The harrowing tale of the Jews who Saved Christmas can now be found right here.

Ah, the intercambio. Barcelona is full of people from all over Europe, Asia, and the US, and they all want to learn new languages. This is definitely a good city for it. Obviously, everyone speaks Castellano, or the Spanish we learned in high school. Just about everyone who grew up here also speaks Catalan, sort of like French and English in Montreal. Franco tried to eliminate the Catalan language and culture completely, viewing it as a divisive force, but there now exists a law that requires 80% of public school instruction to take place in Catalan.

Since Catalunya is a region that includes part of France (and Italy, too) and since we are only about ninety minutes from the border, there are quite a few people who speak French, too. And there are an assortment of English speakers from the US, UK, Germany, and Scandinavia. On boards all over the city, people put up cards offering to trade conversation in one language for another. Intercambio ads appear next to the personals (which, by the way, appear to be a mix between regular old personals and actual prostitution) in several free papers. Everybody’s doing it. It seems like an easy and cheap way to improve your fluency.

But what’s not easy is writing the ad, we discovered, because it is considered best to write in the language you wish to learn, perhaps as a way of alerting people about how difficult it might be to understand you. Leah and I wanted to go to one together, so we had to figure out how to write a short note, in Spanish, announcing that we were looking for another couple to hang out with, without having it attract freaks. Who knows what “we are looking for a couple to talk to and teach us Spanish” translates to in the world of personal ads?

Right away, we got a call. It was actually a text message on the phone with someone’s number, asking that we call him back. That’s sort of a dirty trick here, where cell phone calls are something like 15 cents a minute, but I called. It turned out that it was a guy who hadn’t really figured out that there were two of us and wanted to talk to me. It was weird, we thought, to see an ad posted by two people and only call one of them. But our Spanish is not to be trusted to convey the meaning we intend – it’s possible that we wrote “An American who wants to learn Spanish can meet, but only at two” - so we gave him the benefit of the doubt. We arranged to meet at the language school for an hour of chit-chat.

But think about it. What’s an hour of chit-chat with someone you don’t know, other than a blind date? Yeah, I don’t know either. In languages neither of you speak. Nothing’s worse than making someone repeat a sentence six times, word by word, only to find out it was something like, “This is a nice café, huh?”

Luis and I got into trouble right away, because he had said he wanted to meet at the language school where we had posted the ad, and it was freezing, so I went and sat in the lobby. When I noticed that he was fifteen minutes late, I went to check outside. There was an uneasy-looking man with a Spanish-English dictionary, shivering by the door. “Luis?” I said.

“You are inside?” he said. “We said ‘at the school.’ That means outside.” Here are the things you need to consider when a person says something like that to you in such a context:
1. Is this a language issue? That is, does “at” really mean “in front of” in Spanish?
2. Is he angry about waiting, or is it impossible to read someone’s inferences in a language they don’t really speak?
3. How do you apologize in a way that actually placates a mad person? In English, for example, if you were late to meet someone you had never met before, and you sensed that they were angry, you wouldn’t just say, “Sorry.”
4. Are some people wound up just a little too tight, in any language?

“Let’s go have a coffee,” I said, still not sure if the guy wanted to a) kill me, b) have a normal conversation in English, then one in Spanish, or c) go out on a date with my wife.

“Coffee?” he said, looking unhappy. Who’s unhappy to have a coffee in Spain?, I thought. “If you want.”

I decided to pay him back for agreeing to have a coffee that he didn’t really want by offering to speak English first. “Wait,” he said in Spanish. “Are you from England?”

“No,” I said. “The States.”

“Ah,” he said. “Because you have a really bad accent.”

“Accent?”

“Yes. It is really hard for me to understand. If you could speak without it…” What is a person supposed to do with information like this? Never mind that we had written “de los EEUU” on our ad. (We’re the EEUU, for reasons no one can explain. A few people have said that we would be the EU – Estados Unidos – except people would get it confused with the European Union. But the European Union is the UE here in Spain, and the abbreviation EEUU existed long before the EU. Not important.) Really, what? You try it. Speak without your accent for a minute. Say anything you want. No, no, don’t speak with a different accent. Just speak without your accent. I’m not sure that it’s possible. It certainly isn’t easy. Saying words syllable-by-syllable didn’t seem to make a difference: I was useless.

Finally, I managed to ask him where he was from. “Here,” he said. Then I asked if he lived in the city. “Yes,” he said. Where did you learn English? “Wall Street Institute,” he said. And so on. He rambled on a bit about his job – he paints cars at a local Nissan assembly line, and, in fact, will be going to England in February as a translator for other workers. Since his English really wasn’t too much better than my Spanish, I couldn’t imagine how that was going to work. Isn’t the Nissan corporation of sufficient size to employ actual interpreters?

