Marlow and Wes, Barcelona, 18 September 2012

It is 8:15 p.m. We are in Barcelona. It is twilight. We are sitting in a plaza, a small plaza--there are hundreds of them--under a canopy of leafy trees, chestnut and palm.

There is a gentle breeze and the sky looks like rain.

Barcelona is old. When Emperor Augustus established an official city here two-thousand years ago--yes, 2000 years ago, old, old, old--there were pre-existing villages many centuries old established atop Montjuic.

This particular part of Barcelona--where we sit, the part visited by travelers--is a maze of narrow streets-too narrow for cars. The streets twist this way and that without right-angles. Getting lost is easy and if you land in an unusually attractive area it is fun, but if you arrive at a gritty, urban, street-urchiny dimly-lit alley it is scary; at least to me it is.

Currently it is 8:15 p.m., too early for dinner for the locals. Instead we are having wine and tapas. The wine is Rioja Crianza. Rioja is the region and Crianza indicates a style of wine-making (aged two-years with at least six-months in oak). Our tapas are two small dishes: 1) Chistorra ala sidra (thin, salty sausage, grilled with cider, sliced into chunky discs); and 2) Escalivada con queso de cabra (mixed vegetables--usually eggplant and red peppers--foil wrapped and roasted till they dissolve--topped with goat cheese and put under the broiler).

Life is good.

Our stay in New York City was marked by good weather, good food and a very good play. The play, "Grace", has four characters: a husband; a wife; a disfigured neighbor; and an exterminator, Ed Asner. They grapple with finding religion, losing it, and general meaning-of-life issues. The playwrite (how does one spell playwrite?) In an interview said, "at the present time America is having an on-going conversation about whether it is a secular democracy or a religious theocracy". I am loosely quoting him and I read his words after seeing his play, but he delivered his thesis with a touch that was light, clear and articulate.

But back to Barcelona, on these ultra-narrow streets the buildings on either side are consistently three to four to five floors tall with balconies often hung heavily with drying laundry. It rains frequently. The streets below the balconies are somewhat dark, but clean. Very clean. Every day we see mini-street-cleaning vehicles accompanied by a footman with a high-powered hose traversing the pathways' nooks and crannies.

Although summer has passed and autumn has begun, the locals are still dressed in shorts, tee-shirts and sandals. And I must say, at the risk of generalizing, the Spanish, the Catalan people--men and women--are very handsome.

"Catalan," for the unfamiliar, is the name of this region and of it's language and of it's culture. The language began one-thousand years ago as a spoken tongue. Two-hundred years later it evolved into a written language with it's own poetry and literature.

Several times the Catalan culture and language were under threat of extinction, but it's hold on the local people is so strong it could not be exterminated. When threatened it went into hiding in the mountain villages one in particular, Montserrat,  the site of a legendary monastery where Catalan was preserved while it was outlawed by the government of that time. Today, though everyone speaks Spanish (or as it is called here, Castilian) the semi-official language is Catalan. It is taught in the public schools and is the language of the greatest minds in this region.

As a spoken language, the sound of it hits my ear like a melange of Spanish, Portuguese and French. Of course, if I said that to a Catalan they'd smack me.

After all of these sidebars, I return to our table in the plaza at the Tantarantana Bar where our glasses are empty and our tapas plates have been cleared.

Will we now go in search of dinner? Or dessert? Or an adventure on a narrow winding street......?

Marlow and Wes in Barcelona, 18 September 2012