Unnecessary Personal Update #3: I'm Almost Out of Peanut Butter

Before we came to Barcelona, the counselors and instructors showed us a graph. A long, curvy line showed us the ups and downs we could expect while spending almost a year studying abroad. The excitement of arrival, the frustration of having to shop, get around, and find an apartment in another language and culture, the thrill of actually accomplishing those tasks, the unavoidable homesickness, etc. I glanced at it at the time but shuffled it back into the ream of documents we'd been given. 'Don't tell me how I'll feel,' I probably thought, 'I'll tell you, when it happens.' And through all the good times I've had here in Barcelona, I haven't thought much about that graph.

But during the not-so-good times, the days when the entire city seemed to be an implacable force motivated only to bedevil me... I thought about that graph. The damned prophet that had seen all of it coming. Yes, there have been ups and downs this year. But even in the midst of my own peevishness I knew what a graph like that really meant: the city is always the same; YOU'RE what changes. "... there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." I certainly can't argue against the Bard and a line graph.

Among the mountains and valleys (or perhaps, the hills and ditches), I've come back to my familiar refrain: what have I learned? I think the most important thing I've learned is that I love to travel and I don't like just living somewhere. Barcelona's got a lot to offer, but for the past year it's been the place where I do grocery shopping, where I have class and homework, where I have bills to pay. It's been many other things, but that laundry list (god, I forgot laundry!) is wrapped up in it somewhere, too. The other places- Paris, Vienna, Copenhagen, many others- were fun. They were 'Best of' albums. New food, new languages, new old buildings- constant stimulation. I love that stuff. I'm a junkie. But when I stepped off the plane back in Barcelona I wasn't coming home to a 'Best of'. It may not be fair to Barcelona, but I've studied the history of Catalunya- trust me, nothing is.

This particular entry is probably a little one-sided, and I hope it's obvious that I've had an incredible, life-altering time here that I wouldn't trade away. I don't think I'll really know how much it's all meant to me for another year or two- that's the way it happened with Madrid, anyway. But right now, in this moment, what does all of this mean? It means that with only a few more days until I'm back home, I'm excited. My own personal line graph is taking a decidedly upward turn. I don't know if that was predicted in the first graph, and I don't care. It's time to go.

Besides, I'm almost out of peanut butter.

Pastis

The entrance was a small window and a door lit by a string of lights. I walked in and waited a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting; it was darker in the bar than it had been out in the street. A bar eventually resolved around me but it took me a moment to recognize it as such. It was a room not much bigger than the living room of my apartment, which also wasn’t spacious by any standard. There were two tables with three chairs each, and a short row of stools along the bar. I sat down on one of them and waited for the bartender, a fat man wearing a red sweater, to notice me.

The bartender appeared to be as much a part of the décor as anything else. The limited wall space wasn’t dominated by a giant mirror or row after row of bottles with colorful labels and syrupy liquids. Instead the space was packed with signs, notes, and comics written in French, Spanish, German, a few in English. More than a few of them were handmade, written in careless handwriting. There were also portraits- some photos, some hand-drawn based on the photos- of French singers. I recognized Edith Piaf, but none of the others. About a hundred paper cranes of various sizes hung inexplicably from the ceiling. They seemed to be flocking around the bar’s centerpiece, which also hung from the ceiling: a life-size dark figure of a woman done in papier-mache. It could have been a witch on a broomstick, I wasn’t sure. What was certain was that her legs spread out behind her and her dress hung loosely and indecently from them. It was bizarre and reckless. It fit in perfectly.

I ordered glass of wine. When I paid with a twenty euro note he flung it back to me, asking if I had anything smaller. When I told him it was all I had he grumbled, picked up the bill, and shuffled toward the back to make change. I couldn’t help but feel that I’d already failed some kind of test. I’d lived in the city for a year, more than a tourist but less than a local and in a lot of ways I still had no idea where I fit in. This place was small, meant only for specific clientele. Somehow I’d just proven that I wasn’t in the club.

I sipped my wine and paged through a newspaper sitting on the bar. There was a guitarist setting up on a small area that had apparently been designated as a stage. The bar had seating for fewer than a dozen people, yet valuable space had been given up as a stage. I listened to the guitarist tune and practice while I scanned articles in Catalan and Castellano and looked around from time to time. There was another patron in the bar, a man seated at one of the tables. He was silent and didn’t move much. A glance at a time, I took in his ratty gray-black hair and his stained and distressed clothing. I assumed he was one of the city’s many homeless who’d begged enough money for some wine or a beer and was killing time in the bar until it closed. Me, the bartender, the guitarist, and the other silent patron were the only people in the bar for a while.

