"Please, no more Catalan," my wife, Barbara, protested. "You're giving me a migraine." It was our first morning in Barcelona, and things weren't off to a great start. As soon as we landed I realized my faux Castilian wasn't going to get me far in this fiercely proud, Catalan-speaking city.
It's a family sickness. When I was a kid, my schoolteacher mom turned vacations into history lessons. Barbara is not that kind of traveler. She is a creative wanderer who frowns on guidebooks, preferring to stroll along waiting for magic to happen.
Barcelona is not an easy city to decipher. To understand her, says Teresa Vilaros, a native who is a professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Aberdeen. "You have to seduce her to find her secrets; she shows herself only to a select few."
Clearly we were going to need help. The man for the job would be a young American habitue of Barcelona named Jordan Susselman, who fell so hard for the city when he visited in 2000 that he decided to stay and unlock its secrets. In 2006, he started a tour company called "Hi. This is Barcelona."
Susselman led us on a Barbara-style stroll through the old city, focusing on offbeat sights most tourists pass by: The offices of a Catalan hiking club, on Carrer del Paradis, which houses four Corinthian columns from the Roman Temple of Augustus. A parking lot, jammed with motor scooters, that Susselman proclaimed "my favorite vista in all of Barcelona".
"The whole history of the city is here," he said, pointing out remnants of Roman aqueducts, the crumbling walls of a Gothic palace, an 18th-century church, an ornate modernista building, and a jazz club and organic restaurant called Living.
Like Susselman, we wanted to discover the soul of this city slung like a hammock between mountains and sea. And what could be more soulful than the Boqueria market, with its riot of vegetables, fruits and fresh, glistening fish?
Yet there is something even more compelling about Barcelona than its markets and traditions: a pervasive sensuality that seems to captivate all who enter its energy field.
Susselman led us through the jumble of narrow streets that compose El Raval, once Barcelona's seedy underbelly; the barrio was a source of inspiration for Picasso, as well as the setting for The Thief's Journal, by Jean Genet. You can still engage the services of one of the many hookers who line the streets, have your pocket picked if you're not careful, and order absinthe in some of the old bars.
But gentrification is under way: You can catch an exhibit at the opened-in-1995 Museum of Contemporary Art, or get a massage at Mailuna, a teahouse and spa. Or do as we did, and have tapas with a nouvelle twist at El Jardi, a cafe tucked among orange trees in the courtyard of the former Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, a striking work of Gothic architecture where Antoni Gaudi, mistaken for a beggar, was brought after being hit by a tram - and died.
After saying goodbye to Susselman, we decided to devote more time to formal sightseeing. Our first stop was Pinotxo, at the Boqueria market, known for its classic truita amb pataca (omelet with potatoes), which we finished off. We then headed for the Eixample, the city's open-air museum of modernista architecture. Though everyone visits Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's haunting, unfinished "expiatory temple" that he worked on for 43 years, until his death, in 1926, we were more interested in his less ambitious works, especially Casa Batllo, a newly refurbished house on Passeig de Gracia.
The exterior is a magical homage to Sant Jordi Saint George, the dragon-slaying patron saint of Barcelona, with a shimmering Monet-like facade, an undulating dragon-scale roof, and columns shaped like bones. The interior is even more seductive: A free-flowing world of rounded windows and doorways and aquamarine tiles that makes you feel as if you're floating underwater.
From there we headed to Gaudi's Casa Mila, an otherworldly apartment building with cave-like walls and serpentine balconies, capped by a surrealistic roof deck studded with white chimneys and ventilators (which, allegedly, were models for Darth Vader and the Death Star's guards in the Star Wars films).
After wandering Casa Mila's curvilinear passageways - there are no straight lines in Gaudi's universe - we felt as if we had stepped through the looking glass. The next thing we knew, we were lost in the backstreets of Gracia, a mazelike neighborhood near Barcelona's university. Her face brightened as we came upon Placa de Rius i Taulet, a charming square with a 19th-century clock tower and a gaggle of children chasing a dog around its base.
After the sun set, we found our way to Mesopotamia, an appealing Iraqi restaurant in the heart of the neighborhood. As the Iraq-born owner, Pius Alibek, fed us dishes he had learned from his mother - including the house specialty, bulgur with minced beef, vegetables and nine secret spices - I discovered another secret about Barcelona: Nobody is exactly who they appear to be.
Alibek not only holds a PhD in comparative linguistics; he was awarded a Medal of Honor by the mayor of Barcelona for his promotion of world peace. What's more, he hosts his own program on Radio Catalunya about cuisines of the world.
The next day was the Feast of St. John the Baptist (Sant Joan), a holiday celebrated with fireworks and seaside bonfires. The art critic Robert Hughes says that the key to the Catalan character is the interplay between seny, which is usually translated as "common sense", and rauxa, "uncontrollable emotion". At the Sant Joan feast, Barcelonans experience rauxa in all its Dionysian glory.
When we ducked into Senyor Parellada, a restaurant on Carrer de la Argenteria, between the El Born and Barri Gotic districts, little did I expect that we were about to have one of our best meals in Barcelona.
Everything was superb. The xai de Montseny - roasted lamb with roasted garlic and creamy potatoes - was so tender that I moved it to the top of my best-dish list, unseating the celebrated leg of lamb at Chez L'Ami Louis, in Paris.
After dinner we got lost, but in the process happened upon a block party where a salsa band was playing and a crowd of locals, young and old, sat at long tables, downing pitchers of beer and platters of grilled shrimp. Suddenly, the music slowed, and the street filled with swaying bodies.
I took Barbara's hand and we began improvising our own soulful version of the samba. This time, a silky breeze was blowing off the Mediterranean and brilliant fireworks lit up the sky.
(China Daily December 27, 2007)
