Childhood Spain - Barcelona
One year we stayed close to Barcelona. To be honest my strongest memory of this holiday was that it was quite unremarkable! I know I met a fun bunch of people and spent hours in the pools messing about with my friends. Our parents got on well but it wasn’t a friendship that was to last much beyond the holiday. The beach wasn’t the best either, the sea becoming too deep for me quickly and the waves were large, so we stayed around the pool at lot. The food was different too to that eaten on the islands and further south.
My strongest memory is of the excursion into Barcelona, a city with unique architecture and atmosphere. It’s Spanish, but not quite so, due to the strength of the Catalonian culture. Franco was still in charge on my childhood visit so the city residents were supposed to speak Castellano, the national language, but Catalan could still be defiantly heard. After touring the city, of which from that visit I remember surprising little, we visited the famous Barcelona football ground. Stood near the top of the stand looking down on the pitch it would be fair to say that as a non-fan of the game I was decidedly underwhelmed by the experience. One memory stands out clearly, the pride with which we were told this pitch had the ‘greenest grass in Spain’ – as a child from the UK I just couldn’t understand why I was supposed to be impressed by the stuff that grew the same colour in my own back garden!
Many years later I returned to the city, this time with Dave, and it had a totally different effect on me. The Catalan culture and language plus its unique architecture give Barcelona a very different feel to the Costa Blanca. It is a city I intend to visit again one day.
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