Strike ONE! (explicit content)

So I woke up this morning bright and early, had some cereal, brushed my teeth and headed to the bus stop on Plaza America. Katja and I got on the U1-bus going to the direction of Universidad. This was all fine and dandy, until..

The buses don't go very often so they are often packed, as was the case this morning. Hence we had to stand the 28 minute climb to the mountains, where the university/agent training centre is so conveniently located. As we came closer to this one roundabout, where the road leading to the campus area begins, we started seeing cars parked on both sides of the road. There were dozens, parked bumper to bumper, with no drivers in sight. The other students started looking around as well, all the while murmuring indistinctly. After about 300 metres of this Parked Car Boulevard we reached the roundabout which, too, was surrounded by cars in addition to the several police vehicles scattered around the general area in a haphazard, Spanish kind of way. The bus stopped, and the driver turned on the loudspeaker to address the thoroughly confused passengers. Of course in this case the word "loudspeaker" was a pure oxymoron, because the noise coming from them was neither speaking nor loud. Either way, what we managed to decipher from Mr. Bus Driver's abysmal enunciation was: "......closed...up there..shorter....walk...get out". Everyone got out and started to shuffle towards the beginning of the uphill road towards the campus area. At this point a group of people caught my eye. They were standing in a random formation (häröpallo), holding banners that said something very catchy in Gallego, a language so useless it's amazing.

(I mean it's kind of like Portuguese, a lot like Spanish, with just a hint of Euskara. They only speak it in Galicia and the very northern parts of Portugal, and even then mix it together with their own language. They could have just created a dialect for the area like the rest of the world: a unique, distinctive and yet understandable form of Spanish. BUT NOOO, WE WANT TO BE MORE SPECIAL THAN THAT! WE WANT A LOT OF X'S AND A LOT OF ACCENTS THROWN ABOUT THE SENTENCES IN A CASUAL AND ÜBER-ARTISTIC MANNER! SO WE'RE GONNA TAKE SPANISH AND CHANGE EVERY WORD OF IT JUST ENOUGH TO RENDER IT IMPOSSIBLE TO READ!)

Moving on.. Baffled by the symbols on the banners we approached some of our fellow students and asked what IN THE NAME OF ZEUS' BUTT-HOLE was going on. They proceeded to talk over each other, explaining that this was a strike organized by the university staff, and that no vehicles, not even school buses, would be let through. WELL. We asked if there would still be classes held today, to which their reply was a comforting: "Depends what faculty you belong to.."OUTSTANDING!! Of course we wanted to go to class, if there would be one. After all, we had come this far and the bus had already left. So we continued to climb to the first hill overlooking the campus are, in order to see where we were and where our faculty's building was. Kataya's extremely well-pronounced "!Joder!" (the f-word, obviously) soon informed me that the news was not good. The department of translation and philology was about 200 metres above us, vertically that is, and about 1,6 kms away on the other side of the valley. Of course by roads the distance was anywhere between 2,5 and 3,5 kms so, once again I shared Kataya's razor-sharp analysis of the situation. We weren't going to walk all the way there with Kataya in high heels and myself in an acute lack of motivation.

Walking back down, hoping to catch one of the empty buses going down to the city, we tried to extrapolate some more information on the strike from our peers. They told us that the strike would PROBABLY be over by tomorrow, and that the good news was: the cafeteria was already open. WO-HOO!! What the HELL are we going to do with an open cafeteria on the other side of a closed campus at a handy distance of 2 miles?? And so, only asking for a reason to slap one of the teachers forming the road-block (who seemed to be having the time of their lives), we stood by the roundabout for 37 minutes, until we finally caught a bus and got back to town. Oh, did I mention it was 7 degrees, windy and raining..

My question therefore is: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? Is it so goddamn hard to inform someone about a strike on the second biggest university in Spain? The university has everyone's address, phone number, and e-mail. They could have posted something on the university's RIDICULOUSLY UNCLEAR AND SHITTY web-pages, leaked something to a radio station, a local newspaper or ANYONE REALLY!
Or maybe the exchange student coordinator, the language centre people, the dude at the philology department or the singing janitor, that we all spoke to last week, could have shed some information on this farce ("careful there, wicker..!"), so that people wouldn't have to travel an hour to the friggin' mountains, just to stand in the rain, looking like retards.

For your information, I wanted to come to this country to learn about the language, the people and the rich culture and to see the world, NOT TO BE PUSHED AROUND BY A BUNCH OF FUCKING NON-LANGUAGE-SPEAKING, BACKBONE-LACKING, DISORGANIZED, UNGRATEFUL, USELESS COMMIE-TWATS!!



You can quote me on that...