And finally, my latest from Barcelona and Catalunya... I found a home!

Have you ever come to a place and felt so at home you would never leave if it wasn't for your total curiosity and dissatisfaction with purposelessness?
It happened to me in Barcelona. I arrived after a sneak preview last year when I got an idea of what this place offered. And now I returned, first with my family and experiencing it with them strung in the everyday struggles of argument and defensive discord and then alone with my pensative brother Mark, his silent presence providing good companionship for discovering this strange new land.
This was Spain, but not like the south, where open hearts but closed minds keep creativity in check. Here in Catalunya, imagination and individuality seems to be the order of the day. Difference is greeted with glee and spontaneity accepted as expression. All those people to meet and all those conversations started randomly on trains and in the street made my heart jump for joy and my intellect flow with new ideas after the imprisonment in Gibraltar. The artistic edge brought me a new existence and hope with the possibility of contacts springing up everywhere.
My first few days were spent on the go around there, meeting and satisfying a need and now saturated I stand ... unable to continue because to continue would be to be overcome or throw my body before the machine and be saturated by it. Or maybe the effort involved would exceed me and I would not be able to cope with this life.
Maybe, as I realised a month ago as I almost hit the road for a hitchhike around Europe, to be able to go on in Barcelona would be quite pointless in sofar as the fact that I had no real reason to be here. There was no musical or other artistic consideration to progress in with my only interest a general curiosity in the culture and society of a place in Spain I felt close to. It was almost sentimentalistic, I suppose. I just felt I needed that force of expression and without it I would feel I never fully filled myself in Barcelona. So I returned and got a place with my friends in a suburb of Barcelona, which though far from the centre, had a great community feel and streaming sunlight especially in the evening when the orange glow would want to make me cry. [Can Masdeu picnic- below]

I got a feel of more of that community vibe at Can Masdeu,(http://www.canmasdeu.net/cat/index.php) a squat perched atop a lush valley which reflected more of that unconditional love and neighbourly treatment reigned by logic and a desire to move away from our crazily self-centred society to something more positive. I think their anarchic approach to liberalised community is a useful concept in a modern society where morals are so relative they are practically non-existent and reason is just an excuse for sentimentalistic liberation. Maybe Nietzsche's denial of all truth as an army of metaphors and its incorporation into postmodern society is the beginning of the end for charity and good will.
Anarchists, despite having very little real basis for their morals, attracted me with their general acceptance but scared me with their violence and hatred toward established authority, when such a reaction seems unfair on those pawns of the system which also are victims.
Their cause was one I could have used as a raison d'etre, and a pro-squat demonstration (http://www.lahaine.org/index.php?p=22594)helped me voice some of their concerns and understand their frustration.
Police oppression kept us trapped within this body of protestors for hours in the Barcelona city centre and for the first time I felt I was being deprived of a democratic right to expression and treated as a criminal for the very reason that I was exercising that right. My heart sank as baton-wielding cops stared down at us with contempt and our only defense were our critical chants denouncing the oppression. In the end, we were allowed to go free but the roller-coaster of emotions had by that time gripped me and my desire to strike back materialised.
However, in all this I missed the calm amid chaos of the ocean and the stillness of my heart at those times.
{See more photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/john.culatto]

A summary of 2006

And here is another inspired moment of writing from a freezing cold room in Ouarzazate that made me get angry with my employers who hadn't paid me for two months and eventually get the sack coz i complained. Needless to say I was more relieved than anything else... It also led me to write this...
I know I have been a bit negligent of my communication to you all but I have been trapped in this dead-end bubble known as Gibraltar for too long.

I was, however, able to escape its clutches as I hovered on the verges of desperation and got a job on the Costa del Sol. [right: only high point -lovely home]
Life changed dramatically as I was thrust into the cutthroat world full of English businessmen seeking big bucks in a world which released them from the social responsibilities and constraints imposed on them in the UK. Freed from their shackles and never having a chance of social redemption in their new surroundings, they wage a war of entrepreneurial rape and pillage to see if they can reach the top of a pile in a place that despises their presence and refuses to see their benefit.

In this cultural conflict, everyone is a loser. The Brits live a life of rejection while the new Spanish generation grows up reviling the aliens with all their being, the sentiments of resentment and unforgiveness glowing strong in their hearts.

Through all this discord some hope could be found as a less overpowering race of Englishness sweeps the inland towns. The more impartial and intellectual side of the British psyche seems to prevail here as foreigners live a humble life of co-existence with the locals, trying hard to measure their culture with an acceptance of the one they are immersed into. However, with a younger generation growing up blaming the arrivals for the higher prices and the loss of all they hold dear it is only a matter of time before the cracks in this fragile balancing act will be seen.

If any redemption can be hoped for from this situation it is a desire that the revolution of open-mindedness spreading from one of the fastest growing cities in Andalucia, will embrace those whitewashed towns and see the invasion as a chance for growth than a time to build walls. Unfortunately the development has come hand-in-hand with alarming levels of crime as the sense of community is dismantled stone by stone by a wave of opportunistic relativism.

To make things harder, an unstoppable exodus from Africa has hit the EU's southern border with such force that desperate measures have been taken, upsetting every civil rights group along the way as authorities find a palatable way to get rid of the hordes that arrive on the nation's coast at ludicrous numbers of as much as 1,000 per day. Add to this the hundreds of thousands of South Americans returning to their Spanish routes by the planeload and you have a veritable population explosion that has only been harnessed because of the need for cheap, efficient labour. Other than this it would be untenable but the strains of a growing economy have left a void for those latest arrivals while locals take the cushy office jobs and managerial positions.

