Spanish Sights

Every day, one of the channels on the closed circuit TV’s in our cabins runs a list of names. They flash by, one by one, under a bright pink line of text: “Happy Birthday!” Each name is accompanied by a picture. When I first noticed this, I thought, “Oh great, we have our very own stalker channel. You really do think of everything, Semester at Sea.” Then I realized, somewhat begrudgingly, that it’s rather a sweet concept: look at these people so you know who to recognize today when you see them around. No one really knows anyone here, not like we know our friends at home, and I imagine it would be a little sad to spend a birthday among strangers. Having an early September birthday myself, I remember quite well how lonely I felt at Allegheny freshman year when I could count the number of people, on campus, who told me “Happy Birthday” on one hand. So I started making an effort to memorize the faces and prepare myself should I run into anyone celebrating a birthday on the ship. 

As I sat there every morning, watching one face silently fade into another, my mind started throwing all sorts of questions at me. How old do you think this person is? What do you think they normally do for their birthday? What if they don’t want to acknowledge their birthday? Where do you think this person is from? Is that their natural hair color? What if I creep them out by saying “Happy Birthday”? Where do they live on the ship? What classes do I think they are taking? Do I think they are enjoying this experience? Are they a nice person?  Who is this person, really? What is their story?

Unfortunately, a TV screen can’t answer all of those questions. All it can do is provide a face and a fact. Maybe that’s why we have Facebook, the resource that provides a face with multiple facts.  Perhaps the reason everyone has a Facebook isn’t actually to creep on everyone else, but a way to be seen.  Creating a Facebook page is like saying “Notice me. Look at me. See me.” But even then, Facebook is just facts—it’s Factbook. It’s not someone’s story. Not their real story. I’m interested in stories. 

And I found some in Barcelona. 

If you didn’t know, like I didn’t know, Barcelona is a massive city. As the second largest city in Spain, some three million people call it home, Barcelona is a city of mixture. Different kinds of people, architecture, entertainment, and food are all fighting for attention here on Spain’s east coast. It provides for a great first port, because there is so much to do and to see that, if you want, you’ll never have time to sit down. This is how I spent my first day in Spain.

After a painstaking thirty minutes of listening to a U.S. diplomat give us the latest news on Spain’s economic protests and safety precautions, a few of my friends and I burst through the ship doors, out onto the gangway, and right into Barcelona. Or so we thought. Turns out our port wasn’t as close to the city as some administrators had led us to believe. “Oh yeah, we got the closest berth available. You’ll be right there! Just walk off the ship and right into Spanish culture! Five minutes, max.”  Ok, how do you define five minutes? Because apparently the top dogs at SAS define it as a twenty-five minute expedition across an enormous drawbridge, through the fish mongering/shady car stripping district of downtown Barcelona, traversing six lanes of psychotic European traffic, and across the parking lot of a questionable independent airport. I think what they meant to tell us was that we had “the closest berth available…if you wanted to get shanked and strung up like a catfish at the market.” 

Really though, Barcelona is a decently safe city. The only problem, as we were warned more times than Kate Gosselin says “I’m not a bad mom”, are the pickpockets. They’re quite abundant, like the Gosselin children. Luckily, you can always spot them, warn your friends about them, and awkwardly manage to avoid them, also like the Gosselin children. 

The only place you have to worry about the pickpockets are on Las Ramblas, the heart of Barcelona. From this mile long avenue and marketplace, various other alleys and side streets twist and turn out into the city. This makes it a convenient meeting place with your friends, but also requires you to keep your hands in your pockets at all times, in order to prevent other people’s hands from finding their way in there.  Las Ramblas is where I spent my first morning in Spain, just wondering about, looking at all sorts of different art stands, souvenir shops, cafes, etc. It was a rushed morning, since I had to return to the ship at one o’clock for an SAS sponsored city orientation. 

Said city orientation allowed me to see all of the major sites of Barcelona in four short hours. We went from the breezy mountains above the city, where I got some great panoramic pictures, all the way down to a small Spanish village on the outskirts of the city. Here was the Spain I wanted to see: crumbling buildings, still beautiful in their own right, ancient monuments, and people working at age old crafts on the side of the cobblestone roads. We were given an hour to roam about here, before having to meet at the wrought iron village gates. Somehow, the Spanish breeze carried me into a tiny, glass-blowing shop. 

Inside, transparent sea creatures, flora, and Catholic icons sat on plaster shelves from floor to ceiling. A woman wearing a rust colored robe behind the counter greeted me with a semi-toothless smile and gestured with her hands to a small archway behind the counter. Like the idiotic American I am, I stared at her and smiled back, teeth against no teeth, and didn’t move. She laughed at me and ushered me through the tiny door into the back room. “Si, si” she kept telling me. Or was it “see, see”? 

