Joshua Zamrycki’s Weblog

Christmas with Grandma was beautiful and New Year’s Eve in the City was fantastic. I sometimes forget how really gorgeous and special New York is. Steve was a little concerned about traveling into the City with all of the bomb threats and the millions of other crazies who decided to watch the ball drop in Times Square, but Joe and I convinced him to go to a house party in Manhattan to ring in the year 2000. The party was entertaining with all of the champagne, Taboo, eating m&ms off the floor, hors-d’oeuvre relay races, interpretive dance, and Shannon leading a discussion on the female anatomy, but even more fun was singing in the subway at 2am on our way home. The next leg of my trip brought me down to Florida. Airport delay #2: I spent more than five hours in JFK Airport waiting for the technical crew to change a shoddy valve in engine number four (double fun). Luckily, I met Noelia from Argentina and the two of us got along famously. I spent a much needed, though all too short, five days with my mom, my sister, and my nana in sunny southern Florida before, you guessed it, Airport delay #3: a five hour layover in London’s Heathrow Airport (oh yeah, fun!). This time Rebecca from Costa Rica taught me a few card games in which you have to yell random things in Spanish. A real airplane pleaser. And now I’m back home in Barcelona and life is back to normal again (or as close to normal as I ever want to get). It’s still winter, but we finally started playing volleyball on the beach last weekend so spring can’t be too far off now. I hope the sun is shining wherever you are. That’s all I have to report at the moment. Thanks for sticking around till the end. You’re all in my thoughts.

Still waiting for Godot,
Josh

You know how you feel when you buy tickets to a concert or play you really want to see? You think about it every single day from the minute you purchase your tickets until the night of the big show. Well, that’s exactly how I felt when I bought my plane tickets to go back to the United States for Christmas and New Year’s. The closer I got to December 22, the more and more I started thinking about seeing all of my friends and family who I hadn’t seen since last New Year’s. I hadn’t even seen my mom since the same time last year! It’s not easy getting to see all of the people I love in the US for only a few days a year. What’s worse is I don’t even get to visit all the people I’d like to see because of how short my stay has to be (I’m sorry). Anyhow, the first leg of my trip was spent in New York. Airport delay #1: I spent a few hours in Lisbon, Portugal waiting for some fog to clear (fun). Once in NY, I spent most of my 10 days with my dad in Long Beach and with my friends on Long Island and in the City (if you’re from “the Island” you simply refer to New York City as “the City”). Much of my Long Beach time was spent packing boxes and sifting through childhood memories in an attempt to help my dad move house. You see, after getting married, raising three really great kids, and spending the past 25+ years at 109 Coolidge Avenue, my father has finally sold the house and decided to move in with his mom in Great Neck now that my mom, my sisters, and I have all moved out. It was an awfully big house for just one person. It was really sad and I found it incredibly difficult throwing out the books I’d read when I was seven and the stuffed animals I’d slept with when I was twenty, uh, I mean two (Freddy the Teddy!). Memories…

