Another year, another homecoming

Back in the land of cheesesteaks, oversized cars, drive-thrus, excessive electronics, cereal aisles… Every time I leave Madrid for native lands it’s as if I’ve stepped into another dimension, as if the excruciating plane ride across the Atlantic were really a reality warp. Finally there are people who speak the language of sarcasm. Who say “water ice” the correct way and like eating greasy food. Funny that my first outing here was a reunion with my cousins at PYT Burger in Northern Liberties, complete with longed-for entire bottles of ketchup, shoestring fries, and juicy gourmet burgers. 

Of course, actually being inside my home is my own brand of reality. Enough tv screens to confuse the already attention-deficit mind. Back-to-back episodes of Sex and the City. Home-made chicken wings and Shanghai vegetables. New animal additions to the household: Hermione the cat and Rudy, my sister’s dog. New human addition to the household: my sister, recently back from Chicago.

And of course there’s always the reoccurring existentialist doubts which plague the months of May through August. Extra time makes the mind wander, mostly in circles. There are always so many things I COULD be doing that on some days I end up choosing the vegetable path. This summer, it’s down to business:

  • Some travel article and essay writing. Check out my page and articles on the Hedgehog Guides Madrid page  
  • Stay tuned for The PLUM plum, a new online ´zine under construction, brought to you by the tumor twins
  • It´s time to polish up some poems long kept in the shoebox part of the computer and send them to some literary magazines
  • Studying for the Spanish DELE diploma 
  • Reading and blogging and reliving old memories with my sister 

Up and coming: Turkey trip log.  Some new poems.  New essays.  Mind mush.  

Happy summer all! 

Los libros y la noche

“The universe, (which others call the Library), is made up of an indefinite, and perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal corridors, with shafts of ventilation in the center enclosed by very low rails. From any corridor, one can see the floors above and below, interminably…

Like all men in the Library, I’ve traveled in my youth; I’ve made pilgrimages in search of a book, perhaps from catalogue to catalogue; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I prepare myself to die only a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born.”

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the death of Jorge Luis Borges, the Casa de América will be screening “Los libros y la noche,” a documentary/fictional movie based on the works of the Argentinian writer.

I watched this little clip of the film, a reenactment of one of his most famous stories, “The Library of Babel”, in which Borges creates an elaborate and chilling metaphor for the universe. I had only ever imagined in my head those hexagons, which contain 20 bookshelves, 5 on each side, each shelf containing 32 books exactly, each book enclosing 410 pages, each page with 40 lines, and each line containing 80 black letters… The film creates well that atmosphere of horror and wonder that I always feel reading his stories.

My relationship with Borges began last summer in Vermont on the island campus of Middlebury, where I was ushered into his world of labyrinths, infinite structures, vertigo, dreams within dreams… His stories are akin to those feverish dreams and hallucinations you have while tossing in bed, whose extremity and element of infinite-ness makes them so horrifying, whose sudden moment of heightened consciousness makes it seem as if you have accessed another dimension too fleeting to grasp.

Borges’ infinite Library not only contains all the possible (even uninteligible) combinations of all the “25 orthographic symbols” but also all the misprints possible varying by one or two letters. Some fun facts from Wikipedia about the Library as a mathematical thought experiment:

The Library contains at least 25^{1,312,000} \approx 1.956 \times 10^{1,834,097} books.(That is, 25 orthographic symbols and 1,312,000 letters in each book…then the use of logarithms which beats me.)  

(The average large library on Earth at the present time typically contains only several million volumes, i.e. on the order of about 7\times 10^{6} books. The world’s largest library, the Library of Congress, has 2.18\times 10^{7} books.)

Just one “authentic” volume, together with all those variants containing only a handful of misprints, would occupy so much space that they would fill the known universe.

  • Authentic volume: 1
  • Variants with one misprint: 24 \times 1,312,000 = 31,488,000
  • Variants with exactly two misprints: 24^{2}\tbinom{1,312,000}{2} = 495,746,694,144,000
  • Variants with exactly three misprints: 24^{3}\tbinom{1,312,000}{3} = 5,203,349,369,788,317,696,000
  • Variants with exactly four misprints: 24^{4}\tbinom{1,312,000}{4} = 40,960,672,578,684,980,713,193,472,000

The number of different ways in which the books could be arranged is 10^{10^{33,013,740}}.

What an awful beast of a library…shudder. Okay, that’s enough nerdity and numbers for the day. Go read Borges! He’s good for the soul and for some boggling of the mind.

The surprise trip turned out to be…

….drumroll…Oporto, Portugal!

In Portuguese, it´s Porto, which translates as “port.” Apt name, as its coastal location and its river Douro lend to the city some beautiful views and beaches within a metro-ride away from the center. Even though “charming” is an over-used word to describe most small cities and towns in Europe, Porto really was exactly that, but with many ruined buildings and old grungy neighborhoods thrown in the mix. Adds to the historic charm.

Red rooves, the up and down of hilly cobble-stoned streets, small French-style cafés everywhere…

We finally managed to locate a world-famous bookstore, Livrería Lello, where some of the scenes from the Harry Potter movies were shot. One can see its resemblance to Hogwarts; its snaking ornate wooden staircase is its prize attraction.

FOOOOOD. How can one ever write about a destination without mentioning the food? Especially Portuguese food, with its amazing seafood dishes — codfish, bass, sea barnacles, octopus, shrimp, you name it. The salt taste of the sea makes it seem as if these sumptious creatures were caught only minutes ago. Also, good food is much cheaper here than it is in Spain.

We decided to splurge and order the most expensive fish I’ve eaten ever, a huge oven-baked sea bass buried in sea-salt. Even though the fish alone was 46 euros, the entire meal was actually pretty reasonable, considering it was also my first time trying barnacles fresh out of the sea and seasoned by mother nature. They look pretty weird but are mighty tasty.

Javi putting on his photo-face. The fish was accompanied by a stewy rice with spinach, beans, and a delicious red sauce. After paying the bill, we took a stroll in an attempt to digest the entire fish that we had just eaten, and decided it might have been better if we had gone instead to this restaurant here:

A trip to the beach and bike-riding. Sun, breezes, a long boardwalk, exercise… The weather was perfect, water was cold.

Cabeleireiro = Hair salon. These were everywhere, which led to our non-stop repetitions of “Cabeleireireireireireiro.”

We went on a small cruise of the Douro and got to see some of the bridges connecting both sides of the city and the pretty houses overhanging the water. Also enjoyed just lounging on a bench by the riverside, watching the gondolas drift by, sipping on iced cafe con leite, observing the cable car going up and over the river.

The notable difference between the Portuguese and the Spanish surprised me a bit, in our interactions with waiters, tourist information points, hotel clerks, and even strangers. I mean, they do live on the same península and speak similar languages. But the Portuguese seem much more reserved and professional and speak English exceptionally well. The Spanish generally give off much warmer personalities and love to chit-chat; it only took a funny comment or a thumbs-up from a Spaniard like Javi to get the waiters to crack a smile and show their neighborly hospitality.

Porto’s also home to some interesting ceramic art. We popped into a small ceramics workshop in a little alleyway manned by a busy Portuguese lady. Some of the tile art was quite beautiful, with simple scenes of the city and its river.

Who can resist a city where old trolleys still run regularly?