Three men were hard at work in what looked like the bakery of Hell. Four tiny, black igloos lined the back wall. I couldn’t tell you what was inside, because the heat and the bright orange light prevented me from looking directly at them. Each of the men wore goggles, long dark pants, and a vest. Their hands and feet were bare. They carried long poles back and forth across the room. I fixated on the oldest one, who resembled a wizard when he grabbed the nearest charred pole, and stalked over to one of the ovens. He was encased in light for a brief moment, and then was striding over to a sit at a stool next to a metal workbench. The end of his stick was now glistening with a perfectly circular, clear orb with streaks of orange and white inside. 

Next, he began manhandling the orb, with what can only be described as a pair of giant metal chop sticks, shaping the orb into some sort of amorphous blob. Taking one end between the sticks, he’d pull, and the material would stretch like glue, and the colors along with it. Then he’d stick the chop sticks in and swirl them around, and all of a sudden orange became yellow and pink became red. All the while he’s flipping the shape over and over with the stick. When one side began to droop, he’d twist it around and begin designing something else. Eventually, smiling to himself, he decided on a shape and a color scheme, and he pulled on the matter from four corners, formed a head, and then snapped the blob off of the pole with the chop sticks, adding one final touch after doing so. Then, he bent close and examined his creation, scanning it over with dark, Spanish eyes. He blew on it once, picked it up, and set it on the counter in front of me. With a small clink, I looked down at a miniature glass dog, colored blue and green in the middle. He nodded at me and I picked it up, and it relieved the sweat in my palm.

When I walked back into the main room, the woman behind the counter nodded at me and asked “Si?” I couldn’t help but smile. “Yes,” I told her. “I see.”

The dog has since been put down.  I was showing it to some friends later that evening and a girl who is NOT my friend decided she wanted to see it and make puppy noises so that we could all become educated on what a dog sounds like. Mrs. Doolittle here ended up dropping it over the side of the ship and my little mini-Shadow is now somewhere in Barcelona bay.  So I don’t have proof to accompany my story, but you’ll just have to take my word for it.

I actually don’t have proof of a lot of that first day in Barcelona, because my camera decided to break. Naturally. The only reason I got out of bed for the past several months was the thought of going on this voyage, so why should the universe let my camera work? See, I’m a giant cosmic joke, so I’ve learned to expect these things, which is a good defense. Luckily, I managed to get all the pictures I wanted of the Sagrada Familia, the uncompleted Antoni Gaudi cathedral that Barcelona is famous for. Construction began over 120 years ago and there is still no end date in sight. The original plans are still being followed, despite Gaudi’s death in 1926, which I thought was equally as impressive as the intricate spires, towers, columns, and archways that already exist. 

It was right after that when my camera gave out completely, and so I didn’t get any pictures or videos of the Flamenco dinner show I attended that night. Not that they would have captured the dancers’ passion anyway. Like all good performers, the men and women who danced for us that evening lived for their craft. There was no sense of boredom between any of them, no looks of routine smeared on their faces. It was as if they were doing this in front of an audience for the first time. There were moments when I felt as though we were peeking in on something private. These people danced out their pain and their hurt and their joy on the stage that night and you could feel it flow like the elaborate costumes into the audience. They didn’t utter a single word from the beginning of the show to the end; they just let us watch. They let us see them.

I did end up finding a replacement camera the next day on Las Ramblas, but it got me wondering about what I would do if I, for some reason, couldn’t take pictures for the next two months. All I would be able to do is look. And commit images to memory. Which, in some ways, is better. I couldn’t take physical pictures of my favorite moments in Spain, just mental ones. Especially for what happened on our third day there.

We were exploring Barcelona after having spent the previous day in the mountains at Montserrat. If you didn’t know, like I didn’t know, Montserrat is an ancient monastery built in the Pyrenees and home to one of three Black Madonna’s in Spain. It was quite the adventure getting there—we took the train and ended up getting off at the wrong town. Oops. It wasn’t my fault, I took French. I was just impressed that I managed to even get on the right route. 

Anyway, we quickly realized that 1) we were in some Godforsaken Spanish town where no one spoke a lick of English and 2) we were starving. Solution: the point and grab system at a local café. It worked rather well. We just had to wag our fingers at whatever we saw that interested us behind the counter, the cashier would hold up fingers to communicate the number of Euros, and then the transaction was made. Simple.  All that was required was sight.