So after that great little bar-b-que that fateful night in December, my dad and sister went back to their hotel and everyone else started heading home. I think the last person left at around 4am. I then turned off all the lights, blew out all the candles, and went to sleep. I only slept for a few hours, though, because at 7am Paolo, my flat mate, ran into my room and told me to get up quickly because he needed help. I jumped out of bed and followed him into the hallway where I was met by a huge cloud of smoke. We ran into the living room and there, in the corner, was a 10-foot flame blazing upward from the television set and along the wall to the ceiling. Immediately I thought, “That damn bar-b-que! Thanks a lot dad!” but it turned out that the flames where nowhere near the thing. We grabbed a few blankets off the clothesline on the patio and began frantically beating the fire into submission while other flat mates threw buckets of water on the base of the flames. It was almost impossible to breathe with all of the smoke and I was standing there with nothing on but a T-shirt and my boxers amongst the broken glass all over the floor. I don’t remember ever being so scared in all my life. That’s why I thought it was rather strange that, while battling this blaze, I found myself wanting to take a picture of the action. You know, for posterity. Ironically enough, it was just then that I noticed my camera melting in front of the television. It took about 15 minutes to put the fire completely out and then we all had to stand outside and wait for the smoke to clear. It was quite a sight: five of us, half-naked, huddled together with our faces almost completely blackened at 8am on a crisp winter’s morning. It was then that our “neighbors from hell” decided to make an appearance. There’s this elderly couple who live next-door and enjoy calling the police to complain that we talk too loud or eat dinner too late. Did they offer to call the fire department? No, they threatened to call the police and file a complaint against us. Did they ask if anyone was hurt? No, I heard one of them mutter, “They probably got drunk and did something.” Thankfully no one got seriously hurt aside from a few minor burns from putting out the fire. We decided to just ignore them while Paolo told us what had happened. Apparently everyone was sleeping when the fire started and our bedrooms are too far from the living room for us to have smelled the smoke. Well, while Paolo was sleeping he heard a loud banging on his bedroom door that woke him up. He tried to turn on the lights but the power had gone out. He picked up his flashlight and opened the door to see what the banging was. Just then our cat, Junio, ran through his door and jumped onto his bed. Junio had been banging on his door. Paolo couldn’t see anything in the hallway because of all of the smoke. When he saw the fire in the living room he came and woke me up. Junio saved us! I don’t want to imagine what would have happened if he wasn’t there. So what caused the fire? We don’t know. We think that the television just exploded on its own in the middle of the night. It sounds very unlikely, but two people I know say that they’d heard of a very similar thing happen and our television set wasn’t exactly new (we had found it in the street and fixed it ourselves). So all of a sudden we were left with no electricity, our nice white walls were all black, and everywhere the smoke reached there was now this black plastic dust: on the ceiling, in the sink, on our food, on our toothbrushes, and in every nook and cranny of the flat. We all sleep with our bedroom doors closed so at least our rooms were spared. The next three weeks were spent cleaning, dusting, rewiring the electricity, removing old paint, sanding, cementing, and throwing stuff out. We even knocked down the wall that was dividing the living room and the kitchen instead of cleaning and repainting it. When it was time to leave on Christmas holiday, we left the flat to a couple of crazy Italians who live upstairs and agreed to repaint the place. Thank goodness I returned after New Year’s to find a flat that was not only livable, but arguably better than the flat that had spontaneously combusted just three weeks earlier.

Having not been able to shake the acting bug yet, December 1999 marked my third appearance on a Spanish stage when I appeared as Bernard Marx in Twelve x Twelve Theatre Co.’s production of Brave New World. Now you might be saying, “I didn’t know that was a play!” Well, it isn’t. That is, it wasn’t until we took Aldus Huxley’s book and wrote ourselves a little script. This was the first time I had ever adapted a play from a book before and I truly enjoyed the experience. I learned a lot as we went through the whole process of reading, writing, editing, work shopping, rewriting, and always playing. Plus I had the opportunity to work with the same director and a bunch of the same actors as my last show which was a definite bonus. What we came up with was a piece of physical theater which means that not only were the scenery and costumes minimal, but there were a lot of acrobatics and gymnastics involved. If we needed an Alpha Plus decanting incubator, we didn’t build one out of wood or metal (as if we could); we used our bodies and our imaginations. The show was a week-long success even though I started our run with a pretty bad cold (something to do with standing outside half-naked with my flat mates at 8am on a crisp winter’s morning). I say “success” because so say the critics, our public, our hearts, and my dad and sister Amanda who made it all the way to Barcelona from the US to see little ol’ me. My pop even bought a bar-b-que and four huge, juicy steaks for a celebratory dinner in my flat! He says no American should be without a bar-b-que. Now I’m hoping my mom will be able to make it in June when I join Twelve x Twelve again for our outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Heck, you’re all invited!

Back home after vacation equals back to work. Besides working on my second year as an English teacher, I may have also mentioned to you that I’m working with a recording studio here dubbing movies and cartoons into English. I obviously haven’t worked on any projects you’d have heard of because they’re either foreign titles that someone wants to sell in the US or England or they’re original projects that the owner wants to create for sale in an English speaking country. Either way, I get to do the voices! As you can imagine, my favorite projects are the cartoons and we’ve been getting more and more of them. I’ve already played a super intelligent alien in a movie called Kid’s Game and a friendly Frankenstein’s monster named Norbert in a series called Doc Franky. Right now I’m playing a British mouse named Sparky in a series called The Perez Mouse Factory and various characters in an original series called Scruff about a little dog and all of his adventures in the world. My brain child, though, is a new series called Megaram about three kids who have super powers and travel through the internet helping Dr. Microscopius try to stop the evil Dr. Destroyer from taking over the world. The series hasn’t even been drawn yet. I’m currently translating the original scripts from Spanish into English and if the owners like what I’ve done we’ll hopefully get the contract to dub the voices when the episodes are drawn. Gotta keep those fingers crossed!