And then a few people started trickling in. Some were friends of the guitarist and they gathered around him. Some just sat as I did, quietly with their drinks in front of them. The dim light and confined atmosphere had cast a sort of quieting, intimate spell, which was broken when a group of three girls burst in, looked around the tiny bar, and began giggling to themselves. They sat at the other open table and began speaking loudly. I felt a familiar embarrassment as I listened to them squawk in American English. The bartender had reluctantly tottered over to them and was shaking his head, informing them that he didn’t have whatever drink they were ordering. Eventually he brought them a few bottles of beer and went back behind the bar, leaned against the rail and tucked his chin into his chest with his eyes closed.

The guitarist was beginning in earnest now and I listened to him sing in lilting, lyrical Spanish. Spanish poetry is a lot like Spanish food: it’s composed of simple parts and on the surface it seems uncomplicated. But if you sit down and take it in, really pay attention to it, it can be sublime. In the middle of the second song my friends entered. The stood quietly in the back while he finished and only then did we greet each other, exchanging kisses on both cheeks and speaking in Spanish. My friends ordered and sat down quietly. We whispered briefly to one another if a line or a word struck us. The other American girls had long since finished their beers and left, and I could tell the bartender noted the difference between the two kinds of Americans he had seen so far tonight. Perhaps it was my imagination, or the fact that the glasses of wine I’d had so far at Bar Pastis were not the first of the night, but the bartender looked my way for a moment and seemed to give me a nod. I still wasn’t part of the club, but because of my friends I had been forgiven.

We drank and whispered and listened to music. When the guitarist began one of his last songs of the night the quiet man with matted hair and dirty clothes started singing with him. He stood up and joined him on the stage, and the two sung beautifully together. They sung about the flat plains, open sky, and the deep red setting sun of La Mancha, but they could have been singing about the plains of my own home. Afterward the guitarist thanked him and the man sat back down.

At the end of the night I was drunk and happy, and the end of the Rambla didn’t seem quite as sad as it had when I’d arrived. It didn’t even seem as ugly. I suddenly noticed the stretch of water extending from the port. I looked up at Christopher Columbus atop his ornate totem as he pointed far out into the sea, toward the horizon. The Rambla itself stretched upward into the city, devoid of tourists and human statues. It almost seemed like the wide, tree-lined avenue it might have been many years ago.

The Old and the New

With only a little more than a handful of weeks left in Barcelona, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fine line I’ll approach and cross come June. I’ll be leaving someplace ‘different’ and going home, but in many ways I’ll be leaving a home to go someplace ‘different’- different than I remember it, different than it used to be, different than I used to be. I don’t know how many things have changed in that town that never seems to change, but I know they have. I also have no idea how much I’ve changed, and I probably won’t know until much later after I return. Until then I’m here in Barcelona, thinking about the old and the new.

Which was probably the best part of having Rick and Joy visit all last week: exploring a place I’ve only just gotten to know with two people I’ve known forever. It was a non-stop week that was part show-and-tell, part exploration and re-exploration, and part marathon. Much of the week seemed so natural that sometimes I forgot we were in Spain at all, and others I forgot that Rick and Joy haven’t been here the whole time. “Just waiting for the metro in Plaza España with Rick and Joy, just another Wednesday afternoon.” We saw so many impressive, memorable, and stupefyingly beautiful things that it will take a few weeks to sort through everything, to prove that it really all happened. Fresh off the plane at nine in the morning, we took to the streets and started seeing Barcelona. We wandered from site to site, cathedral to cathedral, and café to café con leche. By the end of the day we couldn’t believe how much we’d seen, and by the end of the week we flat-out refused to believe it.

“No, that wasn’t the first day, it couldn’t have been. Really? Well then what did we do Wednesday? Oh yeah…”

My favorite times, as usual, were the meals. We ate well, and we ate often. Three people eating a three-course menu each can cover a lot of culinary ground. Sometimes we ate new things (rabbit, pan de coca, patatas bravas), but many times we just ate sometime we already knew done exceptionally well (roasted pork leg, stew, tuna). There was satisfaction, and there was happiness, but at the end of the meal, as we all sat back in that wine-purple haze, there was something else for me: affirmation. I’ve been talking to my friends about Spain for a long time, but now I could watch people I know and whose opinions I trust lean back and say, “Yes, this is good.” I knew it all along, but it’s still good to hear someone else say it.

When Did That Happen?

