November 4, 2003 -
“You set me on fire!”
This is not a passionate declaration to a local senorita. This is a disbelieving summary of very recent events. I stare incredulously at Rachael, the little Reese Witherspoon look-alike with a heavy British accent, across the table from me.
“You set me on fire!” I repeat.
“You deserved it,” she says defiantly, but I can see she feels awkward. The scent of burnt skin and hair permeate the air.
“There is a line,” I state, never one to pass on a prime moment. “Setting me on fire definitely crosses that line.”
Joanna, sitting next to me, murmurs her agreement.
“Fuck all y’all,” Rachael declares.
Great. She finally gets it right, after four weeks, as I'm sitting here smelling my singed flesh. She has been trying, ever since I once spouted the phrase, to use it appropriately. Fortunately, the jugs of wine and pounds of lamb coursing through my veins have dulled my nerves, and I don’t feel the pain that must accompany the smell. It is the last night of school and we’re all out celebrating. Rachael and I have spent the meal stealing and sabotaging each other's drinks, and the evening has culminated in this.
“Where to next?” is the general question.
“How about the Eurotrash bar,” I suggest. Last weekend, a couple of us entered a glowing green storefront to be immersed in the sounds of muted kick drums and random German phrases.
“That place sucked!” Anna from Maryland objects.
“Yeah, but it’s close, it’s free and drinks are cheap.”
This logic proves to be unassailable, and we head down the block. Tonight, the music is much better - hip hop and break beats. Twenty of us take to the dance floor, and suddenly the bar becomes a party. This has been a theme of the last few weekends. We descend upon a local club to begin jumping around and gyrating with joyous abandon, often until sunrise. Knowing no-one else, we have instantly become each other’s best friends. Tonight, however, is the beginning of the end. Having finished classes, most of the students will be leaving soon, returning to their home countries, or seeking out new ones to explore. By this time next week, our numbers will have dwindled by half, with further departures pending.
I am feeling quite pleased with myself. School has just ended and I have already landed an apartment and a job, conducting the hunt for both entirely in Spanish.
I have to move out of the room where I was placed for the duration of the course. I have been staying with two French girls and an English girl who graduated last year and have since been teaching in Barcelona. They breathe hash like air and play cards a lot. I have often emerged from hours of homework in my room to a living room hazy with smoke and the three of them hunched over the table, laughing and cursing as they slam cards down. I have been lucky to have such friendly hosts, after hearing horror stories from fellow students about rules governing their use of common spaces and prohibitions on house guests.
I have searched online and in classified ads looking to sublet a furnished room, many of which are readily available. The first place I visit is in the heart of the Gothic Quarter, the cool bustling center of the city’s night life. It is crisscrossed by narrow winding streets full of bars and restaurants, a medieval maze. I cross the Placa Reial. In a city of breathtaking sights, it stands out. It is a large square bordered on all four sides by a series of archways with a fountain and large palm trees in the middle. Leaving the square, I walk down a little street and through a small crowd of Moroccan drug dealers who permanently inhabit the block. At the corner, I turn down an empty alley. I come to an old wooden door and ring the bell. I am let in by a pretty girl with glasses, a pierced lip and a joint in her hand. She shows me around the place. It is a raw loft space with brick walls and a tiled floor. Four bedrooms lie off a mezzanine that overlooks the main common area. The vacant one has a window into a little courtyard. This is common in buildings here. They have been built with tiny open spaces in their center where people hang laundry off of small balconies. The rooms that face these get no daylight. I have been living in such a room for the last month. Talia, the girl, tells me between puffs that she is a law student, one roommate is a photographer and the other is unemployed. His room stinks of dirty clothing and feet so strongly that I make up my mind then to continue the search. The decision is cemented by the revelation that the room is being vacated by a girl who can’t stand the insects that crawl out of the coarse brick walls.
After visiting a couple other places, I have settled on a small but bright room in the apartment of an Argentinean brother and sister. I chose to seek out Spanish speaking roommates to improve my own. Catalan, the common language here, resembles Spanish mixed with a lot of French, but is distinct from both. I can tell the difference when I hear them now, though I hardly understand either. Although my Spanish has improved immensely since my arrival, I still labor to spit out grammatically incorrect sentences and my vocabulary is deficient. I speak a lot less at home than I ever have, but the atmosphere is friendly.
The place has a Brady Bunch kind of sixties feel, with a large living room and deck. It’s in a neighborhood called Gracia that is peppered with little squares where people gather after work to eat and drink on the patios of cafes.
I am actually working as a teacher. Each week, I sit in the living room of a nice middle class family and teach English to six girls, three nine year olds and three eleven year olds. Mostly, we play games. They all study at school, and the parents want me to encourage them to talk. The older girls are quite serious, and know a lot of words, though they don’t speak in sentences. The younger ones are very giggly and just natter in Catalan. After two and a half hours with them, I’m ready to go to sleep.
It has rained so much in the past couple of weeks that I run out of underwear. My home, like most others it seems, has a washing machine but no dryer. Clothing is hung outside to dry. In a moment of naive optimism, I spread my stuff out on the balcony and pray that the weather will hold. It doesn’t, and three days later, my socks, jeans and boxers are still damp. I check the forecast online and purchase new underpants for every day of predicted rain. I have been told that October is the rainy month, and it will clear up soon. In fact, there is no rain forecast for the first week of November.
On Halloween, I dress up as Frankenstein and meet up with some friends to go to a party. The Spanish don’t celebrate the holiday, so I draw a lot of amused looks as I wander alone through the streets with a bolt through my head and blood running out of my mouth and nose. I get to Miranda’s apartment where everyone is getting ready. Miranda, her sister Lizzie and their roommates are going as the different seasons, and have covered themselves in leaves and flowers. Matt is a ghoul and Mike is a hippy. The staff of the bar downstairs are amused by our get ups and offer us a free round of drinks. Then we climb into taxis and cross the city to a large apartment where foreigners in costumes mix with locals in sneakers and hoodies, everyone drinks sangria and chats.
The next day, we meet up in Ciutadella, a small park near the beach with an elaborate fountain and palm trees, where people come on weekends to form drum circles and dance until sunset. Afterwards, lounging in a bar full of beds, we discuss how Barcelona doesn’t really exist. The rest of the world has melted away, and we are in the middle of some collective hallucination where the international, fabulously stylish roam ancient streets in a city by the sea, surrounded by mountains with castles on top. It’s going to be one hell of a come down.

- J Guevara