What I'm Up To/ A Little Bit of Barcelona

Coming to Barcelona is like stepping into a slightly different world. Everything is ever-so-slightly askew. Garbage trucks arrive every night at midnight, and when Alan and I, bleary-eyed and suitcased, trundled towards the train station at five in the morning, the streets were crowded with late-night revelers stumbling home and gypsies selling single cans of beer from six-packs. During the day, the main drag, La Rambla, is filled with a peculiar brand of street performers. There are the usual jugglers and human statues, but most people simply stand about in fabulous costumes. There was a man dressed as Edward Scissorhands who had taken off his scissor-hand gloves and was calmly smoking a cigarette and staring into the distance as people threw coins into his hat on the ground. Another person of indeterminate gender (Alan and I argued about it nearly every day) was dressed as a tree, twigs strapped to his or her fingers, making subtle movements and poses or rolling one of those contact juggling balls up and down his or her arm. Just down the street is the sea. You cross a dock and arrive in a mid-water upscale mall. Everything is expensive, the architecture is a startling combination of old, new, and absurd, paella comes with all shells and legs and eyes still attached and ten o'clock in the evening is a perfectly reasonable time to eat dinner. Alan and I finished eating around eleven or midnight most nights. I will be working next summer at a university just outside of Barcelona, and I am looking forward to further exploring this city. It is enormous. Alan and I, made lazy by the almost constant rain, mostly just walked up and down the streets and ate long meals, but there are museums and churches and clubs to last a person for years. Here are a few photos I took the one completely sunny day in Barcelona: