarity level with a person that would allow me to have physical contact with them… (And I certainly don’t feel comfortable kissing guys).

So, back in my Edinburgh days, I had this somewhat awkard experience. I had just moved to a new flat and I had started hanging out with my new flatmates and their friends. So we are out, having a drink in a club and one of the girls is saying goodbye to us cause she´s going to Canada. My turn to say goodbye to her comes and she leans over to hug me. I hug her too and naturally make the movement to kiss her. It was only when my lips were just about to touch her cheek that I realised that all she wanted to do was to give me a hug, so I immediately turned my head away from her face and gave her a good hug and a friendly pat on the back, trying to pretend that everything was fine.

Before I got here, my Spanish teacher informed about the greeting habits of people in Spain. She explained that, normally, you shake hands with guys and kiss girls, even when you first meet them. She particularly insisted that I should not shake hands with girls if I didn’t want to look stupid. However, I failed to follow her instructions the first times I met or was introduced to a girl (I would offer them my hand for a handshake they would lean over to kiss me and it would just end up feeling awkard…)

But I can say that I am improving with time. The other day, our boss’s wife came to our offices and he intoduced her to me. I very naturally walked towards her, hugged her and gave her two big kisses. Hope this wasn’t very inappropriate given the circumstances…

Anyway, in the meantime I’ve had more experience greeting people and I’ve come to this conclusion (although I haven’t verified it 100% yet..): People in Spain kiss on the left cheek first and then on the right, which is completely the other way around comared to the way the Greeks do that.

Well, what the heck, just one more thing to keep in mind…

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Soundtrack for this post: The Killers – Mr Brightside

It started out with a kiss
How did it end up like this?
It was only a kiss
It was only a kiss