Estoy en Barcelona 1
The apartment staff people had us grab a cab at 9:30AM for a 12:30 flight. Our assumption was that since it was an international flight from Frankfurt to Madrid (where we would change planes for Barcelona) we would have to be there two hours ahead. (In retrospect, I wonder if that’s true? Maybe intra-Europe isn’t considered international. We’ll have to check before we go back.) Anyhow, they said the cab ride to the airport was normally about 20 minutes, but in the morning there could always be problems, so we left early. We were there in 15 minutes.
So there we were at the airport with a lot of time to kill. For a few minutes, though, we weren’t sure that time was all that might be killed. While I checked us in, Sylv, who was sitting in a double row of seats in the middle of the terminal, suddenly found herself surrounded by three guys with machine guns. Someone had walked off and left a bag on a seat behind her. The security guys (who ride around the terminal on silly little bicycles) were very serious. They told her to move, now, which she was more than eager to do. We found a spot where we could be behind a sturdy planter if something did go off, but where we could also watch the drama unfold. A few minutes later, the guy came back; he’d apparently just gone to the bathroom or whatever and left his pack there. But the cops were seconds from calling in the bomb squad.
The security was pretty much like the U.S. I got frisked because my belt buckle triggered the beeper. Sylv lost a can of hair stuff because it was over 100 ml or whatever.
The flight on Iberia from Madrid left 15 minutes late and as we lifted off something unsecured in the galley up front crashed and some stuff came rolling down the aisle. Sylv said that when she was flying for PanAm the stewardess would have been grounded for that or worse. Here no one seemed upset.
Food and drink was available for sale, including water. No free lunch here. We passed. There was also less space from the back of my seat to back of the seat in front of me than the distance between my butt and my knees and the seating was three across, so I couldn’t put my knees on either side. High density seating indeed. Not our all-time most comfortable flight!
When we got into Madrid we had to race through the terminal with our bags to find our onward flight. No Iberia person met our flight to tell us where to go, even though the flight was late and predictably many people might have the same problem, nor did we ever find an arrivals and departures display board. I asked an officious little sh** at a desk if he could tell us where to go, but he said he was too busy. We ended up trading profanities. I thought mine were more creative than his, but I don’t think I enhanced the image of the U.S. as a kinder, gentler nation.
Eventually I did find a friendly face and he did direct us to our flight, about a half-mile down the terminal. We were pretty sweaty by the time we got aboard, where we found a woman sitting in Sylv’s window seat who was not at all willing to give it up. Sylv decided that she was going to insist, given the woman’s attitude. We’d booked window and aisle seats, so next she tried to take my aisle seat and leave me the middle. She gave up when I stuck the ticket stubs in her face and sat stonily until I suggested she take an unoccupied aisle seat a couple of rows ahead, which she did with alacrity. Good riddance. Not a good start to our trip.
Travel is the best geography lesson. I don’t think that if I’d been asked to draw a map of Europe and describe the route from Frankfurt to Madrid I would have been very accurate. We crossed the Swiss Alps over Zurich and Geneva, then passed Toulouse (which I don’t think I would have placed that far inland) and crossed the Pyrenees. Coming into Madrid (which is right in the center of Spain and the square-shaped Iberian peninsula) the landscape looked like the southwestern U.S. – purple mesas, brownish plains. It looked arid, except along the streams where trees grew and on farms where the land had been irrigated. Madrid itself we only saw from the airport, of course, and downtown seemed to consist of four new 60-story modern skyscrapers, one of which had a bottle opener top reminiscent of Shanghai’s new World Finance Center.
It was too cloudy to see much when we were flying over to Barcelona, which is a seacoast city on the Mediterranean in Catalonia, the northeast corner of Spain, just below the Pyrenees and the French border.
(We did break down and buy something to eat on the flight. I had a cheese sandwich, a packet of very tasty olives and a beer; Sylv had a veggie sandwich and a bottle of juice. Total tab: 20 Euros, about $30. I guess I won’t be as annoyed anymore with American Airlines selling hot sandwiches for $5 – that seems like a bargain now.)
