BARCELONA by Michael Garry Smout
March and April
March: The two-week long Carnival is usually in February and just touching March but this year it's pretty much all in March. It's a rather lacklustre affair. Children wander the streets and go to school in costume - teenagers too - but there seems to be little imagination, with a predictable turn-out of witches, vampires and zombies (Halloween is not a dressing-up day). The big Barcelona parade, punningly called Barnaval, is on the last Saturday of the festival and what it lacks in money it makes up for in eager supporters, oblivious, in their skimpy costumes, to the usually cold evening. It’s run by the city’s markets and, let’s be frank here.....Rio, it’s not.
The sex, salsa and costumes of Rio are replaced by children,
cheesy pop-techno and hand written placards. There are some good floats and some
inventive costumes but one feels that Barcelona is just a bit too far north to really pull
it off at this time of year. The story goes that under Franco the thing was banned and
since then it has never really got back off the ground. A much better carnival happens
down the road at Sitges, so-called gay capital of Europe. Sitges follows true tradition
and it has the final parade on "Mardi Gras" (Shrove Tuesday). The town defied
Franco and the spirit lives on but it can get pretty deadly and the centre is sealed off
to prevent ‘glass bottles’, weapons and drugs from getting onto the street. If
your bottle gets arrested, find a plastic water bottle and the police will fill it from
your impounded criminal glass one. Not knowing the police hysteria, I turned up one year
with the ashes of a cremated friend in an urn that was due to be flown to the States.
Seeing my friend was now an off-white, cocaine-looking powder and the police were checking
everything, I had terrible visions of what was about to come down. (Both friend and I made
it through the checkpoint, but we got pulled aside and heavily grilled.). The next day -
Ash Wednesday - is the burying of the ‘sardine’, something I had never seen
until last year as it is mid-week. The event takes place in Barceloneta and not knowing
what to expect I forgot my camera - an error I’m still kicking myself for as it was
some of the best street theatre I have ever seen and blew the parade away. This year, with
camera in hand, I arrived to find a paultry gathering - no sardines on the grill, no
street performers, no fireworks. A total let down.
March is one of those frustrating, fickle months when you think the weather should start to warm up but doesn’t. But it’s still better than what misery is falling on England and Germany; hence, the lemming rush here to what tourists hope is ‘fun in the sun’, forgetting that Barcelona is on the same latitude as New York.
April: Aah! Now things start to happen. The canopy of trees down the Ramblas suddenly go leaf crazy, Mr. Sun puts his hat on and comes out to play, and spring is in the air. The 23rd is the day and seems to signal all sorts of things. The patron saint of Catalunya (and England) is Sant Jordi (Saint George) and the 23rd marks his saint’s day. It is also, in 1616, the day both Cervantes and Shakespeare shed their mortal coil. Back in the distant 20th Century the Catalans hijacked the Spanish Day of the Book – held in February - and threw the party on this day, adding a spring - and therefore a lover’s - touch by including the exchanging of books and roses, the roses having an added fertility symbol of a sprig or two of green wheat. (See photos from 1998’s event and 2000). It has got pretty much out of control with everyone from the cat’s mother to Uncle Tom Cobbley and all selling books or roses, making the city a slow-moving sprawl of...well..niceness; it is, even with all the commercialism, a nice day. This year the usual 10% off books has been extended for a week and it is no joke when I say that a third, maybe more, of Catalunya’s booksales are made on this one day. Exact figures later.
Go with the Catalans on this one, with the sonnets of Shakespeare and the misplaced love of Don Quixote, the worship of books and literature in general plus the first real sun of the year, this is the true lover’s day. Let the rutting begin...er...I should also point out that after the success of the Olympic games the Catalans got cocky and pushed UNESCO for this day to become World Book Day and, bless their cotton socks, succeeded. This year’s event, as mentioned, is a bit marred by Easter and the fact that the UK and Ireland have decided to hold it on the 10th of March. The UK’s emphasis for the day is getting children interested in reading and every UK schoolchild will receive a World Day Book token. There is also a lot of charity fundraising to get books to developing countries: check out www.bookaid.org. And just to round it off the 23rd is The Barcelona Review’s anniversary. Anyway, lovers around the world, get up, buy a book and a rose - each—swap and go back to bed to ...um ...read. The complete history of World Book Day can be found in TBR but in Catalan. ______________________________________________________ Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec
|
||||||
| © 2000 The Barcelona Review | ||||||
|
This article may not be archived or distributed further without the author's express permission. Please see our conditions of use. |
It was never The Barcelona Review’s
intention to enter the world of tourist information or even to draw too much attention to
the city unless, like Sant Jordi (World Book Day), it was literary oriented. The name,
like the Paris Review (long situated in New York) or Mississippi Review,
came about because this is where we live and where it began. But through much of our
e-mail - some from those who mistakenly surfed to the site looking for hard-to-find
tourist info, but most from readers and subscribers and even some contributors - we have
learned that there is a huge interest in the city, with one of the most frequently asked
questions being:
Fiction