Get your digs in! Only an HOUR left!!!!

I can't believe this. Yisus just snapped at me because the owner only paid him €30 for the stupid bike repair workshop. "I could sit at home playing with myself for that kind of money," he hissed.

Well, why are you bitching at the person who's leaving in an hour? I thought.

And then it hit me...the rest of the staff don't know that it's my last day.

OK, for the rest of you who want to have a go: you have sixty minutes to behave like assholes and whine about anything you want. After that, you all have to leave me the hell alone because I'm going biking, not doing power-f***ing-point presentations about it. Are we clear????

Better solo than badly accompanied (Part One)

The Transibérico is the bike trip that was supposed to be the big trip for G-Man and I, but after last night (more personal, inter-cultural relationship crapola, nothing that's suitable for this blog because it's neither Spain-specific or has to do with biking) I think I've decided that I want to do this by myself. I don't want to have to spend a month with someone who doesn't love me, living in a tent and biking 100 km a day; I don't want that failure of the relationship rubbed in my face.

Besides, I know what's going to happen. He'll get all involved in some big project or some class or something and even though he'll have known about the dates for a year before, six weeks before we're due to leave, it'll come to pass that oh, he can't go. And I would like to leave this relationship with more than the memories of how I was disappointed.

Priego de Córdoba Tourism Conference...post-conference post

One of the Match guys I was seeing, (or, more accurately, I saw once and never saw again) said that he didn’t want to move back from Córdoba, where he was from, because he said that Córdoba ages people prematurely. After this morning’s trip from Priego de Córdoba back into the train station in Córdoba, I believe it.

David, the driver in charge of taking us around, didn’t realize that he was supposed to be taking me back to the city this morning and when Cati, the conference organizer, asked him to do so, he asked if it would be all right to double up on a trip that someone else had booked, an older woman who needed to be taken to the Reina Sofía Medical Centre in the city. And I was like, cool, I don’t have a problem with that...and the nice part was that I got a tour of some of the smaller hamlets in the subbética, like Zagrilla and places like that which I know that I’ve always thought about travelling through by bike but never did. (Just as well: up until now I sincerely doubt that I would have been able to handle that much hill riding.)

So we went through Carcabuey, which is where David is from, to pick up this woman and her nephew. Nephew is probably a couple of years older than I am, balding, kind of like the actor Javier Cámara, but with a big ridge of bone missing from his skull about two inches above his brow line. According to David, the nephew used to be a fireman for the Mancomunidad until a car accidetn laid him low for a couple of months; now he spends most of his time caring for his dowager aunt, who is about seventy and has bone cancer. The aunt is not in good shape, and having to travel to Córdoba for radiotherapy every day for thirty-five days straight is not doing her any good – especially because she’s spent almost all her life in the pueblo and the lack of having moved anywhere by vehicular transit has made her unfortunately prone to car sickness. Which she was, several times in the car before we even hit the highway. But the two men were cool with it – I guess it’s a fairly common occurence – and they came prepared. (The truth of it is, I don’t actually know if she was being sick or not – she just kept making this sound like a frog croaking in a closed jam jar and I tried to think about it as little as possible.)

I love travelling through that area, but I can’t think of many other places, even within Andalucía, where the phrase “an area hobbled by poverty” is as apt. They’re not just poor; in a lot of places there, they don’t even want to give a face to how poor they are because just exposing themselves to outsiders would be a source of shame. It definitely fits the description of being “heartbreakingly beautiful”, and one interesting thing about it is that forest fires aren’t a problem in the area there’s no real one-upmanship to be gained by burning anything. (The area’s sparse population is also a benefit – if any suspicious behaviour took place there, half the residents would know who did it before the fire took hold. Like the old Canadian joke: “Could you identify the bank robber in a police lineup?” “Yeah! It were Joe Jones, from the fifth concession – I recognized him by the cigarette burns in his jacket!”)

The conference itself wasn’t a terribly formal affair – some 25 people, with the odd local senior citizen shuffling in and out, the organizers returning late after lunch, and I had to cut my presentation about ten minutes short. Which wasn’t such a big deal, though I do feel funny that they paid me €300 for 30 minutes of work. It’s almost not fair. But at the same time, it seems like the Mancomunidad has money to throw around: when I checked into the hotel and didn’t know if dinner was included in the deal, the Scottish receptionist said she’d check into it. I said that I didn’t want to rack up expenses for them more than I had to. She just kind of raised an eyebrow in a way that told me that that wasn’t that much of an issue.

I didn’t get to see Priego itself, which was a shame. I really would have liked to have taken a tour of the town, but that’s going to have to wait for next time, it seems...

