also, the following posts are coming up, when i get around to them:

(1) thoughts on the goldman lawsuit, and why it’s potentially not a very big deal at all.

(2) in which i get fined €150 for throwing out my trash improperly; or, an ongoing lesson in dublin bureaucracy.

(3) cabs. really. i am going to write about this. i am.

pics:

(by the way, you may want to click through a couple times on some of these pics so see more clearly how expansive the southern rhone feels.)

mother. f-er. i went through and titled all the pics, and wordpress deleted it. oh well. enjoy the beauty of them anyway. we basically went avignon to gigondas to lirac to beaumes de venise to gigondas to chateauneuf de pape. and we staying in vaison la romaine, so those pics are sprinkled through (particularly the last chunk of pics, which were taken in the ancient part of the city.)

and this:

i am pleased.

ok, so basically i just took a ton of pictures everywhere. first was sagrada familia, second was casa mila, and third was parc guell. it should be pretty clear what is what. also, the door to casa mila is probably my favorite thing in here. it’s phenomenal, and imposing, and beautiful.

lots of pics below. i’m not going to go through and title them..

barcelona feels really, really big. it’s way bigger than i thought, and every day we just sort of discovered completely different parts of the city. very cool in that way. it was vibrant, full of people and art. the mercat off of las ramblas is a-ma-zing. and, obviously, there’s gaudi. barcelona really benefits, i think, from having committed very publicly to art and design. there’s interesting architecture everywhere (beyond gaudi), and i think the most beautiful parts of barcelona were almost as beautiful as most of paris.  barcelona, and the coast of spain north of it towards france, definitely seems like a place you could easily spend ten days or so. i’m going to throw some pictures on this post, and then post all the gaudi pics in the next one.

oh and one more thing happened while i was in barcelona:

woot.

more pics below the jump.

there is, i think, a narrative developing (potentially) that is being completely overlooked by the mainstream media. consider: the following things should be happening by October/November:

(1) healthcare reform passes. It continues to get more popular. people start to learn about the good things it will do right away–for those playing at home, that would be “no more donut hole, dependent children covered until 26, insurance access for those with pre-existing conditions” and more, as a democratic staffer put it in a memo.

(2) the economy starts adding jobs. most estimates i’ve seen hover around 200,000 jobs a month. from now till election day, we should get eight jobs numbers. so we’ve added 1.8 million jobs (factoring in a little extra for the april number). (“almost two million jobs since march” is not a bad talking point.) being conservative, let’s say the unemployment number goes down a percent, so it will have gone from over 10% to under 9%. i have no proof of this, but i’d bet that people start feeling better about the economy when people they know get jobs, even if they don’t get jobs themselves, so there’s some sort of multiplicative effect.

(3) more stimulus has been spent, and three more positive GDP numbers, which will by that point be 5 consecutive quarters of growth.

(4) more and more troops coming home from iraq–the combat mission in iraq is scheduled to end this august.

and,

(5) a whole 6 months more to take control of afghanistan, and of seriousness about al-qaeda on the af-pak border. (i don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that we are getting close to osama, since we are finally taking it seriously. maybe there’s a 2-5% chance we capture or kill him this summer. not big, but not nothing.)

anyway, the point is, this won’t just energize the democratic base, it will convince independents that republican nihilism is really damaging and a waste of everybody’s time. and none of this is crazy, either. i don’t think the narrative for the dems is that hard to create, and it’s hard for me to see what the argument is from republicans given that they’ve opposed every one of these policies every step of the way. maybe my head is in the clouds here, and of course these things might not happen, but if they do (which, again, I don’t think is all that unreasonable to expect), it’s hard for me to see how dems take massive losses.

this weekend i’ll be in barcelona…then next week home for pesach!!!

i don’t think recounting exactly what i did is particularly interesting, but the grand’ place (i have no idea why there’s an apostrophe) is really spectacular. it is probably the most impressive square i’ve seen in europe. it’s very baroque–gilded in gold–and i think really intelligently used. there are a couple of restaurants and bars with outdoor seating, but it is mostly wide open.

