Since Tiffany has begun to fill up the journal before I could even notice, I think I must hurry up and put in my grain of sand, with the angelical intention and objective to get more views, more comments, and generally smash her down on the dirt.
My name is Albert, I am 28 (not for long), and I am catalan. I guess I can consider myself pretty lucky, since not everybody can be a catalan these days. In fact, just about 6 milion of people, which is a mere 0,001% of the world population, were selected by the gods to fall in that little corner of the planet, comfortably sitting in the northeastern end of the Iberic Peninsula, and blessed with the warm waters of the big Mediterranian lake.
We catalonians like to be considered different. And this is because we are. We are not like anyone else and, specially and definitely, not like the rest of Spain. We speak catalan, that language that is always described as a kind of between spanish and french. But... is it very different from spanish? they keep asking. Well, is as different as it can be from french. Or from italian, or romanian. In fact, I read somewhere that the closest language gramatically is italian, with an amazing 90%. If you don't believe me, you can read some of it
here, and judge yourself.
We are endemically victimists and we celebrate our defeats with joy, mainly because unfortunately we don't have any victories to celebrate. Our most known apportation to the wellbeing of the world is that little round sweet sticked on a stick, and called Chupa-Chups. Funnily, everytime that I tell somebody that Chupa-Chups means, roughly, Sucky-Sucks, they look at me with a strange face. And probably they look at the sweets with different face, also. I don't know why.
We also climb on top of each other with colorful t-shirts, and we make great parties about it.
So among all those specimens I had been living for the 25 first years of my life, with only shy return excursions to other big and small places in the world, definitely worse, just to quickly come back to the cosy arms of the mighty catalan mama.
But in 2006, incomprensively, I dropped all off and I brang myself and my little bearings to the absurdly cold and amazingly beautiful Norway, tricked by the undoubtable charms of my impressive co-blogger. From then on, I moved my placid existence from the shores of the warm Mediterranean lake to the shores of the frozen Mjosa lake, being happy anyway, and discovering the gorgeous Nugatti Crisp.
And now, not having enough with this placidness, we packed ourselves up to just wonder around for a while, having started in Europe, follwing in India, being now in Australia and, hopefully, continuing somewhere else.
And hopefully also, we will enjoy writing about it and you will enjoy reading about it.
ps. Please, feel free to place the smileys at the end of the sentences. Like that :-)
