De Perros y Limones

Barcelona and so much more

So, I wrote this the night before the bombings in Sri Lanka.  It did not seem right to post anything on a blog that expressed how happy we had been previously because, frankly, after the dreadful news, we both felt the opposite. 

Our physical selves are still in Spain but our thoughts, especially after being with Sri Lankan friends for two weeks, are still 5000 miles away.  The shock of what happened in the country that we lived in for so long  hasn’t  gone away yet.  And neither has the anger and despair.  We haven’t lost loved ones but we know people who have.  And we mourn for Sri Lanka right now and fear the place that we left behind will not be the same ever again.

So I am publishing the blog as I wrote it.  Reading it now seems like the events happened in a different time.  We are both thinking of our friends and family back in the country that we met and married in.  I don’t know what else to say.

Paul

24th April 2019

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Sonalee and I have been on holiday for two weeks during our holiday of a year.  We have had our friends from Sri Lanka, some Canadians and old friends from Europe visiting Spain.  It has been very hectic, involved much driving and been a fantastic experience for all of us, including our menagerie of animals.

To begin with, we had my old colleague from Colombo International School, Andy.  He had made the journey from Sri Lanka for ten days especially to see us.  That in itself is quite a compliment and means a lot to the both of us since he is, for all of his eccentricities, a good friend to the both of us.  He is one of the few blokes able to allow Sonalee to relax enough on an evening out to get ‘a bit pissed’ whilst he and I share the memories of many many hours coaching and playing football on the mean streets of Colombo.

On the eve of saying goodbye to Andy, after showing him the many sights of Granada and Cordoba,  we welcomed three Canadians to our house, three strangers who were to look after our animals for our time away.  What better way to greet them than by taking them out to the next village to ours for tapas and pizza?  And then quite a few bottles of wine back home? Early the next morning we faced a ten hour drive to the outskirts of Barcelona with Andy as an uncomplaining passenger to be dropped off en-route so he could catch a bus to Malaga and a fry-up that awaited him in the nearest British café/bar he could find on the Costa Del Sol. A drive through Spain is never one to be taken lightly nor is it one that never fails to intrigue.  To plow through the different geographical, topographical and economic regions is an opportunity to appreciate the diversity of such a large country and to ponder just how it manages to work so imperfectly and yet so with so much social cohesion.   And to say that it is a large country really doesn’t do it justice – it’s huge.  It’s huge for the likes of me who has only ever lived in the tiny islands of the UK and Sri Lanka.

And it never disappoints.  To see the seemingly endless olive fields finally give way to wheat fields, then huge vineyards occasionally allowing cement factories the size of small towns to encroach upon their territory and then orange groves three times the size of Wales give permission for astonishing hilltop castles to flourish alongside massive Mediterranean port cities is to see Spain at its most diverse.  It really does surprise you at every turn or, as you chug along in your Citroen Berlingo, at every 100 km or so. And this is before you reach the behemoth of a metropolitan area that we shall call Barcelona. 

Sonalee’s oldest friends from way way back in the olden times – before email and facebook! – were having a reunion to celebrate their collective 50th birthdays.  The epicentre was to be in the commuter town of Sant Cugat, a charming town full of flavour in its centre but with banal, identikit soulless modernity in its outskirts, as is the norm in the modern world.   That it also has an astonishing number of parks for kids, parents and dogs to play in certainly redeems it and makes it such a great place to bring up a family.

This is where Sonalee’s friend Dilhani and her Spanish husband had decided to stay awhile.  And what a place to stay with two young children.  Seriously.  If you’re after a family friendly place, you couldn’t have picked better – Spain or Catalonia or any derivative thereof just does it so much better. 

It was, it has to be said, a huge shock to Sonalee and I.  We were suddenly plunged into a world of people who shower daily, change their trousers daily, wash their hair regularly and who don’t have to worry about neverending mud, bits of nature attaching themselves to our clothing or hair, animals who can’t find opportunities to chase rabbits and an accent that actually makes sense.

It was all a bit much for us.  We were spooked.  We found a supermarket that sold the luxury that we call Halloumi cheese.  We were more shaken.  We bought the cheese.  We bought something familiar – apples – so we could feel more like normal.  We dressed in non-campo clothing once again, indulging in the feeling that we had rejoined the world that we had left behind in Colombo.  That world where you actually care how you look to others.

