Barcelona- After a series of difficult decisions and taking an unusual amount of personal risk, I’ve finally escaped from my going-nowhere existence in NYC brought on by what has seemed like (some of which is pure clickbait e.g. “The Case for Wearing Masks Forever” in a recent issue of The New Yorker) a forever global health crisis that has changed our world irrevocably or so some were direly predicting in 2020-2021. I was reflecting the past two days that after coming here for now 18 years I have seen this place grow and change. Change in terms of demography, modernisation, and integration with the wider world. Despite calls, often loud ones, for separatism deriving from a kind of chauvinistic linguistic nationalism based on present perceptions of long-held collective historic grievance, Barcelona is firmly part of a united Europe in the most positive iteration of that ideal. And that ideal was shaken to its core with the introduction of massively draconian lockdown norms far more severe than anywhere in the United States by comparison. By a friend’s telling, one could get stopped and even fined by undercover policemen for simply stepping out to the local bodega at the wrong time of day.
The Schengen agreement of a borderless Europe was either threatened or outright abrogated. The whole post-war order seemed to be at risk from a little understood infectious menace that rattled the whole world. But the world, our world, has come out on the other side of this and things are sort of ok. At least for now.
But things here seem quite normal save for a lingering mask mandate on public transport which is thought to be ending soon. BCN is facing many of the very same challenges NYC is from what I observed walking the breadth of the city’s core. An increase in homelessness, an influx of economic migrants without a societal framework to assimilate them, local politicians who seek to ‘decarbonise’ the city, a polarised political spectrum and so forth. The city has gotten younger or I’ve gotten older, perhaps both. I just have a deep sentimental attachment to this place, pickpockets, drug-addled tramps, air pollution and all.
Even being here shy of 48 hours has been immensely meaningful to me. Sitting in the winter sun. People watching. Small dogs, Intermingling Latin languages echoing through its jumbled stone corridors, tiny beverages with no ice unless you plead for it with smiling “disculpeme.” I still love this city and especially in winter when tourists are few and the gothic warrens are relatively quiet.