Notes from Barcelona
I'm on vacation, and unfortunately, I have thoughts
This will be brief in an effort to not waste your time, or mine. More regular newsletter in ~two weeks, but here are some extremely broad takeaways from three days in Barcelona.
It’s amazing the founder of Barcelona is a guy called Wilfred the Hairy, a man so throughly covered in body hair, they say he didn’t need armour. It’s bold to be known for your body hair. That’s the kind of brave icon who give middle eastern men like me confidence.
Barcelona needs to really cool it with this whole “Gaudi” thing. You go to one museum and they treat an influential, remarkable architect — Antoni Gaudi — like he’s the first person to consider sitting down in a world of people standing up. His houses are cool! The Sagrada Familia… we have not seen yet, but will! Every day we were in Barcelona the Gaudi fandom ramped up around us. The museum guides spoke of him in hushed tones, and would voice his quotes in a deep, thoughtful register. He was a deep Catholic, who never had any romantic relationships and worried the urban expansion of Barcelona would ruin his summer homes. In his 70s, he was a hermit who was killed by a tram. Share some nuance.
Park Guell, the park where Gaudi lived while he was building it. Special notice goes to Casa Batllo where at the end, they invited us into the Gaudi Cube. As we walked in, Sarah and I joked that it felt like we were entering an escape room and then the walls sealed behind us. All the better to deliver our bodies and souls to the greatest Windows 95 screensaver AI art can devise.
Also, Barcelona’s architecture is so good, everywhere. I wish there was some more room on a city scale to acknowledge a few more modernists, and not just designate one representative for the whole city.
A brick of good, fresh cheese here costs 3 euro. I couldn’t believe it. I said to the cheesemonger, “that would cost us $25 back home.” And he just laughed. Now I have to walk around a Loblaws looking at $12 wedges of mediocre parmesan and try not to openly weep.
I bought a Spanish book about Catalonia in an attempt to try to gain a less outsider-y summary of the regions’ culture and history. It opens with the repeated refrain, there are many Catalonias and Catalans. They are not a monolith. Any yet… here are a few sample quotes:
“Catalans are much noisier than the tourists who visit them.”
“Standards in the way Catalans dress have really fallen in recent years.”
“The Catalans’ individualism explains their creativity, vitality and dynamism, as well as their all-consuming jealousy, misgivings at other people’s successes, and a strong dislike of gregariousness.”
Visiting Spain really makes you think about the question, “wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” And so we have been researching the Canadian border regulations on what we can bring into the country. In case you were wondering, Jamon Iberico is firmly barred from Canadian soil. The CBSA always gets its ham.
And final note, every city I go to, I check out their indie bookstores and then mostly don’t buy anything. They draw me in! And then I am cheap and own too many books already! Special mention goes to Fatbottom Books. I really wanted their t-shirt.