If you have visited us, as many have, you will know what I am talking about.  Fuente Tojar life does away with such veneers as clothing or hairstyles.  Here, in this simple village you don’t need to display such vanities because no one here cares.  They really don’t.  

For the important occasions such as a wedding, confirmation or a parade then yes, you have to make an effort.  For the rest?  No worries.  Dress how you like.  No one is that bothered.  For the funeral of an extremely well respected ironmonger who was very popular, as happened last week , you can turn up in your work clothes or your day-off clothes.  No one cares that much.  All you have to do is to be there to show your respects. 

The dissonance between village life that we experience daily and that of the wonderful weekend we spent in Sant Cugat is so stark that it has left the both of us slightly shocked.  We knew that Barcelona was a huge metropolis that attracted millions of people each year because we’d already been there a few years ago as two of  those tourists that made the charm of Las Ramblas disappear beneath a so many footsteps. 

What I don’t think we realise was just how much the hordes of tourists had taken over the city so that it became, in parts, a sad parody of what an attractive destination should be.  There was nothing in the southern parts of Las Ramblas that you couldn’t see equivalents of in Paris or London or Madrid– so many mime artists, cheap Chinese crap to buy, endless banal guide books, Barcelona Football Club flags and shirts, trashy souvenirs that you’ll soon forget the meaning of the minute you unpack them and other garbage that means nothing except to say that you have ticked off one more thing on some supposed list that society tells you is really important.

It’s a load of rubbish.  It didn’t used to be.  Barcelona used to be something a little bit different from the norm.  It is just that mass tourism has spoilt whatever special thing Barcelona had.  It has now disappeared, been swallowed by that thing called making money.  Parts of it are still there but you really have to work hard to at finding it.  When you do find it, it is really worth the effort, for Barcelona has a special place in Spanish life and has done for hundreds of years – a place that is celebrated and despised in equal measure depending upon where you are from and what your political allegiance is.

To dismiss Barcelona as a mere tourist trap is, although partially  true, is to do it an injustice.  It is more than that.  It is the centre of Catalan culture and has been a bulwark against centrism alongside its fellow rebels in the Basque region and Valencia and others who have all agitated against the dictacts of central government in Madrid.  And this is partly why we both love Spain – the Spanish have a natural love of being a bit difficult and dismissive of central authority.  They love bending the rules, not for money, not for personal gain, not for status, not for favour but just because they feel it will be the right thing to do so.

We have seen it.  We saw it when we applied for our residency visas.  When we bought our car.  When we applied for our NIE’s.  When I found out we were months behind on our payments for council rates.   There was nothing illegal.  There were no bribes paid.  There was nothing underhand;  it was just an understanding that we were foreigners, we needed a bit more time, we were obviously good for it and, frankly, the government wasn’t the mechanism to make the decisions, the people we were dealing with were.

Our tickets for the ‘Shit of Fortune’. A donkey is paraded around a numbered square in the village car park. The number that his/her poo lands on will win the ticket holder a thousand Euros

It is such a breath of fresh air for Sonalee and I to be able to deal with people who think like this.  In Sri Lanka we dealt with many people who were in it for a bribe.  In the UK we were only able to deal with people who were doing exactly what they were told with no room for personal or professional interpretation.  In the UK you are told that there is only one way – the way the government tells you. – read 1984 and you will know what I mean.   In Spain there is more than one way.

The Spanish way produces more issues, this is true – this will need to be talked about and the Spanish love to talk, so is this thing  a bad thing?    It also produces more humanity, is empathy such a bad thing?    And more smiles.  This cannot be a bad thing, surely? 

This thing, this  Spanish thing.  What have Sonalee and I done to be so involved in such a thing?  What has this country that we have criss-crossed done to us?  What has this place done to us to make us so ebullient and  enthusiastic? We barely understand the language at its most basic, we have no idea of the political and social pressures that bind it and yet we find that we love it more that we could have ever have imagined when we first arrived nine fraught months ago.

  • Doggie Pics!

Hasta Luego

Paul

Melodia FM has to give way to Radio Two who banged out this tune on our journey to Barcelona.

Paul

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