This mish-mash, though a cultural revelation was far too tense a backdrop to live in and after a series of events I was given the chance to move to Tarifa, something I did and which was incalculably beneficial. [Palmar - near Tarifa - sunset below]

For once I found a community in which I could be myself without feeling pressurised and revel in my multi-culturalism while enjoying the south Spanish warmth which left me with me with fond memories. Whether it was walking along the beach with my family dog as the autumn sun streamed down happily, or surfing clean waves on a friend's longboard or walking the tightly-woven streets of the old town, this place was a breath of fresh air and one I needed after the suffocation of the rest of the year. Independence also felt good especially as my flatmates' absence made the flat practically mine, while the ability to develop some relationships yielded fruit.

That the place had little scope and was full of escapism-chasers from all over Spain and elsewhere was not lost on me, and I yearned for some place where I could develop myself

on every level. This led to a desire to go somewhere new and Barcelona tickles my fancy, especially after a month or two in Morocco and a family Christmastime.
Yeh and I went to these two places - as you can see above and below...
[Here is Andy at right pulling into a glassy evening barrel - well it could be if it was bigger... lol]

Throwback to my Morocco months...

In simple English now, Maroc is great!!!

I have never been this far south and for so much time and I am experiencing a culture and a people I can really identify with. The Berbers especially are incredible, with their hospitality towards strangers surpassing all boundaries.

[I dragged these ones from the archives... I don't think I could replicate it as it is full of the immediacy of the situation and the fact that I was writing it from a cyber cafe where the Moroccans were using the privacy of the curtained off cubicles to express their adolescent post-modernist affection for eachother!!]




1.
I am currently touring Morocco and this time I will not bore you with aimless essays on my endless observations of contemporary socio-cultural trends. Ahem, ok...


We made this one friend in the desert near Ouarzazate, south of Marrakesh and he was so cool, getting the best prices for us and dealing with all the moroccans in arabic on our behalf. pretty awesome. We will miss him when we take him back tomorrow.

We are currently in Essaouira and goin south after having been with my lovely siblings Paul, Mark and Ana and cousin Ian and had so many laughs driving around Morocco with these guys and especially alone with Mark in south morocco thru crazy mountains and meeting crazy ppl.

We also surfed perfect waves too as you will see from the attached pix and and that was so sick i am totally stoked - big swell comin in on thursday too.
Moroccan tagine stew and soup is so gorgeous!!!
After surfing some big waves in Tagazhout and getting nailed comin in against the rocks at Ankas and later catching up with Gary and his bro in the main town I headed south to Sidi Ifni which I soon found out had been a Spanish colony until 1969. Ppl were friendly and down to earth and surf was pumping so i stayed there for a week too.
2.
The latest episode is that I have been staying in the desert with a camel seller who is a tribesman in the area around Goulmime.

Its been pretty crazy as my friend I am travelling with met up with this guy in the last town and made friends with the camel seller, whose name is Mubarrak or somin.
We also met up with this young man earlier in a fishing village. We had just had a puncture and he put us up and cooked a first-class meal for us that left us so full up... He speaks 4 languages and is plotting to take his chances with the fishing boats and illegally emigrate to Europe. At 500 euros a pop it seems an easy option for people like Ali, whose daily income barely keeps him afloat with enough food to survive the week. Meanwhile, his friends in the Canaries work on slave wages and hours there, but then come back to their town having moved up a whole caste.
Needless to say, he fixed our puncture problem and got the trusty Renault Clio on its way again to Goulmime where we were having to deal with this guy...

The tribesman we stayed with was trying to convince him to travel the desert with a donkey and I think my Dutch mate, Ernst, has agreed to do so now. Should be an experience if he doesnt die of thirst or cold. Hehe!! [Actually he tried it... but both times the donkey just stopped in the middle of the desert got to its knees and wouldn't budge. He had to walk back all day until he got to Mubarrak and eventually got the bus. He then followed this by having some incredible adventures in Africa which made me feel quite proud to have met him and wanting to do some of that myself soon].

We lived in a house made of clay which was really warm and ate a tagine which is like a big meat stew with vegetables. Very tasty and filled us up a lot. Learning a bit of Arabic and planning to go north back to Agadir tomorrow. Its been relaxed and quiet in the desert and have been able to communicate with the arabs and open up a new world I never knew was so accesible.
I have fond memories recalling those times we spent in the evening, poking my teeth with my nails as the chicken stuck in its crevices and my stomach rumbled as it digested the large amounts of meat and vegetables it had just consumed.
I suppose it is just that way in people's homes in Morocco. You cannot just say I am not hungry. Mubarrak would immediately grunt at me, gesturing with his hand... "Eat!"; My expression of apparent satisfaction was cordially ignored as he repeated the process with enough ferocity to make me take up the piece of bread next to me and dip it into that tasty bowl of tagine and take one more rummage into that exquisite mix of lovingly-cooked ingredients.
It is no surprise that I actually put on weight rather than lost it in Morocco.
Check all my Moroccan and latest pics on: www.picasaweb.google.com/john.culatto

gonna be more active here

my idea is that i will put the last few group emails which are bloggish in content:
Here they go - if you dont read this message it will look as if it was purposely meant to come out in the blog and i really work that brain for you blog readers - which of course are totally non-existent, because only i and Phil Williams know about this. And I doubt Phil has any time this summer to delve into my rather ambiguous ramblings about life on the road. But hey i am on the road and i love writing so apart from this small 'i' which i cant be bothered to capitulate (can u say that?!?!) it should be pretty legible. Anyway here goes...