Waaah take me back

i'm not depressed.

i'm not depressed.

i'm not depressed.

i just really miss greeting people with a cheery "hola!" i've started emailing photos to friends i made in spain (two puerto rican choristers, gabi and rafy, and one spaniard, maria angeles). in the past hour i've gotten three responses all starting off with hola. it's precisely those three holas that have triggered this rant.

gabi of coralia, and maria angeles from borja (no solo pics of rafy)

i miss the language and how it changed around when we moved to different parts of spain, from fast and clipped to lazy and sibilant (a.k.a. ma-laway). i miss the mental quiet that came from not understanding the language buzzing around you -- you could just tune people out and have your mind blessedly all to yourself.

i miss the challenge of choosing to focus on that language and decipher it. i miss the succession of mini-triumphs in succeeding, word by word, whether it was during a trashy afternoon talk show ("oliver quiere WHAT con dana?"), dubbed episodes of lost ("perdidos") or an opera with subtitles flashing in catalan (guess-translating catalan into spanish and then into english -- or sometimes even tagalog = major migraine).

at the liceu in barcelona, where i saw my first opera (deserves a separate post)

i just really miss the physical activity. croaking to an unexpected sedentary death in this office cubicle is a reformed sloth. we were walking all the freaking time in europe. when i wanted to save money (which was often), i would walk. even when i wanted to take any form of transportation, i had to walk a considerable distance to find it. just going for dinner in tolosa would entail five flights of stairs.

all this physical activity reached a turbocharged peak during my six-day adventure with pia and jeline (las otras chicas), when we were changing cities, rushing to buses and flights, and hauling close to 30 kilos of luggage apiece up various stairs and cobblestoned slopes on an almost-daily basis.

we nearly cried when we saw the stairs at our hostel in sevilla

in barcelona, fate threw miikka, a certified walking junkie, at me, and at his behest (unspoken, of course) i walked for nearly five hours straight on my last saturday in europe. reviewing my map that evening, i was shocked to see how much of the city we had covered on foot, and even more shocked that my feet and legs felt perfectly fine. in hindsight, i'm happy i had done things his way and not zipped around from tourist spot to tourist spot, like i would have on my own. five years ago, i never would've thought we'd be pounding barcelona pavement together

i only took public transportation twice that weekend, up to parc guell and back, and only because parc guell was on top of a mountain.

at parc guell, overlooking barcelona, montjuic and the mediterranean

and now here i am, chained to my desk, spending at least eight unhealthy hours a day sitting on my fat ass. i do intend to start boxing again next week, but there's something different about physical activity just naturally being part of your day. the unfortunate reality that manila is a pedestrian nightmare has never hit me so hard.

gosh. i miss walking so much i almost want to weep. i'm actually excited about going to singapore this weekend with acs just so i can walk. where has the old deepa gone?

i just really miss having hermetically sealed pores and great hair days, every day. marlon told me in paris that he had never seen my complexion so good before. and never before did tweezing my eyebrows cause so much pain, or the hair on my legs take so long to grow back after shaving(overshare?!). i could slather on my extra-heavy olay moisturizer plus mix it with my foundation without going all minola a few hours later.

behold my poreless beauty

and my hair! it mysteriously turned a deep red while i was in france, and it was frizz-free and had just the right amount of wave... it was just perfect, absolutely perfect!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *wails*

i just really miss all the wine. every single meal we had in spain (with the exception of breakfast) was washed down by copious amounts of free-flowing tinto, or red wine. okay, red table wine, but at 11-14% per volume and for absolutely free, you couldn't complain. especially if you know at least two people per meal are going to get plastered -- soooo much fun. besides, we did have a couple of meals with real red wine, after which all the table wine began to taste like vinegar. but hell, we drank it anyway.

"i want to be drunk forever!" shouted mark, our first-time drunk, in urretxu

i was quite surprised at myself; i did not even get so much as tipsy throughout the entire trip. i resolved to drink after our very last concert, in borja, and what happened after was, to say the least, not my idea of fun. (sir jojo mentions it here.) but it was just good to know that the wine was there if you wanted it. and now i find myself missing all the wine i didn't drink. i miss describing drunk friends as borracho or borracha.

let's drink to that

i miss a lot of things about europe (mostly about spain), and about being on tour. reality is wrenching things away from me at an alarming rate, and i find myself putting up a fight to keep them a little while longer.

but i'm not depressed. i'm not.

really.

just let me wallow a bit. and i'll be fine before you know it.