reasons Chris loves Barcelona (and hates birthdays)
I finish class and my students are loved-up in front of my house, shy and embarrassed and staring at the car, and I try to put my shit in the trunk and the trunk is minuscule and I end up with it awkwardly crushed between my ankles. My computer charger is going to make a bruise. I get to the airport and Emilio and I have cigarettes in the car - I still feel bad about that, it is new after all - and then the obligatory kiss and then I get out and feel a little bit sad and go over to the bitchy check-in woman. I fight the urge to tell her it’s almost my birthday, instead choosing to smile why she explains they should charge me for my baggage being 200 grammes overweight but why they’re not going to (because they’re nice people). I go through security and my mum calls to wish me happy birthday even though it’s not my birthday, and I can’t get my Converse back on to save my life. Hang up. There’s a rather sophisticated-looking bar next to the gates, I remember when this airport was a bit more grunge, and I go and have a couple glasses of wine standing up and read Jaime Bayly and I feel sophisticated too. Alcohol + Chris = 1, sobriety 0.
It’s now time to board and, to my dismay, I’m not surrounded by elegant Barcelona people chattering in Catalan as I’d expected. I get on the plane and there’s a fat girl next to me reading an English magazine, pushing the bridge of her pink classes around on her massive nose. What do you think she must be thinking every morning when she wakes up? If I were her, I’d look in the mirror and say “Ha, why bother?” I’m fairly close to doing that already, except every now and then I see myself in my peripheral vision and think, hell, not so bad. But I digress. So I put my shit under the chair and apologised in the handsomest way I knew to the fat girl for requiring her to abandon her chair however momentarily, although I realised shortly afterwards that she probably doesn’t even know Spanish and that all my fancy words were wasted.
By the way, people think I take speaking Spanish for granted: I don’t. I love the way my voice sounds in Spanish, much better than when I’m trying to imitate whoever I’m speaking English with, and when we get to the tricky part of the error-correction process I have to listen more than I speak and try not to imitate the disastrous mistakes my students make, though lately I’ve been drinking coffee and having trouble curbing the urge to laugh at them. Oops. You don’t have to apologise to your students, Chris: here you are God, if they don’t like it they can gtfo and all that. (I’m going to keep that in mind.)
So then we were suddenly in Barcelona, I was a bit drunk, and I caught the bus and ended up in Plaça Catalunya and caught the tube and was suddenly in Jaume I, and before I knew it I was back in some bar in front of the metro with nicer clothes and drinking yet another glass of red wine and having tapas and reading. It was absolute pseudo-Mediterranean magic; repeat, I love Barcelona. I left and went to a restaurant where I ate too much and talked to the waiter, who did an uncanny imitation of the Los Angeles vernacular and accent for my amusement, which was fantastic. Drank an entire bottle of wine (this after the three glasses I’d already had) and quite a bit of water. Tipsily paid my check and waved goodbye.
Flash forward, it’s now Saturday morning, and Chris is queueing in Starbucks to buy Guatemalan coffee - I miss you too, Gabriel, except not really - and it’s full of people who speak neither English nor Spanish, and I’ve got a headache and am in no mood to speak Catalan just to humour them. There’s a procession and all three floors of McDonalds are packed with yet more fat people (there seem to be a lot of them). I finally manage to get the (mediocre) caramel macchiato they made me and leave, crossing Les Rambles and buying a festive Barça lighter, and then I’m in the entryway of el mercat de la Boquería and it’s beautiful; fruits and juices, old Catalan people in berets tasting flutes of Catalan cava before deciding which one to take home. My God. It would appear that there are some civilised places in Spain after all. Oranges from Valencia, the most beautiful organic tomatoes I’ve ever seen this time of year, and everywhere people moving and the smooth nasal sounds of Catalan, which is one of the most beautiful languages I’ve ever heard. En fin.
A lot of things happened almost simultaneously: I bought an enormous and immensely painful and gaudy bracelet in an Indian shop and have insisted on wearing it every day even though it makes me bleed a bit (beauty hurts), I finished my coffee in some hidden gardens in the Ciutat Vella and wrote a postcard to my mother, promptly ordered another coffee in a little hidden bar where they gave you blankets to stave off the chill and let me read as long as I wanted. (The coolest part was that my Catalan teacher actually knew about all of these places when we talked and offered commentary. I need to find a man like him.) I finished and went somewhere cheap and crowded for lunch, for a change. It was nice, although people always stare at the hair - I should do something about this the next time I go back to the hairdresser’s.
Siesta, made cigarettes and watched The Big Bang Theory for a few hours, dressed for dinner (I love how posh that sounds), left, had an undersized and overpriced mojito in some stupid English bar, took the tube, and had sushi, amazing sushi just the way I remembered it except better without nasty Chinese soy sauce, ramen with bamboo shoots and little pieces of tonkatsu, and Asahi. Well, perhaps I could do without the Asahi; but there’s a place in Bilbao that sells Kirin Ichiban and I need to pay them a visit. Then beer and enormous rats in the Port Vella, then this kiosk bar in the street where they refused to let me pay for anything (I love people from Chile) then I vaguely remember something about a disco that was red and white and black on the inside and not being able to stop laughing, then my alarm went off and I had a spectacular headache and my weekend was officially over. Voilà. the end.
