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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.

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