I was standing at the corner of Consejo de Cientos and Pau Claris yesterday when a tiny old woman carrying a huge cardboard box spoke to me. “Uh groarh,” she said. I immediately began the process of declaring the day ruined, which is what I do when I am given a sign that I still can’t understand even the tiniest of small talk. First you understand English-speakers speaking Spanish, and then you understand teachers, and then, after a long, patient wait on their part, you understand your friends. But a distant last is the hombre en la calle. What good are the first three if you can’t understand the fourth? Even with friends, we must have gotten to know them somehow (“somehow” = they speak English). The Spanish speaking there is more like we all learned a new game.

But there I was, still waiting for the light, still waiting for my brain to make sense of, “Uh groarh.” She said it again, waving at the sky. I looked up. She fanned herself. Ah hah. “Calor?” I said. “Heat?” In Spanish, when it is hot out, you say that “It makes heat.” It was, in fact, making heat yesterday. For the record, when you are hot, you say, “I have heat.” Saying, “I am hot,” comes out sounding something like, “I’m in heat.”

The old woman smiled, revealing several teeth. Maybe six, or seven. She made Sue and Jeff look like Pierce Brosnan. I felt better about not understanding what she had said and agreed that it was hot out.

Then she said something like, “Well, that’s green.” What’s green?, I wondered. Was she talking about the light? It wasn’t.

“I’m sorry?” I said. “What’s green?”

She looked at me with sympathy. Poor lost foreigner. She pointed at some of the words on her box. They were green. “These are green,” she said. “Like trees, you know?”

“I know,” I said, probably being more sensitive than I should have been about a language assessment conducted on the corner by someone with six teeth. “I know what ‘green’ means. But what are you talking about?”

“It’s just that it’s not blue,” she said. “That’s blue.” She pointed at something else. “You see? Blue.”

“What’s blue?” I said. I was really emphasizing the word “what’s” by this time, to avoid any confusion about what I wanted to know. Apparently that sort of emphasis is an English-language thing.

“What’s blue?” she said. “Right here.” She pointed at some other words on the box, blue words.

“Thank you,” I said. “But what I mean to say is, ‘Why are you talking about blue things and green things? What do you mean?”

She looked at me for a moment, still smiling. She was, it was clear, trying very hard to be helpful. “What do I mean?” she said. “I just don’t want you to make a mistake with the colors.”

There are many levels in the process known as “communication,” and I, at least on the corner of Consejo de Cientos and Pau Claris, am on one of the lower ones.

According to the “Who’s Visiting?” section of this very web site, we should be running for Parliament by now, since Mark and Susan have come and gone. But alas – we wouldn’t be able to really understand our own radio ads. Time flies when you’re oer learning the subjunctive.

The visit of Los Braverman began at 8 am two Saturdays ago. They were raring to go, but I cannot lead anyone to see the Cathedral at that hour, so everyone was shuttled off to bed. Yet they managed to pack in a full day, complete with a nice dinner at Silvestre, where we were so early that they gave us the special table-on-the-pedestal. How early did we eat? Not early at all by your standards, but early enough that, in the midst of a perfectly good conversation in Spanish about our reservations, the host answered my “nueve y media” with an almost unaccented, “Very good, sir. See you then.” I could hear him thinking, “If only these people would just eat dinner at a reasonable hour, they wouldn’t have all that nervous energy and maybe they’d stop picking so many fights.” Another family came in at 9:45, raising our spirits, but they were German.

By the time we got home, around midnight, Mark and Susan were…um…groggy, with Mark opening his eyes only long enough to swear that he would not be eating at that hour again. We had heard that before: weeks ago, Sue insisted that if we ate dinner at 10, she would already be asleep. Both times, we countered with a short lecture on how time zones work, and how most of you reading this are used to being on the east side of one. In Spain, we are hours from the eastern edge of the zone. Hence the sun rises later and sets later, too. It doesn’t matter what time someone wants to go to bed: they see the sun set at 9:00, and they think about eating maybe an hour later. Poof, you’re Spanish. Eating at 7 feels like you should be riding around the neighborhood in a golf cart and setting your alarm to make the Coral Gables shuffleboard tournament. Mark slept through the lecture, but he stayed up late the next time, anyhow.

Thus began another week of visitors who left Barcelona thinking “Modernista” was just the name of the only restaurant we forgot to take them to.

