Leaving Arles was hard.
The weather was kind, Provence was gorgeous, and as it turned out, I speak more French than I thought I did. By the end, I was conducting conversations and transactions without pre-fabbing each phrase. There were times early in our visit to France where I was certain I looked slightly deranged, moving my lips silently as I prepared a sentence for later use.
Favorite French Flub: me, trying to keep an insistent Housekeeping manager at bay through our hotel room door: "Merci, non -- nous somme serviettes!" ("No thanks, we are towels!")
Unlike Liz, I've never taken a Spanish class. No matter; the woman with whom I'm traveling has sufficient skills to make sure we always ended up with palatable food and comfortable lodging.
We took a day train from France and arrived late in the evening. The Spanish train was a bit tatty -- after we arrived in Barcelona, Liz and I discovered fresh flea bites on our ankles.
We checked in late and wondered how much trouble we'd have finding dinner. No fear; there were three restaurants and an active pizza parlor on the block facing our hotel. I never saw them closed.
Spain is a fine country for night-owls like ourselves. The urban Catalonians fill the small hours with spirits and song; many clubs don't even open until 0200 and only roll down the shutters when rush hour begins.
Before we arrived, a travel commentator on BBC instructed us on Barcelona's social mores. To paraphrase, he instructed that one's final beverage should always be ordered as "la penultima,": the second-to-last drink of the evening. Calling it the final drink would be poor manners, a reminder to anyone within earshot that the night was about to end. I don't know the Spanish for "buzzkill."
We found a cafe down the block and ordered differing versions of paella. Mine wasn't particularly flavorful, but it was filling. Liz marveled at the number of people still out at that hour, many pushing strollers with sleeping kids. Other children were as alert as their parents, well past midnight. Start 'em young, I guess.
One evening, we dutifully followed our guidebook's advice and strolled down La Ramblas, the boulevard in the city center. It's a broad street with up-market shops and a freeway-sized pedestrian mall down the middle; narrow lanes run alongside to funnel the speeding cabs.
The zone was a dense pack of tourists crammed into cafe tables or clustered around street performers. We weaved through the crush, keeping our eyes peeled for an ATM. (Following my bank statements while traveling has been very amusing -- I can see exactly where I've been, and even a notation like "CHECK CRD PURCHASE 07/28 DYMOCKS BOOKSELLERS-ST HONG KONG HK" evokes a specific memory.)
Liz kept her purse well-tucked in the frothy crowd. We stepped quickly around human statues in gold body paint, men on stilts, guys offering shoe shines and more than one game of three-card monte. We kept a brisk pace, sensitive to the constant admonitions that Barcelona is a pickpocket's paradise.
(Years ago, I was awakened at 0530 in San Francisco by a friend who was traveling in Spain. He profusely apologized for the disruption, but he'd just been robbed of his backpack and camera after asking the wrong people for directions. He knew I had a high-speed Web connection, so I was able to give him the phone number for the US consulate quickly.)
"Who plays that?" I asked, nodding at some rubes who were absorbed in a round of thimblerig. "I mean, that hustle's described in the Old Testament!"
She shook her head, and we kept walking slightly downhill to the harbor. There's a column with a large statue of Cristoforo Colombo standing at the Ramblas' end, gazing off toward the New World with a sense of purpose. Someone should erect a statue on a corresponding heading in Haiti that captures the essence of the first native who met the explorer.
Walking is good, even through the cheesy tourist areas in which we sometimes find ourselves. We made a left at the highly developed harbor and sniffed out a tapas restaurant where we fortified ourselves with small plates and sangria. It was across the street from the waterfront, so we expected that the food would be comparable -- but about 25% cheaper.
Correct on both counts, a testament to our fine traveling skills. Our plan was to walk further east to a park that had live jazz. Our cheery waiter confirmed our directions, pointing to the speck of green I'd circled on our tourist map.
"Live jazz in the park?" he said. "I've lived here my whole life, I've never heard jazz in the park!" He seemed genuinely excited about the prospect, then lamented the six hours left on his shift. It was around 9:15 p.m.
After the meal and wine, we took a more leisurely pace. The park was another half mile, next to the zoo. There wasn't much pedestrian traffic, so I kept an eye peeled for weird things in the shadows. Not much to see, just tourists like us and some skateboarders annoyed with the old people taking up all the sidewalk.
We walked past the metro stop closest to jazz in the park. The lights were brighter, illuminating a neighborhood that had yet to be rewritten by gentrification. Two women stood under a bus shelter across the street, one using it as a dressing room, the other staring off into the middle distance. Based on the clothes #1 was putting on -- correction: not putting on -- I realized that she was probably going to work, and that we were in their office. Also, I wasn't hearing any music.
I pointed this out to Liz, so we walked up a long ramp that led to the park, a floodlit concrete plaza that overlooks train yards, the zoo barely visible in the darkness beyond. No jazz combo, no crowd. The only people in range were two English-speaking women in their twenties, their chunky heels slapping concrete as they clunk-clunked across the plaza and consulted a tourist map identical to ours. They didn't look at ease.
Liz and I exchanged shrugs before heading back down the ramp. There were a few more hookers across the street now, and I caught a guy in his sixties gaze at them wistfully as he got off the "up" escalator. So did his wife.
Our hotel was across the street from a Metro stop, so we made it back quickly. After brushing my teeth, I turned on the TV to see news of an improbably large hurricane headed for the Gulf of Mexico. The satellite image seemed entirely out of proportion, even accounting for the slight height of the CNN reporter we've taken to calling "The Weather Pixie."
I fell asleep with the television on.
Posted by Walter at September 16, 2005 06:54 PM