While he was talking, I discovered another problem. In real situations – i.e., those not created by answering an ad off a bulletin board – one has a natural desire to know what someone is saying. Either they sell something you want, or someone you know has introduced you and you’d like to make a good impression, or whatever. But here, the purpose was to talk. Sure, plenty of people make friends via the language intercambio, and for the singles set they serve as a pretty reliable dating service. But the point is to learn, really. Or at least that’s how I was thinking about it, sitting there listening to something about why the guy lives with his parents.

The bubble disintegrated. No, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. That comes later. February, maybe? But I had somehow wound up in a real interaction, full of phrases like, “So I make for the work of paint” (him), or, “So, how long have I live to Barcelona?” (me). There was nowhere to hide. I had finally found the Achille’s Heel of the Illiteracy Bubble, other than letting electricians into your home: actual conversation. Who’da thunk it?

Somewhere along the line, we made plans to meet again. I have no idea why. And this is where the real fun starts. Remember that time when Gloria made me late for something by insisting that I sit down to have coffee with her so I could, ostensibly, tell her if Leah was around and hear that my electrician was actually an unskilled drunk? Well, she had another purpose in mind, and though there isn’t room here to detail it, it has plenty to do with intercambios. For now, suffice it to say she didn’t want me to go meet Luis.

So I arrived at my second appointment with Luis – in Spanish, incidentally, the word for appointment and date are the same: cita – a bit late. As I was walking – no, running, running – there, I remembered that the place we had arranged to meet, at that first meeting that I was in such a hurry to escape from, was Placa Catalunya. Arranging to meet at Plaza Catalunya is sort of like arranging to meet at the Boston Common. It’s not so huge that it seems unreasonable when you make the plans, but when you get there, you realize that it is much, much too large to serve as a meeting place.

I walked around the Placa twice, making myself even later, but did not see the coffee shop he had mentioned. So I called Leah. As it turned out, Luis had called our house (Leah had the phone) and told Leah that he was waiting out in front of an internet café near the Placa. I walked to the café. Or, as it turned out, a café. Like I said, it’s a big place.

That night, I got a call from Luis.

“Oh, I said. I am happy that calling me. You lost…no, I lost the morning. I am very sorry. I walked nearby and nearby in Placa Catalunya.”

He answered me in English. “Well,” he said, then paused. “I don’t know what to say.” Now, that’s a puzzler, when this is the person who I’m supposed to be teaching English. Was I to picture him standing like an angry parent, hands on hips? Or was I supposed to just sympathize? After all, I never know what to say, either. Usually when you use that phrase, you don’t mean it literally, but who knows?

“Yes,” I went on in Spanish. “I am very sorry. Like he says, I am in Placa Catalunya, walking nearby and nearby at 10:30.”

“So,” said Luis, who knows the past tense, sometimes, in English. “You were not able to come?” Another toughie. If someone fluent said this to me about something I missed, of course, I would say, “No, I got lost.” But here, maybe he was understanding. I decided to take my chances.

“Sure, sure. Yes.”

“Well, you should call,” said Luis. That was about when I figured out that I had guessed wrong.

“I am very sorry,” I said again. “I tried to go. But I lost.” At this point, he was probably wondering what the hell it was that I lost that took up my whole morning. He didn’t say anything.

“I got lost,” I said in English. “I was not able to find the café.” I became aware that my English was sounding like I was the one that needed to practice before a trip to England.

“Ohhhhhh,” he said, then switched back into Spanish. “When…think…no…wife,” he said.

“Vale.” Clear enough, since I already knew the story.

“And also…café…Placa Catalunya…morning…I…a little_______.” I had a pretty good how he meant to finish that one, too.

“Vale.”

“So, do you want to meet…or on…or at…?” he said, still in Spanish. The multiple choice questions are the toughest. Sometimes I don’t even catch the format, and just say, ‘Yes.’

“Sí,” I said, hoping he would throw in a little more information.

“Bueno,” he said. “Monday…five…Placa Catalunya.”

As we say in Spain, perfecto. Except that I didn’t particularly want to meet in the first place. We shall see.

So there we were, one museum and one coffee break into our cultural Saturday, when we found ourselves outside the Casa Mila, the building that we already told you was designed for the Milas by Sr. Gaudi himself. It’s the building with the wiggly-looking façade that you’ve most likely seen if you’ve seen pictures of Barcelona. Some of you even got postcards that depict it. There’s a bank in it now, and the bank has been nice enough to open a bit of a museum in part of this building.

In this museum, we were delighted to find a free exhibit with sculptures by this British chap named Anthony Caro. First, there was a little movie about how he works, narrated by the artist. That meant, of course, that it was in English with Catalan subtitles. We were overjoyed. A vacation from the illiteracy bubble, plus something approximating a TV show. Joyous. What this meant to the Catalans, though, was the same thing it would have meant to us to see a movie subtitled in English at home: you can talk during the movie, as loudly as you want, since everyone is just reading. It was fun nonetheless.

