Barcelona
September 22nd 1995
I'd spent a lot of time in Parc Güell, the other two or three times i'd spent in Barcelona. It was designed by Antonio Gaudí one of the most famous architects of all time, and one whose ideas still inspire people all around the world. He also designed the ridiculously massive Templo de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which had been being built then for over a century and was nowhere near halfway finished. It'd probably never get finished, but it was one of Barcelona's biggest tourist attractions nevertheless.
His work stands out from the dreary rest by virtue of the fact that it's not all straight lines and right angles. In fact, it's hard to find any straight lines or right angles in most of his stuff. His main inspiration for some of the structures in Parc Güell was rock formations found in the hills around Barcelona. And almost everything is curved in some way or other. He also used a technique of tiling things with broken bits of ceramic tiles, which has inspired community art in cities around the world. In Hackney, certainly, i know of a few things that are definitely inspired by the work of Gaudí.
Somehow, though, Parc Güell didn't have the magic for me that it had had in the past. It was probably partly the mood i was in. But i think it was mainly the change in my way of seeing that had happened since i escaped from Europe. In a european context, the forms and structures that you can find in Gaudí's work in that park are incredible, magical and inspiring. But taken in the context of the wonders that nature can provide when it hasn't been completely wrecked by human beings, Gaudí's stuff is a little lacking in impact. I still liked it, but i'd seen better sights since my earlier visits to Parc Güell, the sort of sights that the very existence of cities like Barcelona had irretrievably wiped from the face of the planet.
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After i left Parc Güell, i was going to go back to the flat and do some writing, but i just couldn't face being inside any more, so i ended up walking along the Gran Vía, which is one of the main streets in central Barcelona. It's really wide, with a large roadway down the middle and two smaller roads on either side, separated by wide strips of ground with trees along them and occasionally benches.
It was a disaster area that afternoon. All along the Gran Vía, shops and businesses were closed due to flooding and there were big trucks pumping water out of flooded basements. A large section of it still had no power either. It was an inspiring sight! The further i walked, and the more disaster i saw, the happier i felt. People destroyed nature every day and it was good to see nature hitting back for a change. It was just a shame it didn't happen more often, i thought.
There was a multi-level underground car park nearly next door to El Lokal and that was seriously flooded out too. I don't know how many cars there were down there, but there were definitely some. They were still pumping the water out of there well after midnight the night after the rain, so there must have been millions of gallons down there!
Unfortunately, though, El Lokal got flooded out too and books and tapes were damaged. And the concert which was supposed to take place that evening, at the beginning fiesta to celebrate the first anniversary of the Ateneo Chino, didn't happen because of power cuts. Well... every silver lining had it's cloud!
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Saturday, the 23rd of September, the fiesta did begin. The power had been fixed up and a bar was set up in Salvador Seguí Plaza, at the heart of the Barrio Chino, or Chinese Area, one of the poorest parts of Barcelona, which was just down the road from El Lokal and not far from that frantic tourist mecca, the Ramblas.
The Plaza was named after Salvador Seguí, who was a well known anarchist in Barcelona before the civil war. He was murdered by agents of the capitalist industrialists who saw him as a threat to their power and their ability to exploit the workers. The Ateneo Chino was an anarchist community centre, in Carrer d'un Robador (Robber Street) an extremely narrow street near the Plaza where the fiesta took place.
There weren't masses of people, although, considering the previous night's concert had been cancelled, that wasn't entirely surprising. But there were a couple of bands playing and a few different things going on.
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I had intended to get a sleeper direct from Barcelona to Torino, which was where i was going to go next. But the fare was too much for me really and i decided against it. I made up my mind to just get a train to the border and then see what i could find when i got there. I decided to leave on Monday morning, by the half past ten train from Sants station.
I would be glad to get out of Barcelona really, it had been a good stay, but i couldn't stand the claustrophobia any longer. I'd really had enough of being in cities, but i wanted to go to Italy anyway. Maybe i wouldn't spend very long in Torino, a few days would probably be enough. I wanted to meet up with someone else i'd got to know through the internet, and also i was supposed to meet a couple of friends from Melbourne. They'd been in Ghana for a couple of months, and they were supposed to be in Italy round about that time, but as i hadn't heard anything from them via the internet, i had to assume they were still in Africa.
The possibility of not going to Italy at all began to slowly creep into my mind on that Sunday evening. I really didn't feel like doing any more travelling than i had to and it seemed like a very long way to go for just a few days. I didn't make any decision then, i thought i'd just catch the train in the morning and see where i ended up. Either way, i had to go through Cerbère, the town on the border between France and Cataluña, at the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees.