syncategorematic | Entries tagged with spain2010

In the second half of the second half of the game, a bus driver abandoned his bus below our windows to run to the pub to check the score. he did not come out until the game ended.

I was following the online play by play at Fifa.com. I knew my internet updating was slow, because I heard it when Spain scored. And heard it again when the match officially ended.

The noise started slowly, building up. There is now not a second's quiet out there. Honking, mostly, the trumpet solo from "Rock Around the Clock" (we played it in grade eight band); Canadian hockey games tap out that rhythm too. Buses, cars, pedestrians fly the red and yellow flag of Spain. People passed by singing raucously; I do not know the tune of the Spanish national anthem, so I do not know if that is what they were singing.

I swear that twice I heard singing the tune of "Kalinka", of all things. I had figured that I heard it at NHL games in honour of Russian players or something, but in honour of a Spanish soccer match?

I do not think that they will stop much tonight.

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spain2010

Spain is playing Germany in the FIFA semifinals tonight. My brother and I plan to hide out in the hotel room and observe the noise just from there.

(I felt compelled to specify what semifinals, which probably pays my annual membership dues in the Pedants Club.)

The heat yesterday climbed to 43 degrees according to the thermometer on the bus stop below our windows. Thank the dryness of the air it was not perishing, but when we took the subway and changed to another line at one point ---


And the lights shine on my face unkind
From the side, the spotlights drive me blind
The beams lash at me as they repeat...
And the heat! 
The heat...
The heat!...

In other places, it was air conditioned, or had the natural temperature stability of underground. I like the Madrid subway (longtime followers of the story of my life will remember that I am a bit of a connoisseur of the subway systems of world cities.) The trains are sleek; there is a timer showing when the next train is coming; oddly, you have to press on the door to open it instead of them just opening automatically at each stop.

A guy in our first car set his bag down with an mp3 player on top of it, and with a mike, started singing karaoke.

I had encountered guitarist-singers before, on Russian trains, but singing karaoke... He was singing a Spanish song with a melody a lot like "Strangers in the Night" but not "Strangers in the Night", in a pleasant, though not trained, tenor voice, and I could not help myself; I was cracking up in amusement at the surrealism of this, even though it was not _me_ being directly serenaded in karaoke on the subway. I am reminded of the show tunes vs. fundamentalists on the New York subway story. The singer passed a plastic cup around for people to drop euros into, and moved to another car. We wondered whether he would sing the same song there, or switch to a different one.

We went to the grocery store, at the door of which we were accosted by a young panhandler, who asked us, "Ayuda?"

He probably meant to ask for money, but we could not ascertain what help, exactly, he needed, and we did not have that much cash on ourselves anyway, alas. I later joked that I could help him differentiate a function he was having trouble with (even partial differentials; it's been a long time, but I can do those!) but for integration, he was asking the wrong girl.

It was a cheap grocery store, and we kept in mind that we had no fridge, so we arranged various provisions for the next two days for under seven euros.

I fell asleep after eating, and woke at around one am, fully alert, and after taking care of various sundries, read in the bathroom for a while so as not to disturb my brother. He was disturbed anyway, as the noises underneath our window did not abate no matter the lateness of the hour in any time zone.

The next morning:
He: Would you believe there was a traffic jam beneath our window at three o'clock in the morning?
Me: I have to believe that; I heard it.
He: And the girls singing drunken songs....
Me: I didn't hear those; it must have been after I went back to sleep. Songs about what?
He: You won't believe me.
Me: Oh, I think I would. If they were singing drunken songs about theoretical semantics, I probably won't believe you. Drunken songs about sex and drinking, I think I can believe those just fine.

Tags:

spain2010

I write poetry not for publication but merely to kill time. Airplanes are a good place to write poetry and then firmly throw it away. My collected works are mainly on the vomit bags of Pan American and TWA.
Charles McCabe

For reasons known only to the back of my brain (saving paper in my tiny notebook?), this dispatch, written on the plane, is coming out in rhyme. It started off as a parody of Robert Service's "The Trail of Ninety-Eight," as the first line shows, but somehow got taken over by the rhythms (and rhyme techniques) of Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine", and the way of mixing high and low in the service of storytelling that is crude and totally mine.

Spain! - we sprang from our lecture seats; Spain! --- back went my Aeron chair.
Our paperless paperwork was complete; tonight we take to the air.
Every three years this happens to me, between jet-engined wings,
Going east, east again over the sea that had drowned Atlantean kings.

We waited in a crowded hall for the gates; Spaniards argued and babies wept;
From the linguistics school I'd done in the States, I read the monograph I'd kept.
(Yes, crazy thing for a girl to do, but a warning I won't repeat:
You already know I'm the woman who'd rather research than actually _eat_.)

It had been so long since I'd been in a wide-bodied aircraft, I almost knew
That they're bigger inside than they are outside, like the TARDIS of Doctor Who.
Alas, I can't sleep in the seat of a plane, though I twist my spine into place;
The hours crawl by in sleepless pain, and I await the black snake's embrace.

The hour was late in the East that night; the turbulence we met was high.
We checked for the wingtip's cheerful light as winds tossed us across the sky.
The flight directors and pilots knew in three languages to reassure.
(The prosody, and phonetics too, of their Spanish, alas, were poor.)

We get breakfast at three on my body's clock; sleep was scratched as a no show.
My brother slid the porthole shade unlocked, and we looked at the sky below.
(From appearances, the name of the flick on TV is "Too Many Subplots For Its Own Good";
Since the times in-flight headsets had been free I got none, but this I understood.)

Notes: I do not actually own an Aeron chair.

Ok, we're in Madrid, in our hotel, I've slept for about four hours, and then we went and had adventures in the saga of European wireless Internet. Our Internet is not yet guaranteed.

I wish you joy.

Tags:

spain2010

The Point At Infinity

Germany - Spain 0-1 with Spain to the finals

Update from Madrid

Transatlantic

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