Catalunya amor meu
March 1st
And so, I arrived to Spain: After leaving the most glorious and blue of all skies, mountains and the prettiest of towns in my beloved France, I took the Spanish train at Perpignan, full with rather obscure characters, including a drunk that walked back and forth, a very intense ticket "controlleur" ( yeah, I don't know how you say that in English- I haven't been taking that many trains in the US of A), and arrived at Girona in complete darkness, in an ugly rain, being cold: The streets were empty, the buildings rather ugly, very few people on the slippery streets. The train station was bustling though, being full of stores and having a suburban mall athmosphere. And I don't speak Catalan, which is seemingly closer to French than to Spanish, fact that I don't seem to get. When at the youth hostel, my newly acquired rooster identity made me address them all in a suave French, which did not seem to get understood, and this girl started answering in English... Don't worry, you francophone Gruia, in Maroc is Frenchspeakingland once again. Although the youth hostel seems to have a sizeabla German and British tourist presence ( and by the way, the Brits have discovered the Facebook, judging by what my neighbors here in the computer room are doing...), this lady , after carefully examining my Romanian passport ( this situation is something that US citizens will never experience... lucky people) ( yeah Romanians in Spain are like Spaniards in France in the 1950s, the poor migrant worker stereotype, a similarity that these people seem to forget, but whatever)., she placed me in a room with two people that , I have to confess, scared me: a guy, obviously sick, with open blisters all over, a lost look in his eyes ( also a moaning sleepwalker and a terrible snoring machine), and another one, drunk and screaming. Thank you, Catalan lady: You will be remembered.
Other than that I had a huge tapas dinner talking to the young, posh waitress in English-Italian. She was very nice and she told me proudly that she is a "Romanesa" ( aka Roma, aka for the unitiated what was used to be called a "gypsy"): Coming from Romania, that is something.
But the sun is out and I will run out now to the coast ( it's Costa Brava anyway) and to Figueres, where most of Salvador Dali's work is exhibited.
March 2nd
Barcelona is buzzing. Every street that I've been on is full of hordes of people of all sorts, walking at different paces, speaking every European language you can imagine. Of course, the queen is Catalan, the language I'm still trying to decipher. And even though, this is the first Romance language to exhibit such complete similiarity for individual words with Romanian ( "tot" means all in both languages, apparently egg is "ou", new is "nou", etc. ), the ensemble seems irreparably esoteric when spoken. It sounds more like Portuguese than Spanish or French and its written form abounds of double ll, x-s in all positions possible, t-s that appear when you don,t expect ( ex: bitlet for ticket), and a pronounciation for Barcelona itself that makes the city seem like a really ugly place ( for the Romanians among you, imagine saying it with the Ferentari accent dubbed with hatred and dismay). Plus that the suave, very feminine voice of French train stations' announcers ( "Ici, Nice". " le train Corail 456 part pour Lille-Europe ..." " Ici, Nice" once again), is replaced here by seemingly a 45 year old smoker, with a gutural sound and a stuborness to repeat that the train going to Barcelona Sants is leaving from the Platform #4 for like fifteen times in Catalan, Castellano, a weird form of English, and a French that sounds being pronounced with enmity and contempt.
I feared that French would be gone from my life, but no, they seem to be everywhere. Yesterday, in the astonishing Dali theatre-museum in Figueres ( surrealist to the bone, really a dreamlike, magical experience), I forgot I was in Spain ( ahem, Catalunya), being surrounded by a myriad of French tourists of all ages ( ok, there was an American couple with a personal guide, and the traditional Japanese tourists). I ate tapas in a place where even the waiter was from Bordeaux and the menus all around the city were in Catalan, Castellano, French, and sometimes English and Swedish...
Dali dominated my two days in Northern Catalonia ( as a matter of fact, I'm commiting a mistake for which I may be exiled by my Catalonian hosts- Northern Catalonia is actually Rosselo, which was taken by the evil French in 1648 and transformed into Roussillon, or the more prosaically named department de Pyrenees Orientales). Indeed, the amazing museum , the trip today over some very steep mountains with a bus that seemed to be at one point my last trip ever ( if you only ssaw the slopes, the curves, and the canyons...) to Cadaques, a Greek like ( at least for me) whitewashed village with its own gulf, breathtaking, and so tranquil, so quiet ( I don't think one uses tranquil in English, but anyways, it was so peaceful...).