Even on Mallorca, where we had every intention of seeing a cathedral and Michael Douglas’ house, we played within ourselves. The first day, after a typically delightful nobody-really-knows-where-we’re-going-but-how-about-everyone-suggests-directions drive from the airport across the island to Deià, we installed ourselves in the house of Huguette, one of Susan and Mark’s friends from Washington.

And what a house it was. Huguette has spent her career as a poet (and translator of Robert Graves’ work – I think you are supposed to have heard of him, though we had not), and her late husband was a painter. They both owned a gallery in Paris. Evidence of lives not spent in offices is all over the house: books in four or five languages, original paintings and sculptures, pottery from all over the world. She even had the world’s coolest coffee maker, a ceramic stovetop thing with a funny little tube that sprayed pressurized coffee from the bottom part into the pitcher.

From the porch, we had a view of the Mediterranean against rocky cliffs, groves of olive trees perched on terraces put in by the Arab settlers who first lived in Mallorca, and old stone houses. It was the sort of view that makes it easy to abandon the idea of poking around a dank old cathedral in favor of eating lunch on the porch for three hours. We also wandered up into the little mountains behind the house, where a trail took us past farmhouses from the 13th century. The path was steep and rocky, which made the run Mark and I attempted foolish, but it led us to a lot of good views of the sea and made us feel like we had accomplished a lot. Mark, in fact, fired up the e-mail right away in order to tell the guys back at work about it.

The hike also took us past tons of hiking tourists, which led to plenty of silly exchanges like the following:

Us: O-luh!
British hikers: Owe-lawe!
German hikers: Ooo-luh.
Dutch hikers: Hi.

We even found a store in which the owner spoke French – luckily, so does Mark, so we could communicate, a little – but no Spanish. And the restaurants served dinner starting at 7 or so, but we weren’t interested in that sort of thing, since it was still light out.

This left us plenty of time to work the phones. Mark had learned, just before the trip, that he would be stopping in Paris on his way home. Apparently Marsh Maclennan has the contract to re-brand French Toast. People go from Barcelona to Paris for work the way they do from New York to Washington: daily, cheaply, and without fuss. But alas, there is always a travel department. Getting himself to Paris entailed numerous phone calls from the dented booths along the road - the road is such that if you are walking along it and a bus comes by, you need to step into a doorway – to the home office. At one point, nearly an entire bar full of people was involved, offering advice about how to use payphones and buy phone cards in a variety of languages.

Eventually Mark was set for Paris and we had gotten our fill of wandering around cathedrals in the mist and dodging other tourists. Our days kept ending with a relieved retreat for the tranquility for the house along the road between Deià and Soller with the porch overlooking the sea and the lemon trees, and the quaint landline connection for Mark’s computer. Even the young rich neighbors who recently built their house don’t seem to bother anyone – if Mallorca was Cape Cod, England and Germany would be New York, sending well-meaning folks who earn more money, only want to hang out in the nice weather, and don’t speak the language.

And if England is New York, then that would make Barcelona into…Boston. But without any Catholics, that’s not quite possible. A better analogy would make the US into New York, and all of the UK into Boston – plenty of religious similarities, of course, plus a general annoyance about not being in charge of anything, an array of accents that could convince you that you don’t speak their language, and teams that couldn’t beat the Northbrook, Illinois, juniors in powder puff football if making the playoffs was on the line. That would, of course, leave Barcelona, with its stormy history, half-Spanish, half-Mediterranean culture, and, of course, that famous Modernista, as Barcelona.

We had handled guests who didn’t function before 2:30 in the afternoon and guests who wrote on us and even a boarder who never wound up paying for his two weeks here. But four guests at once? It sounds just plain crazy. Matt, Peg, Sue, and Jeff rolled in like a basket full of puppies one lovely Saturday morning. The magnificent Barcelona sunlight glinted off their fake teeth, and shadow cast by Matt’s luggage told us that this would be a different sort of visit.

By now we have sufficient experience with red-eyed travelers that the sequence is simple: they fly all night, show up giddy and swearing they’re not tired, eat about six croissants, and promptly fall asleep for five hours. These four said no to convention and insisted that they be taken outside and marched around to stay awake until a normal sleeping hour. Thus began something of a week-long performance, in which the main characters had names as phony as their bridgework and specialized in pulling the cameraman – Jeff, who really did bring a big video camera all over town – aside and muttering something about the rest of us to remember the trip by. We still haven’t actually seen any of the tape, so we can’t say much more than that.

