Nehaveigur

The conference ended on Friday afternoon and my flight didn’t leave until Saturday. I was free to spend Friday night exploring Barcelona on my own.

From my hotel near the Yacht harbor, I walked north into the old town, and kept walking for most of the next four hours. Soon, I left the parts of the city in which the majority of the walkers were tourists and entered the streets full of locals. A temporary stage at an intersection seemed like a good place to sit down for a while. Initially there was a band playing rock, but later they were replaced by a women’s choir. I bought a beer and watched a group of 10 year old girls follow any couple that walked by, chanting something in Catalan. It couldn’t have been malicious, because they got all of the couples to laugh or at least smile.

Later, at another stage in a less well-off part of the city, a young woman and a young man stood on a stage and gave a speech in Catalan. It was a call to resistance, because I could make out words like “gentrification”, “capitalism”, and “colonialism”. They looked like revolutionaries: He had curly hair and a face that wasn’t too dissimilar to Che Guevara’s, and she was tall and beautiful There was a Palestinian flag behind them.

To me the strange thing was that they both read their speeches of their cell phones, which they held in both hands in front of them. Even the most incendiary call to action fizzles out when it’d read off a small screen, without changing your pitch or any hand gestures. I assumed all of this was quite obvious, but no-one had told them.

I felt smug about this until the speech ended to scattered applause. Without me noticing, one of their accomplices had laid out a line of firecrackers in front of the stage, which he set on fire. The last fire cracker was incredibly loud, and my ears kept ringing for several minutes.