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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.
It’s hard not to love a city with food that great, buildings that beautiful, and a character so well defined. The weather doesn’t hurt, either. This is the kind of place I could visit again and again -
It’s funny, the way we travel now. Most of the time, we go to places we have seen in movies and pictures, or at the very least read all about in a travel guide. There are, in theory, not many surprises, and few places are more predictable than Paris. I knew exactly what monuments I would see in this city, the names of the neighborhoods were familiar, and I could already imagine the smell of fresh baked baguette coming out of the ‘boulangeries’. I had this idea, coming to Paris, that it would be a little bit of a disappointment, a sorry copy of its own cliche.
I was so wrong. Paris has really managed to surprise me. It is bigger, more beautiful, and a little grungier than I expected. Primed by the disappointment of seeing things like the Statue of Liberty or the Disney World castle for the first time, a shrunken version of their own built-up image, I was prepared to feel the same here. Contrary to expectation, the Eiffel Tower was gigantic, and stunning when it sparkles at night, every hour on the dot. The galleries of the Louvre seemed positively infinite, and Versailles made my brain hurt with its unthinkable oppulence (I would have revolted too).
I only had one week to explore Paris, but, in part because I was lucky to have friends that had already carved their place out in the city, and in part because I speak enough French to get over the big invisible barrier, I felt like I a got a much better crack at the soul of the city than I would have expected with just a week.
I did not eat at any world-famous restaurants, and most of the great French food I had came in €0.85 still-warm baguette form. I did not wait in line to climb on top of the Eiffel Tower. And in fact, I may have been too cheap to hang out in the famous Montmartre cafes. But I had a midnight picnic and wine at the Channel St. Martin and tipsily rode public bikes at 2am with little hairy French guys yelling “Putain!”. I had coffee in tiny cups in the apartment of a gay vet that makes beautiful oil paintings at night and lives in a building with the smallest elevator I have ever seen. I had a little Asian girl tell me in impeccable French to ignore her little brother, who was just a baby speaking “gibberish,” when he tried to speak to me in what I presume to be some sort of Chinese. I walked past the open door of the apartment of an African immigrant family, where I saw at least 5 small children and their completely topless and very large mom yelling at them. I saw Indian women with bowls of fire on their heads. And most importantly, I had time to sit and stare in whatever garden or river bank I chose, for as many hours as I wanted, until I got sick of it.
I like Paris. I like the deliberate aesthetic intention in everything she does. I like her creative vandalism. I like her wonderful postcards, and I like her interracial couples holding hands.
But… on we go. Barcelona!
(Sorry for the long and pointless post. One gets bored in a 15 hour bus ride with weird men staring the whole way.)
