Back from Barcelona

It is hard to separate the Barcelona of imagination with the experience of the city itself. There's a myth of Barcelona. This isn't to say that the city is lacking in any way just that the city doesn't suffer from lack of praise. For residents and visitors alike it is a city where ease is the expectation instead of a reward or a short lived pleasure. A place where "cool" sprouts up from the ground like a palm tree and flowers the city; a destination that enables the visitor to feel that they too can revel in the unique aura that towers over the city.

While hip post-communist destinations in eastern Europe abound, they are largely reserved to the summer hordes. Barcelona, for all intents and purposes, is a year round destination. It's unique position nestled between the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees dictate a certain level of coolness through the winter and spring but nowhere near as cold as a dreary March day in London, or a wind swept Krakow. Barcelona is a vibrant city destination where both culture and relative warmth remain at your fingertips. Save for parts of Italy, this combination grants it a unique position known nowhere else in Europe.

Through my few days there, the tourist appeal has been quite evident. Unfortunately this evidence was found not in the monuments and museums but in the sheer number of like minded people traipsing through the city. Whether it be hordes of Scots rollicking through the Barrio Gotica looking for a night of revelry or the masses descending on the Sagrada Familia--the city witnessed was one witnessed by everyone else.

Though Paris trumps in sheer number of visitors, Barcelona is not far behind. I've never been to a place whose visitors are so apart from the city itself--that stick out from the fabric of daily life so much. Personally I attribute this to two factors. First I think it is a reflection on our own ordered and guided lives contrasting so noticeably against the laid back nature of the city and its residents. Secondly, and perhaps more likely, it is a reflection of the things we come to see. In Paris the monuments are generally much older and are more cohesively integrated within the fabric of the city's daily life. The man with the biggest mark on Paris, Baron Haussmann, helped propagate a city of wide boulevards and grand sight lines. Essentially he transformed a hodge podge medieval city in the systematic and sweeping spectacle we all know today. While Barcelona certainly has wide avenues it retains a certain disparateness in its architecture which in turn creates a dissonance between the Barcelona of daily life and the one seen by the visitor. The man with the greatest mark on Barcelona, Antoni Gaudi, had a vast imagination and great skill. Both of these attributes are easily visible to anyone who may happen across his work. Whereas Haussman's mark on Paris was largely reshaping an existing entity into conformity, Gaudi's mark on Barcelona was one of creation. This has spawned huge tourist attractions in quiet areas. For instance, when you visit the Tuilleries in Paris you are still surrounded by the daily life of a major capital. Contrasting this is Gaudi's famous park in Barcelona. Park Guell is so disconnected from the city itself that the only possible visitors are those tourists making a point to see the planned wonderland and take their turn on his undulating benches.

Not until my last day in the city did I feel somewhat apart from the transient and a piece of the tangible. Courtesy of the magnificent sun, I also realized on the last day what had been missing on the previous two days of the trip. Morgane and I had dropped our bag at the train station and set out to find a spot in the sun. We had ostensibly been walking towards a park but belatedly realized our direction was wrong. This turned out to be one of our better "decisions" of the weekend. We found a small bench in a city park that was populated by Iberians instead of visitors and spent the afternoon lazing in the sun.

On our walk to the serendipitous park we were treated to the bizarre sight of an adult marching band of mixed age and sex playing classic Motown hits. Accompanying the band were young girls (8-10 yrs old) learning a pompom routine. The music, the joy everyone seemed to be deriving from the playing and performing, the sun, the park, and the oddity itself all came together in a weird harmony to provide the perfect finale to our Barcelona weekend.