also amazing was the Victor Horta museum. they’re fond, in brussels, of saying that Horta invented art nouveau. i think it’s probably more accurate to say that Horta brought art nouveau to brussels. either way, he really brought art nouveau to brussels. it is all over the place. they don’t let you take pictures inside the museum (which is his house and studio) but it, by itself, is almost worth a day-trip if you’re in paris (two hours on the TGV..high speed rail is cool). one other example of it though is the musical instrument museum, which i didn’t go into, and should have:

the combination of the food and beer in brussels, obviously, is without parallel. i would like to highlight two things: first, eating a freshly made waffle, with freshly melted belgian chocolate on top of it, while standing in the grand’ place in brussels is seriously fantastic. i only ate half the waffle, because i was afraid i was going to die on the spot, but the crispy, warm waffle and the chocolate OMFG. amazing. really. amazing. second: brussels is CHEAP! the beer is SO CHEAP. roland took me to a sort of more modern beer/charcuterie place (it was sort of tria-ish). we each had, you know, a bunch of specialty drafts, and a pretty good sized charcuterie and cheese plate (which was awesome). the bill was €51. that’s it. no tip, no more tax. even in philly, this probably would have been $80. in dublin, easily €100.

so, really, i think you should go to brussels. especially if you like architecture. or art. or food. or beer. or chocolate.

tomorrow i’ll post some more pics.

i was going to do this as one post. but it got really long. here’s the philosophical post about brussels. specifics and pictures will come tomorrow. deal with it.

a couple weeks ago when the fam was visiting i finally realized that my main problem with dublin is that there’s very little diversity here. for one thing, 94.3% of people who live in dublin are white. the followingstates are less diverse than dublin (which, if you didn’t know, is a city): maine, vermont, and that’s it. now as all of you know, i love me some maine, but i don’t love it because of it’s incredible variety of people and places and foods and things to do. i love it because it’s quiet, and beautiful, and, you know, because camp is there. and even portland is only 86% white.

the result of this spectacular lack of diversity in people is, unsurprisingly, a spectacular dearth of diversity in food, music, culture, etc. obviously i haven’t been here that long, and i’m sure if i try really hard i will at some point find someone playing some sort of african/jazz/funk/hip-hop sort of thing at some point. and of course, there is a good thai restaurant, and there’s a burrito place (which just opened, btw), and one indian place that doesn’t give you ten days of food poisoning. but the other good places are french, or irish, or french-irish. and they are really good! but they are all the same really good. there’s one good spanish place (so i’ve heard). but occasional music, and one good restaurant from most cultures does not an exciting, vibrant city make. which brings me to brussels.

brussels is estimated to be 56% foreign born. 56%! and boy is it obvious. there’s a huge arab population, a huge greek population, a huge moroccan population, a big central-african population (due to belgium’s colonization of congo and rwanda). and on top of all that, there’s a huge dutch-speaking population and a huge french-speaking population. (almost everyone speaks french and english, at least in the center of the city.) the best story i have to demonstrate this is that on saturday night we were trying to get into a building where they were having an after-party for museum night fever (think first friday on tons of fucking steroids). there was a huge crowd of people in line, it was a little disorganized, everyone was confused, and so at one point, people in the crowd gave up and just started addressing each other in english. there are so many different types of people in brussels that english was the only way to communicate.

the diversity filters down into every part of the city. in the old part of the city, tons of arab restaurants, greek restaurants, french restaurants, and chinese restaurants are all within a couple blocks of each other. along with these come shops and galleries, and more importantly, when one is out at night, there are so many different kinds of things happening. brussels, like most other cities in europe, struggles with racism and xenophobia (even dublin does, which is sort of amazing…more on that in the epic post about cabs), but it’s a very small price to pay. dublin is pretty good evidence of that.

i think of it as a rebate on my day or something, and it’s not that big of a deal. but it is really bad in one situation: you’re a country trying to get out of a crippling recession. in a recession, governments need to help consumers spend–that is, you want people to be taking their spare change and putting it back into the economy, not into a piggy bank.

for me it’s not a huge deal–i’m spending the same as i would otherwise–but if your checking balance is really low, you might not realize that you have $50 sitting on your counter. and if everyone who’s checking balance is really low has $50 that they aren’t spending every month, that’s a massive problem.

in the successful stimulus package, the “making work pay” tax credit (not the best part of the bill by any means, but stimulative nonetheless) was $400 per person ($116.2 billion total). my change refund would be about $600 a year. that could do a lot for a shitty economy.