SpiritOfTheForest

After a month of lockdown and no physical activity whatsoever, paired with constant shite food and a ton of alcohol, I decided to finally check out that Joe Wicks guy who's doing the daily 30 minute workouts for the kids being kept off school. Nothing to make you realise just how fat and unfit you've gotten in a month than struggling to hop around your living room pretending to be a frog at the behest of some English guy dressed as a frog! 

I've had 2 different spells of living in Spain, each lasting a few months. I was supposed to here until June but God knows what'll happen with than now with the whole pandemic situation. As such I've been teaching myself Spanish online for the last couple of years. I'm nowhere near good but I've noticed a marked improvement in my abilities in this second spell. I think that''s largely because before I was in the mountains of Andalusia in what is regarded as pretty much the hardest Spanish speaking place in the entire world to pick up the language - very similar to if you got some Spanish speaker over to live in Coatbridge or Dennistoun for his first real exposure to the language. This time, I'm in Extremadura where the Castillano is much more clear and I've found it easier. There is something very pleasing about being able to confidently enough ask somebody something or to overhear passers by in the street conversing in a foreign tongue and being able to understand what they're talking about. Having made friends with some of the locals who are eager to help me has been most useful as well. 

I studied French and German at excelled at both, achieving As without too much bother. However in the 12 years since then I've found I've near enough forgotten all of it although I suspect I could get back again if I put my mind to it. More recently, I've been having a wee go at Italian on account of spending much of this quarentine chatting up a Sardinian lass but I'm very very early days with that and finding it pretty hard to pick up (their use of articles is infuriating).

Would highly recommend Duolingo to anyone reading who fancies using this isolation time to give a foreign language a bash! 

The timer counting down and Viscera coming out at Royal Rumble 2000 and the crowd gives off this great awed hush like "oooooh shit" (it's hard to put it eloquently into words). I'm sure Viscera wasn't lighting up too many arenas but it's the perfect example of the audience totally buying into the narrative of a match clearly all being invested enough to think "fuck, this guy's massive! Who's going to throw him out!?".Their reaction really added a lot to the addition of a guy I'm sure nobody thought was going to win the thing. 

My dad took that joke too far/to its logical conclusion and one Christmas actually got my brother a Dukla Prague away kit. 

O'Higgins is still my favourite team name in that league. It's like they got together and were like "what's the least Chilean sounding name we can think of?". In reality they were founded by a Chilean guy who was the bastard son of a chap from Sligo but I prefer my version.

I've always been a bit of a football anorak, spending evenings reading all the league tables on Soccerway but I don't know much about most of the South American teams. Now I have so much time on my hands, might well have to change that. 

As a total aside, given it's the weekend and therefore football time (!), I for one am looking forward to the Belorussian league. Trying to decide on a team but leaning towards Slutsk or Shakhter Soligorsk, purely because of their names. 

Absolute cracker that. I've started sharing these with my father and brother in the family WhatApp group, who are equally as football-starved in these times. Out of curiosity, why fuck Colo-Colo though? I only know of them through betting and warmed to them because of their cool badge and pleasing name but they seem an odd team to hate. 

Aye, rice is a bastard for reheating. I've always been fine when I've done it but it has the reputation of being quite likely to poison you if it's already been cooked once.  I'd only chance it the next morning and if it's been kept in the fridge. 

 

You jest Keith but that's only really the case in certain parts of the Costa del Sol and Gibraltar. I'm in Extremadura  in the city of Cáceres - real, untouched, almost forgotten Spain. Very few foreigners here - to the point that I'm regarded as a curiosity and a bit exotic, which has taken some getting used to! But aye this is a million miles away from Benidorm and the likes (not literally obviously, it's just the other side of the country). 

I had a kebab last night and it was glorious. Okay, we are all aware this isn't classed a chippy as per the requirements of this thread but, being in Spain, it's the closest thing I've got. Also one of the only options for fast food given everywhere is closed. Massive kebab, loads of chips smothered in sauce, 6 chicken nuggets and a can of coke for €9.50, delivered directly to my door.. A shining light of greasy salvation in these bleak times. As I said, it was the absolute bollocks!

