Hasta Luego, Barcelona

Today is of course all about the Mercé, but one question first.

Have you ever walked up a mountain to a fort in a thunderstorm?

We have.













But back to the action. What better way to honor the memory of a Catholic saint than to have hooded men shoot fire at innocent people? I was one of those people and I think it’s entirely appropriate.

And some brief excerpts from the Mercé, from the sound check of a popular band in northern Spain called Suu, to some French dancers.

And along the way, the Van Van, in which anyone with a reconditioned trailer can sell food truck food. The lines were long.

Tomorrow we are off to northern Spain for the next phase of our adventure.

Pre-Mercé

Today is the big day – the beginning of the Mercé. The big stuff doesn’t start until tomorrow, but here’s what we’ve got so far. As a slight bit of context here, the Mercé was originally started as a religious festival (something about the patron saint of Barcelona and a plague of locusts), but how fireworks, dragons and hip-hop tie in with that is anybody's guess.

First, we hung out for a little while with the president of Catalonia. Today, as always, the Mercé kicked off with political speeches and demonstrations. After the final speech, we headed toward the sound of music in front of the Barcelona cathedral, passing by a march demanding freedom for the imprisoned members of the government of Catalonia who supported the secession referendum. Those imprisoned leaders don't include the president, who fled to Belgium right after the vote. Left without a president, the territorial government elected a substitute – Quim Torra.

Anyway, we arrived at the cathedral to find a big band playing traditional music and people from the crowd dancing a traditional dance. A well-dressed middle-aged man hopped into the circle in front of us and we noticed two guys with earpieces, form-fitting suits and gun-shaped bulges in their blazers staring into the crowd. When the dance was over everyone was high-fiving and shaking hands with the guy and I asked a woman near me who he was. “Oh, he’s Quim Torra, the president,” she said.

And here’s a video of the march and the dance. You can see President Torra getting into the circle right at the end.

But enough of the serious stuff, here are some other videos from tonight. First, the projections on the building. Best thing ever. There’s a different one every year. This is an excerpt from this year.

What time is it? Street food time, where we had some great snacks with Lebanese
fireworks on the beach in the background.












And no evening is complete without the parade of the spark-shooting monsters and the neighborhood drum corps. We gave it about an hour and it showed no sign of ending so we left and went to the park. The video is a little long, but do you really have that much else to do right now? You'll have to imagine the smell of singed hair.

It’s possible that there may have been some alcohol involved.

And then we went back to our place. The young people hanging out at the restaurants and bars on our block at 1:30 a.m. were as lively as they were at 8:00 p.m., and as we were 30 years ago.

Barcelona Day 5

While people in Europe are not nearly as hung up about nudity as we Americans are, I must continue to remind myself that the large glass doors and windows in our apartment are about ten feet away from the large glass doors and windows of the apartments across the street, and that there are parts of me that our neighbors probably don’t particularly want to see first thing in the morning.

Speaking of first thing in the morning, this morning I accomplished a successful airport pickup, after which Martha and I walked to the beach for a swim in the Mediterranean, and then, unconsciousness (hers, not mine).










And while Spain now seems to be headed for its fourth general election in four years because of its inability to get a majority of people in or out of government to agree on much (the first year I came here there hadn’t been a president in almost a year – but things seemed to be running along just fine without one), there are some small successes that give me hope, like . . .




. . . the 1st Hair and Yoga, which may actually be the first place where you can get your hair cut and do yoga in one stop, and . . .














El Flako, which offers pricey cereal and milk from all over the world to Barcelona hipsters with disposable income in an environment that might remind one of a very spare Starbucks but with way more plants. Proving how out of touch I am with the youth of today, this place opened shortly before I came here last year and I made fun of it, never imagining in my wildest dreams that it would still be open a year later. But it is.

Barcelona Day 4

Today is the last solo day of my trip. Tomorrow I get up early, put on my cleanest T-shirt, and pick Martha up at the airport.

I go for a run almost every morning. Today I ran through Ciutadella Park. As I gracefully loped by
the beautiful European women having their morning cafe con leche, I couldn’t help but notice them coyly eyeing me up and down, looking at my distinguished graying hair and form-fitting running shirt, thinking “That guy looks older than my grandfather. I hope he doesn’t have a heart attack right here in front of me.”

And then off to Placa España. Why build four replica Greek columns and plop them in downtown Barcelona holding nothing up? “Wrong question” says Barcelona. "Why not build four replica Greek columns?" So that’s what they did, but then just before the 1929 world’s fair in Barcelona the Spanish prime minister had them torn down because they could be interpreted as demonstrating support for Catalonian independence (there are four red stripes on the Catalonian flag and four columns. Perhaps people overthought things back then). And to make some kind of masculine point, he had two even bigger brick towers built in roughly the same place. After many decades of effort, the Catalonians finally persuaded the Spanish government to rebuild replicas of the columns, so now the columns and the towers are there together serving what the literature politely calls an “ornamental function”.




You can see the towers here behind the columns. If someone over here could only be half that passionate about figuring out a way not to have all the stores close between 2 and 6 everyday . . .

But none of that matters; what matters is that stages are going up all over town and that can only mean the Mercé is starting soon.















Not counting music, my must-see list now includes the Procession of Dragons and Fire Beasts, 3D digital face manipulation and the acrobatic basketball players. And don’t even get me started on the video mapping on the wall of City Hall – I’ll post a video of that; it’s pretty amazing. There really is something for everyone here.

