Aw, We Should’ve Talked to the Old Man. ☹

Location: Mataró, Spain

Sunday May 23, 2010

Catching the 12:45 bus into Mataró centro, Jo and I decided that we should have a picnic on the beach. So we walked up and down Mataró’s streets in search for the supermarket, looking like whores in our bathing suites, shorts, and short-sleeved (but there were sleeves, mind you!) shirts while all the townies wore their Sunday best from Mass that morning. Passing by closed shop after closed shop, Jo and I came to the conclusion that really nobody works on Sunday in Mataró except for waiters at cafés. Instead, everyone just sits, hangs out, and people-watches. Only one market was open, the one where I bought milk from the day before, aka the-only-mercat-that’s-open-on-a-Sunday-in-all-of-Mataro. We got bread, salami, and “sandwich cheese” (it actually says that on the packaging and nothing else). And it was supa tasty! I have to admit, I made a killer sandwich with sandwich cheese.

Sunday’s beach crowd was much bigger. I guess that’s where people go to take off their Sunday’s best. On the way to the beach, Jo stopped at a magazine kiosk to buy a magazine in order to practice reading Spanish. She bought one magazine that featured many trends from the spring/summer runways. Jo was also suckered into one magazine’s, Elle’s (maybe?), marketing tactic, also. The magazine came with a free bikini. No, it wasn’t your typical American magazine marketing that offers a free gift if you buy a subscription and send in the request into the company (something that, I assume, a majority of subscribers forget to do, like claiming rebates). The bikini was actually included in the packaging with the magazine. So Jo bought the magazine with the free bikini for the regular newsstand price of the magazine. She tried the top later on at the beach. And it fitted. Yay! We flipped through the magazine together, and we learned our Spanish clothing words, como drapeado, agodón, cuello, terciopelo…

After getting enough beach-time, we people-watched back in the center of town, on a road lined with olive trees. At one point, an old man in a tweedish outfit (I don’t remember if it was a

suit or not) came over from a group of old men sitting on benches on the other side of the pedestrian-only street. Being used to being crept on guys in Barcelona, we got into a habit of ignoring all uncalled for advances. So we stayed silent as the old man tried to speak with us in Spanish. None of us said anything as he went on asking where we were from and how we were enjoying Spain so far. After a while, he gave up by saying that we must not understand Spanish and that he was sorry for bothering us. He slowly walked back across the way to talk to his friends. We immediately felt really horrible after he left, because we (at least Jo and I, Nat doesn’t speak Spanish but speaks French) did understand him and he was actually nice. We probably hurt his feelings by being rude and ignoring him. But we can’t help it if creepy Barcelonan men scarred us.

We ate dinner at a strange German family restaurant. There were actually specified German cartoon characters in the menu. We were confused with the Catalan, even though technically if Nat and I put our heads together, we should have been able to figure it out. But Nat asked for an English menu. She realized that the seafood salad she was about to order contained greens on a “bed of baby eels.” Mmmm… what sounds more appetizing than that? Our server looked very Spanish with his nice facial structure and dark, strong eyebrows (but not crazy, strong but not crazy). Nat commented, ”He’s the first Spanish guy that I’ve found remotely attractive.” Haha, what a compliment.