A time to rest

Girona, ESP
Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Today was a bit slow; I think it was actually my first day off the bike in Europe… ever. Pretty sweet, you realize just how much of nothing is going on, and how set outside of the world you are. The day wasn’t totally wasted though; I mopped the floor for the first time. I’m willing to bet it’s never been mopped since its inception. It still needs to be mopped again, but in a couple more good moppings it should be good to go. Then I ate lunch and took the ‘rest day nap.’ Although walking is generally forbidden on rest days, I had to go grab some groceries from the store. On the way I couldn’t help but wander off my normal path to see where some of the little alleys go. It’s really quite amazing because there are so many of them. Even on the most off the beaten path alley there’ll be at least three shops. I don’t think you could wander every day for the next 20 years and find every shop… Everyday since I arrived I’ve noticed that the streets are always full of wandering people. I thought at first that it was due to the proximity of the shops from the apartments, like how you see plenty of cars on the freeway at every hour of the day. But then as I wandered today I noticed that the people aren’t going to the store or anywhere in particular, they’re wandering like a tourist wanders. They wander in and out of the shops with “no particular place to go” all day, every day…
Then I came home and surfed the internet some more. I had this theory that I wanted to try out; could it be that US stocks fair as Euro stocks do? So this morning I checked what looked like the S&P’s of Britain, Spain, France & Germany on Yahoo’s alternative language web sites & they were all down. So around 7:00 I checked the US markets to see how they’d faired & behold, they were all down! I’d placed a limit order for ITU (Banco Itau) and the stock had come crashing through the limit when the market opened… Maybe I’ll sell that… maybe not…