Day 32 - Godmorgen

Since Spain is pretty much closed down for Holy Week, I made last-minute plans to hop over to Copenhagen, Denmark, which brought us Lego, Carlsberg beer, $7 cups of coffee, coed bathrooms, and blond hair and blue eyes.

Some observations based on the in-depth knowledge I’ve acquired in one day.

These relief sculptures above the main door of the Danish parliament, show people in anguish and pain, which are meant to symbolize the utter misery involved in trying to get laws passed. No sugar coating here.

This is a highly bike-centric place, with 600,000 people and 700,000 bikes. When it snows, the city government clears the bike lanes before they clear the car lanes.

The food is very pretty.

Everything is really expensive. I found a decent hotel and minimized the cost by choosing a room categorized on the hotel website as “tiny.” Which it definitely is. This is the bathroom, which is actually just one large shower with a sink and toilet in it. Hey, I’m on a budget.

But the deep thought for today is this. Our tour guide this morning kept emphasizing how happy Danish people are, with their fantastic lifestyles, their candles and their hygge (look it up if you’re not familiar with the term). But during the tour she also mentioned that there is one state-sanctioned religion, which the government supports financially so they have services every Sunday even if no one shows up, all of the schools, both public and private, teach the same state-approved curriculum using the same text books, the population is 20% immigrant, but most of the immigrants come from other European countries, and 80% of the laws are passed with unanimous consent. Not judging at all here, but there’s also something to be said for messy. 

Yes, there really are coed bathrooms. Get used to it.

Day 27 - Calçot Edition

For a while now, I have desperately wanted to participate in a calçotada, which is something only done in Catalunya and only in the spring. Picture that in Februaryish, the sun starts shining a little more, the early spring flowers start to poke up out of the ground, and townspeople all over the province pull large spring onions (calçots) out of the ground, gather over open fires, grill the onions on large grates placed directly in the flames, then peel them, dip them in romesco sauce and eat them communally accompanied by shots of vermouth, music and socializing.

In all of these years of travelling to Spain, this is the only trip that found me in Catalunya in more or less calçot season so, determined to do this thing, I set out to find a calçotada. The first challenge I discovered was that calçotadas, for which one needs tickets purchased in advance, are organized by neighborhood associations, which are basically a bunch of retired men who sit around all day playing dominoes. This means that there are no online ticket sales or credit cards. You have to go to the neighborhood association, interrupt the domino game and buy tickets with cash. So I went to some neighborhood associations and learned all the different ways to say “we’re sold out” in Spanish.

There are restaurants that serve calçots, but that really wasn’t the vibe I was looking for, so I spent hours scouring the web to find a suitable calçotada, aware of the fact that time was ticking because once you get into March, the season starts to peter out.

On the verge of tapping out, I was thrilled to find a farmer’s market in another part of Barcelona that was going to cook and serve calçots in the traditional way last Saturday starting at 11:00 and going all afternoon. I counted the minutes to Saturday morning and showed up at 11:30, to find this.

But the guy, sensing the desperation in my voice, told me that they were going to be there one more time for the season this past Saturday and that if I showed up at around 10:00 to get in line, some calçots would surely be there for me (with the added benefit that Martha would be there too).

Long story short, everything worked out for the best and my dream came true. Was it an amazing experience or just some crappy grilled onions dipped in canned sauce? No reason it can’t be both.

Day 26 - Company's Coming

After more than three weeks, I decided to wash my jeans and t-shirts, which can only mean one thing. And that one thing is that Martha, who will be the only person physically close enough to me to appreciate that I washed my clothes, was about to arrive.

And arrive she did, along with my cousin Hillary. Staying together in my tiny apartment for two nights allowed us to learn things about each other that we never would have otherwise known, and then Hillary moved on to a hotel in the neighborhood per our pre-arranged plan.

Helena is a good friend here in Barcelona. We meet frequently online and whenever I come here we get together. Last night Helena’s mother invited Martha and me to come to her apartment for a homemade Catalan dinner. Martha’s languages (in order of competence) are English, and some French and Spanish. Helena’s mother has Catalan, Spanish and a little French but no English. Helena is Catalan, Spanish and English but no French, and I am English and Spanish only. As hard as that is to follow is exactly how hard our dinner conversation was to follow. But I’m pretty sure we all had a great time.

Then today Martha made me go to a museum for the second time in a week, which is a record for me. But this museum was full of modern art and I quite enjoyed it. When you go to an art museum and most of the people there are having discussions about whether the things in the building are actually art (like this couch made of dead Snoopies), you are in my kind of museum.

In the meantime, I continue to really enjoy my classes. I’ve worked so hard to get chummy with the students and now that I am, it’s going to be a little tough to leave. I’ve told them all that I’m leaving at the end of April, but since these are beginning Spanish classes and I told them in Spanish, I’m not sure what they think my plans are. I’m not even quite half done and Martha is already making plans for me to come back next year. 

Day 21 - Sunday Morning

Sunday morning in my neighborhood, including a steep walk up to a great Barcelona overlook.