So it's now 2:15 PM and I'm writing this on the AVE back to the capital. I'm gonna shut this down and write more when I get back to Madrid. I’m tired; I didn’t sleep well and I don’t know if it’s because of the combination of roast lamb for dinner and a gin and tonic in the bath after (note to self: G&Ts do NOT mix well with lamb), the onset of That Time of the Month or how quiet it was. But I woke up about four times during the night, just couldn’t get my eyes to stick as they say in Spanish, and I kept thinking, Damn, it’s sooooo quiet here.... I wonder if I could actually sleep or live happily in a place that’s THAT isolated. Nice biking, but what about the living in a place like that?

Freedom!

So we had the talk today. We had the talk and I told her that I was terribly sorry, but I couldn't continue with directing the bike club as it was going now. That things were a LOT different from what I thought it was going to be. I suppose that I could have just told The Owner that all I wanted to do was leave, but I thought it would be better to at least give some kind of explanation for why I was going.

But you know what I can't shake off? I can't shake the feeling that I was being tested.

I can't shake the feeling that somehow, she wanted it to fail so that it would be another arrow in her persona Saint Sebastian of how she'd tried to save the final bastion of road cycling in Spain, and how another person had let her down...

I can't. I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt on this one, but I can't.

Oh, well....

In a little over two weeks from now, it ceases to be my problem.

Herding Cats 101

So the bike club had its first outing today. And the only thing I can think of is that it was like herding cats.

Only half the people came on time. Two people (beginners) got themselves bogged down in half an inch of mud and managed to block their derailleurs. Pablo, who’s a pretty experienced cyclist, lost his cassette twenty miles from the starting point (and, since he’d just had his bike given the once-over the weekend before, never thought about bringing any kind of tools to fix it.) One of the newbies, who hadn’t been on a bike in twenty years, wore really heavy black clothes, roasted in the Indian summer heat...and almost passed out from a superbonk that was only surpassed by being forcefed Arrowroot cookies. Pablo’s wife, Susana, got a fruit fly in the eye and we ended up having to squirt a litre of water in her face before dislodging her contact lens (I don’t know if she ever managed to get the bug out), and my pump decided it had a particular craving for Presta valve tops and chewed up two inner tubes before decapitating a third, which blew six miles before the end. Thank God The Owner drives a Volvo station wagon, and thank God for cell phones because I don’t know how I would have gotten home. A success, all the way around. :-/

And I made an important but not particularly pleasant discovery today, one that at least makes me feel (slightly) more in control: I think that I was in love with G-Man, and might still be. Uck. I cannot think of any other reason why things would still be pissing me off this far down the road. Feelings for a guy who’s just a fling does not hang around you like the smell of camphor, like old sweat on a drunken bum.

You don’t find yourself getting irritated by the small stuff, like when he tells you that he can’t go shopping and then calls your from the sports superstore the very next day, asking you if you need anything. (If you didn’t have time to go, then why are you there??)

You don’t wake up in the morning, touching the pillow and realizing that you remember the constellation of moles on his shoulder, how he grabbed your hand and kissed you on the beach as you were putting sunscreen on his back, how lovely his hands looked on your stomach after lovemaking... And the only way to get over this is going to be cold turkey. Just nothing. Just walking away from it no matter how much it hurts, because at some point you have to realize that all the swapped helmets and bike trips and gagged-on Powerbars will never translate into love. He’s never going to wake up one day and feel this great chunk of something missing in his life....

“One of these mornings / Won’t be very long / You will look for me / And I’ll be gone...”

I don’t usually wear music when I ride, mostly for safety reasons: there aren’t that many car-free areas where you can ride in Madrid, and I don’t trust my own with-it-ness not to start playing air guitar mid-ride. But as I’m sitting here in the bedroom, plunking away on the laptop, thinking about what I could make for dinner that wouldn’t involve actually going into the kitchen where my room-mates are smoking themselves silly, I realize that maybe it would be a better anaesthetic to start heading out with the MP3: I wouldn’t be left alone to start delving deeper into my thoughts and starting to realize that kind of shit. But in a sense, if it’s going to happen, it’s better that it happen on a bike, I suppose: when you’re riding a bike, you can’t focus on the faces of the other people. You go hiking with someone who’s in a bad mood, you can’t get away from it. Someone’s on a bad mood on a bike? Ride thirty yards ahead – problem solved. So while this little revelation dawns on me today and hits me full in the face like a cruel laugh, the one comfort I could take was, at least, no one could see me want to cry.

And riding with beginners is like herding cats is like trying to get over an ex-boyfriend: All you can do is try to get everything together beforehand: once everything is set in motion, there's no other option except breathe deep, hold on and don't read too deeply into what's going on.