Peaceful, though with a good number of visitors. Actually, this is one of the good things about this trip - I'm going in March, when the hordes of tourists that invade the Cote d,Azur , Costa Brava etc. did not make their appearance yet. I can see local life at its normal pace, grannies carrying baguettes in Cannes, and families eating their lunch in a garden in Cadaques...
Except Barcelona, which seems to be flooded with tourists. Even Girona, the city I so much abhored the first day, rain and all, revealed to have some splendid features by day and with a generous sun- a remarkable riverside neighborhood ( and I wait to get to Madrid, to put my pics on a computer and to send, send, send), a well preserved Jewish quarter ( before the infamous evacuation of like 1492 or something), the coolest fortifications I've walked on ( and I'm a freek for these things, especially the Vauban ones, in Alba Iulia, Luxembourg, Besancon, Aigues Mortes or St Malo by now), and a very busy streetlife ( of course, except when it rains, as my first night revealed...)
And I really want to go back there. Not that Barcelona struck a negative cord. No, not at all. But in the middle of Barcelona there is this huge tent housing the Festival of Catalonian Books ( yeah...), I found books about pretty much everything in Catalan, ranging from how to repair your motorcycle to how to repair a Franco-stricken Spain. I also saw some a dictionary " Catala-Romanes" , I opened it, realizing that Romanes means the Romanian language...I immediately approached a lady asking her how tu say "rumano" and "gitano" in Catalan, and realized that actually being a "Romanesa" ,means being a Romanian, and not a Roma. And so, after talking with my beloved waitress in Girona for an hour about being a student in France, about the French, about her life in Girona, I did't realized that she actually told me she is Romanian and that I could have talked in a language that I can actually speak about her experience there... Brrrr
But anyway, it's dinner time in Spain and I'm looking forward for a new treat!
And speaking of, Catalunya amor meu ( = Catalonia my love) is just a name for a tacky restaurant in Figueres, and not une profession de foi
March 3rd
Long day in Barcelona. Trying to find a place to stay for my second night ( the first hostel was booked full.), I ran from one part of the city to the other, called places, went to booking agencies, hearing everywhere about this huge fair that takes place this weekend that can explain why the city is so full. I eventually found a place with a decent price, but also that the insanely popular fair is on astronomy...
I continued many of my French acquired habits ( eating a breakfast consisting of various forms of pastries, albeit the croissant had a certain type of unindentified meat inside..), taking random buses just to see the urban landscape. New Barcelona is very gridlike - apparently there was this competition to design the best model for the expansion of the city beyond Plaηa Catalunya, and they voted for one, but they began actually building a grid.
Central Barcelona is so full of tourists that it can get very annoying. Not even in glamorous Paris have I seen (or actually heard) this many foreigners ( a lot of them being actually French). But I started really enjoying Barcelona in El Raval, poor, colorful, with laundry lying in everybody's eyes, houses in pastel colors , immigrants, grocery stores ( stuff i have'nt seen at all in the central area- even in Paris there's an Ed vis a vis de Centre Pompidou...), and a lot of garbage. The stereotype of the large Mediterrannean city. Something that the slogan " Barcelona is the southernmost city of Northern Europe" ( which is very true for most central parts, in acrhitecture and athmosphere) tries to hide. And there's also the Barceloneta district, beyond the recosmeticized old port, an old worker class neighborhood with the same laundry flying around suspended wires. There I had lunch ( ok, it was 4 PM...), in a small and rather neighborhood restaurant, with locals and not the much too usual tourists bulging in and requesting tables. I was alone, but got a table for 5. And then people kept coming in, and i thought about something I heard once in a German class with Roman, how in Germany, people eat at the same table when there are no more places. So I invited in my best Castellano this group of four ( three guys and a charming young lady), and excused myself that I cannot speak Castellano nor Catala, and my closest Romance bet would be Italian. " Ma, siamo italiani" said the girl, also adding that they thought I was too, judging by the way I speak Spanish => boost in linguistic self esteem) . And we talked , shared five types of intriguing seafood, such as prawns with an excellent sauce etc. " o, you went to Sciences po? i wanted so much to go there as well... But i'm doing my Erasmus at Madrid" said the girl. I feel horrible I don't remember their names ( the visit to the Museum of catalonian history, with stucking in my head names such as Jaume I, Guifre el Pelos etc. didn't help). Of course, she goes to school a la Luiss.... How small is this world...Giulia, Martina, Elena, Antonello, hehe.. We talked about Bocconi, Prodi, Berlusconi and the usual, we planned to hang out in Madrid, but then I realized I forgot to pick up my luggage from my hostel to move it to the other, so I departed, rather rushed without asking for a phone number...
