Saturday, June 25, 2005

Report from Barcelona

Just returned from a pleasant four-day vacation in Barcelona. The Mediterranean city is certainly a hopping place, and attracts a generous quota of college students, eccentrics, grifters, misfits and weirdos. Most of this folly is displayed daily on La Rambla, a major promenade that extends from Placa de Catalunya to la Mirrador de Colon near the harbor.

La Rambla offers a fair share of sidewalk cafes, yet without the grimy beggars one encounters in Mexico. Five years ago, when we stayed in Veracruz, our base was the stylish Hotel Imperial, built on the Zocalo in 1796.

Sitting in the sidewalk cafe of the Hotel Imperial each evening was like being in Fellini’s La Dolca Vita. Within 20 minutes, an assortment of 40 vendors: beggars, panhandlers, cripples and people with appalling deformities, paraded by our table. The vendors were predictable, selling cigars, hammocks, T-shirts, pure vanilla. pencils, straw sombreros. Yet perhaps the most unusual spectacle was the women dressed as nurses, offering blood pressure tests for a modest price. Quite amusing. Of course the circus freak candidates also paid us a visit: the midget shoeshine boy, the blind accordionist, though the woman with the disfigured arm really took the prize. The senora was so repulsive all she had to do was appear before each cafe table, and one quickly paid her to scram. Yet the toothless woman selling gum was also quite memorable.

Between La Rambla and the edge of Ciutat Vella (Old Town) is the Arabic quarter, with row after row of narrow streets of apartments with long-shuttered doors and wrought-iron balconies used to escape the hot-house atmosphere of the tiny, crowded rooms. These scenes resemble a slightly improved version of dilapidated Cairo. All along this area are cheap internet cafes, operated by young men in Punjab suits from Pakistan. Apparently, the Pakis who did not land in the Middle East have made their way to the Iberian Peninsula.

We stayed in a modest two-star hotel on the other side of the Arabic quarter. Early every morning, I walked the streets just to absorb the multicultural flavor of the port city. On the last morning of our stay, I ventured back into the Arab quarter because it reminded me of Bahrain and the Middle East. On the outskirts of the neighborhood, I discovered a bar that had never bothered to close after a long night of patronage. It was barely 7 a.m. and at least a half-dozen men were perched on barstools, grasping some aqua vitae or other equally beneficial spirits; hardcore alcoholics, each and every one. I thought I heard an older man brag that he had “fought in a major world whore.”

Across from the bar on the side of a brick building, there was a giant sprayed painted figure of a nude male pig with a clenched fist and an erect appendage, spewing some half-Spanish, half-Catalunyan diatribe. The artist, however the work managed to be rendered across the better part of a two-story building, was obviously not a Muslim.