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Cackling youths and bindles of contraband

For the Little Pleasures of Life!

B R

B R

— 4 min read

So let’s start off with the most heavily touristed part of the most heavily touristed city in the world: La Ramblas.

A monument in Plaça de Catalunya in the rough shape of the city, honoring Francesc Macià i Llussà - one of the many in the long line of leaders that tried and failed to gain independence for the region.

We are staying in the outskirts; in what was the independent village of Sarrià until it joined Barcelona proper in the 1920s. But the exceptionally good subway system dropped me in the Plaça de Catalunya in about 20 minutes.

I grabbed a quick pastry and coffee at one of the seemingly dozen bakeries within two blocks of the hotel. This, and the evening meal, are opportunities for neighbors to meet and chat before heading out to work or returning home, sipping on espressos or light alcoholic drinks. The seating is almost all situated outside, which means the chance of bumping into someone you know is substantially improved. I’ve only really experienced this kind of thing in Seattle during a weekly farmers market and I wish we had more venues or customs that provided it.

I’m usually a night owl, but a combination of jet lag and a desire to avoid most of the crowds resulted in getting there around 10am. It was still inhabited almost entirely by tourists.

Knock off luxury brands being hocked by illegal street vendors. The sheets are tied on four corners, so the merchants can pull up the whole load into a bindle and rapidly escape the occasional interest of the local law enforcement.

It’s a beautiful wide boulevard with tall mixed use buildings on either side, skinny balconies and fashionable/expensive shops on the ground floor.

I do not remember what this is a monument of but I’m sure it’s important.

The street goes through stages; the top with fountains and a few fixed chairs, then a series of tourist oriented kiosks filled with mostly garbage (The Rambla of Birds)1, an area dominated by flower and seed stalls (The Rambla of Flowers), and finally a series of monuments culminating with a 200ft column dedicated to Christopher Columbus, modeled after Trafalgar Square.

Columbus took a brief sojourn here for like five minutes in 1493 before setting off again to murder, rape, and pillage the indigenous peoples of the West Indies.
The base of the monument tells a very sanitized version of the life and times of Columbus. I think the netting on the statues was a protective measure from the nearby construction, but showing human figures in bondage is a wholly reasonable thing to do here. If you need a pick-me-up, I encourage reading about the suffering of this guy in his later life.

I learned something very quickly about Barcelona - even in October, it is extremely warm, humid, and has consistently terrible air pollution. I usually set a very brisk pace - a combination of Seattle and queer cultural norms - but in subsequent days I forced myself to slow down, take breaks, and drink more water.2

I veered off to have one of the four meals of the day common in Spain - breakfast at the start of the day, a sandwich (bocadillo) at 1100, a big lunch at 1400 (comida), and the light dinner (cena) at like 2100 - at one of the famous market halls of the city, La Boqueria Market.

Per Rick Steves, the stalls toward the front pay more rent and thus tend to charge more. I know his beat is Europe, but I would have liked to have had one of his books for my travels earlier in the year.

The centralization of food distribution is part of an ancient custom, possibly dating as far back as the Roman formation of the city in 10BCE, that seems quite foreign to an American used to a more sizable number of scattered supermarkets (which, of smaller size, are now all over Barcelona as well).

Breaking my own rule, I tried to squeeze in some more sightseeing before heading back home in the nearby old city - the Barri Gòtic - but this post is plenty long enough. I’ll leave you with a goofy shop directly in between these two areas:

The gaggle of cackling 14 year olds goading each other to enter the store aren’t a permanent feature, but really completes the scene.

  1. A long time ago the area was more about selling pets (small birds in particular). I bought some cheap (in quality, not price) sunglasses because of course as a Seattle native it is a cultural requirement to lose 2-3 pairs a year. ↩

  2. The locals are not terribly proud of the taste of the their tap water and, while it isn’t good, I have had far worse (Phoenix, Arizona being particularly notable, especially when they seasonally switch to CAP water). ↩

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