They managed to keep themselves up until after midnight, when Matt decided that he missed some of the six pairs of shoes he had lugged across the ocean, and we returned to the casa for bed. The rest of the week was a perfect example of good guesting: each of them set reasonable goals to challenge themselves, thereby lending some structure to the week. Sue tried to consume all the hot chocolate in Spain. Matt wanted to bring home his ceramics for everyone he knew and all of their first and second cousins. Jeff only wanted to check his e-mail and buy some scallops, but he failed on both counts. And Peg, always easygoing, was happy just to watch a little male porn.

Like all our other visits, much of the time was spent preparing to eat, cooking, finding restaurants, and being too full to remember what it was we were going to do after we ate. Jeff made us a couple of nice risottos and some delightful lenguado, which is what you get is you ask enough people what “Dover Sole” is in Spanish. It’s not quite Dover Sole, but it’s flat, and Jeff is very good at cooking flat fishes. His special flat fish recipe goes mighty nice with a round of good old American Scrabble, a contest that he and Sue purport to play in jags of three or four games in a night. The practice paid off, as Sue wiped up the board with the rest of us. I think she might have doubled my score.

Another night, Matt and Peg took everyone out to dinner, where I fared better. We went to a restaurant called Cal Pep, which I think means “Joe’s House.” It is a small place near the harbor that looks, upon entry, like a tiny bar with a glass case full of funky shellfish behind it. We were led into a tiny hidden dining room with four tables and heavy wooden beams in the ceiling. We ordered the house wine and asked for some menus.

The house wine request went ok. But menus? Not happening. “We’ll bring you an assortment,” said the waiter, and he was gone. Since none of us know exactly what the names of the different shellfish were, I suppose the menu wouldn’t have helped. In other words, we can say, “We’ll have the clams,” but when there are four kinds of clams behind the bar, you need a specialized seafood vocabulary that isn’t taught in intermediate level Spanish classes. We had the assortment.

The assortment consisted of the following:

• three of the four kinds of clams, some cooked in garlic and others in tomatoes
  
• tiny fried eels? minnows? Something, with a fried egg smashed around in it. I assure you it was good.
  
• fried baby squid
  
• more squid, cooked with onions and tomatoes
  
• some funny things that looked like angry shrimp with big claws, with onions
  
• a lot of toasted bread with tomato rubbed on it
  
• a very nice tortilla patata
  
• and Crema Catalana.
  
  When we ordered dessert, Matt had to cause problems and insist on his coffee with it, not after it. The waiter smiled politely, zipped off, and then returned carrying a cup on a saucer. He walked slowly as if he was trying not to spill it. When he got to our table, he stumbled, flipping the cup – empty, of course – over with the handle hooked on his pinky. Matt jumped up and screamed like a stuck pig; to his credit, it did look exactly like he was about to be scalded with coffee, and before even getting to taste his dessert. This was very upsetting, as he and Peg were planning to pay and we feared he might run off immediately. But it was just a little Barcelona humor and he weathered it well, and the only sad part is that it wasn’t on tape. The rest of the coffee came without incident. Nothing else exciting happened on that evening until Peg found the pornography mentioned above.
  
  Later in the week, we took the train to Montserrat, where the Moreneta, or Black Virgin icon, is kept. People line up to rub their fingers on the statue, darkened by years of burning candles. The church in which the Moreneta sits is so cool, in fact, that you could forget that you are on a big jagged mountain with views of Barcelona in one direction and France in the other. For example, there is a carving of Jesus recessed into the wall of one chapel with eerie eyes that follow you around the room, so that’s sort of neat. We walked back and forth in front of it for twenty minutes, lit a candle in a chapel that is supposed to help people bring fewer shoes on vacation, took a little hike, and headed for the train.
  
  On the way home, Jeff, probably overcome by the power of the almighty, put in his fake teeth. Anyone could tell that he was deep in thought about spiritual matters, and it looked nice, so I took a picture of him. Two teenage girls nearby said, “Oh, those Americans are making fun of that poor man’s teeth.” And so we were. But we weren’t making fun later, when Jeff hitched up his pants and fixed our cranky telephone. He did such a good job that it even stayed fixed until nearly 36 hours after they all left.
  
