Let's try this again:

Ok, folks, I don't know why Blogger messed up the text size in sections of my post, but I have been unable to fix it in the original. Here I'm re-posting the part at the end where everything went screwy. It picks up from next to the picture of the orangutan on the original post...

(Also, Warrior Woman, to answer your question: I'm sure your friend is an honest and loyal person and she has a very high level of Spanish. Some of the nonsense on my blog is not in fact Spanish, but the regional language of Catalan. It is spoken in an area barely twice the size of Los Angeles county. Nevertheless, if you talk to any of its speakers it is very, very, very, very, very, VERY important. Very important. In fact, it has 4 million speakers. That's over HALF the number of people living in the city of London. Sheesh, I can't believe you didn't know about it already!)

...Obviously I really don't like Jaume, not only for his oppinions, but also for how he rides. So many times he can't stand having a girl in front of him so he'll hang on to someone's wheel until they pass me and pull in front, then he'll stay to my left and box me in so I can't move up on the inside, nor move to the outside to pass. Then they slow down. I have to hang back and let them pass to pull up again. Let me also explain why I can't speak up against his behavior. Since immigration is fairly new to Spain, using racial slurs is all the same as using the politically correct terms and if you speak up everyone tells you to stop being so sensitive. Had I spoken up I would have been alone. There still is no forum here for anti-racism.

Later that day we were sitting in the patio (teraza) of a bar drinking beer. Jaume was there watching everyone go by. "Ugh! There are so many moores and niggers here, it's disgusting". Xavi said, "It's a workers' town. Someone has to work." "Well, let the whites work!" said Jaume. Xavi: "They work like dogs" (in Spanish "trabajan como negros", literally, "they work like niggers"). I couldn't stand it. Jaume kept going, talking about how horrible it was that they let so many rafts of west Africans land on the Catalan coast. His voice getting louder and louder. "They should do them all a favor and sink 'em all!" "Jaume, lower your voice," said several. "Who cares if they hear me?! Let 'em hear me, then let 'em go home if they don't like it!" he said with a grin. I could have killed him. I needed another beer. Jaume had just finished his. "Who wants another beer? Salva?" Salva shakes his head. "Miguel Angel?" Miguel Angel shakes his head. "One for me!" I said, "Nada de mariconadas," ("no faggotries here"). This was a private joke for me, making fun of them, playing ironically into their game and having them laugh at my burrs. I have this sense of humor where I like to make people say things that I might say behind their backs in a falsetto voice or with an exaggerated accent and make fun of them anyway, but it's much more satisfying to make them be assholes themselves, in their own voices. It didn't matter that no one got my joke, and they fell into my trap. It was my own private revenge, a girl indirectly calling them maricones in front of their friends. But when the phrase "Nada de mariconadas" came up every few hours I started to regret it anyway.

Jaume couldn't stop talking about this pueblo de mala muerte ("god-forsaken town", only stronger than that). There weren't enough bars, there wasn't enough shade anywhere because the streets were too wide and the trees too young, around every corner there was a construction site, and most of all it was full of FOREIGNERS: Arabics, Blacks, Eastern Europeans, everything but his precious Catalans. And he didn't make any secret of his opinions. For dinner Miguel Angel took us to an all-you-can-eat buffet. Now, I'm a vegetarian who's learned not to expect anything from Spain, but even I wasn't expecting this experience. We all walked to an enormous supermarket which looked much like a Costco (keep in mind that so many supermarkets here are barely larger than a 7-11) with people everywhere. Off to the right there was a change machine and a turnstyle. Next to the turnstyle there was a big, mean-looking man watching everyone that came in. Entrance to the buffet was 4 euros which you fed into the turnstyle (hence the change machine), or you put through a Bon Area credit card which automatically charged you the amount. Once inside you could choose from dozens of different kinds of meat: frozen and coldcuts. Then you stood in line for one of four grittles and cooked your meat yourself. There were also gazpacho, eggs and bread, which I took advantage of. People went up to the grittles with plates piled high with raw meat and cooked forever. "This is the only time in a week that a lot of people get to fill their stomach," explained Miguel Angel (who had paid for ALL of our 12 euro lunches earlier that day). It was somewhere between interesting and supremely depressing to see the whole families there enjoying the biggest meal of the week in this 4-euro buffet. "You have to go up there to salt your food," explained Miguel Angel, pointing to the end of the buffet with the oil and vinegar vats. "The salt shaker's chained to the counter because people steal anything that's not nailed down." The children acted the same as any group of children in a restaurant where the whole family goes out to eat, they filled their guts and then went off to run around the place to burn off the leftover energy from a special occasion. Apparently there was a talent involved with snagging a grittle and Salva didn't get it, so he took about 20 minutes to get a grittle. Meanwhile, Jaume sat there tearing off pieces of balogna with his teeth and throwing it on his plate with disgust. "I'm not hungry. This place is disgusting. These people are disgusting." I wanted to throttle him. Miguel Angel was right there, just having sat down after toasting bread for everyone and could hear all his comments. Walking home Jaume walked ahead of everyone with a giant storm cloud hovering over his head, not saying a word to anyone. "What's up?" said Miguel Angel. "You're never quiet". "I just don't feel like talking," said the world's biggest asshole. The whole incident gave me the urge to either kill him with my own bare hands or break down and cry. Here was Miguel Angel, a bit rough around the edges, but one of the nicest men I'd ever met. He even lent me his bike and drove it down to Barcelona so that Lorraine could ride it when she came out to visit me. He wasn't the richest man in the world, but he had opened his house and home to us so that we could all have this weekend of cycling and spending time with the club, and his wife and kid had gone to sleep with the neighbors to free up sleeping spaces. And then here was this ape condemning the whole situation. "Listen," I said. "You don't do anything but complain. Why don't you just fucking lighten up a bit?" My heart was racing from standing up against The President and he ignored me.

