I am starting to close the dozen or so windows I have open on my phone about Barcelona. I am getting rid of the metro tickets.
But, today, I am still so psyched about my trip to Barcelona. I sit at the piano and think of my sister playing Arabesque at a bookstore during the last night of a street festival. I pop a cd of Emilie, the amazing Georgian we found in the metro tunnels. He was playing classical guitar and it resonated up and down the stairs on either side of the space he was occupying. We almost stopped but didn’t. Then we came back. His music, burned onto a DVD-R plays like a dream and I feel like I’ve just popped in a record. I remember the chocolate sculpture made to represent La Sagrada Familia. I am watching a short report and refreshing what I learned from my visit there.
Ahhhhhh.
But, mostly, I am so grateful I followed my 17-year-old dream and figured out what it was that I loved about Barcelona. I thought I wanted to be a Latin pop star. Nowadays, I am really grateful that I learned to improve my Spanish by singing lyrics of Spanish songs. Like Laura Pausini, La Oreja de Van Gogh.
I don’t need to be a Latin pop star. I found what I loved about the city. They don’t even have any signs in Spanish. The classical Spanish guitarist in the metro is an anomaly. I never heard anyone else play like that in the area. I met so many more Spaniards from other areas, but a few Catalan were thrown in and many, many Latin Americans were in the area. There was other diversity, too, in our taxi drivers and the man who drove our rickshaw. Yet, all the signs were in Catalan. It sort of blew my mind. And I went to a congregation all in Spanish. It was amazing. I just looove Barcelona even though I speak no Catalan. I loved meeting a Basque man and his daughter at the bookstore that first night. I loved the salsa dancing in the street. The percussion groups parading through the streets. I loved the Greek food from an actual Greek man. Interestingly, or maybe not, two of the Catalan people I met idealize New York City from a stay they had had, or the other, just because it’s like the city and the neighborhoods that are right here at home. In other words, it is not an inappropriate comparison to Barcelona itself.
I was impressed by the young people of Barcelona. I believe that they are doing the best they know how. But, there are many, too, that don’t have an ambition past high school. I found that curious. And, in a full circle moment, I wondered aloud at a group meeting of my global church’s local congregation, why my 17-year-old dream had brought me here. I had wanted to be a Latin pop star, and I did everything that I knew how to do to be one from that age until about 35. And what was it? That reason above all reasons that drew me in and wouldn’t let me go (as shown through an a capella performing group I joined with full dance moves, advanced level Spanish classes at my University, and unending style research and fashion discoveries, especially with a global flair)?
My self knew then that I could understand how proud the Catalan are of their language and that that intersection of not knowing their place as a part of Spain was something I felt to my core. And I feel it now. The Spanish spoken there was a humble Spanish. Spoken by Indians, Africans and by native Spanish-speakers, yet humbled by their circumstances and leaving Venezuela in droves. In other words, it was like my Spanish. I sang with gusto in that small congregation the Sunday after arriving. I felt I sang with the angels. It was the people themselves.
