Nehaveigur

A recent work trip to Barcelona afforded me some time to explore the city. I grew up in Vienna, which, like Barcelona, is a major tourist destination. The old towns of both cities feel similarly overrun by tourists and avoided by locals. However, when I was a kid in Vienna, I never much thought about tourists. It wasn’t anything anyone minded or talked about, and neither did I. Barcelona residents tell me it’s different for them: tourist overcrowding is a big topic.

The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new places, but in having new eyes (Marcel Proust). Now that I live in California, I see Europe and its cities with different eyes. New eyes, new questions:

• Why do the women in bachelorette parties look so unhappy? Is it the realization that they should be having fun but aren’t?
• Why do souvenir shops all offer the same fridge magnets and T-shirts (“My boyfriend went to Barcelona and all I got was this lousy T-shirt“)? Is this what the market demands, or is it a lack of imagination?
• A question I had previously was: Why do some people think that medieval architecture is beautiful? I have always considered it clumsy and unattractive compared to what came later. After seeing some of Barcelona’s medieval architecture, and specifically the Palau Reial Major, I understand. It’s magnificent in a way that’s entirely different from the magnificence of later times.
• Why do Europeans consider swearing in English acceptable? There are posters in English all over Barcelona that read “Did you remember to drink enough water, you stupid bitch?” At an outdoor neighborhood concert with lots of families with young kids in attendance, one performer kept saying “Fuck“. Similarly, some of the relatively high-brow German newspapers whose websites I sometimes visit often contain articles that have English profanity in their headlines, when they would never do the same in German. Why is swearing in a foreign language more acceptable?
• Why aren’t there more restaurant catering to single diners? I feel self-conscious having dinner by myself, especially on a Friday evening when everyone else is meeting their friends. In America, I would solve this by finding a bar that I can sit down at and order a beer and food, but walking past dozens of restaurants in Barcelona, I didn’t find a bar that served food and where I wouldn’t have been the only single customer. I finally found a food market that sold spareribs and went with that. In case you’re considering opening a restaurant in Barcelona, this may be an underserved market.
• The food at the conference I attended was worse than the food at comparable conferences in America, yet the food that’s available in restaurants in Barcelona, even if they serve tourists, is better that the food that average restaurants in America serve. Why?
• There are small supermarkets and pharmacies at almost every street corner in Barcelona. This is a big contrast with America and its Costcos. Why are stores so fragmented in Barcelona? Is it regulation, absence of space for bigger stores, the lack of cars, or something else?

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