a thousand days and three months

On the last Saturday of January 2006 I arrived in Barcelona after a three hour flight over a rainy and windy Mediterranean. Maria and Fernando were kindly waiting to pick me up from the airport and so around 10pm I entered the flat located on the third floor of a renovated building on Carrer de la Merce, number 6. I went to bed early as I had nothing better to do and I slept my first night in Barcelona in the company of the sound of the rain on my window. The next morning I woke up to find out the day was as rainy as the previous night. I called my parents back home to reassure them I was fine. Then I watched #1 ranked Federer win the Australian Open and spent the whole day in front of my computer. At night, I watched Isabel Coixet's "La vida secreta de las palabras" winning the Goya award for best film.
Before going to bed I posted the first ever post of barcabios, whose name was decided mostly on the availability of a term combining "Barcelona" and "bios" (which is Greek for life). It had this same photo of Parc Guell on a cloudy day on top and was entitled "Intro".

There is a number of reasons we remember some days in detail. One of them is that some days are more special than others simply because they are radically different or because they signify an event of a certain -subjective- importance. First day at school, graduation day or -for that matter- my first night in Barcelona. Another reason for this memory-imprinting is that some days assume a latent character of periodicity. They tend to be recurring, most of them annually. Birthdays, anniversaries, the final of the Champions League, or -in this case- the last weekend of January.

Comparing that weekend three months and a thousand days ago with the last one, would be of no importance or purpose if it wasn't for yesterday nights insomnia. In my desperate attempt to finally fall asleep, I ended up thinking what happened inbetween days since January 2006.

Some things never change. The last weekend was as rainy as that one back in 2006. Perhaps not as windy as then, since the wind only came one week too early this year. I still call my parents every Sunday, still to reassure them everything is fine.

A number of things have changed. For instance, instead of having nothing better to do than going to bed on Saturday nights I have to fight for my right NOT to spend the whole night out going from dinner, to concert, to party and back. It's normal. Back then I knew nobody. Today I know some people. And they are so good to me that they never stop inviting me out. Even when I am as anti-social as possible.
Other things have changed too.
Federer is no longer ATP's top seed. In fact he lost the Australian Open's final to current #1 Rafa Nadal. Isabel Coixet is now considered to be the most promising Spanish (or I sould probably say Catalan) director. Nonetheless she has done only one film in the meanwhile ("Elegy" starring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz), which was not exactly great.
Barcabios has now 167 posts in addition to that distant, lonely "Intro"(ductory) one. It still has more or less the same number of readers (somewhere between three or four people I would say).

As the though came to me that the last weekend of January 2010 will probably find me in military uniform somewhere in Greece, I suddenly fell asleep.