I'm planted in what might loosely be described as a cybercafé -- a hole in the wall, hidden away on one of many dark, narrow streets in Barcelona's Gothic quarter, east of La Rambla. Run by a couple of Pakistani 30-somethings, the space completely unadorned, no music playing, no café to be found (though an unused, unplugged espresso maker sits atop a small refrigerator near the door). Eight or nine computers have been shoehorned into this teeny space, three occupied by 9 or 10 year old males of various ethnic backgrounds, playing computer games, yelling back and forth in Spanish, their exchanges liberally greased with foul language. Reporting on what's happening in their games, insulting each other, producing frequent barks and squeals of enthusiasm, disdain, frustration and other emotions likely to burst out of 9-year-olds cranked up on violent entertainment. A fourth, several years older, sits to my left, quieter than the rest, concentrating intensely on his game -- a military extravaganza that appears to deal in high body counts.
It's the first time I've sat in front of a computer since Thursday. Instead of passing sedentary hours in a chair typing away, large chunks of yesterday and today were spent wandering many, many kilometers of this large, beautiful city. My little feet are tired, and not suffering quietly -- one of the reasons I wandered into this den of cyber-slaughter, to give them a rest.
(The teenager to my left just erupted into a cry of "Ahhh, ¡Ataque! ¡Ataque!", followed immediately by several seconds of diabolical laughter.)
The train trip between Madrid and Barcelona is a lengthy, butt-numbing motherfucker, not to put too fine a point on it. Something I've noticed -- the Spaniards seem to have a thing about playing muzacky pop favorites over the inboard sound systems of planes and trains that either are waiting to head out or are just reaching their destination. Yesterday around 7:30 a.m.: I stumble into the train, having just choked down a cup of some caustic substance resembling espresso (leaving my tongue feeling as if it had been peeled) at a train station coffee shop (one of the counter women, a big blonde bruiser, sported a sizeable contusion on her left cheek; another, also impressively massive, had thick black hair trussed up atop her head in a pile that approached Marge Simpson's 'do in height, mass and form) -- whoever had been left in charge of the train had decided to bring us travelers to full consciousness with a line-up of overemotional pop numbers rendered at top volume. The music blessedly got choked off as the train pulled out of the station, giving way to the clatter of heavy rain against the windows, the morning outside gray, dim.
And that was the story for much of the next several hours. Heavy rain, low, gray skies. Now and then the clouds lifted a bit, allowing glimpses of small houses clustered together amid rough terrain, of dramatic, mountainous outcroppings of rock thrusting upward into dark, misty clouds. All that punctuated by periodic stops through small cities, until the train reached Tarragona, on the coast, and headed north, riding tracks set above the Mediterranean, waves of dark green water rolling toward us, breaking on narrow expanses of shore just below the tracks.
And then Barcelona, packed with tourists, far more than I'd expected. French, American, Brits, with some stray Germans and Italians tossed into the mix, the Germans looking a bit bewildered, as if they'd expected to end up at some other, more tranquil destination. A strange, interesting city, looking and feeling to me in many ways like a mix of Paris and Madrid.
Navigating the Metro system brought me to the lower end of La Rambla, where I discovered I'd booked a room in a joint right on the main drag, a joint that has shown itself to be a find. Not because of its location -- La Rambla turns out to be my least favorite part of the city, a zone geared to tourism in fairly raw form -- but because they actually gave me an apartment, complete with small kitchen, high enough up to provide views of rooftop Barcelona, of the hills that ring the city, of church domes and towers. With a good 25 or 30 feet of terrace, running around the flat's two outside walls, complete with a couple of chairs. Not that yesterday's weather permitted terrace lounging. But today's has, and during a brief late-afternoon return to the flat, I lounged a bit, a few peaceful minutes that felt just fine.
[continued in next entry]
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Convenience store, Barcelona -- getting right to the point:
Madrid, te quiero.
rws 8:33 AM [+]