7:56, just before the alarm. I set down the clock and rolled back over to look at the ceiling and wake up for next four minutes. A few morning sounds filtered in through my window, which opened up into the interior of the building. I listened to the indistinguishable morning conversations of my neighbors, birdsong from the cages hanging in other windows, and echoes of the noise from the street. It was relatively quiet, but I knew that soon the sounds of jackhammers and construction would invade through the walls. When I’d first moved in I would bolt upright in bed at the sound of it, cursing to myself and suggesting that the construction workers’ mothers were promiscuous and, perhaps, canine. Lately, though, I was already awake and getting ready by the time the work started. Today was no different; the first groans of construction were beginning as I got out of bed.

I awoke fully and dressed. I looked briefly in the mirror and, not for the first time, failed to recognize myself. I had lost weight; my own jawline was a stranger to me. I hadn’t gotten a haircut since arriving in Barcelona, and now my hair was longer than it had been in years. I patted it down with my hand and combed it forward with my fingers. It would come down over my eyes soon. After that I wouldn’t even see myself in the mirror, let alone have any idea who was looking back. I shrugged and the mop-headed mirror-me shrugged back.

My bag was already packed for the gym so I grabbed it and headed out the door. The morning was still cool from the night before but already, early in February, the sun was getting stronger and I knew it would be another warm, clear day by the afternoon. I walked the handful of blocks to the gym, joining the joggers and the dog walkers and the bent-forward elderly people that always seemed to be shuffling down the streets and in and out of the bakeries. The bakeries were the only businesses open at this hour, their well-lit display windows filled with almost fetishized works of art in the form of cakes, pastries, and breads. Look but don’t touch, I reminded myself. I had to remind myself again on the way home. Maybe I’d stop in for a coffee and a pastry this weekend.

I stopped at the small convenient store across the street from my building and bought some fruit to go with breakfast. The cashier told me the price and my shoulders slumped.

“I’m a little short.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he laughed. “You’re in here often enough. Don’t worry about it.”

Back home, I was showered and eating breakfast when the doorbell rang. It was the landlord, coming around the collect the rent. He was a short, older man who always smiled when we saw him in the stairwell and greeted us with an enthusiastic “Buenos días.” The first couple of times I’d met him I was still nervous about my Spanish so I had left the room, and even pretended not to be home once. This morning, however, while my roommate counted out the rent money, the landlord and I talked about the roadwork they were doing down the street, and how fast they were moving, and how it really did leave the street looking better and more open. When he left I made some coffee and a bocadillo to bring to school, and headed out into the rest of my day, which was already getting warmer.

‘When did that happen?’, I thought. When did I start to feel comfortable in this large, strange city?

365 and I Didn´t Waste A One

Originally I was going to write a humble, what-I’ve-learned sort of review of 2010’s major events for me. That’s kind of my thing, anyway. But then I started listing what’s happened this year and I decided to throw the humility crap out the window. I’ll just say it: this year was awesome. I’d be doing it a disservice if I tried to play it down.

1. U of I- My second semester of U of I was filled with interesting classes, new friends, and a lot of fun. My classes were varied and I learned so much that I still carry with me. (I can have a basic conversation in French, I can draw and label a cross section of a brain- to a certain extent, I learned about force and momentum and electromagnetism and a bunch of other things I’d never have learned about in an English class.) I got all A’s and made the Dean’s List again. I spent a lot of time applying, writing, and interviewing for the study abroad program that allowed me to be in Barcelona right now. I survived Unofficial St. Patrick’s Day, even if I did pass out by 8 o’clock that night.

2. Lost 50+ lbs.- I’ve done some cool stuff, but this one still impresses me. (Did I mention I’m throwing humility out the window?) Seriously, though, it’s had a profound effect on my life. For a year now I’ve been exercising regularly and eating much better. It’s changed the way I think about what I can do, what I should do, and why I should do it.

3. Brody Christopher- My nephew! To be fair, Keri did most of the work on this one, and I just get to do all the fun uncle stuff. The kid laughs at everything, which I’m pretty sure means he’ll do just fine in life. I can’t wait to get back to the U.S. and hang out with the little guy. (But I do keep having dreams where I’m holding him and he keeps shrinking until he’s just in the palm of my hand and I have to be really careful. Strange, no?)

4. Barcelona- Frankly, the year could have ended in August and it would have been enough for me; Barcelona has been another thing entirely. It’s allowed me to travel to many beautiful places and meet a lot of wonderful people. I’ve gotten to know Barcelona pretty well, too, and Barcelona is a difficult city to know.

5. Next year- Next year I’m looking forward to showing my best friends and my mom around Barcelona, packing up and going home, and continuing/restarting my life there. I want to pay off my old debts and get myself an apartment. It’s obvious that this year has been one of major changes, and they don’t stop at midnight tonight; they’ll carry into next year. (Okay, so maybe there was a “what I’ve learned” element after all. I just can’t help myself.)