Jottings From Journeys

Barcelona

Did you know there’s a Chinatown in Barcelona? Friends said it used to be a leaf torn from the past centuries with its dirty, urine-smelling roads, call girls crouching on benches waiting for customers in front of shabby buildings, and even a black or a Moroccan lady hanging from a window, attentive to passers-by.

Yet, the Chinatown in the Gothic quarter that I visited during the nineties was different. The one relic from the past in that same neighborhood was a church with the dilapidated exterior, but a clean and refurbished interior.

It was a beautiful church surrounded by tenderly restored grey stone buildings. As a matter of fact, the color grey seemed to be dominant on all of these cobblestone roads. Such a contrast to the rest of the city!

On those stone buildings with their rough surfaces sticking out of the facades of the edifices, some of the stones were as big as boulders. The winding narrow lane, which the church was situated on, opened to a larger street with a bar-lounge where, I imagine, many Spanish and French poets and thinkers of the past sat to drink their absinthe, beer, or sangria.
All that grey color here had a shine to it even on the pale faces of the residents. On the narrow, crooked lanes, grey was also more accented by the bridge-like overpasses from building to building. Those ancient cobblestone lanes appeared to be subterranean, as if carved out of one long tunnel, with sunlight coming from above the overpasses. It was dark against light, shadow against sunshine, eerie yet with poetry. This melancholic panorama almost seemed to come from an artist’s charcoal rendering.

A few steps later, things changed completely, for the other roads of the Barrio Chino were comparable to the ones in New York City. Here the streets were wider with many buildings stacked against each other, hosting many businesses and shops with colorful signs in Chinese, some also in Spanish and Catalan.

“The ice on the moon is much more abundant than they thought, did you know that? Si Senoras, inside the craters to the north of it,” he said, folding the daily El Pais.

I was surprised that Pepe, the tall, dark, handsome owner of the interiors store, to where I had accompanied our hostess Delia to buy fabric, would suddenly come up with a remark like that, but then they were acquainted with each other. Delia worked on the same street where Pepe’s shop was.

“At the moment, I’m interested in Barcelona but moon may be my next stop,” I tried to say with my broken Spanish, hoping the words didn’t come out crooked to mean something else. Sensing my hesitation, Delia nodded in approval.

“In that case, I’ll tell you about Barcelona,” Pepe said, pulling a bundle of folded fabrics down a shelf to reach to the green and blue damask cloth Delia had requested.

Pepe said that Barcelona was built about 200 years before Christ, believe it or not, by Hamilcar Barca, a general from Carthage who invaded the Romans by passing through the impassible mountains but he failed at the end.

I commented that I remembered from my high school reading that the Romans had invaded Carthage and razed down the city with salt.

Pepe laughed. “Women always like the gossip part of history.”

After he cut the fabric, he handed it over to Delia. “I held it with my fingertips, so I wouldn’t contaminate it for you,” he said in a serious tone.

“Cut it out, Pepe,” Delia replied, her face changing suddenly.

I didn’t say anything because what happened between them seemed private at that moment.

Pepe had to be interested in churches, since all he talked about afterwards were the churches in Barcelona, especially the Gothic Cathedral of Santa Eulalia, the one built as a monument to Columbus. He said another cathedral that was the most enormous but still under construction since the nineteenth century was the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia but he called it la Sagrada in short.

From the tour bus a day before, I remembered seeing the curvy, ornate, and titanic La Sagrada. To me it looked scary and horrendous like a giant towering over its surroundings with its tall spires; it didn’t seem to be the fantastic building everyone raved about. Not that there is anything wrong with La Sagrada but I just prefer small churches. The smaller they are, the cozier they seem.

Listening to Pepe, I had an uneasy feeling. He wasn’t even speaking in Catalan but luckily in Castillian to us; yet he was talking of something else other than the church’s architecture. Probably he wanted to mention the importance of churches to the city. I haven’t read the Bible in Spanish but I believe his speech was interspersed by quotations from it.

“Pepe knows so much about churches,” I commented to Delia once we were outside. “He seems to be so religious.’

