Drink Life to the Lees

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...

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,...