After our quick brunch, we sat outside debating how much farther we had to go, what it would cost, if it was worth it, blah, blah, blah. I get pretty bored with logistical stuff like that, so my attention was easily captured by four Spanish children playing soccer in the park across the street. Cars drove past, adults walked through the game chatting away, and people on bikes circled the park without even looking in the direction of the kids. It appeared that I was the only one watching them kick the dented rubber ball back and forth. Now, my sister has played soccer practically since she could pronounce the word and I would bet good money these kids would crush her, and her entire team. (No offense to the Lady Lancers). 

The oldest boy ended up kicking the ball near the spot where we were perusing a map of eastern Spain; my guess is that he did it on purpose, as he had no real reason to otherwise. He came to retrieve the ball and asked my friend and I something in Spanish. True to our American selves, we smiled and nodded vigorously. Our impressions of bobble heads clearly entertained him, since he beckoned his friends over and the next thing I knew my friend and I were playing goalie for their little game. She managed to stop one ball; I decided to let them all score so as not to intimidate them with my mad athletic skills…

We didn’t play for very long though, as the others realized we were only one town over from Montserrat. I did my best to explain to the young soccer stars that we had to go (“Adios amigos”). When we started to walk away, the kids stopped smiling and laughing for the first time since they approached us. The younger boy muttered something in Spanish, to which the older boy snapped at him and walked off in the opposite direction. My friend and I paused, unsure of what to do or say in a situation like this. Language barriers can really be language fortresses sometimes. 

But fortresses can also be penetrated. While the two of us were debating on what to do, the smallest girl from the group ran up to my friend and gave her a hug. Then she quickly jumped over and squeezed my knees together in the same manner. Before I could finish blinking she had let go and stood there, now at a safe distance again, just looking into my eyes. In that moment I contemplated not going to Montserrat. Playing soccer all day didn’t seem that horrible. Unfortunately, I’d have to travel back alone, and that’s a big NO-NO with Semester at Sea. That and bringing sand on the ship. (WTF is that about?)

My friends kept shouting for me—we were going to miss the train to the proper town. My chest really started to ache in that moment, and I could not for the life of me break contact with those tiny, hazel eyes. Fortunately, she was the stronger one. She  smiled and held up her hand and shook it furiously in her best American goodbye. I held mine up in response and rejoined my friends.

I’ve never been more thankful for sunglasses.

~

Sorry for the digression. Or rather, the length of the digression. The day after Montserrat, our third day in Barcelona, we explored as much of the city as we could. We covered everything from the marketplace to the Gothic quarter to the neighborhoods we were warned to avoid, to the beach. At one point we got intentionally lost, just for the thrill of it.

While we were wandering, down no particularly exciting street, a woman stopped me. She wasn’t selling anything, she wasn’t part of a scheme to snatch my wallet, she was just a middle aged Spanish woman sitting in a doorway watching the people go by. It wasn’t so much her hand on my shoulder that made me pause, but the clank of her bracelets so close to my ear. Each of my friends had already passed by her and were checking out an ice cream shop, so I gave my attention to the woman.

With a heavy Catalan accent, she told me “You are very sad.” There are instances, I have learned, when silence is your best strategy. This was one of them. Plus, I don’t think she was looking for a response. She brought the dangling bracelets to the left side of her chest. “In here. You hurt.” All I could really do was swallow. Then she took my hand, though I was so shaky I almost didn’t feel it. “You, no deserve. I see it. And, I sorry.” One of my friends, a self-proclaimed Spanish conquistador practically, had noticed she was talking to me, and I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was preparing to intervene, just as soon as he purchased his Magnum ice cream bar. Before he got the chance, the woman went back to the doorway of her home, plucked a leaf off the vine that grew on the wall, and came back, pressing it into my  hand. I had time to notice that the leaf resembled a very familiar shape before this matron told me “You have special heart. Look, see. Nature remind you.” She was inside by the time my friend was at my side.

A lot of what happened in Spain is unbelievable to the point where I’m almost certain I dreamed parts of it, or exaggerated certain details. But as soon as I could, after each event, I wrote down everything I could remember in my journal, and I’m drawing from that right now. I can see it there on the page, so it must be true. 

You can learn a lot about someone just from observing them in person. No Facebook, no Interests, no Favorite Music, Movies, or TV Shows. Just see them. Notice them. It’s all anyone really wants, no matter where you go. 

Because of my absence of pictures from Spain, I feel as though a lot of people are going to ask me “SO, what did you do? What did you see?!” when I get back. I could respond, “The Sagrada Familia, Las Ramblas, Gaudi’s House, an ice bar.” Or I could respond, “Passion, history, dedication, kindness, innocence, loneliness, perception, generosity.” I think the best response to that question, though, would be “People. I saw people.” Which I imagine would be followed by “And???” 

And… they saw me too.

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living”—Miriam Beard