The sculptures, we thought, would really look nice in our apartment. Though they weren’t made of plastic, they were generally done in cheery primary colors. Most of them were comprised of huge hunks of steel from ship engines, airplane wings, or girders, welded together in various shapes. We thought and thought about what they might mean, but it was tough to focus with the attached cards saying things like, “Collecion privado. Maine, EE.UU,” which made us say things like, “Hey! That art’s from Maine! I wonder where?” as if maybe one of our friends who live in Maine might be hiding a priceless collection of modern art.

Then someone gave us a ticket for the continuation of the show across the street, so we wandered over there. In a separate building, the artist, working in tandem with a sculptor who worked in clay, had created a 25-piece statement on the fighting in the Balkans. It was loaded with allusions to various Biblical stories and Greek and Roman myths. Even better than cards that said, “Maine!” It was like a little puzzle, in which art had been specially designed to help us remember some fun facts and stories that we already knew.

We ran around like we were on a scavenger hunt, staring at different pieces – say, one intended to represent the tribunals at which mass murderers who had served in various armies were tried – and then darting off to find each other with reports like, “I found the one with the River Styx! Look! There’s the dog with three heads!” We were drunk on competence.

As you might have guessed, of course, that competence was short lived. Within a few hours, we were hopelessly lost as we tried to find a Japanese restaurant recommended by a member of my Spanish class. We tried two different addresses, calling from the second to determine that 1) we’re more illiterate in Japanese-accented Spanish than in other forms of Spanish, and 2) that the first address was, according to the man on the phone, the correct one. As we walked on, frustrated, we stumbled upon another Japanese restaurant. The Chinese restaurants in Barcelona look like something out of the Sunday evenings of our childhoods: garish paper lanterns, six-page menus with drinks like the “Suffering Bastard” and the “Harvey Wallbanger,” and red pleather booths. They are quite cheap and notorious for being the places that English language schools call when they want to host a Christmas party for their employees. The Japanese ones, on the other hand, are pretty much the same as the ones at home. The food is good and relatively expensive for here. But it was homey in a way that reminded us that whatever “American food” is, you don’t really go out for it, fried clams and buffalo wings being the possible exceptions.

An epilogue to last week’s story about the surprise electrical work done on our apartment:

Just the other day I was running out the door to my intercambio, something I’ll say more about next time. It’s essentially a language exchange in which two people who speak different languages and wish to learn each other’s arrange to meet and speak each language for half an hour or so. It’s a little weird but quite popular here.

Anyhow, there I was, late, when Gloria stopped me in the front hallway and asked if I wanted to have coffee. I told her I was running late and that I would be glad to have coffee later (or probably something like, “I’m slow. I want coffee more slow.” She knew what I meant.) She said, and I quote, “No me jodas,” which means, literally, “don’t f*** with me.” Incidentally, it uses the subjunctive mood. Anyhow, the verb, “jodar,” is one we learned only recently, and we were assured that, used in the phrase above, it can imply anything from “Oh, quit joshin’” to “I’m about to kill you,” depending on the tone of voice. She said it nicely, in a tone of voice that meant, “Please. We are going for coffee,” then added, “only five minutes.” I went for coffee.

She asked how the lights were doing. I told her they were fine. She said that the guy who insisted on messing with them, Rafa, was crazy. “Sure,” I said. “But he did a good job.” Actually, he didn’t do anything but make a lot of noise, but he was her friend, I figured, so I wasn’t about to say that.

“No,” she said, making the universal sign for crazy, a finger tracing a circle next to her ear. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s sick in the head. A drunk. He only works when he needs more money.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, trying to convey sarcasm. That doesn’t really work for us in Spanish yet.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, like it was some big favor to invite a crazy drunk into our apartment to hack up the lights I had so carefully wired together.

“Ok,” I said. At some point when I didn’t notice, Gloria had ordered another round of coffees. It’s almost like the unit of time known as “five minutes” doesn’t really exist in Spain. It’s too small. Nothing happens in five minutes.

“He really didn’t like your lights,” she said, then continued in English. “He said that you were the bird…the bird from the Day of Giving Thanks. Un pavo. A turkey.” Then she laughed so hard that coffee almost came out of her nose. “He wanted you to pay him.”

“But I didn’t want him to fix anything,” I said.

“Ok,” she said, and then proceeded to ask me about Leah’s schedule, the real reason for the forced coffee. Gloria is both an avid student of languages and very concerned about our financial situation. She sees taking English classes from Leah as a perfect way to address both and has been trying to find a group of local women to take the classes with her so Leah can charge more. Having found none, she has recruited her daughter, who speaks perfectly good English. When she was satisfied that Leah would, at some point during the day, pass through the lobby so Gloria could talk to her, I was dismissed to my intercambio. But that is a story in itself. Perhaps next time.

