Despite what Lauren may lead you to believe, it's not all fun and games here in Catalunya. Right now, we're anxiously awaiting construction bids from three contractors. They're due in on Friday but we've already heard that one local bidder won't be ready until next week. I'm afraid that may be a sign of things to come. This week, Lauren and I are taking over/under bets on both the price and the time budgets. Email us if you need any color.

In the meantime, we're making serious contact with suppliers. By serious, I mean we make sure we aren't in our PJs when they stop by for a meeting. Lauren was a little too gung-ho when she sent out an all-call email in February to a legion of potential suppliers. To our dismay, they took the liberty to stop by our office [read: apartment] at nine a.m., unannounced. We've set up the room we've painted in the hostel as an office so now we conduct all of our official business there.

The man we met with last week about electronic locks must have been impressed because he waited 10 minutes before he asked us if he could "tutearse." Senorita Burke, our junior high Spanish teacher, once explained the formal "usted" form as something you'd use to talk to President Clinton. Flash forward to the present- I'm meeting with a sixty year old man in Barcelona, talking about electronic locks in my self-decorated ikea "office", and he wants to know if he can drop the usted form? !Ay Caramba!

Pretty crazy weekend here in Barcelona celebrating the Festa de la Merce. As usual, it wouldn't be a Spanish festival without at least 18 different city sanctioned events that could prove potentially fatal to children and small animals. The Correfoc (literally fire-run) was probably the most mental. People pack into a small street, and they open gates and release people in devil costumes holding metal rod devices mounted with firecrackers. There are no barricades, so they just make their way through the crowd dancing and shooting off sparks. We found a nice spot next to a Mom in asbestos gloves armed with bottles of water prepared to douse her small children should they ignite. It all felt very safe. Not.

We followed that up by a pleasant dinner on the beach to watch the big firework show. Not much mass interest in that show. I guess if there isn't a risk of getting at least second degree burns, fireworks just aren't that fun.

On Sunday, we attended the Castells demonstrations. Again, high fatality potential. The first time we saw the Castells, we went to a neighborhood group's practice session. After witnessing a seven year old girl fall from a few stories high, I wasn't sure I could handle more. But the groups we saw were the pros (supposedly). The first Castell fell.


The others were good though! Here's one of the bigger ones we saw. There's a base layer on the ground that you can't see in the picture. So this one is eight people high.

Today was one of the more random meetings we've had, and trust me, we've sat down with plenty of weirdos. We met a couple guys who are opening a bar here in Barcelona. While visiting their construction site a few days ago, we were introduced to the artist painting a mural for them. Lee, being the good little networker she is, gave this little old man our card leading him to believe that we might be interested in purchasing his beautiful works.

So we met with him at the hostel today. He has a catalogue of his work, which strikes me as somewhat commercial seeing as you can order any piece you want. His claim was that it was a great investment, and he'd be famous some day. He seemed in good health, aside from one messed up ear (Van Gogh attempt?), so I don't think we can count on him dying and his value skyrocketing any time soon. I'm fairly certain his main objective was to get Lee to pose nude for him, which I thought was hilarious and couldn't help but encourage. Christmas present for Mom and Dad? Fortunately, we're getting pretty good at brushing people off, so we told him we'd give him a call in about 6 months if we were still interested.

I'm sure I'm about 2 years behind the curve on this one, but I recently discovered Google Analytics (thanks to our web-designer/ dedicated Google employee Ashley), and I'm obsessed. It basically tracks how many people have visited your site, what source they used to find your site, where they're from geographically (down to the city), what pages they viewed, etc.

It's pretty thrilling (and a little bit eerie) to think about someone in Singapore spending 1:43 minutes on your website browsing 7 pages. Modern technology! What will they think of next?

The steady stream of visitors continues with an old HSBC buddy, Jeremy, in town now. We've managed to get a pretty good deal of work done this week, but Catalunyan National Day and the Spanish tendency to draw one vacation day out to two or three means a short week.

We're meeting with the first of our potential contractors on Friday to walk through the site. I'm hoping our architect's time/budget estimates were not completely off.

Also I've been doing some work on the website. As always, feedback is welcome!
Somnio Hostels

Yet another reason life here is fantastic/keeps me laughing. Out at a club last night, Lee handed the DJ a long list of song requests. Straight from the LTHS Corral to the clubs of one of Europe's most stylish cities, his first pick was "Eye of the Tiger." Crowd favorite.

I'm back from the states after three long flights, a few stinky seat-mates, two positive scans for traces of explosives on my camera, and one lost bag. Oh the joys of post 9-11 international travel! Glad to see Lee did such a terrific job keeping things updated while I was gone.

Things are about to get busy as we start bidding the construction out to contractors and get a more concrete timeline in place. I'm sure there will be many (mis?)adventures to report in the coming days!

So, we were a bit bad with the blog last month (by we, I mean Lauren- I'm maintaining my habitual frequency) but we're just keeping in line with the general Spanish work habits in August. Of course we've always heard that Europe shuts down in August but experiencing it first hand is another story. I nearly cried the day I realized that our convenience store - of all places- was closed.

The hostel progress has been terribly slowed as well. At this point, our main focus is to get the technical plans drawn up so that we can apply for the necessary permits before construction begins. To my surprise, this is one thing that realistically could be accomplished in August because the government entities actually remain open. However, progress on our licensing would assume that our architect and engineer were not going on vacation. I've found that if you do happen to "work" through August, there's not much to be done because you likely rely upon someone who is on vacation to get your job done. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.