Bilbao to Barcelona
September 18th 1995
On Monday morning, i managed to get up by about half past nine. Just in time to say goodbye to Begoña and Konor as they went off to Konor's school. Feeling much less than half alive, i gathered up my things and stumbled out the door.
It was going to be a seven hour journey and i didn't fancy my chances of finding anything i wanted to eat on the way, so i thought i'd better at least buy a loaf of bread. That way i'd have something in my stomach during the day. Trying to buy food near bus stations is more often than not, very difficult, but there was a small food shop not far away and i went in and bought a loaf of bread. They also had jars of cooked things, which still seemed to be a more common way of selling those things than tins, and i bought a jar of lentils and a jar of red pimentos. That was a possibility that hadn't occurred to me before, a cheap source of ready to eat vegan food, that was widely available.
I guess i was kind of lucky to have got on the bus, as there was only one empty seat as far as i could see, and i must have been one of the last to buy my ticket.
Seven hours on a bus wasn't really a long trip for me. And compared to some of the travelling in Indonesia and Mexico, it was just a short hop. But i was glad to get off by the time we reached Barcelona. There was something especially uncomfortable about the design of modern bus seats, which you didn't find in old buses. The bulge at the top of the seat back, which forced your head forward, for instance, seemed to be a hideous form of torture on a long journey!
Anyway, the bus finally stopped at Barcelona's Sants railway station and i could straighten my back and stretch my legs again. I nearly forgot my second bag, which was in the luggage compartment under the bus, but i was only just across the road when i realised i was missing something. I got a map from the tourist information stand in the station and i phoned up El Lokal to see if Joanma was around. He wasn't, but he was supposed to be turning up there later, so i decided to make my way down there straight away and hang around.
I'd never met Joanma, but we'd swapped email messages via internet quite a bit over the last year or so and he knew i was coming, although he didn't know when. It's a bit strange, going to meet someone you know only through net connections. In a sort of way, you already know each other, but only sort of. You can't help wondering if you'll actually like them when you meet up!
El Lokal is an anarchist centre in the middle of Barcelona. It's got a bookshop on the ground floor with a meeting space out the back and office and storage space upstairs. There's a distribution collective, a publishers, a support group for the Chiapas indigenous struggle and other things based in the building. There were a lot of interesting books in the shop - mostly in spanish, but some in catalan and one or two in english, as well as music cassettes, t-shirts, badges and the rest of the things you expect to find in an anarchist bookshop.
They told me Joanma would be in later and i hung around there for a good couple of hours waiting for him to show up. I didn't want to go away and come back again, in case he came and went in the meantime. Anyway, eventually he appeared and as he was going to be in a meeting for a while, i decided to go out for a walk and a look around.
Not far down the road from El Lokal, was the Ramblas, the famous wide avenue that ran from the Plaza de Cataluña down to the docks. It was a place i knew quite well from previous visits to Barcelona over ten years before. The Ramblas had a wide pavement running down the centre, with one-way roads either side of it and in the middle, opposite where the road i came out of, there was a newsagent's stall. "I know that place, i thought", as soon as i saw it, "there used to be a dragon on the wall somewhere around here". I looked up, at the sides of the buildings above the level of the shop fronts, and quite quickly spotted the dragon i remembered. It was a chinese-style dragon and it stuck out at an angle from the corner of a building, like a shop sign. And it was still there after all that time.
And, an even more amazing sight, there was a falafel shop just across the road from it! Falafels, takeaway vegan food! It hardly seemed possible after all this time! But yeah, it was true. I got falafel in pitta bread, which was a bit expensive for what they gave you, but really no more so than Sydney's lebanese takeaways. Anyway, i didn't care, at that point, i would have paid double. Not only was it a pleasant change from the impossibility of finding any takeaway food in Bilbao, but i was starving and i ended up getting a second one from another falafel shop further down the Ramblas, which wasn't nearly as good.
Later on, when the meeting at El Lokal had finished, we went to an anarchist bar called "Dos Pasos Al Norte", round the corner from the bookshop and had a few beers and more food.
- - -
Joanma lived in a tiny flat a block or two away from the bookshop. It was on what was called the third floor, but you had to climb up two flights of stairs before you get to what was called the "principal" floor and then two more to the first floor, so it was really on the fourth floor. And it was a good bloody climb to get there!
As time went by in Barcelona that week, i found myself becoming more and more claustrophobic. Not just because of the matchbox-like dimensions of the flat i was staying in, and the fact that it's only real windows looked out onto a vast expanse of concrete wall, about four feet away. But the whole design and layout of the city is so cramped and crowded that it feels like you're in a straight jacket when you go out of the door.
The old parts of the city, like the area where the bookshop and the flat were, were made up of a maze of narrow streets, just wide enough for one car, but so narrow that the garbage trucks had to drive with one wheel on the pavement. The buildings that lined these streets without a break, except for where other streets turn off, were all at least half a dozen stories high. I didn't handle the claustrophobia of cities well at the best of times, even the relatively spacious cities in Australia, and the effect of this boxed-in feeling in Barcelona didn't do my head any good at all!
I just wanted to get back to Australia and get out in the bush at Wyndham and escape from all this concrete, all these people and all the horrible polluted air i was having to breathe and the chemically tap water i had to drink. Or at least, back to Maldon, to the relatively open spaces and cleaner air. But it was going to be a while before i could go back to Britain. I'd intended to leave Barcelona on Thursday the 21st, but that was only a couple of days really, and it didn't seem like enough. Besides, there was a fiesta at the weekend, being put on by the Ateneo Chino, the anarchist social centre in the Barrio Chino (literally "China Town", but in no way resembling the "China Town"'s in Sydney or London), to celebrate their first anniversary. I thought it would be worth hanging around to go to that, so i decided i'd leave on Monday, instead. I half wanted to leave on Sunday, but it just didn't feel like the right day to move, despite the fact that it was the new moon that day. Apart from anything else, i really didn't like travelling at the weekend if i could avoid it.