Ok, so we promised some more about the other museum. This was a free part of the Fundacio Caixa Catalunya. Caixa Catalunya is a large bank that has its central office in a famous building, which is called both Casa Mila and La Pedrera. The wealthy Mila family commissioned Gaudi to build it for them, but then he wanted to put a big cross on top. The Milas thought that anarchists would wreck it, so they said no, and he quit.

But something funny has happened, and so you’ll have to hear about the art later. Yesterday, I arrived home to find Gloria in the hallway outside our apartment. To fully appreciate what it means to find someone in the hallway outside your apartment, you have to picture our hallway, which is maybe three feet wide. In Spanish, they say, “a meter.” She was with a workman and wanted to know if she could have her ladder back. We had borrowed it last week to hang up some lights.

I invited them in, and they decided that they would enjoy a quick look around before taking the ladder. It was while they did this that they noticed the half-completed wiring job. I had been stringing some sockets to the one functioning light fixture so that the whole living room, and not just the part in the corner where the original light was, would be habitable after, say, 5:30 in the evening.

But, lacking a drill, it was proving difficult to attach the new fixtures to the plaster ceiling. Ergo, a there were a lot of wires hanging around. The workman took one look at them and began to yell at me. Now, as I’ve described before, it is usually easy to deflect someone’s anger by using the powerful bubble of illiteracy. If someone is really mad, but you don’t quite know what for, it is easier to ignore. In that moment, I learned that this trick does not work if you are being yelled it in your own living room.

From what I caught, he said that the three sockets I was using would use way too much power and would cost us a bundle of Euros. In my experience, it is the workmen that wind up costing us most of the Euros, but so far he hadn’t asked for money. He didn’t like the paper lanterns that we were using to cover the bulbs - never mind that every apartment we’ve been in here has about five of them - because they would catch on fire. And he didn’t like that we were using 60-watt bulbs, for some reason.

Gloria translated some of what he said for me, and that made him even madder. “This isn’t China,” he said. Hard to argue with that. “So don’t speak Chinese. Immigrants need to speak Spanish. Don’t speak to him in English.” She began to translate that, but with the bubble rendered ineffective, I stopped her before he got even angrier. Now, understanding someone’s general meaning is one thing, but figuring out something coherent to say is quite another, and before I could manage that, he had told me that he would be back at noon the following day to fix the lights. I was to purchase more bulbs before that point. I got the idea that even if I had known Spanish, he would still have been coming back the next day. I said, “muchas gracias.”

I was going out, too, and we ran into each other in the entryway of the building. I said something small-talky to him in Spanish and he was very pleased. There he was, the grouchy Spanish workman from central casting. A rough exterior, but un corazon del oro. He told me I was a buen hombre for trying to learn Spanish and walked me to the subway.

The next day, he came much earlier than I expected him, around 12:15. He did not approve of the bulbs I had purchased, but like everything in Spain, it was a crisis of epic proportions that didn’t really matter. He made all sorts of noises and horrible faces before saying, “Es igual, es igual.” Then he went up on the ladder, screwed in the new bulbs, cut off one of my sockets and taped up the wires, and took down the paper screens. “Luz,” he ordered. I turned on the luz. The room was…well, not exactly bathed in light. More like misted. It looked like you might expect two bare bulbs hanging from exposed wires in a 400 square foot room to look: shadowy, sort of dark. “Muy bien,” he said. To emphasize his point, he went to the window and lowered the blinds. Windows here are all equipped with metal exterior blinds. When you put them down, it’s dark. The bulbs glowed but didn’t exactly light up the room. “Vale,” he said. This word literally means, “It’s worth it,” but it is used throughout Spain as a cross between, “All right?”; “Sure, why not”; “I’ll take it”; “Fine”; and “Whatever you want.” Like “dude” in English, it is possible to use this word, and only this word and, by varying your inflection, have an entire conversation.

“Vale,” I said, and that was that. No Euros. He told me to get some more nails and tack the wire to the ceiling, “poco a poco” - “little by little.” Since the wire is only about seven feet long, I’m not sure why I need to do this job little by little, but if I do it any other way, it is likely he’ll come by again and yell at me. A few weeks ago, we couldn’t find an electrician to save our lives. Now, they come by, unsolicited, and mess with our stuff. Before he left, he took a quick look around, and suggested that I move a few lamps. He also warned me that I shouldn’t be working at my desk without a lamp, and he took a desk lamp that had been sitting on the floor, put it on the desk, and plugged it in.

We don’t really want the lamps moved to the places he suggested, but it might be easier just to obey. Luckily, we’re still at the stage where every interaction is a Spanish lesson, and as long as we don’t get a bill at the end, it’s cool by us. Vale.