A Thousand Cups of Tea

There’s a café/bar right across the street from where we’re staying, and it’s sort of been our home base and meetup point. For those of you just joining us, The Low Lows are camped in Barcelona, living on dozens of the small Spanish espresso drink that is served in a shot glass and called “un cortado” (or in Ingles, a “shorty”). Today I had the local neighborhood’s sausage in a small French bread sandwich. (The girls who have been acting as our guides in Barcelona think the word “sandwich” is kind of stupid. They were very polite about it, but they said they failed the see what “sand” and “witches” had to do with anything.) These small meat sandwiches, or “bocadillos,” are the staple of lunches served in all of the little bar/cafés around here, and they are really excellent.

Another interesting thing is that tapas, that sort of bougie repast favored by people who have traveled in this part of the world, are as common as bowls of bar peanuts in the US. I had come to accept that tapas is the sort of thing that people with rich parents come back from their summer in Europe raving about while treating everyone who says “Did you say ‘topless’?” with a kind of indulgent contempt. I don’t know about you, but I have secretly always kind of hitched up my trousers and thought “Here we go again” whenever anyone in Athens started banging on about how “Well, yeah, when I was in [insert European country here] watching [insert global soccer competition here], we would all meet at this one bar and have these fabulous bowls of [almonds, olives, local cheese, whatever] and it was WUUUUUUNNNNDERFULLLLLL. You can’t get anything like that here.” Then, gradually, stuff “like that” started to be served “here,” and it was always so exorbitantly priced that only someone who could afford to go to [european country] to watch [global soccer game] could think of it as a reasonably priced snack.

THE FUNNY THING IS that over here, it’s the most working class thing you could imagine. You walk into the Bar Cuntis, there’s an old retired guy with three days of beard and a little white dog who you’d SWEAR was half piglet. He’s smoking a cigar that costs less than two euros and drinking the local beer, and he’s got a dish of tapas in front of him, merrily spitting olive seeds into the potted plants while watching Barcelona Futbol Club on the massive TV at one end of the bar. This is not your pretentious college roommate’s tapas fan. This is a guy on a government pension having a dish of something salty with his beer and enjoying the simple life. I am now going to imagine all of those tapas loving yuppies in stained white short-sleeved shirts leading around pudgy little pensioner dogs whenever they start moaning about the “amaaazing taahhhpas” they nibbled when they were “on the continent.”

Other than that, Barcelona has been a little of a mixed bag. We went to La Ramblas and found it to be unbearably touristy. I mean, totally unbearably. There were tons of shops that satisfied no need in our lives- clothes that we not only would never wear, but could never afford in a hundred years. Plus, lots of mimes. This is always a bad thing. (Unless you’re toting a shotgun, then it’s what the US Military calls a “target rich environment.”)

We did a rapid about-face, and headed for the ocean, then followed the shoreline down to the place where there is a huge, and I mean HUGE statue of Christopher Columbus. He’s pointing roughly west, and saying “go that way until you hit India, then stop.” Thanks, CC.

Wandering through the many neighborhoods of Barcelona has been interesting. I think that my first impression of the Old Arabic section of town gave me the idea that it was less commercialized than it is. The huge plaza outside the giant Cathedral de Barcelona is open and sunny, but there were… mimes. Ugh. We sat down at a cafe on the edge of the Plaza and watched people for a while. We had another round of cortados, but there was the tacit assumption that we were tourists, and this led to a definite taint of rudeness to our transactions with the staff. We decided that a second round of coffees wasn’t worth putting up with it.

Many of the alleys of Barcelona are narrow and tall- as many as eight or nine stories of apartments above alleys that are only slightly wider than a car width. During the Spanish Civil War, battles between the Republicans and the Fascists raged up and down these alleys. I stood in one yesterday and imagined not only trying to fight my way up the alley against someone who was determined to shoot me, but also what it would be like to fire a .303 Enfield or 7mm Mauser in a alley like that, all stone and concrete walls and cobblestone streets…. all I could think was SCARY and LOUD.

The cobblestones were famously torn up from the street and used to build the barricades when the CNT captured the Barcelona Telephone exchange. I wonder how many of those cobblestones were returned to their use as paving stones afterwards. How many of the stones I walked on today were once barricades?

Now, mostly they serve to convey people to and from high-priced shops selling tight pants for men who ride scooters to dance clubs. I find this a little depressing.