Found myself craving a scotch pie today like you get at the fitba. That in turn then led to me craving all the other varieties, none more so than the macaroni. Could murder these sort of things right now. 

Any excuse to post this again. Blackman was indeed the absolute man. I remember an amazing sketch when he and Al Snow went to an old folk's home with Blackman doing some stand up comedy.

 As for Gangrel, he has unironically always been one of my all-time favourites. Always went him in the Smackdown games as a kid and thought everything about him was badass - the look, the blood, the theme and that amazing Impaler DDT I've never seen done so well. Every year I watch the Royal Rumble in the hope of Gangrel making a surprise appearance but I'm always left disappointed. 

They should also bring back the 2004 theme which is among the best pieces of music they've ever done. Fits the event absolutely perfectly  

https://youtu.be/Kq4Rzza_vS4 

Edit: Not sure how to get the video to show up here, sorry. 

It was the same in the Highlands. The Highlands has something like 230,000 people and a grand total of 8 intensive care beds, up in Inverness. Last weekend absolute idiots from the Central Belt flocked up there, whether for a sunny day out or to self-isolate up there in second homes, caravan parks and such in the hope of escaping the virus. Like that's going to end well. 

It was rightly totally condemned by the government but this pandemic is proving what we all suspected all along - huge swathes of the population are beyond thick. 

Day One of lockdown in Spain. I had never imagined the Apocalypse to consist of so much laying around wanking.

The people here are doing the most beautiful thing. The streets are totally deserted - today I have seen nobody but my flatmate and haven't even seen anyone passing from my window. Complete ghost town. Then, every night at 8pm sharp everyone comes out onto their balconies or stands at their windows and there is a minute's clapping, cheering and shouting words of encouragement. It's as a show of appreciation and solidarity with the health workers on the front lines fighting this, as well as those staffing the supermarkets. 60 seconds of applause and then at 8.01, everyone goes back inside and the city is silent once more. It's the loveliest display of the enduring nature of the human spirit in the face of adversity and I really find it to be the most beautiful, poignant, touching thing. Can't imagine that ever happening back home! Spaniards really are a lovely people.

So I've now lost my job because of this fucking virus. I'm an English teacher in Spain and we had a meeting planned to give us information about the Cambridge exams. It then turned into a meeting to inform us that we were all being laid off. The academy is closing. There is a small chance they will open after Easter if this blows over fast but by far the most realistic scenario is they will be closed until September. So we are now all unemployed. I've only been here a month, uprooted my life and now it looks like I have no option to go home again. I'm going to give it till Easter in the small hope I can go back to work but after that I'll have no choice but to head back to Scotland. 

Shit is really hitting the fan here. From Monday morning we are on lockdown like Italy. Nobody is allowed outside apart from to buy food, medicine or some essential jobs. I have been told by my Director at the academy from a reliable source that the army will be on the streets next week to keep order. It's a fucking mental, surreal situation that feels straight out of some post-apocalyptic film. The city I live in is dead - the Plaza Mayor, usually full of friends, family, lovers and dogs on a Saturday afternoon is deserted. I'm not looking forward to having to stay inside for the forseeable future. All this and still Scotland refuses to take it very seriously....

We live in interesting times but fuck the Coronavirus. 

Some competition for Fr Romeo Sensini at last!

To be fair to him, Spaniards and Italians in my experience can have trouble comprehending the charged nature of such language because of how the words translate in their own language. I'm good pals with a girl from Sardinia and last month she dropped an N word in conversation in as innocent a way as possible and when I queried as to whether she was aware that she could get into some real shit for that word in an English speaking country, she was totally surprised. In her case at least, she saw it just like "negro" in the Italian language (their word for black). Spaniards say the same -it doesn't have nearly the same stigma in foreign tongues. 