The next morning we all met for breakfast in a bakery downstairs and rode off into the sunrise. We clocked a record pace since nearly everything was downhill and after 2 hours we'd already covered over 60k. When we stopped for lunch I was starving after hardly eating more than bread and pasta after yesterday's adventures. I ate liberally from the bread basket before getting my half baguette with an omolette. When they served us coffee Jaume started again. "The only problem with the town is that there were so many niggers". He then launched into some speech that made me shake with anger, repeating his arguments about how white people should be the ones working, how the coast guard should just sink any rafts that turn up on the coast. I stood up with my coffee in hand and muttered something about having to make a phone call, not really trying to hide my anger. "Watch out," someone said as the coffee sloshed out of the cup onto the saucer. I didn't give a flying fuck. It made me so angry to have to sit there and listen to the whole bullshit conversation, knowing that Xavi had taken me aside yesterday and said, "Listen, it's just a thing that happens with old age. I'm sure he thinks that things were better in the dictatorship. Let it go."

On the way home everyone seemed to be flagging but me. Maybe it was the extra bread that I ate (the time I left the group behind and won a race I'd eatten about half a loaf of bread also), or maybe it was the disgust with the whole situation, but I was flying ahead of everyone and didn't care to hang back like the stronger guys were doing. Still, Jaume was caging me in worse than he ever had before, or maybe it was irritating me worse than it ever had before. Either way, I wished I could just pull away from the fucking club and go home already. We got to within 25k of Barcelona about an hour ahead of schedule. I could be home with my girlfriend around one, but the boys were LAGGING. The wind picked up, but I still felt strong and I picked up the pace, grabbing my drops and dropping my head. Who fucking cares about those 200 lb wind shields? But then there was a problem: I didn't know how the fuck to get home. I was going to have to turn somewhere, but I had no idea where. I had to stop and let them catch up. "Come on, ladies!" I said, "Let's get home and get some grub." "Calm down," said Miguel Angel. Salva's shoes were bothering him so we stopped. Angel went ahead, but, well, it was just as well to wait as to go ahead with Angel since we'd catch him anyway, so I waited. Then, after that, the ladies were dawdling, no two ways about it. I just wanted to go, but every intersection that looked like it might lead back to Barcelona, I waited, just in case. Finally, finally, FINALLY I knew where we were, but not necessarily how to get home. And who was next to me? Jaume. "Are you going to stop to have a beer with us, nena?" "Naw, I just want to get home already, but I don't know how to get back to Barcelona". We were already only one town away (back in Molins de Rei). "Chill out, nena, I'll tell you how to get there," he said. But then the light changed and I was off, and the next was green, and the next. When I stopped at the next red light he was gone. Who gives a rat's ass? All roads lead to Rome, right? And I did find Barcelona just fine, and was back with my girlfrend half an hour early and not a moment too soon.