Barcelona

Hola from Barcelona, a sort of Paris-cum-Playa drenched in sunshine, history, food, passion, and art. I’m here with a torn meniscus and I don’t typically consume beer, bread, or octopus, so it’s been interesting. My feelings have oscillated between “I miss home” and “Lord how America sucks, this here is the center of the universe.” Extreme feelings from a moody gimp not quite in his element.

When I landed here I could barely walk. As someone who eschews alcohol and does his physical and emotional processing at Ecstatic Dance, I’ve felt stifled, unhealthy and emotionally vulnerable. The language barrier doesn’t help, and neither does all the booze around. Drinking is virtually mandatory.

My best friend is getting married here. He invites me to taste the food at the venue two days before the wedding, a staggering four-hour culinary orgy with wine pairings for everything. I realize when we try to explain to the event manager what a Chupah is - and that we’re going to need two wine glasses in pillows to be smashed by foot - that this is probably the very first gay Jewish wedding in the history of La Cúpula del Garrafe Restaurante. With the acro yoga photo shoots peppering Ceremony day, all the Spaniards are tickled and amused, the Americans jet lagged and delighted.

My newlywed friend invites me to brunch the next morning. Is it a sit-down-in-a-restaurant affair, I ask. No way, I’m assured, just a casual friend thang! I arrive at the restaurant, Flemánt, and tiptoe through the kind of palatial, polished palace the ghost of Queen Elizabeth II must do brunch at when she’s en route between a Parliament meeting and a signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The absurdity of the situation is sharpened by the two people in our party writhing and cackling as they peak on mushrooms, saucer-eyed, with orbiting limb gesticulations and esoteric giggles agitating the thick atmosphere of octopus risotto, goat cheese, cannelloni and truffle oil. My bill for three courses and three glasses of wine totals €21. I’m still struggling to understand how this food thing functions here in Spain.

Another aesthetically gifted adventure graces Rafael and me when we visit Cap de Creus, a wonderland of psychedelic rock formations on the coast just south of the French border. It’s got the technicolor saturation of Painted Rock in Death Valley, the other-planetary weirdness of Haleakala Crater on Maui, and the edge-of-the-world desolation of Point Reyes shore. Salvador Dalí lived around here and was inspired by its surreal magic. Bonus, the Spaniards have installed random monoliths of corten steel that make you feel like you’re in that one scene at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. At one point I feel like the massive winds could pick me up and deposit my paralyzed body into the Mediterranean Sea, and to die there I might be honored.

Cap de Creus under an absurdly hued sky. The staggering mindfuck that is Antonio Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia. Girona, perhaps the world’s most effortlessly beautiful city, under a full moon on New Years Day. “Tonight, it’s actually a Wolf Blood Super Moon,” I’m told. All the better. Coming from safety-obsessed and Puritan-bred United States, I’m dumbfounded by this region’s respect for design. That’s what I mean in the first paragraph; Paris, the art-nouveau wonderland, meets the Burning Man Playa, where art for the sake of art is as abundant as dust.

Art, design, whimsy. Passion. Respect for food. A work ethic that isn’t suffocating. People who look you in the eye and smile and engage. I love these things about Barcelona. But mostly I love the quality of the eggs here. Their yolks are always the color of blood oranges.

Starting 500 years ago, a succession of explorers from around this sea went exploring and found the land we Americans now call home. They delivered gifts like horses and smallpox and death, and they brought gold and corn and tomatoes back to Europe. Today the Bay Area is the technology capital of the world, a handsome gifted teenaged brat some 6,000 miles away from the old world. Today, wrinkly wine snobs and beer-guzzling skaters in Levi’s alike dance around the carrers and cathedrals that existed way before Queen Isabella sent Columbus west to bring back a bunch of curry powder from India.

I do my best writing at odd times. Half of it writes itself in my head when I’m partially asleep, then I just inscribe later. The other half comes when I’ve spoken with no one for days because I’m in a strange foreign land and all the compressed chatter in my head gets squeezed out through a pen with some colorful eloquence.

One night in Barcelona I’m feeling empty, bored, alone and devoid of plans, and it’s freezing out. From bustling L’Eixample I walk through a parade of punks and skaters that transitions the setting to the Islamic part of El Raval. Kosher meat, dozens of fruit shops, lots of bustle and yelling. A woman is lounging sideways in the back of a black BMW 740i with the door open, having an antagonistic conversation in Farsi with two laughing men standing seven feet away; the gap is large enough that strangers stroll through its odd space as they traverse the street. Glistening and grit, a white Range Rover cruising amidst crusty squalor.

Later I’m on La Rambla, simultaneously cleaner and less dignified. Walking alongside me are two African women each on the arm of an African man. The women are taller than me and the man is about five inches taller than them. They move like graceful tanks, speaking in exotic tongue, as passerby stare slack-jawed and completely awestruck. Further down at a street cafe, a group of men sits drinking with giant Palestinian flags draped over the backs of their chairs on display. The next cafe hosts about a dozen people, each drinking beer from a one-liter stein. The exception is the one six-year-old girl drinking orange juice, from the same size stein, with a bendy straw. I sit at yet another cafe and order some tea and chat with the Nepalese owner. I have a Nepalese friend, I tell him. What is her name, he asks. Jui Shrestra. He seems puzzled by the name. A man then walks up from the Rambla and offers to sell me a giant bow and arrow. I don’t think I can get that through customs when I go back home. A woman walks by; we lock eyes for a second and she blows me a kiss before continuing on.

I left Barcelona last night at 10PM. I just arrived in India.