History Museums, fantastically preserved Roman ruins, seeing every inch of a Roman house, medieval buildings, the rise of the Catalonian state as a buffer between the Carolingian Empire and the Muslim Caliphate of Cordoba, the alliance with Aragon, the plague,, entering Spain, having its autonomy dissolved in 1714, economic boom, modernisme, Renaixanηa, anarcho-syndicalism, socialism, republicanism, nationalism, Orwell's homage to Catalonia, the dark years under Franco ( especially a media display in Girona made me almost cry, as i did a couple of weeks ago at the Musee d'Armee seeing Eluard's poem Liberte. J'ecrit ton nom. There's something about freedom that only people having to do somewhat with totalitarian regimes can understand. And that reminds me of my long and deep conversation with my uncle in Marseille, whose father, my grandfather's brother, spend many years in communist prisons, for being outspoken... Liberte, j'ecrit ton nom.)
There's nighttime in Barcelona, and contrary to Franco's time of being resigned and refulated, people are in the streets. They seem to be free. i will try to be part of it. I am free. I will see Gaudi's Sagrada Familia tomorrow and some Picasso, and then off to Zaragoza.
And so, I arrived to Spain: After leaving the most glorious and blue of all skies, mountains and the prettiest of towns in my beloved France, I took the Spanish train at Perpignan, full with rather obscure characters, including a drunk that walked back and forth, a very intense ticket "controlleur" ( yeah, I don't know how you say that in English- I haven't been taking that many trains in the US of A), and arrived at Girona in complete darkness, in an ugly rain, being cold: The streets were empty, the buildings rather ugly, very few people on the slippery streets. The train station was bustling though, being full of stores and having a suburban mall athmosphere. And I don't speak Catalan, which is seemingly closer to French than to Spanish, fact that I don't seem to get. When at the youth hostel, my newly acquired rooster identity made me address them all in a suave French, which did not seem to get understood, and this girl started answering in English... Don't worry, you francophone Gruia, in Maroc is Frenchspeakingland once again. Although the youth hostel seems to have a sizeabla German and British tourist presence ( and by the way, the Brits have discovered the Facebook, judging by what my neighbors here in the computer room are doing...), this lady , after carefully examining my Romanian passport ( this situation is something that US citizens will never experience... lucky people) ( yeah Romanians in Spain are like Spaniards in France in the 1950s, the poor migrant worker stereotype, a similarity that these people seem to forget, but whatever)., she placed me in a room with two people that , I have to confess, scared me: a guy, obviously sick, with open blisters all over, a lost look in his eyes ( also a moaning sleepwalker and a terrible snoring machine), and another one, drunk and screaming. Thank you, Catalan lady: You will be remembered.
Other than that I had a huge tapas dinner talking to the young, posh waitress in English-Italian. She was very nice and she told me proudly that she is a "Romanesa" ( aka Roma, aka for the unitiated what was used to be called a "gypsy"): Coming from Romania, that is something.
But the sun is out and I will run out now to the coast ( it's Costa Brava anyway) and to Figueres, where most of Salvador Dali's work is exhibited.
