You'll be one of us when the night comes.

So, Barcelona.

There's a song... hold on, I'll post it at the end of this post. I don't know why I told you to hold on... I guess this is what they call "live blogging". The blogosphere is totally lame. Do you realize how many cute cat blogs there are out there? Have you any clue?

What was I talking about?

Oh right, Barcelona.

I think Barcelona, as a city, singlehandedly caused the unraveling of what I call reality. Ever since my trip to this warm Spanish city, I have had trouble connecting the already disparate events of my life. Now I'm on ice floes, jumping from island to island, curious about where I'm going, where I came from and if the ice will hold.

If I look angry in that picture in Barcelona, I wasn't. Not at all. In fact, even though I think the unsewing of the quilted patches of my life is a direct result of the eight hours I spent getting to the country, I found Barcelona to be a gorgeous, if confusing, city.

First of all, I don't speak Spanish, which everyone in Barcelona speaks. I also don't speak (much) French, which was the principal language that Ariane, Caroline and Fabien spoke. So the first night there, we drank these lovely drinks to get the whole situation a bit more lubricated:
It is called a Guarapita (I believe) and it is made from freshly squeezed passionfruit, rum, vodka, and another type of Spanish rum that I never think I heard properly. We drank those and we went from mildly talking and eating snails and calamari and squid and mussels to this:


Ha! See the good times? It was just odd, because they all spoke in French. So a lot of the time I spent in my head, describing the techno music mixing with the old architecture, and the seemingly endless amount of lovely squares hidden in the side streets there. The strange and interesting cultural difference of Barcelona to London is that London insists on planting grass and lovely plants and putting statues in the center, and Barcelona is content to put large slabs of concrete and let people skateboard. Also, there were many dog drinking fountains.

Here is the other interesting thing about Barcelona: Gaudi. The further segmenting of my reality can be blamed totally on the architecture of this man. Randomly strewn throughout the city are his works, like buildings amongst other buildings and park benches with his style of mosaic and then this monstrosity:

The Segrada Familia. Absolutely terrifying and amazing, and it was started in 1884. And it will be under construction forever, I think. It's just... never wanting to be finished. It's better that way, actually, if you ask me, because it's this strange and beautiful work and it stands as a testament to this man who was basically a little bit or a lot insane. That first picture, where I look perturbed (I'm not, by the way) I was in the park that he designed, and it's similarly deranged and beautiful. Let me see if I have a picture to illustrate that.


See that? Bizarre.

The other thing about Barcelona is they put all of their food in lots of butter, or chocolate. This is something I can get behind. Here are churros and chocolate, which was fantastic and went together quite well, if you ask me.



And then here is the best paella I think I will ever have. It's certainly the best paella I have ever had in my young life. There were crayfish, and mussels, and every bite of saffron rice had tiny shrimp. I had two helpings. This was gotten from the restaurant below Fabien's place, and we sat around the table talking (they talked a bit more than I did) and drank delicious red wine and I just wondered if suddenly, like a movie, I would understand french implicitly and then I could join in. I also wondered about other things, and I came to the conclusion that Barcelona is the way it is because it is basically a very international city, a concentration of lost souls, trying to party away their problems, eating collage foods in a city of mad construction projects and chasing pleasure and fruit.



Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just... strange. My last night and day there I spent by myself because Ariane and Caroline got a plane for the day before. I don't really know how that happened, but Fabien and I went out to a couple different bars drinking pretty bad beer that night, and we tried to communicate why we both felt a little bit at a loss for words. Have you ever tried to communicate a loss for words? It doesn't work.

And on that Monday, I just sort of wandered around with my clothes on my back and tried to figure out how to best amuse myself before I spent another day on planes, trains and automobiles. I ate fruit and drank a mango coconut smoothie in an incredible market where people shouted fast Spanish about their various fresh wares. And I went to that park where I took the lizard picture and I just felt completely lost in the world, too small and too insignificant and I tried to find people who were speaking English and failed, so I just sat and looked out at the whole city and wished for companionship. I felt oddly free and happy though, at the same time. So it was a happy loneliness, which is bittersweet. Popsicles were appropriate though, so I bought one of those and a cheese sandwich and eventually made my way home, via a taxi, a train, a subway, an airport van, a plane, another three connecting metros, and one final train. And my feet. You can't forget your feet.

Quite the winding path.

Barcelona is basically just a product of collages - putting things together and hoping it all works. That's why the band below works - they are 26 people and they are called I'm From Barcelona even though they are from Sweden. After a couple of those Guarapitas, me and Fabien sang this song as we walked the avenues and side streets.



I'm glad Ariane invited me. I hope I get to see her one more time before I head back to the states.