Back in Barcelona, at last at last! And just in time to celebrate my second annual Mercè Festival! The Mercè is the week-long major festival of Barcelona and explodes every September in a breathtaking array of music, lights, parades, and dance. It’s fun to walk through the narrow streets of the Gothic Quarter and find random stages set up around every corner. I marched in the parade with Los Gigantes (the giants), danced at dozens of concerts in plazas all around the city (from jazz to drum and bass to Catalan folk music), watched the Castellers create their eight-story high human castles, and was awe struck by the hour long fireworks display in Plaza España that was synchronized with a concert and the colorful fountains in front of the National Palace. But the most memorable event of this year’s Mercè was the Correfoc (the fire run). I ran with this parade as devils and dragons shot fireworks at anyone attempting to get close. The idea is to grab a devil from behind and dance or run with him down the street as they shoot everyone else. Wear thick clothes and protect your eyes! Only minor burns from this one.

The month went by quickly and I found myself waving goodbye to many new friends as I rode off into the veritable hurricane that was kind enough to meet me for my final stretch of bike riding from Edinburgh to Motherwell (just outside of Glasgow). Mother Nature has a very cruel sense of humor in that respect. For the most part, I had wonderful weather while I was in Great Britain. Only when I had to ride my bike for two days at a time or set up camp did the sky open up and laugh at me. Oh yeah, I also found it quite amusing how the gusting winds would die down just until a car tried to pass me. To pass the time and keep my mind off of the horrid weather and the many near-death experiences, I found myself talking to all of the animals I saw as I passed. Well, it was more like yelling at them than talking to them. I’d yell, “Cow!” at the cows and “Sheep!” at the sheep. Sometimes I’d vary it up and yell “Mooo!” or “Baaa!”. They just stared. Stupid animals. I treated myself to a big Scottish breakfast on my last day in the country. A traditional Scottish breakfast consists of pig’s liver and intestines, potatoes, bacon, sausage, eggs, congealed pig’s blood, and a nice glass of juice. I regretted that decision for the next 24 hours. Well, four weeks and 400 kilometers later I finally caught my flight from Liverpool home to good old sunny Barcelona. After all was said and done and my legs finally agreed to start talking to me again, I’m really glad I braved the unknown and discovered all that I discovered. I can’t think of a better way to have spent those four weeks. In fact, I’m already starting to plan my next cycling adventure! The idea right now is, sometime this summer, to bike from Barcelona, across the southern coast of France, and end up somewhere in Italy (about 800 kilometers in all). But plans rarely end up how they begin.

After one week in England, I spent three weeks in Edinburgh and I loved every minute of it. Well, almost every minute. The only thing that I really didn’t like about Scotland was the weather. Again I rode my bike from the airport to Edinburgh and it rained the entire time. Now, when it rains in Scotland it rains hard! Thank goodness for weatherproof clothes. Thanks to my trusty collection of maps, I quickly found Edinburgh and a decent hostel to dry off in and started planning my next few weeks. I had found a guide for Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival (the world’s largest theater festival and the #1 reason for this trip in the first place) so I plotzed down on the bed and mapped out the weeks ahead. The Fringe was great in that I saw a lot of really great shows and a lot of shite (rhymes with “height”). Dances from South Africa, clowns from Venezuela, high school kids from North Carolina, street performers from all over the world, and Brits-a-plenty. Aside from the familiar (and beautiful) face of my beloved Nancy from New York whom I met up with while in Edinburgh, I had the privilege of meeting many new and wonderful people: the gorgeous Honor and Fiona from Melbourne, the strapping Jans and Oistein from Norway, the always-smiling Thomi and KK from South Africa, the good-natured Kery and Kara from Tasmania, the lovely Yvonne from England, the beer guzzling Angus from Scotland, and my fellow baseballophile, Chris from Seattle. All of whom I had a wonderful time with and will never forget. I spent most of the time in the Belford church-turned hostel but still managed to do my fair share of camping. I rode up the side of Arthur’s Seat (Edinburgh’s highest mountain) and found myself a secluded section of forest to call home for a few days. The rest of my time was filled with walking tours of the old city, as much theater as I could afford, schmoozing, and working. That’s right, working. The combination of having to buy a new bicycle and the fact that London was so darn expensive forced me to find a job as a waiter in The French Corner Bistro for a couple weeks. Good food, good folks, and good fun.

