When friends and fellow citizens I greet ask me what I will do during the upcoming holidays, feigning that apathy so typical of coffee shop conversation that hides the sole intention of spewing out their own summer plans, I am pleased to await the look of disbelief and weariness I will provoke by telling them that, as is tradition, I will stay in Barcelona. Indeed, while most residents dream of August arriving so they can bugger off to play the fool in Empordà, I take the opportunity to enjoy my own city, which is not only one of the most beautiful in the world, but in summer has the grace of being without Barcelonans.
This is one of the few privileges of the underdeveloped life of the homo autonomus: while your peers spend the summer bothering the natives of Empordà with their predatory capital presence, which includes the horrifying uniform of prototypical white linen shorts and the even more execrable snack menus with which the pixapins stuff their stomachs in Tamariu, I spend the dog days enjoying the tamed Rosa de Foc and a city that, despite living at half-speed, remains a delight. And in Empordà, as you will perfectly understand, we will proceed to bother and go running in September, like educated people.
The inhabitants of Barcelona are a misanthropic species with an adorably lazy spirit. Try to propose to your neighborhood companions a change from the usual vermouth at Xampanyet in the Gothic Quarter for a short metro ride that allows you to go up to Quimet de Horta and you will see how the reactions are scandalous, as if one had asked for a slow pilgrimage to the top of the Himalayas. So also at night, when the inhabitants of the cap i casal get most indignant when someone dares to ask them to go empty beers beyond the mental borders of our bars (in my case, well delimited between the Belvedere terrace of the Mercader passage and the illegal tables of the Ascensor bar on Bellafila street).
I say this because summer is an ideal time to get rid of our ancient laziness and exercise in the art of moving our ass and not, as the pretentious people at Time Out say, to discover (ugh) our city, but to treat ourselves to pleasures unattainable for many fellow citizens of civilized Europe, such as a walk through the nooks and crannies of Carmel or a bar crawl through the hideouts of Sant Andreu. Between queuing up hot at Cala Estreta as if you were entering the Birkenau gas chamber or walking calmly through Barcelona, at home we already have the choice agreed upon and digested.
Between queuing up hot at Cala Estreta as if you were entering the Birkenau gas chamber or walking calmly through Barcelona, at home we already have the choice agreed upon and digestedIf you are readers of theThe New Barcelona Post you still have more reasons to stay home. Our colleague Jacobo Zabalo keeps us promptly informed about Barcelona's cultural offerings, a program that does not cease during the summer (just this week I was able to attend the start of the festivalBachcelona, with a series of Bachian soul concerts to make your eardrums salivate that will last until July 8) andthis servant is also addicted to Cristina Sala and Quim Riera's magnificent urban art chronicles, which genuinely make you want to explore the city and discover the sculptural richness we have right under our noses and which, if it existed in Tokyo or Stockholm, would force us to spend a fortune on plane tickets to feed our culture-vulture soul.
Staying in Barna during the summer may produce smirks of self-satisfaction in the interlocutor, but I would say that the seeker of solitary places in Lisbon or Milan will make a much greater fool of himself than the Barcelonian who enjoys one of the best tasting menus in the world at Dos Palillos on Elisabets Street (for a price four or five times lower than an equivalent restaurant in London) and then goes up to the terrace of the Hotel Camper, inside which one of the best bartenders on the planet is hidden.
When the culture vulture travels to New York, he takes on the task of putting on his hiking boots and investigating the progression of formerly industrial neighborhoods, see Queens or the Bronx as a prototype, to explain to his amiguis how the effects of gentrification lead to first-order urban transformations. I don't see why Barcelonians can't apply the same logic, even if it's a bit artificial, to our city and in that way sniff out not only the factories of Poblenou converted into university libraries, but also play with the shadows of Raval Sud or see for the first time Torre Baró, La Mina or Trinitat Vella, places where (as the artists of the "Sixteen Neighborhoods, A Thousand Cities" project already studied in an incipient but very healthy way) a story of Barcelona is hidden that we don't always have in mind when we refer to the city itself.
Let no one be mistaken, I ask the opposite of treating the city itself with the forced eyes of the tourist who travels in search of pauper singularities: on the contrary, I advocate staying and visiting Barcelona this and every summer as a militant, joyful and necessary civic activity. If your colleagues don't understand you when you propose it, answer them: "you don't know what you're missing."
I advocate staying and visiting Barcelona this and every summer as a militant, joyful and necessary civic activityEvidently, not even the unbearable heatwave will make me lose the desire to write and gloss Barcelona for the followers of this my dearest Post. Evidently, this summer I also work and you will have the result in the coming weeks with new traveling Punyaladas. Because I don't know how to walk without writing. In fact, you already know, they are exactly the same thing.