Building Maintenance Drudgeries & Bear Week in Sitges

My friend Carol left on Tuesday, leaving my cat Sunset and me together to get reacquainted.  Sunset has quickly adjusted to her new digs with all its sights and sounds.  She really started to enjoy walking out on the balcony, watching the birds flying by and the people on the streets 5 stories down.  But that didn't last too long, I'm sad to say.

Facade Work

When I  bought my place, I knew that they were going to do work on the facade and on the front door and that the work had already been paid for by all the property owners, including the previous owners of my flat.  What I didn't know, however, was how invasive this work was going to be.  Before the weekend of my house warming party they constructed the scaffold, which covers my balcony and my view.

The very day Carol left they started drilling and removing the current facade.  I was talking with Chris on the phone in the other room.  He could hear the drilling over the phone and suggested that I may need to close my windows to prevent dust from coming in the living room.  Why I didn't listen to him I'll never know but after I hung up and walked back into the living room/dining room/loft area, I could see billows of concrete dust entering through the shutter slots.  I quickly shut the slots and the windows.  But as I turned around, I could see a thin layer of dust throughout the front part of the apartment.  I spent the rest of the morning cleaning it as best I could.  With the window doors shut, it's like living in a semi-dark cave.  It will continue like this for about 3 months, unfortunately.  For the cat's sake and my own, I open the windows and the shutter slots after 4:30 pm, to get some air and some light in.  Of course that also allows some of the dust on the scaffold and balcony to enter, but the fresh air is worth the inconvenience.

The other thing that I need to be vigilant about is to make sure that both the windows and the interior wooden panels that fold over the windows are securely shut, especially in the evenings when I am out of the house or if I am away for a few days.  It is common that burglars will use the scaffolding to climb into apartments that do not have their windows secured.

Bear Week in Sitges

Bears, bears, bears.  Someone told me that there were about 12,000 of them (I think it was more like 5,000) in Sitges during last week's bear gathering, which ended on Sunday evening.  For those of you who are not familiar with bear culture, according to wikipedia, the bear community movement started in the late 80's for gay men who exhibited more rugged masculine characteristics and was a reaction to the mainstream gay culture of the 60's and 70's which tended to be less so.  Spain seems to have a very large bear community presence and Sitges, a beach resort just south of Barcelona, holds one of the largest bear gathering in the world each September.

Since I now live close to Sitges, I decided to come to the last 4 days of the gathering.  I stayed with two friends, Cristian and Alfonso, and we rented an apartment in Sitges.  Since our apartment was outside of the town's center, we brought our bikes on the train and traveled to the town and to the beach easily (unfortunately, one of my friends had his bike stolen midway through our stay).  The typical schedule was to get up mid morning, pack the backpack with towel and beach accessories, make our way to the restaurant Mont Roig, which is in the center of town to have breakfast and meet and greet friends there, make our way to the clothing optional beach nearby, spend time in the water and on the beach with hundreds of other bears until around 5:30 pm, go back to the center of town for a drink and appetizer,

return to the apartment to take a nap, get up and go out to dinner (typical time - 10 pm), and then spend the rest of the evening in many of the outdoor festivities on the beach walkway or on the narrow streets of Sitges.  Three and a half days was about all I could do, but it was enjoyable, talked a lot in both Spanish and English (there are many visitors that come from all over the world), and spent time with old friends as well as met a few new ones.  My mind continued to return to Chris, wishing he were here and how it would be for the both of us to do this together.  Of course we talked every day throughout my stay.

One of the highlights of my time here was running into an old chorus friend who I hadn't seen in about 30 years.  It was truly just by chance. Jim is a very much of an extrovert and one evening, as I was sitting with friends in the "Bear Village" he and his friend came by and started up a conversation in English.  As we were talking, he seemed familiar, and I finally asked him his name.  We were both delighted to see each other again and quickly caught up on our lives.  Jim now lives in Long Beach, CA with his partner.  He has dramatically changed physically, exhibiting a large, muscular body, as compared to the rather thin blond man that I knew in the early 80's.  But his outgoing personality, gorgeous blue eyes and great smile were still the same and it was great to spend a little bit of time with him.