I had a few hours before I had to catch my flight to Scotland so I rode all over the city of London taking the necessary tourist photographs that I had neglected the week before. Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and all that Royal British stuff. I took the train to the airport and decided to catch up on some sleep that I hadn’t really had in a very long time. I woke up just as the train was pulling up to what looked like the stop for the airport but I wasn’t sure so I asked the gentleman who was sitting across from me. “Excuse me, is this the stop for the airport?” No answer. So I asked again. “Is this the stop for the airport?” The man then turned to me with the ugliest scowl I had ever seen and barked, “Why don’t you open your damn eyes and look for yourself!” He then stood up and walked off in a huff. That was peculiar. I then noticed a sign outside for the airport so I got up and followed the man off the train. I felt as if I had offended this guy so I made an attempt to apologize while we were exiting the train. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me…” and this obvious lover of the American accent quickly turned around and screamed, “Don’t you dare touch me!” I then thought it best to end the conversation by letting him walk ahead while I just stood there amazed. He went down the stairs and I called for the elevator because I still had my bicycle with me. I went down to the bottom and, when the doors opened and I stepped out, the same guy walked right by me. He stopped after a few steps, turned around, looked straight at me and said, “If you ever touch me again I’ll break your f—ing fingers!” I calmly replied, “Look, I don’t know what I did to offend you, but whatever it was, I’m sorry.” My new best friend then threateningly approached me and said, “I don’t know where you’re from, but this is London! You don’t ask people questions in London!” At this point my adrenaline was telling me to drop my bike and break this guy’s face but my brain quickly intervened and reminded my adrenaline that this bloke was much bigger than I was. I found myself laughing at him and all I could think of to say was, “You’re a real prick.” He gritted his teeth for a second, turned around and walked away. London really sucks.

Next stop: Brighton Beach. I hopped on my new bike and headed south for the coast. I made sure to take two days to ride the 50+ miles so I could make use of my new tent and camp out in a wide open field. At least that was the plan. I set off entirely too late so I was riding in the pitch black the whole time. I did have a bike headlight, but I lost the screw to attach it to my handlebars so I had to hold it in my left hand while I was holding on to the handlebars with my right. Imagine riding 20 miles of British roads (on the “wrong side”), up and down hills and through a forest at 1am with a bike-light in one hand and 15 kilos of stuff strapped to the back of your bike. I should have really planned better. The darkness was spooky. I kept hearing weird animals all around me and imagining some farmer with a shotgun jumping out from behind the tree and telling me to get off his land. I started to get really tired and so I looked for a place to make camp. Not being able to see more than 10 feet in front of me made this a little more difficult than I had expected. I didn’t want to wander into some field and pitch my tent next to some bulls (I’d heard stories). After exploring two fields of mud and one of thorns, I found the perfect spot – a clever hiding spot behind a row of trees so no passers by would bother me while I slept. I finished the ride the next day and met my friend Juls at her house in Brighton. One of the best things in Britain is their appreciation for huge bathtubs. I cleaned myself up and we set off for a weekend with her friends. Brighton was definitely my favorite place in England and I think it was because of Juls’ friends. They’re all actors and just really crazy, cool people. We watched a cricket game, ate fish and chips, went to a huge Gay Pride festival, saw a couple concerts in the park, and (keeping with the British lifestyle) drank entirely too much which lead to many impromptu sing-alongs and dance numbers. My last and most memorable adventure in Brighton was on my last day when Juls’ flat mate invited us to join her and her yacht racing team on a big race. Now, neither of us had ever raced before, but we were excited just to tag along. The crew was really friendly and gave us important little jobs to do during the race like holding the mast back so it didn’t kill anyone, but we spent most of the time just trying to stay out of everyone’s way and trying not to fall overboard when the boat turned. We got absolutely soaked (neither of us was dressed properly) and we loved every minute of it. The kicker was that we actually came in first place! I wanted to stay in Brighton longer but I had a schedule to keep. On to Scotland!