After a seemingly nonexistent night's bus ride from Madrid we arrived in Barcelona just as the sun was coming up. We were meeting a friend of mine from Italy and hoping to stay with him for a few nights but it was too early to call him so we made our way into the heart of the city from the bus station. You'd never guess where our first stop was....the Starbucks on La Rambla, Barcelona's biggest pedestrian and tourist hub. We gushed over our big "American" cup of coffee and read the newspaper of Barcelona for a few hours before finally trying to call my friend. To make a long story short, I'd misunderstood his emails in my confusion of Spanish, Italian, English, Bosnian, and whatever else is in my head and it turned out that he was actually leaving that very afternoon instead of the following week. So we only got to see him for a little while and we didn't have the place to stay where we thought. We bartered for a hostel right in the center of the city and found a place to stay for 15 euro. We realized later in the week just how lucky we were to have payed so little in a city that's as expensive as Barcelona is. The dollar doesn't go a long way when you take into account the exchange rate and the standard of living here. We were as frugal as we could be during the whole week. We never ate a single meal out and fed ourselves (well) with baguettes, brie, fruit and the amazing Maoz falafel places that are ubiquitous in the city. Believe me, Mediterranean Deli has nothing on this falafel.
Our first mission in Barcelona was the beach and as soon as we dropped our stuff off at the hostel that's exactly where we went. The beaches were huge and there were thousands of people on them - topless, completely naked, of all shapes and sizes. The water was clear and beautiful, the sand was course and warm, but the beach experience was much like that in America. Except for the hundreds of immigrants from Pakistan, Morocco, Thailand who walked up and down the beach like robots selling "sexy beer," sarongs, massages, coconut, everything under the sun. They never cease to offer their goods. That was something incredibly shocking to me in Barcelona - the number of illegal immigrants, especially from Pakistan. The saddest thing is how little respect they get, how they have to run from the cops as soon as they round a corner, and how meaningless their efforts at making money are. These Pakistani men, who I believe come from one of the most religiously observant countries in the world, are standing on dirty street corners in the middle of the night selling beer for a euro. And I wonder - do they have families? And what is it about their own countries that has made this a more desirable option? That was one of the sadder sides of Barcelona...
That first night we got a free meal at this place called Travel Bar and we quickly realized that the only language around us was English. Barcelona's primary tongue is English, I'm certain, and the population of Americans who don't speak Spanish is embarrassing. They get under-the-table jobs as "pub crawl" promoters and they just stand on street corners and hand out obnoxious fliers advertising their respective bar crawls. We weren't interested in getting wasted for 15 euros nor speaking English, so we headed to our hostel with a baguette and a jar of Nutella for our own private night and then went to bed.
The next day we took our own walking tour of Barcelona, heading north from Las Ramblas to the very northern corner where the Parque Guell is located. It was a long meandering walk through the historic part of the city as well as the more metropolitan shopping area. The park was phenomenal. It reminded me of
The next day we decided to get out of the helter-skelter of the city and visit a less populous beach up the coast from Barcelona. It was about an hour's train ride before we arrived to the peaceful beach of San Pol de Mar, halfway to France on the Costa Brava. It was beautiful and serene and a nice change from the filthy beaches of Barcelona. We spent the entire day basking in the sun and observing the locals in their games of kadima and beach soccer. The water was perfect - cool and clear and so salty. Being there and just feeling the waves rhytmically crash against the shore made me realize that I really want to grow old by the sea. As we were getting back onto our train to head back to the city, we watched a group of retired old locals play Bocci ball in the park. Their skin was bronze and healthy and they looked blissful to be by the water.
That evening we wandered around the streets for a little while looking for signs of Spanish speaking bars and we finally stumbled upon a tiny little, hole-in-the wall place that was packed full of people. We were a little discouraged at first at the familiarity of all the people at the bar, but in no time we were approached by Spanish speakers (yess) and got to start practicing our Spanish. I've learned that what's more effective than any intensive Spanish course, is just striking up conversations with strangers in bars. We talked to a few guys from Portugal who'd been living in Barcelona for a while and then after the bar closed we went to a "clandestino" bar nearby with a Turkish guy who'd been living in Barcelona and studying cinema and a guy from Chile named Sebastian who had somehow acquired the nickname of "piojo," which means lice in Spanish. The Turkish guy blew me away with the number of languages he spoke. He was born in Turkey so that was his mother tongue, but then he also lived in Germany so he spoke German, he'd lived in Italy so he was fluent in Italian, he spoke perfect English and Spanish and was learning Catalan (the language of Barcelona). I was amazed at how young and how well versed he was in languages. He was quite a character though - a skinny little guy with dread locks, who talked a lot and was incredibly angsty. He was a complete anarchist revolutionary who supported the Basque separatists and when we asked him who he voted for he said he voted for the party that's been illegalized in Spain. "Piojo" moved to Barcelona from Chile where he'd studied psychology and he was working in Spain now as a counselor with heroine addicts. By four o'clock in the morning we were exhausted and wanted to go home but our new friends tried to convince us to go watch a soccer match at another club. Of course, we went back to our hostel to sleep. The people of Barcelona don't go to bed, I'm convinced.
