We cannot talk about Barcelona without talking about the chicken restaurant. When we were here last, as a family, more than ten years ago, we arrived on Easter Sunday to a city shuttered and desolate: all locals at home, all restaurants closed. But we discovered, in the neighborhood of our apartment, a blue-and-yellow storefront, brightly lit inside—and, once inside, a warehouse-like space decorated with blue-and-yellow farm implements. We were the only ones there. The menu was simple: half a chicken, half a chicken with potato croquettes, half a chicken with gazpacho. We were served by an attractive young woman named Julia. (I remember no distinguishing features other than that she was attractive and young; my father says she was tall, dark blonde, handsome “like a farmer’s daughter”. I remember nothing about the food—nothing about my first taste of gazpacho, nothing to distinguish this chicken from any chicken I ate subsequently.)
But that dinner somehow became the defining memory of our trip: we cannot talk about Barcelona—Spain, really—without mentioning the chicken warehouse, or Julia (always three syllables, the first one high-pitched and whooshing, like an owl). Dad, in jest, pines after her; I have always supposed I ought to do the same, though my pining has no human detail to attach to.
My sister’s apartment in Barcelona is around the corner from a blue-and-yellow chicken warehouse called Los “Pollos” de Llull. Naturally we have to go back: same décor, same checkered tablecloths, same menu, same curious lack of patronage. Our server is a stocky, dark-haired woman. “Julia?” I ask my parents after she leaves, but they shake their heads. At least I have material for half of the memory, now. I’ve learned something about food (also, I suppose, women) in the last decade, and understand the chicken: loaded with thyme, and a sprinkling of curry powder, each piece moist with fat rendered, while rotating, from skin crisped to near-blackness.
Alas, still no details about Julia. As we leave, I ask the woman at the cash register whether there was a waitress named Julia employed some time in the last ten years. She seems totally unsurprised by the question. “Ah, Julia,” she says (Julia with a Catalan j, before she corrects herself and switches to Spanish). “Colombian. Pretty. A good worker. After ten years maybe not so much anymore. She doesn’t work here now.”
My first night in Barcelona is blustery—high winds from the waterfront, and tall waves on the Mediterranean.
Protest washes over us gradually: first leaflet tumbleweed, then patches of graffiti so fresh they still glisten. Suddenly we’re surrounded by a chanting crowd, waving baseball bats, with far-off police sirens behind. As quickly as it appeared, the mob evaporates, and we find ourselves in the middle of an empty street, a row of police in full riot gear charging directly towards us. (We duck out of the way.) The Catalan leaflets are incomprehensible, but smashed-in bank windows are not. The alley we duck into returns us to ordinary nightlife, with intermittent recrossings—the protests, too, in waves.
In college we always used to joke that the Fung Wah bus was a kind of discontinuity rather than a vehicle—that whatever it looked like on the map, all of America’s Chinatowns formed a single, connected topological space.
To residents of the Bay Area, the local metropolis is not San Francisco but simply The City. Likewise the NY/NJ/CT region; likewise the UK (allowing for a slightly narrower interpretation of the name). A parody of a classic puzzle from philosophy of language: I’ve lived on boath coasts—can I, while of sound mind, simultaneously believe that The City is home to my favorite bagel shop, and that there are no good bagels in The City? Or that The City in summer smells like garbage and jasmine? How does the name designate?
The Plaza Catalunya, the top of Market Street, Canal Street and Picadilly Circus all have the same shops; the same rows of African men hawking counterfeit Gucci leather, tied against theft like dog-walkers to their purses; the same erhu players wailing away on their strings in subway tunnels. There are differences, certainly, but differences not so much greater than one finds between the Upper East Side and late stops on the 7. And I know where to go for good jamón ibérico in New York, good dosa in London, a good Williamsburg-ish Sunday brunch in Barcelona. I’ve taken subway trips that lasted longer than the flight from Luton to El Prat—planes really do stitch spaces together like our non-Euclidean Chinatown buses, and It feels like what I’ve arrived in here is not the city of Barcelona but some Spanish enclave within the global City. I am never far from home.
We’re lucky to have only one day of blue skies in Paris. That city is most beautiful in near-monochrome—all pearl and cream and ash; soot-darkened limestone and luminous tin.
It’s a long time since I was last in Paris, and I don’t remember much of the previous trip. I have never, in particular, understood western culture’s crazed romanticization of the city, its persistence in film and literature—even in video games—as a dream-home, a place of perfect repose. Now here, I understand. This is an image of one of our utopias, where everyone sits in sidewalk cafés, manufacturing culture; where suffering takes the form of heartbreak (this is after all the lovers’ city) but never hunger or thirst—how could it, with good bread and wine so close at hand? So we can drink our coffee in the shade of buildings too grand and superflous to have been built by free citizens, and enjoy beauty without the guilt by association we would feel if the Sun King were a creature of this century.
But of course there is still poverty, and ambition for even greater monuments.