Wait . . . what? A last-minute three-day street-food festival on our block! Is this real life?

Barcelona Day 3

Following the recommendation of some nice people I met a few days ago, I took a day trip to Sitges, a coastal town about 30 miles south of Barcelona.

It’s a really nice place























if you like beaches . . .

. . . and dogs (who also get to ride on trains).

Checks all the boxes for me; it would be a nice place to go for a long weekend once in a while if I didn’t live 4,000 miles from it.

Then back “home” for a quick dip.











But the big news is that the Mercé is only three days away. This is the annual festival that consumes Barcelona each year at this time with several days of music, performances, parades and various dangerous and artsy activities across the city all day and all night.

For example, nothing shouts “a good time for the whole family” like having people dressed as demons shoot fireworks into crowds of people crammed onto one of Barcelona’s main streets. As the program says, “Carrefoc is the appointment for fire lovers” and some precautions are in order, like (and this is not the entire list):
“Protect yourself from burns”
“Protect your neck from flying sparks”
“Protect your eyes”
“Follow the instructions of the devils.” You bet I will.

It seems chaotic, but the program assures the public that everything is quite orderly – “From the outside, the fire and the dances of the devil are seen. But behind what we see as viewers, there is an internal organization.” Is the Carrefoc dangerous, meaningless and unnecessary? Yes. Will I be there? Absolutely.

And the sparks don’t end there. There will also be a large fireworks demonstration put on by a group from Lebanon, this year’s partner country. I can guess what you may be thinking about the concept of Lebanon and fireworks, but let’s be open-minded. Per the official program, “Fireworks will arrive in Lebanon, with the company Nazih Tabbara Fireworks. The gas breakwater, on the Barceloneta beach, will fill with light with an aesthetic proposal that will remember that Beirut is the city invited this year.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I sure hope whoever is setting off the fireworks is better at his or her job than is the person who translated the program into English.

But putting the riskier parts of the program aside (which also include the 8-story human towers and the live birds-of-prey demonstration), there really is quite a lot of great music, performance art and good feelings. Stay tuned.

Barcelona Day 2

Today I explored a couple of neighborhoods in Barcelona I hadn’t been to before.

When you start to approach the Barcelona on the flight in, you notice that the city is surrounded by mountains. One distant Barcelona neighborhood, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, is at the foot of those mountains and is where all the wealthiest Barcelonians live (yeah, that’s what they’re called in English). Also, there is a funicular up in those mountains that goes even higher, which I really wanted to try, because funicular is enjoyable both to ride and to pronounce.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be really wealthy in Barcelona, and who hasn’t, I can tell you a few things now. They live in houses like this  . .

And this.

There are a lot of banks, financial advisory firms and high-end food stores in the neighborhood, and the women all smell of perfume. I originally wrote “expensive perfume,” but really, what do I know about that?











Anyway, it turns out that the funicular is partway up the mountain in a park. You can take a bus there, but you can also walk, which I did. It involved going up a large hill to the park entrance and then climbing up many isolated, steep paths to dead ends, which led me to other steep paths that meandered up the mountain . . .

















This is how high up I was just getting to the beginning of the funicular.













. . . and eventually to this encouraging sign.

Ultimately, after a 45-minute hike up and down and up the mountain, my last clean t-shirt half soaked in sweat, I finally reached the funicular.















And on a political note – there has been a lot of turmoil in this part of Spain, which is the part that wants to secede from the rest of the country. There was a Brexit-like secession vote when I was here in 2017, but the whole episode was a disaster for a variety of reasons and honestly, both sides came out of it looking pretty bad.

Anyway, the leader of the Catalan government fled to Belgium and then kind of disappeared. But other government leaders were actually arrested and charged with something like treason and the court is expected to rule on those charges in the next couple of weeks, so the whole separatist thing is starting to heat up again.

This means demonstrations and flags. The traditional Catalan flag is just yellow and red stripes, but the separatist movement flag adds a blue triangle with a white star. Anti-separatists snidely remark that the addition makes it look like Cuba’s flag. True enough, but it also looks like Puerto Rico’s flag.





Anyway, I mention all this just to give context to this 30-foot long flag I saw today, which shows both extra commitment and some serious sewing skills.

Barcelona Day 1

I upped my apartment game this year, a nicer place but in the same great neighborhood, which over the years has become borderline too hipster for even me. It’s demoralizing to feel insufficiently stylish every time you walk out the door.

This place is on the first floor (which is three floors up – after “baja” “entresuelo” and “principal.”)












We also have a rooftop terrace, with a view beyond the clotheslines and TV antennas to the Basilica Santa Maria Del Mar, the 14th Century church that is right next to my building. This church is incredibly beautiful on the inside. Last year I posted a picture of a wedding taking place there. This year, someone told me that the waiting list to get married here is so long that girls in high school sign up, assuming that by the time they get their turn, they’ll have found someone to marry.










Going against my better judgment, I decided for the second time on this trip to learn something and went on a walking tour of Barcelona. This whole idea of acquiring knowledge once in a while isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. We spent three hours exploring the old town where I discovered that there’s more to Barcelona than fireworks, live music and great food. Who knew?

Speaking of fireworks, we are just five short days away from the beginning of the Mercé, the city-wide festival where lack of sleep, alcohol-fueled displays of bad judgment, and general good times last for 48 hours straight. The only downside is that there are about 100 performances all over town and you have to pick a place to be, which means you’re not at the other places. Just like life.