The next day we hiked the streets of the city again to get to the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's magnificent church that is still being constructed to this day. It was enormous and looked like a Gothic castle in so many ways. His idea with this church was to build the perfect place of worship and he died in the process of doing it, leaving the construction plans behind. The Spanish government is still subsidizing its construction. Will it ever be finished, I wonder. Or perhaps the idea is that the perfect place of worship could never actually be constructed so they keep building it forever and ever.
That afternoon we went to "La boqueria," the big outdoor market full of fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, nuts, everything your heart could desire and bought phenomenal farmer's brie, a baguette, peaches and avocados and we took a little beach sarong out into the Plaza Reial (where all the expensive restaurants are) and we had a little picnic in the middle of the plaza. I guarantee you we ate better than any of the fools paying fortunes for the finger-picking food in the pretentious restaurants and we made people stare....what could be better?
That evening we went to a salsa club on the beach with a guy we met from Colombia. He turned out to be a little unpleasant with all the whiskey he was consuming so we left him and walked along the beach. We ran into a guy on a skateboard and Elyse proceeded to show off her skateboarding tricks, breaking our recently acquired salt shaker along the way. Our skateboarding friend Niko turned out to be a great find - a guitar-playing, vagabond traveling kid from Buenos Aires who'd been living in Barcelona for a while. We stayed out with him for a few hours talking about our different cultures and then went back home to our hostel.
Niko was an interesting character, one I could probably write a book about. He looked like he was 16 but was in fact 21, he was constantly smiling and laughing and called us his "cute chicas." It was as though he was dying for good, normal friends to spend his time with. He was a musician who played his guitar on the Metro to make extra money for lunch, he said. He'd been traveling around Europe and was settled in Barcelona for a while. We met his brother the next night at a Libartad concert, a revolutionary separatist radical experience for the liberation of Barcelona from Spain. His brother, one would think, would also be Argentine. But his brother was in fact from Cyprus. He and Niko didn't have a language in common so they spoke some kind of broken Spanglish between the two of them. Andrea (the brother) had found Niko a couple of years before on the internet as his long lost half brother and they'd met up for the first time in Europe. They shared the same father, but came from different mothers. We paraded around the city with the two of them that night after the concert and ended up on the beach on a blanket under the stars of Barcelona.
On our last official day in Barcelona we were homeless and it was quite an experience. We spent the afternoon hiking up a mountain in Parc Montjuic. I had my heavy backpack with me the whole day, my brilliant idea, of course; but now I tell myself I was training for my next adventure. We climbed to the top of the mountain which overlooked all of Barcelona and the sea below. There was a castle on top that we walked around in and had a little picnic of brie and baguette (our staple diet) as we towered over the world below. We spent the afternoon in the park, watching Spanish families enjoy their Saturday afternoon lounging in the grass and watching their kids play soccer. Here's a little park muse that I wrote, in case you're dying for poetry at this point:
A simple life...
spending a Saturday afternoon in the park
sitting on a blanket in the grass, drinking mate and eating sunflower seeds
watching your kids play futbol down below, electrified with energy from the afternoon sun
the city's angst exhales down below
but you don't feel it because you're so high
rolled r's, "goal" yells and high pitched laughter break the silence of the world
but the noise is like honey in a cup of hot tea
warming your body through your lungs
as dusk trickles in like an unnoticeable, stealthy thief
the mate is sucked dry
the birds are settling in the palm trees
the kids are still playing, and beg to stay longer
the mamas and the papas are content in their languid sprawls
"10 more minutes" tunres into 20, then 30, then more
But it's Saturday and it doesn't matter
and even if the bats come flying and the stars starting shining
they'll stay until the last drop of honey is sucked from the straw
they'll stay to pick the stars from the sky like fruits from a tree
they'll stay until their heart's content
as their chatter trickles, trickles, trickles away
And that's the image I hold in my head of Spanish families on Saturday afternoons.
In the evening we met up with our friend Niko and walked around the city for a few hours before heading to our friend Lauren's bar, where we planned to spend most of the night before going home with her to sleep at her apartment for a few hours before our bus left for Madrid. The bar was small and smoky and most of the customers were regular loonies. At one point we went to an ATM machine to try to withdraw money and when we went into the "cajero" we realized there was a group of Spaniards doing coke lines off the teller. That's Barcelona for you. Drugs on every corner, and not a shrug about it. We finally got to Lauren's apartment at 7 that morning and slept for a few hours before catching our bus back to Madrid. The bus ride was like a dream from which I couldn't wake up and before I knew it we were pulling into the station in Madrid.
My friend Carina wrote to me in an email that Barcelona is a rock star and Madrid is like an old woman, and it's such an accurate depiction of the difference between the two cities. After a week of Barcelona's madness, it felt nice to come back to the old woman that gave us a hot shower and a comfortable bed to sleep in. And tomorrow we head south. South to where the weather is hotter, south to where the people are kinder, south to where the accent is inimitable, south to where the wine and cheese are cheaper and tapas are free. South. I'm so glad I'm moving south. Tomorrow to Granada and in the next couple of days after that to Alora, where I will finally feel like I'm living in Spain.
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