First, you will have seen that you did not come from any airport. I don't know if you come from Paris, New York, Madrid or Brussels, or forgive me, yes I do know: Charles de Gaulle is a post office box office with airs of a Discovery spaceship, JFK has the aesthetic grace of a commuter train station, Adolfo Suárez is like looking for the exit of the children's area and, in Brussels, beyond Tintin's rocket and the grand piano, it's like the EU's foreign policy: nothing would happen if it didn't exist. Only in Barcelona is landing a takeoff, a recovered dignity after having been a sheepish passenger, Roman senate marble bathed by the sun from high windows, well-ordered shops and bars, not an inch of carpet, elegant and gentle like the savoir-faire of the late Ricardo Bofill. Oh, and don't mind the name that, like me, must seem very strange to you: you are at Joan Miró airport.
Secondly, to tell you that you arrive in a city as full of fuss as all the others, but infinitely more vain; much more concerned with looking good and with a pathological self-critical obsession. It's not that we miss the Olympic Games, it's that we very quickly forget that the Olympic Games miss us. Hello, how are you? We are the fucking Barcelona. It would be very long to explain, but imagine that you are in front of a person with so many traumas that it is difficult for them to know where they are and what they want, except that they have the natural (and painful) impulse to tear down walls and expand. Everything else is a great contradiction, a manifest bipolarity, a delirious surf and turf paella from which numerous frustrations arise, but also, as you will have seen, very outstanding genialities. You will like its color or not, but I tell you that you are not in a gray city.
The natural wall is marked by a biblical condemnation (Tibi Dabo are the words the devil uttered to Jesus Christ to tempt him in the desert), a mountain with a military castle, and a sea that is like a joke, like from The Truman Show, placed there just to see if we dared to cross it. If you have landed at night, you will have seen that cars make red or yellow lights alternately depending on whether they go up or down the streets of the Eixample, because you will see that everything here is very politicized. On the balconies you will see a picturesque melting pot and perhaps you will intuit that the tie-breaker, if it ever happens, will also happen in the Eixample. For some reason, that's where the modernist bourgeoisie settled, unlike the current one, which prefers to settle outside of reality.
On the balconies you will see a picturesque melting pot and perhaps you will intuit that the tie-breaker, if it ever happens, will also happen in the Eixample. For some reason, that's where the modernist bourgeoisie settled, unlike the current one, which prefers to settle outside of realityAh, yes, about the night topic: we go to sleep early, we are not the city that never sleeps.We believe that the party is only during the day and we turn our nights into true Gotham scenarios. Even people who live alone live a family life:at eleven it's time to brush your teeth and go to bed, because you'll see that here we don't celebrate things, here, in any case, we commemorate them. The nightclubs are rather far away, save for a couple of exceptions, and if there's a neighborhood for local partying, it will be Sant Antoni or Gracia where, except when the main festival is celebrated, the commotion will always be reduced to a few decent, beer-drinking hours. Perhaps you'll find a jazz cave here and a hotel terrace there, but little else. All the subsequent sordidness we relegate to the tourists and Ciutat Vella, where we let them sort it out among themselves once they've realized they won't get us out of the house. Unless one day they buy it from us, of course.
You'll see that, with the resounding erection of the Sagrada Familia's last star-topped tower, the Easter-less cakes that criticized the temple's construction have become small. From so many drops in self-esteem, we have even come to mock our best prodigies, when for years the Eiffel Tower has been praying that the Núñez and Navarro houses continue to bother on Mallorca Street. But yes: let's talk about talent and research, and R&D and creativity, which seems to be the future, etcetera, but, let's stop the Sagrada Familia. In any case, don't be scared, all communities have neighbors who neither do nor let do and who look down. You, who come from outside, have already perfectly identified who the beauty of the party is.
And for the rest, well, you see: there's something worse than not wanting the airport's third runway, it's not knowing if you want it. There's something worse than losing the Hermitage, it's not having an alternative for the area, and there's something worse than not having Winter Olympics, which is having presented a project more artificial than May snow. Barcelona is a yellow and black taxi with the green light on, driving aimlessly, with a brother-in-law driver who has come to believe that Madrid is better and I don't know how many more stories. Don't listen to him when he takes you from Joan Miró airport to the hotel: Barcelona lives in a poorly digested success, but undoubtedly lives in a success story. Tell him from me to take you for a moment to the exhibition on Frida Kahlo at the Ideal space, which I think is the fourth they've done since 2019. They say they want there to be a similar space in a city that calls itself Madrid, but the original is always to return to the origin.
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