Tourist

In France, I could pretend, at least until I opened my mouth, that I lived there, or could sort of flatter myself from time to time that even if I was visiting, I had come to the city from the provinces or vice-versa. We made a pretty good effort to avoid the worst sorts of tourist traps and our best experiences were in at the homes of locals.

Here in Barcelona, by contrast, there’s no denying that we are just three more of the hundred of thousands of tourists who’ve come to the city to look around, eat, drink, and clutter up the streets, restaurants, and museums with their bodies, voices, and backpacks.

It’s hard to come to terms with, but what can you do? The fact of the matter is we’re here to look around; none of us speak the language, and all we really have to offer the locals are our Euros, many of which continue to pour from our wallets just as quickly as we can extract them from our pockets.

That said, we have seen a few reasonably cool things today along with the rest of the crush of humanity that is enjoying them as well. We strolled through the La Boqueria and ooed and awed over dried pig in all its forms; it might have made me wish I was a meat eater were there not an equally amazing array of fruits and vegetables, including a whole bunch of types of tropical fruit I’ve never seen before.

Then, we marched along this grand boulevard to eye a couple of Gaudi’s masterpieces; the lines to get in to both of them were entirely too daunting, so we just stood outside and made plans to beat the tourist crush early tomorrow.

By chance, we did find our way into a tapas restaurant frequented mostly by locals; I had an order of fried potatoes, a choice so safe it obviously marked me as a visitor.