Hola!
As a student traveling it is always better to enter a city from the back, undetected, thereby allowing oneself a true view of the city, rather than viewing the city’s façade, which it wears for tourists. So too is it with Barcelona: upon stepping off the bus the sidewalk fails to lead into a square of ancient villas, houses with red terra-cotta shingled roofs and decaying, white plaster walls as one may expect. Instead the city looms overhead, the touristic is ideal replaced with pastel colored condominiums stacked endlessly atop each other. Here there are no visible policia to regulate renegade Vespas, and rows of abandoned bikes lie, coated like the air about them in a layer of exhaust so thick that it has hardened into something tangible. The first steps off the bus are an education, not a welcome to utopia.
With a population over 1.4 million the city is well capitalized. While traversing inwards from the city’s bus station the town seems to dwell ahead. Underfoot the gray pathway guides the passerby with a continually changing floral, geometric or cobblestone motif, saving the asphalt only for the highways. It is the small details, such as the Spanish crown atop the cast iron street lamps and the strategically placed Gaudi designs which usher the traveler into the city center also known as the “gothic district”. Here the Sagrada Familia, The Fundacion Foto Colectionia and the National Art Gallery of Catalunya dominate the horizon, dwarfing (by zoning ordinance) the city’s tallest skyscrapers with their foreboding and aerodynamic architecture and musty smell of worn granite.
If one continues to pace down the narrow cobblestone walkways, eventually the monumental buildings come to an end. Near the landing of the 1992 Olypics the cobblestone lay pass away into unadorned wooden boardwalk. At the end of the peninsula is where the course golden sand and saltwater breeze hide, away from the crammed confusion of the city. This is a regular site for meditation, chanting circles, street concerts and nude tanning on the beach.
If you are like me may find yourself enchanted by the city, thereby ending up in such places as: The Ice Bar, waiting in line and paying to sit somewhere that is -20 farinheight while drinking/eating from ice glasses. Or walking into a Flamanco/Opera concert in a Gaudi concert house where such passion and love of the culture are displayed that I find myself unabashed proud of their country and history as performers are.
On Sunday morning I got up with the sun and sneaked into the Barcelona Cathederal to attend a mass with 35 nuns. Following this I found myself meditating on the beach, with Yalan, a young man who accompanied me over the East Town rocks. We did the sun salutaion together and I learned my first guitar chords from him. He is a Shi’it from Iraq who fled to Espania.
All of the things that compose a full trip, but even with these wonders it is strangely relieving to return Home to the Dutch again. The last moments of this trip, spent dancing to terrible 90’s/industrial mixes on the Eurorail at midnight before finally returning to Well’s small neighborhood in the dead of night finds it’s wends it’s way into my memory just as easily as getting sunburned within an inch of my life watching the Red Bull Mini-Plane-Racing contests…
So many stories that go with a thousand moments.
intrepid trekking 