Immediately upon my exiting the bus station, it began to snow. Not the delicate flurries of Prague Christmastime, but the sleety drizzlerun of Dublintown. Falling then from a blank sky. Each insubstantive droplet dissipates as it lands, as it becomes a part of that which is Dublin -- that slickening dulling sheen which clings to the coal-blackened brick of the curving wallform whose perimeter I trace. These rusted girders I walk beneath, arrayed and braced in structural solidity, yes, but according to some 18th-century aleatory variable. Traced by industrial bloodlines. Unbolted pipes an [View Full Entry]

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Part II of II In the mountains behind Bulnes my trial began anew. I had followed out the same path which had led me in, but the signpost now announced travel time to the nearest destination as eighty-four hours. The route here was much less worn, barely-traveled and faint. It quickly turned its back on the small river gurgling to my left and began to switchback its way out of the valley. Almost immediately my feet lost the thin worn line and I found myself abandoned on a grassy slope, with a constant seep of runoff water passing beneath my feet. [View Full Entry]

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Photo Entry. No stories from Prague which one would find interesting. I was sick a lot, and at one point was accosted by a very large, sweat-covered Czech or German (he was not clear) who basically offered that I take vodka shots with him or lose my life at his ogre-like hands. I made the wrong choice, and the next morning would have given anything to have my life ended. And that's really about it. I didn't even go out but once or twice beyond that. Keep in mind I was studying all this time as well. Merry Christmas, Happy New [View Full Entry]

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Part I of II On the morning of that third day I packed my bag, drank a warm diet coke, and began walking up the highway north out of Salamanca. I cut a piece of white cardboard off a box I found lying on the roadside and scratched on it with my black sharpie "HACIA LEÓN" and, below that in smaller letters, "POR ZAMORA." About a kilometer out of town I set down my pack with my new sign strapped to it and stuck out my thumb. That evening I was in León. Two nights I stayed in León and on [View Full Entry]

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[Note: I tried to upload some pictures with this one, but my University computers are utterly worthless. You'll just have to wait until I feel like paying for computer time.] Part II of II Last Friday. After a few friendly volleyball matches, Andres, Flavio, Nacho and I head to a neighborhood tapas bar. We start off with patatas bravas and a round of cañas. I'm starving, weak subject I am to the demands of my metabolism, but I'm forced into the spanish habit of slowly eating light snacks along with the endless flow of small tumblers of beer. I think it [View Full Entry]

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Part I of II Three Weeks Ago Last Friday. From an inquiet, vacuous oblivion am I jerked. Confusedly, blinded by a needlelike chirping. Its origin. Where. Grey square, nondescript. Perched upon this hospital table at my bedside. A bed? Where I am, then. And was? Something important -- on the edge of revelation; gone now. Go back. A girl's lips, one marked. A man with something to tell me: a glimpse of causality, a road leading somewhere. Disorientation here now, not there. No. There it was to become clear. That God-damned chirping. I slap awkwardly at the table. The alarm in [View Full Entry]

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The wind whips at the pages of my journal, causing my errant pen to scribble shaky lines inadvertently across my text. Waves crash dramatically in foamy bursts against coffee-grind boulders half-buried in the sand. I pass my hands unconsciously through the cool, fine grains admiring the tri-banded sea: a swampy olive for the several meters that whitecaps form and stir up the sand turns abruptly to a vivid turquoise beyond the first line of breakers and then fades, futher and further into the Mediterranean, into a [View Full Entry]

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Here are some pictures. [View Full Entry]

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Let me first assuage latent fears: I will be subjecting no one to the gross sentimentality of my previous entry. Upon re-reading it occurs to me for why I generally refrain from departing from a more or less narrative structure. Well, I made it, barely, to Valencia on the night before La Tomatina. I had to sacrifice time in Barcelona, but this did not concern me greatly. Barcelona is a great city: the populace is much more welcoming to the tourist community than such famous cities as Paris and London. The streets are filled daily with street performers: jugglers, acrobats, clowns, [View Full Entry]

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I am here to report that the mullet is alive and well in Spain. Nay, flourishing. [View Full Entry]

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