Looking for Barcelona

I went to Barcelona in February to see some of the works of Antonio Gaudí, my favorite architect, to escape winter in Pittsburgh for a week, and as part of my continuing search for the best place in the world for me to live. The trip was stressful and irritating, but also educational, and I did accomplish my goals.

I left on 5 February, the day of a blizzard in New York City, through which I had to pass. Suffice to say that, due to delays, I lost a day of touring to sitting in planes and airports. Instead of arriving at 8 am, I arrived at 11 pm. Mercifully, my hotel reservation was in order and I was able to go straight to my room after 27 hours of travel.

When I emerged the next day, I headed straight for the nearest Gaudí building--the Palau Güell--and began touring in earnest, alternating between the built or the natural environment, walking up and down the streets or through parks. After several days of strolling, it struck me that Barcelona is a city almost entirely of apartment buildings, 6 to 10 stories, with commercial on the first floors. There are no separate residential areas, no shopping districts, no office districts; it's largely homogenous. And the sidewalks are filled with people at all hours. There is no downtown association concocting special events to attract people from the suburbs to an office-district downtown.

Contrast this with most US cities, including my own Pittsburgh, where the suburbanites converge on the downtown office district every weekday morning, pour out onto the sidewalks at lunch, then high-tail it back to the suburbs at night, leaving the core deserted. In Pittsburgh, what the current City administration seems to consider a success is to keep the suburbanites in town after work for a few hours to eat dinner and go to symphony or the theater before going home to the suburbs a little later than usual. Or dragging them in for special events on the weekends resulting in terrible traffic. People don't seem to understand that in a real city, you live, work, shop, and play there, all without the need for personal transportation. If a city can be represented as a house, with different rooms for different activities, a typical American city's house would have the rooms separated by very long hallways.

Like most old cities, Barcelona is very pedestrian-oriented. In the Gothic Quarter of the old-town area where I stayed, there were many pedestrian-only streets, some only 7 feet wide. Mass transit is excellent, with subways, buses and trains connecting all parts of the city to each other and the city itself to the rest of the country. I walked all over the City in the five days I was there, aided by the dual-route, city tourist-bus service, for which I bought a two-day pass. Sometimes I took the subways, but mostly I walked to get the feel of the City. In such a densely populated city, the personal space around people is much reduced with people routinely brushing against you as they walk by. This was very unnerving and irritating. Sometimes they seem to head right for you and, at the last moment, turn sideways to avoid crashing into you. I was ready to kill them by the end of the week.

Gaudí's architecture was incredible and beautiful. Some of it was so bizarre, so fantastic, it was hard to believe that it existed. In its setting, however--a city that ballooned during the Art Nouveau period (late-1880s to early 20th-Century)--it was not egregiously different from other architecture of the period. It was the pinnacle of its style, however. In Pittsburgh and most US cities, and, indeed, in most of the cities in the countries from where those who built Pittsburgh immigrated, the architecture is very formal, regular, and symmetric. Gaudí's version of the Art Nouveau style might be described as radiation-mutated rococo. It is organic, irregular, and asymmetric. It looks fresh a hundred years later. And, actually, the church of the Sagrada Familia, begun in 1882, is still under construction so it's not surprising that it looks fresh.

Put all this together--a city on the Mediterranean, where the temperature stays mostly between 40ºF and 90ºF, a pedestrian-oriented city of beautiful architecture and good mass transit--and you would seem to have a paradise. But add to the mix litter and graffiti covering everything, diesel fumes and cigarette smoke everywhere, and cars and motor bikes permitted into the narrowest of streets, and the city becomes hellish. I couldn't get a breath of fresh air for several days until I walked up into the hill parks around the City. These were some of the things that made my visit stressful and irritating. Nothing was off-limits for the graffiti-vandals--new buildings, restored old buildings, thousand-year-old churches, Roman ruins--nothing. (At least in Pittsburgh, the vandals usually limit their targets to those structures that are obviously decayed and un-cared-for.) Throughout the day, litter was constantly being cleaned up but, overnight, significant quantities accumulated. Apparently, the only tool for combatting litter in Barcelona is the same as that used in Pittsburgh: cleaning it up after it is dropped. No effort is made to penalize the perpetrators.