Not to say that's definitely the case with Casilla here but for him to be telling the truth about this isn't as far-fetched a notion as it might appear. 

I've just moved to a small city in Spain to start a new job and on Thursday morning I woke up feeling like utter shit. It started as a really sore throat but quickly progressed until the Friday-Saturday peak of the shivers, fever, a throat that felt like it'd be rubbed with a cheesegrater and a terrible cough. I also felt so pitifully weak and frail like a toddler could beat me up and even holding a phone to text felt like climbing a mountain. As each day has passed, I've felt a little better and now it's a constantly running nose, watering eyes and that damned cough. Hoping the recovery continues more tomorrow.

Coincidentally, the first 2 cases of coronavirus were confirmed in this small town today. Could very well just be a regular virus as is quite common to get when you move to new surroundings but I can tell you that it has definitely sucked. 

Former President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan always made me smile if he happened to be mentioned on the news. 

First of all, I think this thread is problematic as this place is quite the chest-beating left wing echo chamber (with threads like the Tories are Cunts for example). 

Secondly, the thread started with "reverse racism isn't a thing" - racism isn't applicable to whatever groups you choose. It's simply a hatred of people based on their skin colour. (There's an argument out there about racism equating to power and and privilege but that's absolute bollocks - racism is quite simply the act of being prejudiced against a person solely based on their skin colour).

I've lived in Spain and have been to a few bars where I'm served last because I'm "guiri" (foreign) - I personally see it as a quirk of the local culture but I'm sure if the same behavior were applied here it would be instantly decried as racist.

I don't think the UK is a racist country (or at least Scotland as that's where I'm from). Of course there are racists like anywhere but I can't imagine any pub in the country where you could walk in saying "I just beat the hell out of some black guy" and be rewarded with cheers. Unless you class racism as things like jokes but ethnicity will always be a constant punchline - of any race - I say that nobody should be above making a fool of. You don't think that the Pakistani community make jokes about white people, or black Americans do? Making those jokes doesn't make them racists. I'm sure we've all seen the "When white people..." memes on social media. 

Something I found quite amusing a while ago is that I watch a Mexican programme called Me Caigo De Risa for practice with the Spanish language and a few months ago they had a bit where the cast all did blackface for a skit. Nobody gave a shit. It wasn't reported outrageously in the media and nobody had their career threatened - they made a joke and nobody really seemed to care. Now, the Mexican people are one who face their fair share of hardship under a Trump presidency but think of the difference if this same skit was on Fox or CNN? My point is not to defend blackface but that we are all guilty of picking and choosing what we want to be outraged by. Otherwise we should be arguing that Mexico is a racist country for most people over there finding this funny. 

My conclusion having traveled extensively is that the UK is pretty much the least racist country I've been to. We're not perfect but neither is the world. We'll get there. 

Cole Slaw. A diabolically bad programme following a post-WWE Michael Cole's misadventures managing a burger restaurant. Regular customer Jim Ross is a constant nuisance invariably making Michael look foolish in front of his other customers. Every bit as dreadful as it sounds but I would still watch. 

 

Essa Rios and Lita reunited a couple of weeks ago. I loved Essa when I was a wee man despite him mostly showing up on Heat. That dive over the turnbuckles was awesome. 

There were at least double the ones seen there underneath the fish. Chips made up for in quality what they lacked in abundance and I'm quite enjoying the sensation of feeling like I'm still able to move after a chippy.  Feeling nicely full instead of uncomfortably stuffed. 

Got a chippy tonight - this one has a great reputation to the point that it won the award for best chippy in Scotland last year.

Pros - Fish is enormous, an absolute leviathan

         - Chips are the bollocks

         - All fish is made to order and it tastes phenomenal. 

Cons - While there's way more chips than can be seen in the picture underneath the massive fish, still way too few chips

We have all done that though.

Or at least, I have. 

The Challenge Cup has this season been named the "Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Challenge Cup" which has now become the single best sponsorship name in the history of world sport. God I adore Scottish football. Check the press conference! https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/48774483