Barcelona by myself

I think one of the most important lessons in travel is just seeing that it’s possible. I romanticized travel (or rather, people who traveled) so much when I was younger. I assumed that people who traveled were innately smarter, more cultured, more beautiful, better. They knew something I didn't. They had secrets they chose not to share. But, alas, it's not as tidy as that. As with everything, it’s not as much about what you’ve done or where you’ve been as what you choose to get out of it.

In the break after my first semester, I bought a ticket to spend a week in Barcelona. It was the cheapest flight on Google Flights and I needed to leave the country soon for my visa. I had no plans, no contacts, no obligations and no knowledge of the Spanish or Catalan language.

My first night there I was so excited I went for a walk in the rain. I rounded the corner outside of my AirBnB in the Gothic Quarter and stopped in my tracks. It was the cathedral of Barcelona, appearing out of nowhere, like the page of a pop-up book.

I stood there for a while, looking at it stabbing the night sky. Then a stranger gave me gave me a map of the city, a nice, big, beautiful map, and I went to a little, twinkle-light lined restaurant where I ate fries and finished Thunderstruck, a collection of short stories by Elizabeth McCracken. My family had picked it out at Parnassus in Nashville and mailed it to me for Christmas. I loved living inside those stories, the blended worlds of loss and joy and oddness and wonder. After I finished it, I sat there a while and thought of things I hadn’t remembered in forever.

I thought of the first time I traveled by myself, when I took a train to Montreal one summer, where I didn’t know anyone and blushed anytime I tried to speak French. That first day, it felt like I had to be breaking rules of some kind and then I had to keep reminding myself that there weren’t rules, that I was kind of a grown up. And that realization made me buy an ice cream cone and walk in big circles around the Canada Day celebration, feeling very old and young and nervous and excited until I went back to my dorm room and watched the ceiling fan until I fell asleep at 9 pm.

Whenever I travel, I get the strongest hankering to read. I told this to Rachel who so succinctly said that “seeing more of the world makes you want to see inside people’s heads, which is what reading lets you do!” I found an English bookstore called Come In English Bookstore and blissfully read my way through the rest of my week.

I didn’t get lonely while I was there; I didn’t wish I was traveling with someone. I liked watching couples have their pictures taken, hearing study abroad students gossip loudly in English. I thought of my grandmother a lot over the course of the week. I thought how she never minded doing something by herself – going to the Rose Bowl, traveling across the country, taking a hike on her 12^th birthday. For her, being the only one to do something was never a reason to not do it.

Despite enjoying myself, a few days in, I was overcome with homesickness. I missed my family: dad’s crackly laugh, mom’s sunniness, Katie’s humor, Rachel’s company. It hit me out of nowhere, and so there I sat in the corner of a café, eating a pork sandwich and having a little cry to myself. Traveling is all well and good, but people need people, I decided, and I will always need mine.

 

I managed to shake my melancholy though while I explored the city. Flying in, I was struck at the diversity from above. Most regions are defined by either ocean, mountains, or city. But Barcelona has all three, in what looks like from above, the photographic rule of thirds. I walked everywhere. I tried to see everything. I spent a day just walking down by the port, looking at the water. I took a day trip up to Montserrat, a monastery nestled in the mountains outside the city.

 

On Friday I met up with my friend, Wade, and we went to the home of a Fulbright researcher where we had a giant potluck made from rummaged vegetables. That weekend we visited the Hospital Sant Pau and afterwards had an enormous lovely, paella lunch. We talked about oral history and The Great British Baking Show and living abroad. After spending so much time by myself, it felt lovely and warm to be around people I enjoyed, to laugh, to linger over food and wine.

When Wade and I were in Chefchaouen, he had said offhandedly, “Traveling is actually just eating.” At lunch with the other Fulbrighters, we imagined a public art piece, one of those giant chalkboards, that says “Traveling is actually just…” and then passersby finish the sentence. We speculated possibilities: traveling is actually just burning through money. Traveling is actually just getting from here to there. Traveling is actually just asking for the wifi password. Traveling is actually just looking for a good cup of coffee.

Being around so much art, history, such a different culture and language, and then talking to researchers made me get back in the mood to learn, teach, study, read, explore, to conjugate verbs and listen to music, to make lists and forget about them. The main thing it did was hit the reset button. I boarded the plane back to Rabat ready to invest again.