Whether I´ve been to a particular place before or not, in taking one trip, I always learn how to better the next one. In this particular segment, I had been to Barcelona before, so when I arrived on Saturday, April 12, it wasn´t with the tourist plan in mind. Rather, I came to visit friends, retrace old stomping grounds, and just hang out for a few days in a city I enjoy.
The place I called home during my stay in Barcelona this time around was the apartment of my friend Jaime, one of my friends from my program in Salvador. He lives in an apartment by the beach, a beach I frequented when I lived in Barcelona two and a half years ago. Since I already knew the tourist sites in Barcelona, I got to know his neighborhood (Barceloneta) through the eyes of a local. We also hit the beach one day, and though it wasn´t quite the weather of Bahia (or the beach of Bahia, for that matter...so far, I haven´t found a beach that is), it was still the beach. Unfortunately, Jaime skipped town and went on vacation with his friend on Monday. Fortunately, he didn´t kick me out of the apartment, and I got to stay there for the remainder of my time in Barcelona! A beachfront apartment in Barcelona? Sometimes, things work out just fine.
When I lived in Barcelona, one aspect of Catalonian culture that surprised me was how closed it was, compared with, say, Andalusian culture. Example A: You smile at the random person on the metro, and nothing. It´s like you´re staring at one of those cardboard cutouts of people with the eyes cut out that you see at a fairground. Anyway, in the interest of learning from previous travel experiences, I decided to take a different course of action this time around: I turned my former metro experiences into a game. I decided, every time I take the train, I´m going to see if I can get those darn Catalonians to smile. The results? Not so hot. The problem is that they look every which way except at people. It´s hard to land eye contact, and it became funnier when they didn´t smile, which then became inspiration for me to try harder. There was the rare ``smiler,´´ but it made me wonder if the person came from Catalonia or from another part of Spain altogether (Barcelona is an infusion of cultures, both from within Spain and outside Spain). And once, I got a girl to smile but then she looked around really quickly and stopped. An interesting cultural exercise, to say the least (especially compared with the bus in Salvador, Brazil, where people take part in your conversations, when you didn´t even know they were listening).
Tuesday, I went back to my old job to say hello and see how everything was going. When I lived in Barcelona, I taught Spanish to immigrants at Ekumene, a center that offers free classes in Spanish conversation/reading/writing, general culture, Catalan, etc. I worked as a substitute teacher, so though I was there often, I didn´t always have the same group of students, and I didn´t always teach the same subject. And sometimes, I just happened to be there and a teacher would be absent, so I would step in and teach a class, a good test to make sure the adrenaline was still working (but not the same feeling as, ``you stop running and we crash´´). Anyway, I dropped by, and the director buzzed me in, and she made me take a seat while she helped a few students. Since it seemed like she didn´t recognize me, when it was my turn, I identified myself, and she said that she thought it was me, but just in case it wasn´t, she didn´t want to greet me and then be really wrong. I ended up talking to her for awhile, and in the course of our conversation, two of the Catalan students (adults) came to the office and said that their teacher didn´t show up. I didn´t know what class they were from, so I asked Ana María (the director). She said, hold on a minute, and left the office for a few minutes. When she came back, she said, ``okay, the castellano (Spanish) teacher is going to teach the Catalan class, and you are going to teach the castellano class.´´ I said, wait, wait -- what´s going on? She explained that the Catalan teacher wasn´t there, and since I don´t speak Catalan (maybe I shouldn´t have dropped my Catalan class), well, I was going to teach the other class. I said okay (I didn´t have a choice in the matter anyway) and that I guess that made sense -- when I started teaching there, it basically happened this way, and then she said, and this is how it continues! So, I went there to say hello, thinking I´d be there for a half hour or so, and I ended up teaching for about 45 minutes. After class, I went back to the office, to resume our conversation, and she started telling me about the students in one of my old classes. Only one of them is still in contact with her, and it happened to be a good student who was fun in class. She told me where she worked, and I ended up going to visit her.
The girl knew someone was going to visit her (Ana María had called her to see what her hours were), but she didn´t know who. It was a fun surprise and good to catch up with her. (It was strange seeing my former student speak perfect Spanish and even use the F-word in everyday conversation. It just makes me so proud! (I didn´t teach it to her.)) She works at a shoe store in the mall, because she doesn´t have the necessary citizenship papers to be able to work as a nurse (she has her degree). Unfortunately for her and her two colleagues, it was a beautiful day outside, so there weren´t many people in the mall. They hadn´t sold a single thing all day, so any time someone came into the shoe store, they were trying to make a sale. I ended up staying at the store for three hours, catching up with Sanaa, and there were even two customers who required the use of an English translator (i.e., me). It turns out that I´m not cut out to sell shoes -- all that effort and nothing. I asked Sanaa if she still talks to anyone from our class and she said the only one she still sees from time to time is this woman named Helena. (The ages in that class ranged from 16 to maybe mid 40s. Sanaa is 20; Helena I think was late 30s, early 40s.) Sanaa said, though, that it is always Helena who recognizes Sanaa. See, even though both of them are from Morocco, Sanaa is very liberal in her style of dress. You wouldn´t necessarily be able to guess by looking at her that she´s Moroccan. Helena, on the other hand, used to wear a hijab. Since I left, however, Helena changed her wardrobe style and now goes all out and wears a burqa. (And it isn´t a question of being recently married, because she was married when she was my student.) So, whenever they run into each other on the street, Sanaa never recognizes Helena, and it is always Helena who says to Sanaa, ``Sanaa!´´ to which Sanaa responds, ``pero, tú, ¿quién eres?´´ since Helena´s eyes are the only part of her visible to the outside world. Here are two people from the same country, albeit different generations (but that hardly matters), and Sanaa is asking Helena, ``but who are *you*?´´ Sanaa was relating the story to me like any old story, and I didn´t even start thinking about it until later, but it just goes to show that cultural diversity exists even within the same culture.
Even though I didn´t *have* to do any touristy things, I still did a few of them at a leisurely pace. I walked along La Rambla, a 1.2km-long pedestrian street that has various shops, stalls, sidewalk shows, etc. I also took a walk around La Boqueria, a market that sells fruits, meat, fish, and other things you would expect to find in that kind of market. It was just a ``no pressure´´ kind of pace, no guidebook in hand. Another day, I revisited Passeig de Gràcia, a shopping avenue with lots of Gaudí architecture, and Park Güell, one of my favorite parks ever. I also spent time catching up with some of my friends who still live in Barcelona. For instance, I went out with one of my old roommates, Paulo, who hails from Portugal, and his Portuguese girlfriend. Paulo has also studied English, so since I wanted to practice Portuguese, and he wanted to practice English, we ended up going back and forth between languages: Spanish, Portuguese, English, lather, rinse, repeat. He even said my Portuguese accent was Bahian. Hooray! (Come to think of it, I hope that was a good thing...)
So, now that I´ve checked up on my Portuguese, and after a month and a half in Spanish-speaking territory, my Spanish is doing fine, it´s time to go eat some pizza and pasta (and maybe eat some words?) and see if that can bring my Italian back.
hasta la pasta,
missy
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