HARA chan Blog / Valencia Diary No. 3

I was feeling good after the beer at Gresini hospitality, and we all decided to watch the race from the best seats in the circuit. We needed to buy tickets, but this kind of complicated process should be taken care of by the young folks. I nominated Mr. A to man up, and after struggling with a Japanese to Spanish dictionary on his hand, he finally got us the right tickets.

While we were heading to our seats, we couldn’t help but noticing so many charming ladies walking everywhere. First, we would pick out every girl we liked, but soon we got tired of saying that over and over again. We still kept doing with the eye-to-eye communication, though. Looking back, I feel a little stupid joining others to do that.

Anyways, small stalls? Stands? Tents? Were lining up just like in Japanese circuits, but the difference was that all the products were hung behind the counter table and we couldn’t reach out to see them in the hands. I wondered if it was because they were afraid of people mashing up and/or stealing stuff. Also, I was very interested in big muscular police officers everywhere wearing berets, sunglasses and masks. They wore something like combat uniforms and had guns in the left hands and batons in the right hands. If I performed my jokes to one of them, he would definitely shoot me before he thought about smacking me with that baton.

Well, thank God I’m alive. And the next interesting people were guys carrying beer servers on their backs. Bucchan and I ordered beer to make a good souvenir story (well, of course that’s just an excuse to enjoy some beer under the sun), and we were so excited about the huge cups the cold beer was served in. “Man, Spanish people know how to drink beer!” I thought so for a few seconds until he charged me a lot more than I had expected. Bigger cups, more money – I got it.

I was wearing a jacket in the morning, but after the sun rose, it became very hot that I was sweating in a t-shirt. What a poor old man I was to have to walk for the long distance to our seats. And the sun was too strong and hurting my skin and eyes. We started watching free practice and qualify, but it was hard to see without sunglasses.

On that night, my face and eyes turned red and burnt just like after welding without a mask, and nobody believed me I wasn’t drinking.

The qualify was under that much of strong sun, but it was so spectacular that I couldn’t even stand up on my feet. From our seats, we could see 70 to 80% of the whole circuit and 30 % of them were right in front of us. It was so different from Motegi circuit. I could feel the intensity of each rider’s passion and spirits aiming only for his win.

I didn’t understand what the circuit announcer was saying, but his emotional and dramatic descriptions of the race united all the audience. Watching the world’s best riders in that atmosphere – we were in the place where language didn’t matter. We felt it with our senses and hearts.

The qualify, as you know, went very well.

We got back to the pit box as soon as it was over because we were about to attend a press release to give a presentation about MORIWAKI CUP with MD250 in Spain starting next year.

We knew the administration wanted Midori to be there, but her schedule was already so many things packed in for every minute. Well, we shouldn’t have been worried because we were real Moriwaki workers, but it wasn’t that easy.

After the presentation, it was a dinnertime and we walked towards Gresini restaurant(?). Various events were going on around there.