March 2nd
Barcelona is buzzing. Every street that I've been on is full of hordes of people of all sorts, walking at different paces, speaking every European language you can imagine. Of course, the queen is Catalan, the language I'm still trying to decipher. And even though, this is the first Romance language to exhibit such complete similiarity for individual words with Romanian ( "tot" means all in both languages, apparently egg is "ou", new is "nou", etc. ), the ensemble seems irreparably esoteric when spoken. It sounds more like Portuguese than Spanish or French and its written form abounds of double ll, x-s in all positions possible, t-s that appear when you don,t expect ( ex: bitlet for ticket), and a pronounciation for Barcelona itself that makes the city seem like a really ugly place ( for the Romanians among you, imagine saying it with the Ferentari accent dubbed with hatred and dismay). Plus that the suave, very feminine voice of French train stations' announcers ( "Ici, Nice". " le train Corail 456 part pour Lille-Europe ..." " Ici, Nice" once again), is replaced here by seemingly a 45 year old smoker, with a gutural sound and a stuborness to repeat that the train going to Barcelona Sants is leaving from the Platform #4 for like fifteen times in Catalan, Castellano, a weird form of English, and a French that sounds being pronounced with enmity and contempt.
I feared that French would be gone from my life, but no, they seem to be everywhere. Yesterday, in the astonishing Dali theatre-museum in Figueres ( surrealist to the bone, really a dreamlike, magical experience), I forgot I was in Spain ( ahem, Catalunya), being surrounded by a myriad of French tourists of all ages ( ok, there was an American couple with a personal guide, and the traditional Japanese tourists). I ate tapas in a place where even the waiter was from Bordeaux and the menus all around the city were in Catalan, Castellano, French, and sometimes English and Swedish...
Dali dominated my two days in Northern Catalonia ( as a matter of fact, I'm commiting a mistake for which I may be exiled by my Catalonian hosts- Northern Catalonia is actually Rosselo, which was taken by the evil French in 1648 and transformed into Roussillon, or the more prosaically named department de Pyrenees Orientales). Indeed, the amazing museum , the trip today over some very steep mountains with a bus that seemed to be at one point my last trip ever ( if you only ssaw the slopes, the curves, and the canyons...) to Cadaques, a Greek like ( at least for me) whitewashed village with its own gulf, breathtaking, and so tranquil, so quiet ( I don't think one uses tranquil in English, but anyways, it was so peaceful...).
Peaceful, though with a good number of visitors. Actually, this is one of the good things about this trip - I'm going in March, when the hordes of tourists that invade the Cote d,Azur , Costa Brava etc. did not make their appearance yet. I can see local life at its normal pace, grannies carrying baguettes in Cannes, and families eating their lunch in a garden in Cadaques...
Except Barcelona, which seems to be flooded with tourists. Even Girona, the city I so much abhored the first day, rain and all, revealed to have some splendid features by day and with a generous sun- a remarkable riverside neighborhood ( and I wait to get to Madrid, to put my pics on a computer and to send, send, send), a well preserved Jewish quarter ( before the infamous evacuation of like 1492 or something), the coolest fortifications I've walked on ( and I'm a freek for these things, especially the Vauban ones, in Alba Iulia, Luxembourg, Besancon, Aigues Mortes or St Malo by now), and a very busy streetlife ( of course, except when it rains, as my first night revealed...)
And I really want to go back there. Not that Barcelona struck a negative cord. No, not at all. But in the middle of Barcelona there is this huge tent housing the Festival of Catalonian Books ( yeah...), I found books about pretty much everything in Catalan, ranging from how to repair your motorcycle to how to repair a Franco-stricken Spain. I also saw some a dictionary " Catala-Romanes" , I opened it, realizing that Romanes means the Romanian language...I immediately approached a lady asking her how tu say "rumano" and "gitano" in Catalan, and realized that actually being a "Romanesa" ,means being a Romanian, and not a Roma. And so, after talking with my beloved waitress in Girona for an hour about being a student in France, about the French, about her life in Girona, I did't realized that she actually told me she is Romanian and that I could have talked in a language that I can actually speak about her experience there... Brrrr
But anyway, it's dinner time in Spain and I'm looking forward for a new treat!