Day 19 - No School Today

While Christmas ends on December 25 and operas end when the fat lady sings, Ramadan ends when official Muslim spotters see the waxing crescent moon. This year, they didn’t see it until Thursday, so my Friday class was cancelled when all of our students decided to go to parties where they could eat a lot.

With no class today, I took a break from my normal culture-free approach to travels to visit the National Museum of Art  (pictured here). It turns out that art can be interesting and I learned a few things. Like these four columns, which were built early in the 20th century to represent the four-striped flag of Catalonia, were torn down by a dictator who didn’t want to give the impression that he approved of Catalonian pride. But he liked the idea of towers in general, so he built two brick towers in the same vicinity. But then after the age of Spanish dictators passed, the original ones were rebuilt so now there are six, four columns and two towers.

But possibly the most disturbing thing I learned concerns my phone. After a couple of hours at the museum, I stopped and bought a café con leche and paid for it by tapping my phone on the card reader (as I always do). A couple of minutes later Martha texted me to say ‘good morning’ and my phone immediately suggested that I reply with a selfie of me holding the coffee I had just bought, a suggestion that was both scary and worthless. It pains me to think that some community had to endure the construction of a data center so that AI could suggest that I text a coffee selfie.

This is the courtyard of my apartment building, which my balcony overlooks. 

The neighbors from the next building have a balcony about five feet away from my balcony, but it’s been a little chilly, so we haven’t met yet. I am looking forward to when the weather warms up. I’m sure they’ll laugh when I ask them if they have any Grey Poupon (assuming they’re old enough to remember the commercials).

And here's a little something to brighten your day.

Day 13-14 Germany

If flying to Düsseldorf, then taking a two-hour train ride through Germany’s rust belt and spending two cold rainy days in a tiny town where all the stores are required by law to be closed on Sunday sounds like the perfect weekend getaway, read on!

I went to visit friends, who are really nice people, and we had a good time despite the fact that there wasn’t much to do. And honestly, sitting around drinking tea and eating great food a few times a day is something that I should probably get better at. It gave me time to appreciate the extraordinary length of German words and have interesting discussions about, for example, why all of the houses in the neighborhood have garages, but none of them are connected to the houses, so that even if you park in the garage, you have to walk through the rain to get in the house. And we thought the Germans had everything figured out! 

The rain did let up enough for us to wander through the town streets . . . sorry. . . street. But only on Saturday when the stores were allowed to be open. 

We also visited the Junkerhaus “museum,” a home built by a guy in town, Herr Junker, at the turn of the last century. He was either a brilliant artist or a slightly deranged loner with OCD (I vote for the latter, and even the informational plaques at the house allow for the possibility that maybe it’s a stretch to put this guy in the same category as Frank Lloyd Wright). They call his work reflective of a movement called “Raw Art,” which is characterized by lack of formal training, impulsive behavior and indications of psychiatric disorders (really). 

Every inch of the interior looked more or less like this.

Then a lovely hike in the woods and back home for more tea. A good time was had by all.

Before I left to come here, I attended a presentation at the nonprofit I’m volunteering at about a groundbreaking new Spanish law that gives legal status to any immigrant who can prove at least 5 months’ residency in Spain and no criminal record, probably the most liberal law of its kind anywhere, and the meeting was extremely well attended by lots of people (including all of my students) who want to take advantage of it. 

Sounds easy, but then questions started to come up. Like if you don’t have a passport or any documents, how do you prove you have been in Spain for five months. And if you come from a country like Algeria, which barely has a functioning government, how do you prove that you don’t have a criminal record? I enjoyed teaching my colleagues the English expression El diablo está en los detalles (The devil is in the details).

Day 10 - Barça Museum

I know almost nothing about soccer (hereinafter referred to as “fútbol”), and almost nothing is slightly more than how much I knew about it this morning before our class took a field trip to the Barça Museum, which pays homage to the Barcelona fútbol team. 

Fútbol is almost like a religion here, with the added bonus that it has a much more wholesome backstory than does the actual religion, Spanish Catholicism. And going to the Barça Museum immersive experience is more fun than going to church.

We all met at the school and were about to leave when someone realized that no one had remembered to buy metro tickets, which meant someone had to walk to the nearest metro stop and buy a ticket for everyone. With 20 minutes to kill I jumped into action and did a review of fútbol-related vocabulary, undeterred by the fact that I don’t really know any fútbol-related vocabulary, in English let alone Spanish. But I came up with a few words and for each one I drew a picture. By the time the class figured out 3 or 4 of the words, spelled them and used them in a sentence, the tickets appeared and we left.

This is about half of our class. Almost everyone is from Algeria.

I run 6km almost every day, along this route because it minimizes the number of cars I have to dodge. The first time I did it, I was sleep deprived, cold and wet, but as I got going I felt terrific, breezing past people right and left, feeling like I could run forever. But once I turned around to come back, I felt like an old man, running slower, breathing harder. 

When I looked at the recording of my run, the elevation view showed that my neighborhood is slightly higher than the rest of the city, so all the way out is downhill and all the way back is uphill, possibly the only thing I hadn’t accounted for when I rented this place. 

