Barcelona, Day 7: Just Visiting

I'd originally thought I'd go wander along the Avinguda Diagonal today, but it was supposed to be such a nice day, that I thought I'd go down to the Boqueria, in part because Kristin mentioned it in another comment. Glad I went. What a great place! New York really needs a market like this. It would be great if the Bronx Terminal turned into something like those, but I don't have very high hopes for that. (Location, location, location, for one thing.) There's a little—no, a lot—of everything there, and it's all gorgeous: produce, meat, seafood, cheese, olives, dried fruit, chocolate, tropical produce, cooking gear, even, uh, dried bugs (which reminded me of the fit everybody's throwing on Eater about finding a grasshopper in a wrap. This made me laugh, having found all kinds of bugs and spiders in my garden-fresh food when I was a kid.).

No pics because it's too crowded, and well, food looks pretty much the same, wherever, even if the cuts of meat are a little different. There were some innards I couldn't quite identify (brains, I think), plus some of the biggest pig trotters I've ever seen, and poor skinned little wabbits with just a tiny bit of fur on them but sans ears; an entire stall of mushrooms, wild and otherwise, dry and fresh, including big fat morels which were astonishingly cheap, I thought; the biggest damn strawberries I've ever seen—don't they test those things for steroids?—lacking only cream to go with them; a giant pile of brown eggs; stalls and stalls of fresh asparagus, tomatoes, artichokes, shucked fresh peas and peapods, avocados, blood oranges, grapes, clementines, apples; fresh bread of all kinds, a stall selling yakitori and teeny sushi rolls; cheese, lots of cheese (I bought a chunk of Manxhego to munch on, which is delish); stalls that sell cooked food (talk about fresh!), and a kind of theatre in the round of fish, right in the middle of it, both fin- and shellfish. Piles of oysters, clams, cockles, razor clams (which, I gotta say, look a little obscene) . . . okay, I'll stop now.  You get the idea. I would love to have a market like this (let alone the three or four of them that Barcelona seems to have) in New York. It makes the Greenmarket at Union Square look like nothing.

Afterwards, I headed off in the opposite direction I've generally gone, into the Barri Xines, or Chinatown, which was oddly full of Arabs and devoid of Chinese. Immigration at work. I went looking for Sant Pau Del Camp and got completely turned around and caught in yet another unforcasted downpour. This time, I had to duck into an expensive tourist trap for not very good fish soup and bitter burned coffee, which I'm hoping to erase from my mind with some good food tonight. By the time I got out and found the church, it was closed to visitors, so I only have outside pics. It's a thousand years old, which boggles my mind, but it looks it. And it looks as if it's sitting in the middle of a Byzantine desert somewhere.

Went in search of Palau Guell, which, like every other modernist building I want to see, is being renovated and is completely draped in scaffolding and netting and inaccessible, dammit. Wonder what I'll find at Park Guell?  So I took myself back off into the Barri Gotic and ended up at Santa Maria del Pi, where I stayed for vespers, contemplating the vaulting. It's not anywhere near the size of the cathedral, but it's still a big, old cold barn of a church, with some very pretty windows, but no crossing or transept, just a nave and chapels. If it felt cold to me, in a coat, in March, I can only imagine it freezing the bones of its old parishioners in January, especially before the acquisition of the electric heaters I spotted. And in the Middle Ages, when it was new? Brrrrrrrr! You'd be able to see your breath, I'm sure, the choir's notes rising up to God on a cloud of exhalations.

One of the things I was contemplating, along with the Gothic vaulting and how it compares to the vaulting in the attic of Casa Mila, was how different this trip to Europe feels than my previous ones. I don't know whether it's a function of age and jadedness, having lived in New York for so long now, and no longer being fresh off the farm (probably in part), but I haven't had any pings of recognition here, that this is "home," the way I did in Edinburgh (but not London, though I liked London). It's a little ironic, because at least four people have come up to ask me for directions here. I suspect that's a function of my NYC "always look like you know where you're going" stride, not walking around clutching a map or guidebook, not caring much if I get turned around or lost as I plunge off the beaten path, and because I'm not wearing sneakers and jeans or sweats like the rest of the touristas. Anyway, I like Barcelona very much, but I don't think I'd want to live here, despite the lovely disposition of its people, the great food, and the beauty of the city. It's not even the language thing. That's bothered me a lot less than I thought it would, less than it did in Wales or France. But I'm definitely just visiting, though I couldn't say why.

Comments

[Roger]

Your post made me recall a scene in one of my favorite films, The Sheltering Sky:

Tunner (Campbell Scott) We're probably the first tourists they've had since the war.

Kit Moresby (Debra Winger) Tunner, we're not tourists. We're travelers.

Tunner Oh. What's the difference?

Port Moresby (John Malkovich) A tourist is someone who thinks about going home the moment they arrive, Tunner.

Kit Moresby Whereas a traveler might not come back at all.

Tunner You mean I'm a tourist.

Kit Moresby Yes, Tunner. And I'm half and half.

I often think how nice it would be not to have to think of returning to work and "home" but being able to be a traveler. Perhaps when I retire.

[Lee Kottner]

Heh, that's weird. I almost picked up Sheltering Sky in the bookstore the other day (and yes, I can manage to find an English-language bookstore wherever I am; part of my talent for being able to find the coolest and most expensive item in any store within five minutes). Then I ran across a version of that quote in the book I did pick up (Manuel Vazquez Montalban's The Buenos Aires Quintet): . . . "he had read, possibly in a book by Bowles, that the difference between a tourist and a traveller is that the one knows the limits of his journey, while the other yields to the open-ended logic of the voyage." By that definition, I was a traveller the last time, but closer to being a tourist, sadly, this time. I'm with you, Roger. Wish I had the time and money to wander at will.

[Kristin]

"part of my talent for being able to find the coolest and most expensive item in any store within five minutes"

That, my dear, is called having good taste, methinks ('cuz I can do that, too!)

Glad you enjoyed La Boqueria--the closest thing I'd ever seen to it was the food halls at Harrod's in London, and those only offer a fraction of the abundance at La Boqueria. A total foodie delight.

Now this is making me really hungry...