  The visit was only a week long, but that was all it took for everyone to realize what a good idea we had: they all began hatching plans to move here themselves. For once, Matt appeared the most serious of anyone, but that might have been because he was the only one who brought all of his winter and summer outfits, as well as raingear, ski boots (not counted as one of the six pairs of shoes), two kinds of flip flops and, inexplicably, a tennis racquet. Sue spent a little time working out what it would cost her to live here if she rented out the second floor of Matt’s bag to sleep in, and Peg left a John Grisham novel, so we think she may be coming back for that. And Jeff kept quiet and got all the machinations on film, grinning slyly through his phony teeth all the while.
  
  

It's official, we've beaten Chowhound.com

Google "barcelona goat brains" and something that is probably icky pops up for Chowhound.com. But that's the second listing. The first? Do I need to spell everything out for you?

Coming soon: Stories of the visitors with the bad teeth and our trip to Mallorca. Two stories, not one. Sorry for the delay.

Epilogue: We’re a Normal Couple

We took some wrong turns on this trip. On the way down, our search for the best arroz Negro – rice with squid ink – took us to Elche, which is supposedly the capital of this dish. It took too long to get there, and then the restaurant which the guidebook recommended was full, and then we were in no mood to find a different one, and so when they said we could eat at the bar we accepted. Forty-five minutes, an undercooked steak sandwich and cold French fries later, we were heading back to the highway unsatisfied.

On day two, we went in search of the highly-recommended nature preserve. We found a small museum with one guide who told us where to find the flamingos: Las Salinas - the salt works. After cruising the highway for a few minutes and seeing plenty of industrial ponds, big machines, and crumbling buildings, we gave up on the flamingos. The most exciting animals we ran into at the preserve were some sheep grazing nearby. We gave up on fauna (and on flora, too, since there was mostly large fields of yucca and scrubby little bushes) and went back to the beach. But we tried a new beach, and it was a bust. We drove to a second. Too rocky. And then our alarm went off, signaling that it was time to drive back in order to beat the parades.

Finally, on the way back to Barcelona, we gave Fodor’s one more chance. Actually, three more chances. First, we headed to the pottery town of Níjar. Tons of blue and yellow pottery, sort of like you could find in just about any store at home. Also unpainted furniture. Back on the road: this time to Mojaca. Mojaca is one of the “white towns,” which dot the south of Spain and look like little white movie sets against the dark hillsides. As we got closer to Mojaca, though, it looked like a tourist burg. We didn’t get out of the car, since we had about six hours of driving to go.

Except, of course, for lunch. The guide recommended a particular small restaurant in some other town, Lorca. We found it and parked, amid massive Easter parade celebrations. We talked to a man who turned out to be the owner about a table and went to wait in the bar. Taking a liking to our cute accents, he followed us in and assured us that we would have a table soon. Where were we from?, he wanted to know. “The United States,” though, wasn’t a good enough answer.

“You don’t have blue eyes and very large shoulders,” he said. “Where are you from?” We tried “maybe Russia?”

“No, no,” he insisted, while slugging a glass of warm vermouth. “They’re blonde, too. You’re Spanish.” I remembered that my uncle had once unearthed the fact that we might have had an ancestor in 13th century Toledo, and brought this up, figuring that there might be free lunch in it. “Ah ha!,” he cried. “No wonder you look so normal. You’re not tall, not big, no blue eyes! Ok, you” – he pointed at Leah – “You could be Dutch. Maybe Belgian. But you” – now pointing at me – “Spanish. And not the North, with all the French people. Southern Spain. A nice normal couple. Spanish.” He ordered another vermouth and slapped me on the shoulder.

Within minutes he had found us a table in a beautiful room with terra cotta walls, insisting that the drinks we had already had could just go on our check. We tried ordering some paella, but they were out of it. Calamari? Out of that, too. Salad? None left. Bread? Not clear. The waiter said something, I misunderstood it and said yes, and a plate of clams appeared. Not quite what we had in mind, but food nonetheless. The waiter vanished. No bread appeared. Cleaning crews appeared around us. We split a piece of fish and got the check. It was wrong by eight Euros, in their favor. And the drinks weren’t on it. After finding someone to fix the math, we split, chalking up the free drinks to the love that Southern Spain – the new Provence – has for the Luna de Miel.