Samanta and Jesus were both still working (they usually work ’til 7PM or later, like Jill and Dave and maybe most young couples these days), so her parents Marie Carmen and Clemente came to pick us up. Neither speaks English and we don’t speak Spanish, but we discovered that we all spoke a little French — they better than us, but ours was good enough to be understood and got better as we used it. For the next couple of days, Thursday evening with the two of them and Friday with Clemente alone, we spoke this incredible mélange of French, Italian and Spanish. If we couldn’t think of a word in one language, we tried another, and it usually worked just fine. (My problem was that because I’ve been studying Chinese, Mandarin words very often came to me first and I’d have to double-translate in my mind to get back in the conversation.) What an amazing experience for an essentially monolingual American. Fifty years ago my Columbia college roommate Jordan (Giordano Pietro) Bonfante spent a few weeks in Spain. Spanish being the only Romance language he hadn’t mastered (his father was chair professor of linguistics at Princeton), he said he got by by putting “s’s” on his Italian. At the time I didn’t know whether he was kidding or not. Now I find that that was probably very close to what he did do. In fact, our friend and hostess Samanta, who’s studying Italian now, says that she used to add an “i” (an e-sound) to her Spanish to be understood in Italy.
Of course the native language here in Catalunya isn’t Spanish at all; it’s Catalan. That’s the language spoken in the streets here, the language of local newspapers, the language of signage in the stores, even in the airport. Many Catalonians don’t think of themselves as “Spanish”; they perceive themselves as quite different from the majority Castilian people. Catalonia has not only its own language and culture and customs; it has a separate history. Catalonia was a self-ruled independent power that had colonies of its own elsewhere in the Mediterranean as late as the 14th century. Catalan is still spoken in places like Sardinia. During Phillip V’s campaign against the French, Catalunya sided with the Duke of Aragon.
The first thing that struck me about Barcelona as the Judezes drove us through the city was that all the streets were tree-lined. How pleasant and civilized. Most of the buildings seemed to be imposing old stone structures, elaborately decorated, and all the windows seemed to have balconies, many with plantings. I asked Clemente, Samanta’s father, if the city had been bombed during the war. “Only by the criminal Franco,” he responded bitterly. He was referring of course not to WWII but rather to the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona was a stronghold of the Republicans and Generalissimo Franco (apparently a.k.a. in these parts as “the criminal”) led the Fascist forces, which unfortunately prevailed. I hadn’t realized that Spain remained under Franco’s rule until well after the WWII. The Spanish Civil War lasted from 1936 to 1939 and his government was in power until he died in 1975. Spain didn’t officially become a republic until 1978 when the constitution was signed. (The last of the original framers of the constitution died on Sunday while we were here, as we learned when we came upon a bank of TV cameras set up in front of some government building where an official was making a statement.)
The Judezes took us to the DDB Needham offices in the heart of the city. Sam is head of account planning, a job I would have loved to do had it existed when I was in “the real world” — though maybe not if I had to work the hours she works. She’s still in meetings when we arrive, so her parents take us off on a walking tour of that part of Barcelona. Again, the streets are tree-lined and the buildings are beautiful. There’s a very comfortable, people-friendly feel to the city. We wander out to a main avenue, very wide, with green space islands down the middle, where we see two amazing buildings. Constructed around the beginning of the last century, they are the fantastic designs of Antoni Gaudi, Barcelona’s most famous architect. Check out this site to see some of the buildings and the park we saw:
http://www.greatbuildings.com/architects/Antonio_Gaudi.html
The city is spectacularly lit up for Christmas, the weather is mild, the stores are open late and the streets are full of happy people. What a lucky time for us to be here.
Finally Jesus arrives, Sam gets sprung from her meetings and we head out to the charming village where they live, called Sant Cugat. (I didn’t know there was a Saint Cugat; the only time I’d ever heard the name was a Latin bandleader in the 1950’s, Xavier Cugat, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a saint!)
Sant Cugat is hilly with cobbled streets, lots of trendy little stores, markets and cafes, street musicians galore and a very large monastery that overlooks the town. It’s only a short walk to the train station for Sam and a short train ride into downtown Barca. The DDB Needham office is just around the corner from the terminal. Perfect situation. (Jesus has to drive to work because the Nestle HQ is a little bit out in the country.)
Sam and Jesus prepared dinner in the apartment Thursday night, for which we were grateful both because it was delicious and because we were pretty much whacked. I’m not sure we needed the good Catalonian wine they served to help us sleep, but it didn’t hurt.