Gracias Barcelona

Empty and rotating, the baggage carousel turned while he watched in traveler’s denial.

“Yo creo mi equipaje esta perdido.”

“Uno momento, senior. De donde eres?”

“Desde Nueva York, y Londres.”

“Ah, si. Lo siento mucho, senior. Su equipaje todavia esta en Londres.”

After a broken back and forth he learned they’d ship his baggage where he was staying and he needn’t worry, so he kicked loose of the front doors and found the bus heading into city which he took to the wrong stop. Brightly colored, the people walked past him speaking fast and beautiful and for all that he understood, they might have been tropical birds.

Placa Universitat bustled with students and he made his way to the metro, enthralled and lost. The purple line took him to Pep Ventura in Badalona, something akin to Barcelona’s Brooklyn.

A very pretty girl with dreadlocks checked him in at the hostel, rattled off a lot of directions in Spanish that were heavily populated with the word “vale.”

A V that bounced in the mouth. Ball-eh. Vale, vale, vale, y tambien, vale.

At a cafe two streets off Avenida de Alfonso XIII he found one middle-aged gentleman watching futbol and nobody else. Unsure he looked around, but the man greeted him and so he sat down.

“Que quiere?”

He ordered a ham sandwich and watched the man grab the cured leg of the animal hanging from the wall and slice paper-thin pieces with a beastly carving knife, laying them across half a long, crusty loaf of bread. Turning, he asked if he wanted anything on it and the traveler asked for mustard.

“Mustasa? No, no, no.” The man said, looking at him as if he’d spat on the floor.

That first meal on Spanish soil was close to the best thing he’d ever tasted and it rushed through him like fresh air and life, the glass of San Miguel tasted like it’d been kept it in a cloud bank.

With a sly smile, the traveler eyed the cigarette machine in the corner and bounced coins in his hand.
He’d quit a month before he’d left, but… well fuck that.

A meal, a beer, a smoke. Disasters have been averted with less, he feels sure.

Four days in the hostel, four days punctuated with midnight rambles through the streets of Badalona where he’d watched a mermaid on the walk of shame and ate meals of tough, flat steak prepared by a Southeast Asian couple who ran a counter near the hostel. When the man placed a dish of olives next his glass of wine, he wants to hug him for it:

“A standard kindness perhaps, but home is far away for you, and so here is a glass of wine and some olives. In a minute, you can go outside and have a smoke and return to find us still smiling and asking if there’s anything else you’d like.”

After one 5am walk in which he tries and fails to watch the sun rise over the ocean, he listens to a quiet conversation over tobacco by several kids on holiday. All of whom live in London but call Sudan home. Later they’d invite him to watch the final game of the World Cup, and he’d find himself acting as both guide and translator to his embarrassment and pride.

So many Ducados in their white and blue package, their lovely harsh burn at the back of his throat, lit with countless disposable plastic lighters.

The morning of his last day at the hostel, two pretty Swedish girls he’d walked around the Barri Gotica with the day before¬, them shopping for swimsuits and him for one of Spain’s famous folding knives, had complained of the bad coffee at the hostel. It seemed mostly offered for American tourists who might be most confused by the tiny glasses of strong espresso and milk that were so common.

“Come with me.”

He’d led them to the little counter where at night he’d been given olives and kindness. Paying for their coffee, he sat back and lit a smoke and watched them enjoy it and wondered how it was that they had not discovered this place, it was only three blocks from the door of the hostel.

Lighting another in a long line of Ducados, he leaned back in the sunshine and inhaled, deep and languorous.

PHOTO: Avenida de Alfonso XIII at 4:30am in Badalona. May, 6, 2011