And speaking of, Catalunya amor meu ( = Catalonia my love) is just a name for a tacky restaurant in Figueres, and not une profession de foi
March 3rd
Long day in Barcelona. Trying to find a place to stay for my second night ( the first hostel was booked full.), I ran from one part of the city to the other, called places, went to booking agencies, hearing everywhere about this huge fair that takes place this weekend that can explain why the city is so full. I eventually found a place with a decent price, but also that the insanely popular fair is on astronomy...
I continued many of my French acquired habits ( eating a breakfast consisting of various forms of pastries, albeit the croissant had a certain type of unindentified meat inside..), taking random buses just to see the urban landscape. New Barcelona is very gridlike - apparently there was this competition to design the best model for the expansion of the city beyond Plaηa Catalunya, and they voted for one, but they began actually building a grid.
Central Barcelona is so full of tourists that it can get very annoying. Not even in glamorous Paris have I seen (or actually heard) this many foreigners ( a lot of them being actually French). But I started really enjoying Barcelona in El Raval, poor, colorful, with laundry lying in everybody's eyes, houses in pastel colors , immigrants, grocery stores ( stuff i have'nt seen at all in the central area- even in Paris there's an Ed vis a vis de Centre Pompidou...), and a lot of garbage. The stereotype of the large Mediterrannean city. Something that the slogan " Barcelona is the southernmost city of Northern Europe" ( which is very true for most central parts, in acrhitecture and athmosphere) tries to hide. And there's also the Barceloneta district, beyond the recosmeticized old port, an old worker class neighborhood with the same laundry flying around suspended wires. There I had lunch ( ok, it was 4 PM...), in a small and rather neighborhood restaurant, with locals and not the much too usual tourists bulging in and requesting tables. I was alone, but got a table for 5. And then people kept coming in, and i thought about something I heard once in a German class with Roman, how in Germany, people eat at the same table when there are no more places. So I invited in my best Castellano this group of four ( three guys and a charming young lady), and excused myself that I cannot speak Castellano nor Catala, and my closest Romance bet would be Italian. " Ma, siamo italiani" said the girl, also adding that they thought I was too, judging by the way I speak Spanish => boost in linguistic self esteem) . And we talked , shared five types of intriguing seafood, such as prawns with an excellent sauce etc. " o, you went to Sciences po? i wanted so much to go there as well... But i'm doing my Erasmus at Madrid" said the girl. I feel horrible I don't remember their names ( the visit to the Museum of catalonian history, with stucking in my head names such as Jaume I, Guifre el Pelos etc. didn't help). Of course, she goes to school a la Luiss.... How small is this world...Giulia, Martina, Elena, Antonello, hehe.. We talked about Bocconi, Prodi, Berlusconi and the usual, we planned to hang out in Madrid, but then I realized I forgot to pick up my luggage from my hostel to move it to the other, so I departed, rather rushed without asking for a phone number...
History Museums, fantastically preserved Roman ruins, seeing every inch of a Roman house, medieval buildings, the rise of the Catalonian state as a buffer between the Carolingian Empire and the Muslim Caliphate of Cordoba, the alliance with Aragon, the plague,, entering Spain, having its autonomy dissolved in 1714, economic boom, modernisme, Renaixanηa, anarcho-syndicalism, socialism, republicanism, nationalism, Orwell's homage to Catalonia, the dark years under Franco ( especially a media display in Girona made me almost cry, as i did a couple of weeks ago at the Musee d'Armee seeing Eluard's poem Liberte. J'ecrit ton nom. There's something about freedom that only people having to do somewhat with totalitarian regimes can understand. And that reminds me of my long and deep conversation with my uncle in Marseille, whose father, my grandfather's brother, spend many years in communist prisons, for being outspoken... Liberte, j'ecrit ton nom.)
There's nighttime in Barcelona, and contrary to Franco's time of being resigned and refulated, people are in the streets. They seem to be free. i will try to be part of it. I am free. I will see Gaudi's Sagrada Familia tomorrow and some Picasso, and then off to Zaragoza.
posted by Gruia Badescu at 11:01 PM
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