Back in Barcelona

We decided we needed a day out of the city. A little quiet. I found a hotel near Tarragona, about an hour south. It looked great on screen, modernly renovated 18th century building. They had a room with a bathtub (!). Heaven. And for the first few hours it was wonderful. Then 12:30pm rolled around and the dinner party with three kids decided to take up residence in the lobby. Hopped up on sugar, the kids were screaming. And of course the cloud of smoke filtered into our room. The hotel staff told me they couldn’t possibly ask them to be more quiet. Okay. We switched to another room.

We’ve come to realize the little cultural differences that come to mean a great deal. Smoking. Loud voices. Treating public spaces as one’s living room. The seeming inability to walk on a sidewalk in any semblance of a straight line (VDD, variable direction disorder, as Gen named it). Smoking and the loud voices have the most impact. We are sensitive to smoke, being from LA, so the problem is worse. But we haven’t gone a day here without it. Sometimes it’s a cloud of smoke in a café. Sometimes it’s just walking behind someone who holds a cigarette, seemingly for effect because we don’t see people actually smoking, just holding the cigarette. The strange thing about this restaurant is that normally high-end haute cuisine restaurants are very concerned about the dining environment, and discourage smoking because it interferes with the taste and overall experience of the food. Not in this place. To their credit the staff was patient with our mediocre spanish and attempted to explain some of the dishes, which needed explanation even though we were reading menus in English.

Yet with all the smoke, Spain, like so many other countries, has a greater life expectancy than the US.