“Almost fanatical, but he wasn’t like this always. Pepe has become a dedicated church goer; he never falters. The truth is, rather than a shop attendant, he’s an artist. He works with gouache and is quite famous,” Delia said. Then, she added hesitantly, “He started up with the churches after the illness.”

“He didn’t look sick to me,” I said.

“He has Kaposi’s Sarcoma, Sida (Aids) you know.”

“So awful!”

“Pepe’s gay,” Delia said. “He, unfortunately, thinks the end of the world came for him. So now he’s addicted to religion.”

Barcelona is a lovely city with hills on its sides and the Mediterranean Sea just in front of it. The old city is surrounded by a fortress and is darker and older inside. The modern Barcelona with a happy, peaceful feeling is romantic like a fairytale basking in sunshine.

The daily life I witnessed was prosperous, dynamic, and enchanting, full of contrasts and delightful surprises. Yet, according to our hostess, there had been a lot of bloodshed here in the last century even up to our time due to terrorism.

During the short duration we were there, people seemed to be serene and to be having fun, for there are lots of public parks and outside cafes where one can sit, eat, drink, or just enjoy life watching and petting the stray cats begging for food around the cafes.

Talking of food, I put on several pounds enjoying the immense spread of food on the tables. My favorites were the tapas somewhat like appetizers. In the evenings, you can go to a tapas bar and enjoy your drinks and an unbelievable variety of food.

Some of the evening wanderers top the tapas by going to a restaurant afterwards. No wonder dinnertime never finishes in Spain because people start around six or seven in the evening with tapas and bar hopping, and finish at a restaurant with main courses and deserts, eating late until after midnight.

A kind of sandwich they serve at tapas bars is called a montadito, which can be a slice of French bread with a gourmet topping of ham, tortilla, tunafish, anchovies, etc. The array of montaditos are served together with drinks and just the view of them are more than enough to fill any person.

The tapas bars are meeting places for poets, writers, painters, musicians and artists. That is where the real action is and where the heart of Barcelona really beats.

The most popular multicultural meeting place is Plaza de Catalunya with the well-known El Corte Ingles department store, which reminded me of Macy’s on 34th and Herald’s Square in New York city, except this department store was less shopping oriented and more sociable for its clients.

The most magnificent street equivalent to Park or Fifth Avenues is the (spelling?) Passeig de Gracia. On this street, several designers, such as Vincon and Cartier, as well The Majestic Hotel are situated.

Since I refused to go to the bullring, deflating some of my Spanish friends’ egos, the Picasso Museum was refused to me. They politely said the Museum was very close to the Monumental Bullring and it wouldn’t be wise to go to one and leave the other.

Instead they took me on tour to Gothic Quarter, the one where the Barrio Chino was, which I talked of earlier. They even managed to get a Spaniard in costume with a scary base voice to guide us through the medieval streets of grey cobblestones, talking of true ghosts and old legends that remained to haunt the imagination and folklore surrounding Barcelona. The Spanish are a very demonstrative sort.

When we travel, we find out that the world is different. We can also travel without moving from where we are, by reading. Reading is not just for passing time but it is also for breaking the iron bars of thought and dogma the society has enforced upon us. So when I travel I look for bookstores and libraries to get the feel of the intellectual capacity of the town I’m in.

From that point of view, Barcelona really impressed me. Aside from being an artist’s city, I also found Barcelona to be a reader’s city.

A book store named Laie had to be the haven or rather a heaven for a book lover, because compared to its small size, it had everything in it that would make a person not want to leave it. In Laie, everyday, they had an event, a jazz or a musical performance, a cultural meeting, a lecture, a debate. The store even had a cafe upstairs, and of course, it had quite a few books.

So did the others. Once I came across a small bookstore that sold all English books. Later I found out that there were many large or small bookstores that catered to the English speaking readers.

There were larger bookstores also. One was borne from a church built in the seventeenth century and it had books in several languages. I think its name started with Libreria.

Each bookstore had a theme. Where one would be well stocked with travel and adventure books, another would have all the current titles, yet another would have lots of historical books on its shelves.

Yet, all the stores had one thing in common. They carried art books or books about Barcelona and how this city fits into the art world.

Barcelona had been a delight.