Day 7 - Dia Internacional de la Mujer

Much of the city shut down today to accommodate marches and demonstrations in support of International Women’s Day. “International” in the sense that it’s a huge deal in almost every country, but not in the U.S. because in our country women already have all the rights they could possibly want.

In a time-honored tradition of liberal politics worldwide, the two main women’s rights organizations in Barcelona couldn’t agree on a common platform so there were two large marches, each starting and ending in different places, and concluding with fiery speeches by women’s advocates promoting slightly different messages. Lucky for me, the more inclusive group started its march much closer to my apartment. Along the way there were signs, songs and speakers advocating not only for women’s rights, but also for Palestine,  affordable housing and trans rights, and against racism, colonialism, capitalism and war in general. I guess they figured since we were all there anyway, why not cover all the main topics.

But almost as important as racism, sexism and war, the sun reappeared for the first time in almost a week. The difference in terms of how the city feels is, both literally and figuratively, like night and day.

Here’s what happened yesterday on my street. One observation is that this person will probably never park their motorbike illegally again. Another is that this same thing happens right here every single afternoon, so why people keep parking here during rush hour is kind of a mystery.

Day 5

There is nothing quite so great as Barcelona in the springtime.

In every year but this one, that is. After many years of extreme drought, a large storm system has parked itself over most of Spain and except for the day I arrived, it has been cold, windy and rainy every day, all day and night. Depending on which weather app you trust, it is predicted to continue like this either every day for the foreseeable future or almost every day for the foreseeable future. And apparently because the storm started out really windy in Northern Africa and stirred up a bunch of dust, the rain falling here is actually dirty rain. 

But no me importa. The big idea I had for this trip was to volunteer at a nonprofit and I hooked up with Bayt al-Thaqafa. Its primary mission is to empower Muslim women, but they also serve a wider population and on Wednesdays and Fridays I’m teaching Spanish to a group of what turns out to be mostly Algerians. 

I guarantee that all of the questions and doubts you may have about this are questions and doubts I also had, but it is turning out to be a fantastic experience. The staff, teachers and students are all incredibly friendly and welcoming. I’ve met some terrific people, and the students are really appreciative. So, “you go,” me. The classes normally have around 20 students, but Ramadan is this week and next, so we only have 10-12. It should pick up later in the month.

One of the other volunteers lamented that his English is terrible and he wished he had an opportunity to improve it, so he and I are meeting after each class to practice English conversation. See, world? Not all Americans suck!

Day 1

De andar por casa is a phrase in Spanish that literally means “for walking around the house,” but it’s used to describe anything that technically fits the bill but only barely. Like “phoning it in” in English.

My apartment is de andar por casa. It’s technically an apartment, and just as the description says, it has two bedrooms, an office and an equipped kitchen, but . . . I don’t know . . . take for example the stove exhaust fan, which isn’t plugged in and even if it were, it would just move the air from the stove to 3 feet above the stove and blow it all over the room from a slightly higher point.

Despite being cheap and curmudgeonly, I decided that if I’m going to be here for two months and I can spend $75 and make this place slightly homier, it’s worth it.

Before

After

We shall never speak of this again.

On the way to the store, I noticed police all over the place closing the streets. They were immediately followed by many marching bands and people on horses throwing candy to the people watching. Turns out it’s the festival for Saint Medir, a guy who told the Romans, while planting beans, that the local bishop had just passed by, which was true. Nonetheless, the Romans killed him and then the beans grew really fast, thus justifying his sainthood. Like most religion-based stories about things that happened many hundreds of years ago, this one sounds totally reasonable.

I thought it was all kind of fun but this guy was unimpressed.

The Big One

Sitting on an overstuffed couch in a quiet, private airport lounge sipping a glass of cabernet (thank you CapitalOne!), alternating between thinking that what I am about to do is either brilliant or dumb, I am certain of one thing, and that is that my return ticket is dated two months from now and I will enjoy not being bombarded (oops, sorry Iran, Venezuela and boats in the Caribbean) by US news. Sure, Spain has its share of floods, train crashes and neo-Nazi uprisings, but we have them beat by a mile (or to be culturally sensitive, by a kilometer).

After checking a 35-pound suitcase (who knew 2 extra t-shirts and a pair of shoes would weigh so much?), I’m heading out for  . . .  I’m not exactly sure what. Aspirationally, while basing myself in Barcelona I have plans to visit friends in Germany, Copenhagen, Sevilla and maybe England, your guess is as good as mine about where and how this will all go. But no time to dwell on that because . . .

. . . now on the plane I’m listening intently to the two guys sitting next to me, both tech entrepreneurs who have just met and are explaining their amazing businesses to each other, including doing software demos on their phones. This requires the use of a lot of words, like “platform agnostic,” “5G integration,” “supply chain,” and many phrases that, combined with the ample supplies on the beverage cart that keeps coming by, ensure that I won’t have any problem sleeping on the plane. We’re only 33 miles from Washington and they’re already putting me to sleep. Next stop, Barcelona and whatever happens after that.