Slush Pile #2: Barcelona Moments

We live in moments, and Barcelona holds these to the excess. No wonder Gaudí designed like a drag queens’s makeup- nothing subtle, everything exaggerated so angels sitting in Heaven’s back row can be blinded by his cathedrals. 

Passing a blunt on the beach at midnight, socks off, toes buried in the cold sand as my body heat warms what used to be seashells when Romans built a wall around the old city. 

Standing in La Cova Fumada shoulder to shoulder with Catalan faces that hold the wrinkles of fishermen, the tiny hole in the wall packed with families rotating small plates of tapas: gambes, pulpo, morcillas. Tiny fried sardines, salty as the ocean. I gulp my Estrella and devour another in two bites. Here I bite into the best morcilla- blood sausage- to ever grace a bar counter.

At a packed mega club as the sun creeps up, three layers of pulsating bodies and spilled drinks. I barely avoid being trampled when a beautiful young man taps my shoulder and smiles. I think he looks like my friend, so I tell him he looks familiar. “I’m a pro footballer,” he says in a French accent, and I tell him I know shit about sports. He leaves in a huff. 

I take the 150 bus to the top of Montjuic on a mission to see the sun set in Barcelona from a hilltop. I love seeing things from above- perhaps because at five feet, I live in a world of craned necks and stray elbows. The castle is closed when I arrive so I weave through the surrounding park, sipping vinegary corner mart wine as I wait 20 minutes for the sun to go down. I lie down on a bench and ignore stares of passerby. Why are they hurrying down after some obligatory photos, when they can see the sun set over Barcelona from a castle if they just paused for 20 minutes? Photographer Pierre Verger said that “Photography allows us to see what we don’t have time to see, for it is fixed.” If people don’t have time for the sunset when on vacation, then it’s a good thing we have Instagram. 

Barcelona street art is the shit- Standing next to some art my friend designed