Una nueva bicicleta y la Sagrada Familia

Friday I went ahead and dropped 200€ on a bike. I decided to go with a plegable (folding model), which allows me to carry it up to my apartment and therefore drastically reduce the potential for theft. Plus it's cool. I'm quite excited to begin commuting to school (3.8 km each way) by bike – it ought to be much more exciting than staring out the window or reading free newspapers on the train. Also, I look forward to travelling the routes in my book and exploring the city.


Yesterday, I went with a couple friends from the program to see el Templo de la Sagrada Familia (Temple of the Holy Family), Gaudi's unfinished masterpiece. It was pretty cool. We took an elevator up one of the towers and then explored a bit. Various passages were closed, so it took a while to find our way out–we had to climb up and then back down a few times, all the while inching past others travelling in the opposite direction (the staircases were about 1.5 people wide and a bit claustrophobic.)

Last night I discovered that if I sit in the laundry room I can access two open wireless networks. It is nice to not have to leave the apartment to steal internet (I used to go up a few stories and sit in the stairwell, but one of the neighbors yelled at me.)

Por fin

Finally.

I’ve been in Barcelona for 16 days, and I’m finally getting around to writing a blog post. I could say I’ve been too busy, but that would be both untrue and a bad excuse. I think I just have some sort of internal resistance to writing things down.

Things are not bad here; I’m living in an apartment with a señora and her dog, Terry. I’m starting to become familiar with the city and where things are in relation to one another. A curious thing about maps here: ‘up’ is not north, but rather something like northwest. Everything is rotated 45º clockwise so that the Mediterranean is on the bottom.

Orientation week was exhausting, jam-packed with jet lag, information sessions, walking tours, bus tours, and eating. After that, we began a 2-week intensive Spanish writing course, which ends this Friday. Next Tuesday, classes begin at the Universitat de Barcelona. I will be taking FONAMENTS DE LA TRADUCCIÓ, SEMÀNTICA ESPANYOLA, and PRAGMÀTICA DE L’ESPANYOL, in addition to Introduction to Catalan Language in its Social Context. I look forward to all of them.

As of last week, I am the proud owner of a Barcelona library card. I’ve been stopping by my neighborhood library almost daily to use the wifi (pronounced wee-fee) and enjoy the musical selection. It is a nice place to be.

I was quite pleased to discover that I can walk from where I live to the Barcelona Bahá’í Center in about 10 minutes. Last Friday night I attended Feast there and was promptly invited to a weekend retreat which I highly enjoyed. It was a welcome break from the general loneliness which I’ve been feeling.

I desperately want a bicycle. I’ve gone a few places to look at them, but haven’t been able to find a suitable bike for a suitable price. Now that my financial aid has come in, though, I might just increase my budget and get a decent one which I can resell before I leave. On Saturday, I nearly bought a lame department store bike out of desperation, but I resisted and instead purchased a book, Barcelona amb Bicicleta, which, despite my only understanding about 85% of it (it is in Catalan), has increased my desire for a set of wheels. The subway is great, but a bike would be so much better.

I will post for real soon...

But in the meantime, I have this for you:

Re: visa status request

I love the email correspondence of the Spanish Consulate in Chicago:

From: Consulate of Spain in Chicago Spanish Government
To: Daniel Greuel
Date: Jul 30, 2007
Subject: Re: visa status request

YOUR VISA IS READY FOR PICK UP AT YOUR CONVENIENCE. NO APPOINTMENT IS NECESSARY. OFFICE HOURS ARE 9:00 AM TO 2:00PM, MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY (except holidays). JUST BRING SOME ID.
Sincerely,

Yep, that's it.

The Hidden Words

Several weeks ago I put together a trilingual edition of the Hidden Words of Bahá'u'lláh. It has the original Arabic and Persian parallel with Shoghi Effendi's translation into English.

For those unfamiliar with the Hidden Words, here is a description, taken from Bahá'í Publishing:

A collection of lyrical, gem-like verses of scripture that convey timeless spiritual wisdom "clothed in the garment of brevity," the Hidden Words is one of the most important and cherished scriptural works of the Baha'i Faith.

Revealed by Baha'u'llah, the founder of the religion, the verses are a perfect guidebook to walking a spiritual path and drawing closer to God. They address themes such as turning to God, humility, detachment, and love, to name but a few. These verses are among Baha'u'llah's earliest and best known works, having been translated into more than seventy languages and read by millions worldwide.

The book can be downloaded here: Hidden Words (PDF, 642KB)

For best viewing:
Preview for Mac OS X: Go to View->PDF Display and select "Facing Pages" in conjunction with "Book Mode"
Adobe Reader (Windows/Mac): Go to View->Page Display and select "Two-Up" with "Show Cover Page During Two-Up"

teeth and bones

dan: are you lying through your sinful teeth, or are you really away?
marjan: I'm 'busy'
dan: ah, yes, i suppose there is a distinction there
marjan: haha, that's pretty funny - lying through sinful teeth
marjan: cause teeth can't sin!
marjan: they're inanimate
dan: yet the sinful are sinful to the core
marjan: ouch
dan: and the teeth, being along with the bones elements which do not perish, are eternal bearers of evil doings.  therein lies the deadly sin.
marjan: wow
marjan: that's almost profound

The masses are waiting

Today I spent a few hours putting Spanish subtitles on the second part of the hilarious "Masses are Waiting" series.



I used subtitle.in, a not-quite-polished (there are some annoying bugs, and i almost lost hours of work) but still very cool tool for adding subtitles to YouTube videos.

You can see all of the videos here:

Masses are waiting (pt. 1) | with Spanish subtitles
Masses are In (Masses are waiting 2) | with Spanish subtitles

The videos are about the Ruhi courses that Bahá'ís around the world are offering to anyone who's interested. Check out this introductory video. Interested in joining a study circle? Fill out this form or call 1-800-22-UNITE.

Covetousness, Greed, and Information

I don't consider myself very materialistic in the acquisitive sense, that is, I don't think I have excessive desire for money or things, but I've noticed myself being rather greedy when it comes to information. I really like to have access to DATA in a clean, well-presented, easily accessible, quick-loading format (PDFs are my favorite). Not only that, I like it to be on my hard drive, not the internet. Oh yeah, and without copy protection. Some examples of this:

• I'm reading this book over at NetLibrary called Becoming a Translator. I can access it 24 hours a day, whenever I have an internet connection. It's as simple as logging in and clicking on the title in my favorites list. I'll probably read through it once and never look at it again, yet I found myself saving each page to disk (and taking screenshots of photos). These will probably end up compiled into one nice, polished PDF file.


• A while ago, I found a large plain text file that was a database for a bilingual Persian-English dictionary (the same one found on farsidic. The entries were encoded like this: "play bAzy krdn", with the Persian terms represented in Roman script. I went through the trouble of finding a script (buckwalter2unicode) designed to transliterate Arabic, modifying it to do Persian, and processing the files so that the entries came out like this: "play بازی کردن". Then I made the fonts pretty and converted the files to PDF (the English-Persian file is 1422 pages). Now I have a searchable, browseable dictionary that doesn't overheat my processor when I open it (the huge text files made the fans in my MacBook go crazy). All this, when I could just content myself with searching the same dictionary online.


• YouTubia. I just found this yesterday and haven't really used it yet, but it gives me a rush just thinking about it.

...and the list goes on. Today I read the following in the Hidden Words:

O QUINTESSENCE OF PASSION!
Put away all covetousness and seek contentment; for the covetous hath ever been deprived, and the contented hath ever been loved and praised.
Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words, Persian no. 50

I reflected a bit on the above, and thought of this quote from Some Answered Questions:

...greed, which is to ask for something more, is a praiseworthy quality provided that it is used suitably. So if a man is greedy to acquire science and knowledge, or to become compassionate, generous and just, it is most praiseworthy.
`Abdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, p. 215

So, is my informational acquisitiveness a praiseworthy kind of greed? I am, after all, thirsting for knowledge, right? Or, am I being covetous? What's my motivation for being so acquisitive? Am I afraid the internet will fall apart and I won't have access to this information forever? Or do I simply love HAVING stuff, whether or not it is tangible?

It's hard to say, there's probably a bit of both going on. I almost certainly overstep the bounds of moderation when my acquisitiveness clearly violates license agreements, as in the NetLibrary example above. Ah well, it's something to work on. More positively, today I paid for software! (I have been using Nisus Writer Express for quite some time, and had found ways to circumvent the limitations of the demo, but now I'm legit!)

Wow, that was a long entry. So much for easing back into blogging.

This made me smile

If you trust Google more than your doctor than maybe it's time to switch doctors.

- Jadelr and Cristina Cordova