Year of the Dragon

Handwritten “bye bye Spain” sign hanging from a window in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter.

In the days after deciding that Barcelona was the next stop in my little Euro trip (mostly because I had the offer of a free couch to sleep on and it lay on the way to Madrid) I consciously decided not to Google it. By now I’ve figured out that the main attractions of a city will usually fight for your attention once you get there, and after the experience in Paris of re-seeing everything I already knew so well just from the collective imaginary, I was ready to be surprised.

And surprised I was. I had no idea what to expect out of the Catalan city, other than some vague notion that I’d see some special architecture. I found a city that seemed to me physically more stunning, more decidedly unique than anything I could have imagined; yet emotionally harder to crack than I expected from a city where I had several connections and was –theoretically- fluent in the language.

The first surprise was that Barcelona was, in fact, the very first place I’ve visited where I didn’t speak the language. Though everyone speaks Spanish (or Castillian, as it should be properly called in Barcelona if you don’t want to be snapped at) every store sign and bus schedule was written in Catalan. Catalan is not just a funny kind of Spanish, as I had imagined it before, but a related yet distinct language much like Italian. It’s close enough to understand what store signs are advertising, but not nearly close enough to eavesdrop on conversations on the bus, hard as I tried.  Things will often be stubbornly translated into English rather than into Castillian.

Of course, the politics of language are just a layer of something deeper going on in Barcelona. The locals do not consider themselves Spanish, and there is a significant independence movement that is visible through the streets of the city in the form of independentist flags hanging from apartment windows (with a star on a field of blue,  like Puerto Rico’s, added to the traditional yellow and red striped Catalan flag). Both the Spanish and Colombian people that I hung out with during my time there refer to the Catalá as “them”. They are accused of being cold and closed, and though I didn’t get the chance to speak with many Catalans and get their side of the story, I did often feel that waiters and store attendants would turn dry bordering on rude once I spoke Spanish.  The only openly warm Catalan person I interacted with in my week in the city was an eighteen year old boy that was falling over drunk on the metro at four in the morning. And even then, he spoke to me only in English.  

I suppose that it’s natural that a culture that has been fighting for the survival of its identity for so many centuries (even as close as Franco’s regime, where speaking the language was actually forbidden) would become resentful of outsiders. I’m just a little sad that I didn’t really get to take much of a peek at the Barcelonés’s Barcelona, instead limiting myself to ogling gorgeous streets with hordes of tourists and hanging out with Colombian grad students come to Spain to polish their résumés with an European diploma.

Thankfully, there was much to ogle at, and I am not referring to the tanned, toned and topless women at the beach, though there were plenty of those, too. Gaudi’s work is something out of a fairytale. It’s hard not to stare at La Sagrada Familia and imagine it as the work of a giant pastry chef with too much time on his hands, and La Pedrera would fit in just fine in a Dr. Seuss story. His work is irreverently original, without seeming gimmicky or impractical for the sake of looks.  I loved it.

But I think what I liked most was that it wasn’t simply a few out-of-place works of genius sprinkled throughout an ordinary city. The non-Gaudi buildings in Barcelona were also beautiful, with great colors, and balconies, and fantastic patterns on the walls. There were plenty of sculptures and fountains, and a refreshing lack of naked cherubs and gild. It’s a walker’s city, with wide shady “ramblas”  and unending boardwalks by the Mediterranean Sea. The gothic neighborhood was a delightful maze of narrow medieval streets to get lost in along with several thousand other tourists.  

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (like Oscar Wilde, he seems to write in little quotable snippets.)

The next year or two are going to be a lot of new things for me, and since I am absolutely horrible at keeping in touch with the people I love, and I have always had a secret dream of keeping a blog, this will be my way of letting people know what I am up to.  I suspect more of the time I will just post pictures or short comments on things that catch my interest, but we’ll see what shape this takes. How could I be a credible expat without a blog?

I graduated Harvard in May, hid my brand new diploma in a spare closet at my sister’s house in Florida, and packed everything I would keep with me in a single red suitcase I got as a graduation gift. The previous November, after a couple of months of intense senior year anxiety in trying to decide what to do with my future,  I was selected as one of the recipients of the Michael Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship. In one of those amazing “is-this-real-life” moments that sometimes happen to me, I was given the complete freedom (and funds!) to travel to another country for one year and develop a personally meaningful project. Real life was postponed, and I was set to go to France in mid August. 

But of course, it couldn’t possibly be so easy. I applied for the requisite long-term visa, and even now, well over four months later, I don’t have a response. In July, I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, where I was working with the Harvard Idea Translation Lab developing a project to connect day laborers with employers. I then got a short stay Schengen visa that let me come to France for a one week conference also with the Harvard ITL, and decided to stay a couple of extra weeks in Europe.

Right now I am in Paris, and will be traveling to Spain at the end of the week. I have to return to Colombia in September 15th, when my visa runs out. I will then have to decide on a new plan of action, whether to keep begging the French for a new visa, or, most likely, to completely re-think the next year. For now, I am living day-to-day. I am choosing my travel destinations based solely on where I have couches I can crash on. I eat mostly baguettes and try to resist the urge to drink coffee so I don’t have to pay for it. I walk around all day staring in awe at this magnificent city, take hundreds of bad pictures, and pick books for my Kindle old enough that I can get them for free (as you can see, Walden is the current choice).

I seem to have completely lost the ability to plan much more than two days in advance, and though I often whine about it (ask my poor boyfriend Robb), it is kind of nice. We’ll see where this goes, and for random updates from the road, keep reading this blog.