My room at the Hotel California was small but completely up-to-date with private bath, phone and TV, and it cost only 70 pesetas (around $37) per night. It opened onto an inner light-well rather than a street, which I prefer because streets are noisy. Even the front door of the hotel faced onto a pedestrian-only walkway, though, so there was no auto traffic noise to deal with in either case. I say "pedestrian-only," but cars and trucks are permitted on some walkways for deliveries, which seemed to be frequent. And motor bikes go anywhere, at high rates of speed. With no threat of freezing, the drain lines for the plumbing fixtures are all outside the building, mounted on the walls in the light-well. So every time someone flushed a toilet or took a shower, the sounds of water echoed off the walls, and into my room. To this was added the nightly sounds of a cat in heat, the only similarity with home, and other hotel guests loudly returning to their rooms. At least I got away from the sirens and helicopters for a week. A restaurant on the next street backed up into the same light-well as my hotel, so my fresh-air outlet was tainted by smells of fried food. This meant that opening the window at night for fresh air made things only marginally better as I tried to vent out the cigarette smoke wafting up from the lobby. Even though the anti-smoking attitude in the US has gone overboard, I found myself longing for a little more of that attitude. There's nothing like traveling to make you appreciate what you've got.

I had no problems eating, with five vegetarian restaurants within a short walk, but the hours of operation for most restaurants I found very different from the US. They close after lunch at about 3 or 4pm, and then open for dinner at 8pm and stay open until midnight. In fact, most stores had the same general hours. Food and clothing seemed very cheap. I had an avocado salad every day; it was the size of two fists and cost only 380 pesetas (about $2). I saw a washing machine that looked exactly like the one I just bought at home for the same price as I paid here. My impression is that imported stuff cost the same as in the US but that local stuff was relatively cheap. The orchestral concerts I attended cost the same as here. The standard of living seemed as high as in the US with cell phones in evidence everywhere. Organic food was readily available in the health food stores. There were few obese people but I saw no hard bodies either, and no bodybuilders although I did see a couple of health clubs. Maybe they were used for aerobics.

I saw a lot of political graffiti, including anarchist, whatever that means over there. Barcelona is in Catalonia, an autonomous region. And Catalan, their language, seems to be a cross between Spanish, French and English. The official government language is Catalan with all signs routinely in both Catalan and Spanish. The desk clerk at the hotel claimed that if you did not speak Catalan, some jobs were unavailable to you, the implication being that Spanish people are discriminated against. This is understandable since the Spanish are looked upon as invaders and conquerors of Catalonia. People everywhere just want to be free, and this means being able to speak their own language and teach their children their own history, as well as having their tax dollars spent on them and not on people in other parts of the country. The Basque region, to the west, is in a similar, but more turbulent, situation. In a libertarian society, these conflicts could not exist. A government that does nothing but protect its citizens from force and fraud arouses no antipathy. This also applies to Northern Ireland, Israel, the former Yugoslavia, and Kurdistan.

In spite of the tourist attraction of the restored areas of the old town, there is so much more of the old town that is in squalor, that entire blocks of it are being bought and demolished by the City in an errant attempt at urban renewal. It seems that people are myopic everywhere. On the one hand, new buildings can look sterile and nondescript, and rarely possess a unique native character. And old areas, with buildings hundreds of years old marked with the scars of time, built in relative isolation from the outside world, usually possess unique characteristics which enables one to distinguish them by their region, if not even more precisely. On the other hand, there is a fine line between character and filth. In some of the old areas, the line was most definitely crossed, but the correct response is to clean and renovate the buildings, not remove them. People do not seem to be able to see through the thin veneer of grime and decay to the sound structure of a building.

When I visit any city, the question always in the back of my mind is "Should I move here?" On the one hand, I would not want to live in a sparsely populated, suburban-type area (widely spaced, single-family houses) since I don't want to be dependent upon personal transportation (the car). On the other hand, while I could definitely live in a densely populated area like Manhattan or Barcelona (medium- to high-rise apartment buildings) with all the amenities that such density brings, such as vegetarian restaurants and orchestras, I also like living in a slightly less densely populated area such as Pittsburgh, Brooklyn or Savannah (single-family row-houses), places with a lesser variety of amenities but which still enable living without a car. I continue my search for the perfect place for me, which would be a pedestrian-oriented, Victorian row-house neighborhood with easy access to a health-food store, a symphony orchestra, varied topography, mild climate, and no litter or graffiti, all in a country with high levels of both personal and economic freedom. Pittsburgh meets my needs except for the litter and graffiti, and the weather in January and February. It also suffers from the same lack of personal and economic freedom as do all US cities. In the meanwhile, I am aiming for maintaining a home in Pittsburgh while spending winter in a warmer climate and traveling frequently to other areas until I find the perfect place. Perhaps a cross between Amsterdam for personal freedom, architecture, and car-free living, and New Zealand for economic freedom, climate, and topography. I'm still looking.

Nicholas Kyriazi